Document Type
Article
Abstract
Last Chance Tourism. 500 Places to See Before They Disappear. 100 Places to Go Before They Disappear. As these (real) book titles attest, climate change, often in combination with loss of biodiversity, has created a new kind of ecotourism, which we term eco-necrotourism--the desire to see natural wonders and rare species before they are lost or transformed forever. As a scholarly topic, eco-necrotourism is a small facet of an emerging necessity for climate change law and policy: the need for planners, managers, lawmakers, and policy writers to consider human psychological responses to climate change and its impacts. However, those responses will be placeand culture-specific, making this new component of climate change adaptation law as varied and complex as climate change adaptation itself. This Article offers a manageable starting place for theorists, managers, and policymakers: the potential impacts of human psychological responses to climate impacts on management of the world's nature parks.
Eco-necrotourism emerges from the intersection of two separately observed phenomena: the long-acknowledged promotion of last chance tourism and the relatively recent naming and explorations of ecological grief. While these two phenomena have become active topics of discussion in other disciplines, this Article is the first, we believe, to discuss their intersection and the emergence of eco-necrotourism as legal problems. Thus, this Article's first contribution to the legal literature is to demonstrate to readers--most importantly public lands managers--that eco-necrotourism is both real (at least for certain public natural wonders) and important for nature park managers who must increasing deal with climate change and its impacts, including the psychological responses of former, existing, and future visitors. The exact implications of eco-necrotourism for managers will, of course, vary according to the impacts that a nature park is experiencing, how tourism intersects with those impacts, and the legal authorities governing management of the protected area. Nevertheless, eco-necrotourism surfaces at least four novel and significant considerations for management: cognizing visitor psychological responses in adaptation planning; the need to reconceptualize use and access; preparing for the last visitor problem; and interrogating the meaning and methods of achieving intergenerational equity.
More generally, however, this Article provides the first concrete example of how subjective human psychological responses may complicate climate change adaptation planning. Specifically, instead of merely assessing likely climate change impacts and mapping scenarios--with, of course, input from the relevant communities, individuals, and interest groups--managers and governments will increasingly need to acknowledge that building capacity to address psychological reactions to climate change impacts is a crucial part of climate change adaptation.
Recommended Citation
Robin Kundis Craig & Katrina F. Kuh, Eco-Necrotourism and Public Land Management: Last Chance Tourism, Ecological Grief, and the World’s Disappearing Natural Wonders, 51 Fla. St. U.L. Rev. 133 (2023), https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/lawfaculty/1279.
