Will giant cruise ships destroy the wonders their passengers
claim to love?
Rowan Moore
Guides who shot a polar bear have been denounced as
murderers. But what does that make the tourists who are ruining its fragile
habitat?
Sun 5 Aug 2018 09.00 BST
A special kind of shock comes with the shooting of a polar
bear. Their magnificence, their appearance of cuddliness, their ferocity, their
vulnerability, their anthropomorphism – all combine to make the death of a
single male, at the hands of guides for a tourist cruise ship, worldwide news.
The internet hummed with denunciation. It is hard to think
of another creature, even one more endangered, whose loss would cause so much
reaction.
Then there is a second shock, with the accompanying
realisation that cruises to fragile wildernesses are on the rise. Eighteen
ships were due to dock last week in the small port of Longyearbyen, the main
town of Svalbard, the archipelago where the bear was shot. Hapag-Lloyd Cruises,
the company whose ship MS Bremen was involved in the incident, is launching
another two next year, the Hanseatic Nature and the Hanseatic Inspiration, to
exploit the growing Arctic market.
It is contradictory
to thrust these floating towns into places whose beauty is in their pristine
solitude
These will take around 200 passengers each, a number that
already makes an “expedition”, as they call it, into a mass-produced
experience. In 2016, to the dismay of environmentalists, the 1,000-passenger
Crystal Serenity became the first cruise ship to navigate the Northwest
Passage. Its owner, Crystal Cruises, is planning to launch a “polar-class
megayacht” next year.
This feels wrong. It is contradictory to thrust these
floating towns, with the pollution and disruption they entail, into places
whose beauty is in their pristine solitude. It adds a new front to the war that
has been fought in Venice for years over the floating, multistorey hotels that
impose themselves on the very views that attracted them to the city in the
first place. As the global cruising business grew by 4% in 2017, and by 20% in
the five years before that, such struggles will only intensify, and in more
locations.
At a personal level, the news of the shooting gave me pause.
I had recently returned from Svalbard, including the Sjuøyane islands where the
incident took place, as part of a residency of artists and writers aboard the
tall ship Antigua. We thought ourselves good people, concerned about the
environment, uneasy about the air miles that had got us there, hoping that our
visit could contribute in some modest way to our understanding of the Arctic.
We voyaged under sail when possible, rather than with the diesel engine, and
gathered washed-up rubbish from the beaches as we went, as you are encouraged
to do.
There were 29 of us, rather than the hundreds or thousands
who might travel in a cruise ship. It is hard to imagine anyone who could love
the Arctic environment more than our guides or who would less want to kill a
bear. But they were armed with rifles as a last resort, in accordance with the
law. In principle, they could have been forced to use them, in which case they
would have faced denunciation across the internet as murderers. If we gave
ourselves the illumination of seeing glaciers and wildlife, moreover, why
shouldn’t the paying punters of Hapag-Lloyd and other cruise lines have it too?
A popular online view was articulated by Ricky Gervais’s
tweet: “‘Let’s get too close to a polar bear in its natural environment and
then kill it if it gets too close.’ Morons.” Never mind the reports that the
guides were acting in self-defence, that they were not seeking an encounter
with the animal, that it surprised them while they were carrying out a routine
check of a landing site. Humans, goes the argument, have no business
encroaching on its habitat.
The problem with this view is that bears can be found
anywhere in Svalbard, also Greenland and northern Canada, and they can appear
in and around towns and settlements as well as on uninhabited beaches. Short of
complete evacuation of all these places, some interaction of human and animal
will happen. So it’s more a matter of what kind of interaction is appropriate
rather than whether it should happen at all.
It’s a question of kind and degree. Common sense says that
there has to be some kind of limit, before ships are jostling round the
glaciers like tourists in front of the Mona Lisa. In Venice, last autumn, it
was finally announced that large cruise ships would have to moor further from
the city, although there is a three-year delay to implementing these laws. So
something can be done – the Arctic nations need to learn from La Serenissima
and act before it is too late.
Giant cruise ships look to me like misery machines. They
don’t make residents happy in the places they visit. They don’t make their
crews happy, if you are to believe the recurring allegations of mistreatment of
staff. As for the passengers, although I am sure plenty of satisfied customers
will tell me otherwise, there seems to be so little engagement with the wonders
they come to visit that they might as well be seeing them on a screen.
They crystallise a mentality, that art and nature are things
to be grabbed, often with giant cameras. A promotional shot for one of
Hapag-Lloyd’s Antarctic cruises, in which a firing squad of tourists, standing
in a Zodiac inflatable boat, point their lenses at penguins, sums this up – why
don’t they just pause to look at the damn birds? Last week’s other wildlife
news, that visitors to Skomer Island in Wales are trampling puffins to death in
their eagerness to photograph them, speaks of the same mentality. You kill the
thing you purport to love.
We’re all susceptible to this acquisitive mentality, myself
and my fellow high-minded travellers included. In our case, the insights of the
guides and crew helped us actually to look at what was around us; the same will
be true of at least some of the other cruises around the Arctic. It would be
nice to think that tourism could serve our better natures rather than our
worst.
It might be hoped that if ordinary tourists have contact
with the Arctic they may contribute, in their home countries, to the spread of
understanding of this essential place. But only if the setup of the tours
allows understanding to take place. How anyone might legislate to encourage
thoughtful cruises and discourage dumb ones is not obvious. It would be nice
but unfeasible to give preference to camera-free trips. It would be a good
start to limit the size and number of the cruise ships.
• Rowan Moore is an Observer columnist
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