This last decade has seen many drastic changes in our HomeWorld's climatic equilibrium. With continued record temperatures, warming oceans, jet-stream instability, the effects of climate change become sadly self-evident. As natural disasters continue to intensify at a ever-increasing rate, the science of climate change becomes settled in all but the most deluded minds. Our beautiful home planet's climate is rapidly changing due in part, to human caused conditions.
As such, it is a sign of the times that we report on humanity's newest tourism category... Disaster or Dark Tourism. Per the entry in Wikipedia, disaster tourism is the practice of visiting locations at which an environmental disaster, either natural or human-made, has occurred. Although a variety of disasters are the subject of subsequent disaster tourism, the most common disaster tourist sites are areas surrounding volcanic eruptions.
Opinions on the morality and impact of disaster tourism are divided. Advocates of disaster tourism often claim that the practice raises awareness of the event, stimulates the local economy, and educates the public about the local culture, while critics claim that the practice is exploitative, profits on loss, and often mischaracterize the events in question.
Now, recent climate change realities have spawned the newest disaster tourism trend... Last Chance Tourism. As the linked article articulates...
“Last Chance Tourism (LTC) is a niche tourism market focused on witnessing and experiencing a place before it disappears,” explain researchers Annah Piggott-McKellar & Karen McNamara, of Australia’s University of Queensland, in the current issue of the Journal of Sustainable Tourism. They point out LCT’s troubling catch-22 factor: “The tourists scrambling to visit a particular site ‘before it’s gone’ are themselves contributing to its destruction.” Tourists can cause these fragile sites to further deteriorate by contributing carbon emissions and population pressure... which, according to the tenets of LCT, only raises their “destination status” stock.
Over the summer, large Midwest and East Coast metropolitan centers such as Chicago and New York City, suffered the kind of suffocating smoke and hazardous air quality that has plagued the west coast for decades. Massive Canadian wildfires and a meandering jet-stream choked cities with thick smoke for most of the early summer. Such is yet another example of our rapidly changing climate.
Out west... Southern California was recently hit with a rare hurricane which historically never happens. Hurricane Hilary slammed into Baja California on August 20th, tracking northward into California... retaining its tropical characteristics through the morning of August 21. It then transitioned into a post-tropical cyclone while over the southern San Joaquin Valley. The threat triggered California’s first ever tropical storm warning extending from the state’s southern border to just north of Los Angeles.
Much to my horror... the devastating fire that swept through and demolished Lahaina, Hawaii on 8/8/23 (such an ominous sync date), was eerily similar in terms of fire dynamics, to the blaze that devastated my beautiful Rogue Valley back in 9/8/20. As in that blaze, and exacerbated by high wind conditions... the ignited, wind-driven wildfire swept off of vegetated grasslands and quickly consumed Maui's beautiful, historic port town of Lahaina... transitioning from a grass fire, into what is known as an urban conflagration.
Such is the future of wildfire dynamics in our Brave Noö, climate changed world.
As fate would have it, your humble blog caretaker had a long-planned-for trip to the Hawaiian Islands on the books. So in an un-intended example of last chance tourism, as well as an immediate instance of synchronicity, my significant other and I were airborne over the Pacific Ocean on September 10th, when Kīlauea volcano erupted on the big Island... our destination.
On the rim, the experience was truly awe-inspiring. As awesome as viewing the smoke and lava spouts was... the sounds that Kīlauea made as she awakened, made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. She emitted a deep rumbling sound that was a cross between a boom and a moan.
The summits of Hawaii's five volcanoes are revered as sacred mountains. Hawaiians associated elements of their natural environment with particular deities. In Hawaiian mythology, the sky father Wākea marries the earth mother Papa, giving birth to the Hawaiian Islands. Kīlauea is the body of the deity
Pele, goddess of fire, lightning, wind, and volcanoes.
It is here that the conflict between Pele and the rain god Kamapuaʻa was centered. Halemaʻumaʻu, "House of the ʻamaʻumaʻu fern", derives its name from the struggle between the two gods. Kamapuaʻa, hard-pressed by Pele's ability to make lava spout from the ground at will, covered the feature, a favorite residence of the goddess, with fern fronds. Choked by trapped smoke, Pele emerged.
Realizing that each could threaten the other with destruction, the other gods called a draw and divided the island between them, with Kamapuaʻa getting the moist windward northeastern side, and Pele directing the drier Kona (or leeward) side. The rusty singed appearance of the young fronds of the ʻamaʻumaʻu is said to be a product of the legendary struggle.
In another example of the
great diluvian flood mythology, Pele comes from a land said to be
"close to the clouds," with parents Kane-hoa-lani and Ka-hina-liʻi, and brothers Ka-moho-aliʻi and Kahuila-o-ka-lani. From her husband Wahieloa (also called Wahialoa) she has a daughter, Laka, and a son Menehune. Pele-kumu-honua entices her husband and Pele travels in search of him. The sea pours from her head over the land of Kanaloa (perhaps the island now known as Kahoʻolawe) and her brothers say:
O the sea, the great sea!
Forth bursts the sea:
Behold, it bursts on Kanaloa!
The sea floods the land, then recedes; this flooding is called Kai a Kahinalii ("The sea of Ka-hina-liʻi"), as Pele's connection to the sea was passed down from her mother Kahinalii.
Kīlauea has been a tourist attraction since the 1840s, and exploitive white businessmen ran a series of hotels at the rim, including
Volcano House, which is still the only hotel or restaurant located within Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park. The Volcano House provides lodging within the park, while additional housing options are available in the nearby Volcano Village. The park provides a number of hiking trails, points of interest, and guided ranger programs.
In its early days, tourism was a relatively new concept, but grew slowly before exploding with the advent of jet airliner travel around 1959, the year Hawaii became a state. And so it is that Kīlauea is the grandmother of Dark tourism. Pele's frequent eruptions, make her one of the most active volcanoes on Earth, with the most recent eruption occurring while your humble weblog author was visiting the Big Island.
What really struck me was the multitude of offerings left on the volcano's summit caldera by the local Hawaiians. Offerings of flowers and fronds, left on the rim to appease Pele, goddess of fire. Seeing these offerings everywhere along the rim was somehow reassuring. It was as if the indigenous Islanders had an inside connection that facilitated and extended protection to us poor pathetic
haole, with our eyes agog at the amazing mythological spectacle playing out yet again.
And so dear intrepid reader, you find yourself, either by design or fate... a dark, disaster tourist, please take a moment to reflect on the beauty and wonder of such vanishing places. Bear witness to that which we are about to lose... to that which will soon vanish off the face of this earth. Reflect and remember that such places did exist on this beautiful, lonesome planet. Be the eyes and the memory of the world.
Yes the fates have funny ways of reminding us of just how precarious our existence is on Spaceship Earth actually is. This accidental dark tourist was amazed and humbled by the power and majesty demonstrated by Kīlauea... by Pele, goddess of fire. May this aspect of the great mother ever erupt to remind us all of our impermanence upon this tiny speck of earth, sky, fire and water, careening through space... that we all call home.
mahalo...
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