Social Media and the Environment - Part 2 - The Pied Piper Effect
Apr 04, 2019
In Part 1 of this series, I wrote about the impact of going after iconic shots on the environment and the way in which social media can contribute to the problem. In this post, I want to discuss the role of social media in sparking what I call the 'Pied Piper' effect, its impact and how we might think about our responsibility as visitors and/or artists.
In the classic (and grim) fairytale, the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the town hires a stranger to help rid them of a plague of rats. He does so by luring them into the river to drown by the music from a magic flute. When the townspeople try to renege on the deal, he then lures away their children, never to be seen again. In some ways, the rise of influencer culture feels a bit like the story, with brands and marketers representing the townspeople and the influencers the Pied Pipers. Then add to that a scramble for all the followers to try and become Pipers themselves. A couple of recent events have highlighted this effect: first is the wildflower 'superbloom' in Southern California last month and second is the recent closure of Fjaðrárgljúfur canyon in Iceland.
After a winter of ample rain and snowfall, conditions have been superb for the wildflower population and people have noticed! Our short trip to Palm Springs, Joshua Tree and the Mojave National Preserve occurred just prior to the superbloom, but we did get a chance to see a bit of it getting started.
When it did come though, it brought people in droves, everyone (seemingly) in search of the perfect selfie or landscape photo. The epicenter of this effect has been Walker Canyon, near Lake Elsinore, California, where tens of thousands of people have come to view and document hillsides covered with golden poppies. Only about an hour from Los Angeles via Interstate 15, the number of visitors has overwhelmed local management resources and caused traffic backups on the Interstate of more than 20 miles. The town has been forced to closed the canyon several times due to the number of people who have visited and the damage that has been caused due to visitors walking off trail and damaging the poppies themselves. A quick search on Instagram shows more than 20,000 posts with the #superbloom2019 hashtag and more than 150,000 with #superbloom. One post by an influencer sitting in the middle of a field of poppies generated more than 60,000 likes, and the madness seems to have culminated in a pair of people even landing a helicopter in the middle of the Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve.
The second example comes from Iceland, which, as I've written before has both benefited and suffered from tourism. There's no doubt that the economy has leveraged the effect of influencers such as the Kardashians visiting the Blue Lagoon and other locations, but that impact can be overwhelming. Early last month, the Environmental Agency of Iceland announced a two week closure of the beautiful Fjaðrárgljúfur canyon, not far from Vik, to allow the trails and vegetation to recover from visitor impact. That closure has since been extended to the beginning of June.
One of the reasons that has been attributed to the closure is that it featured as the background for a Justin Bieber video. The number of tourists visiting the canyon nearly doubled from 2016 to 2017, in part due to Justin Bieber’s music video for “I’ll Show You,” filmed at the location. The video, released in late 2015, has over 400 million views on YouTube. An Instagram post of Bieber's from the same location has more than 1.4 million likes. Media, eager to garner traffic interested in the subject then published to specific locations in the video, which included many of the better known locations such as Seljalandsfoss and Skogafoss along with the relatively unknown Fjaðrárgljúfur, and the rush was on.
When I visited the canyon in September 2017, I'd never heard of the music video and only seen one or two pictures of it. It seemed like a cool location, but we'd passed it by on our first two trips. It is a pretty unreal looking location, with moss covering the walls and crazy rock formations. The paths were muddy and somewhat rutted - you could tell that it was a pretty busy place, but most of the tour buses couldn't navigate the road to get in there, so it didn't seem quite as busy as some of the other icons on the South coast.
There's really no way to measure the real impact of the Pied Piper effect - but at this point, I think we should recognize that it's real, so what can we do about it? I think the lessons aren't too dissimilar from those in Part 1 - if you feel compelled to visit an area that has become super popular, first, examine your reasons for going:
1. Is it a place that you've always wanted go? Or are you being driven by FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)?
2. Do you have to go right now - will your experience suffer if you wait for the hullabaloo to die down?
3. If you still choose to go, make extra sure that your are treating the location with extra care - overcompensate for those visitors who may not be so careful.
4. If you do go, consider not including the location - sure, someone else probably will, but you'll be doing your part by not adding to the volume of the Pied Piper's music. When we post the location of a photo, there may be consequences. Geotagging is getting a bad name, and rightfully so - it makes it too easy for people to identify an exact location, which can lead to over-use and damage.
As individuals, and society as a whole, we have a responsibility to think about how our actions will affect others and how they will affect the world that we live in. So think carefully before you watch the Kardashians travel to some exotic location and say 'Oh, I should plan my next vacation there!'
In the meantime, while I don't have any images from the superbloom, you can check out some more shots of Fjaðrárgljúfur in my Iceland gallery. Thanks for reading and feel free to post any questions or thoughts in the comments section!