A study published online July 8 in the journal Annals of Tourism Research reveals the impacts of Antarctic tourism from the perspectives of 25 former guides who, year after year, took visitors on cruise ships to some of the most remote locations on Earth. What these guides witnessed eventually made them quit, the study and an accompanying article in The Conversation show.
Sokolickova and Cooper divided the interviews between them, speaking with 14 male guides and 11 female guides about their experiences. Together, those conversations shone a light on the reality of Antarctic cruises and the huge emotional toll of quitting a dream job.
Zdenka Sokolickova: We both started to work as postdocs on this project. We started with interviewing current Antarctic tour guides, because we wanted to know more about the industry, and about how they felt about the tourism development. The industry is booming; it's growing rapidly. And with more vessels, more tour operators and more people wanting to go and visit on a guided tour, there is also a bigger need for guides. So more people are accepted into the industry, and that comes with consequences; for example, the industry might need to lower the standards for qualifications, or there are safety risks coming with people who have less experience.
Liz Cooper: We were also motivated to do this study because, generally speaking, tourism research usually incorporates the voices of people who are connected to the industry. It's not so common to see the voices of people who have removed themselves from the industry or refuse to engage with the tourism industry.
A former guide told the researchers: "Very often, for long periods of time, the penguins had maybe a few hours’ break during the night. Otherwise there were hundreds of people walking through the colonies non-stop." (Image credit: Mint Images via Getty Images)
SP: Did the former guides mention specific events that contributed to, or propelled, their decision to leave the industry?
Many of these former Antarctic tour guides were polar tour guides, meaning that they also worked in the Arctic. For some of them, this decision happened through experiencing both Arctic and Antarctic tourism, so some of these tipping points happened in the Arctic. But we still felt it's relevant for our analysis, because polar tourism is connected, even though geographically, these are separated regions. We had a very strong account of something that happened in the Arctic, where the cruise ship hit a whale, even though the tour guide saw it and he was trying to communicate that. But there is a hierarchy in the chain of command that he couldn't break. He ran to the bridge and told off the captain, and then, after that incident, he quit.
The really interesting thing about Antarctic tourism is, of course, that this is the most remote place on Earth that you can visit as a tourist. This means also that it's the most carbon-intensive form of tourism that you can engage in on Earth.
LC: The most striking story that I remember was a participant who was talking about how the ship that they were working on sometimes would try and find a place on the sea ice to land, so that they can get the guests out walking on the sea ice. Not all companies do this, but some do. And then, they have to put the gangway down onto the ice so that people can walk directly out onto it. This piece of ice that they had chosen was apparently too thin, or too unstable or something. Where the gangway was connected to the ice, the ice kept breaking, so the ship kept having to move farther into this ice floe to get a secure holding.
SP: Emotionally, how easy was it for these guides to quit their jobs?
But it definitely was, for many people, a struggle that took a long time in terms of years — from when you realize that your values actually cannot reconcile with what you engage in; through you realizing that there is a radical solution to that, and that you cannot muddle through or find alternative justifications; to deciding to quit; and still from there, to actually quitting. There is a path to walk. You can have decided, but you still can be doing the job, not feeling good about that.
LC: We found that many of those who had quit primarily for environmental reasons and had gone through this particularly difficult decision-making process then made it their life objective, or aim, to do something good for the environment. We have a group of participants who actually moved into environmentally focused jobs. We have somebody who went on to set up an environmental NGO [nongovernmental organization]; we have somebody who went on to fight wildfires; various sustainability positions. It was, for some of the participants, not just a difficult and life-changing decision in the sense that it was hard to do but also because it changed the trajectory of their lives into becoming somebody who's more actively pro-environmental in the world.
A former guide told the researchers: "You’d see massive glacier calvings, and you’d just want to cry. But all the guests would be cheering." (Image credit: Andrew Peacock via Getty Images)ZS: Many of them did, until this day. Since it was a difficult decision to make and to act upon, it still triggers emotions, and people still think back. Yes, some of them do resent and regret and wish it was less environmentally harmful and wish they still could be having that dream job.
LC: Yes. As I recall, many of our participants actually didn't really believe that their decision would make an impact in the overall environmental state of Antarctica. I don't agree with that. But there was a general feeling that, "OK, my individual choice isn't going to make a difference in the grand scheme of things" — also because, like you say, they expect that they will just be replaced, and probably replaced by somebody who's less environmentally concerned than them and might engage with Antarctic tourism practices in a less environmentally responsible way, which actually might make things worse. But in those cases, the decision to leave was basically mainly based on this internal conflict — this uneasiness that got so monumental that they couldn't live anymore doing this job.
SP: Was there anything in the interviews that surprised you?
SP: Did your interviews touch on other popular destinations where tourism may be doing more harm than good? I'm thinking, for example, of the Galápagos Islands and "last-chance" tourism in the Arctic.
I actually did have one guide who also had experience from Bali, for example, and other regions in Southeast Asia. There, the reflections were actually around how destructive tourism can be in Indigenous regions, where people have no say and they don't benefit from tourism; they're just being "consumed" as a resource, as a sightseeing item, basically. That person quit cruise guiding overall, because they felt it was destructive.
"To this day, Antarctica … stays in the forefront of my head as the most incredibly raw environment that deserves all the care and protection. And I just think tourism and us being there was doing the opposite of that completely," a former guide told the researchers. (Image credit: David Merron Photography via Getty Images)
SP: Having done this work, what do you think people should consider when booking their next vacation?
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If it's to feel a connection with nature and be away from the urban, hectic life, you definitely do not need to go to a place that is this remote. Perhaps you have a place where you can feel that connection with nature just a couple of kilometers away.
This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.
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