One Thousand Places to See Because They’re Disappearing?

Newsweek International and MSNBC.com have published a terrific story surveying the many threats posed to some of the world’s most iconic destinations, from the Great Wall of China (believe it or not, tourists are riding go-carts along it) to Mount Kilimanjaro (thanks to deforestation and global warming, the famous “Snows of Kilimanjaro” could be gone in 15 years) to New Orleans (water!).

The story is well worth a read, but here are three noteworthy excerpts:

[N]o place can be taken for granted anymore. No matter how exotic the destination, until recently a traveler’s biggest concern was how to get there, not where the journey would ultimately lead. Now thanks to rising incomes and falling airfares, getting there is the easy part; last year a record 806 million tourists hit the road. But those hordes—combined with forces ranging from climate change to civil war, industrial toxins to runaway development—are laying siege to some of the world’s most treasured and irreplaceable sites.

Later, he writes, “The number-one threat to tourist treasures, paradoxically, is tourism itself. The challenge is how to keep the world’s most esteemed monuments from being loved to death.”

And later still:

Conservation International reckons that “unsustainable tourism” poses the main threat to half the cultural heritage sites in Latin America and the Caribbean, and to one in five sites in Asia and the Pacific. Cambodia’s once-remote Angkor temples now receive a million visitors a year; the Taj Mahal is subject to 7 million. Rising prosperity in the developing world, more and more elderly on the move, and cheap flights to anywhere will only hasten the human flood.

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