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An exploration of cultural attitudes to human waste.

Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 15 August 1916

A dragon-fly of our largest species visited the “Manchester Guardian” office about a week ago, entering through an open window. I have seen a Manchester-captured dragon-fly before, but the occurrence of the insect is worth recording; it is a powerful aeronaut and carnivorous, but why it should attempt to hunt flies in the city when the supply is so much greater outside is hard to understand.

A Wilmslow correspondent has sent me the remains of a crimson geranium, for from each petal a neat semicircular portion has been removed. He watched a bee snipping the petals and bearing them away to a hole in the mortar on his house wall; he asks what the bee is and why it wanted the bits of flower. It is one of the leaf-cutter bees, a pollen-lover like our hive bee, and the cut bits were to build the cells in which its young would spend their early stages, as egg, grub, and nymph or pupa; they take the place of the wax cells in the hive bee’s comb. In the selected crack or tunnel the cells are placed in a long row, fitting neatly into one another; each oblong cell is formed of folds of cut leaves or petals, the insect cutely taking advantage of the inward curl of the drying vegetable tissues in the construction. The base of each cell is convex; in it an egg is placed and a supply of food, and then a concave door, usually formed of several layers of leaf, wonderfully rounded and out to size, closes the cell until the perfect bee is ready to push its way out. The convex base of the next cell fits into the concave door. The grub, when it leaves the egg, converts its well-filled storeroom into living-room to suit its growth, eating room for its enlarging body. Some leaf-cutters show aesthetic taste, selecting red or yellow petals, but the majority cut their cell material from the leaves of our garden roses. If my correspondent will excavate one or two of the cells I am sure he will be amazed at their beauty.

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Check it out while you can. Tourism Queensland/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

The health of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is declining – a fact that has not been lost on the world’s media.

The issue has made international headlines and attracted comment from public figures such as US President Barack Obama and British businessman Richard Branson.

Some media outlets and tourism operators have sought to downplay the effects, presumably to try to mitigate the impact on tourism. The industry provides roughly 65,000 jobs and contributes more than A$5 billion a year to the Australian economy.

But our research suggests that the ailing health of the GBR has in fact given tourists a new reason to visit, albeit one that doesn’t exactly promise a long-term future.

When we surveyed hundreds of GBR tourists last year, 69% of them said they had opted to visit the reef “before it is gone” – and that was before the latest bleaching generated fresh international headlines about its plight.

‘Last chance’ tourism

“Last chance tourism” (LCT) is a phenomenon whereby tourists choose to visit a destination that is perceived to be in danger, with the express intention of seeing it before it’s gone.

The media obviously play a large role in this phenomenon – the more threatened the public perceives a destination to be, the bigger the market for LCT.

There’s a vicious cycle at play here: tourists travel to see a destination before it disappears, but in so doing they contribute to its demise, either directly through on-site pressures or, in the case of climate-threatened sites such as the GBR, through greenhouse gas emissions. These added pressures increase the vulnerability of the destination and in turn push up the demand for LCT still further.

The GBR often features on lists of tourist destinations to see before they disappear, alongside places such as Glacier National Park, the Maldives and the Galapagos Islands.

While the media have proclaimed the reef to be an LCT destination, it has not previously been empirically confirmed that tourists are indeed motivated to visit specifically because of its vulnerable status.

Surveying reef tourists

We wanted to find out how many of the GBR’s holidaymakers are “last chance” tourists. To that end, we surveyed 235 tourists visiting three major tourism hotspots, Port Douglas, Cairns and Airlie Beach, to identify their leading motivations for visiting.

We gave them a suggested list of 15 reasons, including “to see the reef before it is gone”; “to rest and relax”; “to discover new places and things”, and others. We then asked them to rate the importance of each reason on a five-point scale, from “not at all” to “extremely”.

We found that 69% of tourists were either “very” or “extremely” motivated to see the reef before it was gone. This reason attracted the highest proportion of “extremely” responses (37.9%) of any of the 15 reasons.

This reason was also ranked the fourth-highest by average score on the five-point scale. The top three motivations by average score were: “to discover new places and things”; “to rest and relax; and "to get away from the demands of everyday life”.

Our results also confirmed that the media have played a large role in shaping tourists' perceptions of the GBR. The internet was the most used information source (68.9% of people) and television the third (54.4%), with word of mouth coming in second (57%).

Airlie Beach, a great spot for some last-chance tourism. Damien Dempsey/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Our findings suggest that the GBR’s tribulations could offer a short-term tourism boost, as visitors flock to see this threatened natural wonder. But, in the long term, the increased tourism might exacerbate the pressure on this already vulnerable region – potentially even hastening the collapse of this ecosystem and the tourism industry that relies on its health.

This paradox is deepened further when we consider that many of the tourists in our survey who said they were visiting the reef to “see it before it is gone” nevertheless had low levels of concern about their own impacts on the region.

Where to from here?

We undertook our survey in 2015, before this year’s bleaching event, described as the most severe in the GBR’s history.

This raises another question: is there a threshold beyond which the GBR is seen as “too far gone” to visit? If so, might future more frequent or severe bleaching episodes take us past that threshold?

As the most important source of information for tourists visiting the GBR, the media in particular need to acknowledge their own important role in informing the public. Media outlets need to portray the reef’s current status as accurately as possible. The media’s power and influence also afford them a great opportunity to help advocate for the GBR’s protection.

Educating tourists about the threats facing the GBR is an important way forward, particularly as our research identified major gaps in tourists' understanding of the specific threats facing the GBR and the impacts of their own behaviour. Many survey respondents, for instance, expressed low levels of concern about agricultural runoff, despite this being one of the biggest threats facing the GBR.

Of course, tourism is just one element in a complex web of issues that affect the GBR and needs to be part of a wider consideration of the reef’s future.

The only thing that is certain is that more needs to be done to ensure this critical ecosystem can survive, so that tourists who think this is the last chance to see it can hopefully be proved wrong.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Nauru's parliament would have been rebuilt in Queensland, but with less power. CdaMVvWgS/Wikimedia Commons

Nauru is best known to most Australians as the remote Pacific island where asylum seekers who arrive by boat are sent. What is less well known is that in the 1960s, the Australian government planned to relocate the entire population of Nauru to an island off the Queensland coast.

The irony of this is striking, especially in light of continuing revelations that highlight the non-suitability of Nauru as a host country for refugees. It also provides a cautionary tale for those considering wholesale population relocation as a “solution” for Pacific island communities threatened by the impacts of climate change.

Extensive phosphate mining on Nauru by Australia, Britain and New Zealand during the 20th century devastated much of the country. The landscape was so damaged that scientists considered it would be uninhabitable by the mid-1990s. With the exorbitant cost of rehabilitating the island, relocation was considered the only option.

In 1962, Australia’s prime minister Robert Menzies acknowledged that the three nations had a “clear obligation … to provide a satisfactory future for the Nauruans”, given the large commercial and agricultural benefits they had derived from Nauru’s phosphate. This meant “either finding an island for the Nauruans or receiving them into one of the three countries, or all of the three countries”.

That same year, Australia appointed a Director of Nauruan Resettlement to comb the South Pacific looking for “spare islands offering a fair prospect”. Possible relocation sites in and around Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Australia’s Northern Territory were explored, but were ultimately deemed inappropriate. There weren’t enough job opportunities and there were tensions with the locals.

Fraser Island in Queensland was also considered, but the Australian government decided it didn’t offer sufficiently strong economic prospects to support the population. The Nauruans thought this was a convenient excuse (and archival materials show that the timber industry was fiercely opposed).

The Curtis solution

In 1963, Curtis Island near Gladstone was offered as an alternative. Land there was privately held, but the Australian government planned to acquire it and grant the Nauruans the freehold title. Pastoral, agricultural, fishing and commercial activities were to be established, and all the costs of resettlement, including housing and infrastructure, were to be met by the partner governments at an estimated cost of 10 million pounds – around A$274 million in today’s terms.

But the Nauruans refused to go. They did not want to be assimilated into White Australia and lose their distinctive identity as a people. Many also saw resettlement as a quick-fix solution by the governments that had devastated their homeland, and a cheap option compared with full rehabilitation of the island.

Australia also refused to relinquish sovereignty over Curtis Island. While the Nauruans could become Australian citizens, and would have the right to “manage their own local administration” through a council “with wide powers of local government”, the island would officially remain part of Australia.

Frustrated by what it perceived as a genuine and generous attempt to meet the wishes of the Nauruan people, the Menzies government insisted it wouldn’t change its mind.

So the Nauruans stayed put.

Nauru’s phosphate industry has left the landscape scarred and useless for agriculture. CdaMVvWgS/Wikimedia Commons

The issue briefly resurfaced in 2003 when Australia’s foreign minister Alexander Downer once again suggested wholesale relocation as a possible strategy, given that Nauru was “bankrupt and widely regarded as having no viable future”. Nauru’s president dismissed the proposal, reiterating that relocating the population to Australia would undermine the country’s identity and culture.

Planned relocations in the Pacific

Today, “planned relocation” is touted as a possible solution for low-lying Pacific island countries, such as Kiribati and Tuvalu, which are threatened by sea-level rise and other long-term climate impacts.

But past experiences in the Pacific, such as the relocation of the Banabans in 1945 from present-day Kiribati to Fiji, show the potentially deep, intergenerational psychological consequences of planned relocation. This is why most Pacific islanders see it as an option of last resort. Unless relocation plans result from a respectful, considered and consultative process, in which different options and views are seriously considered, they will always be highly fraught.

Nauru today is at the highest level of vulnerability on the Environmental Vulnerability Index. The past destruction wrought by phosphate mining has rendered the island incapable of supporting any local agriculture or industry, with 90% of the land covered by limestone pinnacles.

It has a very high unemployment rate, scarce labour opportunities, and virtually no private sector – hence why the millions of dollars on offer to operate Australia’s offshore processing centres was so attractive. These factors also illustrate why the permanent resettlement of refugees on Nauru is unrealistic and unsustainable.

Nauru’s future seems sadly rooted in an unhealthy relationship of co-dependency with Australia, as its territory is once again exploited, at the expense of the vulnerable. And as the story of Curtis Island shows, there are no simple solutions, whether well-intentioned or not.

This is an overview of a longer article published in Australian Geographer.

Jane McAdam receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Research Council of Norway. She is engaged in several international policy processes aimed at developing strategies to address human mobility in the context of climate change and disasters.

WaterAid shares the global concern for the world’s top athletes dealing with the sewage in Rio’s bays (Report, 4 August). But the heavily contaminated waters don’t only put at risk the health of Olympians, it’s clear they also adversely affect the millions of people facing this faecal nightmare, day-in and day-out. Despite Brazil being an upper-middle income country, nearly 2% of Brazilians, or 3.5 million people, have no access to clean water, and 17%, or 35 million people, live without good sanitation. In Rio alone, 30% of the population is not connected to a formal sewerage system. It is a travesty that anyone should have to live like this.

Sadly, Brazil is not alone in facing a water and sanitation crisis. One in three people globally live without decent toilets, and one in 10 are without clean water. These Olympic Games have put the spotlight on one of the most urgent yet beatable crises of our time. World leaders must address it. The UN global goals for sustainable development were agreed by these leaders last year. The challenge now is to put those promises into action, ensuring that everyone, everywhere has clean water and sanitation by 2030.
Margaret Batty
Director of global policy and campaigns, WaterAid

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Body says, with government reviewing £18.5bn project, benefits of renewables such as offshore wind should be looked at

The crown estate has waded into the battle over Hinkley Point, pointing out that offshore windfarms are already being built at cheaper prices than the proposed atomic reactors for Somerset.

While not arguing the £18.5bn nuclear project should be scrapped, the organisation – still legally owned by the Queen – said that the government’s current Hinkley review makes it a good time to consider the advantages of other low carbon technologies.

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Falling costs and increased reliability mean this clean power now offers a mature part of the solution for the UK’s energy mix

With the government re-examining the case for new nuclear reactors at Hinkley Point, it’s a good time to reflect on recent breakthroughs in another low carbon technology: offshore wind.

Offshore wind is already meeting about 5% of the UK’s electricity demand, more than any other country globally, and is on course to meet 10% by 2020. The sector has undergone a sea change over the last few years, driven by rapid advances in technology, cost, and industry’s ability to deliver on time and to budget.

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AeroFarms has put $30m into a green revolution that seeks to produce more crops in less space, but whether it’s economically viable is an open question

An ambitious, almost fantastical, manifestation of agricultural technology is expected to come to fruition this fall. From the remains of an abandoned steel mill in Newark, New Jersey, the creators of AeroFarms are building what they say will be the largest vertical farm, producing two million pounds of leafy greens a year.

Whether it even qualifies as a “farm” is a matter of taste. The greens will be manufactured using a technology called aeroponics, a technique in which crops are grown in vertical stacks of plant beds, without soil, sunlight or water.

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A woman and her dog are rescued from a car in Baton Rouge on Saturday, as floodwaters swallowed the vehicle. Shot by local television station WAFB, three men are seen trying to break open the car that is almost submerged in the water. One of the rescuers, David Phung, jumps in and pulls the woman and her dog out

• Louisiana flooding cuts off roads and thousands of homes

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Toxic bloom is terrible for acquatic life – the good news is, we may be able to harness the sludge as a carbon-neutral biofuel

Ideally, in these days of busy news cycles, an eco problem needs to be visible from space to gain traction. Algae has obliged again this summer.

At Florida’s largest freshwater lake, Okeechobee, the cyano-bacteria blue-green algae bloom, covering 33 miles, has been clearly captured in Nasa satellite imagery.

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They were hunted to near-extinction. Now a £3.5m project aims to let the Scottish molluscs flourish again

The sun shines on clear river water running through a valley in the Cairngorms, bringing the stones on the river bed into colourful focus. Here and there are dark shadows, half-buried clusters of dull black shells, lined and gouged by decades of shifting water and gravel: the pearl mussels of the river Dee.

Related: Fundraising drive aims to save seabird paradise off Scotland

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In the far south-west of New South Wales we meet a team of environmental rangers who are trying to bring country back to life by coaxing animal populations back, constructing 'fish hotels' to keep the fry safe from predators and protecting cultural heritage sites.

Campaigners say Crystal Serenity trip puts at risk very environment tourists are travelling to see in Northwest Passage

A decision to proceed with plans to sail the first huge cruise liner through the Northwest Passage on Tuesday with 1,000 passengers on board has rekindled rows with environmentalists about the Arctic.

The wildlife charity WWF has accused Crystal Cruises of putting at risk “the very thing that tourists would come to see” – a pristine wilderness and home to endangered species such as polar bears and walrus.

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South Uist They exist in two worlds, coming to flower in the sunshine and open air while rooted in the murky waters of the loch

It’s a scene worthy of the grounds around the most cultured of stately homes. An expanse of tranquil water faithfully reflecting back the glorious blue of a cloudless summer sky while a spread of white waterlilies rests serenely on its surface. Yet this is no planned garden but just one of the many lochs and lochans on the moorland and rough grazing which, for a short period each year, becomes something almost magical.

The contrast with the wiry grasses and the stands of scratchy, leggy heather itself soon to come into bloom only emphasises the waxy perfection of the waterlilies. Each layered ruff of white petals curves gently upward, cradling the mass of yellow anthers in the centre of the flower. There is a touch of the purity of the lotus about them, yet also somehow a hint of danger and mystery, existing as they do in two worlds, coming to flower in the sunshine and open air while rooted in the murky waters of the loch.

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The Rio Olympics, wildfires in Europe, the continuing violence in Aleppo – the best photography in news, culture and sport from around the world this week

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Jodie Rummer is modelling scenarios for the world’s oceans by the end of the century and investigating whether and how fish might be able to adapt to warmer waters.

Bob Beale says the Earth is sending strong messages that things are seriously out of balance.

Prior to 1956, women were banned form being in Antarctica. Today women lead major research institutes in Antarctic science.

New South Wales government couches its words carefully, but community hopes the end of BHP mine also spells the end of the Shenhua Watermark mine

One of Australia’s biggest mining battles could be drawing to a close, with the enormous Shenhua Watermark coalmine looking set to be stopped by the state government after relentless community pressure.

In a major victory for the uneasy coalition of environmentalists, farmers and conservative politicians and commentators, the New South Wales government said it was moving to stop mining in the fertile farming soils of the Liverpool Plains.

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Behind the scenes at Perth Zoo is a room full of small glass aquariums. And within each enclosure is one of Australia's rarest marsupials. The dibbler.