Don’t do this route

ESP – ENG

Overcrowded beaches, towns with more hotel beds than inhabitants, overexploited natural environments, wipes and cellulose waste everywhere, local demonstrations against uncontrolled tourism… More and more symptoms are showing that we’re doing something wrong in our country’s tourism, environmental and educational management.

This is an issue that has worried and frightened me ever since I launched Montañas Vacías, as you surely know. I’ve always thought that the balance between the positive impact of an initiative in a rural area and environmental conservation is a delicate point that everyone can place in a different place depending on their interests or lack of them. The owner of a small village bar may not locate that balance point in the same place as his mayor, for example. There are as many shades of environmental awareness as there are people.

That point of balance has been in my head since the beginning of this project, and it’s something I’ve decided to devote more energy to lately. All the effort in raising awareness about the conservation of Silence is proof of that.

That’s why I’m launching this campaign, #DontDoThisRoute, inspired by an advertising campaign of a prestigious brand back in 2011, which with a striking message invited people not to buy their products, as an act of awareness against the disproportionate consumerism derived from campaigns such as Black Friday. Simply, the planet cannot afford this rate of consumption.

That marketing campaign marked me for a long time, and today, thirteen years later, that concept, format and message are more relevant than ever, and can be perfectly applied to the issues I mentioned above.

We travel beyond our planet’s possibilities, so this campaign is meant to be a call for moderation and coherence:

• We collect destinations only to tick them off a list.
• We need to do it constantly, almost compulsively.
• We want those destinations and we want them now, quickly.
• We are often not fully aware of the value and fragility of the places we visit.
• We make disproportionate use of fossil fuels, overusing motorbikes and off-road cars to effortlessly access places that we could reach on foot or pedalling.

All this has led to the collapse of a large number of natural environments, and on many cases, their managers wonder how to reverse the situation when it is already too late. In this report you can see some examples of this.

I’ve always thought it takes less effort to spend time and energy on prevention than on fixing things once we’ve already messed up.

That’s why:

---