Update: Well now, my little blog post went a little bit viral and my server has been copping it big time. There has been some amazing feedback to this article – most of it in agreement with me – some not so much. Those who were most outraged by my post don’t actually seem to have read it, particularly the last paragraph, which is only to be expected in this post-truth Trumpian era of ours – but it’s highly amusing all the same. Anyway, I just wanted to address some concerns and clear up a few things that other folks have raised.

Firstly – yes, I probably should have finished on a more upbeat note in which I encouraged folks to clean up after themselves, to consider the natural environment and to ‘leave it like you found it’. In my defence, I don’t think that the kind of people who are the problem are going to be reading articles like mine in the first place. The kind of people who treat the natural world such disregard care only about getting to 50,000 Instagram followers and if that means a few pristine bush trails get trampled in the process then so-be-it. I guess the mantra ‘education not vilification’ is a worthy one and an ideal that I will aim for in the future.

Secondly – as I say in the mea culpa in the last paragraph – I am part of the problem too. I fully accept it and henceforth I will be taking steps to ensure that I am not part of the problem.

I think the central issue here is that two worlds have collided.

For many years the world of the landscape photographer was a largely closed one in which a few geeky souls went out into the countryside, at ludicrous hours of the day and night and, using skills learnt through years of practice and took photographs of the natural world. It was a genuinely small clique of people who, by and large, operated under the same unwritten code of ethics. As I see it, it all changed in three stages – 1) when we went from film to digital, 2) when we went from high-end DSLR to smartphone camera and 3) when we went from printing our photos to uploading them to social media. The bottom line is that in 2018 – everyone is a photographer and that old unwritten code of ethics simply does not figure in the lives of most people. Combine the exponential increase in the number of people taking photographs with the world of social media and, in hindsight, it’s easy to see that it was always going to play out the way it has.

It has been pointed out to me – and I completely agree – that the massive increase in tourism since the 1990s is also to blame for the current situation. Even extremely well known places that have been on the tourist map for a hundreds years, such as Yellowstone in the states, Abel Tasman National Park in New Zealand, Lofoten in Norway, the Lake District in England, Santorini in Greece and pretty much the whole of Iceland, have all been suffering from a massive increase in visitation rates. Even newly ‘discovered’ locations such as Torres Del Paine in Patagonia, have been feeling the pressure of greatly increased visitor numbers. It is becoming increasingly clear that the only way of managing this in the long-term is by limiting the number of people who can access a particular area at one time – although I suspect the situation will have to get much worse than it currently is for the authorities to step in.

The other argument – and again I completely agree – is that there is no malice intended by the people sharing locations. In many cases they had no idea that their photograph would go viral, or be noticed by an influencer and copied, or get picked up by a tourism organisation and shared.

Thanks to everyone that commented, whatever their viewpoint, at least people are talking about it now.

Update (Oct 2018): Saw this article in The Guardian and thought it was a sign of things to come. “One of the world’s most popular beaches, made famous by the 2000 film The Beach, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, is to be closed indefinitely to allow it to recover from the damage caused by millions of tourists.”