All you lousy people should just stay home -- your galavanting ways are screwing up some of the world's great treasures. So says Newsweek magazine in its "The Rush to See It Before It's Gone" piece of Rocky Mountain High Environmentalism (in honor of the John Denver song in which he praises the beauty of the Rockies, which he unfortunately can't get maximum pleasure out of, because they've also been discovered by all those other nasty people, "more scars upon the land"). Thanks to "rising incomes and falling airfares," you see, "the number of tourists hit a world record of 806 million last year." And many of these tourists "are now booking to see sites while they still can," which of course "will only compound the problem," since it is those very tourists who are imperiling the sites in the first place.
My favorite line is that, while nature might certainly be causing some of the problems (the Earth, it seems, does change over time), "The man-made threats, particularly from economic development, are more immediate." How dare those pushy, greedy people of the world try to climb into the middle class and have better lives in a suburban housing complex if it means the destrucion of "a gem of 1930s modernist architecture."
