Lessons from Nature
My mother was a keen gardener. She taught me that a thriving garden requires understanding how different species support each other, how soil health underpins the entire system, and how weather and the seasons affect the garden's rhythms. For her, a healthy garden wasn't just a collection of plants, it was a living, breathing ever-changing system.
Beyond that, she also taught me that spending time in nature, observing, feeling and connecting with the earth, admiring nature’s palette, sweet smells, textures and fruits was a way of resting, restoring, and preparing for the week ahead. This knowledge was not spoken but shared by doing and being together, usually in connected silence.
This post is part of a two part series that explores tourism, characterised by industrial monocrop, and the shift towards a regenerative living systems approach. In this first post, I explore how tourism has been framed as an industrial sector and the implications this has had for places, nature and communities.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, this early exposure to living systems, complexity, and the healing power of nature was a powerful gift and way of being that has profoundly shaped how I see and understand the world. Now, as global capitalism and its neoliberal playbook unravel at a pace we could not have imagined even a month ago, the search for a new paradigm unfolds with renewed energy. Learning how to respect the earth and the ecological systems that support all life is no longer a call from the margins. It's a homecoming to old ways of thinking and knowing. Most of us possess the seeds of this way of seeing and understanding the world, but it's been locked away and isolated. Instead, we donned our armour and went into the economic fray in pursuit of more, better, and never enough. It's where consumerism drives mass production and scaling means spreading beige solutions that flatten the colours, smells and textures of the special places we call home. There is no time to enjoy nature, let alone let nature's wisdom speak.
Tourism as a Monocrop
For decades, we've approached tourism destinations as monocropping, focused on maximising productivity, instead of seeing these places as diverse and flourishing gardens of creativity and unique potential. In doing so, we have applied the same basic tools to every destination: marketing campaigns, destination management plans, and economic metrics. Big infrastructure provision is used as a fertiliser to improve productivity—and it works for a time. But we know that fertiliser does little to improve the underlying structure, composition or nutritional value of the soil. Little by little, the soil is degraded until it can no longer support cropping activities.
Applying this metaphor to tourism, the visible results of this approach include short-term increases in visitation, often leading to overtourism. Over the medium term, mounting community concerns over a range of flow-on effects, including housing affordability and availability, cost of living, quality of life, and precarious employment can leave communities feeling depleted and exploited (like the soil under monocropping). Over the long term, communities feel increasingly depleted, the over-reliance on tourism reveals both economic and social vulnerabilities, and the environmental impacts of resource depletion affect ecological rhythms and processes.
This is where I start my preparation for the Great Ocean Road Community Network's (GORCN) upcoming seminar series - contemplating how we can see and understand differently. The Great Ocean Road (GOR) in Australia, like many iconic destinations worldwide, faces complex challenges. Rising visitor numbers, stressed infrastructure, and community anxiety are coalescing with the global ‘metacrisis’. Tourism seems hopelessly underprepared for the change ahead. In this first blog post in this two-part series, I share why tourism is in a stuck place.
Reframing Tourism in Complexity
Tourism both influences and is influenced by the complex social, ecological and economic processes from global to local levels. However, since the mid-1980s, Australia has adopted a narrow industrial framing where tourism is treated as an industry driven by market forces with economic growth as the end goal (Dredge 2016). This isn't just the dominant paradigm. For many professionals, it's the only paradigm they've ever known. It fills their entire worldview and it becomes impossible to consider that tourism might be something other than an industry (Dredge 2023).
But what if the real problem isn't tourism, but us?
What if the reductionist way we see and understand tourism, and the limited toolkit we’ve built as a result, is the core problem? Limitations in understanding the interconnectedness of tourism in its context, and the lack of complex thinking and approaches have created a perfect storm where we can neither fully understand the challenges nor imagine alternative futures.
To illustrate this complexity, let’s take the GOR. A risk assessment conducted in 2024 by Mandela using Zurich data found that up to 68% of Australia’s tourism assets could be in the major risk category by 2050 under a 2C warming scenario. The Great Ocean Road was singled out as being among those tourism assets in the high-risk category. It is subject to multiple climate perils with potential physical impacts including shoreline erosion, landslides, and compromised infrastructure. Disruptions to transport along the GOR as a result of climate-related events would likely have cascading effects on the social and economic fabric of local communities.
If we were to think of places that are touristed, as gardens of diversity and connection that need to be tended, not exploited, then perhaps we might manage tourism differently.
New ways of thinking and working are needed, involving both a mindset shift at the individual level and systems change at the collective level. Unfortunately however, we appear to be stuck on 'sustainable tourism' because that is where the consulting industry would like us to stay. Selling their accreditations and ecolabels is nothing more than business-as-usual consulting, however these tools won’t stop the depletion and exploitation of our natural and social resources. Nor will they address the cascading effects of climate change or bring back declining wildlife populations. They also won't address demand, seasonality or housing issues. Put simply, sustainable tourism remains firmly embedded within the industrial worldview, adding a veneer of green to the same extractive model. Like putting solar panels on a coal-fired power plant, sustainable tourism attempts to make the extractive system slightly less damaging rather than fundamentally reimagining what tourism could be.
But in order to shift mindsets we first need to understand why we are blocked from thinking differently. It starts with understanding the nature of industrial policy which incentivises business as usual. So let’s step back to understand how we got here.
Who is Industrial Policy Designed For?
Tourism is complex - a perfect practice ground for systems thinking. Yet since the 1980s, we've stripped it of this complexity, reducing it to an industrial model that primarily serves the interests of large industry players who dominate policy discussions. I've written a lot about tourism industrial policy over the years (see references) and made observations about the frequency and reliance on crisis and recovery packages (Dredge 2011) which are not 'one off' policy initiatives but deeply engrained and expected as a pillar of the government policy approach.
This focus on industrial policy stands in stark contrast to tourism's actual composition, where 80-90% of tourism businesses are small operators, deeply embedded in their communities. As a result, small, micro and part-time businesses experiencing tourism's impacts through their lived experience as both business owners and community members.
The reality is that these small operators often have little influence over, or engagement with, the policy decisions that affect their futures. They're increasingly challenged by economic conditions, housing affordability, staff shortages, and rising costs - the very issues that industrial policy tends to overlook.
The industrial policy toolkit primarily targets large industry players through:
Reducing barriers and costs of access to and use of public resources for private gain (e.g., commercial leases in protected areas)
Minimising the costs of production for the industry (e.g. through subsidies, grants that turn public money into private gain)
Provision of infrastructure (e.g. airports and ferry terminals)
Assisting in growing market access through, for example, international marketing, airline access and passenger capacity building, and tourist visa management
Offering crises and recovery packages in times of crisis so that industry can bounce back to ‘normal’.
Recent initiatives like Tourism Australia's "We are the Australian tourism industry" campaign suggest there may be a disconnect between those that industry policy supports (i.e. the top 10-20%) and the lived experience of small, micro, and seasonal businesses (the 80-90%). While claiming "we are the tourism industry" and profiling operators who tend to sit on various state and local tourism boards, the question is whether this campaign seeks to create artificial unity. Moreover, when the campaign speaks of "economic prosperity" and Tourism Australia discusses "sustainable growth," they're speaking the language of industrial tourism, not the language of small businesses in regional, rural and remote communities struggling with daily operational challenges. In my own work, I see a huge disconnect between regional, rural and remote businesses and what industry policy stands for.
Community Tipping Points
Most small business owners in regional and remote communities are also community members. Communities aren't just grappling with tourism pressures - they're simultaneously facing housing crises, economic instability, and increasingly frequent climate events such as floods and fires. Each of these challenges intersects with and amplifies the others, creating a complex web of interconnected problems. This awakening to complexity comes at a particularly challenging time, especially for regional, rural and remote communities facing:
A contraction in community services
Declining volunteerism
Reduced funding for essential infrastructure
Economic restructuring that threatens local jobs and business viability
Weakened capacity to respond to natural disasters (and an increased reliance on crisis and recovery packages)
Increasing frequency of climate-related emergencies
The specific pressure points vary depending on the community, but the pattern is clear: many places are approaching a critical juncture where continuing with ‘business-as-usual’ tourism is no longer an option. These tipping points, while challenging, also create opportunities for reimagining tourism's role as place-based community development as opposed to industry. The place to start is to value local knowledge and lived experience in the co-design of locally appropriate reframing of tourism.
Reimagining Tourism
My mother taught me that nature's wisdom comes from quiet observation, from doing and being. While a garden flourishes in diversity, complementarity and adaption, industrial agriculture depletes and is not a long-term solution for thriving. It should seem obvious that tourism cannot flourish when reduced to industrial management. A holistic approach should recognise diversity and support all life (including small businesses and communities) to thrive. Such an approach requires us to think like regenerators - to see tourism not as an industry to be managed, but as a living system to be nurtured.
While industrial policy clings to a narrow definition of resilience focused on market recovery (Dredge 2021), nature shows us that true resilience comes from diversity, from complex relationships, from the ability to adapt and evolve. In a garden, each plant, insect, and microorganism plays its part in creating conditions that support life. Similarly, tourism needs to nurture the diverse "microbiome" of small businesses, community initiatives, and local relationships that create truly resilient destinations.
This means developing new capacities to work with complexity rather than trying to simplify it away. It means understanding the rhythms and patterns of place, just as a gardener understands the seasons. It means learning to create conditions where communities and nature can flourish together, rather than extracting value from them.
Such an approach requires us to stretch our imagination beyond the confines of industrial thinking. Like preparing soil for new growth, we must first acknowledge and let go of old patterns that no longer serve us. This letting go can feel uncomfortable in a world that craves certainty and quick solutions. Yet it is in this discomfort - what I like to think of as the rich, dark soil of possibility - where new ideas can take root and flourish.
In Part II - How Communities are Reimagining Tourism Practice Inspired by Living Systems, I explore how living systems principles offer practical pathways for reimagining tourism.
For those ready to dive deeper into regenerative approaches, I invite you to join our upcoming Tourism CoLab course Think Like A Regenerator where we'll explore these ideas in practice. Together, we'll learn how to unlock our collective imagination and develop the tools needed to create tourism systems that truly serve communities and nature. To find out more, simply head over to the course page:
Selected References
B&T 2024. Tourism Australia Launches “We Are The Australian Tourism Industry” Initiative To Highlight Industry’s Role in Economy
Dredge, D. 2011. Tourism Reform, Policy and Development in Queensland 1989-2011, Queensland Review 18(2),152-174.
Dredge, D. 2015. Short-term versus long-term approaches to the development of tourism-related policies. in Haxton, P. (2015), “A Review of Effective Policies for Tourism Growth”, OECD Tourism Papers, 2015/01, OECD Publishing, Paris.
Dredge, D. 2016. Governance, tourism and resilience: A long way to go? In Gill, A. and Saarinen, Resilient Destinations and Tourism Governance Strategies in the Transition towards Sustainability in Tourism. Taylor & Francis.
Dredge, D. 2019. Unleashing Creative Thinking in Tourism. The Tourism CoLab
Dredge, D. 2021. Policy Shifts Towards Regeneration. The Tourism CoLab.
Dredge, D. 2021. Why Bounce-back Narrative is Stealing Our Future, The Tourism CoLab.
Dredge, D. 2023. Changing the Narrative Through Small Practice. The Tourism CoLab
Green Matters. 2020 What is moncropping? May 2020.
Mandala. 2024. The Zurich-Mandala Climate Risk Index: The impact of climate change on the Australian tourism industry.