Meanderings, 30 December 2023

Welcome to 2023’s final edition of my Saturday Meanderings, a collection of news stories and their link. We look forward to 2024 — but not to yet one more cycle of news stories about the USA’s presidential election. We look forward, too, to the celebration of the famous countdown!

Photo by Keith Luke on Unsplash

What we learned, according to this news story, is where not to go in 2023 and maybe a warning then for 2024!

Following several years of pandemic-induced downturn, the travel sector is not only back, it’s positively booming. According to the World Travel & Tourism Council, the industry is expected to bring in some $9.5 trillion in 2023 — which accounts for 95% of its pre-pandemic levels.

Nowhere is this surge more evident than at popular tourist hot spots around the world, many of which have experienced record visitor numbers over the past year.

Such surges may be sweet for local economies and hospitality businesses’ bottom line, but they also come with notable downsides: increased noise, pollution, traffic and strain on public resources; a lower quality of life for locals; and a diminished visitor experience, just to name a few.

Not surprisingly, many tourist magnets across the globe, including several European hubs, have created initiatives and restrictions aimed to combat overtourism issues. Among them: new or increased tourist taxes, campaigns aimed at discouraging problematic visitors and attendance caps at popular attractions.

On the bright side, more travelers seem to be aware of the risks of overtourism — and how they can help alleviate the problem. In a 2022 survey by travel booking site Booking.com, 64% of respondents said they would be prepared to stay away from busy tourist sites to avoid adding to congestion. And 31% said they’d even be willing to choose an alternative to their preferred destination to help avoid overcrowding.

On that front, here’s a look at some of the most prominent destinations around the world whose overtourism issues made headlines in 2023 — along with what’s being done to address the issue and how travelers themselves can mitigate (or avoid altogether) the crowds in 2024.

[SMcK: Where? Amsterdam, Athens, Bali, Barcelona, Miami, Paris, Phuket, or Venice! So, popular places were too popular.]

This story has “Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful” written all over it!

A project that began in a garage in the early 1990s has since grown into a large, influential distributor of goods.

No, it’s not Amazon — it’s Harvest House, a Texas food ministry founded by the Nichols Street Church of Christ in Bay City, 75 miles southwest of Houston.

Glenn Organ and a few other members of the congregation started feeding about 25 families per week out of the garage of a church-owned apartment in 1993 — a year before Jeff Bezos founded the online retail giant out of his garage in Bellevue, Wash.

And while Harvest House may not boast Amazon’s $500 billion revenue — or any, for that matter — Organ is proud that the ministry now feeds an average of 300 families every week, providing them with about 5,000 pounds of food.

That makes it the largest food pantry in Matagorda County, with a population of about 36,000 — nearly a quarter of whom live below the poverty level, according to U.S. Census data.

The pantry mostly operates a weekly Wednesday drive-up or walk-up food distribution. One week each month, it runs a mobile food distribution on Thursday instead in nearby Van Vleck, Texas.

“We are trying to do as Christ admonished us to do in Matthew, when he depicts the final judgment, and one of those number of people who will be congratulated in that judgment are those who have fed the hungry,” Organ told media.

The 88-year-old former Harvest House director and church elder now serves as the associate director, having stepped down in 2015.

OBE, or Outcome-based-education. Wait for it!

The educational standards movement has cast a spell over teaching for the past half century. According to this movement, learning must be framed in terms of measurable outcomes. As a new high school teacher, I recall receiving feedback from my Associate Principal at a curriculum workshop at the beginning of the year. Attempting to fashion my course objectives, I had written something like the following: “Students will appreciate the transformative power of stories.” The words, “appreciate” and “transformative,” she demurred, are too vague, subjective, and difficult to measure. Instead, she advised me to use verbs like “compare,” “analyze,” and “evaluate.”

New to the teaching profession, I dutifully embraced this orthodoxy, carefully re-constructing my student learning outcomes (or SLOs), and then making sure they were correlated with my course assessments. At the end of my first year I received additional feedback. My outcomes and assessments, the Associate Principal noted, were largely at the lower end of Bloom’s taxonomy. She urged that my students be challenged to apply, analyze, and evaluate what they have learned. Overall, I found this feedback to be both helpful and constructive. It improved the quality of my teaching. My students learned more, as I challenged them to rise to higher levels on Bloom’s taxonomy (applying, evaluating, and synthesizing, etc.).

Nevertheless, I felt that something was missing, especially when I recalled my best teachers. Dr. Morty Fuchs–my college biology teacher–stands out in particular. Teachers like Dr. Fuchs seem to defy or transcend the logic of the standards paradigm that I was introduced to. Dr. Fuchs spoke with a booming Brooklyn-accent and would occasionally stammer and stutter, struggling to get words out. Thoughts and insights, caught within his stammer, would burst out with even greater force. I recall one class, as Dr. Fuchs diagrammed the parts of the human cell (the nucleus, the mitochondria, the plasma membrane, and so forth) underscoring their incredible inner workings, he exclaimed with dramatic power, “IT’S…IT’S…IT’S…IT’S A SYMPHONY!” Dr. Fuchs’ knowledge of biology was exhaustive, but what stood out most was his unapologetic love for his discipline–his rapture as he delighted at its sheer beauty and wonder.

Feasting isn’t a feast without some fasting, eh?

Whatever the precise components, I grew up believing in things which I now look on very differently. To put career before family. To accumulate wealth as a marker of status. To treat sex as recreation. To reflexively mock authority and tradition. To put individual desire before community responsibility. To treat the world as so much dead matter, to be interrogated by the scientific process. To assume our ancestors were thicker than us. I did all of this, or tried to, for years. Most of us did.

Perhaps above all, and perhaps at the root of all, there was one teaching that permeated everything. It was to treat religion as something both primitive and obsolete. Simply a bunch of fairy stories invented by the ignorant. Simply a mechanism of social control. Nothing to do with us, here, now, in our very modern, sexually liberated, choose-your-own-adventure world. We were with Nietzsche, we moderns: we knew the God stuff was self-deluding balls, and soon enough the apostles of the New Atheism would be along to rub it in for us. Dawkins would sneer and Hitchens would bray and the pattern of the 21st century would open up before us: a slow, steady crawl towards a world unclouded by anything that could not be managed or measured by the people we believed we had become.

It was fun, in its way. Now that I look back, I almost wish it had been true.

A feast without a fast is a strange, half-finished thing: this is something I’ve only learned recently. We are in the midst of the greatest annual feast of all, the one that most people, whether Christian or not, are going to end up celebrating. I’ve celebrated Christmas all my life, mostly with no religious trappings, and I’ve always loved it; more so since I became a father. But Christmas, in historical terms, is only one of a number of great feasts that make up the Christian ritual year, which was once — and still is in those parts of the world which continue to take it seriously — studded with saints days, festivals, processions, and feasts.

The Christmas feast is the last remnant, in the secular West, of the ritual year that made us. Since I unexpectedly became a Christian three years ago, I have thrown myself into it with the predictable gusto of a new convert, and it has helped me to understand something about the world I grew up in: we wanted the feasts without the fasts. This, in fact, is the basis of our economic model.

Resolved and now cared for:

A 12-year-old stray dog found roaming in an English village turned out to have been missing for several years – until an animal rescue and the community that fed her helped bring her to safety.

Volunteer nonprofit Lost Dog Recovery UK South said in a Facebook post someone told them in November about a small black dog running in the road near Crawley Down, a village in West Sussex, England.

“They stopped the traffic, let the dog disappear into the woodland and knew not to follow and just returned ASAP to leave food,” the organization said in a social media post on December 11.

The person asked around about the dog, a Patterdale terrier, and learned locals were familiar with and sometimes fed the animal, according to the post.

“Realizing it could just have been an ‘owned dog allowed to roam’ situation, a camera was taken over and food left anyway until more information could be gathered,” the nonprofit said.

The camera captured the dog wandering nearby a few times over three days, and by the third day, she appeared to be waiting for her dinner to arrive with the rescue group, they said.

Lost Dog Recovery UK South learned from locals the dog was “in good condition, fed and cared for,” but may have been straying for about a decade – a guesstimate that the rescue later learned was inaccurate. …

“Although we will never know when exactly she came to settle in Crawley Down, what we do know is that she is finally safe, and now will not spend the rest of her senior years fending for herself in the cold and wet,” the post read.

Rose’s initial owners were contacted, but they had relocated, their circumstances had changed and they could no longer care for her, according to Lost Dog Recovery UK South.

“They are thrilled she is safe and unhurt and, of course, sad they aren’t able to take her back,” the Facebook post read.