The Tourist Effect

by Randell Bosse

Up until college, all of the places I have lived have been either suburban or slightly urban areas. After graduating high school in Sacramento area, my journey took me to San Luis Obispo (SLO) to attend Community College. This was the first place I had lived where it seemed as if the community had a responsible relationship with the surrounding environment and nature. There is and has been a strong focus on protecting the natural beauty in this town, and this attitude rubbed off on me during my four years living there.

While living in San Luis Obispo, I actually met my girlfriend Laurie. Laurie had lived in the same town for her entire life before she moved to San Luis Obispo for college. One thing I noticed was that Laurie was not as surprised by the attitude of the San Luis Obispo locals with regard to the environment. This was largely due to her home town and its similar attitude towards nature. This magical home town she was referring to is called Grass Valley. Grass Valley could not have had a more opposing feel to it than the two towns I previously had called home.

I was used to identical neighborhoods, cookie-cutter houses, imported trees and no water within close proximity, what some people refer to as “suburbia”. Whereas Grass Valley is a town with more trees than people, the residents have great respect for the environment, and has a beautiful river running through the outskirts of town. Upon visiting Grass Valley, and seeing all of this beauty around me, I started to draw similar parallels to San Luis Obispo, with regard to the people and the environment.

The Yuba River stretches through Grass Valley and provides a great destination for its residents and also tourists. Whereas San Luis Obispo has the ocean within a 5 minute drive. And although they are a catalyst for the surrounding economy, it is the tourists that are creating a problem in Grass Valley and San Luis Obispo.
Tourists are a necessity to all different types of cities and towns, but in the case of these two beautiful places the negative effect is starting to get overwhelming. Trash and different types of pollution are a huge problem for both SLO and Grass Valley. 
When tourists come to Grass Valley or SLO, they naturally produce more human and car traffic to some of the popular destinations around town. When groups of people get together they have the potential to create a lot of trash, noise pollution, and car pollution.

Trash is the easiest of the three due to the fact that it is completely within your control to pick up after yourself at all times. With regard to noise pollution, it is not as easy to control but I believe that it does take away from experiencing nature in its truest form, blissful silence. The most difficult of these to control is the pollution from the vehicles in which the tourist added the existing vehicles owned by the residents going to their favorite spots. The easy answer is to carpool, but more often than not, the tourists are in many individual groups and that would not apply.

Don’t get me wrong, traveling to different places is still a wonderful thing and I encourage it. All I am suggesting is that we need to take the respect that we have for our home towns and take it with us when we travel. This way, the beautiful places in the world can stay beautiful.