Chapter 9 The Extraction Model of Tourism
Tourism has been celebrated as a clean industry, preferable to mining or manufacturing because it does not deplete natural resources or generate industrial pollution. This celebration obscures what tourism actually extracts. Tourism is indeed an extraction industry. It extracts atmosphere, culture, labor, tolerance, and quality of life from host communities. The extraction is less visible than mining because it leaves no pits, but it is no less real.
This chapter develops the concept of tourism as soft extractivism. It shows how the extraction model illuminates tourism's impacts in ways that standard frameworks miss. And it argues that understanding tourism as extraction reframes debates about its benefits and harms.
Extractivism traditionally refers to economic activities that remove natural resources for processing and sale elsewhere. Mining, logging, and drilling are paradigm cases. These activities share several features: they deplete non-renewable resources, they generate wealth that flows away from extraction sites, they impose environmental and social costs on local communities, and they create dependency relationships that limit alternative development.
Tourism shares each of these features, but with different extracted resources. Consider atmosphere. Tourism destination marketing sells the atmosphere of places: the vibe of Barcelona, the romance of Paris, the energy of New York, the tranquility of Bali. Atmosphere is not renewable in any simple sense. When too many tourists arrive seeking atmosphere, their presence destroys what they came for. The cool neighborhood becomes the tourist neighborhood. The tranquil beach becomes the crowded beach. The authentic market becomes the staged market.
This is extraction because the atmosphere is used up without being replaced. The depletion is not physical (the buildings still stand, the beach still exists) but experiential. What made the place desirable has been consumed by the desiring. And the consumption benefits primarily visitors and investors while costs fall on residents who lose what made their home distinctive.
Cultural extraction follows similar patterns. Tourism commodifies culture, converting practices with internal meaning into performances for external audiences. The dance that marked community ritual becomes a show for cruise passengers. The craft that served local function becomes a souvenir for tourists. The festival that celebrated community identity becomes a marketing opportunity.
This conversion extracts meaning. The same practice can have quite different significance depending on its context. A religious ceremony performed for believers differs fundamentally from the same motions performed for tourists, even if the external form is identical. Tourism extracts the external form while discarding the internal meaning. What remains is a shell.
Labor extraction in tourism is more straightforward. Tourism employs millions of workers, but under conditions that typically transfer value upward. Wages in tourism are among the lowest in service industries. Working conditions are often poor. Job security is minimal. Emotional labor requirements are high. The work literally extracts effort, energy, and emotional display from workers while returning inadequate compensation.
The labor extraction operates across multiple scales. At the individual level, workers give more than they receive. At the community level, labor that might have produced local value is redirected to serving external visitors. At the global level, workers in developing countries serve tourists from developed countries under terms set by global capital.
Perhaps the most overlooked extraction is tolerance. Tourism imposes on residents in countless small ways: crowds on sidewalks, noise in neighborhoods, lines at coffee shops, prices elevated by visitor purchasing power. Each imposition requires tolerance. Residents must accommodate visitor presence without complaint, or at least without effective resistance.
This tolerance is extracted, not freely given. Residents do not choose to share their city with millions of strangers. The strangers arrive because industry and government have arranged for their arrival. Tolerance is then demanded as the price of economic participation. The resident who complains is told they benefit from tourism and should be grateful. Their tolerance is treated as owed rather than extracted.
Quality of life extraction encompasses all of the above. When a neighborhood transforms under tourism pressure, its livability for residents typically declines. When a natural area opens to tourism, its ecological and aesthetic qualities degrade. When a culture commodifies, its richness thins. Residents experience these changes as diminishment, as the loss of something valuable that had been present.
The extractive model reveals tourism's structural similarity to industries it ostensibly differs from. Both extract value from places and communities. Both generate wealth that flows away from extraction sites. Both impose costs that do not appear in their accounting. Both create dependencies that persist even when extraction becomes harmful.
The similarity becomes clearer when we consider who benefits from tourism extraction. Like extractive industries generally, tourism generates concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. The hotel owner benefits directly. The tour operator benefits directly. The airline benefits directly. Residents of a touristified neighborhood bear costs collectively but receive benefits individually, if at all.
Leakage rates in tourism are comparable to extractive industries. When a tourist pays a hundred dollars for a tour, how much stays in the community? Studies consistently find that leakage to foreign-owned businesses, imported supplies, and expatriate workers removes the majority of tourist spending from local economies. The money flows out just as ore flows out of a mine.
Understanding tourism as extraction also reframes sustainability discourse. If tourism extracts from places as mining extracts from the earth, then sustainable tourism is as paradoxical as sustainable mining. You cannot sustainably extract non-renewable resources. You can only extract more slowly, extending the time until depletion while not altering the fundamental trajectory.
This is precisely what sustainable tourism has meant in practice: slower extraction, gentler extraction, extraction with better public relations. The sustainability discourse has never questioned whether tourism should extract at all. It has only asked how extraction might be managed. The extraction model exposes this limitation.
What would non-extractive tourism look like? It would have to give more than it takes. It would have to generate benefits for host communities that exceed the costs imposed on them. It would have to build up rather than deplete the atmosphere, culture, and quality of life of places visited. This is possible in principle but rare in practice because the economic structures of tourism are organized around extraction.
Reorganizing those structures would require reversing the flow of value. Instead of value flowing from destination to origin (from host to tourist, from periphery to center, from South to North), value would need to flow into destinations. Tourists would need to leave places better than they found them, not just financially but in terms of the intangible qualities they came for.
This reversal challenges basic assumptions of the tourism business model, which is premised on capturing value from places rather than creating value for them. It challenges tourist expectations, which are premised on receiving experiences rather than contributing to communities. And it challenges development orthodoxy, which treats tourism as a vehicle for extracting value from peripheral regions for the benefit of metropolitan centers.
The extractive model does not suggest that tourism should end. It suggests that tourism as currently organized is extractive and therefore harmful in ways that standard analysis misses. It suggests that post-extraction tourism would need to be fundamentally different from tourism as we know it. And it provides a framework for evaluating proposed changes: do they reduce extraction, or merely disguise it?
The chapters that follow will develop alternatives to extractive tourism. They will examine how communities might control tourism to prevent unwanted extraction. They will propose mechanisms for ensuring that tourism generates more than it consumes. They will imagine what tourism might become when extraction is no longer its organizing logic.