European Tourists Are Staying Away from America

European tourism to America is in steep decline, averaging about 25 percent for seven major countries. Since I live in France, I was particularly interested in French tourism to America. It has declined by about 20 percent, according to this article in Le Monde. This article is in English, but you can only read the first two paragraphs without a subscription.

The decline in European tourism is almost completely due to the hatred generated by Donald Trump against Europe. It is a pattern all to familiar, when Canadians largely stopped coming to American ski resorts after Trump threatened to annex Canada. He had no serious intention to do so, but he caused billions of dollars in lost revenue just by spouting off his hatred.

The decline has also resulted from safety concerns. Europeans, quite frankly, are afraid of getting shot if they visit America. My son-in-law, when he moved to America to marry my daughter, said he had checked on the figures before coming, and he was fifty times more likely to be shot in America than in France. While this may not appreciably increase a tourist’s risks, everyone keeps hearing about American mass public shootings. They happen almost every weekend. The news on December 14 was of a public shooting at Brown University. The previous week it was Kentucky State University. After this happens enough times, European minds begin linking the thought of visiting America to the fear of getting shot.

And I honestly cannot tell them otherwise. In one of my French classes, we read a passage in which a (fictitious) French woman dreamed of moving to America. I had to say, « Pour quoi est-ce qu’elle aimerait habiter en Amérique ? Les États-Unis ont tant de fusillades!» Why would she want to live in America ? The U.S. has so many shootings!

This is a science blog, so I will make a connection to evolution. Throughout human evolutionary history, migrating to a new location has given immense fitness advantages to many people and to their tribes. There has always been a risk, but the risk has been worth it. But today, visiting another country has risks without much benefit. Natural selection may have favored wanderlust in the past but today it provides no benefit. Why buy a plane ticket to America when you can hop on a train and visit Spain or Italy?

Trump has tried to compensate for the loss of agricultural sales (from his tariffs) by paying farmers. This is a big government approach. His big government ruins business then compensates for it by a socialistic payout. But is Trump going to offer a big payout to the tourism industry in return, not for tariff payments, but merely for the personal pleasure of insulting Europe? Just how many billions of dollars is America willing to lose to pay for Trump’s peevish insults?

I’d better post this pretty soon before we have another mass public shooting.

How Cultures Can Unite without Domination

Part of the message of the Christmas season is “Peace on Earth, Goodwill toward Men.” But is this even remotely imaginable?

Yes, it is.

As shown in a video [https://youtube.com/shorts/D4GB35JCuzE?] I have just posted, war raged between what is now France and what is now Germany for millennia until 1945, when Nazi Germany was defeated. Today, no two countries are as closely allied with one another as are France and Germany. Today, war between them is unthinkable (as well as illegal). How did this happen?

First, the country (Germany) that wanted to conquer and assimilate the other (France) had to be humiliated into abject surrender. Second, the two countries had to make the deliberate decision to cooperate, and to resolve any and all tensions through constructive negotiation rather than war. And that is what France and Germany have done. Not only them, but all of the other couple of dozen nations that make up the European Union, which is a unique accomplishment of the work of peace in human history.

The result of the European Union has not been assimilation. Neither France nor Germany assimilated the other. The French still have their own language and culture, and the same is true of Germany. As shown by the statues in the video, France and Germany are saying the same thing (“I give, you give, we live”) in their own languages. They have the same objectives, each in their own cultures.

As I also explain in the video, this has not been the case in the United States, with regard to the Native American nations. The white culture of the United States has conquered the Native nations and imposed its culture and language on them. There is no mutually respectful meeting of cultures. Many tribes, such as the Cherokee tribe of which I am a member, maintain cultural identity, but it has little practical meaning in governance or the economy.

Two cultures can mutually benefit one another if they cooperate and share objectives, while maintaining their distinction. This happened with the European countries, but not with white and Native America.

Donald Trump has declared that Europe is weak, Putin is strong, and that it is stupid for America to help Ukraine remain independent. Putin represents all the worst in assimilation; he wants to obliterate Ukrainian culture and identity, and make Ukraine into a colony that provides cheap goods and labor to Russia. And, according to Trump, it is stupid for us to help Ukraine to resist this. Putin wants to do (as Russia did under the communists) to Ukraine what white America has done to the Native nations. But it is Europe that is strong, because a Union of proud nations has come together to defend its common interests.

The New World of Mega-fires

Mega-fires! Or, megafeux in French, as in the book Quand la Forêt Brûle: Penser La Novelle Catastrophe Écologique by Joëlle Zask (Premier Parallèle, 2019). (When the Forest Burns : Thinking about the New Ecological Catastrophe.)

Through much of my professional life, I have considered fires (in forests, prairies, and chaparrals) to be ecologically beneficial. Where to begin with the ecological benefits of fires? Fires clear away underbrush and release nutrients in the dead litter into the soil where new plants can grow back and use them. The sunlight can now reach the soil surface, warming it up earlier in the spring than would have been possible with a thick litter layer still in place. In many cases, the perennial plants that were present before the fire grow back, more vigorous than they were before. This is the case for hundreds of species of prairie plants, which maintain their thick sod of roots and underground stems. It is also true, as I have seen for the cross timbers forest of Oklahoma. As for the plants that grow back from seeds in the soil, the seeds germinate profusely, as I have seen Phacelia strictiflora do in cross-timbers forests after fires. So frequent are these fires that many plants have adapted to them even to the extent of requiring the fires to maintain their populations. My research has shown that Phacelia seeds require smoke chemicals in order to germinate; the same is true for hundreds of species around the world in fire-prone habitats such as chaparral. How can fire, which has so many ecological benefits, be bad?

Fire has long been a tool of habitat management. The whole landscape evolved with wildfires. Since the spread of western civilization, wildfires have decreased, mostly because people do not like to have their homes destroyed by fire. Ecological landscape managers have to set control burns to compensate for the decline in wildfires. This photo shows a control burn near Lake Texoma in Oklahoma in 1999.

In the absence of natural fires and control burns, dead biomass builds up under the trees and virtually assures that a fire will break out soon and be very big.

White landscape managers were not the first to use fire as a management tool. All over the world, native peoples have set fires to forests and fields to renew their growth. This was nowhere more true than with the Native peoples of North America, as I describe in my book Forgotten Landscapes.

But times are changing. In particular, global warming is changing the landscape. As Naomi Klein said in the title of her book about the economics and politics of global climate change, This Changes Everything. It has certainly changed the scientific way of thinking about fire.

Global climate change includes not only hotter temperatures but less rainfall and more wind in many areas, such as southern Europe during recent long, hot, dry, windy summers. This is not a prediction; it is something that has already happened in many parts of the world. Some of these forest fires have flames almost a hundred feet tall and that spread faster than anybody can run. The fires consume houses, including outdoor free-standing barbecue grills which are built to withstand fire: the grills simply melt.

Other human activities promote the spread of large fires. All around the world, not only in rainforests but even where I used to live in Oklahoma, native forests are cut down and replaced by tree plantations such as loblolly pine. Tree plantations, with breezy understories and with flammable, fast-growing trees, burn more readily than native forests.

The result is that, right when we need control burns more than ever, we do not dare to conduct them. There is a tremendous liability cost associated with a control burn that gets out of hand. If a private citizen loses so much as a shed to a government control burn, the land-owner will sue for lots of money. As global warming progresses, almost any control burn is guaranteed to escape and become a major fire.

A mega-fire, unlike most smaller fires, can and do sterilize the soil, so that there are no roots, stems, or seeds to grow back. The resulting moonscape will recover, but it might take many decades and suffer uncontrolled soil erosion in the meantime.

The time is coming, and in some places is already here, when there will be no such thing as a little control burn. There will be only mega-fires.

I have retired, so it is too late for me to tell my classes, forget everything I said about control burns.