The Geopark Tagline – Decontructed
Check out this brochure published by the Geopark promoting Killarney. It uses the phrase “Explore the geological past. Create a sustainable future.” 6 times. One time it even states “The goal of the Georgian Bay Geopark is to explore and respect the lessons of DEEPTIME and help create a more sustainable future for this irreplaceable ecosystem.”
Doesn’t that sound like a conservation organization to you? And isn’t sustainability a good thing?
And what exactly are the “lessons of deep time”? Never explained, but apparently respected.
Let’s focus on the tagline and take it apart.
Explore the geological past. That is all about learning, history and rocks and the ecosystem. So far so good.
Create a sustainable future. What exactly do they mean by create a sustainable future? It means help preserve the ecosystem, right? After all, it came right after “explore the geological past.”
So isn’t the obvious interpretation that if you visit the geopark and explore its geology, somehow you are helping protect Georgian Bay’s ecosystem? Or at least its geology?
Actually, you are not. In fact, overtourism harms ecosystem, and that is already happening in Georgian Bay on the Bruce Peninsula. The Geopark does not manage any of the destinations that they are proposing people visit and has no conservation initiatives. But the clever juxtaposition of these two phrases leaves the impression that it does.
Organized hypocrisy. Through this tagline the Geopark is putting on an organizational façade. This is ‘‘a symbolic front erected by organizational participants designed to reassure their organizational stakeholders of the legitimacy of the organization and its management.’’ You can read the scholarly article that explains organized hypocrisy here.
So what king of sustainable future is being created when people visit the Geopark? An economically sustainable one. Because, according to the Georgian Bay Geopark Executive Director, “They (geoparks) are a proven tourism and business generator.” You can hear him say that in our video.
To put it into a haiku:
It’s a profit play
by very clever players
playing Georgian Bay.
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