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Q&A: What Is Dispersed Tourism? [1]
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Date: 2025-02-28
Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Elijah Hicks grew up roaming the woods and helping out at his family cabin rental business in the rugged Red River Gorge of Eastern Kentucky.
In 2023, he received a Watson Fellowship for studying sustainable tourism alternatives and embarked on a yearlong, eight-country journey of experience and education. He now applies what he learned in home region through his tourism consulting and grant writing business, SincerelyAlive.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Kim Kobersmith, The Daily Yonder: What do you call the kind of tourism you advocate for, and what are its characteristics? How is it a better alternative to larger development projects?
Elijah Hicks has traveled the world to study how tourism can best serve local communities. (Photo courtesy of Elijah Hicks.) Elijah Hicks: My preferred term is dispersed tourism because, while it is relatively new, it carries a picture that describes exactly what it is. I first heard this term in reference to camping. Dispersed camping allows for ecosystems to recover. It follows the mantra: “too much of a good thing is a bad thing.” Dispersed tourism is the same concept, just expanded to encompass the social sphere as well as the ecological one. It is connected to the term in the field of ecology known as “carrying capacity.” Dispersed tourism seeks to stay within the social and ecological carrying capacity of a location to ensure the lasting ecological, social, and economic stability of a region.
I also talk about small scale tourism. It involves small, grassroots businesses, often run by families. And when I need to explain in a few words what my fellowship was about, I talk about sustainable tourism. While it can be misleading and is too easy to greenwash, it does communicate a concern for ethics.
These ideas are in opposition to mass tourism, which focuses visitor traffic on one destination. This can be experienced at places like Gatlinburg and Disneyland.
DY: How do these kinds of tourism currently play out in rural Eastern Kentucky?
EH: In 2013, the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce commissioned the multinational planning firm AECOM to “tell us if there could be a well-planned modern Gatlinburg in Eastern Kentucky.” The Chamber wanted a mass tourism attraction to solve the coal collapse of Eastern Kentucky that left more than 25,000 in the coal industry alone without jobs.
The Chamber was right in identifying the incredible economic asset potential in tourism, yet misplaced in their approach. Mass-scale tourism is an extractive industry, just like the coal and timber industries. A plan is developed, out-of-county and state investors are found, and the project is underway. The real people that benefit live far away.
Dispersed tourism is one of Kentucky’s most powerful tools for economic stability. We need tourism that serves people and place.
In Eastern Kentucky, Hicks envisions “a network of tourism towns, each with their own specialty and character.” (Photo courtesy of Elijah Hicks.)
DY: How has your home place changed in the last decade and a half? What are some of the threats to the wildlands and small towns where you live?
EH: After the recession of 2008, my family moved to the Red River Gorge for six months to manage guest cabins. We fell in love with the place and never left. Much has changed since then. On the positive side, there have been a number of small businesses that have opened and become successful that add to the character of the region.
On the more alarming side, development has taken off as the eyes of investors have turned to the area. It is becoming less and less a place where people go to find relaxation and wild adventure. Many of the important safe guards, such as infrastructure to match the tourism loads, have not been a priority. For example, the Daniel Boone National Forest will hire no summer staff for this season due to budget cuts.
Another challenge the Gorge is facing now is gentrification. The result of sky-rocketing land prices is that many locals can’t afford to pay the increased property taxes, and alternatively can’t refuse the huge price tags offered to them.
DY: Can you share about one of the inspiring examples of sustainable tourism you experienced on your fellowship?
EH: In the 1980s, only 30% of Costa Rica’s rain forest remained. It was all being logged for lumber and cow pasture. One day a teacher in Sweden was teaching her students about the disappearing rainforests. The next week, the class had a visit from the American biologist Sharon Kinsman from Monteverde, Costa Rica, where agricultural development was destroying the last cloud forests in the region. Kinsman showed the children pictures and told them stories of the hundreds of birds, animals, insects, and unique plants found there.
The children set up lemonade stands, they asked their parents, family members, and friends to help them save the rainforest. Within a day they had a couple hundred dollars. Soon fifteen acres were purchased. Children from 44 countries created bake sales, washed cars, and held rabbit races to protect Costa Rica’s rain forest. Now the “Bosque Eterno de Los Niños” (the Children’s Eternal Rainforest) is 56,000 acres strong and growing.
These children changed the legacy of the Monteverde region. Soon locals realized the incredible value of what they had. Visitors both national and international started flooding in. Even farmers that didn’t care about the forest suddenly had an economic incentive to preserve it. Now Monteverde is a brilliant, vibrant community full of small businesses, and 60% of Costa Rica is forested once again.
DY: How do you envision a dispersed tourism-based economy in rural places like Eastern Kentucky where communities need the opportunities it can provide? What coordination and resources might that require?
EH: We traveled through Quintana Roo state, Mexico, which gets about 12 million visitors a year, most from America. Sadly, most tourists we observed didn’t care where they were except for the sunny sky, cheap booze, and flashy entertainment. The place didn’t matter. My vision is the opposite: an Eastern Kentucky where people and place are core to the tourism experience. I envision a network of tourism towns, each with their own specialty and character.
Imagine if you were a birder and had the top-ten birding hotspots in Kentucky to visit on your bucket list. Or a flyfisher, a hiker, an off-roading enthusiast, and across Kentucky there were locations that highlighted the very best of these offerings in the region. Such a strategy would bring people to a town because they are intensely interested in whatever their passion or leisure may be. In return, it would bring economic income in manageable quantities to towns across Eastern Kentucky, right where the jobs and economic stimulus are needed. Instead of 12 million in one destination, it’s 120,000 people in a hundred destinations jumpstarting small businesses, and bringing jobs and careers to where they are needed across rural areas.
What’s needed to get here? Primarily, a usable, simple yet beautiful online guide. Jumpstarting and funding this ground-up model of tourism would need county, state, and national cooperation. We need to call on our local banks to make accessible small loans and assistance for starting small businesses. And what if high school students could work with, or even incubate, their own small businesses as part of their senior year? I saw this in action in the Republic of Georgia, and it’s giving students an interest and opportunity to stay in their home communities.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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