DESERT FANTASIES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 142

the few that were breathing appeared to be paralyzed. Marine life has had a hard time
surviving during this rush to build a major tourist destination. During the dredging to cre-
ate the artificial island that is home to the Atlantis Hotel, the only known coral reef off of
Dubai was destroyed as well as the turtle-nesting sites. (In his presentation, Gerald Lawless
noted that his Jumeirah hotel group started a turtle rehabilitation center in Dubai and has
returned twenty-five turtles to the sea.)
Those beaches have also been bathed with pungent tides of raw sewage, toilet paper
and chemical waste material. The problem is simple. There aren't enough sewage plants
to treat human waste, so it is retrieved from septic tanks, hauled away in trucks and
dumped into drains that go straight to the sea. It is cheaper for hotels. The construction of
a second sewage treatment plant has helped, but raw sewage still courses through the sea
and onto beaches. Garbage and sewage from the millions of tourists simply outpace the
infrastructure.
This has become a common problem in resort areas around the world. Bali, the ulti-
mate paradise, is now inundated with sewage and garbage from the millions of tourists who
test its limits. All these tourists produce waste—human waste, garbage—that goes into il-
legal dumps or is thrown into rivers and the ocean. As in Dubai, there just aren't enough
public collection and waste disposal sites. Everything suffers and yet more and more hotels
are going up on the island. Olivier Pouillon moved to Bali, married a Balinese woman,
and started a family and tackled what he considered the island's worst problem: garbage
from all the tourism. He set up his own nonprofit in Bali to encourage hotels and the local
government to do something about the growing burden of that waste. He told me that it
needs to be regulated just like “pollution, methane and carbon pollution from hotels and
resorts. These resorts pump out trash and pollution like factories.”
Trouble in paradise takes on a whole different meaning when truck-loads of human shit
are dumped into the sparkling blue seas.
Several government speakers at Abu Dhabi's World Green Tourism conference accen-
ted all the positive work underway, implying that their emirate was trying to learn lessons
from the mistakes of Dubai. Her Excellency Razan Khalifa Al Mubarak, of the Environ-
ment Agency of Abu Dhabi, promised that she is putting “environmental protection at the
forefront and not waiting until all you can do is mitigate the damage.”
To that end, she painted a picture of the UAE as home to “huge” numbers of birds and
wildlife with the “unique ability” to survive in the harsh conditions of the salt marshes or
the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Desert and home to fish sheltered in the intricate coral
reefs of the Persian Gulf. This starkly beautiful landscape, she said, has shaped Emirati
culture and is the spirit of Bedouin poetry whether in verses about hunting with falcons or
camping in the desert. And, of course, it is the backdrop for parts of the Koran.
“We are people of the desert. We are people of the sea,” she said. “We have a fantastic
natural heritage.”