Infrastructures of Transiency: On Cruise Ships

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Infrastructures of Transiency: On Cruise Ships

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Learning with Infrastructures of Transiency: On Cruise Ships 

By Francesca Savoldi

This episode elaborates critical perspectives on the social and spatial phenomenon of “cruise ship cities,” defined by Dr. Richard Simpson as a new urban dynamic where the accumulation of spatial strategies are shaped by disproportionate tourism in which tourists outnumber residents.¹ The sense of “disproportion” is an emblem of the cruise industry: revenue distribution shows a massive discrepancy between the industry’s profit (with unclear amounts destined for tax havens) and economic benefits provided to port cities at destination. Most cruise lines employ workers from the global south to keep wages as low as possible, with challenging labor conditions. Ship sizes are also increasingly disproportionate; the capacity of the Icon of the Seas, a vessel launched in 2024, is almost ten thousand people. Such dimensions mean enormous environmental impacts—air pollutants, sewage, gray waters, and now even toxic water due to the use of scrubbers. These impacts require the adaptation of the seabed as well as port infrastructure. 

In spite of port expansion being frequently enabled through public finance, they are difficult to control by democratic means, as a few large corporations dominate the industry and pressure port authorities to do what they want. The result is that the industry is reshaping the social and spatial geographies of port cities that host them, independently from the will of citizens or municipalities.

As Simpson argues, transience is a characteristic of cruise ship cities, as crowds of tourists outnumber residents leaving ghost towns when they leave. In effect, transience captures more comprehensively the temporality of the cruise economy rather than “acceleration”—a concept largely used for analyzing how capitalism shapes socio-spatial relations and everyday life. As in the polarizing rhythms of just-in-time global logistics, transience describes increasingly intense waves of circulation of customers and products, paced with apathetic phases. This new condition requires the constant adaptation of cities, workers, and ecologies to higher peaks of effort and stress.  

This rhythm of pressure is reflected across the new dependencies that the cruise model enforces on cities, which most visibly expresses overtourism and overconsumption. In Venice for instance, the dependencies created by cruise ships and overtourism made the city vulnerable to economic downturns, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown. The renewed pressures of this industry on cities are recognizable through diseconomies and conflicts of resources with local communities. A striking example of this is the case of Barcelona, in which the 2022 drought made it necessary to establish a priority between providing water to the city or to the cruise ships (according to Garcia et al. 2020, one cruise passenger consumes 285.5 liters of water daily).²

As author featured in this podcast episode, Simpson unfolds all these critical issues via critical voices from academia, an NGO, and an international network of community activists. Such a panel of voices is rare in the analysis of the cruise industry and emphasizes the potential of building multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary narratives. As Simpson remarks, to characterize the impact of the cruise industry requires a range of specialisms that reaches beyond the capacity of environmental science or tourism studies. Beyond disciplinary perspectives, a characterization that takes into consideration the complexity and accumulative impacts of the cruise industry needs to center the direct experience of citizens, including their perception of risk related to their bodies and their territories.

Bringing in critical voices from differing contexts of knowledge production isn’t only an exercise for deconstructing dominant narratives; it is also a grounding practice for thinking about the future away from sectorial interests. This exercise is crucial in the current conjuncture, in which geopolitical tensions influence patterns of circulation, the increasing frequency and severity of climate-related disasters highlight the urgent need of a paradigm shift, and tensions are mounting between activists in the street and institutions that are unable to face crisis. In this regard, the issue of pollution and energy transition in port cities and in the cruise industry is an urgent political and societal issue. The speakers remind us that what is unique to cruise ships is their energy needs; they need energy to move thousands of passengers and to power the system of overconsumption they have onboard, which includes casinos, swimming pools, restaurants, etc.

In this regard, activist Karla Hart from the Global Cruise Activist Network highlights that after the pandemic, cruise activities have increased by roughly seventy percent—equivalent to fifty thousand flights between Paris and New York. The industry is getting bigger while it claims it is becoming “greener”—a paradox given that impacts cannot be dematerialized. On the one hand cruise corporations are adopting Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) and scrubbers, a format conversion that simply shifts the framing of pollution. In the United States, the export of LNG has doubled the climate impact of fracked gas used domestically.³ Scrubbers are turning air pollutants into water pollutants. 

On the other hand, cold ironing is presented as a second main alternative. Ports are investing in electrifying their infrastructure (expected to be through public finances), but are shipowners adapting their ships? And if they are, how will this energy be produced and sold? “It is like plugging in a city,” Karla Hart says in this episode. NGO Transport and Environment has shown that an average of 210,795 households in the EU could be supplied with the volume of gas required to power the existing fleet of LNG-powered commercial ships today (29 cruise ships and 171 container ships).⁴ That number could jump to an average of nearly seven million households in the EU by 2030 should there be no change to the EU legislative framework. Will this growing need of energy create a new conflict of resources between port and city? Will territories around ports have to submit to the production of energy to feed the industry? Will such needs push energy transition towards nuclear energy? 

The search for energy security has become a crucial driver of political tensions and necropolitics, i.e. Europe’s plan to wean off Russian gas following the invasion of Ukraine, and Israel awarding offshore gas licenses while conducting a genocide in Gaza. With increased energy consumption and accelerating climate crisis, we will have to establish new priorities. In this sense the cruise industry and its growing energy needs should be far from being a social and economic priority; as Dr. Luc Renaud remarks at the end of the episode, there are many other and more sustainable ways of doing tourism. 

In 2023, six out of nine planetary boundaries have been crossed according to the Stockholm Resilience Centre, indicating the urgent need of a paradigm shift.⁵ Organized citizens from diverse port cities are already developing alternative scenarios, structuring alliances, and conducting direct actions and debates. They are building potential to influence policy and societal dynamics. Academics must choose what role they want to play. As Gramsci highlighted, traditional intellectuals have a lot to learn from organic-intellectual campaigners’ challenges to power. Transdisciplinary alliances based on transmission of knowledge can generate enthusiasm, sparking multidimensional learning. At the same time, analyzing real-world challenges together with students can shape very useful tactics. As critical educators Paulo Freire and bell hooks have taught us, the classroom is a political space that connects the personal with the political, and which can catalyze social change. Richard Simpson’s critical pedagogical practice mentioned in the podcast episode is a very good example of how focusing on the cruise industry in the classroom can produce critical thinking and tactics for understanding how space and relations are produced in this era of port cities. 

Bio

Francesca Savoldi is a human geographer (PhD) concerned with the dimensions of power, politics, space and place in coastal and maritime areas. Her most recent work has focused on the urban geography and political ecology of port cities and coastal territories.  As a Marie Skłodovska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at Delft University of Technology (2021–2023) she has critically examined the evolution of the port-city relationship, its contemporary power imbalances, and related contested spaces and relationalities. She is the founder of ContestedPorts.com, an online platform dedicated to social mobilizations in port cities.

As a member of the Jean Monnet Chair in EU Integrated Maritime Policy,  Francesca has previously investigated the ongoing transformation of maritime spaces, economies, and politics. She has also conducted research on different types of urban conflicts, as well as citizen sciences. Currently, she is a lecturer at the Glasgow Caledonian University, visiting researcher at Erasmus and TU Delft universities, and postdoctoral research fellow at Cà Foscari University.

Audio Transcript

[00:00:00] Andrew Culp: Welcome to Positions, the podcast of the Cultural Studies Association, sponsored and published through the open source journal Lateral. Positions aims to provide critical reflection and examination on topics in cultural studies for scholars, students, and a general audience. Make sure to follow CSA and Lateral journal on socials, and subscribe to our podcast to keep up with new episodes.

[00:00:27] Rich Simpson: Hello and welcome everyone. I’m Rich Simpson, and I’m a visiting assistant professor in the English department at the University of South Florida. Today we’re talking about the cruise ship industry, its impact on the environment, and its immense territorial power within coastal cities around the world.

[00:00:45] These developments are provoking a growing number of intense clashes between multinational corporations and local communities. And in this episode, our aim is to bring awareness to the unique complexities of this tension, as well as the different ways in which organizations work toward this industry’s reform or complete transformation.

[00:01:05] To characterize the effects of the cruise industry requires a range of specialization that reaches beyond the capacities of environmental science or tourism studies. My own research addresses the urban impact of the cruise ships, and I use critical geography, narrative analysis, and regional studies to examine the way the ships completely transformed Juneau, Alaska from 2014 to 2020.

[00:01:31] In that essay, I introduced the concept of the cruise ship city to name the new urban dynamics uniquely defining communities where the inflow of seasonal tourists annually outnumbers the local resident population. Cruise ship cities yield much of their urban and oceanic landscape to accommodate an infrastructure of transiency in the form of both mega vessels and millions of people. All for economic, educative, and entertainment purposes that only marginally benefit [00:02:00] the local community. In response to this process, I developed a pedagogical practice unique to the cruise ship city that helps my students identify and reconfigure its material, its discursive, and its lived experiences.

[00:02:16] Building on that teaching practice, I’m now developing a participatory digital mapping of cruise ship cities. And if you live in one, or conduct research on the ships, please get in touch. This map is one part of a growing international classroom connecting people who live in cruise ship cities and establishing a comparative approach to the way these ships impose urban strategies that demand new forms of critical study and resistance.

[00:02:44] The goal of this mapping project is to build a much needed global exchange that can collectively address how the cruise industry intertwines human experience, urban development, global economies, and ecological transformations around the world. So for this episode, I invited three people whose work organizes different responses to challenge the global practices of the cruise industry.

[00:03:09] One is a European policy campaigner, one is a Canadian geographer, and one an American activist. While each of them advocate to reduce the impact of the ships, they differ on how to go about that process and on how they understand what is or isn’t possible. I’m delighted to have each of them with me today.

[00:03:32] Let’s begin by having everyone introduce themselves. 

[00:03:35] Constance Dijkstra: So I’m Constance Dijkstra, I work as a shipping campaigner for Transport & Environment, which is a climate organization based in Brussels, where we campaign for clean transport solutions. 

[00:03:49] Luc Renaud: I am Luc Renaud, I’m an assistant professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal.

[00:03:55] I work at the Tourism and Urban Studies department, and I’m also part of a research group called Tourism Territory, a society research and intervention group. We work on a very critical standpoint towards tourism, so I’m glad to be here. 

[00:04:15] Karla Hart: Thank you, Rich. My name is Karla Hart and I’m with the Global Cruise Activist Network.

[00:04:20] I’m in Juneau, Alaska, where I’m also a community activist and I serve as coordinator of the Global Cruise Activist Network. 

[00:04:29] Rich Simpson: Excellent. Thank you everyone and welcome. Constance, I’d like to begin with a few questions for you. Your organization develops policy regarding shipping, yet you’ve also written one of the most important studies we have on the environmental impact of the cruise ship in Europe.

[00:04:43] Can you tell us a little bit about what Transport & Environment does and describe some of the findings from that report? 

[00:04:49] Constance Dijkstra: Yeah, sure. So thank you so much for having me. Um, so we published recently a study that looked at the amount of air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions that cruise ships emitted in Europe in 2019 and 2022.

[00:05:09] And our objective was to understand whether the pandemic had impacted the activities of cruise ships, and evaluate whether these types of vessels were polluting more or less than before the pandemic. And so what we found out is that the number of cruise ships, the time they spent around ports, and the fuel they consumed all increased by about a quarter.

[00:05:40] And this has resulted in an increase in sulfur oxide emissions, in nitrogen oxides emissions, in particulate matter emissions, which are all air pollutants that are linked to various illnesses that can affect people, especially respiratory or cardiovascular diseases. When it comes to climate change, we found out that CO2 emissions increased by nearly 17%.

[00:06:07] And, you know, CO2 emissions account for the vast majority of the global warming from cruise ships. It’s roughly the equivalent of about fifty thousand flights between Paris and New York. That’s just to give you kind of like a concrete example. What also we noticed is that, for example, methane emissions were multiplied by five.

[00:06:29] And this can be explained by the fact that more and more cruise ships are powered with a new type of fuel in the market, which is liquefied natural gas. And when you use liquefied natural gas as a marine fuel, there are some leaks from the engine, which generate methane into the air. One thing that we have not looked at too much is the impact of the cruise ship industry on biodiversity or on nature, but it’s obviously something that is worth looking into. You know, in 2005, we had about 359 cruise ships globally.

[00:07:06] And in 2020, we end up with 461 cruise ships. Okay. And to give you an idea in terms of like, sizes. Since 2009, we have been building cruise ships that can accommodate between five thousand to six thousand passengers on board. Whereas if you look at the cruise ships that were built before 2000, the maximum capacity of the largest liners was between three thousand to four thousand passengers.

[00:07:34] Rich Simpson: So the capacity of each vessel has nearly doubled, and we now have over a hundred more of these larger ships in global circulation than we did in 2005. Yeah, the growth in this industry is substantial and perpetual over the last two decades. So what kind of research is Transport & Environment now conducting?

[00:07:50] And what kind of research does your organization need to develop regulations? 

[00:07:54] Constance Dijkstra: There’ve been a number of pieces that look at the pollution from the shipping industry and the cruise ship industry, notably on the health impact that this industry can have on, on people who live, you know, close to the ports or alongside the coast.

[00:08:08] One issue is that many of those studies have been conducted in European waters. And so we have less information on the impact of cruise ships in other world regions. I think another challenge is that it’s quite challenging to ascertain whether the pollution that is being emitted comes from cruise ships as opposed to other ship types.

[00:08:30] Obviously, it is possible in some cities that welcome many cruise ships. But it’s sometimes challenging to exactly differentiate that in big cities where there are going to be other types of vessels, such as, you know, container ships or ships that transport things like sand. I think in terms of research needs, I think it’s always good to have research that looks at the impact of local and world regional regulation on shipping.

[00:09:03] That’s always quite interesting because I think research can show that you don’t necessarily always have to go through the International Maritime Organization to regulate the impact of ships, including cruise ships. Another element that is worth to look at is to really have some strong research on all the solutions that are being put forward by the shipping industry, including cruise ships.

[00:09:29] So, for example, I mean, I mentioned that there are more and more cruise ships that are powered with liquefied natural gas, but you know, the amount of methane that is being emitted by those ships is really up for debate. And so having some really good independent research on that would be really, really helpful and it would be really helpful to understand the exact climate impact of those type of vessels.

[00:09:51] But you could also have some more research on other solutions that are being put forward, like scrubbers, for example, which are generally used to prevent sulfur from being emitted in the air, but that can result in polluted water as a result. So, this type of research, I think, is also quite useful.

[00:10:12] Rich Simpson: Yeah, the cruise industry introduced scrubbers as a new form of green technology if they emit enormous amounts of pollution directly to the ocean. Karla, could you give listeners some background on how the scrubbers came about and how they work exactly? 

[00:10:26] Karla Hart: The International Maritime Organization adopted rules that banned the sulfur content in the discharge. They restricted the sulfur content in discharge, thinking that in making this restriction that it would end the burning of heavy fuel oil. Technology was brought in called an exhaust gas cleaning system, which takes water and sprays it into the emissions and captures the sulfur and some of the heavy metals and polyaromatic hydrocarbons.

[00:11:00] So, they’re spraying seawater into the exhaust system of the cruise ship, capturing toxins, and then discharging them into the ocean. So, as they cruise, whenever they’re burning heavy fuel oil, whether at dock or underway, they’re discharging hot, acidic, heavy metal laden, polyaromatic hydrocarbon laden waste into the waters.

[00:11:24] And with very few exceptions, they’re allowed to discharge that pretty much anywhere because it got slipped in and folks weren’t paying attention. 

[00:11:33] Rich Simpson: The ecological impacts of the ship requires looking not only at its atmospheric pollutants, but its oceanic ones as well. It causes these research needs that you mentioned.

[00:11:42] Research on health impacts in coastal cities of biodiversity, research on the methane emissions of liquefied natural gas. And regional regulations on shipping that have been attained outside of the island. Point us towards some of the crucial aspects of this industry that now demand our attention. But I want to circle back to another point that [00:12:00] can help us to contextualize this issue.

[00:12:02] The cruise ship, in fact, accounts for a very small percentage of shipping in Europe. So can you tell us how the cruise industry stands in relation to other kinds of ocean transport? Is there something unique about the cruise ship within the shipping world? And how does that uniqueness serve Transport & Environment’s work to regulate shipping at large?

[00:12:19] Constance Dijkstra: When we look at the overall climate impact of the shipping industry in Europe, it’s true that cruise ships in comparison to other ship types, you know, they emit less emission in the sense that they arrive in seventh position in our ranking in terms of different ship types. Overall, they emit less emissions than ferries, less emission than tankers, and far, far less emissions than container ships.

[00:12:46] But I think it’s important to understand that we’re not exactly working with the same order of magnitude. You know, for example, in 2022, we recorded the emissions of more than 1,800 container ships. Whereas in our study, we look at the container ships of 280 cruise ships. I think perhaps, another thing to kind of, you asked what exactly is unique about cruise ships, and I think it will come as no surprise that it’s obviously their energy needs, which are very, very different from those of a container ship or a ship that transport sand or grains.

[00:13:20] Cruise ship needs a lot of energy because they need to power swimming pools. They need to power an entire hotel infrastructure to cater to the needs of thousands of passengers. But I think also all the things that kind of sets the cruise ship industry apart from other shipping sectors is that these vessels tend to navigate closer to coast and they stay at a port all day long.

[00:13:49] In some cases that port is really in the city center and then they move every day to another port. In some cases, especially when it’s a small port, there isn’t always shore-side electricity. And so that means that a cruise ship is not going to be able to connect to the electricity at the port. And that’s quite a problem because as a result, it’s going to be relying on its engines and burn fuel at the port in order to sustain all its activities on board.

[00:14:22] That’s quite problematic. 

[00:14:25] Luc Renaud: I want to add also that those ships are traveling for no really good reason at all. That our transporting mentioned that it’s for leisure only. So there’s other ways to do leisure, but I just want to point out that there’s no really good reason for those ships to go around and to pollute.

[00:14:45] So it’s just, you know, transporting grain to feed people and transporting people to feed the cruise companies, it’s different thing. But question I have to confess is that, um, how do you manage to get all those numbers? Because the problem with cruise [00:15:00] industry is the lack of transparency. Uh, you talked about independent research.

[00:15:05] But it’s very difficult for scholars to ask those questions or have the real numbers. And when, when we go out with some studies, they just say, well, that’s not the real numbers. But at the same time, they don’t want to share the real numbers with us because, you know, it’s strategic information for them.

[00:15:21] So, we would have to check every boat that comes in Canada, check the type of boat and see how much emission they, I don’t know, it would be very complicated if we don’t have the collaboration of those companies and the government. So, I wonder how you managed to get all that information and put out all those numbers.

[00:15:40] Constance Dijkstra: We were able to undertake this study by selecting cruise ships. By relying on a database called Clarkson. And then we looked at the trajectories of all those vessels in Europe. Then we looked at the technical specificities of those vessels, and we looked at the fuel [00:16:00] consumption. And then we looked at emission values from the International Maritime Organization.

[00:16:09] And it is through those emission values that we were able to exactly understand how much, you know, air pollution was being emitted. But you have to agree that this was a huge amount of work and that we had to establish a model in order to do so, but I think it’s also important to understand that it’s not as if we started from scratch.

[00:16:32] We had originally published another study on cruise ships air pollution. And so we basically updated our number, but we already had that model in place. So that’s also why we were able to do it quite quickly, but it was a huge amount of work, and it did require us to actually buy AIS data. And I was going to say, you mentioned a really, really interesting point related to the transparency and the [00:17:03] lack of transparency that we have, and I think it’s really important to keep in mind that in order to really understand the climate impact of just of cruise ships, but also shipping as a whole, you need to have a good starting point. And that does mean that either as a region at a world regional level or at a national [00:17:29] level, you need to monitor shipping emissions. We need to understand, you know, how much emissions are being emitted annually. How much of those, how much air pollution is being emitted, you know, at a port, for example, what is exactly the type of fuel consumption. So in Europe, we have a monitoring, reporting, and verification system, which is compelling ships, for example, to report on an annual basis [00:17:55] their fuel consumption, their CO2 emissions, [00:18:00] and this was the starting point to regulate basically the shipping industry. Because once you have that information. You then know exactly what can be regulated, what needs to be regulated, who emits the most, but you do need that basis to begin with. But yeah, I will agree that it’s not always easy to obtain data from the shipping industry.

[00:18:25] I think that if you are working in a climate organization, it’s even more difficult. 

[00:18:32] Luc Renaud: No, I’m not surprised. Like, it’s not a lack of transparency, no transparency at all. Like, as soon as you are in a position that you want to check out what’s happening, what’s the deal with any kind [of] cruise tourism, it’s always the door shut.

[00:18:49] You know, they always shut the door because they don’t want to talk to you. They don’t want to talk to me. They won’t talk to Karla, probably. Like, it’s all a bully industry. Or to make it in a polite way, you know. 

[00:19:01] Rich Simpson: Absolutely. And this is why collaboration at an international, regional, and local level becomes so important.

[00:19:07] Constance, I know Transport & Environment focuses on Europe, but I wonder if you can tell us about the challenges that you face when you begin to work at an international scale. 

[00:19:15] Constance Dijkstra: Yeah, it’s true that at Transport & Environment, we, we really put our, our political capital at the EU level. And the reason for that is that it’s really, really difficult to work at an international level.

[00:19:27] And by international level, I mean, it’s really challenging to change the system through the International Maritime Organization. So the International Maritime Organization is a UN organization, which is notoriously known for being difficult to lobby, especially when it comes to climate related measures.

[00:19:46] To give you an idea, you know, the new objective is to reach net zero around 2050 and to strive for 30 percent emission reduction by 2030 and 80 percent reduction by 2040. And I think if you’re someone who is not involved directly in the debate, you know, these objectives might appear really, really positive and, and they’re all better than what we had before.

[00:20:11] That’s for sure. But these objectives are non-binding. They’re just aspirational objectives, and they can only be achieved if the International Maritime Organization adopts mandatory and clear regulatory measures, which is going to be really, really tough. What I mean is that, you know, technology is not, like, really the problem here.

[00:20:37] We have studies that show that you could slash shipping emissions through various energy efficiency measures, through, I don’t know, wind-assisted technologies, for example, by using green fuels. But the challenge is really a political one. At the IMO, there are 175 member states with different economic and climate strategic interests.

[00:21:05] And this situation is forcing ambitious nations to lower their climate standards in order to reach an agreement that is going to represent the lowest common denominator. We have some developing countries that are worried about the impact of rules, such as a global price on carbon emissions. You know, these countries are worried because they’re at the end of long lines of communications.

[00:21:36] So these countries can be, for example, Brazil or Argentina. And so what I mean is that because it is going to be very tough for the International Maritime Organization to set up clear and strict rules. They will need to be complemented at the national or the European level to basically fill the gap that will be left at the IMO level.

[00:22:03] Rich Simpson: I think it’s a crucial point here that the challenge is not developing new greener technologies, but rather finding political agreement among IMO members. And so the IMO’s tendency toward that least common denominator makes regional and national organizing around this issue absolutely necessary. Can you tell us what collaborations among NGOs around the world looks like right now?

[00:22:26] Constance Dijkstra: I think we already are quite good as NGOs who are based all around the world to share information. Like we do have a number of coalitions of different groups where we always try to stay on top of it. I think sometimes that the issue is that because the shipping industry is so big, because there are so many different economic interests, so many different type of business models, it’s hard to keep up with all ship types.

[00:22:54] So I think sometimes it’s, I mean, for example, Karno focuses more on cruise ships, that, that makes sense, [00:23:00] but some of us, you know, focus also a lot on container ships. Which is a whole different type of business, so it’s also hard to keep up with developments in the maritime sector overall.

[00:23:13] I think also one thing that makes it challenging is the fact that you need a strong knowledge basis on many different sectors. You know, we’re talking about the energy transition, we’re talking about climate change. We’re talking also on things like how a ship engine works, for example. We’re talking sometimes on, you know, technical specificities or certain fuels.

[00:23:36] These are not topics that are easy to master and to also provide a very critical analysis. And I think sometimes that’s also what allows the shipping industry to kind of not be too transparent because their excuse is, it’s complicated and you can’t understand. 

[00:23:54] Rich Simpson: So there is this need to broaden our approach to the maritime sector.

[00:23:58] To see cruise ships as one [00:24:00] segment of a much larger industry of business models. And then there’s this other issue of needing a strong understanding of different kinds of knowledge in order to make critical analysis a possibility. I think this is another place where regional organizing and activism becomes vital as they present different approaches to developing interventions into this industry.

[00:24:19] Luc and Karla, can you share some of the local responses to the cruise industry at the scale of the city or grassroots? 

[00:24:26] Luc Renaud: I’m not very optimistic about all the climate and emission regulation, and taking for a fact that the industry is booming, getting better and bigger and bigger, and the advance they make by reducing their emission, like with technological stuff and everything, it’s like the aviation industry. They say we’re going to cut off at 20 percent of our emission in 2030, but they’re going to grow from up to 40, 50 percent more passengers.

[00:24:56] So the gains they’re doing on one side are cut off by the tension of the industry. And I’m, I’m not saying that there’s nothing good there, but it’s a lot of discourse of getting greener, but at the same time getting bigger. So I don’t know about being optimistic about goals for 2030 or 2040.

[00:25:18] We tend to think that cruise ships companies are very powerful, but that’s what I tried to show in my paper in 2020. Tell people that, in fact, the cruise companies, they need more of the destination and the community than the other way around. And there’s a lot of arguments for this.

[00:25:39] In the pandemic time, we saw that the cruise ships were not able to move. And for them, it was just a nightmare, you know, they need to move, they need to go to destination. And most of the destinations, they internalize the discourse of the cruise company that we need the cruise companies because it’s going to be good for the destination, it’s going to be [00:26:00] good for the economy, it’s going to be good for a lot of things, but it’s not true.

[00:26:04] And if you look at the numbers, economical benefits of cruise company are quite marginal if you compare them to overnight tourism or the rest of the tourism industry. I’m not talking about Serbian destination where cruise companies or cruise tourism is very important. But I’m talking about all the other destinations where you have both overnight tourism and cruise tourism.

[00:26:25] And it’s beginning to understand that it’s not that important to have cruise tourism. The numbers are there and it shows that cruise tourism can disappear from a lot of destinations and it won’t change anything for the old picture of the tourist industry. So knowing that, we add that labor to say, well, to impose transparency, to force the companies to be accountable.

[00:26:50] And to impose new regulation and things like that. I think that as a community, we’re able to say, we should be able to say that if you [00:27:00] come to our nation, you should comply to certain types of regulation and put some resistance against those groups, companies, because I’m sure that a lot of this nation, they don’t need cruise tourism to survive as a tourist industry. So there’s a stiff, I think, of power relationship here after the pandemic. And we should be more vocal about that and say to the destination. And that’s what I’m trying to say with my work and the conference I’m giving. And when I speak to [a] person from a tourism association, that’s the kind of the discourse I’m trying to put in front, because we have more power than they have, I’m sure.

[00:27:39] But right now, or since the beginning of cruise tourism in the 80s, in the 90s, when they started to be bigger, we always felt that we should do the best to make them come to our destination and, and, and then we should change that. 

[00:27:55] Constance Dijkstra: I do think that  the destinations are absolutely crucial for cruise ship companies.

[00:28:02] We have seen some cities in Europe restrict quite a lot, the activities of cruise ships, or even in some cases sort of like banning them from their cities. And I completely understand that, that reaction. The difficulty is, you know, how, how do you make sure that if you’re banning your cruise, it doesn’t go to the port next door.

[00:28:25] And that’s a bit the issue that we see sometimes is that, well, for example, in Venice, it’s a lot harder at the moment to dock for a big cruise ship, but we have seen those ships basically go to neighboring cities. And so sometimes that’s also difficulty with going against cruise ship is, you know, how do you make sure that this is a coordinated effort at a local level?

[00:28:48] How do you make sure that cities are prepared? To what extent are you willing also to make concessions to allow perhaps some cruise ships, not some cruise ships? I mean, at T&E, you know, we, we’re [00:29:00] not, we’re not against cruise ships. Like we, we never said let’s ban cruise ships, but these are questions, you know, that we think about.

[00:29:08] Karla Hart: We struggle with that within our activist group, talking about whether or not we’re just pushing the issue onto somewhere else if we manage to get limits or do things. And that’s been one of the levers that the industry pulls against us. If you’re not allowing us to come to Alaska where you have stricter water quality standards, then we’ll go to somewhere where there aren’t stricter standards.

[00:29:33] And so you should just let us come here. Or to the communities. If you push us away from this community, it’s going to hurt, or cause impacts to another. I think that most of us within our network have concluded that any time that we can make any restrictions for a cruise ship to have access to a port is an overall win in the whole concept of being destinations, and that power, they need destinations and just because they want to dominate and colonize the entire coastal world for their purposes, doesn’t mean we as each community don’t have the right to say no. 

[00:30:14] Luc Renaud: I totally agree with you, Karla. Like that’s how they worked since the beginning, like try to divide, to conquer, you know, like, and I was talking about being a bully industry.

[00:30:25] So if you’re not happy with what we’re asking for you in our destination, well, go. Go somewhere else. Because, and there’s another thing that “the destination” don’t understand. And I want to point out that it’s different for the Caribbean again. Because the Caribbean, they have mostly the same kind of tourism offered.

[00:30:40] Sand, sun, and the water, the sea. But I’m telling to people here in Quebec City, if they try to bully you and think that, well, if the regulation is too harsh in Quebec City, we’ll go somewhere else. But that’s not true. Because there’s only one Quebec City in the world. There’s only one Venice, there’s only one Dubrovnik, okay?

[00:31:04] So the customer will ask to go to Quebec City because they want to see Quebec City and they want to see Venice. So that kind of discourse is live because they will get the pressure from their customers to go to those cities at the end of the day and they will find a way to comply with local regulation.

[00:31:23] Just saying that we’re going to go to the next door port, that’s one thing, but people, they want to come to Quebec City. They want to, they don’t want to go to another different city where it’s not UNESCO and things like that. So. It’s very important to understand that outside the Caribbean, we have the power to say no because we’re a unique destination.

[00:31:46] Rich Simpson: Luc, when I read your work on this point, I find an interesting tension. In your article on Placencia, you show how locals internalize the logic of the cruise ship and they want to bring more ships into the port since they depend upon this income. Yet on the other hand, your vision is also for locals [00:32:00] to embrace the city’s uniqueness and its notoriety as leverage to resist the domination by the industry. This is the tension that I mean: how does this sense of dependency and internalized logic shift to collective empowerment through a vision of regional identity within the community? Do you have examples of how this happens? 

[00:32:18] Luc Renaud: So what I was trying to say in my paper is that there was one part of the community that was fighting against cruise company Norwegian Cruise Lines for that, let’s take an example in the Southern part of Belize, because the cruise line managed to like kind of lock the territory and to keep all the economic benefits for themselves.

[00:32:40] And they managed to push out all the local entrepreneurs and tour guides and away from the cruise tourists. And within the community, there was this pressure to get involved with cruise tourism and try to be able to make business with those cruise tourists. And so there was a struggle within the community, at one point, for one side to push away the cruise company.

[00:33:04] And there was also another part of the community that were saying that, well, they are there, we see them every day. We need to be able to talk with them and try to make business with them. So what happened at the end is that the more powerful stakeholders within the community that managed to get involved with the cruise tourism and the cruise service and to harvest the benefits about that. So the ones who are marginalized in the first place, they were still marginalized after, when the local community managed to have more control on the cruise industry in that region. It’s kind of complicated within the communities, there are politicians, there are people who have more money that can advance, there are people who want to get involved with cruise tourism, and they don’t care too much about the impact.

[00:33:55] They just want to grab it for themselves. So it’s not better always to say that local will manage the cruise industry or will manage the tourism industry. Some of the dynamics are just reproduced at the local level. So, as for cruise tourism in Calcutta and Belize, what I found is that, before, it was all the cruise companies who were controlling, and today, what we see is that it’s the elite of the communities that are controlling the economic benefits of cruise tourism. So which one is better? I don’t know because where does the money go at the end? Uh, wWe don’t know but it’s not going to the right person, that’s for sure. 

[00:34:39] Rich Simpson: Yes, this reproduction of the dynamic at the local level is what I saw living in Juneau, and I write about this process as well. What I focus on is how the state uses elements of storytelling to represent itself in a particular way, not only to outsiders and tourists, but also to the people who live there.

[00:34:57] In Alaska, there’s this obligation to constantly repeat narratives about how this state is a wild frontier on the margins of capital. And that story functions as a powerful tool that subordinates the local community and allows the cruise industry to transform that environment at will. It very much determines who can and cannot live there as much as how one has to live there.

[00:35:18] Karla, I’m sure you have a feeling for this as well. 

[00:35:21] Karla Hart: I see the co-optation of some of the locals is phenomenal. Like, you’ve got the local guy who I grew up with speaking, and when he speaks in a public meeting, he’s just a puppet for the industry. But then in a private side conversation he’ll say, I know you’re right.

[00:35:37] We need to do something. And I’m like: say something. And he says, I can’t. So the industry, the people who sell their souls to the industry lose all control. They’re, a hundred percent of their economic future is locked into an industry that would slit their throat in a minute if they crossed them. So if you say, I’m not willing to accommodate your [00:36:00] increased demand for more shore excursions, the industry says, fine, we’re selling them anyhow. We’ll just get somebody else to do it and cut you out completely. It’s very vicious. And so even the locals that seem sold out, I’m seeing the exhaustion here where they’re sold out and they can’t do anything, but they know it’s wrong.

[00:36:20] Rich Simpson: I’m going to take stock of our conversation and then shift gears to address everyone’s thoughts about what can be done. We’ve been addressing the ecological impact of the ships. The difficulties of organizing on an international scale, the lack of transparency of information, the internalization of the cruise ship logic among those living in destination cities.

[00:36:40] And at the same time, we’re witnessing tremendous growth of this industry, both in terms of the size of the ships, as well as their numbers in the ocean, and their popularity only grows with the innovative ways in which the industry is meeting consumer demand. This morning I learned about a Taylor Swift-themed cruise ship launching next year from Florida to the Bahamas. So, in [00:37:00] this cruise ship era, what do each of you identify as examples of successful actions against the ships? And what do you believe a successful intervention against this industry looks like right now? 

[00:37:12] Luc Renaud: What I was telling about the Southern Belize, in fact, it was a victory for the community.

[00:37:18] It was one of the first times, what I documented. It’s one of the rare example where communities managed to push out the cruise companies from their community because the cruise tourists, they were not allowed to come in the community of Placencia. They were forbidden to come. And after that, their community, well, they let the cruise company have about 300 tourists a day to come in their community.

[00:37:44] But the community had control of those persons. So what I mean is that most of the communities in the Caribbean, they get overwhelmed by the cruise industry, by the numbers, by the people, and they don’t have that agency to push back those cruise companies. But Sinsa and the Caribbean managed to do that.

[00:38:01] The power strip went to the elite in the community, but I think it’s still a victory. That even if the certain person in the community managed the cruise tourism or the cruise tourist, it’s still better that than the other way around then, if it’s only the cruise companies that have the say. So, I think that for the Caribbean, for a Caribbean community, I think Placencia was something very special and it’s very rare to see that, but for other communities, I think it’s more of giving more power to the people and trying to, I don’t know, push back those companies and try to make people understand that we don’t really need them, or if we want them, well, they will have to comply to our way of doing things. 

[00:38:49] Karla Hart: Bar Harbor, Maine and Key West, Florida both had citizen initiatives that were successful that said, we want to dramatically limit the number of cruise ship passengers coming into our community.

[00:39:01] Key West ended up with one cruise ship instead of two cruise ships at a time, large cruise ships, through their efforts. It’s still a large cruise ship that’s causing environmental damage, that’s causing turbidity in the waters. It’s not a complete win, but they got half the cruise ship impact that they had before.

[00:39:20] So there are little bits like that. Some of the wins have come about as a result of communities that aren’t even on our radar or participating in our network. Seeing what’s going on globally, perhaps benefiting from the work that we’re all doing and the media that we’re getting around it to say, hey, let’s limit this so places outside of the US where the industry has less power to sue, there are some of the Pacific Islands that have said no to cruise ships over a certain size, or only one cruise ship. Well, Norway is saying no emissions into a [00:40:00] bunch of their fjords. Pretty soon, in the next few years, they’re going into a zero emissions policy there.

[00:40:07] We’ll see how that goes. At the same time, the industry is rapidly colonizing Greenland as an Arctic alternative. 

[00:40:16] Constance Dijkstra: In Europe, you know, we have the European Union, and so we do have the possibilities of pushing for effective rules that are going to ensure the shipping industry pays for its climate impact. Okay, so I can give you an example at Transport & Environment, we’ve been pushing for policies that compel ships to connect to shoreside electricity because that will result in less pollution into the air at different port cities.

[00:40:48] So, you know, in Europe, it will be compulsory for cruise ships, for ferries and for container ships above a certain size to connect to shoreside electricity by 2030. [00:41:00] Okay. So that’s a major win for us. The challenge is that, you know, we are going to have to ensure that other ship types also connect to shoreside electricity eventually.

[00:41:13] I think it’s also going to be difficult to push for ships to connect to shoreside electricity before 2030, because in general, it’s a lot cheaper to produce electricity from the fuel that you have on board your vessel than to buy it from the port. But I think, you know, pushing for shoreside electricity is something that we have been working on a lot and we’re happy to see that at least now there’s a date.

[00:41:42] So that’s one example, you know, where we’ve been pushing for and where a policy at a regional, at a world regional level can help. 

[00:41:50] Karla Hart: Shore power is an amazing thing that we’ve spent, some of us, a lot of time with the Global Cruise Activist Network looking at. It takes an hour and a [00:42:00] half for a ship to switch over from their engines to shore power and an hour and a half to disconnect.

[00:42:06] It’s not just plugging in, it’s 14 megawatts. It’s a city. They’re plugging and unplugging a city and there are all these different really complex factors. So, even if everybody is on shore power that can be, it’s a minute fraction. The industry has really pushed that all of the shore power infrastructure, they’re bragging about making their ship shore power ready, but they want all of the infrastructure for the shore power and the power itself, which is immensely expensive to provide clean power at this scale to have access.

[00:42:42] They’re expecting all of that to be borne by governments, by the public, they’re not putting up the money to make that happen. So what I’m seeing with this 2030 limit for cruise ships in Europe is a way for a community to say no to a ship. The law is that you [00:43:00] have to plug into shore power by 2030. In 2030, if a community simply opts to not build a shore power capacity that holds the biggest of ships, but says, gosh, we really like the ships that carry 2000 passengers, and so we’re going to provide six megawatt shore power, but we’re not going to provide 10 and 14 megawatt.

[00:43:24] Possibly, that is a lever that we can use to make the bit of difference. So I’m excited about that lever.

[00:43:34] Constance Dijkstra: I do see a lot of groups at local level being active, or new groups also emerging in many different cities. You know, in Spain, there are so many groups that are active on that question. There are many groups also in France, in Italy.

[00:43:51] So yeah. I mean, there’s definitely a strong civil society involvement. And I think it’s important to point out that those people, I mean, that they have [00:44:00] lives, you know, on the side, they work, they have their own family, et cetera. So it really shows that it’s something that touches them. 

[00:44:09] Karla Hart: I look in awe of some of the protests going on in Europe, where people are really right down there.

[00:44:15] You’ve got a lot of Extinction Rebellion involvement. You’ve got the people who are going and saying, do not come. You’re not welcome. Go away. And within our cruise activist network, we’ve had a fair bit of discussion because towns that have become port communities for the cruise industry, we would have zero credibility in our own community with our work if we said we want no cruise ships.

[00:44:40] It’s simply not an option with the dependency that is being created on our entire region. We used to have a good independent tourism economy, and the cruise industry ate that. They either absorbed all those people, or they made what used to make us [00:45:00] so attractive go away by overcrowding us, so that we’re completely dependent for our tourism, or we’ve been told that we’re completely dependent.

[00:45:09] People have that perception. So when we go down on the docks and protest, I can get people to turn out, but the rule is we’re polite. The rule is we say, oh, hi, welcome to Juneau, please don’t pollute. And so the cultures of protest are very different. In a small town, you have the reality that the person that you’re in there facing in terms of a local business, or that you’re trying to shut down, it may also be literally your next door neighbor you rely on to pull you out of the ditch if you get stuck.

[00:45:40] I mean, it’s a small town, whereas the protesters in Seattle, Washington are able to have a different approach because there’s more anonymity and it’s a different pool when you’re in a larger city. And so we’ve had a lot of discussions there just between what we can [00:46:00] do. Like, I have more power to go to my city government.

[00:46:03] I can call the mayor. I can call whoever, but I also have a different kind of accountability and really tight connection. So it becomes really complicated, the nuances of how there’s no formula. And that’s where with the network, what we do is just a lot of sharing. We had the folks who snuck onto cruise ships registered as guests and took air quality readings on cruise ships, the researchers, and reported on that.

[00:46:30] They spoke, we had some of the really great European activists talking to us about strategies they used, including the folks in Kiel, Germany, who had stopped a cruise ship from leaving port by surrounding the cruise ship and getting on the cruise ship. People from the South Hampton who do big projections of pollution onto the ships.

[00:46:53] So we had a lot of really good activism training and a lot of details on different aspects of economic impacts, all these different things. And from that, I think we all came away with an overwhelming knowledge that there really is no redeeming value of the cruise industry at all. 

[00:47:11] Luc Renaud: And I think we’re working against something much bigger than the cruise ship here.

[00:47:15] We’re working against tourism and the right to tourism and this huge industry that the cruise ship is part of it. The power of discourse also, that’s what I’m telling to my students all the time. We have this big sign by the road here right now. It’s a recall, and the sign reads like winter is coming.

[00:47:36] You know, like it’s a reminder, winter is coming. That’s the publicity we have right now here. And people, oh man, the snow is coming here, they want to go south, they want to go on a cruise ship and, and they’re tired and they want to have vacation and, and we understand that it’s a part of a big picture.

[00:47:52] So, working on the cruise tourism thing is one thing, but the big picture of mass tourism is a big beast, again, who has a lot of power. So, I’m not saying nothing’s going to change, but we have a lot of work to do because we’re not just fighting against the cruise industry. We’re trying to make things better for tourism as a global industry, but it’s sometimes overwhelming.

[00:48:18] Rich Simpson: I’m glad you said that this issue is definitely part of a bigger picture. The cruise ship is interesting because it’s very much about taking a break from life. And that could be a break from winter as in your case, or it could be an embrace of winter. As we see with this industry’s enormous growth in destinations in Alaska and[00:48:36] throughout the northern passage. Leisure is always an escape and the character of that escape reveals needs that go unmet or what’s lacking in one’s particular way of life. I’m struck how ideas about nature and the environment do so much to generate the desire for certain kinds of tourism and travel Which is a terrible irony given what the ship does to the environment. In [00:49:00] Alaska, for example, what’s clear is that the idea of wilderness and the experience of nature validates the vacation, and thereby it legitimates the presence and expansion of the ship.

[00:49:11] Everyone wants a photograph on top of the glacier. And so this desire to see some part of the earth which is supposedly untouched by modern life motivates the entire enterprise. It’s worth remembering that the tropes of discovery of wilderness and its natural resources legitimize the Alaskan oil industry in the twentieth century and the mining industry before that, all of which occur alongside constant dispossession of land from Alaska native populations.

[00:49:38] So the cruise ship utilizes the concept of nature that builds upon and advances economic and social inequalities that are often believed to be a part of the past. I think it’s important to keep these bigger pictures in mind. As we track the uniqueness of this industry as well. 

[00:49:54] Luc Renaud: I think that cruise tourism is probably, until they convince me of the opposite, it’s probably the worst way of traveling. I’m not afraid to say that it’s the worst way of traveling for a lot of reasons, but we said a few of the reasons today, but if you want to travel. Don’t cruise. It’s just despicable for everybody, for the environment, for the community, whatever. 

[00:50:21] Karla Hart: A lot of humans seem to be such herd animals.

[00:50:24] The idea that if you go to Europe, you quote, “have” to go to Venice, to Rome, to Paris, to London. When there are so many amazing places in between that nobody’s told you you have to go to that are still genuine, that are still wonderful, that really could use somebody staying in a little bed and breakfast, taking the train.

[00:50:52] Luc Renaud: We all know Karla, that the herd is also on social media. You know, like if you send a picture on Instagram about the [00:51:00] town that nobody knows, the people care, and that’s not what they want. They want to show themselves in the place where everybody is expecting them. And we could do another whole podcast on that issue.

[00:51:11] Rich Simpson: I feel we could easily make a sequel to this episode. There’s so many important points to elaborate on, but I want to bring us to an end by giving everyone a chance to share thoughts they have from our discussion. Or points they’d like to make before we come to a close. 

[00:51:25] Luc Renaud: The only thing I found so far is say to people, and I say that to my relatives also, I say that to my friends: travel less often, travel closer to home, and when you travel, travel for a longer time, you know, for a lot of good reasons.

[00:51:40] Go in the community, take time. And I know it’s not everybody that can go three, four, five weeks like in Europe, summertime. I understand that. But if we start thinking about flying less, discovering our region, our town, even, and when we’re traveling, when we do decide travel, try to manage to travel longer, I think that could be a path, could change the mentality slowly, slowly. Instead of the week in Punta Cana, Cuba, you know, or instead of going to Europe for 10 days and see all Europe.

[00:52:13] So I think there’s ways of traveling because when we say travel less, people get scared, you know, I’m not gonna be able to to travel. Or you’re saying not travel. I’m not saying not traveling, but I’m just saying try to travel in a different way, and yeah, that’s the only thing I can come up with. 

[00:52:30] Karla Hart: For my part, I think we need to help people to understand that tourism shouldn’t just be a panacea that you go and get, you drink yourself to death and gamble and get these superficial looks at things, but maybe we use less carbon-intensive ways of rejuvenating ourselves and connecting with others so that we have a better society, better societies.

[00:52:55] Constance Dijkstra: There’s perhaps a point that I would like to emphasize, which is, a little different from what Luc and Karla said, which is that cruise ships do represent a small segment of the shipping industry. And I understand the opposition to that industry, but I think it’s also important, an impact of other types of ships, of container ships.

[00:53:18] For example, all of the tankers that go around, and I think it’s important to keep that in mind that the cruise ship is representative of something that is a lot bigger and that it’s something that is a problem that is linked to our global economy and that we will need to also do something about that.

[00:53:39] Rich Simpson: I want to thank everyone for their insight and for sharing their important work and ideas with us. In my mind, a transnational coalition amongst communities, organizations, and scholars is required to form a critical response to the multiple detrimental effects of the cruise industry. What might a relational sense of autonomy among all of these coastal cruise ship cities now look like?

[00:53:59] I hope our conversation today allows you to visualize a step in that direction. Thank you for listening. Bye for now. 

[00:54:08] Andrew Culp: On behalf of the Cultural Studies Association and Positions Podcast, enormous thank you to our guests today, and also a special shout out to the production team, including Mark [Nunes], Elaine [Venter], and many others, and look forward to more podcasts coming soon.

[00:54:23] Thank you so much.

Credits

Produced by Mark Nunes, Elaine Venter, and Richard Simpson.
Hosted by Andrew Culp.
Production by Elaine Venter, Nick Corrigan, and Lucy March.
Editorial by Mark Nunes, Jeff Heydon, Ayondela McDole, Evan Moritz, Hui Peng, Shauna Rigaud, and Richard Simpson.
Music by Matt Nunes.

[Editors’ note: Richard Simpson co-produced this episode. For more information on the Cruise Ship Cities project or the Globalizing Southeast Alaska project, contact Richard at rfs1881gmail.com. This work has undergone post-publication peer review through a published scholarly commentary and public comments.]