A team of student journalists from the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications spent their senior semester reporting on the limits of ecotourism–in their own home state of Florida and globally. After eight weeks’ background reporting and setting up interviews, they traveled to Costa Rica, a global model for nature-based tourism thanks to bold policies that reforested a quarter of the country and prioritized conservation. The student journalists found that mass tourism and foreign investment are becoming too much of a good thing, raising questions about whether outsiders are loving Costa Rica too much–and whether too many local people are being left behind. Their reporting blended human stories of local Ticos and Ticas who had nuanced relationships with tourism and tourists. One described it as a paradox: It had become hard to live with mass tourism, but impossible to live without it.
The project blends those deeply personal narrative stories with data analysis: In the real estate story, for example, Maria Avlonitis used unoccupied housing data to show the degree to which coastal areas have become dominated by vacation homes and AirBnBs. The farming story showed the plummeting share of GDP derived from agricultural crops.
One of the strongest investigative stories, “Gone Wild,” showed how ecotourism is harming the very wild animals that tourists flock to Costa Rica to encounter. Franklin Lopez Martinez used roadkill data now being collected from iNaturalist to show how tourist highways are some of the most dangerous threats to distinctive species like ocelots. Franklin also got powerful photographs of beloved animals dead on Costa Rica’s major tourist highways, or perilously trying to cross.
