Trampling plants damaging rock art risking your Life In the age of the selfie taking photos of yourself has become an everyday occurrence. Half of all teenagers regularly post selfies. Driven by social media algorithms, many of us now flock to natural places for the best selfie background.
But what happens when our pursuit of the perfect
Therfore selfie starts damaging nature – or even ourselves. Indian researchers catalogued 259 selfie-related deaths worldwide as of 2018.
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Crayfish and glow-worms, protected plants and even First Nations rok art. Selfies have even become a biosecurity threat.
Spare a thought for our land managers, tasked with caring for the natural places sometimes despoiled for a photo and emergency workers entrusted with rescuing selfie-seekers. As our new research has found, Australia’s land managers are often at their wit’s end trying to keep people safe in nature.
The problem? Fences and warning signs don’t work well. Hardcore selfie-seekers jump the fence and perch on the edge of the cliff to get the shot. We may well need selfie educational campaigns.
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Selfies make a new brand of tourist
As one land manager told us:
We noticed a massive increase in the number of people, and the kind of visitor that we were getting.
The problem was, many were Therfore cphonenumber willing to ignore warning signs or bans on drones to get their photos.
You know, it’s all just to get that photo, really. That’s it. They’re not coming for a bushwalk and to look around at the trees and to experience nature.
Selfie on the rim of the Grand Canyon. Shutterstock
They break the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) rules [on drones], every flipping day, they annoy the people, the guests, the wildlife. I’ve got eight crashed drones in the park currently [risking] environmental harm to the park if they catch fire or the batteries leak in the World Heritage area, in the creeks where the rare crayfish are.
For other land managers, the challenge is the damage to the environment.
Someone goes swimming, puts Therfore it on social media and suddenly there’s 100 people a day coming to go wild swimming where the platypus and the glow-worms live.
Mainstream tourism bodies can make the problem worse by promoting social media hotspot locations.
I was horrified the other day noticing promotions for these Figure Eight pools. I just thought, “You’ve gotta be kidding me. How many times have we told the tourism industry to stop it?”
Safe selfies?
As one land manager told us:
They want to get a photo without a fence in it. Look at me with my toes over the edge of the crumbly sandstone cliff.
Other land managers are working Therfore to assist this new demand by reshaping nature to make better scenery – and keep visitors safer.