Tourism, as stated, is Iceland’s number one source of income. Like many other countries, millions of people visit these landmarks each year and while this makes a lot of money, it also comes with a lot of problems. Many problems with tourism include safety, cleanliness, and preserving landmarks. Tourists sometimes don’t listen to signs and go off-path which can damage ecosystems and plant-life that isn’t supposed to get stepped on. Or they can throw trash and other pollutants around the landmark which will breakdown and release micro-plastics that can interact with the environment in harmful ways.
Some sustainable tourism practices to ensure the preservation of these landmarks can be simply to clean up after yourself. It seems cliche but making sure no trash is left behind and that you don’t affect the area is a sure way to ensure the preservation of the landmarks. It would simply be like you were never even there in the first place. Another way to preserve the landmarks is to follow all directions when observing these monuments. This would be like listening to all the signs around the landmark or listening to the tour guide providing information on the landmark. Just overall being respectful to the environemnt and people working at the landmark is important to make sure the landmark is preserved.
To conserve these places of their natural beauty is to ensure that human manipulation and interference aren’t present in the landmark. The idea of visiting and viewing these things is to see how nature has created these beautiful landmarks by itself. Human intervention wasn’t and isn’t needed to make this, and it’s a marvelous scene to see nature create these landmarks. These places are naturally beautiful because humans haven’t touched them and have allowed nature to shape and mold them to look how they look today.
Swanson School of Engineering 