Before you keep traveling…
For a long time, traveling has been synonymous with escape — with seeking the new, the other, the distant. But… what happens when that journey, meant for rest or discovery, ends up depleting what it encounters?
In many territories of the Global South — such as Latin America, Southeast Asia, or Africa — tourism has often functioned more as a mirror of an outsider’s gaze than a real bridge between cultures. Our lands, rich in diversity and living memory, have also been the stage for extractive tourism: the kind that turns life into a product and strips communities of agency and meaning.
Today, something within us calls for a pause — to reflect and to imagine other ways of moving, inhabiting, and connecting.
It is from this South that thinks, that creates, that remembers, that we want to open a conversation about regenerative tourism. Because we believe — and want to collectively explore — that tourism, far from being a simple act of leisure or consumption, is deeply intertwined with global power dynamics. It is not neutral: it is a practice that shapes territories, imaginaries, and futures.
Tourism is not neutral
From the places portrayed as “exotic” or “authentic” to those who set the price, the narrative, and the rules of the game, tourism — especially international and mass tourism — reproduces colonial, extractive, and neoliberal structures.
The desire to “explore the unknown” often repeats the same scripts of appropriation, simplification, and cultural consumption. Complex territories — full of history, resistance, and diversity — are packaged as attractive products for the outside visitor, who rarely sees what underpins the experience: precarious labor, environmental displacement, and the loss of community meaning.
In many corners of the Global South, tourist destinations are not merely places to discover — they are carefully staged scenes meant to be desired, photographed, and consumed. Rich, complex places full of life, tensions, and stories are reduced to postcards. To exotic experiences. To content.
There are communities forced to reshape themselves to fit into someone else’s narrative. There is knowledge that gets simplified to seem “appealing.” There are territories that get emptied out to make room for what’s profitable. And there are silences — about water, waste, labor — that uphold the comfort of those who stay just a few days.
Tourism, in its most massive and globalized form, reproduces many of the very logics we claim to want to overcome: extractive, colonial, and unequal.
With all this, we’re not trying to “blame” the traveler. Nor to deny the beauty of connection, or the value of movement. Traveling can be an act of care. But for that to happen, we first need to acknowledge the weight it carries. And ask ourselves:
What does it mean to move through the world with responsibility?
What narratives are we upholding when we choose a destination?
What do we call knowing?
What do we leave behind when we arrive somewhere new?
Let’s talk about regenerative tourism
In this context, the concept of regenerative tourism begins to emerge as a critical response — one still in the making.
While it’s important to acknowledge the path laid by the sustainability paradigm, regeneration goes beyond minimizing harm: it is a call to direct action, here and now. It warns against corporate greenwashing, while aiming to restore community ties, revive and strengthen the vitality of ecosystems and cultures, and co-create presents and futures where territories are not just spaces of transit, but living, environmentally healthy, interdependent networks.
That’s why regenerative tourism, to be meaningful in the Global South, cannot be a copy of imported models. It must honor the history of practices, knowledge, and struggles of each place, and build bridges with those who are already regenerating the ecosocial fabric today.
Contextual Ethics
In this sense, regeneration is not a technique — it is a situated/contextual ethic. From this perspective, this project is born. Not from a place of authority or technical expertise, but as part of a process of observation, learning, and committed reflection. We are a group of friends from Misiones (Argentina) and São Paulo (Brazil) who share a common desire: to inhabit the world as part of nature, to learn from it and from one another, to build more conscious and caring relationships, and to create lives more worth living.
Our contribution is modest: to open a conversation, hold a question, and build knowledge and bridges. This blog is an open logbook that seeks to weave questions, readings, references — and also testimonies.
We want to think collectively about how to move without destroying, how to travel without displacing, how to create without extracting.
If you’ve ever felt out of place in the dominant tourism narrative,
if you’ve ever felt discomfort or dissonance between traveling and caring,
if you’ve ever imagined another kind of tourism is possible but haven’t yet found the words for it —this space is for you.
This space can also be your starting point.
Cover photo by Jonathan Borba