“The language of tourism shapes who belongs, who holds power, and how we relate to place.”
Students at Acadia University immersed themselves in a field course with Dr. John Colton’s Ecotourism and Nature Based Tourism spring 2026 class, in collaboration with Earth Rhythms’ Celes Davar. Here, students are experiencing the recently protected Wabanaki forest in the Gaspereau Valley called Ksu’skue’kati (Place of the Hemlocks). Hemlocks are sacred to the M’kmaq peoples. How forests regenerate is critical information that can be experienced as part of nature based tourism. These students experienced regenerative practices from four different businesses in the Annapolis Valley, Wolfville, and Gaspereau Valley including Longspell Point Farm, Basin & Bloom Cookery, Benjamin Bridge Winery, and Earth Rhythms.
I am inspired by the many leaders in regenerative travel in Canada today. In this case, two leaders have joined together, to create a remarkable online publication.
IMPACT National is Canada’s leading sustainability summit for global travel & tourism. Their annual Global Summit in Victoria, BC unites DMOs, tourism operators, government, Indigenous leaders and academia in a collaborative, innovative dialogue on our industry challenges. The co-founders created IMPACT with a mission: To propel, inspire, and showcase innovative, sustainable, and regenerative solutions, fostering positive tourism development across the globe. We invite you to join us in learning and dialogue, looking at the impact tourism has on the environmental, social, and cultural fabric of a destination.
Landsby “…creates unique and immersive experiences that not only provide travellers with purposeful and enriching trips but also aim to positively impact the communities being explored. We are supporting and rebuilding Canada’s tourism sector through innovative collaborations, storytelling, and a focus on Indigenous and Regenerative travel.”
Together, they have created THE IMPACT Magazine. In this most recent article, author Izabela Jarosynski interviews Michelle Holliday and JoAnna Haugen, globally recognized for their work in helping to shape a different narrative about tourism as a global force for good. Here are a couple of excerpts…This article is inspiring and informative. The Words We Travel By.
“Tourism is built on familiar language: destinations, experiences, hidden gems, visitors, growth. These words appear so frequently in our strategies, marketing campaigns, and industry conversations that they have faded into the background, becoming the invisible scaffolding of how we talk about travel. Yet, we rarely stop to consider what they imply about our relationship to the places we visit, or to the people who call those places home. For a growing number of regenerative thinkers and storytellers, however, language is far from neutral. The words we choose reveal how we understand our relationship to place, community, and one another.
“The language we choose signals which of those visions we believe.
In conventional tourism narratives, places often exist primarily for the benefit of visitors. Communities become destinations. Landscapes become attractions. Culture becomes experience.
Regenerative thinking starts from a different premise. Places are homes before they are destinations. Communities have stories, needs, and aspirations that exist independently of tourism. Visitors are invited into those stories, but they are not the centre of them.”