The Nordic Journey

The most pristine landscapes on the planet are found in Antarctica. Untouched by humans beside a few research stations and only four deep field tourism companies, it is the ultimate testing ground for the footprint of our activities. 

 Eleni Antoniades is an environmental scientist that has been working with White Desert, a company that offers deep field experiences in their own camps on the icy continent. Following the strictest environmental rules you can find for any sustainable tourism activites, where everything that goes in must come out, including your waste and sewage, I am pretty sure there are things or two we can learn from their materials, the technology they use and processes. 

 In this episode of The Nordic Journey Eleni takes us on a trip into the extreme environment of Antarctica, telling us about the Blue Ice runway they built, the energy experiments they are conducting, their use of SAF and environmental testing which could be applied in the North as well. 

 Further resources mentioned in the podcast are:

 https://www.environmentalhub.co.uk/ Environmental Hub Discover Antarctica course, endorsed by the Institution of Environmental Sciences. The pages on the course  second run are being updated today/ tomorrow and will be live by the end of tomorrow     Eleni Antoniades - Institution of Environmental Sciences (IES) | LinkedIn I do publish a number of Antarctic case studies on my Linkedin profile     https://white-desert.com/about/sustainability This is where you can find the link to the Environmental Impact Assessment  (EIA) for White Desert, known as IEEs in Antarctica and you can also find out more about White Desert’s sustainability efforts   https://www.ats.aq/devAS/e/EP/EIAList If you would like to read more Environmental Impact Assessments and find out how other tour operators assess and manage their environmental impacts, as well as reading about National Antarctic Programmes, this is the central database for all Antarctic EIAs.

Welcome back to the first episode of the second season of The Nordic Journey podcast - where we talk about everything related to the development of sustainable tourism. This episode is a little different than previous episodes in that it is recorded during a webinar, set up as a presentation followed by discussions where DMOs could participate. In this episode we meet Dr. Dirk Glaesser Director of UN Tourism for Sustainable Tourism and Resilience. The UN has dedicated the year 2027 to sustainable tourism development and resilience, preparing for the 2030s of tourism where we need to plan for a rapidly changing scenery. Dr. Glaesser introduces the program UN Tourism is starting followed by interesting discussions on the changing nature of tourism and human mobility. Enjoy the show!

Paras Loomba is a trained military officer and electrical engineer - and an award winning sustainable tourism leader, almost by accident. Paras is joining us today to talk about his expedition company Global Himalayan Expeditions or GHE, where he takes groups of people into the remote Himalayan mountains bringing not just tourists and currency, but also electricity, light and community development to those mountains. A truly regenerative tourism company. Today, many of the villages offer Homestays, enabled by the opportunities and income GHE has brought to those remote, mountain communities. Listen to the story of Paras and the Himalayan villages.

In this episode we talk to travel writer and keynote speaker Doug Lansky about what is wrong with tourism today and what needs to be done to fix it. Doug is a popular speaker on the topic of tourism and has recently published a book named Why Tourism is Broken and How to Fix It. We talk about his book and some of the examples of overtourism, mismanagement of tourism, tourism taxes and the protection of both the local environment and the local population. Enjoy the show!

In our 17th episode of the Nordic Journey podcast we continue to explore different venues of regenerative tourism, this time moving over to Canada to learn about indigenous tourism. Sébastien Desnoyers-Picard is from the Wendat Nation in Quebec City in Canada and the founder and CEO of Destination Original Indigenous Tourism (DO-IT). Sébastien talks to us about the value of indigenous tourism, the importants for the community and the different, more regenerative tourism approaches they use, which the more mainstream tourism could definitely learn something from. His organisation is now established in Canada, the US and New Zealand with more countries to follow, offering opportunities to indigenous tourism professionals to offer more authentic products for the benefit of their culture, heritage and community. Enjoy the episode.

In our 16th episode of The Nordic Journey, we talk to Dr. Carina Ren from Aalborg University. Carina is joining us from Sisimiut in West-Greenland and will be telling us about her research on climate change, sustainable tourism development and the Arctic - and how coastal communities are adapting. Her current research project is Regenerative Economies in Arctic Coastal Communities. Here are some blogs and articles from Carina Ren for further reading: On Greenlandic tourism and the road to indpendence: https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/tourism-greenland-expanding-runway-towards-independence/ On Arctic Tourism: https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/arctic-tourism-industry/ From more tourism to better tourism: https://traveltrade.visitgreenland.com/latest-news/switching-focus-from-more-tourism-to-better-tourism/ Sustainability and tourism management in Svalbard and Greenland: Reference: Sveinsdóttir, A. G., Ren, C. B., Olsen, J., Hovelsrud, G. K., Dannevig, H., Bjørst, L. R., & Freng Dale, R. (2025). Navigating a changing Arctic: toward adaptive governance in Greenland and Svalbard. Tourism Geographies, 27(5), 1057-1077. Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2025.2515098#abstract And finally if you want to learn more about Haraway's Worlding, you can check out this blog: https://thearchaic.nl/the-world-as-a-verb-on-harawayan-worlding-the-many-worlds-of-the-anthropocene/ or her book: Haraway, Donna J. (2016) Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Iran is making headlines all over the world at the moment - and yet we are getting very little news from inside the country. What is happening, how are people coping, what is the impact on tourism?   There is of course no international tourism there due to the war, but the tourism operators are still there, trying to figure out what comes next. In this episode which was recorded on Friday March 27th, I spoke to Dr. Azam Bahrami, who teaches sustainability and regenerative tourism at the University of Mohaghegh Ardabili in Iran, when there is not war, but is currently living in the Netherlands. Azam gave us a little insight into her work for ecotourism in the Middle East and the resilience of the Iranian people and the tourism industry there.

Can you use tourism for a rewilding biology project? In this episode we talk to Kim Worrmann Jensen, a former rock star and current sustainability champion from Destination Trekantsomådet in Denmark. He is the head of sustainability and has been developing products that are based on regenerative tourism concepts. One interesting project he has been working on and developing is the rewilding of Møllebækken, a small creek that had been put into underground pibes to make way for a new highway - killing all wildlife in it at the same time. Kim and his biology friends came to the rescue activating tourists from Germany and the Netherlands. Learn more about how he designed the project and the lessons learned which you can apply to your next regenerative tourism project.

High in the Himalayas, locked between the giant countries of India and China, is a small Kingdom that somehow has evaded colonialism and western influence for hundreds of years. This is Drug Yul, the Kingdom of the Thundering Dragon, better known as Bhutan. In this show we have as a special guest the former head of the national tourism board in Bhutan, Dorji Dhradhul, who is sharing with us his culture and perspectives. In Bhutan the government follows Gross National Happiness, where everything is measured on the impact it has on environment, community and governance. Dorji shares how they work with that, his two new books, a new City of Mindfulness that is under construction and the upcoming TedX-Thimpu. A different of looking at how we do things - and why we do them. Here are the titles of his books: Creativity - Time to Crown Again Bhutan - Kingdom of Mindfulness More information on the books can be found here: https://dojidhratyul.com/my-books/

The antithesis to bullying, which we see too much of in the media nowadays, is to live decently - says Geoffrey Lipman, co-founder of SunX Malta, former Executive Director of IATA, former president of WTTC and former Assistant Secretary General at UNWTO. Together with Dr. Hans Friederich, a nature and conservation specialist with vast experience from Africa, Asia and Europe they are running Sun X Malta and the Climate Friendly Travel portal, a global initiative backed by the Maltese government that is aiming at promoting and educating tour companies around the world in sustainable thinking and climate action. (Something you might want to look into joining.) With their impressive resumes and experience they share their perspectives on the state of the travel industry, the challenges of sustainable tourism today and their concerns for tomorrow. An episode dedicated to the generation that is being born today.