Social Change and Tourism in the Okanagan: Senses, Mobility, and the Atmosphere

Unwanted Sound? Contested Lake and Highway Noise in Okanagan Summer Tourism

World attention on the problems of noise related to mass tourism has risen in the past decade. Well-publicized anti-tourism protests in Barcelona, for example, demonstrate the seriousness of local residents’ disputes with tourism-related noise. Closer to home, in the Okanagan Lake region of BC, Syilx Nation Territory, conflict over boat and road noise in the busy summer months occurs. Media accounts pop up when highway traffic, speed boats and personal water craft noise lead residents to voice concern over the noise pollution and call for regulations of the sound environment. Because the main highway infrastructure that runs through the cities of Kelowna and West Kelowna brings the majority of the region’s visitors by motor vehicle to Okanagan Lake and surrounding lakes that are a major tourist draw, the traffic din can reach high levels. While the numbers of tourists coming to the Okanagan are small in comparison to the large influx of tourists to European cities like Barcelona, the issue of noise is no less insignificant to those people and communities affected by tourism noise, no matter the size or scale.

Through experimentation with sensory ethnography, the project explores summer tourism noise and contestations in the Okanagan. Rather than take noise for granted as background din, we investigate how, why, and for whom noise becomes unwanted sound. Because car tourism especially contributes to carbon emissions and imminent global warming, climate change underpins the issue. Concern with car and boat noise in summer tourism is linked to environmental conditions (and threats) that take place within a region historically framed in colonial discourses as an “oasis” for relaxation and quietude. Noise is material, emanating from "loud and polluting" machines. But it is also social, negatively valued in opposition to notions of the region as unspoiled while also being valued positively by norms of masculinity, for example. The project will elucidate the thorny social aspects of tourism.

Tourism studies have focused on visual aspects of tourism, silencing the importance of sound in sites of leisure. Few ethnographic studies address the phenomenology of sound at tourist sites, and none look at lake and highway sounds, making the project a unique contribution to scholarship in several fields —anthropology of tourism, transportation studies, environmental anthropology, and the Anthropocene, sensory anthropology, and sound theory and methodologies. The project opens a new line of inquiry into connections between transportation, tourism, and the sonic— bringing an interdisciplinary perspective to the study of how anthropogenic sound is complexly bound up with tourism mobilities in the form of road and water power vehicles, and why these issues matter.

Link HERE to the website for this project.

RESEARCH TEAM

PI: Susan Frohlick, PhD (UBCO)

FUNDED BY

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Grant (430-2020-00771)