Abstract

Hit by the pandemic more than other economic sectors, tourism’s crisis enables us to grasp the dimension and transformative power tourism has gained over the last one and a half centuries. In many regions worldwide, millions work in gastronomy and accommodation, in businesses for building and maintaining infrastructure, organizing supply, discharge, and mobility services, offering programs of culture, leisure, and sports. Tourism in its sheer complexity necessarily is a force of major socioecological impact. It is a particular form of producing and consuming specialized landscapes and a major factor of resource use and material change. Debates on the social and ecological sustainability of tourism and on the desirable future of the sector demand for a sound interdisciplinary analysis of its social ecology, applying a long-term perspective. Taking our fi elds of expertise (environmental history, tourism history, urban and landscape ecology) as a starting point, and commenting the state of the art in these disciplines, our paper advocates a joint interdisciplinary effort to investigate a comprehensive social ecology of tourism.