Historian Simon Winchester recalls a long-ago visit he made to the remote British-owned island of Tristan da Cunha, and how a seemingly innocent act of journalism got him banned from the place for life. Years later, he concluded that the extreme act of the island’s residents had been justified. And:

Then came a cascade of similar memories, from earlier journeys. The woman from San Diego whom I met in a truly remote Amazon village, buying up everything she could see—a volcano-sized pile of old chairs and tables and statuettes assembled on raffia mats in the village square, the villagers looking on in eager anticipation of their good fortune from the sale of their castoffs—but who promptly walked out on the deal when told that the village had no facility for taking her Visa card. The Microsoft billionaire who arrived on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast with five helicopters full of bodyguards, and demanded that all available local lions be collected in one oasis so that he could see and picture them. The Texan who insisted on being pictured beside his golf club’s pennant on every Arctic and Antarctic stop he made, then teeing off and driving one ball—such a little ball, he would sweetly insist—into the sea.

We have an unceasing capacity to make ourselves nuisances, basically. Students of tourism science can and do construct elaborate theories from physics, of course, invoking such wizards as Heisenberg and the Hawthorne effect and the status of Schrödinger’s cat to explain the complex interactions between our status as tourist-observers and the changes we prompt in the peoples and places we go off to observe. But at its base is the simple fact that in so many instances, we simply behave abroad in manners we would never permit at home: we impose, we interfere, we condescend, we breach codes, we reveal secrets. And by doing so we leave behind much more than footfalls. We leave bruised feelings, bad taste, hurt, long memories.

Attractive-sounding mantras about footprints and photographs won’t fully resolve the problem. The only real solution, however impractical and improbable, is to hearken to Pascal’s much scorned adage, to resolve to resist the blandishments of the brochure, and stay away.