Instagram Influencers Are Wrecking Public Lands. Meet the Anonymous Account Trying to Stop Them
Latest
At this very moment, Southern California is full of poppies, and the poppies are full of influencers. The superbloom—a fun word for a particularly riotous profusion of wildflowers—has brought thousands of tourists flooding into areas across the state, like Lake Elsinore, where access to the Walker Canyon poppy fields was temporarily shut down because of City Hall called an “unbearable” amount of people, many of them stampeding through the fields and even picking the flowers.
People behaving horribly in natural spaces isn’t new, though it’s a problem getting more attention recently. During the government shutdown, Joshua Tree was particularly badly hit by vandalism, including people climbing the delicate trees, vandalizing them, and even cutting them down, damage that experts estimate could take as long as 300 years to repair itself. (Miley Cyrus apparently did not get the memo. She posted two photos of herself this week sitting in a Joshua tree. After the comments trended towards outrage, the comments on the posts have been closed, but the photos themselves remain up.) The damage to Joshua Tree alone was bad enough to generate an Instagram account, Joshua Tree Hates You, which shows a truly soul-crushing amount of damage, which seems to only get worse as the park gets more popular.
In the case of the superbloom, a more fleeting phenomenon, the unruly crowds have garnered a lot of attention and more than one guide to seeing the flowers without ruining the flowers. Yet reports of appalling poppy-centric behavior keep flooding in. Definitely not helping: the sheer number of influencers staging photoshoots among the flowers. The images tend to be pretty uniform: a beautiful, often white person sitting in a poppy field, gazing dreamily into the distance, sometimes holding a carefully placed sponsored product, like a cellphone case or a jaunty can of soup. They tend to make the poppies look very, very inviting, and like it’s cool to sit among them, which it’s absolutely not.
But it was that can of soup that really got to the person who runs Public Lands Hate You, an account dedicated to pointing out the ways that Instagram tourism—particularly the influencer variety—wrecks delicate natural ecosystems. What’s more, the account-holder is trying to do something about it, by either gently trying to educate influencers about the damage their actions cause and, when that fails, contacting their sponsors.
We spoke recently by phone with the person behind the account, a 31-year-old man who lives in the Pacific Northwest. He asked for anonymity due to the unquenchable ire of the influencers, several of whom he says are very angry at him for costing them money. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
JEZEBEL: Thanks for taking the time to talk. Are you also behind the Joshua Tree Hates You account?
Public Lands Hate You: I am not. We chat back and forth quite a bit. Whoever runs that account will send me messages saying, ‘Hey, take a look at this. It’s outside our domain because it’s not Joshua Tree but it should be brought to your attention.” I do the same thing, I’ll send things their way. I think they were the first account to do this, and I jumped on the bandwagon.
I agreed to your request for anonymity due to the threats you said you’ve gotten recently, but what are you comfortable sharing about yourself?
Yeah, my concern is that I’ve gotten threats from people, mainly influencers who have lost sponsors. I’m 31 and I grew up in New England. I have been hiking and backpacking and canoeing and all that outdoor stuff since I was five years old. I didn’t go to my first national park until I was 18. Since then, I’ve been to all the national parks in the lower 48. I’ve been to a bunch of national monuments, national forests, national lake shores, I’ve been all over the place.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
