Well, that didn’t take long.
It’s been only a handful of years since glamping burst into general public awareness on this side of the Atlantic (it became a thing in Europe about a decade earlier), less time than that since most print references stopped explaining what the term means or how it was derived. Yet its growth has been so explosive that glamping has overshadowed its more staid forebears, which have answered the challenge by falling into an identity crisis.
Camping is old-school and plebian, heavily populated either with geezers trying to recapture a lost sense of youthful freedom or with society’s cast-offs, living in the only housing they can afford. Glamping is money and luxury and a barely concealed sense of decadence, all dressed up in back-to-nature pretensions amid wine bars and hot tubs. Glamping is, most of all, for the young, as vividly graphed at the top of this column.
But the surest sign that glamping has gone mainstream, and in the most hip way possible, is its starring role in a newly released Japanese movie (with English subtitles), “Evil Does Not Exist.” As reviewed by New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis, “Evil” traces what happens when two Tokyo outsiders descend on a pastoral hamlet with plans to build a glamping resort “where tourists can comfortably experience the area’s natural beauty, a wildness that their very patronage will help destroy.” When one of the local residents points out that the resort will obliterate a deer trail, eliciting a suggestion from the developers that the deer will go elsewhere, his response is poignantly brief: “Where would they go?”
But that’s not something that’s high on the list of concerns for the resort’s developers—indeed, it’s entirely incidental to the story they want to tell the hamlet’s residents. Parked behind laptops and seated before a projector screen, they play a video for the locals explaining “glamorous camping” and its rewards, predicting that the area will become “a new tourist hot spot,” as if that alone should dispel all objections. As Dargis writes: “‘Water always flows downhill,’ a village elder says in response. . . . ‘What you do upstream will end up affecting those living downstream,’ stating a law of gravity that’s also a passionate, quietly wrenching argument for how to live in the world.”
For all its timeliness, however, “Evil Does Not Exist” is scarcely more than a rap on the knuckles of the ongoing commodification of Mother Nature or The Great Outdoors or whatever the next trendy tagline may be. The juggernaut is gaining momentum from one year to the next, grossing $791 million in North America last year and growing at an average 12.6% a year through 2030, according to Grand View Research—enough to make glamping a $1.7 billion industry by the end of the decade. All that growth, alas, will come at the expense of a proliferation of domes and cabins with mirrored walls and platformed tents blanketing the landscape, disrupting not just deer trails but entire eco-habitats.
In that regard, it’s instructive to read Grand View Research’s description of what makes glamping tick, at least on this continent. “Travelers interested in glamping want services and amenities similar to that in hotels or resorts,” the analysts write. “They prioritize services and amenities that include social activities, Wi-Fi, a full kitchen, and private restrooms and want them in a family-friendly, laid-back atmosphere that offers a mix of activities and peace.”
Nature? Nary a mention. Maybe evil does exist, after all.
Renting Dirt 