After Everest, we have to rethink the places we are loving to death

“Everest is over,” declared the Atlantic earlier this month. The conclusion came at the end of a tragic climbing season on the mountain. Eleven new deaths added more bodies to “the world’s highest garbage dump”, even as tourists to the summit posted photos to social media of their passage past corpses that had been there so long, they had become landmarks. Accumulating with the tonnes of spent oxygen cylinders, tents, gas cartridges, plastic and human turds left by a literal queue of visitors to Everest’s peak, is the globally shared concern with overtourism.

Cheap flights, internet bookings, opportunistic businesses and no small amount of status competition is driving record crowds towards popular destinations. In 1995, global tourist arrivals numbered 525 million; last year, they reached 1.4 billion.

Related: Why I won’t be joining the queue at the top of Everest

A European Union report found 105 European cities are straining to accommodate an expanded pool of guests. Workers at the Louvre in Paris have gone on strike over unmanageable crowds, while Dubrovnik has seen a 53% increase in tourist arrivals and Prague is being squished by visitors’ foot traffic.

In Japan there is growing concern with “kankō kōgai”, or “tourism pollution”, crowding locals out of sites of national value. In 2016, Machu Picchu in Peru took 5,000 visitors a day – double what is recommended by Unesco. The Taj Mahal in India is receiving eight million visitors a year, and surging crowds have caused injuries. The precious ecosystem of the Galápagos Islands in Ecuador is threatened by habitat destruction from infrastructure built to accommodate tourists coming to view its, um, precious ecosystem.

Little wonder “anti-tourism” movements are springing up within communities. There have been protests against the cruise ships that bring tourists to Venice. In Barcelona, graffiti reads: “If it’s tourist season, why can’t we shoot them?”

Remedies suggested by the World Tourism Association, of course, lean heavily towards increasing government regulation of the tourist experience – restricting entry to sites, capping numbers, tightening rules around operators, “sensitising” guests to local customs, investing in improved infrastructure, and promoting lesser-known routes and options. It’s a commonsense framework with benefits for both local communities and the tourism experience, but comparable to placing a Band-Aid on a decapitation wound.

There are class and privilege implications of restricting access to territories and monuments based on a capacity to pay. But even Bhutan’s $200–a-day tourist charge has not deterred crowds from its delicate habitats, and so the challenge is to relieve the physical and environmental pressure on places by asking some fundamental questions about tourism itself.

Examining, with honesty, personal motivations for travel is on my mind: I write this while on holiday; I write this as the problem. I joined the crowds at the British Museum last week, unable to catch a peep of the Rosetta Stone due to a throng of duelling selfie-stick warriors gathered around it. In Bali a year ago, a stroll mere metres from my seaside hotel landed me in plastic waste up to my ankles, on a part of the beach the staff weren’t paid to clean.

The author Douglas Adams foreshadowed my environmental angst – and culpability – in that particular moment in his chronicle of impending extinctions, Last Chance to See. He wrote of visiting that “part of Bali which has been made almost exactly the same as everywhere else in the world for the sake of people who have come all this way to see Bali”. Given the world is now swimming in plastic, Bali, Cornwall and Mount Everest are all more like the rest of the world than they ever were.

We can make excuses to ourselves about seeking fresh conversations or new experiences from tourism, but stand outside an overtouristed monument and you’ll quickly observe crowds engaged in ancient and indistinguishable rituals of performative mass trampling. The selfie sticks are not there to record the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics to Greek. Rather, they’re re-enacting the scene in Don DeLillo’s prescient novel White Noise, where the protagonist visits “the most photographed barn in America” and is told the tourists who snap cameras “can’t even see the barn ... we see only what the others see ... a collective perception”.

We are lured to overtouristed places because we want to share our own stories with the romances established around them, and project ourselves into the collective perception of their beauty and uniqueness.

Related: The Guardian view of over-tourism: an unhealthy appetite for travel | Editorial

This is why the solution to overtourism is not rooted in how we do tourism, but in how communities can be invested in actively creating – or restoring – places of beauty. And not just to spread the crowds more evenly.

Everest did not become a holy mountain at the whim of a marketing committee. Machu Picchu was not built as a theme park. Only when places become the realisation of a culture’s most profound collective values – beliefs in sanctuary, holiness, glory, reverence, knowledge – are they collectively empowered to suggest their own myths and inspire new fantasies.

The places we are loving literally to death should motivate us to realise that every street, town, park, garden and steep hill is capable of this transformation. They offer us the same lesson if they are trashed and destroyed, but in a way far colder, sadder and more painful.

• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist