Paras Loomba is a trained military officer and electrical engineer - and an award winning sustainable tourism leader, almost by accident.

Paras is joining us today to talk about his expedition company Global Himalayan Expeditions or GHE, where he takes groups of people into the remote Himalayan mountains bringing not just tourists and currency, but also electricity, light and community development to those mountains. A truly regenerative tourism company.

Today, many of the villages offer Homestays, enabled by the opportunities and income GHE has brought to those remote, mountain communities.

Listen to the story of Paras and the Himalayan villages.

In this episode we talk to travel writer and keynote speaker Doug Lansky about what is wrong with tourism today and what needs to be done to fix it. Doug is a popular speaker on the topic of tourism and has recently published a book named Why Tourism is Broken and How to Fix It. We talk about his book and some of the examples of overtourism, mismanagement of tourism, tourism taxes and the protection of both the local environment and the local population. Enjoy the show!

In our 17th episode of the Nordic Journey podcast we continue to explore different venues of regenerative tourism, this time moving over to Canada to learn about indigenous tourism.

Sébastien Desnoyers-Picard is from the Wendat Nation in Quebec City in Canada and the founder and CEO of Destination Original Indigenous Tourism (DO-IT). Sébastien talks to us about the value of indigenous tourism, the importants for the community and the different, more regenerative tourism approaches they use, which the more mainstream tourism could definitely learn something from.

His organisation is now established in Canada, the US and New Zealand with more countries to follow, offering opportunities to indigenous tourism professionals to offer more authentic products for the benefit of their culture, heritage and community. Enjoy the episode.

In our 16th episode of The Nordic Journey, we talk to Dr. Carina Ren from Aalborg University. Carina is joining us from Sisimiut in West-Greenland and will be telling us about her research on climate change, sustainable tourism development and the Arctic - and how coastal communities are adapting. Her current research project is Regenerative Economies in Arctic Coastal Communities.

Here are some blogs and articles from Carina Ren for further reading:
On Greenlandic tourism and the road to indpendence: https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/tourism-greenland-expanding-runway-towards-independence/
On Arctic Tourism: https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/arctic-tourism-industry/
From more tourism to better tourism: https://traveltrade.visitgreenland.com/latest-news/switching-focus-from-more-tourism-to-better-tourism/
Sustainability and tourism management in Svalbard and Greenland: Reference: Sveinsdóttir, A. G., Ren, C. B., Olsen, J., Hovelsrud, G. K., Dannevig, H., Bjørst, L. R., & Freng Dale, R. (2025). Navigating a changing Arctic: toward adaptive governance in Greenland and Svalbard. Tourism Geographies, 27(5), 1057-1077. Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2025.2515098#abstract

And finally if you want to learn more about Haraway's Worlding, you can check out this blog: https://thearchaic.nl/the-world-as-a-verb-on-harawayan-worlding-the-many-worlds-of-the-anthropocene/
or her book: Haraway, Donna J. (2016) Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Iran is making headlines all over the world at the moment - and yet we are getting very little news from inside the country. What is happening, how are people coping, what is the impact on tourism?

There is of course no international tourism there due to the war, but the tourism operators are still there, trying to figure out what comes next.

In this episode which was recorded on Friday March 27th, I spoke to Dr. Azam Bahrami, who teaches sustainability and regenerative tourism at the University of Mohaghegh Ardabili in Iran, when there is not war, but is currently living in the Netherlands. Azam gave us a little insight into her work for ecotourism in the Middle East and the resilience of the Iranian people and the tourism industry there.

Can you use tourism for a rewilding biology project?

In this episode we talk to Kim Worrmann Jensen, a former rock star and current sustainability champion from Destination Trekantsomådet in Denmark. He is the head of sustainability and has been developing products that are based on regenerative tourism concepts.

One interesting project he has been working on and developing is the rewilding of Møllebækken, a small creek that had been put into underground pibes to make way for a new highway - killing all wildlife in it at the same time. Kim and his biology friends came to the rescue activating tourists from Germany and the Netherlands.

Learn more about how he designed the project and the lessons learned which you can apply to your next regenerative tourism project.

High in the Himalayas, locked between the giant countries of India and China, is a small Kingdom that somehow has evaded colonialism and western influence for hundreds of years. This is Drug Yul, the Kingdom of the Thundering Dragon, better known as Bhutan. In this show we have as a special guest the former head of the national tourism board in Bhutan, Dorji Dhradhul, who is sharing with us his culture and perspectives. In Bhutan the government follows Gross National Happiness, where everything is measured on the impact it has on environment, community and governance. Dorji shares how they work with that, his two new books, a new City of Mindfulness that is under construction and the upcoming TedX-Thimpu. A different of looking at how we do things - and why we do them. Here are the titles of his books: Creativity - Time to Crown Again Bhutan - Kingdom of Mindfulness More information on the books can be found here: https://dojidhratyul.com/my-books/

The antithesis to bullying, which we see too much of in the media nowadays, is to live decently - says Geoffrey Lipman, co-founder of SunX Malta, former Executive Director of IATA, former president of WTTC and former Assistant Secretary General at UNWTO.

Together with Dr. Hans Friederich, a nature and conservation specialist with vast experience from Africa, Asia and Europe they are running Sun X Malta and the Climate Friendly Travel portal, a global initiative backed by the Maltese government that is aiming at promoting and educating tour companies around the world in sustainable thinking and climate action. (Something you might want to look into joining.)

With their impressive resumes and experience they share their perspectives on the state of the travel industry, the challenges of sustainable tourism today and their concerns for tomorrow.

An episode dedicated to the generation that is being born today.

A twenty year old Japanese girl falls in love with sea kayaking - which leads her to one of the northern most villages of the world, Qaanaaq in North Greenland.

Today we hear from Sakiko Daorana, one marriage, three children and twenty something years later, where she operates expeditions in this extremely remote corner of the world. Greenland has been getting a lot of attention recently and the village of Qaanaaq has in some ways, despite its extreme remoteness, been at the centre of both the cold war, and now the threats of taking Greenland.

We are not going to discuss defence and geopolitics in this episode but rather learn more about this tiny little village at the top of the world, and the remarkable people that live there. This is the story of Sakiko-san and the Inuit of Qaanaaq.

We head back to Norway in this episode, one of the leading countries when it comes to sustainable tourism. There we speak to a serial entrepreneur, Håvard Utheim, who has founded several companies with different angles and approaches to sustainable tourism, an adventure travel company, gear rental, travel tech company, accommodation company and a company focused on transparency in travel.

Listen to his journey to where he is today and what he has learned along the way. In the podcast we talk about a practical book for companies who want to become more sustainable.

The link to the book is here: https://www.transparency.travel

Happy listening!