Meet Celes Davar: A Storyteller, Guide, and Champion of Community-Rooted Tourism
This year’s IMPACT 2025 Award celebrates a visionary who has long believed that the most meaningful travel experiences don’t just take place on the main stage; they unfold in community halls, hidden trails, shared meals, and impromptu kitchen jam sessions. Celes Davar is a biologist by training, a storyteller by calling, and a deeply grounded advocate for tourism that reflects the soul of a place.
From his Passive House home in rural Canada to the communities he has coached across the country, Celes brings a rare ability to connect people through food, music, ecology, and authentic, local experiences. His company, Earth Rhythms, has shaped how visitors engage with Canadian culture while helping communities adopt sustainable, zero-waste practices and a climate-conscious approach.
We sat down with Celes to learn more about his path, what fuels his passion, and how we can rethink tourism to be more local, more meaningful, and more sustainable.’Celes accepting his IMPACT 2025 Award alongside founders Starr McMichael from Starrboard Enterprises Inc., Jill Doucette from Synergy Enterprises, Deirdre Campbell from tartanbond, and Paul Nursey from Destination Greater Victoria. Celes accepting his IMPACT 2025 Award alongside founders Starr McMichael from Starrboard Enterprises Inc., Jill Doucette from Synergy Enterprises, Deirdre Campbell from tartanbond, and Paul Nursey from Destination Greater Victoria.
- Congratulations on receiving the IMPACT 2025 Award! What does this recognition mean to you personally and professionally?
Thank you! As I mentioned in my acceptance comments in Victoria in January 2025, this award is a reflection of how many tourism businesses, stakeholders, destination managers, and others have been willing to listen, learn, and accept the invitation to do tourism differently – with broader metrics than just increased volume or more revenue. My invitation to them over the past decade has been to ask how tourism can be a force for good, in practice, not theoretically. When people implement what they have learned, in their own unique ways, that is when I feel I have made a difference. Professionally, this is heartwarming. Personally, it is tied to my broader desire for tourism to actually be understood in our communities as much more than just an economic driver. It is about working together to host people to our communities in a professional manner, and in an inclusive way.
This award means a lot to me, because I have been trying to foster a community-based approach to tourism in Canada for decades, that is at the intersection of excellence in hosting, leadership in experiential techniques, leadership in regenerative practices, acting on reconciliation, demonstrating increased diversity, and becoming climate change resilient, while also being more inclusive. So, it has taken a long time to develop a set of tools, shareable practices, a repeatable and adaptable process, and guidebooks that offer leadership in how individuals and destinations can begin to change the business of tourism in a more fulsome manner.
2. Let’s discuss regenerative tourism. You are one of the pioneers to have introduced the concept of regenerative practices and regenerative tourism in Canada. What does it mean to you, and what should it mean to the tourism operations and tourism destination with which you work?
I would prefer a different word than “pioneer’, which has its roots in colonial military actions and colonization efforts. While it is more widely used now, I might suggest that I am an early adopter and advocate for a more values-based approach to tourism. Language is important. Many businesses are values-based, meaning that the businesses and their production and service offerings are founded on some core values that guide what they do, how they do things, and even who they collaborate with. Often, these core values relate to how they create what they create, their organizational culture, supporting community and social values, environmental responsibility, and more. These values are what drive business operations, who is hired, and how profits are reinvested.
My advocacy for regenerative tourism emerges from my early training as an ecologist, my years of managing visitor facilities and programming with Parks Canada in Riding Mountain National Park, and from my own instinctive approach to welcoming and hosting others. Just after graduating from high school in Fredericton, New Brunswick, I worked at two clothing retail stores. The days spent on the floor of a men’s clothing store, encountering many different people, and finding ways to connect to them, were a higher priority than actually selling them something immediately. If we found a connection with each other – a personal relationship between us – it would enable some level of trust from them to engage in the process of learning about what they needed, and then buying clothes that they wanted, with me as their “guide on the side”. As it turned out, I was very successful at selling clothing and helping the stores build a loyal clientele who returned frequently to the store. Why? Because they trusted me to give them helpful advice. This approach has always guided my work as a park interpreter, guide, Experience Host, tourism business owner, facilitator, and coach.
I have always loved nature – at a deep level. I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1969 and understood the terrible reality of how humans have manufactured lethal chemicals, and the species that have been affected by our widespread use of these chemicals. I graduated from high school in 1969, when only 3.6 billion people were living on the planet, but we were already seeing air pollution and elevated carbon in the atmosphere. Today, we have 8.3 billion people on the earth living and consuming as if it were still 1969. With this current situation, we have a climate crisis, a social crisis, and an economic system that is collapsing around us. Degenerative policies, actions, and developments all over the world in tourism have also contributed to this.
After reading the Club of Rome Report in 1973 called Limits to Growth, I could see the possible pathways ahead. “In 1972, The Limits to Growth was the first study to explore the possible impacts of the growing ecological footprint of population growth, human activities and its physical impacts on our finite planet from a systems perspective. The authors warned that if growth trends in population, industrialisation, resource use, and pollution continued unabated, we would reach, and then overshoot the carrying capacity of the Earth at some point during the first decades of the 21st century.
Over the past half-century, the findings of The Limits to Growth have proven remarkably accurate. The world population and economy have continued to grow, and as a result, humanity now finds itself facing an unprecedented planetary emergency. The publication has played a critical role in shaping the narrative of sustainable development, alerting the world to the dangers of unlimited growth, environmental pollution, and unchecked resource consumption.” – From Limits and Beyond, the 50 years later retrospective to Limits to Growth.
With this understanding already embedded into my worldview at the very beginning of my career choices in the mid-1970s, I chose to work with Parks Canada for 22 years. They were formative years, and helped me understand ecological science applied to the management and protection of old forests, which functioned as critical habitats for many species, the impacts of human infrastructure on the movements of wildlife, and why the carrying capacity of our landscapes and communities was a real issue. I also began to travel to various unique ecosystems with intensive tourism development (Canary Islands, Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, Aspen, Colorado, the island of Cyprus), where I was invited to share lessons I had learned in Canada about doing tourism differently, about using experiences as the locus of travellers’ transformations. I also began to see how four decades of intensive tourism practices were creating overtourism, adversely affecting other nations and regions. Tourism has had a history of being largely degenerative, negatively impacting people, destroying habitats, overloading municipal infrastructure during peak visitation seasons, reducing the biodiversity of wildlife species, and not engaging communities thoughtfully. Tourism has usually meant building large-scale infrastructure, and environmental and community impacts were not often assessed well if at all, or these considerations were intentionally ignored in search of high volumes of visitors to get a return on investment as the primary outcome. Marketing campaigns were designed to attract high volumes, irrespective of the impacts.
When I took training with Al Gore’s Climate Reality project (Three times) to become an international climate change presenter, I began to see more clearly the actual global scientific impacts of human actions creating accelerated climate change. This is when I had my Ah-Ha moment. I realized that the work I was doing in tourism, as an operator and as a tourism coach and facilitator, had to help tourism businesses and communities address climate change, reduce waste, and be strongly locally oriented. This meant I had to learn to stand in the middle ground between climate science and tourism as an industry, and try to find ways to both communicate tourism as a force for good, and practice tourism that was effective in having a lower carbon footprint and waste stream. In short, regenerative tourism to me meant finding ways to redress tourism, do it differently, and be restorative in purpose for our communities and our local ecosystems (think water systems, forests, coastlines, marshes, and places we hold dear).
Tourism, for me, meant that my guests needed to be in nature as an essential component of the visit, and my company had to demonstrate in simple, practical ways how tourism could help to restore natural systems, support other local businesses, and reflect local foods, stories, and storytellers. Protecting Earth systems and supporting local communities became my professional life as a communicator, storyteller, advocate, and tourism operator.
3. You often describe yourself as a guide, choreographer, and storyteller. What does that mean to you in the context of regenerative tourism?
Some of my development as a guide has been as a result of conversations with my wife, who was a teacher. She introduced me to Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences. In my work as a Parks Canada Visitor Services manager, I gravitated towards understanding visitors’ learning styles to create relevant visitor programming. Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle was formative for me to understand the power of experience, and how to facilitate visitor experiences that helped visitors to reach a deeper level of engagement as part of their travel journey. As well, I realized that I needed training as a facilitator, and took several facilitation training courses all over North America. One of the most formative changes in my life was being introduced to Appreciative Inquiry as a framework and methodology for facilitating tourism development at the community level.
With these strong core foundations, the experiences I was creating began to flourish. I spent several years facilitating corporate teams using nature based experiences in Riding Mountain National Park, and designing experiential activities to support organizational and team learning. As a guide, I understood that my guests had different learning styles. I shifted away from being a “tour guide” to crafting experiences in which my guests could learn science hands-on quickly, spend time in nature to learn about patterns in the regional landscape (awakening a sense of place connection), making something to take away as a memory of the experience, tasting local foods made by locals, and showcasing my “neighbours” who were passionately doing their own things to earn income – such as beekeeping, fine carpentry, songwriting, growing unique foods, making pottery, and many others.
Guiding people into the heart of my community led naturally to the realization that an experience is an opportunity to sequence introductions, activities, personal reflections, and closure of an experience in a systematic and organic way that supported the learning styles of our guests. This meant being tuned into the “psychographics” of why people travel. Destination Canada’s market research into why people travel, and what their social and travel values are, has been beneficial in crafting innovative experiences, and coaching other Experience Hosts all across Canada.
With the above foundations in educational methods, facilitation, and psychographic market research, I realized that any community or destination offers multiple stages for choreographing experiences. I began to partner with many different community partners whose stories were inspiring. Story became “the stitch: that helped a visitor experience to have relevance and meaning. Storytelling was not so much about an Experience Host “telling a story” like reading a book. Rather, I flipped the model by which a visitor experience was designed so that each activity within a set of experiences offered hands-on engagement of some kind, which often elicited questions. Questions from visitors became the means by which stories would emerge. Not just “a story”, but vignettes about place, vocation, food, art, and nature. So, storytelling reflects good experiential design. Well-crafted stories and activities have led to working with photographers and videographers to produce videos and images that truly shape the marketing. Marketing is a reflection of the power of a storyteller, their location, their story, and the meaningful experiences that can be hosted for travellers.
4. You’ve helped communities across Canada express their identity through meaningful visitor experiences. Can you share a moment that’s stayed with you from that journey?
Perhaps one of the most powerful and transformative coaching opportunities I have experienced has been with Dave Schonberger, from Ottercreek Woodworks in Tillsonburg, Ontario. Dave considered himself to be a woodworker, a charcuterie board maker, and a fine cabinet maker. During the coaching process, and subsequently, Dave has realized that he has an intergenerational family story to share, and that he has skills and tools to help his guests design and make a personal charcuterie board to take home. But, what has been incredibly inspiring is watching how Dave began to choreograph and fine-tune the experience for all seasons of delivery – from the outdoor welcome with fire, to a guided outdoor walk in the forest to deepen relevance about living forests and their patterns; to then coming back to the wood shop to pick out their own live edge boards to design their own charcuterie board; to sharing a “Bounty of the County” food story with multiple local food partners in his county; to each guest taking home a finished board. What I have learned, from both coaching this experience and taking part in it after it was developed, is that the board I have created and now have in my kitchen is not about bragging about making my own charcuterie board. Rather, when I share food on my board, I share my friendship with Dave Schonberger, what he has learned about the forest, his skills as a Red Seal Carpenter, and his deep love for community, regenerating Carolinian forests for his children, community, and the planet. In short, From Tree To Table is an excellent example of a regenerative visitor experience.
5. For more than 22 years, you’ve been influencing others toward zero-waste practices and local sourcing. What has been the most rewarding shift you’ve seen in the tourism industry during that time?
The most rewarding shift is that every single experience that I coach results in an experience that is regenerative in practice. Each Experience Host crafts an experience that is zero waste (sustainability in practice), gives a portion of the visitor fee back to a community initiative (restorative), is hyper-local in focus (local foods, local materials, local business collaborators, and includes time spent in nature locally); strives to reduce carbon-based energy, and reflects a personal connection to place. As a result, visitors don’t hear us talking about zero waste practices – they live it.
Perhaps one of the most rewarding moments recently was when we invited the catering team at Acadia University (Nova Scotia) to help us deliver a three-day workshop for 48 economic development officers to learn about experiential and regenerative tourism, to reflect low waste and local focus. The Events Acadia team created a unique beverage from local ingredients for the conference. It was a blueberry drink, which was a hit. They created a food map to show where all of the ingredients for the meals were coming from. They created a zero waste lunch to accompany an offsite afternoon of experiences. They created lunch menus to reflect African Nova Scotian recipes, Mi’Kmaq food traditions, Acadian themed foods, and settler foods and recipes. This thoughtfulness reflects transformation for me, when working with community partners. We invite them to do differently, and explain why. They, in turn, feel valued for their expertise and rise to the opportunities.
6. You and your family live in a Passive House and drive low-emission vehicles. How does your personal lifestyle influence your professional ethos, or vice versa?
From my perspective, you have to walk the walk. It is not possible for me to facilitate a tourism destination workshop about regenerative practices, or ask others to adopt regenerative methods in their tourism products and services, without having developed my own commitments and lifestyle. We designed and built our first home in Manitoba in 1996, using R-2000 building code. It was our first energy efficient home. I bought one of the first Ford Escape Hybrids in Canada in 2008 as a commitment to lowering my carbon emissions from a vehicle. We still drive a more recent hybrid vehicle. We now live in a Passive Design house in the Gaspereau Valley of Nova Scotia. As well, my wife’s pottery studio and my office (in a separate building) are both Passive Design buildings. We also have ground mounted solar panels, to help us reduce the annual cost of electricity through net-metered renewable energy production. The incredibly rewarding thing about our home and studio is that they have been designed by our son, who is now the CEO of Atlantic Canada’s leading Passive Design architectural design company. They create designs for residential and multi-residential affordable housing. Today, my wife and I are the stewards of a 68 acre Wabanaki (Acadian) Forest that is a wildlife corridor for many mammals, and protects a number of bird and plant species at risk. Working with the Nova Scotia Working Woodlands Trust, we have now fully protected this 200 year old forest in perpetuity, by placing a legal conservation easement on the entire forest, in perpetuity. This means that this forest will always sequester carbon (no commercial logging or harvesting); it will protect multiple species of plants and animals (biodiversity protection); and it will always protect the nearby banks and slopes from intense erosion from severe weather events.
When I facilitate experiential tourism workshops, and we begin to ask Experience Hosts what they can give back to their community, I am able to come from personal experience and share with others what we have been doing to live in energy efficient housing and lower our living costs at the same time, while also investing into protecting a local forest as part of our legacy and commitment to the local community.
I am aware that we are privileged and able to take these steps. Not everyone can. But, when facilitating community-based tourism, it is really important for the facilitator/coach to have credibility and demonstrate what they have been able to do personally and professionally to lower our impacts on our local ecosystems.
7. Food is a central thread in your work. What is it about food and food culture that you believe makes it such a powerful tool for connection?
As a South Asian immigrant, my mom taught me how to cook tasty Indian meals. Tasty does not mean hot spicy, but fragrant spicy, with complex flavours. Cooking is one of the ways that I express my love for others. So, the preparation of a meal to host others is serious business. The foods that I have been lucky to try from all over the world, and in my own backyards where I have lived, or in the communities where I facilitate Experience Development, are full of stories, traditions, and have meaning through decades if not centuries of tradition. It is part of how we “taste place”, terroir. From my own perspective as an Experiential Tourism Operator, “food is the glue that helps a guest experience to excel”. When the food quality is poor or lacking authenticity, the entire experience suffers. When the food offered is unique and unexpectedly good, the entire experience is enhanced. So, paying attention to ensuring that food producers and food hosts are showcased, local ingredients are used, and local recipes are tasted, is an intentional part of how food connects our guests to our communities and places.
8. Climate storytelling is a critical part of the global transition we’re in. As a trained Climate Reality Leader, how do you integrate climate education into your experiences without overwhelming or alienating visitors?
One of the biggest lessons I had to learn about climate reality storytelling is that it cannot be delivered in a preachy, wagging-of-fingers kind of way. It turns people off. I have realized that I can’t change governments, corporations, or climate denialists. However, I can work within the tourism sector, and within my own community, and within our own family investments to reduce our impacts on climate change. It has taken me years to shift from showing examples of all the degenerative things that are happening to Planet Earth which dries up hope, to showcasing stories of success – of people, communities, businesses and tourism itineraries that are actively addressing climate change through various tactics. I specifically went on an Intrepid itinerary to Costa Rica in 2024, to learn how they are building in regenerative practices and investing into locals hosting guests, throughout their entire global business model for hosting visitors in travel journeys in multiple destinations. The climate crisis has been exacerbated through our use of fossil fuels and carbon emissions over the past 175 years as part of the industrial revolution. Understanding climate science is actually a very important part of the global tourism story. No one is stopping travel. If tourism were a global nation, it has the 5th or 6th highest carbon footprint as a nation. That means we have responsibilities as tourism operators and an entire industry to decarbonize, to reduce carbon emissions, to reduce waste, and to become locally resilient.
There are three key ways that I integrate climate education into experiences and experience development coaching: First, I illustrate the bigger context in which we are all operating today in which volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) influence all of our decisions. Evidence needs to be presented to help illustrate the problem. We are all in this together. Then, I showcase people and businesses (globally, nationally in Canada, and locally in regions) who have already taken steps to reduce their impacts on climate change, lower their energy use, and reduced their waste stream. Finally, we craft experiences to practice sustainability in every single aspect of the design and execution of an experience. We don’t talk about sustainability. We just do it. It is not on the side of the desk of our tourism projects. It is embedded into everything we do. Visitors should not see it as a separate aspect of how tourism is delivered. It should seamlessly be the bottom line, and they should simply notice all of the little sustainability details as “business as usual”.
9. How do you envision the future of the tourism industry within the next 10 years? Will the future of the tourism industry be fully regenerative?
I am not overly optimistic about the tourism sector within the next 10 years. As I often say, “those most invested in the status quo, are the most resistant to change.” A large part of the tourism industry involves investors and owners who operate tourism in a traditional manner, with large infrastructure investments that depend on volume of visitors. Hotels, motels, cruise ships, and airlines are not moving fast enough to adopt sustainable practices that integrate profitability, social equity and inclusivity, and environmental responsibility. There are many examples of some companies that have made significant changes to their business operations (Patagonia, B-Corp certified companies, and others), but they are not the norm. Like the agriculture sector, tourism is yet to have its reckoning. We cannot continue to develop tourism marketing campaigns, designed simply around growth. Destination Canada is leading Canada’s tourism sector with the evolution of tools like the new Wealth and WellBeing index. Communities, DMO’s, DMMO’s and municipal organizations need to create new ways for aligning marketing investments and use of marketing levies with community and business sustainability goals, waste reduction, and carbon emissions reductions. With these changes, tourism businesses will realize that the playing field and the rules have changed. At the present time, there seem to be few tourism businesses who are adjusting their playbooks, revenue targets, emissions reductions investments, or their municipal investments to acknowledge climate change, severe weather events due to climate change, or linear economic thinking.
It is very encouraging to see examples like 4VI, or Oxford County in Ontario, B-Corp certifications for some tourism businesses (Benjamin Bridge Winery in Nova Scotia) or Discover Halifax taking steps to lower their impacts on the environment, to operate business events with a strong sustainability platform, and to develop a culture of sustainability and regeneration within their companies. However, these examples need to be escalated year over year. Provincial and Federal Government incentives to help the tourism sector make these shifts would be enormously beneficial.
If I were to offer a vision for what would be a thriving tourism sector 10 years from now, I would like to see that all municipalities and DMMO’s have a mandate for aligning all spending and capital investments based on an intersection of triple bottom line accounting criteria. Projects and marketing campaigns should demonstrate reinvestment and regeneration of community infrastructure, mitigation of climate change severe weather events, and huge investments into energy conservation and lowering carbon emissions. Marketing should feed business and community resilience, not just growth of tourism visitors and revenues. This is a mindshift. I would like to see that all airlines, cruise ships, cruise ports, and bus companies have made the transition to hybrid engines or electrification, and that provincial power grids are acknowledging this by gearing up for a renewable energy future that powers our tourism sector. Finally, I see a tourism sector that leads the nation in application of regeneration as practice, not words.
10. Finally, what’s next for you? Are there new communities, ideas, or collaborations you’re excited about in the year ahead?
My goal at the present time is to ensure that all of the tools, frameworks, examples of how I have helped communities and tourism businesses throughout Canada, are shared openly and accessible. I am working in Nova Scotia to help the FoodArtNature initiative evolve to its next stage. I am still helping multiple communities across Canada, tourism businesses, and DMO’s in Atlantic Canada invest into expanding our capacity to offer regenerative visitor experiences, be better business-to-business collaborators, and build greater reliance on local foods as part of our regional resilience strategies. I will continue to be a coach, mentor, and champion for community investments into experience development. Why? Because our communities are where we have stories to share. Because the art of choreographing meaningful visitor experiences is yet in its infancy. Because more and more visitors want more authentic and meaningful engagement as part of their travel journeys. Because I want our tourism experiences to be examples of leadership in a troubled world, where visitors and community hosts, can find comfort in each other, knowing that we will help our planet to survive.
In celebrating and learning from Celes Davar, we’re reminded that the future of tourism is written in community halls, kitchens, forests, and in the choices we make together. If his lens on regenerative, community-led practice resonates, pass this along, tag a collaborator you’d bring to the table, and keep the conversation going.
Congratulations again, Celes, on your well-deserverd IMPACT 2025 Award.
We’ll be building on these ideas at IMPACT 2026, where stories turn into strategies and strategies into action. Join us and be part of what comes next.