Huacachina - is this what tourism means?

Huacachina is a small oasis in the southern sand desert of Peru, apparently a once tranquil place where one could bathe in the lagoon and wander amongst the peaceful sand dunes.  But then it began to develop into a more active tourist destination, with backpackers coming in to go sand-boarding down the dunes, zooming around in noisy dune buggies, peddling around the lagoon in garish plastic boats, and partying all night on cheap pisco sours.

I spent a night there as it is on the route going south down the Peruvian coast, and it sounded nice despite the dune buggies.  I did find the odd nice corner such as this mini-lagoon a dune away from the main one:

There were moments of tranquility (between passing dune buggies).  It truly was a beautiful setting.

However, the presence of so many temporary visitors leads to much more consumption locally.  Not just in whatever fuels those awful buggies, but in the acres of plastic bottles and bags that people seem unable to do without these days.  When I travel I carry a water bottle with me, fill up from the tap, and add a chlorine tablet - and sometimes a neutralising tablet to get rid of the chlorine taste, but not always.  As far as I know these do no direct harm to the environment, although there is of course some environmental impact in their manufacture and packaging.  But - despite this also being cheaper than buying bottled water - no-one else seems to do this.  With the result that the above mini-lagoon looks like this if you walk a little further down:

(with dune buggy on the sand dune behind, grrr!).  & the yellow-crowned night heron I was so pleased to see was surrounded by plastic waste:

I used to have hope that we could sort out our environmental problems.  I started giving to Greenpeace some 35 years ago and they are still the main beneficiary of my will.  I am mostly vegetarian (100% vegetarian at home, and mostly so when I travel though will eat meat to avoid inconveniencing people), for environmental reasons as I do like meat, I always use public transport (have never owned a car), and I try not to consume more than I need to - although I do recognise the negative impact of all my flights around the world, of course.  I will continue all this for the rest of my life, as I would feel selfish and irresponsible to live any other way.  But sadly I no longer feel sure that it is worth the effort.  The world's population keeps on increasing, we keep on consuming more and more, and finding more stupid ways of using up finite resources whilst churning pollution into the environment (bitcoin??  using more energy to 'mine' the coins than most countries use in a year - so that people can use them to evade taxes and other obligations or to gamble on their value?).  I no longer feel much hope, and sometimes even wish that some deadly new disease could sweep the planet and wipe out half the population.  As I say, I will continue to try to keep my own contribution to the damage low, but knowing at the same time that there is probably no point.