On an Indian Ocean island last November, John Allen Chau, a 26-year-old American, was killed by the isolated tribe he was attempting to convert to Christianity. In an article for the Canadian magazine The Walrus, Kate Harris (author of Lands of Lost Borders) considers the lessons to be drawn from his story:

… travel has a tendency to bring out the Chau in all of us. We want what we want when we go abroad, which often is the untouched, the authentic—even as our arrival, by definition, undermines those very qualities in a place or of a culture and contributes to the slow, involuntary conversion of one way of life into another.