I was a fortunate youth. We had a home in Hydra, my father’s ancestral island, and from eight years old to 16 I spent the greater part of every summer on the island, traveling from Salt Lake City to another world in 1980s Greece.

Hydra was always expensive, at least since artists and tourists ‘discovered’ the island’s charms in the 1950s, though this of course obscured its earlier history as the center of Mediterranean maritime trade, and the epicenter of the Greek War of Independence.

The island boasted plenty of foreign buyers even then, and prices for locals were always problematic.

Nonetheless, the place was full of returning Hydriots, whether a hydrofoil away in Athens, or like me, from the Diaspora, and local people owned their homes with no need to sell them.

Crucially, there was still the presence of the Greek Merchant Marine, and many of my playmates had fathers who still worked the ships, for high wages which fueled the upward mobility. As such, though there were plenty of foreigners with cash, there were plenty of Greeks too with solid economics.

And it was wonderful, a feast for the senses, and the palate – and first loves blossomed on the beaches and the quiet evening promenades. When we lived in Greece, from 2006 to 2008, the cracks in the pavement were ever more apparent, but a robust, charming façade remained.

Back in the 1980s, when the first of August came, Greeks went on vacation, and the holidays were usually in Greece (this was the drachma era and exchange rates served as a barrier to travel abroad). August is when my playmates’ parents arrived, as the kids usually stayed with relatives or grandparents.

Greeks’ holidays might have been a summer house (very common to nearly all social classes) and/or an ancestral home in a village, yet the holiday was taken, money was spent, restaurants and cafes were full, and in many cases, the holiday would be in another part of the country at a hotel.

The Greek summer was always hot, particularly in the last half of July, and fires were a perennial problem, often deliberately started to clear development land, but also due to poor forestry management. Yet the scale was different, and so was the heat. There was a sense that the damage was manageable, containable, and sustainable. Perhaps it was an illusion, yet that illusion too has passed. That was over 40 years ago.

Now, the Greek Summer, particularly for Greeks, is largely over. The crisis of the 2010s did not really end, and the solution, it seems, to bad economic management and deep constraints of Euro membership, has been to treat tourism the way Russia or Venezuela treat petroleum – as an extractive industry to be ‘mined’. This of course was (ill)-timed with technological trends such as Airbnb which quickly boosted property and rental prices in most locations, along with an expansive, minigarch-friendly Golden Visa program offering residence for investment. In Greece, with few productive assets, this usually meant real estate.

And what of the results? The one thing that Greeks had across a large section of the population was home ownership, including second homes. It is hardly surprising and unfair to criticize a person in Greece laboring for some of the EU’s lowest wages (another discussion altogether) for renting out a property to visitors at a rate far higher than a monthly rental. Nor is it surprising that such a person might sell such a property in a climbing real estate market to a wealthy Golden Visa buyer, when this money could send kids to college, pay off debts, or cushion the cost of living in the face of stagnant wages. It is hard to blame a Hydriot resident in Piraeus or New York accepting an offer from a megarich foreigner to buy a dilapidated home for 1 million euro, when the renovation costs are probably an often-unavailable 300,000 euro.

Gooses are killed. The Golden Eggs are no more. And the Greek summer will increasingly be without Greeks, who cannot afford a trip in their own country, much less abroad. They will often work enough work as wage earners where they or their families previously were owners, competing with foreigners from poorer countries or illegal immigrants for jobs, pushing down already low wages. Most often they will vote with their feet, leaving for other parts of Europe or farther afield, and exacerbating the economic collapse.

Much of this is unseen by the tourist, including Greeks abroad, often several generations removed from Greece, unless it is obvious, or unless the tourist has relatives or friends of a sufficient closeness. Instead, they will take their innumerable summer selfies of a land they think they understand – but do not. Nonetheless, though buffeted by fires and increasing heat, the unquestionable beauty of Greece and the incredible resilience of ‘Brand Hellas’ remains – for now. Everything is packed, and though prices have spiked, particularly in celebrity-oligarch-heavy glamor spots like Mykonos, the cost of visiting is still within the budgets of richer countries’ citizens.

But it is largely gone for those who live there, work there, and are charged with preserving and protecting Greece.

The weather has gotten hotter, more unpredictable, and the fires, predictably, have gotten worse. The same creaking infrastructure must support an ever-larger number of tourists, and the new ‘owners’ will likely lack the sense of ownership of the locals (though the record is often spotty with them too). In time, having ‘done’ Greece, both the tourists browsing holiday options and the oligarchs and global owners will find new opportunities to ‘mine’.

While perhaps not as horrific as the Kazakh oligarchs who fired rockets from their rent-a-yacht into Hydra’s pine forest, and then boarded a private jet out of the country, the cumulative effect is similar. They will take their money and their depredations elsewhere, having degraded one of the world’s most beautiful and historic countries in the process.

The problem with an extractive economy, like Greece’s tourism economy, is that eventually the resource depletes, particularly when it is not sustained and when alternative resources, particularly human resources, are not fostered. In Greece’s case, the tourism brand is fraying slowly but surely, but the internal consequences of this monoculture are creating permanent ecological, financial, and demographic – and democratic – damage.

More is being lost than just memories of the summer.