From the BOSTON GLOBE
Author(s): MARTHA HONEY Date: January 20, 2002 Page: G8 Section: Focus
The United Nations has declared 2002 the International Year of Ecotourism. Bad timing, you say? Given the events of Sept 11, any news about travel has been mostly about its disastrous decline.
Before that terrible day, tourism had a very different trajectory. Often ranked as the world's largest industry, employing some 10 percent of the global workforce, tourism has been growing every year. Today it plays a major role in the economies of 125 of the 170 nations in the world, and it is the biggest breadwinner in many developing countries. A good number of those countries - Costa Rica, Nepal, Fiji, Kenya, Tanzania, Belize, South Africa, and Australia, to name a few - claim to be promoting ecotourism. While most ecotourists are from North America and Europe, ecotourism destinations are increasingly in developing countries. So what is ecotourism and why has the UN named a year in its honor? Succinctly defined, it is responsible travel to natural areas that concerns the environment and improves the welfare of local people. In contrast with tourism that is travel for pleasure, ecotourism focuses on the impact of travel. It seeks to provide tangible benefits for both conservation and local communities, as well as an enjoyable and educational holiday for visitors.
Ecotourism entered the lexicon in the 1970s, an outgrowth of a number of factors: a disillusionment with mass, prepackaged tourism; the burgeoning environmental movement; alarm at the rapid loss of endangered species and ecosystems; and mounting anger from host communities over lack of control, cultural erosion, exploitation, and leakage of profits.
Many countries began experimenting with new models of tourism that would have a low impact, be culturally sensitive, and keep a larger percentage of profits close to home. Many regarded ecotourism as a better, more sustainable industry than alternatives such as logging, mining, drilling, or mass tourism.
By the 1990s, ecotourism was the most dynamic sector of the tourism industry, growing at a rate of more than 20 percent a year. The UN year is the crown jewel in the movement's mantle, testament to an idea whose time has come.
But the reality is that ecotourism comes in various shades. Much that wears the eco label is "ecotourism lite" - small, cosmetic, and often cost-saving changes that the industry markets as major innovations. Take, for instance, the increasingly common practice in hotels that gives guests the option of not having their sheets and towels laundered daily. A sensible step - but hardly, as was claimed in one press release, one that will save the planet. What it does save is the hotel some money.
Then there is greenwashing outright frauds that market themselves as environmentally responsible. In the ecotourism mecca of Costa Rica, nearly everything having to do with tourism has an eco prefix. There's the Ecological Rent-a-Car that rents the same gas-guzzling autos as Hertz or Avis, and Eco-Playa, an ordinary beach being developed for tourism. More egregious is Ecodesarrollo Papagayo (eco-development), an enormous, Cancun-like mega-resort. As a critic in Costa Rica quipped, "The only thing green about these places is the dollars they are earning."
By separating the wheat from the chaff, it is possible to identify many fine ecotourism projects that provide great holidays and tangible benefits to local communities. In Costa Rica's Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, where most businesses are owned by local residents, naturalist guides help visitors locate quetzals and other rare birds. In neighboring Nicaragua, the San Ramon Sister Communities Project promotes ecotourism on Finca Esparanza Verde (Green Hope Farm), offering cultural and language emersion classes, shade grown coffee, a butterfly farm, and other healthy economic activities.
In southern and East Africa, national wildlife parks now give part of their visitor entrance fees to development projects in neighboring poor communities. In Fiji, the honeymoon resort of Turtle Island is helping to better the lives of the islanders through financing health clinics, a school, and a series of village-owned, backpacker hostels on neighboring islands. In the Galapagos Islands, increased park entrance fees, controls on tourist boats, and well-trained guides are helping to protect one of the world's most fragile and scientifically important ecosystems.
Authentic ecotourism isn't easy to build. Done properly, it takes careful collaboration between the private sector, government, NGOs, and community groups. Vigorous standards and sound eco-labels are needed to help visitors chose authentic ecotourism from the "lite" and greenwashing variants. Such standards are one of the topics under discussion at regional meetings associated with the International Year of Ecotourism.
We shouldn't have illusions: Today, as Hawaii so sadly illustrates, mass tourism and all its incumbent problems still dominate the industry. But significant changes are occurring, in part because we have no alternative. The tourism industry cannot continue to operate business as usual. It is both unsustainable and inequitable.
Over the long run, the post-Sept. 11 downturn will likely appear as a temporary blip on tourism's radar screen. In contrast, ecotourism is a revolutionary concept that can fundamentally transform an industry badly in need of change.