The Routledge Handbook of Tourism and the Environment

Andrew Holden, David Fennell, Andrew Holden, David A. Fennell, David Fennell, Andrew Holden, David A. Fennell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415582070
• eBook ISBN: 9781136325557
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

The Routledge Handbook of Tourism and the Environment explores and critically evaluates the debates and controversies inherent to tourism's relationship with nature, especially pertinent at a time of major re-evaluation of our relationship with the environment as a consequence of the environmental problems we now face. It brings together leading specialists from range of disciplinary backgrounds and geographical regions, to provide state-of-the-art theoretical reflection and empirical research on this complex relationship and future direction.

The book is divided in to five interrelated sections. Section one evaluates the philosophical basis, rationale and complexity of what is meant by the term 'environment' considering the major influences in the construction of how we understand our surroundings and the types of values we place upon them. Section two evaluates the types of eco-systems that are used as natural resources for tourism and the negative and positive impacts upon them. Section three evaluates relevant environmental policy and management mechanisms for the impacts of tourism on the natural environment. Section four focuses on the changing tourism-environment relationship, and the types of tourism that have become established in the tourism industry, market and policy. Section five, analyzes contemporary and future issues of the tourism-environment relationship, based upon themes of environmental and social welfare.

This timely book will provide an invaluable resource for all those with an interest in tourism's relationship with the natural environment, encouraging dialogue across disciplinary boundaries and areas of study. The book is international in its focus, emphasizing that issues of tourism and the natural environment are not only localized but transcend national boundaries that sometimes require both international and global responses. This is essential reading for student, researchers and academics of Tourism as well as those of Geography, Environmental Studies and Development Studies.

Part 1

Scientific realities and cultural constructs of the environment

1

Introduction

Andrew Holden

The term ‘environment’ is now embedded in the global vernacular and since the 1960s has progressively become synonymous with concern and political controversy. The conscious and deliberate use of the term is symbolic of an increased re-awareness of human interaction with the surroundings, an interaction that had been up to the Industrial Revolution implicit to our own survival and welfare. A combination of Enlightenment rationality, scientific endorsement and industrial development had, until the latter part of the twentieth century, created a generalised perception that nature could be ‘mastered’ and controlled for our own benefit. However, the emergent realisation that human endeavour could affect our surroundings, an awareness created by research endeavour in the environmental sciences alongside political and ethical green discourses has caused a re-evaluation of our interaction with the ‘environment’. This process of re-evaluation is politically and economically contentious, we need look no further than the issue of climate change to exemplify divergent interests and stakes in the environment. However, in many debates, issues of spatial scale, ecological composition and ecosystem changes, ‘rights’ of non-human species vis-á-vis anthropocentric interests, reflect disparate constructions and interpretations of our surroundings.

The focus of the opening section of this handbook is to subsequently reflect on and critically evaluate the paradigms and constructs of the term environment, utilising approaches from the national and social sciences. Underpinning how philosophical paradigms have influence on our understanding of the environment, a natural science ontology of the environment that attempts to organise the knowledge of material aspects of existence is analysed by Hall. Drawing on the ontological traditions of classical empiricism, transcendental idealism and transcendental realism, he illustrates how ontological differences lead to different paradigms and awareness of the environment, incorporating reductionist and constructivist perspectives. Utilising the example of climate change, Hall highlights how ontologies of environment influence knowledge creation and policy. It is argued that a dominant paradigm of reductionism has led to knowledge creation in a business-as-usual scenario on a global scale, emphasising the physical properties of greenhouse gases in isolation of the surrounding social relations.

In contrast to the natural science ontology presented by Hall, Grimwood presents and evaluates social science ontology of the environment that challenges human exceptionalism, the construct that emphasises that humanity is different from and superior to all other species. His chosen four theoretical moments that present this challenge are critical realism, phenomenology of perception, social nature and ontological multiplicity, all of which are applied to the analysis of the ecological impact of tourism on the Thelon River in Canada. The application of these ontologies to the case study illustrates how our interpretation of environment as social scientists generates different research questions to the ‘same’ situation. Thus it can be argued, as in the case of critical realism, of the primacy of ontology over epistemology.

Although both the natural and social sciences lend understanding to the scientific ‘reality’ of environment, central to the evaluation of human constructs comprehending our relationship to our surroundings have been the influences of spirituality and religion. Developing the theme of religious and spiritual influences on the understanding of nature, Dallen Timothy’s chapter evaluates the primary interfaces between religion and nature and spirituality and nature. Contrasting spiritual belief systems with organised religion, he cites the research of Owen and Videras (2007), which found that people with spiritual belief systems who are not part of an organised religion are more likely to exhibit pro-environmental attitudes than people who belong to organised religion. This derives from an ontological construct of environment that explains the oneness of humans and nature. He proceeds to explore how these influences play out in the realm of tourism, including the context of pilgrimage tourism, cultural tourism and the introduction of geomantic design in tourist settings. Hollinshead also stresses the sacred belief in living things of the surrounding environment in the Indigenous Worldview.

Transcending the spiritual and religious to incorporate the cultural, the theme of ‘wonderment’ of aspects of nature is developed in Basham and Hitchcock’s chapter, which continues to evaluate the influence of the Romantic movement in the cultural framing of why certain landscapes are attractive. The Romantic era, approximately dated to the time between the end of the eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century, emphasised the imaginative gaze through poetry, pose or landscape painting of the traveller. Critically in terms of making what had been unattractive landscapes attractive, the emphasis of observation changed from the material objects of environments to emphasise the emotions of landscape. As Barsham and Hitchcock observe, the Romantics believed they had found an interpretive key to nature, formulated in a transcendent language that embraced human life.

Continuing the theme of Romanticism, Seaton’s chapter explores the construct of nature from the time of classical and pagan cultures through to the epoch of Romanticism, considering as part the influence of Christianity upon the nature construct as it was transferred into an understanding of the human condition, a position that was subsequently challenged by Romanticism. As Seaton comments, ‘nature’ has always been a construct, shaped by centuries of human interaction, manipulation and agency. Recognising three key discursive orientations in the writings of the Romantics: the rational-scientific, transcendental religious, and the sublime, he exemplifies how they have influenced contemporary tourism.

A constitute part of the Romantic is the concept of the ‘aesthetic’. An in-depth analysis of the aesthetic and the role of the aesthetic in tourism is the theme of Todd’s chapter. Utilising a primarily normative approach to understanding the role of the aesthetic in tourism, Todd explores the relevance of Kant’s distinctiveness of the aesthetic appreciation of tourism, distinctiveness of type of appreciation, and issues of authenticity and well-being.

Stressing the role of inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary approaches to understanding the relationships between tourism and the environment, Stevenson investigates and reviews approaches to the use of complexity theory to challenge positivism and linear thinking and to offer a holistic approach to comprehending the relationship between society and environment. Taking a conceptually different perspective, Franklin finishes the first section of the tome with an analysis of how nature has and continues to transpose political interpretations. In the context of Romanticism, Franklin points out that not only was the movement a precursor to contemporary tourism but also involved a politic of protection and conservation, which sat uneasily with a democratising culture over 200 years ago, just as it does today. He also highlights the outstanding and indeed political involvement with society in presenting a new way to live with nature.

Reference

Owen, A.L. and Videras, J.R. (2007) ‘Culture and public goods: the case of religion and voluntary provision of environmental quality’, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 54(2), 162–180.

2

The natural science ontology of environment

Michael Hall

Introduction

Whether explicitly recognised or not, humankind’s and hence tourism’s relationship to the environment is underlain by philosophy. Philosophy affects how we understand the environment, our positionality and our ethics. For some commentators the present global environmental crisis characterised by biodiversity loss, deforestation and desertification, and climate change, is more than a crisis of policy, economics and governance but also extends to philosophy itself (Stott 1998; Demeritt 2006; Stables 2010). As Weston (1999: vii) commented, it is ‘a crisis of the senses, of imagination, and of our tools for thinking – our concepts and theories – themselves’.

The sciences

The natural sciences are distinguished academically, philosophically and, to an extent, methodologically, from the formal, behavioural and social sciences as well as from the humanities (Weyl 2009). The term ‘natural sciences’ generally refers to those areas of organised knowledge that utilise a naturalistic approach and are concerned with the material aspects of existence. Such an approach posits an understanding of reality, existence and being that excludes supernatural theological knowledge (Balashov and Rosenberg 2002; Weyl 2009). Natural science is a term also used to describe natural history, the scientific study of plants and animals (Mayr 1982; Worster 1994), but this chapter will use the term natural science in its broader sense.

The formal sciences are those areas of knowledge that are concerned with formal systems – pure deductive systems consisting of a formal language and a set of inference rules in which no meaning can be ascribed to the expressions of the system other than that explicitly assigned by the formation rules of the system. The formal sciences, including mathematics, statistics, computer science and logic, are not necessarily concerned with the validity of theories based on observations in the real world as are the natural sciences. Nevertheless, formal science methods are extremely important for the methods and frameworks used in the natural sciences (Balashov and Rosenberg 2002; Weyl 2009).

Social science refers to a range of fields, usually also including tourism studies (Hall 2005; Holden 2005; Coles et al. 2006; Tribe 2009), that are primarily concerned with the study of society and the individuals, institutions and social structures within it. According to Bhaskar (2008: 195), ‘the trouble with social science … is not that it has no (or too many) paradigms or research programmes; but rather that it lacks an adequate general conceptual scheme’. Arguing that for science to be possible, ‘society must consist of an ensemble of powers irreducible to but present only in the intentional actions of men; and men must be causal agents capable of acting self-consciously on the world’ (Bhaskar 2008: 20). The natural sciences have had considerable influence within the social sciences with respect to research philosophies, particularly positivism, as well as method, primarily quantitative. However, the social sciences are also characterised by an extremely significant interpretive tradition that tends to be qualitative, or at least a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, and an understanding of society and the environment as being socially constructed. Much of the criticism of natural science ontologies and associated epistemologies and methods stems from research on the history and philosophy of science (Kuhn 1970, 1977; Feyerabend 1993; Galison and Stump 1996; Greenberg 1999; Henry 2002). Such criticisms shed light on the implications of how natural science ontologies, particularly with respect to environmental change and impact analysis (Demeritt, 2001a), are interpreted and utilised by tourism researchers (Gössling and Hall 2006a; Hall 2008a; Hall and Lew 2009).

Ontologies of the environment

Understanding ontologies of the environment is significant at a number of levels. Different ontologies lead to different paradigms and assumptions. Ontologies can be regarded as metatheories, which ‘presupposes a schematic answer to the question of what the world must be like for science to be possible’ (Bhaskar 2008: 18). Different fields of knowledge have different ontologies.

Every account of science presupposes an ontology … Thus suppose a philosopher holds, as both empiricists and transcendental idealists do, that a constant conjunction of events apprehended in sense-experience is at least a necessary condition for the ascription of a causal law and that it is an essential part of the job of science to discover them. Such a philosopher is then committed to the belief that, given that science occurs, there are such conjunctions.

(Bhaskar 2008: 18–19)

Ontologies frame the ways of seeing, creating and understanding not only different forms of knowledge but also their acceptability. As Castree (2005: 16) comments,

without knowledges of nature we can never really come to know the nature to which these knowledges refer … we use tacit and explicit knowledges to organise our engagements with those phenomenon we classify as “natural”. There is, in short, no unmediated access to the natural world free from frameworks of understanding.

Ontologies are therefore not just academic concerns. Such a situation is directly related to: how the environment is defined and understood (Merchant 1980; Humphrey 2000; Keller 2009); the difficulties that can exist in legal and institutional decision-making systems in recognising the validity and standing of different envir...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1 Scientific realities and cultural constructs of the environment
• Part 2 Ecosystems and impact issues
• Part 3 Environmental policy, resource governance and management
• Part 4 Terminology and types of tourism
• Part 5 Contemporary and future issues
• Index