Environment and Tourism

Andrew Holden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317664086
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industria dell'ospitalità e del turismo
• Index: Business

The global demand for tourism continues to increase as economic growth creates opportunities for its consumption as a lifestyle option across cultures. The spatial reach of recreational tourism into remoter environments reflects a desire to reconnect to nature that is partially created by the global trend toward urbanisation. At the same time, anthropogenic created environmental problems have led us to re-evaluate our relationship to nature and the values that are held by the environment. This third edition of Environment and Tourism incorporates additional material on environmental philosophies and ontologies of nature and how these influence our understanding of tourism's relationship with the natural environment. In an epoch representing a critical juncture for the future well-being of the planet based on our relationship to nature, the text has been updated to reflect the growth in significance of the interaction between tourism and the natural environment as a part of this discourse. It communicates a range of key conceptual debates on the ethics and economics of the consuming nature for tourism and relates these to real world examples whilst evaluating environmental planning, and management responses. The book seeks to highlight the relevance of the significance of tourism for nature within the framework of society, as a system of inter-connected places across space and time, exploring the relationship of the environments of where tourists come from with the ones that they travel to.

The updated features include:

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• new chapters on philosophies and constructs of the environment, environmental ethics, and tourist consumption

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• an extensive range of international case studies used to illustrate the theoretical ideas presented

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• boxes offering bite sized insights, and think points designed to encourage students to further engage with the topics discussed

Environment and Tourism emphasises a holistic view of the tourism system and how it interacts with nature, illustrating the positive and negative effects of this relationship. It emphasises how ontologies of the environment influence the planning and management of tourism for natural resource conservation and human development. It is an invaluable tool for anyone studying Human Geography, Tourism and Environmental Studies, as well as for policy makers and consultants working in the field of tourism development.

1 Introducing tourism

DOI: 10.4324/9781315767659-1

• Understanding the complexity of tourism
• Tourism as a system
• The history of tourism
• Conditions for the growth of tourism
• Tourism’s reliance on climate and ecosystem stability

Introduction

To understand the interaction that exists between tourism and the natural environment it is necessary to comprehend the complexity of tourism. Although tourism may seem like an activity that merits little consideration beyond recollecting the experiences of the last vacation, anticipating the enjoyment of the next and subsequently choosing where to next visit, it is an outcome of a variety of interacting factors that encourage and facilitate the movements of hundreds of millions of people between spatially diverse locations and environments. This mobility of peoples presents a range of opportunities and challenges across economic and cultural spheres alongside the natural environment, which is the focus of this book. The geographical range of these challenges and opportunities continues to widen, as numbers of tourists increase and the choice of destinations becomes more diffuse, with new places and environments entering the tourism system.

A growth in international mobility has been accompanied by increased levels of domestic tourism, notably in the rapidly developing economies of Asia and Latin America. In recent decades outbound tourism from China and India has added tens of millions of travellers to the global tourism market. Global economic development combined with political reforms, notably in the old Soviet Union, have made the right to international travel accessible to more people than at any point in human history. This right to travel is enshrined by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights under Article 13 that states that: ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state’ and that ‘Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country’ (United Nations, 2015a). The observation of what has been termed ‘hyper-mobility’, a term reflecting heightened global mobility of peoples between places, is supported by the statistical measurement of numbers of international tourists. The recorded number of international arrivals (to the nearest million) in 1950 was 25 million, in 1980 this had risen to 278 million, by 1995 527 million, by 2000 it had reached 687 million, 1,113 million by 2014 and by 2030 it is projected to be 1,800 million (UNWTO, 2015). The actual growth in international tourism arrivals for the period 1950–2014, and the projected growth to 2030 are shown in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 International arrivals: actual and projected figures, 1950–2030

This rapid growth in international tourism, combined with a rapid expansion of numbers of domestic tourists in most countries, places pressures upon natural environments and resources, including land, water and biodiversity. It is not possible to facilitate the visitation of hundreds of millions of peoples to destinations without the development of facilities to accommodate their needs. Consequently, the ability to understand, plan and manage tourism will be decisive in deciding the degree to which its relationship with the environment is held to be positive or negative. This growing demand for tourism is a reflection of changing economic and social conditions in the places people inhabit, as much as it is about the qualities and characteristics of the environments they travel to. Not only are the markets for tourism economically and geographically dynamic but they also evolve according to consumer taste and fashion, reflecting changes in individual priorities, motivations and lifestyles. Whilst the pursuit of hedonism remains integral to tourism, the desire to learn, to give back to global society through volunteer tourism, and to experience the species and ecology of natural environments, are examples of an evolving desire for different types of tourism experience. This chapter subsequently examines the meaning and complexity of tourism, its history, and how social changes since the Industrial Revolution have shaped contemporary mass participation in tourism.

What is meant by tourism?

The expectations of ‘going away’ on holiday or vacation as a norm of lifestyle in many of the richer countries of the world may suggest that it has always been a feature of people’s lives. Yet the word ‘tourist’ is a fairly new addition to the English language – the word ‘tour-ist’ (deliberately hyphenated) first appearing in the early nineteenth century (Boorstin, 1961). Boorstin draws a distinction between the arduous conditions undertaken by ‘travellers’ (a term originating from the French word travail meaning work, trouble, torment), such as pilgrims, and the ‘tourist’, for whom travel has become an organised and packaged affair. This distinction of typology remains today with the label of ‘traveller’ retaining the association of integrity and authenticity of experience that may escape the more consumer-oriented and packaged experiences that are often understood as characterising tourism.

The idea of participating in travel for pleasure, for example to visit ‘beautiful’ landscapes, as opposed to travel for necessity or to demonstrate religious piousness, is in fact a relatively recent phenomenon. Until the nineteenth century and the advent of the railways, travel was not an easy option, nor were landscapes that we now regard as aesthetically pleasing necessarily regarded in the same way. However, in spite of the statistically grandiose figures for international tourism, trying to define what tourism is has proven to be more problematic than perhaps might be expected. This difficulty is a reflection of both the complexity of tourism, and the fact that there exists a diverse range of stakeholders with an interest in tourism, all of whom have varying aspirations of what they hope to achieve from it. These stakeholders include governments, the tourism industry, donor agencies, local communities, environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs), non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and tourists.

Attempts to define tourism are challenging because it is a complex amalgam of various tangible and intangible parts. These are diverse, including: feelings, emotions, experiences and desires; natural and cultural attractions; suppliers of transport, accommodation, tours and other services; and government policy and regulatory frameworks. Subsequently it is difficult to arrive at a consensual definition of what tourism actually is, as commented upon by many authors of tourism texts (for example Mathieson and Wall, 1982; Murphy, 1985; Middleton, 1988; Ryan, 1991; Mill and Morrison, 1992; Davidson, 1993; Gunn, 1994; Burns and Holden, 1995; Cooper et al., 1998; Holloway, 1998; Cooper and Hall, 2008).

Yet trying to understand the meaning of ‘tourism’ is important if we are to plan the use of natural resources and manage impacts associated with its development. What all commentators would probably agree with is that tourism involves travel, although how far one has to travel and how long one has to be away from one’s home location to be categorised as a tourist, is debatable. A convenient definition that overcomes this difficulty is the one proposed by the World Tourism Organization (1991) which was subsequently endorsed by the UN Statistical Commission in 1993: ‘Tourism comprises the activities of persons travelling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business or other purposes.’ One notable advantage of this definition is that by setting a time limit on the movement of a person away from home it eases the recording of who may be counted as a tourist and who may not.

The preceding definition challenges the commonly held perception that tourism is purely concerned with recreation and having fun. Whilst recreational tourism is the most usual form of tourism other types also exist. For instance Davidson (1993), besides recognising leisure or recreation (in which he includes travel for holidays, sports, cultural events, and visiting friends and relatives) as the main type of tourism, draws attention to the importance of travel for business, study (or education), religious and health purposes. Indeed the origins of tourism lie in travel for reasons of faith, education and health, as is explained later in this chapter.

From the World Tourism Organization (1991) definition it can be inferred that tourism involves some element of interaction with a different type of place and environment to the one found at home. The consequences of this interaction are typically referred to as the ‘impacts of tourism’, and can be categorised into four main types; economic, social, cultural and environmental, all of which may be judged as either being positive or negative. Recognition of the impacts that tourism can have on a destination environment were noted in the following definition of tourism given by Mathieson and Wall (1982: 1) over three decades ago: ‘The study of tourism is the study of people away from their usual habitat, of the establishments which respond to the requirements of travellers, and of the impacts that they have on the economic, physical and social well-being of their hosts.’

Besides referring to the impacts of tourism, Mathieson and Wall’s definition adds a further dimension to the concept of tourism by introducing a behavioural dimension, that is, the ‘study of people away from their usual habitat’. Given that tourism would not exist without tourists, understanding the motivations of tourists and the effect of their behaviour on the environments of destinations are areas of interest to social psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists. How we interact with the natural environment in our everyday lives has also become of increasing interest to environmental philosophers in recent decades as a consequence of the environmental challenges facing global society. The last word of the definition, ‘host’, implies an invitation from people who are happy to receive tourists. The use of this term has received criticism from academics, NGOs and the more socially aware quarters of the tourism industry, as levels of cultural and environmental awareness have grown since the early 1980s. It is now recognised that in some cases tourism is something that is tolerated or even forced upon communities as opposed to necessarily being welcomed. An extreme case of this practice is where indigenous peoples have been evicted from their lands to establish protected areas for nature conservation that are subsequently used for tourism, denying them access to the resources they rely upon.

A further dimension of tourism is its ability to transform nature and cultures into resources to be experienced and used by tourists and the tourism industry. Introducing the dimension of resource usage into a definition of tourism, Bull (1991:1) suggests that: ‘It [tourism] is a human activity which encompasses human behaviour, use of resources, and interaction with other people, economies and environments.’ This definition draws attention to the natural and cultural resources that are the focus of much of tourism and are used in various ways, including for pleasure, financial gain and economic development. Whilst awareness has existed of the economic and financial potential of tourism since the railways made mountain and coastal areas accessible to increasing numbers of tourists during the nineteenth century, the use of nature for tourism for the purpose of national development received increased attention following the economic success of tourism development in Spain during the 1950s. Today, the use of tourism for development has special significance for many developing countries, including those in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where many of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems and rare species exist. However, the extent to which nature should be used as a resource for tourism to achieve economic development is often ethically contentious, not least because of the sometimes negative consequences for indigenous peoples who often depend upon the same resources for their livelihoods.

An alternative way to think about tourism is from the perspective of the tourist, emphasising the experiential dimension. For example Franklin (2003: 33) defines tourism as: ‘an attitude to the world or a way of seeing the world, not necessarily what we find only at the end of a long and arduous journey’. In this definition, emphasis is subsequently placed upon individuals constructing their own meaning of tourism instead of it existing as a defined entity. It is also based upon a range of experiences provided by a range of resources in the destination environment. Similarly, as is discussed in Chapter 2, people may mentally construct their own ontology of environment, rather than it existing purely as a scientifically defined reality.

This succinct analysis of definitions of tourism illustrates its complexity and that it is about much more than simply ‘going on vacation or holiday’. Tourism is an outcome of the dynamics of the economic and social processes occurring in the environments of the societies where tourists originate from. It is the pace of this dynamism that has created tourism and continues to transform it into new types and varieties. Its development in destination environments will impact on and bring changes to the nature and culture of these places.

What is the ‘tourism industry’?

The macro-economic statistics of tourism emphasise its global impact and help explain why it has become a focus of global policy. According to the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC, 2015), travel and tourism contributed directly and indirectly to the global economy 277 million jobs and 9.8 per cent of GDP in 2014. Integral to the movement of hundreds of millions of people and the generation of the economic impacts depicted by these statistics is an industry to facilitate individual requirements for travel, subsistence and pleasure. However, trying to define what is the ‘tourism industry’ has proven difficult, not least because of its complexity of different parts and sub-sections that often are identified as separate industries in their own right. This challenge of definition is summarised by Lickorish and Jenkins (1997: 1): ‘The problem in describing tourism as an “industry” is that it does not have the usual production function, nor does it have an output which can physically be measured, unlike agriculture (tonnes of wheat) or beverages (litres of whisky).’ They also add that the vague and dispersed nature of the tourism industry has made it difficult to evaluate its impact upon the economy relative to other economic sectors. Similarly, in destinations where tourism development has taken place and environmental problems have arisen, it is not always that easy to disaggregate tourism’s contribution to these problems from the contributions of other economic sectors. An evident difference to other industries is that tourism is largely consumed in the places of production.

For Murphy (1985) a tourism industry does not exist because it does not produce a distinct product and industries such as transport, accommodation, and entertainment are services to local residents besides tourists. Cooper and Hall (2008) draw attention to tourism only having a partial claim to being an industry owing to the involvement of other stakeholders including governments and communities in delivering the product. Perhaps closest to a tourism product are ‘package’ and ‘all-inclusive’ holidays that combine a basic combination of travel, accommodation, food and beverage into a commodity for purchase. This type of ‘product’ forms the basis of what has been referred to as mass tourism, a standardised package, which is then sold into the market-place en masse to thousands of consumers. This type of vacation that relies on mass consumption to keep the prices low, displays the characteristics of ‘Fordist’ production. This is a term used to describe the mass conveyor belt techniques pioneered by Henry Ford in the motor car industry in the early twentieth century, which paved the way for mass car ownership through keeping production costs low. Although the development of mass tourism has meant that millions of people have had the opportunity to travel to different countries, its development in destinations has often been associated with negative environmental and cultural impacts. Commenting on mass tourism Poon (1993: 4) writes:

Mimicking mass production in the m...