Ecotourism and Sustainable Development, Second Edition

Who Owns Paradise?

Martha Honey

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781597261265, 9781597261258
• eBook ISBN: 9781597268578
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry

Around the world, ecotourism has been hailed as a panacea: a way to fund conservation and scientific research, protect fragile ecosystems, benefit communities, promote development in poor countries, instill environmental awareness and a social conscience in the travel industry, satisfy and educate discriminating tourists, and, some claim, foster world peace. Although "green" travel is being aggressively marketed as a "win-win" solution for the Third World, the environment, the tourist, and the travel industry, the reality is far more complex, as Martha Honey reports in this extraordinarily enlightening book.
 
Ecotourism and Sustainable Development, originally published in 1998, was among the first books on the subject. For years it has defined the debate on ecotourism: Is it possible for developing nations to benefit economically from tourism while simultaneously helping to preserve pristine environments? This long-awaited second edition provides new answers to this vital question.
 
Ecotourism and Sustainable Development is the most comprehensive overview of worldwide ecotourism available today, showing how both the concept and the reality have evolved over more than twenty-five years. Here Honey revisits six nations she profiled in the first edition—the Galapagos Islands, Costa Rica, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Kenya, and South Africa—and adds a fascinating new chapter on the United States. She examines the growth of ecotourism within each country's tourism strategy, its political system, and its changing economic policies. Her useful case studies highlight the economic and cultural impacts of expanding tourism on indigenous populations as well as on ecosystems.
 
Honey is not a "travel writer." She is an award-winning journalist and reporter who lived in East Africa and Central America for nearly twenty years. Since writing the first edition of this book, she has led the International Ecotourism Society and founded a new center to lead the way to responsible ecotourism. Her experience and her expertise resonate throughout this beautifully written and highly informative book.

Part 1

What Is Ecotourism?

1

In Search of the Golden Toad

In 1987, Costa Rican Giovanni Bello and other investigators counted more than 1,500 adult golden toads in the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve. The next year, scientists and naturalist guides found just ten. In 1989, they found only one. Later that same year, there were two unconfirmed sightings of others. Since then no golden toads have been found. Many scientists concluded that the brilliant orange-colored toad, which was thought to exist only in Costa Rica’s Monteverde Reserve, had become extinct. At the same time, scientists around the world began noticing a dramatic drop in numbers of other species of toads and frogs. There are many theories to explain why. Some speculate a connection with volcanic eruptions, the warming El Niño winds and currents, acid rain, depletion of the ozone layer, chemical pollution, habitat destruction, or disease caused by a lethal, single-celled protozoan.¹ Others warn that frogs, like canaries carried down a coal mine shaft, are giving a biological signal that conditions for survival are horribly out of balance and catastrophe is close at hand. Most recently, a type of fungus, known as the chytrid fungus, has been found to be driving amphibian extinctions worldwide, including in Central America.²

Bello and other Costa Rican naturalists continue to hope that the golden toads are simply in hiding, buried deep under the reserve’s rich, moist biomass, and that one spring day they will again emerge, hopping from fern to vine to root. Such hopes may be maintained by the fact that another amphibian, the harlequin frog, had also disappeared in Costa Rica, but in 2003, a Yale scientist rediscovered it.³ Nowadays, visitors to Monteverde see the golden toad only on postcards and on the entrance sign to one of the reserve’s most popular tourist lodges, El Sapo Dorado.

Researchers Chris Lupoli and Emy Rodriguez researched and updated this chapter.

In Monteverde, the disappearance of the golden toad has coincided with the phenomenal growth of tourism, in particular a relatively new “species” known as ecotourism. Although often equated with nature tourism, ecotourism, properly understood, goes further, striving to respect and benefit protected areas as well as the people living around or on these lands. The history of the golden toad and that of ecotourism are intertwined, and some speculate that an ecotourist (or perhaps a scientist) may have carried into Monteverde’s rain forest an alien organism that caused a plague among the reserve’s toad population.⁴ If true, it is ironic, since Monteverde scientists and residents have consciously used conservation grants and ecotourism profits to protect the habitat of the golden toad and other exotic, endangered species, including the Resplendent Quetzal, one of the world’s most majestic birds. Monteverde’s farming community and conservation organizations began buying and incorporating surrounding land so that by 2005, more than ten thousand hectares (some twenty-six thousand acres) had been incorporated into this privately owned park, which is managed by a nonprofit scientific organization.⁵ Initially, the reserve attracted only scientists, some students, visiting friends and family (known in tourism lingo as VFFs), and a trickle of hardy travelers. But beginning in the mid-1980s—on the eve of the golden toad’s disappearance—the worldwide growth of ecotourism brought a flood of visitors and a tidal wave of change to this small community. Tourist numbers grew from just over 450 in 1974, to 3,100 in 1980, 17,500 in 1989, 50,000 in 1993, to about 200,000 by 2005.⁶ Most of Monteverde’s hotels have been built since 1990, and ecotourism has surpassed dairy farming as the community’s main source of income.

Around the world, ecotourism has been hailed as a panacea: a way to fund conservation and scientific research, protect fragile and pristine ecosystems, benefit rural communities, promote development in poor countries, enhance ecological and cultural sensitivity, instill environmental awareness and a social conscience in the travel industry, satisfy and educate the discriminating tourist, and, some claim, build world peace.⁷ Although “green” travel is being aggressively marketed as a win-win solution for the Third World, the environment, the tourist, and the travel industry, close examination shows a much more complex reality.

This book is about the search for ecotourism. Although nearly all countries in the world, including the United States, Canada, Germany, Australia, and other developed countries, are now engaged in ecotourism, perhaps its most exciting potential is in its use as a tool for economic development and environmental protection in developing countries. I lived in East Africa and Central America for nearly twenty years, first as a graduate student and then as a journalist covering liberation struggles, civil and cold war–inspired conflicts, natural and human-made disasters, popular protests, and a variety of economic development strategies spanning the political spectrum. Although tourism was only occasionally a central focus of my reporting, I was fascinated by its complexities and contradictions as they played out on the ground in East and southern Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

During my decades abroad I had found that for many economically poor countries with rich, unique, and largely unspoiled national parks and natural wonders, tourism offered a possible means for earning foreign exchange. But the infrastructure costs of conventional tourism are high, its adverse social effects are often great, and the economic benefits frequently meager, since most of the profits did not stay in the host countries. In the 1970s, I witnessed a lively and contentious political debate over tourism between socialist Tanzania and capitalist Kenya, which shared between them some of the world’s finest game parks. By the early 1990s, these countries and the island of Zanzibar were all aggressively promoting nature tourism and ecotourism, with historically marginalized rural communities demanding a slice of the tourism pie. When I lived in Costa Rica during the 1980s, I saw the country transform itself from a low-key outpost for nature lovers into the most popular ecotourism destination in the Americas. Beginning in the 1990s, there were alarming reports that the Galapagos Islands—a unique ecosystem and one of the world’s most fragile, often cited as the place where ecotourism began—was being permanently altered by an uncontrolled influx of tourists, immigrants, and commercial fishermen. And, during this same decade, I was intrigued to see that both South Africa and Cuba, two countries that for very different political reasons had been considered international pariahs, were promoting tourism (and ecotourism) as the engine for economic growth and reintegration into the worldwide free-market system. By 2005, ecotourism was booming in South Africa. With Fidel Castro’s retirement, however, Cuba’s future direction was very much up for grabs. Cuba’s early ecotourism innovations did not expand into wider government-backed eco-projects. Instead, its development model appeared increasingly to be based on classic Caribbean-style resort tourism.⁸ Given these uncertainties and the difficulties of conducting research in Cuba, I decided to shift gears and add to this edition a chapter on the relatively unexplored topic of ecotourism in the United States. Prior to 2005, when The International Ecotourism Society (TIES) organized the first-ever conference on ecotourism in the United States,⁹ little attention had been paid to its growth here in the American heartland. Today ecotourism is taking off, informed both by lessons and experiences from abroad and by our own history, most importantly our tradition of environmentalism and our well-developed national parks system.

In looking closely at Costa Rica, the Galapagos Islands, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Kenya, South Africa, and the United States, I have assessed whether ecotourism is succeeding in its objectives of protecting the environment and benefiting local people and developing countries. I came to realize that to make such an assessment, it is necessary to examine the growth of ecotourism within each country’s tourism strategy, its political system, and its changing economic policies. Just as scientists have come, over the past thirty years, to realize that individual species cannot be studied in isolation but must be analyzed within their ecosystems, so, too, must tourism and ecotourism be placed within a country’s overall development strategy, as well as within the context of a global economy that is systematically eliminating trade barriers and facilitating the penetration of foreign capital.

Research for this book involved journeys to all these countries, briefer forays to other destinations and international conferences, and the contributions of numerous researchers who have helped to revise, add valuable information, and update the case studies. What I found in the search for ecotourism was a mixture of hype and experimentation, superficiality and creativity, juxtaposing industry promises before international forums and “green” imaging in slick brochures with in-the-field struggles over the uses of parks and other protected areas between tour operators, government officials, and some of the world’s poorest and most marginalized peoples. At its worst, when not practiced with the utmost care, ecotourism threatens the very ecosystems on which it depends. At its best, ecotourism offers a set of principles and practices that have the potential to fundamentally transform the way the tourism industry operates. In the early years of the new millennium, the scorecard is very mixed: genuine ecotourism is hard to find but, unlike the golden toad, it is far from extinct.

The Contemporary Context

In 1990, The International Ecotourism Society (TIES), the world’s first ecotourism organization,¹⁰ coined what has become the most popular and succinct, yet encompassing, definition of ecotourism: “Responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and improves the well-being of local people.”¹¹ Ecotourism is often claimed to be the most rapidly expanding sector of the tourism industry,¹² but when its growth is measured, ecotourism is often lumped together with nature, wildlife, and adventure tourism. In fact, ecotourism should be viewed as distinct from these other categories. Nature tourism involves travel to unspoiled places to experience and enjoy nature. It usually involves moderate and safe forms of exercise such as hiking, biking, sailing, and camping. Wildlife tourism involves travel to observe animals, birds, and fish in their native habitats. Adventure tourism is nature tourism with a kick: it requires physical skill and endurance (rope climbing, deep-sea diving, bicycling, or kayaking) and involves a degree of risk taking, often in little-charted terrain. Whereas nature, wildlife, and adventure tourism are defined solely by the recreational activities of the tourist, ecotourism is defined as well by a set of principles that include its benefits to both conservation and people in the host country.

“Real ecotourism,” writes tour operator Kurt Kutay, “is more than travel to enjoy or appreciate nature.”¹³ It also includes minimization of environmental and cultural consequences, contributions to conservation and community projects in developing countries, and environmental education and political consciousness-raising, such as the establishment of codes of conduct for travelers as well as a wide variety of certification programs for components of the travel industry.

Within the tourism industry, it is difficult to calculate the size of the ecotourism sector. Unfortunately, there has been little systematic effort to gather data worldwide on ecotourism as a category distinct from nature, wildlife, and adventure tourism. However, there is a range of estimates. During the 1990s, the annual growth in demand for ecotourism was said to range from 10 to 34 percent, ¹⁴ while in 2004, the UN’s World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) estimated that ecotourism and nature tourism were growing three times faster than the tourism industry as a whole.¹⁵ In 2005, The Tourism Network also rated ecotourism as one of the fastest-growing sectors in the tourism industry, with an annual growth rate of 5 percent worldwide, representing 6 percent of the world gross domestic product and 11.4 percent of all consumer spending.¹⁶

Looking ahead, broadly defined, ecotourism is expected to grow in the coming years, while some types of traditional tourism have reached a saturation point. According to a 2001 UNWTO analysis, sun-and-sand resort tourism, for decades the staple of Caribbean tourism, has now “matured as a market” and its growth is projected to remain flat. In contrast, both cruise tourism and “experiential” tourism (which encompasses ecotourism, nature, heritage, cultural, soft adventure tourism, rural and community tourism) were among the sectors expected to grow most quickly during the coming two decades.¹⁷

The projected growth is not surprising. Ecotourism, or at least a revamped version of nature and wildlife tourism, is at the core of many Third World nations’ economic development strategies and conservation efforts. Nearly every developing country is now promoting some brand of ecotourism. At international conferences and in the travel and environmental literature, the choice of countries seems endless: Dominica, Bolivia, Belize, Mongolia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bhutan, Fiji, Indonesia, Peru, Senegal, Namibia, Madagascar, Thailand, Uganda, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are, in addition to the ones profiled here, among the countries worldwide actively marketing themselves as ecotourism destinations. In May 2002, over a thousand delegates from 132 countries gathered in Quebec City for the World Ecotourism Summit. The event culminated in the drafting of the Quebec Declaration on Ecotourism, a comprehensive and visionary proclamation on behalf of all involved parties that “ecotourism embraces the principles of sustainable tourism, concerning the economic, social and environmental impacts of tourism.” The Declaration focused on the establishment of small and locally run enterprises, emphasized the use of local materials and products, encouraged the establishment of legal mechanisms to promote such activities, and encouraged international finance institutions to direct their resources toward promoting small and medium-sized ecotourism firms.¹⁸

Major international conservation organizations have initiated ecotourism-linked departments, programs, studies, and field projects, and many are conducting nature tours, adventure tours, or ecotours for their members. International lending and aid agencies, under the banner of sustainable rural development, local income generation, biodiversity, institutional capacity building, poverty alleviation, and infrastructure development, pump billions of dollars into projects with tourism components; most of these are described as ecotourism or sustainable tourism projects. According to a 2005 analysis, twelve international donor agencies, including the World Bank, US Agency for International Development (USAID), UN Development Program (UNDP), and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), were giving almost $10 billion to some 370 tourism-related projects.¹⁹ The major travel industry organizations have set up programs, developed definitions and guidelines, and held dozens of conferences on ecotourism.²⁰ Simultaneously, many of the leading mass tourism players have tried to “green” their operations. ²¹ In the United States alone, there are scores of magazines, consultants, public relations firms, and university programs specializing in ecotourism. Globally, a growing number of nationally based and regional ecotourism societies have emerged in countries and regions such as Kenya, Zanzibar, Laos, Pakistan, Australia, Italy, France, Japan, Ecuador, Mexico, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Belize, Brazil, and the Caribbean.²²

And all this has happened in just three decades.

The Historical Context

The word tourism—describing travel as a leisure activity—first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1811. But the concept goes back as far as the ancient Greeks and Romans, whose wealthy citizens vacationed at thermal baths and explored exotic places around Europe and the Mediterranean region. A French monk, Aimeri de Picaud, is credited with writing the first tour guide. His book, published in 1130, was intended for pilgrims traveling to Spain. Early travel was often combined with religious pilgrimages, scientific inv...

Table of contents

• About Island Press
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1 - What Is Ecotourism?
• Part 2 - Nation Studies
• Conclusion - The Road Less Traveled
• Notes
• Index
• Island Press, Board of Directors