Industrial Development and Eco-Tourisms

Can Oil Extraction and Nature Conservation Co-Exist?

Mark C.J. Stoddart, Alice Mattoni, John McLevey, Mark C. J. Stoddart

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030559434
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030559441
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the "oil-tourism interface", the broad range of direct and indirect contact points between offshore oil extraction and nature-based tourism. Offshore oil extraction and nature-based tourism are pursued as development paths across the North Atlantic region. Offshore oil promises economic benefits from employment and royalty payments to host societies, but is based on fossil fuel-intensive resource extraction. Nature-based tourism, instead, is based on experiencing natural environments and encountering wildlife, including whales, seals, or seabirds. They share social-ecological space, such as oceans, coastlines, cities and towns where tourism and offshore oil operations and offices are located. However, they rarely share cultural or political space, in terms of media coverage, public debate, or policy discussion that integrates both modes of development. Through a comparative analysis of Denmark, Iceland, Newfoundland and Labrador, Norway, and Scotland, this book offers important lessons for how coastal societies can better navigate relationships between resource extraction and nature-based tourism in the interests of social-ecological wellbeing. 

© The Author(s) 2020

M. C. Stoddart et al.Industrial Development and Eco-Tourismshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55944-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Contact Points Between Offshore Oil and Nature-Based Tourism

Mark C. J. Stoddart¹ , Alice Mattoni² and John McLevey³

(1)

Department of Sociology, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St John’s, NL, Canada

(2)

Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

(3)

Department of Knowledge Integration, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

Mark C. J. Stoddart

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

TourismOilPoliticsDevelopmentEnvironmentCulture

End Abstract

Around the world, societies are caught between the desire for social and economic development and a plethora of ecological crises that include global climate change, biodiversity loss and species extinction, and declining ocean health. Social and economic wellbeing traditionally relies on various forms of extractive development, where natural resources like fish, forest products, fossil fuels, or minerals are removed and sold on regional and global markets. Increasingly, however, social, and economic development is also built on knowledge-based and cultural industries that sell services and experiences. Tourism, leisure, and recreation are important forms of what political scientist Timothy Luke calls “attractive development,” or what geographer Nigel Thrift calls the “experience economy” (Luke 2002; Thrift 2000). In attractive development or an experience economy, communities and landscapes are valued as sites of leisure and tourism experience rather than as natural resource pools.

When pursued as parallel development paths, extractive and attractive development do not always go easily together. For example, conflicts can emerge when oil, forestry, or mineral extraction infringes on well-used and highly valued leisure or tourism landscapes (Gould 2017; Reichwein 2014; Shaw and Magnusson 2002; Widener 2011). This book examines how societies in the North Atlantic navigate the relationships and tensions between extractive and attractive development.

Throughout this book, we use the language of social-ecological wellbeing, which we prefer to “sustainability.” Sustainability is well-used in policy and business spheres to talk about the need to balance long-term environmental integrity with economic and social development goals. However, sustainable development is a malleable term, to the point where it often loses meaning. Scholars across a range of disciplines are searching for more satisfactory ways to think about building better social-ecological relationships. This includes the framework of resilience theory (Berkes and Ross 2013), as well as recent work, primarily developed in Latin America, on the notion of buen vivir (Gudynas 2011). This also includes the emerging dialogue around planetary health, which builds on the UN Sustainable Development Goals to conceptualize the multidirectional relationships between natural systems, social systems, and community health (Whitmee et al. 2015).

We prefer the language of social-ecological wellbeing for thinking about links between ecological, cultural, political, and economic dimensions of individual, community, and ecosystem health. As an alternative to sustainable development, our emphasis on social-ecological wellbeing aligns with trends towards resilience theory, buen vivir, or planetary health. However, the framework of social-ecological wellbeing responds to criticisms of resilience theory that it is insufficiently attentive to social dynamics, and especially power dynamics, in social-ecological systems (Davidson 2010).

Our guiding questions ask how North Atlantic societies navigate offshore oil and nature-oriented tourism (or eco-tourism) as development pathways, and whether they do so in ways that build social-ecological wellbeing. To answer our high-level questions, the substantive chapters of this book address a series of empirical questions: How are tourism and oil development models evaluated across societies, and what do these evaluations reveal about consequential differences in what is valued or devalued, and why? How and to what extent does the oil-tourism interface feature in formal governance? To what extent to social movements and civil society organizations intervene in and shape the oil-tourism interface?

Coastal societies around the North Atlantic navigate relationships between fossil fuel development, nature-based tourism, and a range of other coastal activities, including fisheries and shipping. We focus primarily on the intersections of oil and tourism, though we periodically touch on other sectors, including fisheries as a crucial third sector across the region. The oil-tourism interface is our focus because it provides a valuable entry point for understanding the cultures, politics, and economics of eco-tourism and industrial coastal activities. In answering our research questions, we provide insight into the relationships and tensions between extractive and attractive development more broadly.

The Oil-Tourism Interface

Our central concept of the oil-tourism interface describes a set of direct and indirect contact points that involve conflict and complementarity across these two sectors. Direct contact points include conflict over new oil exploration or extraction, such as the controversies in Ecuador examined by Widener (2011) and in Belize examined by Gould (2017). The threat of resource extraction can also create an interest in tourism to threatened environments that visitors should see before they are transformed. During the 1990s, for example, conflict over old-growth forestry on the west coast of Vancouver Island also worked as an “envirotisement” for tourism to contested areas and boosted the tourism economy of the region (Luke 2002). Conflict over oil development may play a similar role, as Widener (2009) demonstrates in her analysis of conflict over a pipeline project in Ecuador, where the threat posed by the pipeline also drew tourists to threatened areas. The energy sector itself may also serve as a tourism attractor, such as tours of oil facilities, or oil-oriented museums or museum displays, which are found in cities like St. John’s, Canada, Esbjerg, Denmark; Stavanger, Norway; or Aberdeen, Scotland. Similarly, geothermal power facilities in Iceland are also signposted and interpreted for visitors as tourism sites. Finally, the energy sector provides resources, including funding, that supports tourism development, as in the case of Shetland Islands, Scotland (Jennings 2015). Similarly, oil companies often support cultural institutions or mega-sporting events like the Olympics that are linked to tourism, as Uldam (2018) notes in her analysis of contention between BP and social movements in the United Kingdom.

Beyond these direct contact points, there is a range of indirect contact points that the oil-tourism interface concept brings into focus. Infrastructure development for the energy sector, including roads, airports, hotels, and restaurants, may subsequently be used to support tourism development. Tourism mobilities—including airplane, car, tour bus, ferry, or cruise ship travel also rely on fossil fuel extraction and consumption. Oil-fuelled transportation systems form the skeleton of tourism mobility networks (Cohen et al. 2011; Luzecka 2016; Urry 2013). Finally, tourism environments are impacted by climate change, which is driven to a large degree by fossil fuel-based industries (Hall 2010). In the coastal societies of the North Atlantic, climate change impacts include sea level rise, increasingly severe storm seasons, changes to seasonal weather patterns, shifting wildlife habitat and migration patterns, as well as the transformation of Arctic and near-Arctic ecosystems.

These contact points are an ideal type, intended to clarify salient dimensions of the concept. The specific forms these contact points take differ across host societies. These contact points may involve collaboration or conflict across sectors, as well as with national, regional, or local governments. These contact points may also involve mobilization, opposition, or collaboration with environmental movements or other civil society groups. Our purpose in outlining this range of contact points—and the purpose of the book—is to highlight how these forms of development, which are often understood as siloed off from each other, are intertwined in a variety of ways that impact the social-cultural, environmental, and economic wellbeing of host societies, and which therefore deserve closer scrutiny.

Our concept of the oil-tourism interface highlights links between networks of oil extraction and distribution, and “tourism mobilities” (Sheller and Urry 2004). Tourism mobility is part of the shift towards “cosmopolitanism” as a way of engaging the world, which is characterized by “a kind of connoisseurship, of places, people, and cultures” that relies on “extensive mobility” (Szerszynski and Urry 2006, p. 114, italics in original). Eco-tourism is a form of travel where nature is the central tourism attractor. Eco-tourist travel is presumed to cultivate environmental awareness and provide a rationale for environmental protection (Luke 2002; Snyman and Bricker 2019; Urry and Larsen 2011). Often, eco-tourism emerges because host regions wish to diversi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Contact Points Between Offshore Oil and Nature-Based Tourism
• 2. The North Atlantic as Object of Inquiry
• 3. Cultural Dimensions of the Oil-Tourism Interface
• 4. Environmental Governance and the Oil-Tourism Interface
• 5. Environmental Movement Conflict and Collaboration in the Oil-Tourism Interface
• 6. Lessons Learned and Social Futures: Building Social-Ecological Wellbeing in Coastal Communities
• 7. Epilogue on Methodology
• Back Matter