An Island Saved, At Least for Some Time? The Advent of Tourism to Rennell, Solomon Islands - Island Futures: Conservation and Development Across the Asia-Pacific Region - page 169

Chapter 13
An Island Saved, At Least for Some Time?
The Advent of Tourism to Rennell,
Solomon Islands
Nils Finn Munch-Petersen
Introduction
Tourism has too often been a harbinger of cultural commodification and environ-
mental degradation. This is perhaps nowhere more glaringly evident than on small,
sunshine islands. The world's most penetrated island tourist economies - in the
Caribbean, Mediterranean and Northern Pacific - are today typified by large resorts,
overcrowding, erratic waste management, the replacement of man-made attractions
for lost amenities (Bryden 1973 ; McElroy 2003 ), along with the transformation of
the local populations as exotic museum pieces, objects of a lingering and ubiquitous
gaze (MacCannell 1999 ; Urry 2002 ). And yet, appropriate types of tourism policies
have at times be used as tools for environmental conservation, and certainly as a
more palatable alternative to the wholesale destruction of natural assets for short
term economic gain. On the island of Rennell, a raised atoll outlier in the Solomon
Islands, the introduction of tourism, at least for a time, has saved a unique ecosystem
with a wide range of endemic species.
Following a largely autobiographical style of writing, based on personal obser-
vations and reflections, this chapter describes the serendipitous introduction of
tourism on the island of Rennell, and the eventual inscription of the eastern part
of the island as a UNESCO World Heritage Site ( UNESCO n.d).
Rennell Island
The islands of Rennell (Mungava) and Bellona (Mungiki) are Polynesian outliers
and form the southernmost extension of the Solomons, comprising the administra-
tive province of Rennell and Bellona since 1993. The island of Bellona is densely
populated and covers only 6.5 square miles; while Rennell is larger with a land area