Living over Water - Restorative Redevelopment of Devastated Ecocultural Landscapes - page 277

FIGURE 14.42 ( Continued ) The islands closest to Puno are characterized by signage,
observation towers, and large groups of tourists.
are beginning to be put off by the artificiality of the manufactured experience as well
as the in-the-face begging of children for candies and money.
These near-shore floating villages also suffer in other ways due to their proxim-
ity to Puno. The embayment in which they are located has experienced increasingly
severe eutrophication (Figure 14.43) to such an extent that islanders now have to
travel out into the lake to obtain freshwater. No smiling amphibious children frolick-
ing about here.
Some good news is that the islanders and group tourism companies on the main-
land are beginning to realize that their livelihoods might be threatened as the percep-
tion of the fabled floating villages of Titicaca becomes one of a polluted Disneyland.
Efforts are now underway to make better inroads in treating the water discharged
into the lake from the city of Puno. And a consortium of progressive ecotourism
companies has made alignments with island leaders to better plan tourism in a more
sustainable and less culturally damaging manner.
Similar concerns exist for the archaeological sites around the lake, particularly
the historic Islands of the Sun and Moon where the Inca culture was born (Stanich
2003). Stanich fears what tourism development might bring: “The pressures of large
tourism companies to remake [the islands] into a Disneyland kind of place will be
immense.… It's really important that the local people have a stake in the tourism
economy. If they do, the sites will be preserved” (quoted in Mayell 2001).
Such a local people = good, tourism companies = bad analogy is, however, too
dichotomous and possibly simplistic. The lesson for the Iraq marshlands from the
floating islands of Lake Titicaca is twofold: if left unregulated or at least unsuper-
vised, tourist companies can certainly contribute to ruining tourism (there are many
examples of this around the world); but if on the other hand, all tourism decisions