Sustainable Development and Nature Conservation in Jordan - Restorative Redevelopment of Devastated Ecocultural Landscapes - page 318

FIGURE 16.13 ( Continued ) Many affluent Jordanians from Amman visit the café for its
interesting cuisine and begin to learn about the RSCN's environmental and business mandates
either while flipping through the menu or through attending various music or social events.
• Tour operators need to be educated about what ecotourism is and how it can
be developed.
• Greatest success comes about from mixing ecotourism with archaeologi-
cal tourism.
The take-home message is that under such a regime, tourism can very easily com-
pensate for changing livelihoods among locals.
The RSCN plans are to develop and finalize a protective network of eighteen pro-
tected areas, of which seven currently exist. Importantly, and again useful as a model
for the large spatial scale of the Iraqi marshlands, the RSCN wants to move from
managing these protected areas as isolated islands toward a concept based on larger
regional areas such as the entire Jordan Rift Valley as a single ecological corridor
in which conservation is integrated into agriculture toward an end of creating the
county's first regional land use plan.
Today, Dana Village is almost at the point of becoming a victim of its own suc-
cess, threatening to be turned into a sort of “mini-Arabic Las Vegas” (Johnson 2007;
Figure 16.14) with several entrepreneurs installing satellite televisions and such.