BECOMING GREEN - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 195

On the other side of the Atlantic, Harold Goodwin is something of an éminence grise
of the sustainable-tourism movement with a different vision. He prefers to work directly
within the industry to effect change, eschewing outside activism. As a professor, he foun-
ded the International Centre for Responsible Tourism at Leeds Metropolitan University
in Britain and is a familiar figure on the international conference circuit.
His inspiration is Jost Krippendorf, a Swiss academic who examined the politics of tour-
ism in the 1970s and argued that the industry needed to help the environment, culture
and local communities. Goodwin believes that there is no single global industry. “There
is not an international market for tourism,” he wrote to me in an email exchange.
Goodwin argues that sustainable tourism has to be created in “each originating mar-
ket,” or the homes of the tourists. In other words, educate the tourists and the companies
they use to travel. To that end, Goodwin concentrates on working with the industry and
governments and not with nonprofit groups or activists. “The private sector is achieving far
more than the NGOs,” he wrote, dismissing programs such as community-based tourism,
ecotourism, carbon offsetting, global sustainable-tourism criteria as “superficially attract-
ive” but unproven.
Through his teaching, Goodwin says he has trained tourism professionals who work
around the world to transform the industry from within by creating tourist operations that
put sustainability into practice. He gives Responsible Tourism awards to what he considers
good examples of responsible tourism. He also hosts an online forum called Irresponsible
Tourism where people can complain about the bad apples.
• • •
The tented auditorium was draped with ropes of fresh branches. The Brazilian night had
fallen and strings of lights sparkled in the cool evening. Columns holding up the tent were
covered in leaves, fruits, flowers and more branches. Dirt swirled on the floor. The motif
was Amazon rainforest. The glittering invitation-only gathering was the 9th Annual Sum-
mit of the World Travel and Tourism Council, held in May 2009 in Florianópolis, Brazil.
The dinner crowd included the titans of the tourism industry, who mingled with the
political elite from Asia, Europe, the Americas and Africa. As they gathered at the buffet
lines, the guests resembled a society photograph in a glossy magazine: well dressed, well
heeled and enough beauties, both male and female, to create a buzz. This was the annual
summit of the movers and shakers, and the theme behind the rainforest décor was respons-
ible, sustainable tourism and green tourism. In the buffet line I met Thea Chiesa, of the
World Economic Forum of Geneva; at dinner Costas Christ, chairman of the judges of
Tourism for Tomorrow Awards. The industry definitely saw itself as protectors of the plan-
et, not exploiters.