Tourism, Development and the Environment - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 255

A number of individual catastrophic events served to add substance to
the environmentalists' concerns at that time. For example, the disaster in
Bhopal in 1984, which cost the lives of some 2500 local inhabitants, and
the Exxon Valdez catastrophe emphasised the extent to which both human
and natural environments were vulnerable to such sudden 'shocks'. In addi-
tion to these and other anthropogenic events, which fuelled environmental
concerns, the 1970s and 1980s also witnessed a number of natural phenom-
ena which suggested the 'limits' of environmental resilience were rapidly
approaching. The increasing incidence of floods, drought and famine were
well publicised as the media started to reflect widely shared public con-
cerns for the global environment whilst, during the 1970s, the death toll
from natural catastrophes increased six-fold over the preceding decade
(Reid, 1995).
Inextricably linked to the fears over pollution and resource depletion was
the concern over population growth. To many environmentalists, as long as
the global population continued to grow the problems of resource degrada-
tion, pollution and human misery would not be solved (Ehrlich, 1968). Quite
simply, 'resource problems are not really environmental problems: they are
human problems' (Ludwig et al. , 1993), and, as long as human exploitation of
natural resources increases, so too do the environmental consequences of
that activity. Thus, against a background of rapid industrialisation, increas-
ing patterns of inequality and high rates of population growth, the ques-
tion of sustainability began to dominate the debate over appropriate paths
and means of development. Academics and policymakers from diverse back-
grounds and spanning the political continuum reacted to the perceived envi-
ronmental crises, with tourism being no exception. Even by the late 1970s,
with international mass tourism still in relative infancy, commentators criti-
cised the unbridled growth of tourism and its resultant environmental con-
sequences and called for restraint in its development (de Kadt, 1979b; Smith,
1977; Turner & Ash, 1975; Young, 1973). As Mishan (1969: 142) argued,
'travel on this scale . . . inevitably disrupts the character of the affected
regions, their populations and ways of living. As swarms of holiday-makers
arrive. . .local life and industry shrivel, hospitality vanishes, and indigenous
populations drift into a quasi-parasitic way of life catering with contemptu-
ous servility to the unsophisticated multitude'. Interestingly, Mishan's élit-
ist 'solution' was to ban international air travel but, more generally, what
were the initial responses to this perceived environmental crisis ?
Environmental Crisis: The Neo-Malthusian Response
The rise in popular environmental consciousness during the 1970s
exhumed many of the founding ideological roots of environmentalism. These
resided in mid-19th-century Germany and the work of Ernst Haeckel