Tourism, Development and the Environment - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 257

of the global environment to accommodate rising populations and man-
kind's continuing quest for prosperity with technocentrists, such as
Beckerman (1992), pointing to the contribution of continual technological
advance in addressing such challenges. Thus, for example, over the last 30
years average global food supply increased from 2360 to 2740 calories per
person per day as a result of agricultural expansion and intensification. At
the same time, and contrary to the forecasts of Malthus and his followers,
economic growth (as measured in real per capita incomes), has been highest
during periods of rapid population growth. Asian countries experienced
economic growth of 25% between 1820 and 1950 whilst their population
increased by 84%. From 1950 to 1992, average incomes increased five-fold
while their population increased by 128%. India has more than doubled its
real per capita income in the past four decades while its population has
grown by a factor of four. In the 1960s, the Green Revolution resulted in
huge increases in production, particularly for wheat and rice. Thus, the
environment and development discourse embraced a new optimism about
mankind's resilience, ingenuity and capacity to institute the social and
institutional changes to promote effective environmental management
(Boserüp, 1965). Moreover, as suggested later and in Chapter 15, this evi-
dence also raises questions about the environmental/developmental con-
tribution of sustainable tourism compared with more intensive (i.e. mass)
forms of tourism development.
Yet the ghost of Malthus has not been completely laid to rest. Many still
forecast an imminent crisis for humanity due to its sheer size, though they
overlook the fact such claims have always proven to be false. Today, atten-
tion is drawn towards the differentiated allocation of resources and the
unjust political economy of globalisation, rather than population growth
itself, as an explanation for the many human crises blighting the World's
poorest (Bernstein et al. , 1995; Collier, 2007). Nevertheless, despite the meth-
odological deficiencies of the Limits to Growth school and the ill-conceived
Malthusian interpretation of the 'environmental crisis', the events of the
1970s very much shaped the emergence of a popular environmentalist move-
ment. In the US, for example, such issues as the preservation of the Spotted
Owl at the cost of 'tens of thousands of jobs' (Chase, 1995) propelled envi-
ronmental issues up the political agenda and fuelled a vitriolic corporate
'green backlash' (Rowell, 1996), testament to the growing political strength
of the incongruent but vocal environmental movement.
The emergence of a 'general Green philosophy' (Eckersley, 1992) during
the 1970s and 1980s drew partly upon its early philosophical roots, as did,
arguably, the 'alternative' tourism perspective that also emerged in the 1980s
(Smith & Eadington, 1992). However, the influence of 1960s left-wing ideol-
ogy and its focus upon participatory politics, alongside the re-emergence of
doomsday environmental literature, gave birth to what Eckersley (1992: 8)
describes as a new 'ecologically inspired political orientation'. The emergence