Tourism, Development and the Environment - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 277

promoting a precautionary approach to tourism development and 'respect for
local environmental limits' (Hunter, 1995). Several alternative approaches to
carrying capacity have been suggested, such as 'limits of acceptable change'
(LAC). According to Wight (1998: 82): 'LAC is a planning procedure designed
to identify preferred resource and social environmental conditions in a given
recreation area and to guide the development of management techniques to
achieve and protect these conditions'. LAC bases the whole notion of 'accept-
ability' on local connotations of positive and negative environmental change,
a paradigmatic shift away from the narrow social and environmental basis
of carrying capacity.
Allied to the concept of ecological sustainability is the thorny issue of
environmental valuation (see Chapter 3). A major failing of neoclassical eco-
nomics pertains to the under-valuation of ecological services and its failure
to account for the depletion or degradation of natural resources through pro-
cesses of 'development'. The specific problems of devising and implementing
methods of environmental valuation have remained marginal to the far more
woolly abstract notions of sustainable development. Today's economic activ-
ities bear environmental externalities which must be borne by future genera-
tions and, thus, the environmental economic contribution to sustainable
development theory argues that the present generation must compensate
future generations 'to ensure that we pass on to the next generation a stock
of . . . capital assets no less than the stock we have now' (Pearce, 1992: 4). The
fundamental building blocks of ecological economics are the notions of inter-
generational equity, intragenerational equity and the emphasis placed upon
meeting basic human needs, and the integration of ecological processes into
economic calculations. Operationalising sustainability depends, therefore,
upon the maintenance of a non-depleting stock of natural capital and upon
a methodology for valuing environmental goods and services. Constanza
(1997) has applied valuation methods to value the planet's global ecosystem
in the region of US$33 trillion per year. Other environmental economic pre-
scriptions for achieving sustainability include those that have great theoreti-
cal strength but confront political obstruction (such as revamping national
accounting systems to accommodate the true costs of natural resource
depletion) to others that have become operational within the context of
neoliberal approaches to environmental policy (such as 'green taxes' and
other market-based instruments).
New Interpretations of Tourism, Environment and
Development
The above discussion implies a need to rethink the relationship between
tourism development, the environment and the communities dependent