Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
upon environmental resources. Sustainability in tourism development lies
not in the rigid blueprints of development planning but in recognition and
utilisation of local social and institutional capital. Evidence is mounting that
sustainability is most likely to be achieved where local as well as national
interests are respected by tourism developers, where communities engage in
decision-making and where market institutions engage with local and
national governance structures. Under these circumstances, tourism can
actively promote both conservation and development, a far cry from tour-
ism's image as a degrading and exploitative industry.
Throughout the era of mounting public concern for the environmental
impact of development, tourism retained its image as a 'smokeless industry',
although publications such as Turner and Ash's (1975) Golden Hordes drew
tourism into the 'limits of growth' debate. Since then, the dramatic growth
in tourism has redefined it as an industry 'subordinating environmental
issues to the primary need to add new products' (Kousis, 2000: 469), whilst
since the 1970s, a vast quantity of research has explored the environmental
impacts of tourism and recreation, particularly in respect to impacts on soil
and vegetation (for example, Bayfield, 1971; Goldsmith et al. , 1970).
Significant effort has been dedicated to understanding factors influencing
the environmental impact of tourism (Cohen, 1978; Wall & Mathieson, 2006).
Indeed, as Croall (1995: 1) contends, tourism can 'ruin landscapes, destroy
communities, pollute the air and water, trivialise cultures, bring about unifor-
mity, and generally contribute to the continuing degradation on our planet'.
Is such a critical perspective warranted ? Interactions between tourists, devel-
opers, policymakers and planners and the environment are often highly com-
plex (Mieczkowski, 1995). Furthermore, it is often difficult to differentiate
between environmental changes caused by tourism and those associated with
changing biophysical conditions or those related to other social or economic
factors. Mieczkowski (1995) states that tourism is vulnerable to environmen-
tal deterioration mediated by socio-political pressures outside the control of
the tourism industry. Accordingly, the natural environment both 'consti-
tutes a tourism resource' and is 'part of tourism's product' (Mieczkowski
1992: 112). Indeed, the damage (environmental, cultural and social) tourism
can impart is not an intrinsic product of tourism per se, but a manifestation
of the broader socio-environmental hazards of the prevailing mainstream
development philosophy which relegates people and resources below the pri-
macy of profit and economic growth. For example, environmental change in
and around Kenya's Amboseli National Park, most evidently borne out by
vegetation changes within and outside the park, has occurred over a period of
time that has witnessed a marked growth in tourism, a sharp rise in the
human population and a related diversification of land use, changing land
tenure arrangements, several years of anomalous climatic conditions and
increased salinisation of ground water (Lovatt-Smith, 1993). The distant
clouds of dust marking the passage of tourist vehicles across the barren
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