Adam
Weinberg, Story Bellows, Dara Ekster
"Sustaining ecotourism : insights
and implications from two successful case studies"
IN: Society and natural resources 15 (4, 2002) : 371-380
The authors, "draw on field research from Costa Rica and
New Zealand to examine the potential for sustaining ecotourism
projects over time to find that successful ecotourism projects exist
in a paradoxical or dialectical system with Internal dynamics that
tend to speed up the rate of tourism production. This poses a number
of ecological, economic, and social problems. In general, the
problems are known to local communities and public officials. The
challenges are also technologically fixable and economically viable.
The obstacles are political. The communities exist in larger
political systems that lack the capacity to control economic action.
In other words, the political process is not capable of keeping the
economic system in check." |
Luis
Vivanco, The Ecologist, Volume 32, Issue 2, Mar 2002
"Escaping from Reality"
Aptly-named, selective, self-contradictory, nihilistic venom against
Ecotourism. See how the second paragraph destroys the first:
"After the events of 11 September, the
globalisers' delusions of an inevitable and universal
Western modernity are under threat of collapse. With the drop
in international tourism that has resulted from these events,
ecotourism's promoters have, as expected, urgently reiterated their
mission to bring development to those real and imagined hotbeds of
potential antiWestern sentiment, cynically repeating concerns
that it is the poor who are truly suffering the drop in tourism. What
is worse, they will argue, is that nature's survival is at stake since
without ecotourism's revenues people in the South apparently have no
alternative to destroying it. We can surely expect that the IYE will
now, more than ever, use its global pulpit to argue for ecotourism's
central role if not inevitability in combating poverty and nature's
demise, and its positive role in creating world peace and
understanding.
However, to do so
would miss the true lessons of the globalist era.
The attempt
to force people everywhere into the same cultural, economic, and
political mould (which itself harbours deep contradictions) is bound
to generate insecurity, resentment, conflict, and even ecological
degradation. The task is how to forge conviviality and coexistence
among peoples with profoundly divergent histories, beliefs, and
values. This will be achieved by acknowledging at the outset the
strength in pluralism and self-determination, not by
rejecting tourism and tourists, but by rejecting the monistic
logic and politicaleconomic structures underlying ecotourism's
developmentalist fantasies and tragedies. In so doing, it may be
possible to strengthen an alternative vision of public engagement, nature
conservation, and tourism beyond the IYE's universalistic and
self-serving vision."
I wonder if the
author of this "enlightened" article goes on holidays and if
so where. If he does, he is a hypocrite. Also if he has successful
examples of "conviviality, coexistence, pluralism and
self-determination, nature conservation and tourism" to offer or
if he is talking about that place up in the sky. Could it be him that
is "escaping from reality"? |
