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By Totty Posted on History
In this month’s issue you’ll read about several examples of eco-tourism. The rise of this movement is one of those chicken-egg things. Is eco-tourism one of the causes of the slowly rising global consciousness about the need to preserve earth’s resources or is it one of the results? Either way, eco-tourism seems to promise a way to address the traditional imbalances in wealth and power between the developed and undeveloped world.
The traditional equation has been that people in poor countries sell their forests, or big-game animals or minerals in return for food and daily necessities supplied by industrial nations. Eco-tourism proposes a more even exchange: The poor country says, “We have a pristine forest (great ruin, mighty river, herd of rare animals, etc.) that you want us to preserve. But we have mouths to feed and that thing you want us to preserve is our only way of making money to feed them. You will have to pay us no matter what, so here are your choices: Pay us for the resources we extract or pay us to not extract them. Either way, pay enough money for us to survive.”
Until a generation ago, most people in developed nations would have said, “Thanks, we’ll take the resource.” But these days the answer is more likely to be, “We’ll help you build a travel infrastructure and encourage you to build your local economy around the protection and exhibition of your resource rather than shooting it or chopping it down.”
What happened was that technology and affluence combined to create perfect conditions for eco-tourism. Cheap travel allowed millions of people to reach far places. While tourism increased the pressure on fragile ecologies that had suddenly become popular, it also planted to seeds for actions by travelers who were willing to take steps to preserve those locales. The Internet helped them raise consciousness and recruit collaborators by giving non-travelers access to the issues through online stories, articles, position papers and visual images of endangered places.
Fortunately, the developed world had prior experience with eco-tourism. The American national park system in some ways anticipated the structure and methods of eco-tourism as it acquired and protected certain lands. A classic example is the 1968 creation of Redwood National Park in California, a congressional act that caused a near firestorm of controversy. Simply put, loggers were convinced that the removal of thousands of acres of mature redwoods from potential exploitation would lead to a local depression and the impoverishment of thousands of families. These men had never known another trade and didn’t see how they could survive economically in a region that, by their lights, had suddenly seen its raison d’etre eliminated by the stroke of a presidential pen.
What happened then was painful, but instructive. The federal government did offer some money to help retrain laid-off loggers, and in anticipation of increased tourism to the area, some loggers set about building inns, opening tour guide businesses or heading off to school to learn about the hospitality industry. Others found jobs as government contractors, hired for their expert knowledge of the redwood forests and useful in such areas as flood control, reseeding and fire suppression. The economy adjusted and most locals were able to stay in the area and not have to migrate in search of work.
This isn’t to paint an overly rosy picture. There are still big problems with eco-tourism, namely corrupt governments that pay lip service to the concept while looking the other way as poachers or illegal loggers continue to peck away at some precious resource. Even in the developed world, with reasonably honest governments and court systems, precious resources are often endangered by perfectly legal threats.
For instance, until its hostile takeover in 1986 by Maxxam Corp., Scotia, CA-based Pacific Lumber Co. was a model of sustainable logging, harvesting its holdings at a rate that guaranteed its ability to generate income from redwoods for hundreds of years. But Maxxam had incurred so much debt in its leveraged buyout of Pacific Lumber that the only way it could pay off creditors was to frantically accelerate the pace of logging. Pacific Lumber’s highly respected, carefully laid scheme of sustainable forestry was trashed.
At the individual, non-governmental level there is the perpetual problem of the Ugly American (Canadian Japanese, Chinese, Australian, German) eco-tourist who sees the desperate poverty of the country he’s visiting and turns his trip into a game of “How little can I get away with paying?,” imagining all the stories about his cleverness he’ll get to tell when he gets backs home.
But on the whole, eco-tourism is one of the best ideas to emerge in global travel in a long time. The transfer of wealth that it encourages is not a “here today gone tomorrow” thing where income for poor locals exists only as long as there are trees to harvest or animals to hunt. Instead, their economies have a real chance to adopt a far more sustainable and rational footing. As long as people are willing to pay to see where they live, and need food, guides and accommodations to do so, locals now have every incentive to protect and nurture their resources.
Eco-tourism is defined as travel that treads lightly on its destinations, involves travelers personal lives of the people they visit and tries to offer locals other ways of making money besides the industrial exploitation of their mineral or biological resources.
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