Green Tragedy: The Blight of Eco-Tourism

Tourism is by some estimates the world's biggest industry; it's certainly among the fastest-growing, and few believe the events of Sept. 11 will cause anything more than a downward blip on a steep upward curve. In 1950 there were around 25 million international tourist visits. Currently there are around 700 million. By 2020 there will be around 1.6 billion.

As it has grown, so have its destructive effects become manifest, and these are greater than most of us might suspect. Along with television, tourism is one of the most potent agents of globalization -- tourists are the shock troops of Western-style capitalism, distributing social and psychological viruses just as effectively as earlier colonists spread smallpox, measles and TB in their wake. And as with globalization, there are voices urging reform.

The year 2002 has been designated the International Year of Eco-tourism by the UN. Eco-tourism is, supposedly, the antidote to mass tourism -- small-scale, nature-based, environmentally-friendly. That's the theory, anyway. The reality is that no-one has properly defined eco-tourism, no-one really knows what it means, it's highly unlikely that anyone ever will define it in a way that will command assent from critics of the industry, and in this vacuum the marketing men, greenwashers, corporate developers and government spin doctors flourish. I have heard a casino in Laos described as eco-tourism -- because it was sited in untouched countryside.

According to Tourism Concern, the British-based non-governmental organization, much eco-tourism relies on places from which native people have been excluded, often forcibly, or which are being destroyed by the sheer number of tourists. A UNESCO report recently concluded that the World Heritage site of Macchu Picchu in Peru (where a cable car has been proposed to cater to the 350,000 "eco-tourists" who visit it each year) has reached saturation point. Villagers there who want a greater share of tourist revenues have protested by blocking access to the site. Can any phenomenon which so breaches ideas of carrying capacity justify the prefix "eco"?

Yet eco-tourism, as defined by the World Tourism Organization, represents only 2 to 4 percent of international travel spending. Suppose it grew to the point where it dominated the tourist industry -- with hundreds of millions of eco-tourists every year. Could such a large-scale industry be managed in a small-scale way? Can anyone who has flown halfway around the world in a jet powered by subsidized fossil fuel and puffing out greenhouse gases qualify as an eco-tourist -- whatever the shape or content of the holiday that awaits them?

The attempt to construct an eco-tourist alternative to mass tourism does at least signify a perception that the industry has gone seriously wrong, and the more one considers how and why this has happened, the more the paradoxes abound. The first is that tourism was, and still is, seen by many as a "clean" path to development -- an industry without factories and fumes and the consumption of finite resources. The reality is that it has proved a terrible destroyer of landscapes, either through development or through the fundamental strains that Westernized appetites impose on fragile economies and ecosystems.

The second paradox is that, while repeatedly marketed as "of all-inclusive benefit to the economy," the financial gains of tourism are highly unevenly distributed. In practice, most of the money it makes ends up in the hands of local or international elites -- hotel-owners, package tour operators and airlines. And although tourism may create jobs, the biases and distortions involved in this process mean that these displace, and often replace, jobs -- or rather, livelihoods -- based around agriculture or fishing.