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responsible tourism — English
Trips or tours by visitors that do not cause any harm to the visited environment itself (the host environment) or to the culture and way of life of the people in the visited regions (see “host community”). Also, the number of visitors should not exceed the carrying capacity of the attractions or the capacity of the host area to absorb the waste associated with up-market tourism (see “carrying capacity”). Tourist facilities should not despoil the natural or human-made attributes – the assets – of the area, because these assets are the very reason why the visitors are there. If these attributes were degraded, the owners or managers of the area are destroying their own asset base (like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs!). In order to ensure the sustainability of the place as a tourist attraction, its tourist attributes have to be managed sustainably and with great care (see “demarketing” and “carrying capacity”). There are justifiably serious concerns that the tourist carrying capacity of the Kruger National Park is being exceeded by too many day visitors and a proliferation of small camps. The Yellow Stone and Yosemite nature reserves in the USA have had to limit visitor numbers many years ago – if for no other reason than to relieve the problem of traffic jams inside the nature reserves! Irresponsible tourism in the form of littering and exceeding the carrying capacity are despoiling the once pristine slopes of mountains such as Mount Everest, Kilimanjaro and Mount McKinley. Anything – from empty oxygen bottles to human excreta – is strewn all along the climbing routes. At Everest, the Sherpas (see “accessibility”, “adventure tourism” and “alternative tourism”) literally have to remove tons of waste from both the south and the north slope of the mountain every year (56 tons were removed from the south slope alone in 2012!), and teams of “clean-up” and sanitation workers are continually removing waste from Kilimanjaro. The fact that the waste is at least removed makes the littering and deposition of waste more acceptable, but the first principle of eco-tourism and nature tourism of “leave nothing but your footprints” (see “ecological citizenship”, “ecological footprint” and “environmentalist”) is conveniently, but lamentably, ignored. One cannot but wonder how many people would try to climb Everest or Kilimanjaro if they themselves had to carry all their waste – and that includes their own excreta – down the mountain! The fashionable past-time of the well-to-do so-called “nature lovers” is to drive their environmentally unfriendly, 4x4 gas-guzzler off-road, over sensitive grasslands, right through wetlands, over steep slopes, across dune ridges and on beaches. To describe all the environmental damage they do would fill a thick book, and their “love of nature” is at best superficial and at worse a very flimsy “green screen” for hubris. From an envirocentric point of view, 4x4-tourism is – by its very nature – environmentally irresponsible. Well-heeled tourists, who troop through squatter camps or shanty towns and dish out sweets to the children, are equally irresponsible – their behaviour is at best insulting and at worse socially and/or culturally and eventually politically inflammatory. Even the oceans do not escape irresponsible tourism! Scuba and snorkel divers have committed indescribable, irreversible damage to the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, the coral reefs of the Maldives, and just about every coral reef on Earth. The damage done to coral reefs by the enormous tsunami of 26 December 2004, pales to insignificance compared to what has been wreaked by so-called nature-loving divers. There are so many examples of irresponsible tourism and especially irresponsible up-market eco-tourism (which is per definition irresponsible!) that one could easily fill an entire book on it. It is encouraging that there are some positive examples of responsible tourism, such as day-trips to the Galapagos Islands, and trips to Antarctica, sections of the Pantanal, and specific regions of Canada, Alaska and the Amazonian forests.
