"There's No Such Thing As Eco-Tourism"

[bloom]

Colonialism isn't dead.

Colonialism is alive and well every time you travel from the First World to the Third and come home bearing photographs of sharks and storms and slums, of scorpions fried for snacks, sunflowers bigger than your head, stalled buses whose aisles are slick with spit, and then you tell your friends and co-workers, "Oh man, it was so great, you gotta go."

We call it ecotourism and adventure travel. That sounds sensitive. We think Ugly Americans are the fat ones on cruises and on package tours -- anyone but us. We think we're different because we don't have a stars-and-stripes patch on our backpacks as -- buckle your seatbelt -- this summer's travel boom defies the presence of not one but several wars around the world right now which may or may not become a world war. This is the busiest summer on record for air travel, according to USA Today, with 207 million Americans expected to board U.S. planes for domestic and international flights, up from last summer's 205 million....

Takeoff. That plane transporting 207 million of us to giant-flowerland is causing global warming. That's what Ian Jack writes in the latest edition of the literary journal Granta, whose theme is "On the Road Again." Carbon emissions from aircraft into the higher atmosphere are thrice as potent as those rising from ground level, Jack writes. To slow the coming debacle, "because all we can do now is to modify the severity of the inevitable," he makes a radical proposal that we go virtually nowhere: "We would need to ration the carbon dioxide produced by traveling to an allowance of no more than half a ton a year for every human being alive today." That translates to 2,200 kilometers (1,320 miles) by car a year, with no air travel, or 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) by car a year with a round-trip international flight once every 15 years.

"Fortunately for the climate," Jack half-jokes, "a lot of the world's population is too poor to do much traveling at all."

...

http://alternet.org/story/40174/

From last August - but I didn't see where it had been posted. Still as relevant as ever.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. Not all ecotourism takes place overseas, though

there's an active ecotourism movement here in the US. If going to hike along the Buffalo River in Arkansas causes someone in, say, Memphis or St. Louis to NOT get on a plane and expend as much fossil fuels, I'd say it is a good thing. Plus it provides income to folks who otherwise struggle.

[bloom]

3. I expect

that the writer of the article would be behind the idea of people hiking in areas within a short drive of their home.

There is a certain thing that is advertised as eco-tourism and it generally involves people getting on plane and going to some remote region of the world. That is what this is about.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

4. Shows how out of it I am

I first heard of eco tourism when a local nonprofit working to bring jobs to the area started promoting the idea. A lot of folks are known to even bike up here from places like Fayetteville and Little Rock, so that's even more ecological. Perhaps we should all be promoting local eco tourism.

[pooja]

2. Ok, the benefits from opening your minds and experiences and

your wallet to some of these countries far outweighs the global warming issue.... Also, if there is a demand to see a beautiful indigenous country, it provides extra income to the country to preserve the land and the heritage that they have.

I am happy that more Americans are travelling and seeing the world and learning to co-habitate and make friends.

Sorry, this is just one that I cannot get behind believing. Why not develop better transportation systems in all cities in America, then the carbon spewing would be reduced and we would still be able to travel. You will never convince me that the experience of different people's is bad.

[bloom]

5. The experience of different people/culture isn't bad....

unless - as the article describes - it's all a show anyway - put on for the tourists.

The question is - when are people going to take global warming serious enough to change what they do? The planet can be loved to death by people who have the resources to waste.

It does seem ironic - and what people should be thinking about IMO - that if you love wilderness, and unspoiled areas - then why spoil them? If you love the idea that other people are living outside the bounds of our civilization - then why bring our civilization to them?


The better thing - would be to find the modes of travel that have the least impact.

[Odin2005]

8. I agree entirely.

Also, Eco-Tourism creates an economic demand to preserve wilderness areas. Sorry to burst the bubbles of the naive idealists, but you can't convince people to protect the enviroment entirely with moral and metaphysical arguments, you have to awnser the "what's in it for me" question as well for most people.

[Porcupine]

10. Not if flying there kills their children through drought......

and war. Africa is going to face an enourmous climate disaster of such proportions it will probably dwarf the AIDS crisis. Bangledesh will be a total loss in many of the sea level rise predictions. Likewise much of the third worlds tropical coasts.

We will kill these people and poison their planet before we stop.

[YankeyMCC]

6. Interesting piece on a similar theme

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/4728

[kestrel91316]

7. The least an ecotourist shold do is MITIGATE the damage

done by their flying by contributing to someplace like Native Energy by buying carbon credits, which fund wind and biogas power developments in the US.

They have a carbon footprint calculator.

[BeFree]

9. Going nowhere

: "We would need to ration the carbon dioxide produced by traveling to an allowance of no more than half a ton a year for every human being alive today." That translates to 2,200 kilometers (1,320 miles) by car a year, with no air travel, or 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) by car a year with a round-trip international flight once every 15 years.

Thank gawd we still get to go places. Too bad all those poor people can't. That way we who can go places can keep all the free air to ourselves, and that means there's more of it for us to mess up! We've got more time, thanks to poor people.

****************

I've always said that if the rest of the world lived like the average American we'd have been fighting over the last barrel of oil years ago.

***************

Carbon emissions from aircraft into the higher atmosphere are thrice as potent as those rising from ground level, Jack writes.

[Reterr]

11. kick