Ecotourism
Ecotourism is the practice of visiting natural habitats while trying to minimise ecological impact. It doesn’t mean all our luxuries, such as flushing toilets, have to be completely abandoned. Ecotourism can benefit the environment in several effective ways: it can provide a sustainable way to source income from the environment, reduce threats to biodiversity, and promote sustainable use of reserve resources. Ecotourism provides work for local inhabitants who would otherwise source income from destructive activity. This creates an incentive to preserve the area and establish more parks and reserves. An ecotourism venture also seeks to minimise the harm caused by nature tourists. Ecotourism defined by the Nature Conservancy is, “Responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and improves the well-being of local people.” Apparent negative impacts from tourists, such as degradation of plant life along a trail, need to be compared to the overall benefit of providing money to the park for employment of more rangers, which might be more important to the overall conservation of the area. When ecotourism takes place in less formal areas that aren’t classified as national parks etc. ecotourism could promote the establishment of a protected area and provide incentive to put formal protection in place.
Ecotourism is one of the main ways we can protect the rainforests. It enables local people to source income from the rainforest without chopping it down for timber or to make way for farmland, a practice the tropics are not well suited to. Rainforests used for ecotourism have become many times more profitable per hectare compared to clearing land for pastures and fields. Ecotourism is utilised by developing countries to bring in foreign revenue by preserving the rainforests. Tourists pay entrance fees to the park either directly or indirectly, which supports reserve maintenance. People visiting the area bring money for local people directly by buying produce and handicrafts, and by the lodges and tourism industries employing locals as managers, guides, cooks, and cleaners etc. This has the knock on effect that rainforests are what bring the tourists, and therefore the money, paving the way for formation and upkeep of more reserves, protecting more of the world’s biodiversity.
Another benefit of ecotourism is enabling people to witness these fragile cradles of life and hopefully entrenching the importance of conservation. These new martyrs of biodiversity spread the word to friends and colleagues. As more people from prosperous nations visit these areas, they can see how incredible and irreplaceable they are. This increases the mounting pressure to ensure the survival of these havens of biodiversity. However, all tourism is not good tourism. For instance, destroying the breeding ground of animals to build a five star hotel that ultimately degrades surrounding habitat, or that disturbs breeding areas of sea turtles on a near by beach etc. is not good for the environment. In order for tourism to be beneficial in the wake of conservation, it must be carefully planned and properly managed. Poor park management, inadequate facilities, and too many people result in disaster for the eco-tourism objective of preserving the environment. This failure has already occurred in some countries and is looming in others. From these, however, we can learn from the mistakes and apply the lessons to the many successful eco-tourism ventures.
Education programmes should also be set up for the local inhabitants, as tourists present an irresistible temptation for locals to sell them anything and everything from the rainforest e.g. selling bones of protected animals or, as an extreme example, even selling jaguar cubs as pets (the illegal exotic animal trade is a fifteen billion dollar per year industry). For ecotourism to be a viable alternative to destructive activity such as logging, we need to make reserves profitable for the people who live in and around the parks. This means involving locals in the upkeep and decisions of the park, and then showing the governments that protected areas can yield a higher profit than logging and farming on the same land. At present, 10% of land is protected, but this is not enough to protect the vast percentage of species. Plans should be made to increase the amount of protected land, and if protected land is shown profitable, then more parks will open protecting more of the world’s habitat. To put the cost of reserve upkeep into perspective, Edward Wilson states that this can currently be achieved with a one-cent-per-cup tax on coffee.
