Sustainable Tourism Chapter 11 Relational Summary

Sustainable Tourism Chapter 11 Relational Summary

Voice over image from textbook:

Upon completion of this chapter, the reader should be able to:

_ explain the three criteria that constitute an ecotourism product and show how the

variance within these criteria gives rise to comprehensive and minimalist interpretations

of ecotourism

_ differentiate the concepts of hard and soft ecotourism and demonstrate how this

typology relates to the comprehensive/minimalist distinction and affects estimates

of the magnitude of the ecotourism sector

_ assess the strengths and weaknesses of specialized components within the ecotourism

industry

_ describe the spatial distribution of ecotourism both globally and within protected

areas as well as modified spaces

_ assess the potential environmental costs and benefits of ecotourism and discuss

how these vary within hard and soft ecotourism

_ explain the extent to which quality control and credibility within ecotourism are being

positively and negatively affected by certification initiatives such as Australia’s

EcoCertification Programme and

_ critically assess the importance of a comprehensive ecotourism model that incorporates

soft as well as hard ecotourism dimensions.

And now, the host of our show, Everest B. Green:

Host:

Hello, I’m your host Everest B. Green, and welcome to today’s edition of Sustainable Tourism – what does it mean … to YOU.  We have as our guest online  today, Professor T.H. Culhane from the Patel College of Sustainability and co-founding director of the NGO “Solar CITIES” which is introducing food-waste-to-fuel-and-fertilizer biodigesters to the ecotourism industry.  Welcome Dr. Culhane.

T.H.:

Thankyou, its great to be here.

Host: 

I understand that this week’s chapter topic, “Ecotourism: the conscience of sustainable tourism” is something you’ve been grappling with that has been weighing on your conscience for quite some time…”

T.H.
Yes, well I got my start in eco-tourism activities as a 13 year old attending clown college in Venice Florida when I fell in love with the coastal environment and become a passionate snorkeler.  This turned into a lifelong passion for scuba diving when I got my PADI certification at the age of 15 and made my first of several  trips to Bermuda for my checkout dives.  By  17 I was working as a voluntourist at the Forfar Field Station in a remote backstage part of Andros Island in the Bahamas, spending a month exploring tropical marine ecosystems and their association with tropical rainforest and mangrove communities, doing underwater photography, interacting with local Bahamian sponge fishing communities and assisting scientists in doing biodiversity surveys.   The net effect on me was that I became hooked on what Weaver describes as the 3 core areas of ecotourism:

1) ”nature-based attractions”, like the spectacular coral reefs at the tongue of the ocean in the Bahamas and the rainforest fringed blue hole ecosystems where salt water and freshwater meet in the center of the island

2) “educational interactions with these attractions” which were achieved  through the local experts in botany and marine ecosystems and the professors from Florida Insitute of Technology who awarded the three credits I earned for the experience

 And

3)  “management practices that make every reasonable effort to achieve environmentally and socioculturally sustainable outcomes”, which, in our case, involved constant interaction with the local fishing population who were learning with us how to sustainably harvest the sponges that were part of their income, as well as local reef fish and land crabs and conch which they sold to us and cooked for us.

As a kid who had just finished his junior year in high school, I spent a lot of my time with the teenage boys from the community who taught me a lot about their culture and really enjoyed learning with me what the course I was on was teaching.

That summer I became what Weaver talks about on page 205 when he says,” Ecotourists, then,

are regarded in this model as active agents of positive environmental and social change.”

Host:

Yes, and you’ve talked in previous lectures about  the long term impact that had on you and how you went on to make Ecotourism activities an essential part of your education and your career. We’ve spoken of your tree planting activities and permaculture and renewable energy teaching  and social and environmental justice activities around the world, from your time at the  Eco-Escuela in Guatemala and in the favelas of Brazil, of your living in Eco-Villages in LA and Europe to your treks in Nepal and activities in Africa and Indonesia and Egypt and Iraq and Palestine, participating in both comprehensive and minimalist ideal types of tourism, each with its different expectations and outcomes, and the parallel typologies of hard and soft ecotourism activities based  more on market and experience characteristics, … seems you have a very broad approach to Ecotourism…

T.H.
Yes, well, I tend to take a bird’s eye view of these things and my lifetime of participation in these activities, having the privilege – and it really is a privilege, to have seen so much of the world, at  so many levels, from 5 star hotels and exclusive ecolodges like the Great Plains conservation lodges in Kenya and Botswana to pup tents in snowy mountain passes and goat herders huts and Bedouin tents in deserts is that we need the post-modern lens of both-and approaches to get away from the binary modernist impasses  of the “either-or” , black and white, you’re either for us or against us binary mentality that creates such conflicts.  As we talked about in the last chapter summary, we are much more nuanced today, replacing the blunt instrument of carrying capacity, for example, with the concept of “Limits to Acceptable Change”.  So I seek ways to understand, evaluate and promote both the hard and the soft side  of the Ecotourism Spectrum shown in Figure 11.1 of Weaver’s book, and everything in-between, believing that even though I am certainly a die-hard hard ecotourist who goes active and deep spending much of my career focusing mainly on broad sector outcomes and embracing philosophies that are holistic and taking the  elemental approach, working on enhancement or status quo sustainability, exploring global or local spatial scopes, etc.),  we can have sustainable Mass  Tourism that takes has a specialized or diversionary focus, accommodates large groups, multi-purpose trips, shorter trips etc., leveraging its economies of scale to bring about positive change.  What I eschew are what Weaver calls on page 193 “nature-based tourism products such as beach resorts, where the natural environment provides a convenient setting for the fulfilment of hedonistic or similar impulses”.  You rarely catch me doing anything like that unless I’m trying to accommodate family or friends and they all know I rather disdain such tourist activities as not just a waste of time, but ultimately destructive.  My whole world basically revolves around what Weaver calls the “Ecotourium”.

Host:

Yes,,let’s take a look at what Weaver says about the “Ecotourium” concept he has set forth on page 204, which he says is an improvement even on the Comprehensive model. Weaver says the industry and sector is seeking to

“operationalize the modified comprehensive ecotourism model through the concept of the ecotourium, which they define as a protected area where all types of ecotourist are mobilized in conjunction with the tourism industry, local communities, government and NGOs to participate in activities consistent with the

principles of comprehensive ecotourism that protect and enhance these places, thereby generating symbiosis between tourism and conservation. Ecotourists, then, are regarded in this model as active agents of positive environmental and social change. Relevant activities can include tree-planting (suitable in modified and degraded areas), removal of invasive exotic species, trail maintenance, assistance

with scientific research (e.g. plant identification surveys), participation in community based projects and donations. Crucial to the concept is the formation of an accredited global network of such areas in which all types of environments and ecosystems are represented and results from the activities are shared.”

This does seem to describe what you have been doing throughout your life.  Can you comment on this?

TH:

Well sure, a good example will be the trip I made to Swaziland two summers ago, in 2014, to visit Sakhiwe and Bonkhe, two high school students who we had given a science in action prize at the Google Science Fair for their work on low cost hydroponics. We also had a finalist in the Science Fair, Rohit, who had designed a more efficient toilet, and his brother Amit, who travelled from India to Africa to join me. We spent the week staying in tents at a youth hostel and integrated the Indian boys toilet, my biodigester and the Swazi boys hydroponics growing system, building at both the hostel for ecotourists and at Sahkhiwe’s grandfather’s farm.  So we got to live social sustainability, experience and contribute to green lodging and work in rural Africa on a farm.  The last day we then were taken by the locals to the national park on safari, so we got to see crocodiles and zebra and giraffes and hippos.  So a project like this proved the ecotourium model is really robust… we not only had the high school and college students, a professor like me, and the kids grandparents and relatives involved in putting best practice into action, but one of the cooks in the youth hostel asked if her 11 year old son could stay with us and be an apprentice, so we had younger kids too.  And on top of it, the lodge owner and his staff, who was looking for a way up the ante in terms of their sustainability practices, became so enthusiastic that they not only adopted the technologies we brought to them, but provided their vehicles and staff to help us implement them in the local community. Having built these bonds, and even gotten press for it in Scientific American, the next step is that we actually are forming this accredited global network Weaver talks about.  The key is forming these social networks of active agents. I believe in Weavers model because I am part of the process. This January I am going to the Zaatari Refugee camp in Jordan with students and volunteers to provide sanitation relief. We will also help create a permanent permaculture training ground by the Israeli border. And of course we will contextualize it with special side trips to the Dead Sea and the hot springs and the ancient ruins of Petra, but the touristic cultural and natural activities will then have more meaning, contextualized within the framework of “ how do we keep our seas from dying, how might we harness the hot springs for clean renewable energy, and most importantly how do we keep our own civilization from collapsing and being devoured by the desert sands…?”

Host:
Pretty heady stuff.  Do we have any evidence that this sort of experience has more general appeal? And what makes you think these goals are even achievable?

TH: Well, none of us can say if we won’t end up doing too little too late, but I stay in the game because whether or not we “save the world” or not, it really is a whole lot more fun than hedonistic tourism, and I’m not the only person to feel that way.  Perhaps it is because I work with students, from middle school through college and graduate school, but I think what we are seeing is a new more engaged form of both education and activism.  Weaver lays out the agenda on page 193 in section  11.2.2 where he says,

“Motivations of education and learning about the natural environment distinguish ecotourism from other nature-based tourism products such as beach resorts, where the natural environment provides a convenient setting for the fulfilment of hedonistic or similar impulses (Weaver, 2001b).” 

We covered that earlier, and you know how I feel about that. I’m reminded of Francis Bacon’s 1627 Eutopian novel “A New Atlantis” in which he insisted that it was our educational systems that were making a mess of society by divorcing learning from civic duty and applied theory.  In his utopia he has a resident of the New Atlantis explain to a tourist visiting the eutopia from England that  the mere experience of touring the city or going out in the countryside was in itself a meaningful education. Just by going about sightseeing you were guaranteed to learn philosophy, the arts and science and math. Weaver paints such a picture of the emerging Ecotourium.  He continues by saying,
“ As with nature-based attractions, educational opportunities and experiences can be ranged along a continuum. At one pole, these attempt to foster deep understanding through interpretation that conveys

complex messages and seeks to transform the attitudes and behaviour of the audience along a more environmentalist-oriented trajectory (see Section 10.4.2). This model, which is evident in the whale watching tours at Kaikoura, New Zealand (Curtin, 2003), aligns with the holistic approach to nature-based attractions described above.

At the other pole, shallow understanding is conveyed through relatively simple and basic messages that focus on charismatic megafauna. In either case, ecotourism product managers should provide appropriate interpretation, or at least maintain conditions (e.g. peacefulness, non-interference) that allow ecotourists to pursue a more self-directed or contemplative path of learning.” 

So what we are seeing emerging is this world in which the mere creation of that Baconian New Atlantis in the tourist destination may be enough to ignite in both the tourist, the tour operator and the local backstage community what Bacon thought of as a natural human tendency toward good citizenship. Think of it – a touristic environment of peacefulness and non-interference bringing out the best in human nature, allowing contemplation to take place that many of us belief can lead to SELF directed good outcomes. That’s the key, which we explored last chapter about not being heavy handed about it.  The act of going into the world can be the first act in the theater of healing.”

Host:

Well, that is fairly utopian, isn’t it?  It requires a deep belief in the Biophilia hypothesis of Harvard Sociobiologist E.O. Wilson and the principles of Environmental Psychology doesn’t it? It flies in the face of Judeo-Christian notions of “original sin” and the Hobbesian view of human life being “Nasty Brutish and Short” and takes us right back to the debate between Hobbes and Lock and Jean Jacques Rousseaus Social Contract and ideas about Noble Savages and all that doesn’t it?  Do you really think Ecotourism offers insights into all this?

T.H.

Well, we do have an opportunity for some controlled experiments here, which we didn’t have in the preceding centuries. All we have to do is control for a random sample of tourists, some engaging in normal hedonistic tourist activities and some in ecotourism, and see what the outcomes are and subject them to statistical analysis.  I mean look, the idea that meaningful activity makes a difference in people’s lives is now enshrined in the Holocaust survivor psychologist  Victor Frankel’s classic  “Man’s Search for Meaning” and  the idea that tourist destinations can have curative effects is what motivated Frederick Law Olmsted to create the completely artificial urban wilderness we now call Central Park.

Evaluating the impact of the growing Ecotourism sector shouldn’t be so difficult, as we can use not just stated preference surveys but Revealed Preference surveys to see what impact it is having. And remember how Weaver defines Ecotourism. He says on page 193,

“Ecotourism is the only high profile tourism sector where environmentally and socioeconomically

sustainable practices, or at least the credible attempt to engage in such

practices, are widely regarded as a prerequisite. It is because of this explicit accountability

and the issues of credibility it raises, that ecotourism is referred to in the title

of this chapter as the conscience of sustainable tourism. The reference to credible

attempts is from Weaver (2001b), who regards as unrealistic any definition that requires

the ecotourism product to be sustainable, given the challenges and issues of sustainability

discussed in Chapter 2. These render it effectively impossible to say that any

particular ecotourism product or destination is, without doubt, sustainable, especially

if these products and destinations involve high order protected areas or similar

venues that merit a strong approach to sustainability. Rather, the litmus test of ecotourism

according to Weaver (2001b) is the application of best practice strategies to

attain optimal sustainability outcomes and the timely remediation of any inadvertent

negative impacts that become apparent to management (see Section 11.6).”As with other sectors, the engagement with sustainability within ecotourism can

range from a ‘basic’ model that focuses on sustaining the on-site direct impact status

quo, to a deeper approach that focuses on the enhancement of the site and its surroundings

(potentially at a global level), while also taking into account the amelioration

of indirect impacts and the effects of external forces and systems (see Figure 2.1).”

Host:
Yes, and you seem to be a big believer in the remediation and enhancement ideas that Weaver talks about aren’t you?

T.H.
Of course, and after all, this is what places like Central Park teach us.  Many people assume that Central park was the orginal Manhattan wilderness that the Dutch encountered when they created New Amsterdam which then became New York, and that the city was somehow built around this untouched piece of real estate. In fact the park was created out of an old munitions dump. The rocks were trucked in, the trees planted, the ponds and streams sculpted.  It is a work of art.

Having worked for 4 years in the horticulture department of the Los Angeles Zoo and participated in educational and interpretative ethnobotanical projects in ecotourism areas of Guatemala and Belize and Costa Rica, I know the kind of rehabilitation and enhancement and restorative magic we humans can participate in with nature once we understand the regenerative processes. I agree with Weaver when he says on pare 201, “environmental benefits derive from the capacity of ecotourism to

foster the rehabilitation of modified spaces and to mobilize ecotourists as volunteers (e.g. to plant trees, maintain trails and serve as informal auxiliary police) and a potent source of on-site and ongoing donations.”  When I was in Sumatera and Borneo with the Indonesian Forest Service we helped find and arrest poachers who were illegally logging the area.  What was best is that we had a chance to speak to them and find out why they were poaching. Most said they felt the tourism areas were socially unjust; that the government and tour operators were protecting the forests only for the benefit of the high paying ecotourists and they felt it was better to get some money from exploiting the forest in the short term than see it turned into a playground for the rich. I think if we hadn’t been there as a kind of informal auxiliary police we helped the real police do a better job. They might have simply beat the poachers for breaking the law… who knows… and that would have just made the conflict worse. By having us there as international observers who understood the issues we were able to get the different perspectives aired out, and that helps create better policy that meets all stakeholder needs. And knowing which trees had been removed and what the damage was we could take steps to reforest in responsible ways that attract the right wildlife rather than just planting any old fast growing tree which might not fit the ecology.

And when it comes to completely modified spaces, like cities, it gets even more exciting, especially for most of us who have to return to cities, given that over 60% of humanity now lives in urban environments.

Weaver says,
“Urban areas are an extreme version of modified space and therefore seem at first to be especially unsuited to ecotourism. However, the apparently oxymoronic concept of urban ecotourism is now receiving considerable attention in the literature. Weaver (2005b) argues that within the urban area proper, ecotourism settings can range from remnant natural habitats in river valleys and hills, through to derelict and reclaimed sites, manicured green spaces such as municipal parks and golf courses, and built sites. The preserved forests in the centre of densely urbanized Singapore are a good illustration of the first scenario (Henderson et al., 2001), while the latter scenario is represented by the above-mentioned storks of Europe as well as the peregrine falcons reintroduced into high-rise buildings in some North

American central business districts. The city of Austin, Texas, is noted for a colony of 1.5 million Mexican free-tailed bats that roosts beneath the Congress Avenue Bridge*. Perhaps the best articulated example of urban ecotourism centred on abuilt structure, the bridge attracts an estimated 100 000 visitors per year and approximately $8 million in revenue (Moreno, 2004).”
As an urban planner, this particularly excites me because I can’t for the life of me see why, if we finally accept that human beings are animals that evolved with our environments and start seeing ourselves as completely “natural”, why we can’t focus on making our built environments as healthy and sustainable as that of any other organism that has achieved a balance with the ecosystem. After all, we don’t consider beehives, anthills, beaver dams or deer hollows “unnatural” or unsustainable.

Weaver excites the imagination when he says on page 200 “In addition to being conducive to an elemental approach to ecotourism attractions, modified spaces offer excellent opportunities for deep learning and sophisticated interpretation because of the complex landscape influences and effects that

they feature. The juxtaposition of remnant natural habitat with intensive arable land, for example, can be used to illustrate concepts such as edge and oasis effect, while succession can be featured in areas where rehabilitation is being undertaken.”

This is the sort of embedded learning that would have pleased Francis Bacon in the New Atlantis very much.

Weaver continues, “With regard to the third core criterion of sustainability, modified spaces have the advantage of having a high carrying capacity compared to relatively undisturbed natural venues, thereby meriting a weaker approach to sustainability. Ecotourism is therefore not only less likely to generate serious negative environmental impacts, but may serve as an effective agent of enhancement sustainability because of the opportunities for rehabilitation. From the perspective of sociocultural sustainability, modified spaces are more accessible to the ‘masses’ and hence avoid the problem of elitism that characterizes the visitation of hard ecotourists to remote wilderness locations.” So that addresses some of the issues we saw in Sumatera.

And when it comes to the truly threatened areas that simply can’t maintain their balance with too much human occupation of the wrong type, ecotourism provides some answers.  Yes, as Weaver reminds us, ecotourism creates a “a dilemma by concentrating ecotourism, and its potentially negative impacts, in

a shrinking amount of vulnerable space with the highest conservation value that is least capable of withstanding these impacts” But the comprehensive model seems to take that into account, with Weaver concluding,

“the  comprehensive approach must be applied to both hard and soft ecotourism (see Figure 11.2), since it is allegedly the latter – soft ecotourism --  that produces the economies of scale necessary to operationalize the incentive and funding effects described in Section 11.6.1.” where he talks about ecotourism’s greatest environmental benefit, which is “providing a direct financial incentive for the preservation of relatively undisturbed natural habitats that would otherwise be exposed to more exploitative and profitable (at least in the short term) activities. This effect can also be indirect, as demonstrated by efforts to protect terrestrial watersheds in parts of the Philippines from logging in order to protect the clarity and quality of water in an area used for marine ecotourism (Sherman and Dixon, 1991). Ecotourism revenues, additionally, are a critical source of the funding required to undertake basic protected area management as well as park system expansion and enhancement”.
He reminds us that “ Through such accommodation, the model embraces all the opportunity classes of the Recreation Opportunity Spectrum, as well as both weak and strong approaches to sustainability, depending on the setting. In this way, the model in theory has a universal application that embraces ecotourism both as locally focused alternative tourism as well as corporation focused mass tourism.”

Host:

So essentially you are not opposed to corporate mass tourism? For ecotourism to be the ‘conscience of sustainable tourism” can we really allow corporations, which have been described as “negative externality machines” to be involved? What’s your final statement about that?

T.H.;

I think if we have learned anything from our journey into the topic of Sustainable Tourism it is that what we are all trying to do is figure out how to live on the planet without hurting ourselves or others, and we have all the tools we need. We are now in the implementation phase and the awareness building phase. Not everybody is aware that there are win wins out there, and the wealth and power amassed by corporations as they create and control mass markets has been devastating. But those same powers can be harnessed for great good once best practices are put in place and yes, Ecotourism has to be the conscience that guides this transition.  As Weaver states, and I’ll end with this in defense of Ecotourism as the most important tool we have to make things work,

“All tourism entails costs as well as benefits and ecotourism is no exception. What

distinguishes ecotourism from other forms of tourism in this respect, however, is

that to qualify as such, every effort must be made to ensure that environmentally

and socioculturally sustainable practices are undertaken. Hence, most of the negative

impacts that do arise from ecotourism are inadvertent, while the positive

impacts are generally deliberate”.

If our conscience says to do DELIBERATE GOOD, and we face inadvertent harm, then fine, we can use our consilience and our science  and policy to correct those harms and try again. And that is why I believe that ALL tourism should apply the core principles and evolve into a form of Ecotourism, but an ecotourism that includes human ecology and does so by considering us and our industrial ecologies part of natural ecology. It’s a way of looking at the world.  We have the 8 core principles of the EcoCertification Programme which are 1) The need to focus on a personal experience with nature that leads to increased understanding and appreciation. We can’t forget that nature is at the core of our ability to survive, whether in the city or out in the countryside where the city’s ecological footprint is today so huge. 2) the integration of opportunities to understand the natural environment into each experience – that would include our experiences in the built environment and, 3) the pursuit of best practices – ones we know can turn our problems into solutions, our wastes and liabilities into fertilities and assets, 4) Positive contributions to conservation, -- every action we take should conserve and preserve or recycle or enhance 5) emphasize the rights and needs of local communities 6) be  sensitive to local cultures in product interpretation – this is just common decency  7) accurate marketing – that just means telling the truth and  8) meeting client expectations on a consistent basis – that means not just not lying or misrepresenting but talking  to people and listening  to people – to all stakeholders – that’s simple democracy in action --  and make sure you never turn a deaf ear to what people need. Most people don’t really need a vacation,you’ll find.  they need experiences that are meaningful and life affirming and joy enhancing and edifying. And we can create those anywhere and everywhere.
Apply the array of core and advanced indicators and require the Ecotourism Certification in which a product must meet 100 percent of the core criteria, scaling up to Advanced Certification and its critieria, and you shift society away from a destructive model to something far more productive. 
I see a time coming where, whether you are in the city or the countryside or in a wilderness, you will ask yourself three simple questions: Is the ecosystem here healthy and life affirming? Will what is happening here work economically so that it isn’t a net drain on the flows of income and will remain affordable both in a resource and financial sense? Is it socially just?
If the answer is yes to those three pillars, it will be sustainable, and visiting the location will be itself an economically viable, life affirming and dignified form of sustainable ecotourism. “

Host: Let’s hope your dreams of this Eutopia come true.
That’s all we have time for folks, so we hope you enjoyed our show and look forward to seeing you next season… or out in the field somewhere, putting these ideas into practice.  As they say, “Goodnight, and goodluck!”

Sustainable Tourism Chapter 10 Relational Summary

 Sustainable Tourism Chapter 10

Textbook by David Weaver

Relational Summary by T.H.Culhane

Chapter 10:

Visitor management strategies for destinations

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

• Assess the circumstances under which visitation capping strategies such as quotas, entry fees and infrastructure limitations are warranted in a destination to prevent negative tourism impacts
• Describe how spatial and temporal channeling strategies can be employed to obtain sustainable tourism outcomes
• Apply the recreation opportunity spectrum (ROS) as a framework for matching visitor expectations with available tourism resources
• Evaluate the strategies by which visitor behavior can be positively modified through effective education, including persuasion and interpretation and
• Explain how destination managers can use target marketing and demarketing to attract desired visitors and discourage those that are unwanted.

These are all laudable goals and I hope to cover most of them here. Let’s start at the end though, shall we?

Demarketing strategies. That’s a good one. How about a sign that says “Trespassers will be eaten”.  I could  make jokes about theme park castles putting alligators in their moats but…  we don’t want to go there…  Still, you gotta ask yourself, when is it appropriate for a tour operator to say, “hey, DON’T COME”?   When I was doing my senior thesis at Harvard way back in 1984, I spent a semester and a summer videotaping the behavior of the world’s only talking marine mammal – a harbor seal named Hoover. He was the New England Aquarium’s star attraction, bringing in tourists from all over the world to admire his talents.  And what did this amazing talking seal actually say? “Ge-ge-ge – get outta here!”  Get outta here! Talk about demarketing.
It didn’t work though – the more the seal yelled at people to leave and insulted them in a bluster of agonistic male dominance behavior, the more came to see him. Kinda like certain politicians…

But first, why would a tourist destination want to make itself unpopular?

Well, it seems there are two pricing strategies in most markets  -- low price high volume and high price low volume.  Exclusive resorts go for the latter, and to maintain the price premium they have to guarantee a certain level of exclusivity.  Weaver tells us that “the concept of demarketing was introduced in the early 1970s as ‘that aspect of marketing that deals with discouraging customers in general or a certain class of customers in particular on a temporary or permanent basis… Demarketing is evident in the tourism strategies of Bermuda and other ‘high end’ destinations.. wherein mass tourists are actively discouraged at the same time as high spending visitors are encouraged.  Hence, demarketing can be regarded as the opposite of target marketing. Indirect demarketing strategies include reductions in overall promotion, price increases and the elimination of products that attract the undesirable markets” (p. 187)

Other examples of such demarketing are the exclusive Scottish golf courses, like those belonging to , er… certain politicians… In some of these cases there is no need to set a “quota” per se, rather one can restrict visitorship to manageable levels by setting the prices so high that very few can afford it but just low enough that it guarantees the number of visitors at the right rate to maintain the desired profit margins of the resort.

In private businesses offering the differentiated luxury services Weaver talked about in the previous chapters this isn’t so hard to achieve, it is in the worlds of higher volume/lower price mass tourism and in public tourism, such as national parks, that the acts of demarketing must be more carefully thought through.  Weaver, on page 175, talks about the iconic Galapagos National Park, describing it as “a high order protected area off the coast of Ecuador that was declared a World Heritage site in 1978” where “its managers have employed a strategy wherein visitor caps are established and periodically raised, thus indicating a fluctuation between fixed and flexible carrying capacity approaches. The 1973 Master Plan established a ceiling of 12000 annual visitors, which was subsequently raised  to 25,000 in 1981 and 50,000 in the early 1990s There is evidence to suggest that these ceilings have been frequently and deliberately violated, although it is unclear in the first instance whether such exponential increases were viable from a sustainability perspective.”

From where I sit I believe that the profit motive makes people walk a tightrope of ever greater danger,  because  humans tend not to apply the cautionary principle very well. One is reminded of the advice people give for cooking in a Wok: “Cook it until just before it burns.” Of course you have to have experience burning things to get a feel for how far you can push the envelope before things are ruined.  The problem is that many parks are running uncontrolled experiments, hoping that if they mess up, things will recover. The temporal considerations given on page 180 give some hope if we understand recovery cycles in natural and sensitive cultural environments, but it does take a deep level of commitment to applying the proper science since many natural systems can go into collapse. This is usually the case where ecological systems have not been exposed to human impacts and where mechanisms aren’t in place to preserve cultural artifacts and this is particularly the case on public lands. So quotas need to be enforced.
Weaver says that “visitor caps are …  becoming increasingly prevalent at high demand linear recreational resources such as the West Coast Trail in British Columbia, Canada and the Wilderness trails of Yosemite National Park in California, where numbers are regulated through a free permit system. In the former case, no more than 60 hikers are permitted to begin the hike each day and an annual quota of 8000 users has been imposed.” (P. 175).

The carrying capacity is of course somewhat subjective.  I had the unpleasant experience of trying to impress a girlfriend from Germany in the year 2002 by renting a hybrid car from Los Angeles (yes, I was that eco-conscious back then – there was only one rental agency in the whole city that had them and it cost a premium) and driving all the way up to San Francisco on the coastal highway to show her the redwood trees of Muir Woods National Monument near the Golden Gate bridge.  Though the giant sequoias were still there, surrounded by the moss and the mist that make viewing spectacular, there were so many tourists on the trail lined up for the hike that she actually cried and said furiously, “America is ruined, ruined! This isn’t a wilderness, it is a theme park. If I wanted to wait in line to see attractions we could go back to Disneyland.”

In fact, hanging out in the false wilderness of Tom Sawyer Island  one would actually see less people. If you want to see the kind of traffic around trees that you see at John Muir state park you need to hop over to Universal studios to the ET ride where the same  huge sequoias are made of polymerized concrete and create the mood for the beginning of the ride.

However, it can be said that that level of foot traffic is precisely what is allowing those peri-urban giants in the real forest and the wildlife they support survive so close to a major metropolitan city.  It’s the place the newly uplifted hominoids in Planet of the apes escape to in the latest movies and very accessible by the Golden Gate Bridge, just 15 km north.  The tourists did stick to the trails and follow the advice of the signs and game wardens and it didn’t seem that erosion was high; I imagine the trees and the squirrels and owls have long since adapted to the presence of bipedal hominids milling about gawking and taking selfies and don’t let it interfere with their breeding opportunities in the least.
So we can’t really say that the carrying capacity of the forest has been reached from an ecological point of view.  At one time it may have been herds of Tule Elk, a rare species of native San Francisco ungulates that once numbered over 500,000, that the other wildlife watched slowly file by on the trails, and they munch on the vegetation, while the people just leave candy wrappers.
No, the limits here are more psychological than anything else, and since tour operators and park revenue collectors know there is a latent demand to see the trees that is never satisfied, no matter how many people get in the long line that weaves through the trees and how much my then-girlfriend swears she will never go back and will discourage all her friends, this wildlife park will stay open for business, making lots of money off of parking and entrance fees.
In fact, the way most of these parks are run, when it comes to public parks, is that well intentioned NGOs and governmental organizations do the famous WTP or “Willingness to Pay” Survey and figure out a population pressure point and a price point that will keep the tourists coming. And they will keep coming. 
Good examples of how long they will keep coming came to my consciousness when I joined a group of National Science Teacher’s Association members on the the hike to El Yunque Rain Forest in Puerto Rico one day, and the downhill coral reefs beneath it the next.  We paid good money to hike around and swim around looking at the devastation from one of the major hurricanes.  Much of the forest was flattened, there were gouges of depression erosion, and the silt that had come down had all but killed the reef, making the dive one of the worst I had ever been on with horrendous visibility, hardly any fish and coral that was silt grey and brown rather than vibrant hues of red, yellow and blue. But we paid for the experience.  It was only topped by the dive I did in Bahrain, an island nation in the Gulf of Arabia whose name means “the two seas” and who once had one of the few “ribbon reefs” in the world, a reef where the ancient pearl divers got the best most precious oysters with the largest pearls, a reef so spectacular in species diversity that Jacques Cousteau filmed one of his first television specials there in the 1950s.  By the time I got there in 2005 it was so dead that our best dive was on a shipwreck, a massive hunk of an oil barge that had been sunk deliberately to try to bring the reef back by providing shelter for fish and surface area for new coral to cling to.  It was like diving in a ghost town, and I was fortunate to have done it at night because at least that way there was some mystery to exploring the graveyard of what was once a reef, where now only spiny black sea urchins scour the dying sea bottom while the ubiquitious striped yellow tails and jelly fish patrolled the upper waters, scavengers all. When I asked the boat captain what was going on he said, “it is Bahrain’s great tragedy – they have been experiencing a construction boom for tourism, for all these high end shopping malls and  hotels and casinos and nightclubs – it is the other Mecca for wealthy Saudis who drive across the causeway that connects Bahrain to oppressive Saudia Arabia in their Mercedes to come and party, to drink alcohol and hire Russian prostitutes and ride jet skis and lounge by the pool and shop til they drop.  Meanwhile most of the sand from that construction is dredged from the coastal areas of Bahrain and that has either directly killed the reefs or silted up the water to kill them.  This wreck is a cheap way to provide something to do on a dive, just sink ships you don’t want anymore and call them tourist attractions.”
I asked whether anything could be done about it.  He shook his head sadly and said, “Recently I gave the diving certification course to the nephew of one of the top ministers.  He was very enthusiastic about diving but  then became very disillusioned by the devastation he saw. He went to his uncle and said “Uncle, why do we continue to dredge the sand in our waters and kill our national heritage? Why aren’t we simply trucking in sand over the causeway from the deserts of Saudi Arabia?” His uncle said to him, “Nephew, we are having a business boom and a tourist boom and we have contracts in place with our suppliers. It saves us money it makes us money. And as for your precious reefs, don’t worry, we will be so rich that when the time comes we will simply rebuild them.” This is the level of ecological awareness of the ruling elites in these countries – they see the living reef pavilion in Epcot and think they can fix nature by throwing money at it. In fact, my next dive on that tour was in the artificial reef tank in Kuwait City next to the Imax theater, diving with sharks and rays and magnificent fish from the oil spoiled Arabian Gulf. I paid good money for the experience too, and it was climate controlled, like the desert ski runs and ice skating rinks in the malls.  For adventurers like me, firmly on the Allocentric side of the tourism scale, there is always the chance to pay to dive on the dying reefs outside, and I did so, just as I used to pay as a kid to dive in the Quarries of New Jersey where I could get inside a underwater magic schoolbus and pretend to drive.

In other words, in case you haven’t noticed,  I’m not convinced that Visitation Caps and quotas will actually do much, though because I can afford to pay and am willing to pay for more exotic and less populated experiences, I do appreciate them – diving Oman was incredible because it is much more expensive to get to and is thus much less spoiled. Also, I understand why quotas may not be appropriate. As Weaver says, “In a democratic society, formal visitor quotas are only rarely applied to municipality level political units due to issues such as freedom of access rights, political opposition and enforceability (e.g. easy physical access, cost). At the national level countries with border controls in place are in a better position to levy quotas on foreign visitors, though they seldom do so because of the desire to increase revenue from international tourism.” (p. 176.)

This is an important issue for equity and social and environmental justice as well as business sustainability, which are pillars of our sustainable tourism concept.  For example, when I visited the Sultanate of Brunei, two of the things that kept the primary rainforests intact where eco-tourism and offshore oil revenue. Unlike neighboring Malaysia the government of Brunei and its business elite had no reason to cut down the forests for timber or African Oil Palm plantations, and the local people had no reason to poach or mine. The rainforest I did my research in even had Clivus Multrum composting toilets so the more tourists who visited, the more soil they created.  A simple technological fix like this ensured that the rivers were not spoiled by fecal material, while nearbye in Sumatera at a rainforest lodge I had gotten desperately sick from swimming in the local river because of human sewage. And because Brunei can afford to maintain its forest cover, it can concentrate the activity in certain eco-lodge areas.
As Weaver points out on page 178, “Unregulated tourism development, as depicted in the destination life cycle model, tends toward spatial and temporal concentration, which in turn is commonly regarded as both a cause and symptom of unsustainability… Yet, with appropriate regulation and management, spatial concentration can actually serve as an effective strategy contributing to the attainment of sustainable tourism within the destination as a whole. This contention is based in part on the premise that concentrated tourism activity serves to confine negative impacts such as congestion to a small portion of the destination, thereby leaving most of the latter as a backstage relatively unscathed by these direct negative impacts, while still receiving benefits from employment and revenue disbursments.” He tells us, “The Gold Coast of Australia illustrates this phenomenon, wherein the vast majority of tourism activity occurs along a narrow coastal strip occupying less than 2 percent of the City Council area… strategies focused on concentration are also justified by the economies of scale they generate that allow otherwise uneconomical site hardening and visitor management measures to be pursued within confined frontstage spaces. For example, the sophisticated and environmentally friendly  facility development that is being carried out at the South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park is only feasible because of the expectation of four million or more visitors per year at the site. Central to this development is the introduction of mass transit shuttle options that will largely eliminate the need for private vehicles and parking lots in the South Rim area…. Seen in this light, the confined frontstages that are generated through concentration strategies can be described as nodes of sustainable mass tourism rather than ‘sacrificial spaces” in which negative environmental or sociocultural impacts are assumed.” P. 179.

I’ve seen the dispersal/concentration based hybrid strategies in places like the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, where the investment of huge numbers of tourists enabled the Egyptian tourism authority to replace all the usual smoky diesel and gasoline buses with electric trams – Weaver also talks on page 180  about a time limit on group visits to Nefertitie’s tomb, so as to disperse or concentrate visitors through time, allowing natural recovery through a temporal component to a redistribution strategy, and I saw this in Lebanon at the famous Jeita Grotto caves where they  provide silent clean electric boats during limited hours to move large volumes of tourists through to explore the caves. It felt a little like being in Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyworld and it was fun.  These high value experiences, which have been hardened to protect the primary sites, subsidize other more vulnerable  protected areas as part of what Weaver calls the “Recreation Opportunity Spectrum” or ROS – an organizational framework that facilitates concentration and dispersal strategies by matching various types of recreational expectations and desired experiences with areas where these experiences are compatible and where satisfying as well as environmentally sustainable experiences can be subsequently undertaken. Hence it is closely related to the concepts of carrying capacity and LAC as discussed in Section 9.2.3.” For example, says Weaver on page 180, As employed by the US Forest Service, the ROS allows for six categories of ‘opportunity classes’ ranging from ‘primitive spaces that emphasize isolation and close contact with nature, to ‘urban’ spaces that are heavily  serviced to accommodate large numbers of visitors pursuing a wide range of activities. Intermediate categories include ‘semi-primitive non-motorized’, “semi-primitive motorized’, ‘roaded natural’ and ‘rural’”… a novel critique is offered by R. Manning, 1999, who criticizes the ROS for adhering to rigid linear alignments of environmental, social and managerial criteria (i.e. ‘natural’ environmental conditions are aligned with ‘low-density’ social conditions and ‘undeveloped’ managerial conditions) when there is no inherent basis for precluding the possibility, for example of high density use in natural areas under intensely managed circumstances”, end quote page 180… and that is what I experienced in the Muir Monument Forest. I think perhaps the difference between me and my then German girlfriend and our enjoyment of the redwood trees is that I saw the concentration of people there as a positive thing precisely because I knew at least something about the Recreation Opportunity Spectrum and appreciated it. I felt by spending our money to see the trees and staying on the trail with the other tourists, we were doing our part to preserve wildlife, and came away feeling like a good citizen. And after all isn’t coming away feeling good the common denominator for the whole tourism experience?

Fundamentally, whether tourists are an asset or a liability, and whether or not they come away from their travels and visits feeling good and doing good is a matter of perception and most importantly EDUCATION.  In his section on Education and Persuasion, 10.4, Weaver has two charts that we should look at before we wrap up this relational summary of the chapter.  On page 181, Figure 10.1 shows the “Effectiveness of intervention strategies by type of action” depicting when and how indirect and soft intervention can work and when and how direct and hard intervention can work to discourage illegal, careless, unskilled, uninformed and unavoidable bad behaviors.  As you might surmise, illegal and careless actions require higher levels of direct intervention (such as physical barriers and policing) , but for the most part soft, indirect action, such as persuasion and education that is “not to pedantic or heavy handed”  tracks the numbers of tourists and does quite well.  After all, as McKercher, 1993 remind us in his exposition of the ‘fundamental truths’ about tourism, “tourists are not anthropologists but consumers who are primarily concerned with being entertained.” But Weaver in tern reminds us that this assertion “fails to recognize that tourists motivations are extremely diverse, but does suggest that desired sustainability outcomes are unlikely to be achieved in a destination if mass tourists are exposed to education that is too pedantic or heavy handed…”  One of the  things we learn from theme parks and even from restaurants like McDonalds, is how little careless behavior people engage in when the normative culture persuades and emphasizes good practices – after all, who would have suspected that a fast food restaurant could get so many people, who normally expect to be waited on,  to politely do the clearing of a table themselves, carrying their trays and trash to the designated areas.  People in mass tourism have been described as sheep pejoratively, but in the hands of a good shepherd or normative structure they tend to fall in line quite nicely.

The last two graphics we will look at (there are only three in the entire chapter after all!) are Figures 10.2 and Figure 10.3.

Figure 10.2 hows the Himalayan Tourist Code which helps tourists frame their experience and engage in best practices by appealing to their sense of decency.  It tells them how they can help protect the natural environment (for example by using as little firewood as possible and actually HELPING THE GUIDES AND PORTERS FLLOW THE CONSERVATION MEASURES,) and respecting local traditions and helping maintain local pride.  When I was trekking in the Himalayas with National Geographic’s Dr. Alton Byers Director of Research and Education at The Mountain Institute two years in a row, I learned about the endangered slow growing juniper shrub which stabilizes the vulnerable soil from erosion and catastrophic flooding but which was being used unwittingly or irresponsibly by tourists and their guides for cooking fires and heating water . Once I and the other members of the expedition knew the dangers of using juniper shrub we became champions and advocates for best practices and even went so far as to purchase and carry up to the top of the world a vacuum tube solar hot water system and install it. In this way we turned our tourist into a net positive impact on the fragile ecosystem.  Other tourist groups were coming up and installing solar cookers.  Nobody forced us… in fact it became a badge of pride and a voluntour experience in itself! 

Figure 10.3  considers “Channel Factors” or influences on persuasion, looking at how the message is delivered.
In the left column it shows a sequence from Message to Persuasion to Favourable Actions that goes from Exposure to Absorption to Reception to Interpretation to Integration to Action. It asks “How many people are exposed to the message? What proportion of those exposed read, see or hear the message?” “Does it enter the memory and make an impression on the above? Do these people make sense of it? Do they form an option about it? Does it make a long-term impact on their values and attitudes? Do they act positively on these?”

From a sociobiological point of view, humans are just other animals in the landscape, and whether we do great harm or great good really depends on whether or not we interact with the natural world in  a life enhancing or a life degrading way.  We have the technologies and techniques and mechanisms to be a force for extreme good. In my opinion courses like this, and the kinds of discussions we are having, can turn humanity into a welcome partner with the natural world and with other cultures and each of you can be the educated ambassador how can make that long-term impact on other humans values and attitudes so that we can truly create a sustainable tourism.