Ecotourism: Responsible Travel or Marketing Sham?
By Richard Hammond, The Guardian. Posted March 29, 2007.
As green travel has become big business, it has sparked a rise in faux ecotourism. Who's scamming, who's legit and how do we tell the difference? "You have to see it to Belize it" was scrawled across the T-shirts I saw hung on a roadside stall in Belize City a decade ago. Belize's barrier reef -- the second largest in the world -- had just been enlisted as a world heritage site and the country was gearing up for a surge in tourism. Ten years on, Belize now vies with Costa Rica as the ecotourism capital of central America.
Its success reflects a growing trend for travel that puts something back into the environment and local communities. Britain's buoyant green pound is sustaining a green travel market worth £409m and it is set to grow by 25 percent a year, according to a recent report by market research analyst Mintel.
Yet there is currently no single internationally accepted standard for green tourism. Holidaymakers have to grapple with over 350 independent eco-labels, most of which are designed as a checklist for the industry, rather than as a searchable tool for travellers. Many assess only on environmental credentials so they don't provide any guarantee of quality, and none are held to account by one internationally accepted accreditation body so you can't compare like with like.
And not all eco-holidays are everything they're cracked up to be. The popular South American ecotourism website planeta.com cites John Noble, editor of Lonely Planet's Mexico guidebook, who said, "What you call 'ecotourism' in Latin America, in Europe we call a 'walk in the country'." ......(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/49881/
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