[Assam] [WaterWatch] Why ecotourism?

Wed Aug 20 05:15:19 PDT 2008

I am all in favour of banning Ecotourism.
Sankar Ray highlighted what was a suspicion since long.
Trekking by loners to enjoy nature may be condoned."Opening" seasons in Kaziranga is such.
Not organized money-spinning ones  like  helicoptered Quick-Hindu-Pilgrimages.
Let Ecology be -unspoilt by spoilers.
MM

To: waterwatch at yahoogroups.comFrom: ray_sankar1941 at yahoo.co.inDate: Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:12:19 +0530Subject: [WaterWatch] Why ecotourism?

Wetland conservation is all right, But why ecotourism?
Several years back, I wrote a piece in Deccan Herald against ecotourism.
It's pasted below for a healthy debate.
Sankar Ray
Silent ecocide? Theoretically, eco-tourism should be on a small scale, eco-friendly and, above all, an ?antidote to mass tourism?. But, in reality, it has almost  become a money-spinning initiative, rues Sankar Ray 
In one of the recent issues, the well-known science and technology weekly, New Scientist, expressed concern about the very concept of eco-tourism. A team of research workers, led by Kathleen Alexander, a senior wildlife veterinary officer of the Government of Botswana, identified distinctively, the weekly wrote, "the first clear-cut case of a primarily human pathogen being passed to wildlife. They have discovered two outbreaks of TB in banded mongooses at Chobe, and one that wiped out a group of meerkats in the Kalahari Desert". Chobe, many people outside Africa know, is the second largest national park where hundreds of tourists, mostly from the western countries, flock in and generate US $ 1.5 million as park fees alone. It is a pity that the more the tourists, the more the possibility of development of TB among mongooses and meerkats in Botswana and researchers doubt that the Mycobacterium tuberculosis passed on from the human beings. All this is due to the media-hyped eco-tourism, which a section of environmental scientists were from the very beginning skeptical about.David Nicholson-Lord in a hard hitting piece against eco-tourism in the US journal, Resurgence, captioned, ?Green tragedy: the blight of eco-tourism?, wrote in June this year: "Eco-tourism, as defined by the World Tourism Organisation, represents only 2 to 4 per cent of international travel spending. Suppose it grew to the point where it dominated the tourist industry. Could such a large-scale industry be managed in a small-scale way? Can anyone who has flown half way around the world in a jet powered by subsidized fossil fuel and puffing out greenhouse gases qualify as an eco-tourist?" Nicholson-Lord's critique was timely as the UN defined the year 2002 as the International Year of Eco-tourism. Theoretically, eco-tourism is to be on a small scale, eco-friendly and attuned to Nature and in a way it should be an "antidote to mass tourism". Nicholson-Lord blasts this absurd theoretical obsession. ?That's the theory, anyway. The reality is that no one has properly defined eco-tourism, and in this vacuum the marketing men, greenwashers, corporate developers and government spin doctors flourish. I have heard a casino in Laos described as eco-tourism because it was sited in untouched countryside."In India, the concept of eco-tourism was afloat in the early years of Structural Adjustment Programme during the tenure of P V Narasimha Rao as the PM. The Confederation of Indian Industry in one of its programmes brought a delegation from the Republic of Seychelles, a state, which was projected as a model for development of tourism. The presentation was magnetically elegant. But, as a member of the media, I remember the critical comments by a Tanzanian scholar who was in Calcutta. "Tourism can develop if and only if the natural habitat and natural surroundings are kept intact", he said. Theoretically, eco-tourism ensures the biological continuity of flora and fauna. But the fact remains that proliferation of concrete structures takes place even where pristine beauty draws tourists for a tranquil and blissful pastime. This should be religiously discouraged, the Tanzanian research scholar observed. I recall a visit to Raipur in the early 1990s, on a visit to a plant of the Uniworth Group. By chance, I had a meeting with an Adivasi who was working at the Bhilai Steel Plant. He said, "I am well off today. But I am not happy as I am isolated from my lovely tradition. Can you give me back my muddy cottage with frescoes that endeared us so emotionally in our childhood? Can you make me sing our tribal song and dance once again? You can't as you are in bondage with the city life." His parents used to live near the Maithon Dam of Damodar Valley Corporation. They became oustees due to the craze of large dams that are hated today unlike in those days. I felt very bad about the point my Adivasi friend rightly tried to drive home. How can the natural environment survive if the lives of those that preserve the same are endangered?The eco-tourist alternative to mass tourism is, to be ingenuous, a serious perceptual aberration since tourism has to be in the traditional sense ?a clean path? to development. But in practice, tourism industry, including spots that are regarded as eco-tourism destinations, have turned into ?terrible destroyer of landscapes, either through development or through the fundamental strains that Westernised appetites impose on fragile economies and ecosystems.? In 1950, there were around 25 million international tourists, and now the figure crossed 700 million, despite the September 11 tragedy. Nicholson-Lord suggests a politico-economic viewfinder in judging the emergence of tourism as a whole. ?Along with television, tourism is one of the most potent agents of globalisation - tourists are the shock troops of Western-style capitalism, distributing social and psychological viruses just as effectively as earlier colonists spread smallpox, measles and TB in their wake. And as with globalisation, there are voices urging reform.?The Botswana research group corroborates this view very strongly. According to Kathleen Alexander, in offering explanation on the TB epidemic among the mongooses, ?At Chobe, the mongooses are thought to have caught the disease from rubbish heaps outside a tourist lodge that were contaminated with the human pathogen. It is less clear how the meerkats became infected.? The disease, she agrees, ultimately might have been transmitted from the locals ?as there are no animals in the area known to naturally carry human TB.? But the AIDS epidemic afflicting more than one third of Botswana's population might have been aggravated by eco-tourists. Those that have both AIDS and TB are ?much more likely to infect wildlife because they shed higher levels of the bacterium in spit or faeces.? The alternative of eco-tourism is to drastically minimise the contact between animals and people if it is to be genuinely environment-conducive. But in that case tourist attraction may wane. According to the London-based Tourism Concern, eco-tourism is to develop sans native people who are ?often forcibly? made oustees or ?being destroyed by the sheer number of tourists?. A recent UNESCO report states that the World Heritage site of Macchu Picchu in Peru has become almost saturated. The people justly want a greater share of tourist revenues. They are forced to do so and are blocking roads to prevent tourists from going to the ?heights of Macchu Picchu?. Western capitalist notion is that tourism generates a huge albeit intangible social benefits. Slogans like "world peace through travel" are from these super-profit MNCs. This concept is very much debatable. Tourism, very certainly eco-tourism, that negates the role of forest villagers and native dwellers in tourist spots, aggravates the fault lines of global economic inequality in the peripheral economies of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Most interactions between tourists and local people revolve round what is nothing but the cash nexus. If people who are supposed to derive benefits from tourism suffer, why should eco-tourism be fostered? After all, the new version of tourism destroys the rich and varied tribal culture and replaces them by the casino culture 

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