Ecotourism and Sustainable Tourism Development in Southeast Asia: John Edmonds and George Leposky

Would the goal of environmental preservation be better served if wildlife and wilderness were placed off-limits to holidaymakers? That's the view of Richard Leakey (1998), paleontologist and director of the National Museum of Kenya. He believes that ecotourism has become a label prone to abuse, fostering incursions into "areas of enormous biological importance that cannot sustain utilization by large numbers of people." Such areas, he says, would be better off if holidaymakers watched nature on TV instead of going to visit it.