ABSTRACT

The short title to this chapter belies the complexities of the issues that are manifest in the tourism/environment interface. As Holden (2000: xv) suggests, the two simple words ‘tourism’ and ‘environment’ represent complicated concepts, and ‘both can be interpreted as intricate systems, where actions taken in one part of the system have consequences for its other component parts’. Indeed, Hall (2000: 145) describes how tourism, like the environment, constitutes ‘a meta-problem, characterised by highly interconnected planning and policy messes’, cutting ‘across fields of expertise and administrative boundaries and, seemingly…[being] connected with almost everything else’. This interconnectedness is, in fact, vitally important in terms of policy implications for two major reasons. On the one hand, it implies that tourism may have adverse environmental impacts, which not only affect tourism firms and tourists (for example, through marine pollution affecting the quality of bathing), but also non-tourism subjects (for example, hotel sewage piped into the sea, which can reduce fish catch). On the other hand, it suggests that tourism can be used in a positive way, to give both the impetus and the means for environmental conservation. While there are problems of commodifying nature by attaching a financial value to it (in particular because indigenous nature/culture relationships are often ignored), tourist revenue from nature tourism, especially wildlife viewing, provides a strong economic rationale for conservation. It has been estimated that, over its lifespan, a lion in Amboseli National Park in Kenya will draw US$515,000 in foreign exchange receipts from tourism; in Botswana, the gross contribution to GDP attributable to elephants from game-viewing tourism is estimated to be US$39 million.