ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter we outlined a basic conceptualization of the ecotourism-extraction nexus in order to draw attention to the core problematique that drives this volume: the seeming incommensurability of the activities of ecotourism (sustainable) and extraction (unsustainable) and the unstable epistemologies these are derived from and to which they lead. In this chapter we seek to further conceptualize the ecotourism-extraction nexus theoretically, so as to provide a foundation for the case study chapters. In particular, the aim is to develop a theoretical framework that seeks to bring together concrete lived experiences and abstract political economic power structures in order to problematize and ‘defetishize’ the incommensurability associated with the nexus and related ideas about ‘sustainable’ and ‘unsustainable’ development. Indeed, we go further than this. Epistemologically, the ecotourism-extraction nexus works across a broad terrain of seeming contradictions or dichotomies that need to be dealt with to adequately capture the ‘nexus’. The categories that are both visible and implicit in the ‘common-sense’ juxtaposition of the incommensurability in question are enumerated in Table 2.1, although the list is by no means exhaustive. These categories span and connect imaginaries of places, ideologies, ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ values and outcomes, and even attributions of emotional labour around this framework of seemingly dramatic crossroads. Contradictions or dichotomies associated with the ecotourism-extraction nexus https://www.niso.org/standards/z39-96/ns/oasis-exchange/table">
Ecotourism
Extraction
Nature
Society
Sustainable (pure/pristine)
Unsustainable (degraded/spoilt)
Space of attraction
Space to avoid
Adventure/romantic
Ordinary/mundane
Hope
Despair
Altruism/virtue
Responsibility/guilt
Good
Bad
Post-industrial
Industrial
Primitive
Modern
Green
Brown
Ecological holism/integrity
Ecological alienability
Pre/post-capitalist
Capitalist
Alternative
Mainstream
