Mother Nature's Best Kept Secret?

Since the early 1990s, ecotourism has been promoted around the world as a sustainable alternative to resource extraction, such hunting, logging, and mining. Indeed, widely circulated images of specific countries as ecotourism hotspots — such as Costa Rica and Belize — often portray them as spaces that are fundamentally incompatible and opposed to extractive industry. At the local level, ecotourism is thought to promote environmental awareness in both travellers and host communities — what Arun Agrawal (2005) calls environmental subjects — resulting in the creation of strong advocates for nature conservation (Ceballos-Lascurian 1996; Norris et al. 1998; Horwich and Lyon 1998; Wearing and Neil 1999: 55; Alexander 2000; O'Neill 2002: 519–20). Ecotourism is also intended to generate funds through park entrance and concession fees and provide rural communities with jobs that will act as incentives for local people to protect rather than exploit their environments (Horwich and Lyon 1998).