ABSTRACT
However, tourism-environment relationships are not just fundamental, they are also highly complex, although the level of complexity has probably evolved through time as levels of activity and the spatial extent of tourism has increased. Page and Dowling (2002) suggest that the relationship between tourism and the environment might initially be characterised as one of ‘coexistence’. This implies that whilst tourist activities were not necessarily fully compatible with their environments, neither did they initiate damaging impacts and might actually have delivered some benefits. By the 1970s, though, the expansion of mass forms of international tourism had raised growing levels of awareness of the role of tourism in promoting environmental change and its considerable capacity to destroy the resources upon which it depends. Under these conditions the relationship between tourism and environment has often evolved from one of coexistence to one of ‘conflict’ (Page and Dowling, 2002). The notion of tourism and environment in conflict spawned a burgeoning literature on tourism impacts that emerged during the 1980s and the 1990s and which is conveniently and well-summarised in Mathieson and Wall’s (1982) benchmark text and in subsequent work around the same theme (e.g., Hunter and Green, 1995).
