Ecotourism Australia has thrown its weight behind the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council’s River Red Gum Forest Draft Proposal, claiming that it will open up important new ecotourism opportunities for the region.
However, another NGO, Timber Communities Australia, argues that as many as 400 families, whose livelihoods are dependent on access to these forests, will be adversely affected by the proposals.
Ecotourism Australia’s foray into the debate represents an expression of its mission to contribute to conservation solutions and projects; involving and providing benefits to local communities, but will those 400 families be the targeted beneficiaries?
My dubiousness reflects the pre-existing capacity of genuine ecotourism to access an already existing superb environment. Change of tenure to National Park is not prerequisite. What is does provide though, is subsidisation of the full costs of conservation and commercial operator relief of the requirement to improve the well-being of local people.
Genuine ecotourism is internationally defined as:
Responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and improves the well-being of local people.
Ecotourism Australia is a membership-based organisation that is strongly representative of protected area managers and holders of commercial activity permits. It has adopted a different definition to the international standard:
Ecologically sustainable tourism with a primary focus on experiencing natural areas that fosters environmental and cultural understanding, appreciation and conservation.
The Oslo Statement on Ecotourism was recently produced at the Global Ecotourism Conference held in Norway 2007.
‘Ecotourism’ was recognized as being widely used, but also abused, as it is not sufficiently anchored to the definition. The ecotourism community, therefore, continues to face significant challenges in awareness building and education and actively working against greenwashing within the tourism industry.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
I’ve been over to Fraser Island and seen eco tourism in operation.
$70-00 on the ferry, I asked the fella if he had a gun, 800 metre trip and return. Park permit $30-00.
Can’t drive on the track inland part of the Island because the eco tour monster trucks have shredded the tracks, so to get around you must use the beach.
Park Rangers never saw any.
A flock of birds killed in a storm. People muttering deep and darkly about portents, while charging me 6 bucks for an ice cream.
Go to have a fish on a 50 mile beach, 5 4WDs pull up in exactly the same spot.
I am over eco tourism, just lucky a dingo didn’t get me.
Heaven help the poor sods in timber communities when these eco clowns get loose.
A tourist is a paying guest. He/she is purchasing hospitality.
Eco Tourism Australia represents vested interests – tourist businesses charging for the ‘hospitality’ experience they market. Of course they will support a govenment agency that proposes to remove current occupiers, and livelihoods at no cost to the businesses, and in doing so, open up more areas for “paid hospitality”.
Economically it would be much better for all concerned for multiple land use to continue. Environmental agencies and tourist interests talking “net economic benefit” are talking outside their field of expertise – they are talking crap.
Not long ago, I took a trip to Fraser Island on the Kingfisher Resort ferry to the resort.
On the boat, I was talking to a group of young travellers, maybe 25 to 35 years old.
I asked why they were going there. They replied that they were going to Fraser Island for a wilderness experience.
This is their idea of wilderness.
It is like Bondi street in peak hour..
Young urban people have absolutely no idea of wilderness, have never seen it, have never experienced it.
Yet they are vehemently protective of their rights to make decisions about it.
I was stunned.
Australia must not be allowed to destroy its ecotourism potential through green-washing. It is simply too important.
About 70% of the landscape of Australia is held under private interests, including indigenous landholdings. This vast majority of Australia is off-reserve (outside its system of protected area estate) and yet it contains outstanding values in terms of biological diversity and ecological integrity.
Australia’s National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development encourages protection of these values and challenges for nature conservation, both inside and outside protected areas.
Off-reserve conservation requires the cooperation of landholders. Financial incentives through ecotourism have enormous potential to remunerate for the care and presentation of natural and cultural assets by the most rightful and intimately knowledgeable beneficiaries.
Indigenous and non-indigenous peoples in rural and remote parts of Australia have particular expertise and familiarity with the special attributes of the land that sustains their families and local communities, as it did their predecessors. The relationship that exists between human inhabitants and the natural values of their lands is unique. It is a completely different relationship to that which exists between a tourism operator from a more centralised accommodation locality and their natural area destination. The former is an integral part of the landscape, whereas the latter is a visitation. This distinct difference represents an important ecotourism quality in the matter of continued human connectivity. Transmitting the complex and intergenerational mantle of human knowledge of the ecosystem’s interrelationships, in all its moods and seasons, is intrinsically valuable. Ecotourism is nature-based and whilst particular natural attractions may prioritise a preferred travel destination, it is ultimately the manner in which the host community interacts with its particular environment that provides participants with a frame of reference for direct comparison with their own lives. Whether the activity is genuine ecotourism or merely nature-based, is determined by the manner of the traveller’s social and economic interaction with the local people and the environment that they inhabit.
Off-reserve conservation, through ecotourism and regulated access, enables visitors to enjoy wilderness values under the informative supervision of an inhabitant. This perspective value-adds to the destination’s nature-based appeal. Visitors are amazed by the natural values but are also very interested in the interaction between human inhabitants and their natural environment and how they go about stewardship. ‘User-pays’ fully-finances the conservation management of the land without any cost to the taxpayer. The visitor is an active and willing participant in the achievement of Australia’s conservation obligations and as a consequence, the environment is preserved for the livelihoods it provides its stewards, to perpetuity.
Tourism in protected areas, masquerading as ecotourism, has a profound exclusionary impact to genuine ecotourism off-reserve. It is not the biological diversity or other intrinsic values of the public lands that warrants criticism on the grounds of unfair competition, it is the millions of dollars of subsidisation to construct and maintain free-access facilities to the exclusion of lands that are not so privileged in budgetary allocations that they can offer the illusion of free-entry.
Under misrepresented ecotourism, taxpayer-funded facilities are constructed for the convenience of Commercial Activity Permit holders, predominately from communities at regional accommodation centres rather than the destination. The hidden disparity of recurrent funding for salaries, capital expenses, vehicles, repairs and maintenance, administration, signage, marketing, insurance, training, superannuation, workplace health and safety, et cetera, provides the marketplace with the illusion of free-entry, when in fact taxpayers unwittingly finance a multi-million dollar exclusionary influence to fair-trading between the public and private sectors.
Genuine ecotourism transcends nature-based tourism by providing a medium through which participants express their willingness to pay for what economists define as ‘non-use values’; benefits derived from knowing particular environmental values exist and valuing their bequest to one’s descendants and future generations – including the health of the ecosystem, its bio-diversity, rarity, endemicity, scenic amenity and continuity of human habitation. Off-reserve ecotourism relies on visitor willingness to pay for non-use values.
Australia has a remarkable wealth and diversity of ecotourism potential through the interpretive expertise of indigenous and other local inhabitants, which lies begging to be cultivated. Best-practice ecotourism articulates respectability through the principle of sustainability and encourages participation through a culture of altruism. It has the potential to supplement and moderate the fluctuations of fickle rural economies and provide recompense and dignity to remote indigenous homeland peoples.
Ecotourism is the cuckoo in every regional economic nest. It is an industry that can only expand itself by bringing in more and more people and ultimately destroying the values they claim to be preserving.
More importantly, it is a community segment that is entirely beholden to the whims and delusions of distant urban markets and will invariably place those distant urban delusions over and above the real and legitimate interests and aspirations of the local community.
Ultimately, they will attempt to exclude the local community from enjoying the services provided to them through pricing and other exclusionary methods.
A good example is the way the Byron Bay business community, self proclaimed ecotourism ventures one and all, now actively discriminates, indeed, villifies, those who live in the hinterland. Their view of the ‘proper place’ of the local community is as an empoverished source of ancilliary staff, poor white trash to serve those with external income sources.
And it is brought to you by two decades of green majority Local Council. The road to hell is paved with GREEN intentions and despite all the altruistic hype, it leads to a place riven with class division and systematic politics of exclusion.
Ian,
What you have described is eco-corruption. The greeenwashing or misrepresentation of this usurpation is the issue at hand. Its accreditation as ‘ecotourism’ is appalling.
Destroying income-earning attractions is not ecotourism. Disenfranchising local communities from their real and legitimate interests and aspirations is also not ecotourism. And neither is excluding the local community from enjoying the services provided to them through pricing and other exclusionary methods.
I don’t think Ian discriminates Neil. It’s ALL bad!
From what you describe, Neil, ecotourism is nothing but an ideal, and a utopian one at that.
The little thatched hut I stayed in at Kuta Beach in Bali back in 1979 had all the attributes you would class as “ecotourism”. It was only a short way along a sand track, then, to a little place that eventually came to earn itself, and it’s customers, a bomb blast, due in most part, to the sign at the front that said, “No Asians Allowed”.
Ecotourism is nothing but rhetoric. It is the acceptable face for the bars, the pimps and the wheeler dealers that will inevitably follow.
There is always one underlying constant, if it is “cool” it will eventually be f**cked.
“They called it paradise, I don’t know why.
If they call some place paradise, then kiss it all goodbye”. Eagles, The Last Resort.
Genuine ecotourism describes a relationship between ethical travellers and communities whose well-being depends on the care of the natural environment.
It is utopian, but also necessary, particularly when so much of the world’s wealth is concentrated in largely artificial environments and so much of the world’s natural capital is without an alternate conservation economy.
“Genuine ecotourism” and “ethical travellers”? Hhmmnn, the view from the big rock candy mountains.
Look at it another way, Ian:
Imagine that the perversity of existing arrangements was acknowledged and government reciprocated funding arrangements and exclusionary mechanisms, so that travellers were affirmatively encouraged to visit remote locations without having to part with any of their money for entry to private lands and the local inhabitants were paid career-level salaries, provided with all associated expenses and housed in purpose-built dwellings at the centre of management advantage for the environmental landscape of interest.
Parks and Wildlife Services are simultaneously cut-off from funding for every expense and required to recover from user-fees the full cost of providing the public with environmental goods and services, without any development entitlements whatsoever.
Now that would constitute the view from the big rock candy mountains.
Ian obviously sticks to the cities if he ever gets let out and goes o/s. Hypocrisy and absolutes – now there’s a pairing.
For your information, Travis, I rode a bicycle from Singapore to Bangkok, Chiangmai, and up the Ganges valley. I rode with a guy who went from Paris to Bali and back. What the #$%&@ have you done, freddy?
For your added information,Travis,I clearly recall Ian’s farewell dinner at the Balkan Restaurant and receiving many a posting of his travels.Ian could also regale you with many a tale of his yoof on the family farm in the hinterland of none of your business!!!
Clearly then Ian you place yourself high above anyone else who decides to go off the beaten track and have a more down-to-earth experience. Your constant, tedious harping regarding anyone else who partakes in eco-tourism suggests rednecks like yourself are the only ‘ethical travellers’ worthy of such an endeavour. Heaven help us. Just because your morals do not extend to something, doesn’t mean it does not exist.
>What the #$%&@ have you done, freddy?
Yeah, I’m sure likely to share my travel experiences with you Ian. On yer bike yobbo.
Hi, I just googled around abouth greenwashing and I`m trying to find companies that actually does this..in the hospitality business. I know a lot of hotels doesn`t keep their promises…but I have a hard time finding any hotels or resorts that I can write abouth …that really does greenwashing..please help me.
Greetings from Helsinki, Finland =) In Europe