By Carolyn Wild – It’s hard to believe I’ve been involved in ecotourism development for over 20 years now. I remember when ecotourism was such a new concept that the first articles in the travel pages of magazines and newspapers always went to great lengths to define it. The controversy over what ecotourism is and the debate about whether protecting nature through developing tourism is an oxymoron were prevalent then and they are still with us today.

“Luckily there are always people who put quality before quantity and operate on a small and green level, and they make a real change. In our region we have one eco adventure travel agency that grew extremely over the past years, and they use a lot of that income for improvements in the Mayan communities… They manage quite some numbers of tourists in the high season though, and although they provide income for communities, their vans make a large part of the daily traffic.” – Stefanie Baeker, Project Mayan Encounter

“Without tourism, the Pantanal (in South America), the world’s largest wetland, would have just turned into a major cattle feed-lot for McDonald’s” – Costas Christ, at the International Symposium on Sustainable Tourism Development. Highlighting the roles of tourism in supporting and promoting conservation, this article discusses the social, economic and environmental sustainability of travel and tourism, noting that “the very essence of tourism is selling culture and nature, and those must be protected or there will be no industry.”

Jamaica for Sale, a documentary about tourism & unsustainable development, takes a sharp look at the environmental, economic, and social impacts of tourism such as: degraded water quality and shoreline habitats, depleted marine species, poorly regulated large-scale development that relies on low-wage, unskilled local labor, and uncontrolled development of an industry that leads to inflation in land and housing prices, and consumes large amounts of local natural resources.