Nature Bound (Is the Ecotourism Industry developing in Montana?)

Ecotourism principles are an important guide to developing and maintaining the increasingly popular ecotourist resort destinations.

by Larry Pearson Urbanland.org

One of the travel industry’s strongest trends continues to be ecotourism, which has been growing by 20 to 30 percent a year. Ecotourism combines specialized leisure travel with a focus on environmental protection and visitor education and generally takes place in environmentally distinctive destinations. These properties often include an on-site hotel or resort, with an unspoiled or reclaimed environment of indigenous flora and fauna, and usually are protected by a local or national government. These destinations vary from wildlife parks and nature preserves to jungle hideaways like the Coconut Beach Rainforest Resort in Queensland, Australia; guest (dude) ranches like Hidden Creek Ranch near Harrison, Idaho; beachfront properties like Wilderness Safaris’s North Island Camp in the Seychelles off the coast of South Africa; and small hotels that celebrate the local culture like Lisu Lodge on the edge of a village in northern Thailand’s mountains.

Ecotourists generally range in age from 35 to 54 years old (i.e., the baby boom generation and younger), with a 50-50 male/female gender split, according to the Burlington, Vermont–based International Ecotourism Society. Approximately 82 percent are college graduates, although more and more leisure travelers overall are turning to ecotourism. The majority (60 percent) prefer to travel as couples on trips that last one to two weeks. Ecotourists have a high level of environmental awareness and a philosophy founded on protecting the environment. They express an interest in learning more about the ecosystem they are visiting, and they favor beautiful scenery as well as the opportunity to view wildlife and to have new experiences. Currently, the majority of ecotourists come from the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Ecotourism, and the principles behind it, are regarded as important to the hospitality industry primarily because a number of governments around the world are now mandating ecotourism-based zoning and policies. The state of Queensland, Australia, for example, has enacted ecotourism development policies, and has established standards that ecotourism resorts must meet to receive government accreditation. In addition, some hotel companies—particularly owners of independent properties—are expressing an interest in doing the right thing for the local environment and community and are employing ecotourism principles as a guide. The World Tourism Organization, the International Society of Ecotourism, and a number of other ecotourist-related organizations have published guidelines that range from building design and materials to water conservation. Also, current demographic changes reflect an increased interest in ecotourism. The aging of the baby boomers has made somewhat passive outdoor recreational activities like bird watching and nature hikes more attractive to this group as leisure travel activities—with ecotourism a logical beneficiary of this shift in outdoor pursuits. Finally, ecotourists tend to be affluent and frequent travelers; therefore, they are seen as a potentially very profitable market.

However, reaping profits from ecotourism is not a given. Ecotourists are knowledgeable—they know how to separate the true ecotourist destination from a “wanna-be.” They know that an ecotourist destination is not a petting zoo or a theme park, that it is more than a hotel plopped down in the middle of a rain forest, and that it is much more than a property that simply installs water-saving showerheads or uses recycled paper for its stationery.

The challenge for large hospitality companies and individual hotel owners, as well as hotel developers, is to create the kind of ecotourist properties that environmentally minded leisure travelers are looking for—ecotourist destinations that serve the environment, guests, local residents, and—the bottom line.

Ecotourism sites need to be identified and preserved based on ecological, scientific, economic, aesthetic, recreational, and regional concerns. Planning studies should identify the habitat of the ecological amenity and address the visitor capacity of the area to avoid negative effects on flora and fauna. Environmental protection should be the priority and the influx of tourists needs to be carefully planned and managed.

Environmental protection, reclamation, and/or enhancement—including repatriation or introduction of flora and fauna species to the ecotourism site—should be part of a formal plan. For example, the Begawan Giri Estate, a 19.8-acre, 22-suite resort in Bali, took from London four endangered Indonesian Jalak Balis, or Bali starlings, and repatriated them, instituting a program that has produced four dozen birds ready for breeding. The plan is to produce around 1,000 birds within the next three years and release them into the wild. Wilderness Safaris, an Africa-based ecotourist resort developer and tour operator, not only is preserving the 500-acre North Island in the Seychelles off the coast of South Africa, but also is in the process of reversing 200 years of human impact with a full-scale, ecological restoration that includes removal of nonnative flora and fauna and the reintroduction of endangered native species, including the giant tortoise and the nearly extinct Seychelles magpie robin. Only after that restoration is completed will the 11-villa ecotourism resort be opened.

Everything that has to do with water—its source, use, rain collection, runoff, recycling, and protection—needs to be carefully planned. Hydrological studies should carefully analyze the impact of ecotourism on the site’s natural hydrology. Taking obvious water-conserving steps, like planting native vegetation rather than thirsty tropical plants in a desert environment, are often not enough. Sometimes, water conservation requires a major shift in the mindsets and behavior of guests. Maho Bay on water-scarce St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands does not provide private baths in its guest accommodations. It has centrally located bathhouses with low-flush toilets and pull-chain showers connected to a recycling system that irrigates the surrounding vegetation.

A property zoning plan needs to be established that sets up a hierarchy of uses, such as areas that prohibit tourists, wilderness zones that allow only pedestrian activity, moderate tourist use zones, and zones for actual development. The regional planning guide should be used to create a land use plan that accommodates the tourist while protecting the environment. The Great Barrier Reef in Australia is a nationally protected ecosystem in which overlay zones are used to designate specific areas for tourism and scientific research. The Rio Bravo Conservation and Management Area in Belize, Central America, sets aside areas for nature reserves, sustainable forestry and farming, and tourism.

The site plan for buildings, walkways, and other tourism-related facilities should disturb the environment only minimally. The Kakum National Park, a 140-square-mile preserve in Ghana’s Upper Guinean rain forest that harbors many endangered species, has more than 1,000 feet of walkways suspended 100 feet above the forest floor, allowing visitors to view both flora and fauna with minimal environmental impact.

Structures should be built into the site to make them part of the landscape, clustered to minimize the impact to the land, oriented to capture breezes, and designed to use solar, hydro, and/or wind energy. Harmony on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands has two-story, passive solar buildings that use photovoltaics, rain collection, and roof scoops that draw breezes through the rooms. Interactive computers monitor energy usage on a daily basis.

Local communities should be involved and educated in ecotourism planning and management and the conservation of local natural and cultural resources. Ecotourism should provide an economic means for these communities to coexist with—and protect—an environmentally sensitive resource, and the host country should receive economic and/or cultural benefits in order for ecotourism to be sustainable. The founders of Lisu Lodge on the edge of a mountain village in northern Thailand work closely with village elders to identify potential employees, to coordinate food production with farmers for the lodge restaurant and for expansion into new markets, and to build a handicraft center to showcase and sell local crafts and products. The Shangaan people in Zimbabwe participated in the negotiations with Zimbabwe Sun hoteliers and CAMPFIRE (Communal Area Management Programme for Indigenous Resources) to develop Mahenye Safari Lodge, an ecotourism lodge on an island in the Save River adjacent to the Gona-re-Zhou National Park. Mahenye now allots 10 percent of its profits to the local Sangaan village, whose people also staff the resort’s photographic and hunting safaris. The program has been credited with transforming former poachers into wildlife guardians and has funded a variety of community projects.

Once an ecotourist destination has been planned and designed, problems can arise during the actual construction. Standard construction practices often do not work at an environmentally sensitive ecotourist destination. For example, heavy equipment that greatly harms and pollutes the land—and often the water table—should be left behind and lower-impact construction practices that protect the environment adopted instead. Maho Bay was built using hand construction methods rather than bulldozers, backhoes, and cranes. The environment was left relatively undisturbed and soil erosion was avoided, which would have endangered the nearby beach and coral formations.

Appropriate—including indigenous and recycled—durable and nontoxic building materials should be used. Harmony Studios was constructed with recycled building materials, including plastic lumber, glass tiles, recycled steel nails, and rubber tire rugs. Lisu Lodge used local materials for its wood frame, thatched roof, woven bamboo walls, and rattan floors. Idaho’s Hidden Creek Ranch used only dead and fallen trees to construct its buildings. Living trees were not cut down—buildings were built around them. Harvesting local materials should not cause habitat destruction, topsoil erosion, or pollution runoff. The use of concrete and plaster on site should either be minimized or eliminated. As much of the construction process as is possible should be planned and assembled off site. The Phinda Forest Lodge in South Africa’s Northern Zululand relied heavily on prefabricated elements manufactured elsewhere and assembled on site.

Management plans should assure long-term maintenance of the ecotourist destination’s environmental integrity. The plan should include everything from identifying which habitat areas can and cannot be visited to energy and water conservation. It should be determined how supplies will be brought in and how garbage and sewage can be handled without disrupting the environment.

The plan should include programs to benefit the local community, like finding and training local residents for on-site staff and managerial positions. Lisu Lodge, for example, is managed and operated by local mountain people who also staff the wilderness expeditions. Locally produced foods can be used to support the indigenous population and to increase guest awareness of the surrounding culture. The critical educational component of the destination should be planned, implemented, maintained, and continuously upgraded. Education should include “back of the house” tours so that visitors can see the property’s renewable energy, water conservation, and other ecologically based systems and procedures in action. A management plan also should provide conservation incentives. For example, Hidden Creek Ranch’s owners present an award each month to the employee providing the best idea for living greener.

As more and more of the world becomes heavily populated and industrialized, ecotourism is bound to become increasingly popular. Yet, ironically, too many visitors will invariably damage, even destroy, the fragile environment that attracted them in the first place. Even so, resorts and the tourism they attract, can be managed so that the winners will be many—visitors, local residents, and the environment.

Larry Pearson is a principal of the SWA Group, an international land planning, urban design, and landscape architecture firm headquartered in Sausalito, California.

August 2002
© 2002 ULI–the Urban Land Institute, all rights reserved.

http://urbanland.uli.org/DK/CrntIss/ur_CrntIss_Sample_fst.html