Linking Culture and the Environment

124 ‘The Natural Step’ to Sustainability Planning
Williams, 2005). It required a new framework for strategic planning and decision
making. Local leaders needed an innovative and user-friendly way of communicating
and engaging the broader community about sustainability issues.
The introduction of TNS to the resort came about unexpectedly as a
result of a personal visit to the resort by the TNS founder, Karl Henrik Robèrt.
He was invited to informally share his concepts and visioning processes with
the community. Whistler’s TNS journey began shortly after this visit in 2000
with the creation of a small but influential group of local organizations who
were committed to developing a range of sustainability programmes that
would focus on implementing the TNS principles within their own institutions.
This handful of ‘early adopters’ was comprised of stakeholders from
the RMOW, Whistler Blackcomb (the ski lift company and major real estate
developer), the Fairmont Chateau Whistler, Tourism Whistler (the main marketing
organization), One-hour Photo (a prominent retail operation) and
AWARE (the leading environmental non-government organization). They
launched an awareness campaign entitled Whistler: It’s Our Nature that promoted
understanding and adoption of the TNS framework, and engaged the
community in the process. This was followed by a programme called Whistler:
It’s Our Future aimed at uncovering community members’ hopes and priorities
for Whistler’s future. These initiatives and the previously developed
Whistler Environmental Strategy (Waldron, 2000) provided the impetus for
using TNS principles and processes to inform the creation of ‘Whistler 2020’
– which eventually became the foundation for the RMOW’s Comprehensive
Sustainability Plan (CSP). While Whistler was already in the process of establishing
a sustainability plan, the TNS framework brought coherence to the
process. Whistler became the first resort community, and the first municipality
in Canada, to adopt and successfully begin implementing the TNS
approach in a destination community planning domain.
In keeping with TNS principles and guidelines, the RMOW embarked on
an aggressive public engagement process between 2002 and 2004 and subsequently
developed a community vision, which stated ‘Whistler will be the
premier mountain resort community – as we move toward sustainability’
(http://www.whistler.ca/Sustainability/Whistler_2020.php).
The RMOW’s CSP provides a consensus-based vision, strategic direction
and a set of ambitious steps to navigate Whistler towards a more sustainable
future. Replacing previous Comprehensive Development Plans, the CSP is
Whistler’s highest-level policy document. It provides the destination with a
long-term, community-wide framework that is guided by local values and
core sustainability principles. It frames all future plans and programmes
developed and implemented by the destination’s municipal government and
its partners (Vance and Williams, 2005).
Whistler’s CSP is built on the collective efforts of many public, private
and non-government stakeholders. The sustainability rubric – so frequently
incomprehensible to the general public – is demystified in the plan through
the use of TNS terms and concepts.
Recognizing that extensive interdependencies exist in tourism destinations,
Whistler 2020 addresses its economic, social and environmental sustainability
challenges in an integrated fashion. It emphasizes that the traditional ‘pillars of