Linking Culture and the Environment

R.N. Moisey and S.F. McCool 285
tourism is as much a political act as an economic one? If so, then the issues
that illustrate the pathways to achieving sustainability but also illustrate the
pitfalls to avoid while on the way provide a small piece of the roadmap to a
more sustainable place.
Tourism and sustainability: guiding fiction or realistic end-state?
The oft-cited 1987 Brundtland Commission Report provided the catalyst for
much of the discussion concerning the issues of development and sustainability.
But the report provided little guidance on how to achieve sustainability.
In terms of direction for tourism development, much of the discussion
still focuses on what role tourism should take. Does tourism sustain itself,
sustain local communities, or should tourism’s role be one of sustaining
larger global systems? One can see that as the question moves from the local
to the global, that the relationships become more abstract and the answers
further out of reach.
Rather than focusing on sustaining tourism or on tackling the larger
issue of global sustainability, the authors in this book look more to how tourism
might help sustain local systems (i.e. at the community level). Sustainable
tourism is a more gentle form of tourism, one that is smaller in scale, sensitive
to cultural and environmental impact and respects the involvement of
local people in policy decisions. Clearly, the field of sustainable tourism is an
area filled with norms and myths, particularly the focus on developments of
smaller scales, yet there is much to be done to make existing larger scale
developments themselves more sustainable, particularly in energy and water
consumption, waste generation, and in training, pay levels and benefits to
employees. This raises an important question: can the benefits to the ideal of
sustainable tourism be more effectively achieved by working with existing
larger-scale developments than by constructing more smaller-scale ones? To
be sustainable, tourism in this context must ‘fit’ within the system and forge
symbiotic relationships with other segments of the social and economic system.
Visions and definitions of what tourism should sustain are critical to
progress. Yet, the growing complexity of our economic and political systems
points to the fact that action requires multiple actors with a variety of skills
and capabilities, each sharing these definitions.
Sustainable tourism’s role in this situation is illustrated in Fig. 16.1.
Definitions of sustainability must be shared among three major institutional
participants in tourism development decisions: (i) public agencies that manage
the natural resources and ensure their long-term health; (ii) the tourism
industry that provides an array of supporting lodging, eating and transportation
services; and (iii) the local residents whose culture may form part of the
attraction and may benefit from tourism development, but who may also
pay certain costs associated with impacts on quality of life, physical infrastructure
and services.
Each of the participants has a direct interest in sustaining their component
but also an indirect interest in sustaining the other components of the