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een done. This offsetting could, for example, be the gross planting of
forests. As one of the advocates of green capitalism put it:
We’ve put Earth at the brink of climate calamity, thanks to rapid
industrialisation and market forces. That’s part one. The sequel is
how to get out of this fix. I believe it’s those same forces, innovation
and profit – and nothing else – that can stop global warming (Fred
Kupp cited in Prudham 2009, p. 1595).
Yet, it is difficult to resist thinking this as “greenwashing” economic
growth that at its core has been, and still is, dependent upon fossil fuels
and other resource usages. As Gunder and Hillier suggest:
rather than encouraging opportunities for social change that might
comprehensively reduce consumer behaviour to those consistent with
the earth’s carrying capacity, the narrative of sustainable development is
often deployed simply to further the interests of an entrepreneuriallysupportive
state and institutions. This last is a pro-market interpretation
of sustainable development, consistent with Smart Growth and
globalisation, that dilutes the concept of sustainability to literally
‘business as usual’, with, at best, an objective to partially reduce urban
consumer energy consumption and waste outputs, while maximising the
potential for economic growth with little regard to overall resource
depletion (Gunder and Hillier 2009, p. 136).
It may be true that “current business and destination level
environmental initiatives generally fail to address tourism-induced
contributions to broader global climatic and environmental changes”
(Williams and Ponsford 2009, p. 403), but times of crisis are also times of
opportunity, perhaps also for climate change. The financial meltdown has
led to a renaissance in public responsibility in a situation where all
“governments face deep dilemmas in reconciling climate change and
energy policy with sustaining popular support, especially in times of
economic difficulty” (Giddens 2009, p. 230).
While many of these measures follow conventional lines of what
may be distinguished as unsustainable tourism practices, there is a growing
awareness for the need for active policies to create more sustainable
tourism practices. “Green recovery”, a global “Green New Deal”, and a
“green energy revolution” are catch phrases that now find their way into
governance and policy making. In 2010 the United Nation's Millennium
Development goals will be a decade old. At present carbon off-setting is in
an embryonic stage of usage by the tourism industry and tourists and
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