University of Aarhus ECOTOURISM AS A WAY TO PROTECT ...

Ecotourism as a sustainable way to protect nature
police, the American Embassy replaced their clothes and they flew back to New
York on Tuesday. They will not recommend South Africa as an ecotourist
destination to their friends” (Yahoo news, 2000).
As commented before, a programme of formation/information would
solve part of these problems. During a long time, National Parks managers have
not informed the population about what was happening because they never
considered it necessary (it is different nowadays as Ronnic McKilvey -
Londolozi’s managing director - explains “We created Londolozi as a model not
because we’re good guys. We know if we want to stay in tourism, we have to
have friendly neighbours” (Honey, 1999). Now they continue not giving
information but for a different reason. They are scared of what happened in later
years, as explained by Ndumo’s manager, Ian Derrick, “The community as a
whole and the tribal authorities up in the mountains have not been well informed
about what’s happening here. It’s hard for us to go out and tell them. They’ve
been lied to before by whites, so why would they believe us” (Honey, 1999).
This is a very understandable feeling but anyway, information cannot be denied
in advance because of problems, which were encountered a long time ago.
Although, there still is a problem.
3.2.9. Conclusions
This chapter has shown that the problems in managing wildlife and local
people are numerous and very different. This is, however, not an excuse for not
working with the problems.
When protecting animals, local people should not be forgotten because
they are not an integral part of the solution; the animals may suffer, so both
factors (locals and animals) are keys to protecting nature. Education is the key to
the problem. As explained before, visitors of national parks want to have more
information before coming to the parks. If visitors are well educated with
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