Sustainability and Tourism: The Need for Ethics in Leisure

By: Logan Shine

When a community attracts travelers to visit and engage in their local recreational pursuits; those travelers tend to bring many benefits with them. In fact, most governments around the world show support for such activity since it positively affects a nation’s GDP through money spent in said communities.  The United States alone generated $1.9 trillion from travel and tourism in 2011. Roughly $124 billion in tax revenue circulated back to states, counties, and communities for use in infrastructure, education, and ecological restoration.  Jobs are also an indispensable by-product of community attractions. The economic importance of tourism is not really up for debate. What can be called into question are the lasting issues that temporal gains tend to foster in the absence of sustainable practices (U.S. Travel Association, 2012).

Many tourism assets are located on or near sites of cultural and/or ecological importance. The fact that tourism - as an industry - generates $1.5 million/min. in the U.S. from visiting these places provides an idea of the human traffic that these sites and communities endure. Tourism is a cost historically borne by the government and local residents when most often the benefit is siphoned off by large hotel and restaurant chains, and even theme parks and resorts. Many residents of host communities often make a living by serving tourists seasonally at meager wages only to be faced with higher living costs of residing in a location with rising property values. Local residents are often faced with the high prices that visitors pay with the exception that locals aren’t getting the benefits of leisure and recreation that visitors get from a vacation stay in the community. The visitors will leave and the local residents bear the high cost of living year round, along with the economic downturn of the off-season. The sites that attract visitors – whether they are culturally, ecologically, or intrinsically valued – fall victim to degradation due to the propensity for the transient consumers to indulge more than usual while on vacation. The price is often paid by slowly degrading the landscape that draws visitors in the first place. A more immediate impact can be seen in water resources. They can become polluted by surface run-off and groundwater pollutants from traffic emissions and amplified sewage production from the tourist season (Environmental Impacts of Tourism).

Tourist destinations and the communities that rely on them can be spared from blindly exploitative practices with the ethics of sustainable tourism driven by an online group called The Sustainable Tourism Gateway at www.grdc.org which are being adopted and reviewed by groups around the world and in the U.S. The principles of sustainability in tourism according to this organization are:

·  Make optimal use of environmental resources that constitute a key element in tourism development, maintaining essential ecological processes and helping to conserve natural heritage and biodiversity.

·  Respect the socio-cultural authenticity of host communities, conserve their built and living cultural heritage and traditional values, and contribute to inter-cultural understanding and tolerance.

·  Ensure viable, long-term economic operations, providing socio-economic benefits to all stakeholders that are fairly distributed, including stable employment and income-earning opportunities and social services to host communities, and contributing to poverty alleviation

The group Travel Green Wisconsin is one organization in the U.S. that is pioneering these ethics in practice. If this idea gains momentum our resources may likely be a source of well-being and enjoyment that will outlast us.

Works Cited

Environmental Impacts of Tourism. (n.d.). Retrieved September 17, 2012, from www.grdc.org: http://www.gdrc.org/uem/eco-tour/envi/index.html

U.S. Travel Association. (2012). U.S. Travel and Tourism Statistics.