The challenge of ecotourism: A call for higher standards

One of the fastest growing sectors of the tourism business is nature-oriented tourism. The travel industry has enlisted the support of environmental organizations and park agencies and is promoting nature travel as the hottest "environmentally correct" activity available. But is ecotourism the panacea these promoters claim? The author argues that ecotourism really means environmentally sound tourism. The definition must be sufficiently rigorous to create a goal that challenges tour operators, park officials, and the traveling public. The definitions in popular use are too lax and may foster the false idea that a trip or tour is environmentally benign when in fact it is destructive of the local, regional, and global environments. The solution is to establish a 0-5 scale to classify the stages of ecotourism, much like the difficulty scales used to classify whitewater rafting or technical climbing. The author proposes preliminary criteria for defining the Ecotourism Level (EL) of different stages in the greening of the travel system.