Environmental turn in tourism

Ed MacDonald explores connection between promotion and protection, Feb. 18

Ed MacDonald will be the guest speaker at the February presentation of the Island Lecture Series on Tuesday, Feb. 18, in Charlottetown.

MacDonald’s lecture will revolve around tourism and the environment.

The lecture will be held at 7 p.m. in the faculty lounge of UPEI’s SDU Main Building.

Tourism has always traded on the Island’s pastoral landscapes and pristine beaches, but as the old summer trade became mass tourism in the 1970s, promoters and planners began to worry that uncontrolled development would kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Around the same time, advocates of the Island’s natural landscape began to argue that the Island’s wilderness was a tourist asset that should be promoted.

Promotion and protection made uneasy bedfellows during the decades of the 1970s and '80s.

This lecture, based on a forthcoming history of Island tourism, will explore the sometimes controversial connection between tourism and the environment.

MacDonald teaches in the history department at UPEI. His research focus is the social, cultural and environmental history of P.E.I.

Along with Josh MacFadyen and Irene Novaczek, he is the co-editor of Time and A Place: An Environmental History of Prince Edward Island. The best known of his books is If You’re Stronghearted: Prince Edward Island in the 20th Century.

Admission to the lecture is free.

For more information, contact Laurie at iis@upei.ca or 902-894-2881.