Sustainable Tourism

BACK in my healthier days, I attended a quite expensive training on ecotourism in Subic. The training was so-so as most of the resource speakers were unimpressive. Their inputs came straight from the books, and not so much from actual field experience.

Most of my co-participants were practitioners in various environmental fields, community coastal resource management and protected areas. I came from a community forestry

background.

We felt that the well-paid speakers spent too much time inside the four walls of academia and not so much the nitty-gritty of field work.

One of the speakers failed to give concrete examples of carrying capacity for trekkers in protected areas. The most he can manage to give as a case study was to present Soylent Green, a 1973 American dystopian thriller movie.

The gist of the movie tackled 20th century industrialization that led to overcrowding and Earthwide pollution. Natural resources were already exhausted, nourishment of the population is provided by Soylent Industries.

The film showed extinct forests, wild animals, rivers and ocean life, and where human corpses were converted into Soylent Green. Nice fictional movie, though.

Although not a forester, I do have quite an extensive background on community organizing (read: poor communities), working for nongovernment organizations.

That ecotourism training was meant to enhance my technical knowledge and skills of conserving forest trees. As an alternative to timber utilization, sustainable tourism was an answer to non-timber grassroots development.

Tourism is one of the world’s fastest growing industries and is a major source of income for many countries. Being a people-oriented industry, tourism also provides many jobs which have helped revitalize local economies.

Sustainable tourism is defined as “tourism that respects both local people and the traveler, cultural heritage and the environment.” It seeks to provide people with an exciting and educational holiday.