Trampling Paradise

Environmental Health Perspectives, May, 2000 by David J. Tenenbaum

Dream Vacation--Environmental Nightmare?

It's a small world after all. At least, that's what the millions of tourists who take to the skies, roads, and paths each year to discover it are finding. Advances in technology and transportation and the emergence of a global economy are providing greater access for unprecedented numbers of travelers to explore the once-remote world around them. Directly and indirectly, however, tourism may often also be harming the very environment that lures so many people away from home in the first place. Tourism is a key part of the economy in such biodiversity hot spots as the Caribbean, the Amazon basin, and countries such as Mexico, Thailand, and Kenya. Although tourism supplies badly needed income to such areas, there are environmental costs for every visit to the elephants in Kenya, the tortoises in the Galapagos, or the national park nearer to home. The damage comes in the form of noise, air, and water pollution, the usurpation of productive land, natural habitat degradation, and the disruption of local cultures and economies.

According to The Ecotourism Society, a nonprofit membership group of outdoor travel entrepreneurs, researchers, and conservationists, there is currently an explosion of tourism based on nature, wildlife, and adventure travel. The society estimates that 40-60% of tourists are attracted to natural areas such as coral reefs, savannas, beaches, and forests. In a September 1997 article in Parks and Recreation, Alan Ewert and John Shultis estimated the growth in this so-called resource-based tourism at 15-25% per year, compared to 2-4% for conventional tourism.

Tourism of all varieties, however, is on a half-century boom. Tourism is defined as voluntary travel to see and experience new sights, so its volume roughly equals the transportation and hospitality businesses, minus business and personal travel. Direct receipts from 613 million international tourists in 1997 were tallied at $448 billion, according to the World Tourism Organization.

Intranational tourism, although harder to measure, is a much larger business. The Travel Industry Association of America says tourism is America's third-largest retail sales industry, with $542 billion in total receipts and nearly 7.6 million direct employees, According to the association, in 1998 tourists made 222 million air trips in the United States alone. The World Travel and Tourism Council estimated the global receipts of domestic and international tourism in 1998 at $4.4 trillion; during that same year, the industry employed 230 million people, about 10% of the formal global workforce. If that estimate is correct, the tourism economy is larger than the gross domestic product of every nation except the United States.

Where jobs and money are scarce, tourism's huge economic potential gives the industry considerable clout, even when it conflicts with environmental values. Because so many tourists are attracted to natural, unspoiled destinations, however, the environmental degradation caused by tourism also hurts the tourism industry. Traffic-choked national parks and shorelines damaged by untreated sewage from tourist developments play a major role in the final stage of what tourism researchers call the life cycle of tourist destinations--discovery, development, maturity, and decline. According to Jafar Jafari, editor-in-chief of the Annals of Tourism Research, in 50% of the studies published in his journal, environmental problems are the key to the decline of tourist destinations. Although some of the problems are cosmetic, such as beaches lined with high-rise hotels, Jafari says habitat degradation and air and water pollution also contribute to eventual avoidance of areas by tourists.

Planes, Trains, Automobiles ... and Cruise Ships

It's not just what people do to their destination once they get there that harms the environment-getting there in the first place is also a major culprit, whether it's by air, sea, road, or even by foot. Airplane and car travel contributes to air and noise pollution, cruise ships may dump human and fuel wastes into the oceans, and people exploring fragile ecosystems may trample wildlife underfoot or collect natural souvenirs to take home.

Although it's difficult to estimate the tourist proportion of airplane travel, airplanes in general are a major source of air pollution. Michael Prather, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California at Irvine, evaluated the global warming impact of air travel for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which analyzes the global warming issue for the United Nations. Prather says aircraft produce 2-3% of the global emissions of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas. After adding in the warming effect of contrails (the clouds formed around jet exhaust) and other airplane impacts (such as the emission of sulfur oxides, which tend to reflect sunlight), he says, planes account for 6-7.5% of overall human-caused warming.

In addition to their warming effects, airports rank as high as smokestack industries in the amount of pollution they release into the environment, according to Flying Off Course, a 1996 study by the Natural Resources Defense Council. For example, the report says, based on government statistics, airplanes at Los Angeles International Airport were the second largest stationary source of smog in Los Angeles (an oil refinery was the largest source).