Trampling Paradise

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

Garbage is another sore spot. Tourists often consume far more packaged and disposable goods than the average resident, and local disposal systems frequently can't handle all the extra trash. In Zihuatanejo, on Mexico's Pacific coast, the evening air is often soured by the stench of burning plastic as restaurant owners torch their trash in open pits. Island resorts, where land is inherently limited, are particularly prone to garbage disposal problems. For example, according to a report cited in The Green Host Effect, residents and hotel owners on the island of Lesbos, Greece, throw their trash into the water, exacerbating an existing pollution problem.

In the Himalayas, Mount Everest is visited by a growing number of climbers who have traditionally had more energy for packing in supplies than for packing out trash. The camp at 26,000 feet "has become known as the highest junkyard in the world," according to a 4 March 1996 article by Peter Ford in The Christian Science Monitor. "Like camps farther down the mountain, it is littered with empty oxygen and cooking gas cylinders, tins, tents, sleeping bags, food, ropes, batteries, plastics, and the frozen corpses of climbers who have died on the mountain." The government of Nepal now requires climbing groups to submit a deposit that is refunded only after teams return with their trash.

A Room with a View

Tourism development can drastically alter land use, particularly when large numbers of tourists descend on small, fragile environments such as often exist on coastlines. In the Philippines, the 2,500-acre island of Boracay had 2,000 residents in the 1980s; today, up to 20,000 tourists may crowd the island at once. One-tenth of the land is now devoted to a golf course, and in 1997 environmental regulators noted dangerous levels of fecal coliform bacteria, an indicator of untreated sewage, in ocean waters where people were swimming. According to figures cited in The Green Host Effect, sprawl is further advanced in Cancun, on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, which grew from a tiny fishing village in the early 1970s into a tourist mecca with more than 20,000 hotel rooms and 2.6 million visitors annually. Each day, the local landfill receives 450 tons of garbage. Many of the poor among Cancun's 300,000 residents live in shantytowns, and 75% of their sewage flows untreated into the lagoon behind the beach. Heading south toward Belize, shoreline destinations along modern highways are replacing pristine rainforest, and tourism in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, has been growing at 30% annually.

Coastal development can damage other marine resources. Anchoring and disturbance by scuba divers and their boats has damaged reefs in the Yucatan, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. Road building and development can cause siltation and destruction of harbors and sea life.

Tourist development can also cause problems inland. In Asia, for example, golf courses near tourist destinations are causing concern. Thailand bills itself as a "golfer's paradise," but densely populated tropical nations may be ill-suited to golf courses, which appropriate large tracts of land from agriculture. Golf courses also reportedly use between 800,000 and 1.3 million gallons of water per day during the dry season. Oliver Hillel, director of the ecotourism program at Conservation International, says, "In the Malay Peninsula of Thailand, a local government has opted to supply tourist facilities--golf courses--with water and energy before [serving] the local people." The average golf course also receives 1,500 kilograms of fertilizer, herbicide, and pesticide each year, according to The Green Host Effect, which also notes that the chemicals "have been associated with pollution of water resources, the death of wildlife, and increased diseases, including cancer, among humans."