Can anyone who has flown halfway around the world in a jet powered by subsidised fossil fuel and puffing out greenhouse gases qualify as an eco-tourist – whatever the shape or content of the holiday that awaits them?
Take away tourist

First take a look at tourism. Tourist sites require reconstruction of the landscape and increased use of petroleum products and toxics such as chemicals, fertilisers and pesticides. These cluster sites greatly disturb natural human patterns of living, are at odds with wildlife and the natural world.

Tourists, on the other hand, also have a huge ecological footprint, bringing with them their consumption-driven city lifestyle, with little regard to the habitat, ecosystem or locals that they happen to visit. So it is in effect a double whammy for the environment.

Enter ecotourism, an alleged mantra to solve the problems of both the tourism industry and ecosystems. But first, what is ecotourism, anyway? One definition is tourism that a) provides for conservation measures, b) includes meaningful community participation and c) is profitable and can sustain itself.

Easier said than done. In 1984, Mexican conservationist Ceballos-Lascurian helped set up a travel agency Ecotours to give tourists a quality education experience and boost the local economy. Ecotourism became a buzzword after that and soon came to encompass any form of tourism that was related to nature or made token murmurs towards sustainable development.

In fact, the ecodevelopment Papagayo project included construction of 1144 homes, 6270 condo-hotel units, 6584 hotel rooms, a shopping centre and a golf course. So much for saving the environment.

And in Malaysia, lands were cleared and locals displaced for a huge dam project just to provide ecotravelers with electricity in Malaysia!

Species and knowledge, and dependence on monocrops, so the picture of ecotourism's environmental record is revealing a darker side."

Eco-tourism has been called ‘ego-tourism’ by author Ian Munt, as it is much about confirming one's class identity, educational sophistication, disposable income, and cultural capital as it is about visiting nature in far away places.