The History of Ecotourism

Ecotourism is often looked at as a modern phenomenon, something that happened when environmentally-aware people started getting enough money together in their lives to travel to those places they'd only read about. This is just not true. Ecotourism is as old as tourism itself.

In fact, ecotourism history is embedded in the literature of Western civilization: Caesar's travelogues from Britain and Gaul, Marco Polo's exploration, and Aristotle's stories of the strange people of Egypt are all precursors to modern ecotourism. These xamples did not have tourism as their main goal, but rather conquest, trade, and the pursuit of knowledge took center stage.

Still, how much difference is there between ecotourism and our earliest explorations, if you remove the more venial goals? Only when exploration itself became the motivation for travel was ecotourism born, but the similarities are still there: the exploration of a relatively-wild part of the world, with the goal to understand the flora, fauna, and other cultures found therein.

In Victorian England, the separation began, and an entire class of gentleman and lady explorers sprang up, mounted elephants, and started thundering through the savannahs and jungles of Africa and Asia, sending back missives and quaintly-worded novels to their friends and family at home.

The Adventurers' Clubs: Victorian Ecotourism

From elephant safari hunters to Tarzan to Charles Darwin, you can clearly see the roots of modern ecotourism in Victorian times. Male and female adventurers, invariably members of the idle rich, packed steamer trunks and purchased trendy (at the time) khaki suits perfect for sweating it out in the steamy Congo.

This, however, wasn't pure ecotourism as it exists today. Instead, the Victorians made numerous blunders we should learn from in our own movement toward a more sustainable appreciation of nature.

Start with preservation of species. The Victorians were notable hunters for trophies, and shooting elephants and water buffalo, lions and gorillas, were par for the course during your African safari. Even those who did not shoot were in the habit of purchasing beautifully-carved ivory trinkets, or elephant-foot umbrella stands. Their impact was twofold in the end: first, their stories and letters brought back the real world of Africa for others to put into books and art and, eventually, movies. But secondly,
and more sinister, their veritable rape of the wilds taught the impoverished cultures they moved through that the way to get the crazy Europeans' money was to destroy their own ecosystems.

And so it went.

Modern Ecotourism History

What is surprising: we haven't learned as much as you might imagine from the history of ecotourism. Modern ecotourism, beginning in the 1980s, has brought an unheard- of prosperity to countries like Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Nepal.
However, many of the same old mistakes are being made. Instead of minimizing impact, as a true ecotourist should, by rough camping or staying with host families, many are opting to stay in some of the large hotels that tend to spring up in these often ecologically-sensitive areas. Ecotourists hike through inaccessible areas - after driving there in poorly-maintained diesel Jeeps. Governments thriving on ecotourism dollars force programs on the indigenous population that they neither want nor need, in
order to bring more tourists in.

Looking back at ecotourism history, we should all strive to:

* Have minimal, no, or positive impact on the ecosystems and people we visit.
* Provide environmentally-responsible employment to the people of these areas - sharing the wealth without damaging the world.
* Eschew luxury in favor of wasting nothing and leaving behind no trash or mark that we were there.
* Appreciate and enjoy the flora, fauna, and cultures of the areas we visit, and leave them exactly the same for their own sake and for the sake of others who want to enjoy their beauty.

With goals such as these, ecotourism could be a means for preserving things that would otherwise be lost for centuries to come, giving to the future in ways that ecotourism's history has never done before.

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