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From Away.com

Nature Tours: An Ecotourism Primer
Nature Travel: The Basics

By Bill Belleville

Nature travel is so trendy these days that just about anyone with a few trees, some half-addled critters on a tether, and a bit of open space not edged with concrete calls themselves an "eco-tourist" destination or resort.

We invite you to take a virtual exploration of what nature travel is really about—what to look for, what to avoid, and how to tell the difference between them.

First, let's settle on what "eco-travel" is really about. The Ecotourism Society, a nonprofit agency that helps set standards and ethics for the industry, describes it as "travel to a natural place that both conserves the place and the culture associated with it." In other words, nature travel isn't loading up a boat with a few thousand tourists and dumping them on a tiny island full of penguins or tortoises or some fuzzy-but-overstressed species.

In fact, the most genuine sort of ecologically sensitive travel doesn't even consider visiting a destination unless that destination has a management plan or strategy in place to monitor tourism impacts—and to restrict them when natural sustainability is at risk.

Beyond this approach, however, the breadth of nature travel can be divided into two major types:

Pure Eco-travel
In this variety, visitors spend their entire time exclusively in a place themed to nature. Such a place might be the Galapagos Islands--a sort of cradle of evolutionary biology--where nightlife and neon are virtually nonexistent. The biggest surprise of such a place comes not from hitting three cherries on the slot machine but watching a blue-footed booby perform its mating dance, or a nesting frigate extend its throat like a red balloon.

Auxiliary Eco-travel
Here, you visit a traditional tourist site and then spend part of your visit exploring more natural aspects of the destination. In this case, you might go to St. Lucia in the Caribbean for the umbrella drinks and the luster of the fancy beach resorts, and then end up snorkeling the reef and hiking a trail through the mountain rain forest. Insiders call this "eco-tourism lite," and see it as a way of educating traditional tourists by using such local devices as interpretive nature paths, botanical parks and zoos, and novice-level snorkeling trails.

Auxiliary eco-tourism can best be ferreted out during your trip by reviewing brochures and flyers at your hotel and by asking the concierge about the availability of local nature tours.

However, if you are a more serious "green" traveler, you'll want to be more particular from the very beginning about selecting a destination at all. And there are some fundamental questions to ask, either of your tour operator and/or the lodge or green resort where you intend to stay.



Know Before You Go
  1. What is the track record of your tour operators? How long have they been in business? Are the guides naturalists or just glib public relations types more interested in tips than in helping you have a true eco-tourism experience?
  2. Will your guides harass or "herd" the animals in any way to get them to perform for you and your camera? Do they bait or feed them? Will the animals be available in their natural setting, and will the appearance of your group by as unobtrusive as possible? As for culture, will you be visiting sacred sites without permission of the indigenous people who still revere them?
  3. Does the lodge or eco-facility blend in well with the natural environment? Is solid waste (read: garbage) and wastewater processed in such a way that it doesn't degrade the sites? Are alternative methods of supplying power considered, such as solar panels, photovoltaic cells, and wind generators? Transporting fossil fuel to remote sites can be both incredibly expensive as well as environmentally problematic.
  4. Is there a plan that limits the number of visitors to a certain site and closely monitors that site for degradation? In recent years, Costa Rica--once a premier eco-tourism destination--is now scrambling to recover its reputation as a result of degradation and tourism overload.
  5. Understand why you want to visit a site--something beyond the fact that it advertises "ecotourism" or "jungle tours." Do you have an interest in birding or certain "charismatic mega-fauna" like large beasts? Is your interest in habitats themselves--swamps, savannahs, rain forests? Research the subject thoroughly before selecting a site so you'll be more knowledgeable about it. When you arrive, you'll also have a better idea of what you're looking at.
  6. Consider joining a volunteer group that works closely in the environment, usually helping a professional in their field research. EarthWatch does this well on land, and the Oceanic Society does so along the coast and in the sea. The Sierra Club and Audubon Society offer group tours that often interface with working scientists, as do many museums, such as New York's Museum of Natural History, and, increasingly, large city aquariums, such as the National Aquarium at Baltimore.
  7. The admonishments to "take nothing but pictures," or, for divers, "leave nothing but bubbles," may sound trite--but they are actually quite profound. If you are in a public preserve or park, collecting anything, including plants or even empty shells, is often prohibited. And, if a local vendor is selling souvenirs made from local fauna and flora, make sure its origin isn't threatened or endangered. The idea of nature travel, after all, is to leave the place just as wild as you found it--both for the traveler who comes after you and the indigenous person who may still be living in harmony with his or her local environment. If you find yourself with a tour guide who operates otherwise, it is your responsibility to express your concern with such behavior--you are, after all, the paying customer.




Bill Belleville, an Away.com contributing editor, is a Florida-based writer specializing in nature and marine issues. He contributes widely to national magazines and has scripted and co-produced two PBS documentaries. River of Lakes: A Journey on Florida's St. Johns River has recently been published by University of Georgia Press.