So can tourism ever really be ethical? ; A report says eco-travel is booming, and yet aviation is de...

Jul 19, 2006 - Evening Standard;
London Author(s): Simon Davis


THE driveway of my Spanish hotel cut a ribbon through one of its three golf courses, kept lush by thousands of sprinklers. I checked in and a sign in the bathroom read: "We do not wash your towels daily as we care about water usage and the environment."

It's confusing, this ethical travel thing.

Then there's the classic tale of Brazil's first eco-resort, Praia do Forte, a 247-bedroom hotel opened by a developer who bought 30,000 hectares of rainforest that happened to border a spectacular beach. His aim was to show how you could develop eco-friendly tourism, so he levelled the forest and built his hotel. It didn't occur to him that the most friendly thing would have been not to built the resort in the first place. Still, Sting went along and now everyone wants to take the 14-hour flight there.

Try as it might to make planet-saving concessions, the travel industry is fundamentally detrimental to the environment and nothing of lasting value can be done to ease the damage holidays inflict on the planet. The only way to stem the effects is to reduce the number of holidays, and business trips, people take.

But this would prove unpopular with those of us who work hard and enjoy our holidays. It would go down badly with a travel industry generating $682 billion annually and providing millions of people with their livelihoods.

We therefore find ourselves in a Catch-22. You can't stop people flying off on holidays. Even if you could, the loss of revenue for many destinations would be calamitous. Yet if we keep travelling at the rate we do - we now fly billions of extra miles, thanks to budget airlines and cheapo destinations - we will destroy the planet. It's never easy to reconcile yourself to a problem that has no feasible solution.

I see no point in the popular towel fascism of that Spanish hotel - it is like McDonald's trying to ease obesity rates by offering salads - but we should still support efforts being made to reduce the environmental impact of our holidays.

The most important area to examine is the effect of global warming, resulting from the greenhouse gases emitted from your journey. By 2015, aviation is predicted to account for half the annual destruction of the ozone layer.

The airline industry, like the motoring industry, is trying to improve fuel economy and reduce emissions but aircraft take a huge amount of fuel to get off the ground. This will never change unless we learn to fly, which is unlikely.

Cruise ships, which more than 10 million people use annually, are also great spewers of greenhouse gases and use up an extraordinary amount of energy.

The best thing you can do is holiday at home and avoid flying, but we want to see the world, taste its foods and experience cultures. Do we need five foreign holidays every year, though, as a recent survey showed that many Londoners take? Why not one holiday with a flight each year, then maybe one by train?

The second effect of our holidays involves the destinations we choose to visit. There are concerns that ecotourism can unwittingly harm the people, animals and ecosystems they seek to protect - whales are often killed surfacing under whalewatching boats and hundreds of turtle nests are destroyed each year by tourists. And we must not ignore the obscene amounts of water and electricity that have been used to create the likes of Las Vegas and Dubai.
"It's a difficult balance to try to help a community maintain its cultural integrity without destroying the goose that laid the golden egg," says Carole Carlson, science adviser at the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).

We are doing our bit, though, it seems. Reports surfaced this week that ethical holidays are the fastest growing travel sector. According to a survey from Mintel, by 2010 the outgoing market for ethical holidays from the UK will have swollen to 2.5 million trips a year - five per cent of the market.

Responsible Travel (www.responsibletravel.com) has seen bookings double in the past year, while Climate Care (www.climatecare.org) has seen an eightfold increase in people offsetting carbon emissions from flights.

A survey by Tearfund, a Christian action group, found that more than half of all holidaymakers would pay more for their trips if they were guaranteed that the money went towards preserving the local environment and that workers get good wages and working conditions.
Perhaps the most important thing you can do in developing countries is to ensure that as much of the money you spend on your holiday goes to the locals.

For every pound you spend on a package holiday to Kenya, 20p goes to the travel agent, 40p to the airline, 23p to the hotel chain, 8p to the safari company, 9p to the Kenyan government: the Masai, on whose land you will probably take a safari, get nothing.
The nearest I have come to an ecolodge that has done something special is Adrere Amellal, in the western desert oasis of Siwa, in Egypt. It was built using traditional techniques by local tradesmen and serves local food. It is reminiscent of the Flintstones but more elegant. Prince Charles and Camilla visited on their recent trip to Africa.

There is no electricity and a freshwater swimming pool is fed by a natural spring. The owner is Dr Mounir Neamatalla, the head of one of Egypt's most prominent families and the president of Environmental Quality International, a business that "protects economic development that respects a region's natural heritage". All the staff are local and they benefit directly from the hotel, although they can't understand why they wait years for electricity and when it arrives wealthy tourists pay US$400 a day to stay in a hotel that prides itself on having none at all. I can accept that must seem odd.

But despite the merits of Adrere Amellal, the fact remains that I took a fumechugging taxi to Heathrow where I had breakfast in an overlit, air-conditioned restaurant. I then boarded a five-hour flight to Cairo, which released 0.36 tonnes of carbon dioxide per passenger into the environment (apparently). This was followed by an eight-hour drive across the Sahara to lie in a mud hut.

We have to accept that we cannot take holidays that benefit the planet because the negative aspects of most journeys outweigh the positive ones - no matter how many towels we avoid washing.

I'm off to Cornwall.

This article found at:
http://www.intellisearchnow.com/mp_pwrpub_view.scml?ppa=7iempY%5BihinortWUgc%7DGJ%7Bbfel%5D%21