World Summit Erred by Ignoring Tourism, Editor Says

By Robin R. Burfield
for National Geographic Traveler

September 4, 2002

Tourism is huge business, possibly accounting for as much as 4 percent of the entire world's economy. Most countries—rich and poor—depend on tourists to create jobs and generate income.

Yet many places tourists like to visit are faced with the problems of overcrowding and a burgeoning infrastructure that puts pressure on natural and cultural treasures, including icons like the Inca mountain city Machu Picchu in Peru and the Khmer religious citadel Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

Did the United Nations err by neglecting to place tourism at the top of the agenda of its recent Summit on Sustainable Development? National Geographic Traveler Editor-in-Chief Keith Bellows discusses the summit and the issue of sustainable tourism in this interview.

The ten-day World Summit on Sustainable Development—the largest UN conference in history, with 40,000 delegates from nearly every country—has just ended in Johannesburg, South Africa. Sustainable tourism was not prominent on the agenda. Was this a lost opportunity?

I think it's astounding that tourism wasn't front and center in the discussions, because it's central to the economies of most countries—and arguably among the three biggest industries in the world. If you look at the economic power of tourism and the issues that surround it, in particular sustainable tourism and sustainable development (the two are inextricably linked) the omission from the agenda is almost unfathomable. You simply cannot extract sustainable tourism from the overall fabric of sustainable development.

Could you give me an idea of how large, financially, the tourism industry is worldwide?

The latest stats that I've seen would put it at about 4 percent of the world's gross national product. It is a massive, massive industry. The problem is that it is sometimes difficult to define tourism-related commerce. For example, how many patrons of restaurants in Washington, D.C., are tourists and how many are local? It's very difficult to know, but if you take the macro point of view, tourism is a colossal business.

For developing countries, is tourism a good economic solution for creating jobs and bringing in hard currency—perhaps even a better solution than developing natural resources at the expense of the environment?

Absolutely. For many developing countries that may have limited industry and agriculture, tourism is an economic imperative. Botswana, for example, has done African tourism right, bringing in a great deal of revenue from visitors. Then you look at Zimbabwe. Two years ago when I visited, the country was hoping to essentially turn itself around with tourist dollars, and maybe it could have. But since that time, Zimbabwe has virtually destroyed not only its agricultural industry but also its tourism industry. The animals that I went to Zimbabwe to see two years ago are now being served on the plates of imminently starving Zimbabweans.

The UN conference highlighted the differences between the goals of the developed world and the goals of the developing world. The wealthier nations want emerging economies to conserve their cultural and natural heritage through sustainable development, while the developing world wants to alleviate poverty first. What is your take on the debate?

This is the crux of the sustainable tourism debate. In a sense, the developed countries are exercising cultural imperialism. Consider China. The biggest Kentucky Fried Chicken sign in the world is in Tiananmen Square. Our reaction may be, "That's appalling." However, the Chinese happen to like Kentucky Fried Chicken, and that's their right. Who are we to impose our aesthetic values on them? That said, the developed world has learned a lot about how to manage and promote tourism, and those lessons could be enormously valuable to developing countries.

Meanwhile, we are still learning from our own mistakes. Let's take two classic examples: Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and Niagara Falls, New York. Gatlinburg is the gateway to the Smoky Mountains, and Niagara Falls is a town next to one of our great natural wonders. Both places are very touristy, not particularly attractive, and they certainly don't add a lot to the ambience of the respective areas. Those two communities are trying to do things to improve the situation, so this isn't to denigrate them. But the situation would be better if they had practiced sustainable tourism—the type that doesn't diminish the attributes that attract visitors to a place to begin with.

We are learning that there are ways to have your cake and eat it, too. Rather than our telling impoverished nations, "don't develop your important places," we should be saying, here are some initiatives, sustainable tourism initiatives that can make a difference, so you won't make the same mistakes we did.

Traveler does a great job of inspiring people to visit great U.S. destinations like the Grand Canyon and Yosemite. But now perhaps too many people visit the most popular national parks. Where will this lead?

Well, 9/11 gave the parks a bit of a respite. While more Americans visited them rather than going abroad, visits from foreigners declined. Or course, that's an aberration that won't continue. If we don't slow the traffic into such parks as the Grand Canyon and the Great Smoky Mountains, which has a serious air-pollution problem because of all the vehicles, there is a real possibility that in ten or 15 years you won't be able to visit a national park in the way you do now. We may have strict lottery systems for admission not just to campgrounds but to the park itself, stipulating how much time you're going to spend there. We're going to see, I'm absolutely sure, an end to personal automotive traffic in the national parks, with more public transportation instead. We cannot continue to give every visitor the right to take their car into the national parks, if we're going to keep the parks the way we want to see them.

For readers who want to explore the great sites of the world, what should be their approach to sustainable tourism? What is appropriate travel behavior and what is inappropriate?

It's like the recycling movement that started in the 1970s, when the average American consumer saw the impact refuse was having on the environment. Now I think we're going to see the same thing with sustainable tourism. Travelers are realizing they have a personal responsibility to leave the places they love as unchanged as possible.

There are small personal things everyone can do. At hotels, for example, we don't need to have the sheets and towels changed every day if we are staying several days. That will conserve water and energy. Also, ask questions. If you go to, say, an island resort, be a bit of a journalist and ask about the relationship between the resort and the local community. Is the resort owned by an offshore owner? Do the locals share in the prosperity of that resort? Your curiosity leads to awareness, which will affect your spending decisions.

What's critical, whether it be on an island like Jamaica, or in a country like Zambia, or even in our own backyard, a place like Carmel, California, is that locals are invested in the tourism industry. They have to want tourists to come and not look upon them as locusts. When locals stand to benefit, they too will work to preserve the character and the sanctity of the place.

So what we're really interested in is informing travelers about the stake that they have in a place. Because we've all had the experience of returning to a place and saying, "Boy, you should have seen it back then, when it was completely different. It was great ten years ago but look at it now." It doesn't have to be that way.

Is there a smarter way to experience the most popular destinations? Should people get up earlier in the day, travel in winter, look for opportunities to see places when everyone else is headed in a different direction?

There are two kinds of visitors, what I call tourists and what I call travelers.

Tourists are people who generally want to travel in packs, go to the predictable places, have an experience that is largely safe, easy, predictable.

Travelers want to experience a place in as authentic a way as possible, which is what we encourage in the magazine.

If you see yourself as a traveler, it makes a lot of sense to go, yes, in the off season, to try to get in touch as much as possible with the locals, to sidestep the typical tour-bus kinds of events and places. This isn't to say that when you go to Florence you don't go to the Uffizi Gallery, or when you go to Paris, you don't go to see the Mona Lisa; you do. But for instance, I went to Paris in December and we went into the Louvre, we walked right up to the Mona Lisa and had an unencumbered view. You go in July and you're going to wait two hours, three hours in line, and you'll see it over the heads of 50 to 60 people.

So it really is a matter of how you want to travel, and this isn't saying it's bad to be a tourist. There are lots of people who are comfortable traveling that way. It's perfectly fine. But those people who want a little more of an authentic experience, they don't necessarily want to do it with a herd. That's something I think is to be applauded, and I think that you'll find that if you travel that way, you'll have a much richer experience.

National Geographic is all about celebrating and conserving the wonders of the world. Are you ever hesitant to write about and encourage travel to sites that may not be able to handle an influx of visitors?

Whether or not a particular place can handle the tourist traffic, yes that is something we worry briefly about and that's why we spend so much time preaching the ethics of sustainable tourism—leaving a place as you found it and being aware of the importance of people being invested locally in the sanctity of a place.

I had someone stop me on the elevator yesterday, and he said "boy I really loved your Inside Washington, D.C., article, but why did you have to tell them about this particular crab shack, now I won't have it to myself." The truth is, we're a travel magazine; our job is to expose the world to our readers. The hope is that our readers will be sensitive enough to approach these places in a responsible way, and that's what sustainable tourism is all about.

Do you encourage travel to well-worn sites that already have too many visitors such as Machu Picchu?

Machu Picchu, one of the great travel icons of the world, is a very good case in point. When the Shining Path revolutionaries were creating problems for Peru, traffic to Machu Picchu was way down. It's now coming back, though Peru still has its political problems.

If you look at this particular example you would say, they get some number of thousands of people a day who get on buses who climb this dusty, treacherous dirt road, belching exhaust to get to this magnificent site. Now what they want to do is put in a cable car. The opponents of the cable car say it's going to spoil the view; it's going to increase the amount of traffic. The truth is, what is going to happen is you're going to lose a busload of tourists off that dirt road one day and that whole place is going to get shut down.

So this is a matter of responsible development. The cable car, which can be done in a way that isn't going to be an eyesore, will actually get safer, quicker, less polluting access to Machu Picchu and you can gate the number of people you take there, by virtue of how big that cable car is. So you can slow down the amount of traffic at the base of the mountain that Machu Picchu is on and, in the end, what sounds like a terrible development at first turns out to be a more sensible way to deal with an inevitable problem.

You can't stop people from going to Machu Picchu. Our world-class attractions, whether they be Venice, Angkor, the Great Wall of China, these are the birthright of the world. It would be very easy for me to say, oh we shouldn't cover these places, but the fact is, people want to know about these places. They want to dream of going there. They want to actually go there. So it's a matter of covering these places but doing it in the context of trying to sensitize people to the importance of preserving them.

The Traveler mission statement urges communities and travel businesses to adopt policies that prevent over-commercialization and pledges a commitment to support enterprises that sustain and enhance "sense of place." What inspired this pledge?

It comes directly from the strong conviction of Jonathan Tourtellot, who is our geotourism editor (and who, by the way, coined the term "geotourism"). Jonathan had been traveling the world for many years and seeing bits and pieces of it being mall-ized and dumbed down. He had seen the encroachment of a "global" look and feel, if you will.

You go to Paris and 25 years ago you could really feel the French-ness of it, but now you see Banana Republic, and you see The Gap, and you see The Limited, and you see McDonald's, and you see all these sort of averaged attractions.

We could see this happening, not just over ten years, we could see it increasingly over one or two or three years in any given place. So it became critical to us, as a publication of the National Geographic Society, that we start to educate people to the consequences of travel, and the principles of sustainable tourism.

We are working with Conservation International to issue the World Legacy Awards, which recognizes achievement in sustainable tourism. We have worked with the Travel Industry Association of America in terms of doing a survey of Americans on their attitudes about sustainable tourism; now we want to start benchmarking people's sentiments toward it. We know now that there is a small but strong and growing constituency in this country that cares a great deal about the issues around sustainable tourism. We figure that's going to grow and we want to be a part of that, and we will do whatever it takes to make readers aware of the issues.

Where are you going for your next vacation?

Probably at the end of October, Beijing. It's interesting, because the tourism industry is being largely driven by travelers from America and Western Europe. Chinese travelers haven't been as significant in numbers. But that's changing. The outbound traffic from China is currently about ten million people a year. That's a drop in the bucket for a country with more than one billion people. In ten years, as China becomes wealthier, as its middle class emerges, you're going to see tourism traffic from China like nobody's business. You think we have problems about traffic to our national parks, or pollution in the canals of Venice, whew, when the Chinese start traveling, watch out.

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