Ecotourism: curse or blessing?

Is nature-based tourism Africa’s best economic trump card or an invitation to plunder? Donald Pinnock explores the option – and discovers their complexities.

After many years of war – three and a half of them spent in a Japanese prison camp – South African writer Laurens Van der Post was still in uniform as the British Government’s representative in Southeast Asia when he received an urgent call from the War Office to return to London.

On the Cairo airstrip, while his plane was refuelling, he spotted a South African military transport . . . and, risking court martial, he hopped on board and landed in Johannesburg instead. There he hired a truck, bought some provisions and set out for the wilds near the Limpopo River.

That evening, as he walked down towards the river, an enormous kudu bull “with horns so tall and wide and heavy that only pride enabled him to keep his head in the air” stepped into the path. As they stared at each other the bull threw his head back and sniffed the air between them. Then, “as if he had known me but never expected to see me again,” the majestic creature resumed its journey, passing a few metres from the man without a trace of alarm.

For Van der Post “it was as if all the chains of a kind of slavery dropped from me with such a rush that they tinkled and rattled in my imagination. Suddenly I had finished with the war, and a great rush of emotion swept over me that was impossible to describe except that all its urges and manifestations met in a wordless cry: ‘I have come home!”‘

This experience was to be the deep keel of Van der Post’s life. It also says something significant, though often neglected, about why we travel to wild places. In the wilderness, he wrote, we find “a blueprint of what creation was about in the beginning”, and “an incredible nostalgia rises in us, an impulse to return.”
In today’s age of mass travel, however, this impulse by a few hunters and eccentric bushwhackers defying the urbanward flood has been replaced by a flow of city travellers beating their way back to where their ancestors started from. And, as mass movements do, this urge has led to an industry and been given a name: ecotourism.

But seldom has so much been said in the name of a single word with such contradiction. A recent newspaper article illustrated this point when it suggested Johannesburg as the new ecotourism centre of South Africa. The man who invented the term – Mexican environmentalist Hctor Ceballos-Lascurin – was once distressed to discover a hotel in Mexico which described itself as ‘ecotouristic’ because it had caged peacocks and monkeys in the garden!

Few people, it seems, can agree on exactly what the term means. For tour operators, it’s clearly about making money out of a growing number of people seeking peace and pleasure in the wilds. For rural communities in eco-destinations – and their political champions – it’s a possible road to collective prosperity and development. For ecologists it’s simply a necessary evil, tolerable only on the principle of ‘take only pictures, leave only footprints’.

Ceballos-Lascurin coined the term in 1983 while working for the Mexican Ministry of Urban Development and Ecology. His original definition was: “ecotourism is responsible travel to relatively undisturbed natural areas with the object of studying, admiring and enjoying the natural landscape and its wild plants and animals, as well as any existing cultural manifestations (both past and present) found in these areas”.

After the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 he extended it to encompass the notion of ‘sustainable development’ and produced a new definition which is now generally accepted: “Ecotourism is environmentally responsible travel and visitation to enjoy and appreciate nature (and the accompanying cultural features), which promotes conservation and sustainable development, has low visitor impact and provides for beneficial, active socio-economic evolvement of local populations”.

That definition has caused much debate and seen several refinements, but it is generally agreed that ecotourism involves tourism into areas of great natural beauty or interest with minimum impact on the environment and maximum benefit to local communities.

But definitions, destinations and desire to travel are not always comfortable bedfellows.

As this century draws to its close, a search for what urban sprawl cannot offer is drawing an increasing number of people towards wilder, more exotic and rural areas of the planet in search of meaningful leisure-time experiences. In a world where huge numbers of people living in cities have the wealth to travel, however, this nostalgia is putting enormous pressures on those areas where the spirit of wilderness still rules.

While some sectors of the travel industry are sensitive to this problem, it is an industry requiring a return on capital and investments. What travellers want comes before the impact of their desires – and these wants are growing. According to calculations by the World Tourism Organisation, there were 450-million international tourist arrivals in 1991 (compared with 60-million in 1960) which generated around US$270-billion.

A report prepared for American Express claims that travel and tourism presently account for nearly 5,5 percent of the world’s total GNP and produce annual revenues of US$2,5-trillion. An estimated 118-million people work in the industry, making it the world’s largest employer.

Ecotourists are an increasing portion of this movement and tour operators in the Third World, particularly, are preparing for a boom. But there is a downside. A World Bank study claims that only 45 per cent of tourist expenditures remain in developing countries and in many cases the figure is much lower. And there are many examples of tourism resulting in severe environmental and cultural degradation.

For example, the area around Mount Everest in Nepal is strewn with litter left by climbers; coastal erosion around beach resorts is a problem in Kenya and the Philippines; sensitive desert biomes in the Namib Desert are being roughed up by tourists in 4x4s; a culture of begging and stealing has developed along tourist routes; Antarctica has a trash problem; forests are being stripped of indigenous hardwood for tourist carvings; ancient Bushman paintings are being sprayed with water or Coke to improve their visibility; reefs are being plundered by locals who sell their pickings to tourists. . . .
Cultural warping is also occurring. An Open Africa journalist recently complained that while many lodges in Southern Africa try to expose their clients to local culture, “the modus operandi is for half-dressed kitchen staff to dance round the fire as an accompaniment to the clients’ after-dinner drinks.”

Farieda Kahn of the University of Cape Town’s Environmental Advisory Unit tells a similar story about the people of the Kagga Kamma nature reserve in the Western Cape. Tourists travel to the reserve to see the ‘last surviving Bushmen’ living an authentic lifestyle. But just out of sight the Kagga Kamma people wear ordinary clothes, buy their food from a shop and send their children to a conventional school.

Although clan leader Dawid Kruiper insists they are not forced to ‘perform’ for tourists, it is difficult to avoid the perception that the clan is a sort of natural curiosity or, in Kahn’s words, “the human equivalent of the coelacanth”.

A question which needs to be asked – if we agree with Ceballos-Lascurin’s definition – concerns power relationships. If the balance is wrong at ground level, eco-tourism will surely be an industry no different in its effect from Third World copper or coal mining: the locals have it and work it for foreigners who use it and get rich.

An extremely disturbing example of power imbalance – and its consequences – can be found at Lake Mburo National Park in Uganda. In 1984 the Obote government declared the area a national park and opened it to the public – after residents were evicted, their houses and fields burned and their cattle confiscated. Not surprisingly, this turned many people against the park and when Obote’s rule ended in 1986 pastoralists quickly re-inhabited the area and destroyed all the park facilities.

Less obvious (but no less arrogant) action took place in Kenya’s Shaba reserve. According to an article in Mail and Guardian, a spring traditionally used by Samburu herdsmen as the only reliable water source for their cattle is now being diverted to fill the swimming pool of the Sarova Shaba Hotel.

“There are few successful ecotourist ventures which involve indigenous southern African people on a basis of an equal partnership,” says Kahn. The reasons are not hard to find: “Most of the ecotourist ventures in which indigenous people are involved are initiatives launched by the owners of private game lodges or government-owned national parks. However well intentioned, such a partnership with a powerful senior partner who has probably initiated, funded and implemented the project is inherently unequal.”
In a perfect world perhaps it could be equal: locals own land and wildlife without which ecotourist operators cannot function while the operators have the capital and skills without which locals cannot initiate tourism. But it seldom, if ever, works that way. Indeed, Dr Merl Sowman of the UCT’s Environmental Evaluation Unit observes that because, in most cases, ecotourism just won’t work unless big business is backing it, this “raises a question about the whole notion of ecotourism.”

For Kenyan conservationist Dr Richard Leakey, however, ecotourism is not about power relationships but about human and habitat survival. With hundreds of millions of people in Africa who “can’t look forward to one square meal a week let alone a day, we can’t ask them to put hand on heart and support our conservation policies.”

Poverty, he says, is incompatible with conservation, especially considering most poor people use wood for fuel. The real issue is human food and energy needs.

“What governments have to realise is that unless poverty is addressed nationally, so that people can join the mainstream of economic opportunity, the efforts to preserve national parks and protected areas will ultimately fail.”

University of California researcher Dr Donald Moore, who spent several years working on the relationship between parks and people in Zimbabwe, adds another warning: “The international tourist trade is fickle. If subsistence skills are replaced with tourist-service skills the former may, over time, be lost. If tourism departs, as it can, communities may be left with no means of survival.”
However, in spite of these concerns, there are places where ecotourist relationships are being built on more solid foundations. In the Northern Province Chief Joao Makuleke and his tribal authority are reclaiming ownership of the biologically rich section of the Kruger National Park between the Luvuvhu and Limpopo rivers. (The community was removed from this area at gunpoint in 1969)

Makuleke and his community are negotiating a deal with the National Parks Board whereby – if the title is regained – they will not demand to return to their land inside the park but will retain the right to operate tourist lodges there in partnership with the private sector and the parks board. The Department of Land Affairs, together with the German support agency GDZ, has begun a project to plan ways in which the land can be used to stimulate a regional economy with tourism at its centre.

The parks board is involved in similar negotiations in Hondeklip Bay on the Cape West Coast. Officials have confirmed that 38 000 hectares between the Spoeg and Groen rivers will soon be declared a national park. The area offers a combination of rare succulent Karoo, strandveld fynbos and sandveld – all endangered vegetation types – together with creatures of the arid area such as caracal, bat-eared fox, black-backed jackal, springbok, gemsbok and wild ostrich.

The local community has been intimately involved with the development of the park and has elected representatives to serve on the planning committee. Park design includes guidelines for revenue-sharing with local inhabitants, development of local ecotourism ventures, training and employment of locals to run the park, the use of natural resources such as veldkos, marketing of locally made products, and other ideas for direct economic involvement.

Private-sector leader in large-scale ecotourism partnerships is Conservation Corporation Africa which has set up a Rural Investment Fund to promote rural development through ecotourism. The fund’s aim is to draw local communities into discussions about ecotourism activities in their areas, develop viable local economies, build environmental awareness, facilitate social services, finance small businesses and involve communities in land development.

To this end, the fund has raised capital to develop a clinic, classrooms, training facilities and an environmental centre at Phinda in Maputaland and has promoted bush clearing, charcoal production and a community leadership education fund in the area.

Other projects include a clinic in the Makhasa Tribal Area, road building from Hluhluwe and Sodwana Bay, water reticulation projects, a regional runway and rural business support in Maputaland, a small-business development fund supporting stokvels, glazing, fruit bottling, chicken farming, coal yards, sewing and hawking.
A question begging to be asked about such projects, however, is the degree to which partnerships are formed with local communities and how much say these communities have in management decision-making. This was a question central to the planning of the Campfire project in Zimbabwe.

In the early 1980s people and wildlife were coming into conflict, mainly because of drought and Zimbabwe’s rising human population. The Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management found that to local people wildlife was simply a nuisance. Elephants, buffalo and other big herbivores roamed through their villages, raided their meagre crops and sometimes trampled their huts, while lion and other carnivores killed their domestic stock and occasionally their family members.

The department also found that in the effected regions farmers were using agricultural practices which were economically and ecologically unsound. Any solution they proposed would have to benefit the locals, the land and the wildlife.

After discussions between various organisations, including the department, the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) and local communities, the Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (Campfire) was born. Its logic was extremely simple: wildlife and habitat management by communities had a benefit measurable in dollars.

Campfire developed a threefold goal: to conserve Zimbabwe’s wildlife and environment, to enhance rural prosperity in areas where wildlife use was the most productive form of land use, and to act as a catalyst in order to promote self-management in rural communities.

In this, apart from corruption in a few projects, it has been hugely successful. By setting strict hunting quotas and marketing these to safari-hunting operations, poor communities are now making nearly a quarter of a million Zimbabwean dollars a year, money which is used to set up schools and shared projects such as grain mills.

Wildlife is no longer seen as a nuisance. In the Tshikwarawara area along the Limpopo River a Campfire committee member told journalist David Holt-Biddle: “The poaching and illegal hunting have stopped completely because everyone in the community is a policeman now. Anyone who comes into this area to hunt had better find a hole and hide himself and his trophy in, or the people will get him!”

Although Campfire’s ecotourism roots are in hunting, over the last decade many non-hunting safari lodges have been developed as Campfire projects. Among these are Chizarira Wilderness Lodge in the Chizarira National Park and Chipembere Safaris on the Mana Pools escarpment. Even some large hotels in Zimbabwe are Campfire partnerships. This network of projects forms probably the most comprehensive, successful and genuine ecotourism venture in Southern Africa.
If you have read this far you could be forgiven for imagining the reason people should travel to wilderness areas is to uplift the poor. But, of course, that’s not why they do. They travel because in the wilderness there is something definably ‘other’, a quality they need in order to unwind.

Environmental author Jonathan Porritt has suggested that most people are “totally disconnected from the workings and mysteries of the Earth” and that ecotourism can help to rewire some of those lost connections.

Because the wilderness is where all creatures, including ourselves, come from, the important question concerning our relationship to the wild is part of a larger query: how shall we live and what shall we live for? American philosopher Henry David Thoreau offered a possible answer when he wrote: “In wildness is the preservation of the world. . . . Not yet subdued by man, its presence refreshes him. When I would re-create myself, I seek the darkest wood. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature.”

These linkages are an often unconsidered part – the ‘eco’ part – of ecotourism but are central to contemporary ecological thinking. Environmentalist and founder of America’s Sierra Club, John Muir, has commented that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe”.

These ideas resonate with the understandings of old cultures which considered nature to be an aware, living, holy being which needed to be treated with respect. They also often show a delicate sensitivity to the place of people in the greater scheme of things. Reflecting on the white scramble for the lands of his people, Chief Standing Bear told his biographer:

“The man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures and acknowledging unity with the universe of things was infusing into his being the true essence of civilisation. And when he left off this form of development his humanisation was retarded.”

The words of a Bushman song show an acceptance of life’s passing which are profound in their simplicity: “The day we die a soft breeze will wipe out our footprints in the sand. When the wind lies down, who will tell in the timelessness that once we walked this way in the dawn of time?”

Indigenous people can often translate ancient intuitions for Westerners who have long forgotten them, and their cultures are treasure-houses of earth wisdom for those willing to listen.

Renowned South African naturalist and writer Ian Player acknowledges that he learned his bushcraft from Zulu game guide Magqubu Ntombela who, though he was unable to read or write, was “the best educated and wisest man I have ever known.”

Reflecting on a life which combined wilderness and a quest for personal wholeness, Player was to write: “For me it began many years ago on the banks of the Black Umfolozi River and following my friend and wise old man, Magqubu, with his acute sensation function, along rhino paths that started from nowhere and gradually became more distinct. Then just as suddenly as they began, became indistinct and vanished. They are much like the lives of men”.
To a greater or lesser degree, ecotourists are people seeking their paths in the wilderness. They are travellers unwilling to be cast adrift in the shallowness of constructed urban life. Van der Post felt this deeply when he wrote: “The churches and great cathedrals are really, in the time scale of human history, just tents on the journey to somewhere else. . . . Wilderness is an instrument for enabling us to recover our lost capacity for religious experience.” Anyone who has slept around a campfire under the starry arc of an African sky can vouch for that.

So what, in the final analysis, is this thing called ecotourism? It is, of course, simply what you define it to be: and to disagree is human. However, in the words of Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer Arne Naess, what you end up with should be simple in means, rich in ends and mature in its understanding of the needs of the human soul.

But the moral costs can be high. Tour operators and others involved in nature travel who allow wild places and indigenous cultures to be marketed to their destruction will have done much more than squander a good opportunity. They will have betrayed a planet’s sacred trust.