As tourism in European cities continues to thrive, ecotourism allows companies to capitalize on tourists' interest in the environment.
It's easy to associate environmental harm with profit and business, particularly when it comes to tourism. Airplane transportation, cruises, and double decker bus tours all show tourists new places at the expense of the environment. Eco-tourism, however, can show tourists the natural features of new places – ideally without creating the same environmental damage as other forms of tourism.
In Stockholm, our first city of the seminar, we embarked on a kayak tour around an island in the city. This allowed us to see Stockholm from an environmental perspective without releasing too many emissions, especially since we took public transportation to the site. One negative impact of this tour that our guide pointed out is that the kayaks are made of plastic, the production and eventual disposal of which has negative environmental effects. Our guides did, however, tell us that they have acquired some new kayaks made of recycled plastic, which eliminate many of the harmful effects of using new plastic.
On our kayaking tour, we learned a bit more about ecotourism in Stockholm, where there are hiking and moose-finding tours in addition to the kayaking tour that we participated in. Our guides also told us about the right to roam, which means that people may hike or camp on any land, even if it is private.
While ecotourism is popular in Sweden, there is still a lot of traditional tourism where people go around in a bus or come to the city on a cruise ship. These types of tourism are still very profitable and accessible to tourists, and even if tourists are learning about Stockholm's environmental features, they are doing damage to those features. If Stockholm marketed itself as an ecotourism city where people could learn about the sustainable initiatives, visit nature, and use only low-impact transportation, I wonder if the city's tourism sector would continue to thrive.
In Finland, our second country of the seminar, we visited a small husky farm, where in the winter sled rides are offered to tourists who make the trek up to the Arctic. The two owners of the farm were able to sustain themselves solely on this business, meaning that the profits from their tourism initiative were enough to maintain a comfortable lifestyle.
Where there are profits, however, there are people there to capitalize as much as possible. The owners of the small husky farm we visited described how large husky farms have started to appear in the area, offering sled rides to tourists with little care for the animals on the farm. This introduces the idea of ecotourism becoming unethical, as people are exploiting nature and animals for monetary gain without preserving the health and integrity of the nature and animals. Since there aren't many regulations currently outlining ethics in ecotourism, it is up to each tourist to decide what they believe is right. There is certainly room for activism in this area, as awareness is the first step in being able to make these ethical decisions.
Lastly, in Copenhagen, Denmark, we participated in biking tours. From bikes we saw Copenhagen's sustainable initiatives and natural features. It is easy to believe that biking has little environmental impact, but our coursework showed that we may have had more of an impact than we thought.
Using data from the Keith Group at Harvard (1), we found that producing the food to fuel biking on the average American diet uses 0.11 megajoules per person per kilometer on a bike, with a climate impact of 65 grams of carbon dioxide equivalents per person per kilometer. If we biked ten kilometers, this means that each person had a climate impact of 650 grams of carbon dioxide equivalents.
If instead our groups of six rode with our guide in a Prius, the climate impact would be 250 grams of carbon dioxide equivalents per person per kilometer. With six people and ten kilometers, our climate impact would be 250 grams of carbon dioxide equivalents per person, which is less than the impact of biking!
Of course, many of us still would have eaten similar amounts for breakfast and lunch whether or not we had gone biking, and the biking added utility to our experience, as it was more enjoyable than seeing Copenhagen from a Prius for about ten minutes. This exercise, however, is important in that it shows us that sometimes we make incorrect assumptions about our climate impacts, especially when we are making decisions involving tourism. Furthermore, this exercise highlights the immense impacts of the agriculture industry, which is so frequently overlooked when people are trying to make low-impact decisions.
Our ecotourism experiences were all great ways to experience the places we visited in Copenhagen, but a closer look at ecotourism shows that there can be ethical and environmental pitfalls. In my opinion, lowering our impact in any small way is a victory, and I don't think that certain activities, such as kayak tours, should be renounced because they do not completely avoid climate impact. We should be weary of the all or nothing approach when it comes to ecotourism, especially when we try to encourage other, less environmentally-inclined people, to embrace ecological tourism.
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