Ecotourism as a Core of Sustainability
in Tourism
Aleksandra Machnik
1 Introduction
When the UN announced the Bruntland Report in 1987 that introduced a new development direction—sustainability—to the scientific and politic world, tourism was
not even mentioned in this document (Brundtland 1987). At that time, many thought
that tourism could not be an environmentally hazardous activity. However, others
like Jost Krippendorf (1986) noticed otherwise and proposed the concept of alternative tourism, which was both criticised (e.g. Cohen 1987; Wheeler 1991) and even
called the buzzword of the 1980s (Butler 1990). Macleod (2005) accentuates that this
concept is far too broad and raises many problems, but that it is also subject to many
emotions and evokes them. Generally, the main idea in alternative tourism was to be
different and opposite to mass tourism, which began to gain momentum in those days,
inevitably leading to the phenomenon of over-tourism observed today. Therefore,
two basic concepts of this phenomenon can be distinguished—the response to mass
consumerism (counter-cultural alternative tourism) (Cohen 1973) and the response
to the exploitation of the Third World (applies to the so-called concerned alternative
tourism) (Holden 1984; Millman 1984). The alternative tourism attitude, however,
is very close to the simultaneously nascent modern theory of sustainable development in tourism, based on three main pillars—society, economy and the environment
(Charter for Sustainable Tourism 1995; Butler 1999). Ecotourism, understood as the
responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and sustains the
well-being of local people (TIES 1991), is at the heart of this approach. Ecotourism
is also perceived as a special kind of alternative tourism closely associated with
areas that are environmentally and culturally vulnerable (Lu et al. 2016). Due to the
ecological prefix of ‘eco’, it is often seen as a tourism dealing only with ecological
A. Machnik (B)
The Angelus Silesius University of Applied Sciences in Wałbrzych, Zamkowa 4, 58-300
Wałbrzych, Poland
e-mail: amachnik@pwsz.com.pl
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
A. Lubowiecki-Vikuk et al. (eds.), Handbook of Sustainable Development and Leisure
Services, World Sustainability Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59820-4_15
223
in Tourism
Aleksandra Machnik
1 Introduction
When the UN announced the Bruntland Report in 1987 that introduced a new development direction—sustainability—to the scientific and politic world, tourism was
not even mentioned in this document (Brundtland 1987). At that time, many thought
that tourism could not be an environmentally hazardous activity. However, others
like Jost Krippendorf (1986) noticed otherwise and proposed the concept of alternative tourism, which was both criticised (e.g. Cohen 1987; Wheeler 1991) and even
called the buzzword of the 1980s (Butler 1990). Macleod (2005) accentuates that this
concept is far too broad and raises many problems, but that it is also subject to many
emotions and evokes them. Generally, the main idea in alternative tourism was to be
different and opposite to mass tourism, which began to gain momentum in those days,
inevitably leading to the phenomenon of over-tourism observed today. Therefore,
two basic concepts of this phenomenon can be distinguished—the response to mass
consumerism (counter-cultural alternative tourism) (Cohen 1973) and the response
to the exploitation of the Third World (applies to the so-called concerned alternative
tourism) (Holden 1984; Millman 1984). The alternative tourism attitude, however,
is very close to the simultaneously nascent modern theory of sustainable development in tourism, based on three main pillars—society, economy and the environment
(Charter for Sustainable Tourism 1995; Butler 1999). Ecotourism, understood as the
responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and sustains the
well-being of local people (TIES 1991), is at the heart of this approach. Ecotourism
is also perceived as a special kind of alternative tourism closely associated with
areas that are environmentally and culturally vulnerable (Lu et al. 2016). Due to the
ecological prefix of ‘eco’, it is often seen as a tourism dealing only with ecological
A. Machnik (B)
The Angelus Silesius University of Applied Sciences in Wałbrzych, Zamkowa 4, 58-300
Wałbrzych, Poland
e-mail: amachnik@pwsz.com.pl
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
A. Lubowiecki-Vikuk et al. (eds.), Handbook of Sustainable Development and Leisure
Services, World Sustainability Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59820-4_15
223