Green Fork in the Road (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine, March 2003

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Green Fork in the Road (Cont.)

THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE

Espen: What kind of personal experiences have each of you had with ecotourism?

Costas Christ: I paddled Botswana's Okavango Delta with a guide. It was just the two of us for three days, camping along the way. The guide grew up in this area, he knew the waterways of the Okavango, he knew the wildlife, he knew the birds, he knew the lay of the land, and it went beyond just straight information. It wasn't just a question of being able to identify a bird or an animal. It went to a sense of caring, a feeling of spirit, and I felt that I was on a journey into nature and into cross-cultural learning with another individual. And when I left that experience I felt very enriched, and also that I had contributed something positive to my guide's life. I feel this really is what ecotourism is about.

Andy Drumm: I used to work as a naturalist-guide in the Galapagos Islands. I found that people—urban, affluent Americans, who don't really think too much about their relationship with the natural environment—by the end of their week on the islands, were desperately keen to know from me how they could continue to contribute to conservation. They'd been so inspired by their experiences of interacting with wildlife in a sustainable, low-impact fashion—the encounters with the sea lions, with the blue-footed boobies and nesting frigate birds—that I found it easy to motivate them to contribute financially to the conservation of the Galapagos. I found people much more accessible and open to conservation ideals as a result of their interaction with nature in an organized ecotour.

What we're seeing is a growing pattern of tourism that is moving increasingly into areas of areas of high biodiversity—the last wilderness areas on our planet. Left to its own devices, it has the potential to do devastating damage to the earth.

Oliver Hillel: I'm Brazilian, and I've just recently gone back to the Brazilian Pantanal wetland. I visited a 7,500-hectare farm that was bought by Conservation International and managed as an ecotourism destination and also as a research center. The interesting thing there is that this led several other landowners in the area to turn to ecotourism as a way to complement their revenues, which they normally got from cattle ranching but now can't generate the kind of economic return as they did before due to the economic situation. And it's worked for them.

I took my two daughters there—they're four and six—and we spent ten days on the farm. There are moments when these experiences can be mystical or just very human; when you see how people living how they have lived for many, many generations, and the kind of relationship they have with their environment. The magic part of this for me was to not only to be there with my daughters, but to also imagine that because of that particular setup, I knew that my girls, in twenty years, will be able to see this beautiful place again. For me that was sort of a recharge. Sometimes I need to go back to those places to see why I'm doing this, you know?

Stanley Selengut: I've been doing this for something like 25 years. One of the things that I remember is from early on, when I wanted to try composting toilets at my resort. I went to the health department and the official there said he didn't know how he could ever give me a permit. There was nothing in the building code. And I said, wouldn't it be wonderful if toilets that use no water, no electricity, that turn human waste into compost and could be used to support the soil? And he says well, I'll tell you what I'll do. You're a person of good will. I'll give you a permit on one condition: promise me that if the toilets don't work you will fix them. So I got my health department permit on the basis of that promise. What I'm pointing to is that there's the sense of trust you get with the community around you in terms of being part of it, and that's very gratifying to a developer.

Martha Honey: I was at a park in Zimbabwe in a very remote area that was part of the Campfire Project. There was an upscale lodge there. It was a place where they had been doing hunting safaris but had moved into just doing camera safaris. They had an arrangement with the local villagers, who were getting certain benefits from the hotel. I went out to the village thinking I wouldn't real see any results. I happened to arrive there just when the local committee was deciding what to do with their profits from the hotel. They were sitting under a baobab tree with an easel, and the local schoolteacher was the chair of the committee. And they were listing out all of their priorities, and then how much money they had, and what they could do with it. It only amounted to maybe five thousand dollars, but the amount of things that they were able to do with that in this small, remote village was really extraordinary. I drove around and they had built three or four new classrooms, along with cattle dips and a grinding mill so that the women didn't have to walk thirty kilometers to grind their corn. They had installed new water pumps around the village, and electricity was coming in for the first time. All of this generated from a modest-sized eco-lodge that was nearby. And so it made me realize that ecotourism really can make enormous changes in people's lives.

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