A Critical Evaluation of Ecotourism
In: Ecotourism in Forest Ecosystems: Workshop & Todeg in its tenth year. 2010, Ankara: Todeg, s. 66-81.
ABSTRACT
This presentation examines the reality and prevailing
explanations of ecotourism as ideological discourse helping to legitimize,
sustain and expand the industrial activities by means of creation and forging
descriptive concepts purposefully tied with practices called ecotourism. Doing
so, this presentation clarifies the rationale underlying the increased need for
mind and behavior management, explains the reinterpretation of economy via the
concept of environment, explicates the inclusion of tourism in development as
sustainable tourism and expanding it to the ecotourism, and discusses dominant
explanations and real facts of ecotourism. The presentation concludes that the
dominant discourses on ecotourism provide a mythical way of understanding,
thus, fail to explain scientifically the nature of the host of interrelated
activities called ecotourism. Aspiring to establish, sustain and expand mental
environments that are functional for the tourism and related industries, they
present theoretical descriptions as facts, make functional exceptions rule, and
offer strategically prescriptive and normative ethics and principles that are
mostly unattainable, but functional in marketing, promotion and mind
management. They ignore the fact that the dominant notion of ecotourism is
deeply embedded in the logics of ideological normalization of corporate
activities, commodity production and circulation and global governance of the
economic, political and cultural markets.
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