Sustainable tourism: a way out of current social and environmental dilemmas

The Yucatan peninsula in southern Mexico bears the traces of one of the grandest and most ancient historic cultures, the Mayan Civilization. To this day, its knowledge and wisdom remain alive, manifesting in the practices and customs of local indigenous communities throughout the region. Not only this, but the peninsula is also a global sanctuary of nature, the second largest forest area in Latin America, enriched with diverse terrestrial, freshwater and marine plant communities. As if all this was not enough, nowadays the peninsula also hosts some of the largest tourist destinations in Mexico, which makes it a substantial contributor to one of the nation’s most important sources of income, and the base for more than 4 million Mexican jobs. 

However, not everything in the picture is sweet and shiny. The arrival of mass tourism in the region has also come to clash at times with the region’s most valuable assets: its culture and nature. New forms of predatory tourism have meant either direct environmental degradation of local sites through un-contained construction and waste disposal, or indirect , yet still nefarious damages, through the displacement of local communities, whose very ways and knowledge have been responsible for safeguarding the balanced environment of the peninsula for centuries. 

Faced with such scenarios, some have come to see the issue affecting the peninsula as an irreconcilable struggle between the forces of tourism and the environment, of jobs and the economy against the preservation of local culture and biodiversity: as if a combination of both of these outcomes was nothing short of unimaginable. However, sustainable tourism has come to teach us precisely that such a combination is possible, and that it is also the most desirable of outcomes. The eye-opening experience of traveling and meeting new cultures, facilitated by the modern tourist industry, needs not to be at odds with the preservation of millenary ecological sites and practices of environmental protection. Jobs and a booming economy don’t have to come at the expense of the community, but can in fact come hand in hand with it, and with an enhancement of those activities and ways of life that preserve local environments. 

Additionally, it seems reasonable to claim that under our current context, the best way to guarantee the preservation of much-valued natural spaces is by supporting sustainable and environmentally friendly forms of tourism. Rather than pitching the incomes of families against their local spaces and environments, sustainable tourism suggests we make the preservation of the environment the very source of families’ incomes. 

In the struggle over the shape of tourist services, the predatory industry has the cards stacked in its favor, with large economic resources at its disposal, and less qualms about the paths they take to make their business thrive. However, travelers around the world are becoming ever-more conscious of the need to visit places in ways that are sustainable and environmentally friendly, as well as supportive of the people in local communities. There is a veritable rebellion of awareness taking place in the ways people want to do traveling, and in the ways people rejoice when visiting new places, and luckily, that rebellion of travel culture is on our side, the side of sustainable tourism :).