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Chapter 9: Sustainability and Regenerative Tourism

A photo of the peak of Mount Everest. Most of the mountain is in shadow, but the peak itself and several clouds drifting over it are bathed in yellow-orange sunlight.
Figure 9.1 Mt. Everest. Known in Nepalese as Sagarmatha, or Peak of Heaven, and in Tibetan as Chomolungma (also spelled Qomolangma), or Goddess Mother of the World, Mt. Everest boasts the world’s highest mountain peak. Credit: Ryszard Pawlowski

To preserve nature and biological diversity as essential tourism resources, including critically endangered and emblematic species, all necessary measures must be taken to ensure ecosystem and habitat integrity is always respected. We need to work towards an ecosystem-based vision of tourism.

—World Charter for Sustainable Tourism +20, 2015, p. 20

Overview

This chapter explores the sustainability movement within tourism and the harms of overtourism and extractive tourism. It provides examples of the problems currently facing overtouristed destinations and describes the shift toward regenerative tourism, which aims to enhance the wellbeing of nature and community. The regenerative tourism model conceptualizes tourist destinations as living ecosystems. It does so by encouraging closed loop economies, drawing on a blend of Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and Western science as well as promoting grassroots tourist development designed in conjunction with the residents of a destination.

Objectives

Reading and reviewing this chapter will enable an attentive learner to accomplish the following tasks:

  1. Identify how sustainability has informed the tourism industry
  2. Define regenerative tourism
  3. Identify the role that Indigenous worldviews play in 21st-century tourism
  4. Describe how regenerative tourism differs from mass tourism
  5. Identify several of the key traits of ecolodges
  6. Describe the role that a destination’s community members play in regenerative tourism development
  7. Identify how the environmental movement has impacted tourism since the 1950s
  8. Identify a few key figures in the environmental movement and their contributions to living systems thinking
  9. Discuss 2 or more examples of regenerative tourism, either in the abstract or via concrete examples

Key Terms

  • Anthropocentric
  • Biodiversity
  • Biogas
  • Buen Vivir
  • Community-led tourism
  • Ecocentric
  • Ecolodges
  • Ecosystem
  • Enclave resorts
  • Permaculture
  • Regenerative agriculture
  • Regenerative tourism
  • Responsible tourism
  • Rights of Nature movement
  • Sustainability
  • Traditional Ecological Knowledge

Attributions

  1. Figure 9.1: Everest – Polish International Mt Everest expedition 99, by Ryszard Pawlowski, is licensed under CC BY 3.0.

License

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Introduction to Hospitality Copyright © by SBCTC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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