an accent on carbon emissions and carbon footprinting. This environmental agenda hardly needs rehearsing here given the breadth of discourse on such matters over the last 25 years, which has raised more questions than answers (see Ekins, 1986; WCED, 1987; Pearce, 1993; Jacobs, 1996; Johnson and Turner, 2003; Blowers and Hinchliffe, 2003; Connelly and Smith, 2003). As environmental concerns expanded then so pressure mounted
on industry to address the actual and potential contribution of their operations in contributing to environmental degradation and develop systems to assess the environmental performance of individual operations – enterprises (Welford and Starkey, 1996, p. xi).
Tourism has certainly not escaped such attention, particularly in the 1990s, leading to a plethora of conferences, myriad books and articles over the years (see Romeril and Hughes-Evans, 1979; Krippendorf, 1987; Harrison, 1992; Jenner and Smith, 1992; Smith and Eadington, 1992; Cater and Lowman, 1994; Hunter and Green, 1995; McCool and Moisey, 2001). Such an outcome was supported and furthered by the development of tourism as a field of study in its own right within academia since the 1980s. This largely coincided with the recognition of tourism as a tool for regional development in response to the decline of rural areas due to changing agricultural practices (Champion and Watkins, 1991) or the socio-economic problems arising from the decline of traditional industrial and manufacturing bases in urban areas, e.g. Glasgow (Leslie, 2001a). In many instances tourism was promoted and often grant funded by the government and notably so by the EU (Leslie et al., 1989; Leslie, 2011).
Sustainability, succinctly described as striving for social, environmental, economic and ethical responsibility (see Hall and Gossling, 2009), not surprisingly gained attention, albeit limited when considered in the overall context of such output. However, a key theme within such work was, and continues to be, that the development and impacts of tourism should not be detrimental to the physical environment and should be beneficial to the destination locality and communities involved. An agenda for tourism that first gained prominence in the 1980s; as Krippendorf (1987) argued, tourism enterprises should be more responsible – environmentally and also socially. A period during which we saw the rise of alternative tourism as tourism development and enterprises were slowly coming under more scrutiny. Furthermore that:
… the industry and tourists individually are being expected and required to shoulder more responsibility for the effects of travel and behaviour on host environments, both physical and human (Butler, 1995, p. 5).
This is well illustrated in the outcomes of the UK’s Tourism and Environment Task Force – set-up post the Brundtland Report, the renowned outcome of the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Stockholm Congress of 1987. The report listed four key areas:
• tourism business to develop ways to support rather than detract from the quality of the environment;
• promote respect of the environment;
• ensure staff are trained to consider the environment; and
• promote environmentally positive tourism.
The quintessential point to be made here is that much that can be done in response to the issues of sustainability, that is by way of reducing consumption of non-renewable resources, reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and promoting positive economic and social impacts has been advocated for over 20 years (as previously noted) and, though to a much lesser extent, with specific examples of practices that tourism businesses can adopt (for example, see Middleton and Hawkins, 1993, 1994), the most substantive without doubt is InterContinental Hotel’s promotion of their environmental management system which subsequently became the International Hotels Environment Initiative (see Black, 1995). However, the wider dissemination of such advocacy by and large has been within the context of the greening of tourism policy (see Leslie, 2001a, 2002a) and conferences designed with the objective of promoting such policy, related initiatives and best practices, and within academia (for example, through learned journals and books). This largely escapes the attention and/or interest of most practitioners. That is ‘most’ in terms of the vast majority of owners/managers involved directly in the supply of tourism provision. Obviously there are exceptions but mainly such exceptions are leading representatives of national and multi-national enterprises, leading stakeholders and players in the tourism sector such as hotel chains, airlines and major tour operators.
These leading players established the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) in the early 1990s to represent their interests on the international stage, especially in the wake of the United Nations ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio de Janiero, 1992. As they have since argued, there is a:
… need, now more than ever, for travel and tourism to be recognised as a vital part of the global economy, a view that has yet to be fully acknowledged by governments. (WTTC et al., 2002, p. 7)
and to reinforce their own role and vested interests went on to say that:
The inevitable transition to sustainable development gives the travel and tourism industry an opportunity to confirm itself as a solution, rather than a contributor to the economical, social and environmental challenges facing the future. (WTTC et al., 2002, p. 7)
Whilst many analysts would not support such high sentiments, there is some truth in such claims given that there is much tourism enterprises can do to reduce their environmental impacts. To some extent, and in its favour, the WTTC has been at the forefront of promoting ‘Sustainable Tourism’ and environmental management initiatives and practices; well illustrated by its ‘Local Agenda 21 for the Travel & Tourism Industry’ (WTTC et al., 1996). Professional associations in the sector have also advocated environmental management (EM) practices (see Bricker, 2009); for example, the HCIMA (now Institute of Hospitality (IH)) in ‘Hospitality’, the members’ journal (see Leslie, 2001b). Without the specific context of the latter, much of what is written focuses on developing countries and involves, by way of illustration, national and international companies; yet whilst these enterprises predominate in financial terms and influence at international and national levels they are hardly representative of tourism supply in terms of the number of enterprises involved.
Overall, the recognition (albeit in hindsight) of first the negative impacts of tourism, attributed predominantly to mass tourism and second, the promotion of the greening of tourism which involves:
… much greater awareness of the interconnectedness of the economic, the physical and social dimensions of the environment rather than just the physical or natural e.g. pollution and damage. (Leslie, 2005, p. 251)
As Millman (1989) argued in the late 1980s, travel organizations should develop more ‘sensitive forms of tourism’ which rather catalysed the categorisation of different manifestations of tourism consumption e.g. sustainable-, alternative-, green-, eco-, nature-(see Leslie, 2012a). The problem with this development is as Jay Appleton (1991) wryly put it:
Once we begin to categorise, we begin to moralize also, and before we know where we are we have set up a highly inflexible binary system of good and evil, right and wrong. There are no grey areas where there are green enthusiasts. (cited in Glyptis, 1995, p. 195)
In this instance it appears that ‘mass’ tourism was/is the ‘evil’ and the alternative categories the ‘good’. But this is misleading in that the ills attributed to tourism are not necessarily confined to or absent from these other forms of tourism consumption. Certainly they will vary according to the type of touristic activity and destination environment. More importantly given the context here of tourism enterprises and sustainability they have responsibility irrespective of the type and scale of tourism development for their own operations. The interpretation therefore that these other forms of tourism, i.e. not considered mass, are more aligned with the concepts and more so the practices promoted under the umbrella of sustainability is very much open
