[email protected].
Rajendra N. Suwal is an Ashoka Fellow and has extensive experience on the biodiversity of Nepal – especially on bird ecology, Sarus Crane Conservation, wetland development and ecotourism. He is interested in capacitating citizen scientists, promoting community conservation stewardship, community-based wildlife tourism, and designing sustainable finance mechanisms in protected areas, strengthening national economy and benefitting local livelihood. Deputy Director, Partnership Development, WWF Nepal, Kathmandu, 44600. E-mail: Rajendra.suwal@ wwfnepal.org; [email protected].
Kai Weise has been working along the Himalayas as an architect and planner over the past three decades. He has facilitated the establishment of management systems for World Heritage properties in Nepal, Uzbekistan, India, and Myanmar, including for Lumbini. He has been involved in the strategic response and rehabilitation planning after the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake in Nepal and the 2016 Chauk Earthquake in Myanmar. President, ICOMOS Nepal, Kathmandu, E-mail: [email protected].
1 The Environmental Impacts of Religious Tourism
Kiran A. Shinde1* and Daniel H. Olsen2
1College of Arts, Social Sciences and Commerce, La Trobe University, Australia; 2Brigham Young University
*Corresponding author: [email protected]
Introduction
Like other tourism niche markets, the religious tourism market has increased over the past two decades, with sacred sites in all faith traditions receiving record numbers of visitors (Olsen, 2013a; Butler and Suntikul, 2018). Some scholars and tourism experts suggest that, each year, between 200–600 million people travel for religious purposes (Timothy, 2011; World Tourism Organization, 2011), which has led scholars to investigate the linkages between religious/spiritual tourism and pilgrimage to sacred sites in different religions including:
• Islam (e.g. Din, 1989; Timothy and Iverson, 2006; Henderson, 2009, 2011; El Hanandeh, 2013; Bouyahya, 2016)
• Catholicism (e.g. Collins-Kreiner and Kliot, 2000; Fleischer, 2000; Voye, 2002; Pohoaţă et al., 2013; Rodrigues and McIntosh, 2014; Rodríguez et al., 2018)
• Protestantism (e.g. Collins-Kreiner and Kliot, 2000; Fleischer, 2000; Feldman, 2007; Ron and Feldman, 2009)
• Hinduism (e.g. Singh, 1997, 2005; Ghosal and Maity, 2010; Shinde, 2017, 2018; Pinkney and Whalen-Bridge, 2018)
• Buddhism (e.g. Hall, 2006; Goldberg, 2013; YES Bank, 2014; Geary and Mason, 2016; Chen et al., 2017; Wong, 2018)
• Sikhism (e.g. Jutla, 2002, 2006)
• Judaism (e.g. Kosansky, 2002; Cohen Ioannides and Ioannides, 2006; Collins-Kreiner, 2010a; Collins-Kreiner and Luz, 2018)
• Shintoism (e.g. Wong et al., 2013, 2016; Wong and Ryan, 2013; Nakanishi, 2018)
• The Bahai (e.g. Gatrell and Collins-Kreiner, 2006; Kreiner et al., 2015)
• The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (e.g. Olsen, 2006b, 2013b, 2016, 2019b; Schott, 2010; Olsen and Timothy, 2018).
While a large body of work examines the interrelationships between pilgrimage, religion, and tourism from anthropological, theological, ethnographic, historical, geographical, and religious studies viewpoints (e.g. Timothy and Olsen, 2006; Badone and Roseman, 2004; Collins-Kreiner, 2010b; Stausberg, 2012), this is a young and growing field of academic inquiry.
One of the research areas that is sorely lacking is the relationships between religion, tourism, and the environment. With so many people travelling to religious sites and events for religious, educational, and leisure purposes, what do these large movements and flows of visitors mean for sacred places of great religious importance? How do such large numbers of visitors interact with both the natural and the human-built environments of these destinations? How can natural and human-built environments support pilgrimage and religious tourism at such scales, and if they cannot, what can be done to increase the carrying capacities at these sites?
Fig. 1.1. The interrelationships between religion, tourism, and the environment.
The purpose of this book is to examine the interrelationships between religion, tourism, and the environment (Fig. 1.1). This chapter sets the context for the other eleven chapters in this book by first briefly reviewing the literature between religion, tourism, and the environment, identifying gaps in the existing literature, and then presenting a conceptual model to understand the ecosystem of pilgrimage and religious tourism.
Tourism and Religion
There is a growing literature related to how religion and tourism influence each other (Timothy and Olsen, 2006). More particularly, this literature focuses on the similarities and differences between pilgrimage and religious tourism (Jackowski and Smith, 1992; Smith, 1992; Oberdick, 1995; Butler and Suntikul, 2018), with attempts to distinguish between leisure-inspired tourism and religiously motivated pilgrimages (Huntsinger and Fernández-Giménez, 2000; Bremer, 2000; Doron, 2005; Olsen, 2010; Shinde, 2012b; Damari and Mansfeld, 2016). These attempts have relied on the binary pairs of pilgrimage/tourism and pilgrim/tourist (Collins-Kreiner, 2010b; Olsen, 2010) binaries have also been used to illustrate the types of experiences different visitors have at sacred and religious sites (Fleischer, 2000; Poria et al., 2003).
Many scholars have posited that religious tourism has its origins in religious practice of pilgrimage (Tomasi, 2002; Timothy and Olsen, 2006; Shinde, 2007b; Butler and Suntikul, 2018). Driven by religious needs and with religious and sacred places as its destination, pilgrimage is generally considered a form of tourism because of its use of existing tourism infrastructure for mobility purposes (Gupta, 1999; Timothy and Olsen, 2006). As Olsen and Timothy (2006, p. 7) argue, ‘A “pilgrim” is a tourist (religious tourist) who is motivated by spiritual or religious factors’. Indeed, religious tourism combines elements of both religion and tourism, which combinations vary depending on a person’s beliefs, needs, motivations, behaviour, and sought-after outcomes. However, there seems to be limited understanding of religious tourists– they are not a homogenous group (Olsen, 2013a). On the contrary, most religious sites will have a considerable blending of different types of religious tourists – from pilgrims who perform staunch rituals to those interested in the educational aspects of religious heritage to free-spirited travellers seeking to fulfill life goals through engaging with religious and spiritual practices (Huntsinger and Fernández- Giménez, 2000; Terzidou et al., 2008; Moufakkir and Selmi, 2018; Rodríguez et al., 2018). The nature of religious tourism and religious tourists differs based on religions, faiths, followers, religiosity, and the religious relevance of sites. The authors wonder if these different types of visitors lead to different kinds of impacts at religious tourism destinations. Moreover, do, different religious motivations translate into types of religious behaviour that have any bearing on the environmental impacts of religious tourism?
In
