Eco-Tourism

First, I'm going to agree and say that the 'tropical' vacations people take often run parallel to those shown in the Life and Debt film - ignoring the extreme generalizations. It's obviously pretty hard to avoid if you're heading to a place in the Caribbean, which is where many Americans travel on vacation because of the proximity to our own country. I'm definitely guilty of it - in Aruba whenever we left the resort we drove around the island amid tiny shanty houses and goats. In Mexico, on the drive to our hotel we drove along a (long) stretch of road with a makeshift village - people literally living along the side of the road under tarp and other scraps. Obviously it made us feel incredibly guilty and more than a little uncomfortable. The other side is that the majority of those tropical vacation spots would be devastated if people stopped vacationing  there as the bulk of their economies are often tourism.  

  I'm not sure how I feel about eco-tourism. Obviously, it's a great concept - if you love to travel you'll want to help to preserve those beautiful places you love visiting. However, I'll also agree that currently eco-tourism may be less helpful to the environment and more helpful to the pocketbooks of bigwig companies. I watch the Travel Channel often (ok, all the time) and recently they've been covering this trend of eco-tourism. It looks awesome, the resorts are stunning and breathtakingly situated right in the heart of nature. However, I've noticed that these same resorts seem to be incredibly expensive and only a logical option for the wealthiest of travelers. I'm sure cheaper options exist, but it seems like currently, eco-tourism is cashing  in on the "Hollywood trend" of being green -  and acting here as the  chic  alternative to vacationing. 

While I know the economic costs of air travel are high,  I don't think they should be considered into part of our cost of travel. Rather, we should focus our energy into technologies to help reduce the impact of the airplane and make it universal to help preserve the tradition of travel. If anything, one could argue that travel can help the environmental movement by encouraging more people to care; people will be more inclined to help to save the planet if they've actually witnessed its beauty firsthand!