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Urban Ecotourism Conference Opens
What does the ecotourist do in the city? |
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| PLANETA.COM -- The Urban
Ecotourism Conferencespotlights more than 40 cities around
the globe and celebrates the notion of place, a concept explored
in previous Planeta events.
Environmental sustainability is tied to human settlement. At
the Quebec
Ecotourism Summit a European delegate said that an understanding
of ecotourism needs to include cities.
Why? Europe may lack pristine areas -- a component in early
models of ecotourism -- but there is abundance of desire and
will to conserve and restore.
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Says Antonis Petropoulos, director of ECOCLUB,
one of the conference co-sponsors: "Urban Ecotourism, in
more ways than one, can be more ecological than many other types
of ecotourism."
Antonis continues: "It baffles me why so-called 'official'
definitions of Ecotourism start with 'travel to natural areas'.
This could not be more irrelevant. Ecotourism, is ecological
tourism, period. And thus, it covers urban areas just as well.
Urban areas are not unnatural in any sense. Urban centres go
back 10,000 years and are an integral part of what we call human
civilisation ... Most ecotourists live in urban areas. They
say charity begins at home, and so does ecotourism.
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"Isn't it far more ecological to take a 6 km walk in the
urban jungle of your city on a Sunday morning and meet friends
rather than to drive alone your suv through a national park
some 200 km away to be isolated in the 'wilderness'?"
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Another co-sponsor John
Shores says that he approaches urban ecotourism as a regional
planner with a special interest in natural resources and ecosystems.
"I was born in Washington
DC, USA, which has a marvelous example of an urban park
system based on Rock Creek Park -- essentially a protected watershed
in the middle of a city of 600,000 and a metropolitan area of
several million. I now live in Silicon Valley/Bay Area of California,
USA, which has plenty of biking trails, city and regional parks,
open space preserves, and restored wetlands ... much of which
is based on a system of protected watersheds and creek channels.
Water,
because of its vital importance to human life and urban living,
is a recurring theme. I am an advocate of encouraging local
residents to visit and enjoy their urban natural areas. For
me, one of the major constituent audiences for urban ecotourism
should be our neighbors."
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Edna Aguiñaga, who works with the Mexican
Nature Conservation Fund says that those in favor of ecotourism
should be promoting a way to interact with nature in our closer
environments. "I have had the opportunity to live outside
Mexico and have lived in some cities that offer quite a bit
of options for recreation within the cities and I think we should
develop ideas that can be implemented in our local environments."
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