GREEN EVENTS
Events need to be more creative.
Dialogues are inherently more interesting than people reading
at one another. End the tyranny of Powerpoint!
Why are so many 'eco' conferences without eco amenities? Putting
shade grown coffee on the table cannot be the only measure of
a green event.
Why are so many important tourism events are not blogged? Kudos
to the organizers of the Civic
Tourism Conference for going online and making contact with
colleagues months before meeting in the natural world.
Last year the United Nations celebrated World
Environment Day by focusing on city environments. Unfortunately
'urban ecotourism' and tourism were not on the primary agenda.
Will this year's World
Environment Day -- focusing on deserts -- be blogged? Flickered?
URBAN TOURISM
We discussed the merits of city-based travel in the Urban
Ecotourism Conference. There is growing interest around
the world in making cities as green as they can be for travelers
and locals.
Without urban ecotourism or civic tourism, how can wilderness
to be respected? As Wes Jackson writes in his book Becoming
Native to This Place: "The wilderness of the Sierra
will disappear unless little pieces of nonwilderness become
intensely loved by lots of people In other words, Harlem and
Saint Louis and Iowa and Kansas and the rest of the world where
wilderness has been destroyed must come to be loved by enough
of us, or wilderness too is doomed."
A new amalgamation called 'civic tourism' puts cultural tourism,
heritage tourism, ecotourism and geotourism into the pot. Prescott,
Arizona hosted a conference
in March.
"What we're trying to do is explore the issues that connect
them all -- carrying capacity, authenticity, interpretation
-- and find ways for them to work together," says Dan Shilling,
coordinator of the event.
"We want the conference to be three days of genuine discussion,
not a series of PowerPoint lectures," he said.
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