Proceedings of an International Year of Mountains: Part 4

Day Three – Plenary Session Celebrating Mountains – An International Year of Mountains Conference 309 Jindabyne, New South Wales, Australia 310 Celebrating Mountains – An International Year of Mountains Conference Jindabyne, New South Wales, Australia Mountains And Tourism : Meeting The Challenges Of Sustainability In A Messy World Stephen F McCool School of Forestry, The University of Montana, Missoula, Montana, USA Abstract The power of mountains to inspire, enhance our spiritual well-being, and excite and challenge serves as the foundation for a growing tourism industry worldwide. The decisions to develop and sustain this tourism industry—to say nothing of determining what it is that tourism should sustain—require multiple actors, acting in a variety of roles seeking somewhat overlapping, sometimes conflicting goals. Tourism management situations are increasingly confused and contentious, with not only multiple goals, but differing perceptions of sustainability, inequitable distributions of political power, structural distortions in access to information and changing paradigms of protected area planning. Traditional planning processes are not particularly well-suited for making decisions in this “messy” situation. Other approaches combining scientific and technical knowledge, learning, accommodation of interests and consensus building offer some optimism for those interested in managing mountain landscapes for tourism. Escalating Challenges and Emerging Opportunities The power of mountains to arouse our dreams, to enhance our spiritual well being, to stir our imaginations, to empower our passions, to excite our senses and challenge our capabilities serves as the foundation for a growing international tourism industry. Largely, the foundation for this industry is not just the overwhelming magnificence, beauty and serenity of mountain landscapes, the infinite combination of geology, topography, water and vegetation that are found in them, but also the meanings and symbols that people attach to mountain environments. An important set of those meanings and symbols deals with the attraction of mountains as places to sustain our lives through recreation. Mountains, as we have heard from other speakers here, are the source of legends and myths, they are at the heart of unnumbered tales and fables, they are often the underpinning of spiritual traditions, but perhaps more significantly, these narratives enrich our experiences as tourists and expand our lives as residents. Mountains provide the perfect blend of spectacular topography, awesome beauty, and distinctive culture, a mélange that local communities can build upon as they seek to enhance economic opportunity, preserve their heritage, and advance their quality of life. Against the background of increasing attention to the cultural wealth of mountain landscapes lies the traditional way in which contemporary society has viewed their physical attributes. The techniques we use to measure these attributes communicate how society views their value: cubic meters of timber, animal unit months of forage, tons of minerals and cubic meters per second of water. Yet, these measures Celebrating Mountains – An International Year of Mountains Conference 311 Jindabyne, New South Wales, Australia are now increasingly substituted by such terms as visitor-days, skier nights, user-days or recreational visits, terms that reflect the accelerating value of mountains for recreation and tourism development. The collision of long-standing approaches to defining the utility of mountain landscapes with emerging values and changing meanings, largely symbolic in character, also suggests that we need to reflect on how we frame mountain landscape planning and decision-making processes. This is no small problem: significant institutional barriers exist to effective, equitable, and efficient resolutions to the planning challenges typifying contemporary landscape management. These processes are important in selecting futures and finding the means to achieve them. And yet, development of tourism in mountain landscapes provides a number of opportunities, not only for visitors to experience the splendors these settings offer, but also for local communities to reap some economic benefit through employment, tax revenues, and infrastructure development, for residents to boost their quality of life, and for local people seeking respectable prospects for protecting their natural and cultural heritage. These opportunities emerge only with sensitive, skilled stewardship of mountain landscapes and communities. In this paper, I examine a few of these developing challenges and opportunities and suggest several dilemmas in managing tourism. I initially discuss the attributes of mountains that make them attractive to tourism. These attributes serve as the context for understanding the more substantive nature of the challenges of managing tourism in mountain environments within contemporary society. The ensuing section contains a brief description of several dilemmas confronting society as it seeks to sustain the cherished values of mountain landscapes. The paper concludes with a discussion of opportunities presented by developing an ethic of sustainability as it applies to tourism development in mountains. Tourism and Mountains: An Attractive Mix We in this conference, of course, are not the only ones that understand the strength of mountains to shape our cultural essence, appreciate their ability to evoke our imaginations, recognize how they provide escape and refuge from the pressures, chaos and fast pace of urban areas and evade, at least temporarily, the warm, humid and often uncomfortable climates of coastal and subtropical regions. Tourists come in increasing numbers to mountains and their valleys with expectations of what they may encounter, with anticipations of what they may experience, and with illusions and beliefs about mountain landscapes. These visitors bring with them behaviors that may or may not be very desirable. The extremities of climate, topography, and geology not only are the cause for much of this tourist activity, but also mean that mountain landscapes are sensitive to impacts. Moreover, given the relatively short growing season in many mountainous regions, their ecosystems tend not to be resilient, thus exacerbating the impacts that come from human activity. Mountains are difficult environments for tourists, resorts, development, and day-to-day living. Their very nature means that they are challenging settings in which to survive, they are difficult topographies to traverse, and they can provide taxing experiences for us to endure. The vagaries of weather that occur within their boundaries require us to be ever alert, lest our survival be uncertain. The attractions of mountains for recreation—as “pleasuring grounds”—have long been recognized institutionally. The first national parks in the US (Yellowstone), Canada (Banff National Park), New Zealand (Tongariro National Park) and Australia (Mt. Buffalo) embraced mountains, and the rivers, streams, lakes, forests, meadows and unique features they contain. To 19th western civilization, these wild and remote landscapes stood in stark contrast to the domesticated, cultivated and manicured ones of the European homeland. They provide opportunities for recreation that are not found elsewhere. Perhaps John Muir (Muir 1901) said it best: Camp out among the grasses and gentians of glacial meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of nature's darlings. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings, Natures peace flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. (p. 56) 312 Celebrating Mountains – An International Year of Mountains Conference Jindabyne, New South Wales, Australia It is these very characteristics that continue to make mountains attractive as vacation destinations, as settings for ever more extreme sports and recreational experiences, as locales for learning about how cultures interact with natural environments and as places to challenge our physical and mental capacities. As these demands accelerate within the context of other demands for the goods and services mountain landscapes provide, conflicts among competing uses and values themselves multiply. But … A Recipe for Messiness These subjects cause us to take pause about the future of mountain landscapes. If they are so cherished, but are so sensitive to impacts and lacking in resiliency, how can we ensure that the values they provide will indeed be available for future generations? In the 19th century, those who asked these types of questions relied primarily on gazetting of national parks to sustain these values. However, we are now into the 21st century, with challenges much more complex, with problems more enduring, and with questions more tortuous than in the past. It is not that the physical landscape will not exist: mountain ecosystems and geomorphologic processes occur on simply too large a scale for humans to impede significantly their evolution. However, there are doubts about mountain landscapes continuing to provide all the values, goods and services in the quantities that humans seek; to supply all the minerals, water, timber, forage and other physical substances that a growing world population demands; and to meet all of our expectations for tourism. Largely, our concern about mountains is generated by the apprehensions ensuing from such expectations that without

Load more