Responsible Tourism: A Conservation Tool or Conservation Threat?

Abstract

The year 2003 marked the 30th anniversary of organized gorilla tourism, with tens of thousands of international visitors catching a precious glimpse of the gorillas’ fragile equatorial ecosystem (Weber, 1993). For three decades, gorilla trekkers have stepped into a breathtakingly beautiful African landscape, steeped in human and gorilla blood. Gorilla lives and deaths have been played out against a backdrop of human war, genocide, poverty, and disease, seemingly unnoticed by the international community at large (Stanford, 2001; Weber and Vedder, 2001). During these 30 years, global international tourist arrivals per year have increased by about 500 million (World Tourism Organization, 2000), and more than 30 new diseases have emerged (World Health Organization, 2002). Ebola hemorrhagic fever decimates gorilla populations in western equatorial Africa (Walsh et al., 2003), and the rapid global spread of SARS coronavirus, shows how easily new diseases may be spread by international (air) travelers (World Health Organization, 2003a).