Sustainable Tourism in Global Perspective: Part 1

by Johan Hattingh, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Stellenbosch University

HOW DO YOU approach sustainable tourism against the backdrop of sustainable development, and what initially made you think it was a good idea? How did you begin implementing sustainable tourism? What were the biggest challenges and obstacles you encountered, and how did you overcome them (or not)? What have been the results of your efforts so far? What does sustainability look like now within GST? How do you see the path forward, especially with climate change appearing to become a significant problem?

These are the six questions that GST asked its founding members in a survey during 2024, and not only were there remarkable responses in their own right, but also responses that resonated in a striking way with groundbreaking global perspectives on sustainable development and sustainable tourism.

In a series of four articles, some of these responses are highlighted, elucidated, and linked to cutting-edge thinking in environmental ethics and how we can approach sustainable development and sustainable tourism.

The first article focuses on sustainable development and tourism as a process, and more specifically, a process of expanding the mind. The second article addresses sustainable development and tourism as a process of collaboration; the third explores sustainable development and tourism as a set of challenges that pose different challenges in different places and require different responses. The fourth article deals with sustainable development, tourism, and the challenge of climate change.

Sustainable Development and Tourism: Expanding the Mind

It sounds somewhat strange to view sustainable development and tourism primarily as a process of expanding the mind, because don’t development and tourism rather come down to material things like investments, profits, and the provision of accommodation, electricity, food, water, and exciting experiences? All concrete, tangible, measurable.

But none of this would ever have come about, one respondent said, if I had stuck to doing things the way they were done when I was a child. In his own words: "I believe that most of the old farmers were land people, but often with little real respect for their land. And that’s also part of my childhood background. Farm memories and sentiments were always there, but culture, conservation, and sustainability? No. Everyone just wanted to move to the city for a better, more convenient life and escape the countryside. I often wonder if that wasn’t typical of most former farm kids, myself included."

From there, things have shifted rapidly and far in recent decades. The term "sustainability" is now on everyone’s lips, farmers have started earning degrees, and now most of them are stewards of land and culture, using their land to introduce city dwellers to rural life.

This became possible through a shift in mindset, one respondent pointed out: "Many things we experienced as impoverished, like sleeping on a haystack during the December holidays, or picking up acorns and plucking apricots, are now purchased at a premium by tourists from urban areas to experience. Now such things, and other aspects of simplicity, are exclusive. I also had to ‘grow up’ to realize that I had actually grown up in a paradise."

Now I look at things differently, my mind has turned, I see things differently now.

The Norwegian environmental philosopher Arne Naess (1912-2009) saw this shift as one of the most important elements of his Deep Ecology: the expansion of the Self, which gradually becomes more mature, leaving behind the small, self-centred, selfish (childlike?) self.

In this broader perspective, the Self sees itself as part of, and a participant in, the larger web of existence that makes our lives as individuals, families, groups, countries, and regions possible, on which our existence depends, and with which our fate is intertwined.

This is an ecological perspective that emphasises and respects interdependencies, bringing us the insight that the well-being of the ecology in which we are woven is intertwined with our own well-being as humans.

If we damage and destroy this ecology, the environment, nature, and culture, we damage and destroy ourselves. If we preserve and promote it, we preserve and promote ourselves.

Aldo Leopold (1887-1948), the influential American conservation ecologist and ethicist, laid the foundation for this ecological perspective with his view that we are ordinary citizens of the "community of life."

We make a great mistake, Leopold said, if we think we have conquered the land we live on and can rule over it as if it were a mere possession. We make a great mistake if our only relationship to the land is economic in nature, seeing it solely as a resource for exploitation and profit.

The direction in which Leopold wants to turn our minds is to see that land (including water, rivers, grasslands, and mountains) is a living and life-giving whole, a community of life, which can be disrupted, damaged, and destroyed by our actions and interactions.

Leopold advocates that we position ourselves differently than before in the community of life, not primarily as conquerors and managers solely for profit, but as ordinary participants and citizens of the community of life, working with it and not against it.

Both Naess and Leopold acknowledge that we must eat and live, and that economic activity is necessary. But they challenge us to base our economy on a different foundation than before: to operate it in a way that promotes ecological relationships, interactions, and interdependencies which, in the bigger picture, promote Life itself, and us as humans along with it.

To flourish in this way, Naess advocated for a kind of unification with this broader Life. Leopold expressed it poetically, saying we must begin to think like mountains: to see things from a radically long-term perspective.

From this perspective, sustainable development and tourism, as economic activities that they undoubtedly are, are only possible as a process of ongoing mental expansion: a process in which we learn more and more about the ecological relationships and interactions in which our lives, all life, are woven, and what we can do to preserve and sustain these life-giving relationships and interactions.

In other words: everything changes when we begin to think like a mountain, a plain, a river, a forest, a coastline, an eagle, or a crayfish.

The question is whether our minds are expansive enough to begin thinking this way and at a pace that our clients and society can handle, to weave it into how we practise sustainable development and sustainable tourism.