Wildlife Tourism Futures

Encounters with Wild, Captive and Artificial Animals

Giovanna Bertella

• Publisher: Channel View Publications
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781845418199
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This book presents a series of possible future scenarios in wildlife and animal tourism by combining critical thinking and imagination to stimulate reflection and ways forward. The future of wildlife tourism faces uncertainties that revolve around many factors, including climate change, mass wildlife extinction, human population growth, deforestation, sustainability and ethical assumptions. For wildlife tourism to meet these challenges, new ways of thinking are necessary. The chapters in this volume focus on future wildlife tourism development and management; the experiential value, educational components and ethical relevance of tourism–animal encounters; and the technology applied to wildlife tourism. They offer critically-imagined futures in order to encourage readers to reflect on the possibility of shaping a better future. The book will appeal to researchers, students and practitioners in wildlife tourism, environmental studies, sustainability and conservation.

1 Introduction: Welcome to the Futures of Wildlife Tourism

Giovanna Bertella

Terra Incognita: hic sunt dracones

[Unknown Land: here are dragons]

Hunt–Lenox Globe, c. 1500

The core of wildlife tourism concerns humans observing and sometimes interacting with wild animals. The settings where such encounters occur can vary: the tourists can meet the animals in the wild, in protected natural environments and in captive settings (Newsome et al., 2005; Shackley, 1996). The types of encounters can differ: the tourists can observe (e.g. bird watching), touch (e.g. petting zoos), hand-feed (e.g. whale shark feeding) and kill (e.g. trophy tourism) the animals.

For a long time, scholars have investigated the various forms of wildlife tourism in relation to their management as well as their educational and, more recently, ethical dimension (e.g. Carr & Young, 2018; Higginbottom, 2004; Lovelock, 2018; Markwell, 2015). The point of departure for this book is that it might be time to rethink wildlife tourism and adopt a new approach in order to respond to the numerous challenges that the sector faces. Among these challenges, mass wildlife extinction and human population growth can be mentioned as examples (Ceballos et al., 2015). Recently, a certain concern about animal welfare among tourists seems to have emerged, although not always followed by consistent behaviours (Moorhouse et al., 2017; Shani & Pizam, 2008). For wildlife tourism to meet these challenges, new ways of thinking might be necessary.

In the future, wildlife experiences in the wild might be limited. For example, WWF (2020) reports that 17% of the Amazonian forest has been lost in the last 50 years, mostly due to forest conversion for cattle ranching. Without a radical change in food production and consumption, the tourists of the future might only encounter wild animals in captive settings. Furthermore, according to the United Nations’ Revision of World Urbanization Prospects (UN, 2018), the proportion of the world’s population that lives in urban areas is expected to increase from 55% to 68% by 2050. This trend might influence our perception of what qualifies as ‘wild’. Nature can be viewed as a socially constructed concept and so can our definitions of ‘the wild’ and ‘wildlife’ (Demeritt, 2002). In an increasingly urbanised society, tourists might view any non-human animal as wild, understood as extraordinary, exotic and fascinating. Signs of this trend are already observable: urban children have very limited experience with farm animals (Knight, 2018). The view of a cow eating grass might be experienced by tomorrow’s tourists as wild as today’s tourists perceive the view of an elephant.

The necessity to rethink wildlife tourism derives also from technological advancements, for example cloning and virtual reality. The tourism sector might adopt the new technology to develop wildlife tourism giving priority to the tourists’ amusement, with little or no concern either for the involved cloned animals or for the implicit educational message of such experiences (Newsome & Hughes, 2017). Another option might be that the animals that today are the main attractions for wildlife tourists would be replaced by virtual animals (Bertella, in press). The application of future technology to the wildlife tourism sector might occur in various ways and with different results but, in any case, would drastically change the sector.

The theme of this book is the exploration of how wildlife tourism might look like in the future. Investigating different types of settings, animals and animal–tourist encounters, this book aims to provide its readers with a broad spectrum of approaches to envision the future, and to provoke deep reflections on relevant aspects such as wildlife tourism sustainability, ethics and management. This can contribute to gaining some new insights on how to proceed in the development and implementation of the type of wildlife tourism that we would like for the coming generations of tourists and, not least, animals.

Methodologically, the idea behind this book is that futures thinking, and in particular scenario developing, might constitute a valuable approach to explore tourism from a new perspective (Bina et al., 2017; Phillimore & Goodson, 2004; Wilson & Hollinshead, 2015; Yeoman, 2019). More precisely, the combination of critical thinking and imagination to envision the future of wildlife tourism is here considered to have great potential. Critical thinking and imagination might allow us to break free from mental barriers, reflect deeply on our relations with wildlife and start building possible pathways towards more desirable futures.

Moreover, the moment we start to think, write and read about critically imagined future scenarios, we also start to consider what it is about the present that we like or fear, and which possibilities we, as scholars, students and general citizens have today in order to shape a better future (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005). Until now, few scholars have adopted a futures approach to wildlife tourism (Bertella, in press; Wright, 2016, 2018). Thus, this book originates from an invitation to scholars to imagine how wildlife tourism might be in the future. Seventeen scholars answered this call and accepted the challenge to imagine the future of wildlife tourism. Accordingly, this book presents a series of scenarios about the possible futures of wildlife tourism developed by these creative and critical scholars. We, the authors, now invite the readers to follow us while we venture into the future.

In cartography, the term terra incognita (Latin: unknown land) was used to indicate unexplored areas that were not yet mapped. We can think about this book as a journey to this still unexplored destination, terra incognita. Curiously, an expression that is sometimes reported in association with the term terra incognita on ancient maps is hic sunt dracones (Latin: here are dragons) suggesting that wild animals might have an important role to play in our future. Dragons are indeed special animals: they are represented as fiery and evil, sometimes benign, non-existent and still ubiquitous and, not least, guardians of treasures (Barnard, 1964; Blust, 2000). The latter feature of dragons about guarding treasures is very promising. At the end of our explorations into the futures described in this book, we might find a treasure. Probably, it will not be gold or jewels, but may come in the form of valuable lessons to apply to the development of wildlife tourism theory and the management of its practice.

Outline of the Book

The future scenarios concerning wildlife tourism presented in this book derive from the application of various perspectives, such as management, innovation, experience design, interpretation and, not least, ethics. These scenarios are grouped into three parts to emphasise their main focus and the book concludes with a final chapter concerning reflections relevant to the future of tourism theory and practice.

Part 1: Paths Towards the Futures of Wildlife Tourism

The depicted scenarios in the first part of the book describe and present some main pathways to the future of wildlife tourism. The key words of these pathways are sustainability, ecofeminism and ecocentrism.

Qingming Cui (Chapter 2) takes inspiration from the debate between green growth and degrowth, science fiction and existing studies about wildlife tourism and conservation. His chapter sheds light on the future of wildlife tourism from a sustainability perspective by picturing different social development paths in response to climate change. Three scenarios are described: green growth, degrowth and dark growth.

Rie Usui and Carolin Funck (Chapter 3) reflect on the role and management of tourism experiences centred on domesticated animals living in the wild. Their chapter is inspired by the case of Ōkunoshima Island (Japan), where the presence of numerous rabbits gone wild attracts tourists and, at the same time, can have negative effects on the rabbits, the local wildlife (flora and fauna) and the safety of tourist–rabbit interactions. This chapter adopts a normative scenario approach and proposes it as a foundation for the management of this and similar challenging situations deriving from the adoption of the main tenets of ecofeminism as a valuable alternative to sustainability.

Part 1 closes with Georgette ...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Welcome to the Futures of Wildlife Tourism
• Part 1: Paths Towards the Futures of Wildlife Tourism
• Part 2: Human–Animal Encounters
• Part 3: Technology Advancements
• Index