Nature is a nice place to save but I wouldn’t want to live there: environmental education and the ecotourist gaze

Abstract

This article explores the role of ecotourism in the neoliberalisation of environmental education. The practice of ecotourism is informed by a particular ‘ecotourist gaze’ in terms of which the ‘education’ that providers characteristically offer is implicitly framed, embodying a culturally specific perspective in which western society is depicted as alienating and constraining and immersion in ‘wilderness’ is understood as a therapeutic escape from the reputed ills of industrial civilisation. While in the past, these educational aspects of ecotourism delivery have often contradicted the activity’s promotion as a quintessential neoliberal conservation mechanism, increasingly this education has become neoliberalised as well in its growing emphasis on the environment’s role as an instrumental provider of ‘ecosystem services’ for human benefit. In conclusion, this analysis calls for transcendence of these limitations in pursuit of a more inclusive environmental education encompassing diverse ethnic and socioeconomic dimensions of the human community.

Keywords:

• ecotourism
• conservation
• governmentality
• wilderness
• nature deficit disorder

Notes

1. Quotation printed on T-shirts distributed at 2008 Association of Outdoor Recreation and Education (AORE) Conference in Boise, Idaho. Ostensibly from a young participant in an unidentified wilderness therapy program.

2. While the term ‘neoliberalism’ has been defined in various ways (see Flew 2011), it is most commonly characterised as the overlapping processes of commodification, marketisation, privatisation, deregulation, and decentralisation implemented via ‘free market’ reform policies throughout the world beginning in earnest in the 1980s (Castree 2008; Harvey 2005).

3. Unfortunately, due to space limitations, issues of gender and sexuality will be neglected by this analysis, as will a further important issue, namely the ‘continued marginalisation of animal others in environmental education research’ (Fawcett 2013, p. 412).

4. Of course, this is not entirely so, and even this demographic bias is changing rapidly at present as ecotourism practice becomes increasingly globalized (see Fletcher 2014).