KEYNOTE ADDRESS: TOURISM AND CONSERVATION - IS THERE A DILEMMA?
To some eyes tourism is an exploitive industry degrading to the participants and to the resources on show. To other eyes conservation is seen as an idealist's dream, unnecessarily hindering progress and profits.
To most people in the tourist industry and the conservation business both views are unacceptable and the majority of attitudes are somewhere in the middle. Yet despite this predominance of middle ground thinking, the real world results usually reflect a lean to one of the poles with conservation requirements overruling tourist development, or vice versa. The underlying reason for this dilemmas the inability to see man as an integral part of a changing natural environment, although man is often a conspicuous member of the wildlife community. Take a tourist cave, for instance.
Conservation does not mean absolute and static preservation, that is impossible. The only constant is the universality of change. All physical and biological things are changing and change cannot be prevented. Man is one factor that brings about change but he is not the only one. All caves are subject to change, both tourist and non-tourist caves.
A cave is a delicate natural phenomenon comprising the landforms, perhaps a river, the atmosphere and life forms found there. Man can influence these components. He is a trogloxene - an occasional visitor to a cave. Human activities can also be influenced by the cave.
It is easy to see some of the changes man brings about in a cave; from footprints to the installation of paths, bridges and lighting systems. Less obvious change can occur to the atmosphere, such as CO2 build up and an increase in temperature from lights and body heat. Atmospheric changes can lead to changes in speleothem growth also. Man can also influence the other life forms found in a cave - bat numbers, for example, are often influenced by the number of human visitors and human activity inside a cave can bring about changes to population numbers, distribution and feeding breeding cycles. Cave lighting can allow photosynthetic plants to grow where none did before.
If human activity brings about change in caves, caves can influence human activity also. Because there is an endless variety of cave morphology some caves attract more human visitors than others according to their accessibility, their attractiveness or the degree of difficulty. Again, cave morphology can affect the number of people on each visit. It may be the life forms in the cave that attract people. Glowworms are a good example and if these disappear or are lost, the number of visitors diminishes accordingly.
So in a tourist cave man is an integral component of the environment influencing and being influenced by the other components.
Managers of tourist caves have to accept this component approach to man. Their resource is particularly vulnerable to human activity such as tourism because of the localised and confined nature of the cave.
Where aspects of man's part of the system or other component are not fully understood, research should be done. The scientific understanding that follows usually reinforces the concept of man as an integral part of the environmental resource and allows tourist carrying capacity to be established. This then allows the human component to be kept in balance with the other components so that the careful use of the resource can be maintained.
Cave tourism is an intensive human activity in a vulnerable environment which needs sound scientific understanding and management. A great proportion of tourist caves were established both to prevent damage and to develop a tourist attraction. This idea of controlled tourist development as a means of conservation is not new. The revenue from tourism can supply not only the capital for development but also the funds for scientific research.
By examining the needs of both conservation and tourism, it can be seen that both can build on and support each other; nowhere more so than in a tourist cave.