Sustaining the Ego

Abstract The paper draws on media and marketing material to argue that by combining the myth of the return to ‘the golden age of travel’ with that of images of a ‘return to nature’, the ‘thinking’ tourist is, willingly, being seduced into believing that they/we are in fact sophisticated, eco-sensitive travellers. The corollory of this cosy conspiracy is that tourism products deemed acceptable to this market have come to be regarded (wrongly) as being synonymous with sustainability. The process becomes one of smug satisfaction, of self-justifying growth and of expansion and spread of tourism. The paper examines what is actually being achieved in practice and suggests that examples of tourism ‘successes’, currently being lauded as role-models of sustainable tourism are at best simply examples of good tourism practice. Despite the industry's protestations to the contrary, these should not automatically be regarded as suitable practices to adopt. It draws the conclusions that the proposed solutions are just about as far away from addressing the realities of the actual problems as the traveller would wish to be from the tourist. This absurd situation, however, satisfies the immediate short-term wishers of many of the main protagonists in tourism's impact debate. That it fails to bridge the gap between tourism theory and practice is hardly surprising given the enormity of what some would say is an unmanageable task.