campfire. Many nights as the fire dimmed, I saw or heard wild animals enter the camp. One night after I had gone to bed, a lion came into the camp and plunked himself down right next to the tent, rolling against me as I slept and waking me up in the process. I could feel the cat’s large warm body next to me breathing deeply. Between us was only the paper-thin nylon wall of my tent. I lay there for hours not daring to move and barely breathing for fear of startling the big cat. All night long I imagined that I was about to end my fledgling career as a conservationist and adventurer in the stomach

of a fully-grown adult lion. But just before sunrise, the great beast heaved himself up and simply walked away.

As the months passed, and I spent each day studying monkeys, I found myself increasingly starved for social interaction with human beings. Little by little, I began to strike up friendships with the local indigenous tribe in the area — the Samburu — who lived on the outskirts of the park and moved in and out of the area as pastoralists. As this friendship developed and trust was established through my attempts to learn their language, I discovered that the Samburu hated the very park that bore their name and attracted tourists from all over the world. They threatened park rangers (who considered them a nuisance) and they killed wildlife. They were so angry that they even set fire to the park in an effort to burn the tourism lodge down! When I asked the park warden how

things had come to this sad state of affairs, he dismissed the Samburu as primitive people who loathed the park and disliked the tourists who visited it.

Quite naïve at the time, I wondered how anyone could hate a nature reserve, a sanctuary for protecting nature, a concept that seemed to me like one of the most noble things on earth. Why resent tourists who had simply come to enjoy wildlife and in the process spend money? But as I raised these questions with the Samburu, I discovered why. I learned to my dismay how they had been forced off their land to make way for a tourist lodge built by a faraway company, how they lost access to land that for as long as they could remember had been the only permanent grazing area for miles around to keep their cattle alive during time of drought (which it was), and how they had learned that tourism was making some people a lot

of money, while they reaped no benefit from it at all.

This new understanding set me off on a different kind of journey, a quest to find a solution for this injustice. What if we could turn the relationship between tourism and indigenous groups like the Samburu around so that travel and tourism contributed directly to the wellbeing of local peoples? What if the people who lived closest to the earth’s most pristine natural areas became the major partners for conservation in those areas? What if tourism could truly become a catalyst for safeguarding the cultural and natural heritage of our planet?

TOURISM: THREAT
OR OPPORTUNITY?

In the years since those thoughts first crossed my mind in the shadow of Mount Kenya, much has changed. A handful of people, myself included, took the notion that you can experience the world

and simultaneously give something back, and went on to launch a global movement under the banner of “ecotourism” and “responsible travel.” Today, the Samburu people are directly involved in owning and managing their own ecolodges, on their own land, and they are protecting wildlife in the process. And there are many other parts of the world where local people benefit economically from tourism and where nature and cultural heritage are protected in the process. But, despite these suc-cesses, there are also many areas where conditions remain the same as they were 26 years ago. Thus tourism represents both an opportunity and a threat to our planet today.

In 1950, there were 25 million international travelers. Last year there were more than 700 million international tourist arrivals — a 3,000 percent increase. The United Nations World Tourism Organization forecasts that in the next 15 years,

this number will grow to 1.5 billion tourists, twice today’s total. Tourism is one of the top five income earners for 83 percent of all countries. If global tourism itself were represented as a country, it would consume resources equivalent to 80 percent of Japan’s yearly energy supply, produce the same solid waste as France and consume three times the amount of fresh water contained in Lake Superior. Simply put, tourism is one of the largest, perhaps the largest industry on earth today.

In 2002, I led an international research team, under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Programme and Conservation International, in an unprecedented initiative to map tourism’s global footprint. We were exploring how and where tourism is expanding in relation to the world’s remaining natural areas — those places on our planet that represent wilderness and are home to many of