What constitutes Ecotourism?
The growing reliance on ecotourism as a medium that seeks to juxtapose development and conservation — what some refer to as a micro solution to a macro problem (Ryan, Hughes, and Chirgwin 2000) — requires a closer and critical analysis. Surprisingly a number of popular assumptions regarding the sector’s potential economic, socio-cultural, and environmental benefits often go unquestioned, especially when there is a lack of consensus over the definition and a “serious deficiency in quantitative evidence and analysis” (International Resources Group 1992; iii). Some claims posit that ecotourism is the fastest growing sector with an estimated growth rate of 10-15 percent per year (Panos 1997 qtd. in Scheyvens 1999), or that a 4 percent growth per year through the year 2010 is expected (World Tourism Organization 1996), or that in 1988 between 157 and 236 million ecotourists generated economic impacts from $93 billion to $233 billion (Filion, Foley, and Jacquemot 1994). These figures shoul
