Ecotourism and Sustainable Development—A Bibliographic Approach

Abstract

Ecotourism is a niche market that emerged due to the increase in demand. Sustainable tourism practices, however, are difficult to manage in all three dimensions of sustainable development in these sites. It is known that it was Hall 2009 [1] who found that in the mid-nineteenth century, the first global manifestations of ecotourism were promoted, on the consequences of the depletion of natural resources and their supposed inexhaustibility in his book “ Man and Nature ”. The present study is to answer the following research question; “How to do ecotourism with balanced trade-offs between economic, social and environmental dimensions?” One of the theses that can be drawn from this research is that all the actors of sustainable development can be balanced. The actors of ecotourism are: 1) Nature; 2) Flora; 3) Fauna; 4) The owners of nature; 5) The ecotourist. However, there are other qualitative aspects such as: Culture, traditions and customs, the needs of the ecotourist and the organization. The role of the ecotourist is the key to the conservation of environmental sites, for example in Durango in the ecotourism site El Ejido “el Mil diez” where garbage accumulates and neither visitors nor the owners of the site, take into account the deterioration of the ecotourism place, can avoid visiting it and become an abandoned and degraded site. This is a bibliographic study that aims to make known two things that can happen: 1) ecotourism as an engine of nature conservation, or 2) ecotourists are the cause of the destruction (construction) of the best natural places. Actions and experiences are proposed for planning and projects to open an ecotourism site. They can make the difference between a site for current and future generations or lose the best sites that are available.