Fifth International Conference on Tourism & Leisure Studies

Abstract

For most island tourism destinations, climate and landscape are the initial catalysts for tourist development. In this era of anthropocentric climate change, typified by global sea level rise and weather extremes, islands are particularly vulnerable. This sharpens the need to understand the historical connection between tourism, environment, and environmental awareness. This case study traces the environmental turn in tourism in the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island during the second half of the twentieth century. Although tourism promoters had long marketed the small island’s pastoral landscape and restorative climate as its principal, tourism planners accepted a need for environmental protection beginning in the mid-1960s, as their industry experienced exponential growth. Concurrently, tourism development was harnessed to an ambitious $725 million, federal-provincial “comprehensive development plan,” designed to transform the island’s economy and society. All three faces of “environmental tourism,” the landscape as tourist attraction, threats to the environment from tourism, and threats to tourism from the environment, were subsumed within tourism development policy. Packaging the pastoral (landscape and culture) now meant accommodating concerns about issues such as roadside litter, overcrowding, and inappropriate attractions, testing the limits of state authority over private enterprise. The creative tension between tourism and environment that first crystalized in the 1970s continues to frame the much greater environmental challenges for twenty-first century Island tourism, as the much mediated pastoral landscape morphs in the grip of long-term agricultural trends, erosion threatens coastlines and soil quality, and tourism providers try to reconcile profit and free enterprise with environmental sustainability.