Neat trends: current issues in nature, eco‐ and adventure tourism

Abstract

Trying to identify trends as they are happening is a dif®cult task, but one that is fundamental to business planning and public policy alike. Both of these are routinely subject to academic analysis, and searching for trends is an important component. This analysis examines one sector of the tourism industry, namely that which depends on outdoor natural environments as a principal attraction or setting for tourist activities. Few human social trends are suf®ciently powerful and all-encompassing to entrain entire economies and societies; and even the largest trends start small. Large-scale trends are clearly identi®able only in retrospect, as descriptive history; and even then, only through the cultural perceptive screens of individual historians and their societies. Perhaps indeed, `the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempts to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth' (Eco, 1989). From an analytical perspective, therefore, the critical issues are scale and priority. Trends are only recognisable when they become large enough to be important; but what is important depends on individual priorities and perceptions. At any time, in any industry sector, many small-scale independent patterns and trends can be identi®ed. Some will expand, others fade; but by recognising them early we can at least identify some possible futures as more likely than others. Attempting to identify these trends, therefore, is akin to postulating historical hypotheses: open to debate now, and testable retrospectively in future. Trends can differ greatly in reliability. In nature-based tourism, trends driven from within the industry may be differentiated from those driven by larger scale social change; those driven by basic human behaviours and population dynamics; and those driven by the basic biophysical characteristics of the planet (Buckley, 1998a). Trends within the industry change more quickly, and reverse more readily, than those driven from outside it. This analysis attempts to address trends that are suf®ciently new to be interesting; suf®ciently established to be identi®able; and driven largely from within the industry, its clients, and public agencies directly associated with it. For convenience these trends are grouped under four major headings, as follows. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TOURISM RESEARCH Int. J. Tourism Res. 2, 437±444 (2000)