Research Area
Ecotourism
Ecotourism is typically taught in Hospitality Management, Tourism Business Management, Recreation and Park Management, or Conservation degrees of some kind. Growing up in a tourism market on the East Coast of Florida, none of that interested me. I saw the kinds of jobs it created and the Jimmy Buffet lifestyles. It is a great place to be a kid, and a retiree too, but working-age adults can find tourism-sector employment to be seasonal, precarious, and high-turnover. It is probably surprising, then, that I pursued ecotourism development as a dissertation topic. However, in a non-English, developing economy context, I saw it as a way to study many of the more interesting subjects in contemporary applied anthropology: sustainable development, dependency, colonialism, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), etc. I saw it as an opportunity to apply the emergy ecological economics that I was learning from HT Odum. And last, I saw it as a place to test the qualitative field methods and language discovery procedures that I learned in my Masters degree from the linguist Hardman. It turned out to be all of those things, more or less.
When I moved to Tzu Chi University on the East Coast of Taiwan, I found myself in yet another tourism environment. I developed an Ecotourism class with both a sustainability approach and a business approach, as many of our students would eventually work in tourism. Under the guidance of a Taiwan National University biologist, I learned the ecotourism of whale watching. It was a natural fit, and I continued using emergy accounting to evaluate development impacts. The papers below are either directed to the study of eco-dive tourism on Bonaire or whale watching on the East Coast of Taiwan.
2000 Ecosystems, Sociocultural Systems, and Ecological Economics for Understanding Development: The Case of Ecotourism on the Island of Bonaire, Netherlands Antilles. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Florida. [online] URL: http://etd.fcla.edu/etd/uf/2000/ane0595/Abel.pdf
Of the ABC islands (Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao), Bonaire had been an afterthought. Aruba and Curacao were dramatically transformed by oil refineries in the middle of the last century. Their populations grew ten times, and their fragile reefs, dry ecologies, and traditional ways of life were dramatically transformed.
Neglect became a blessing for Bonaire. Without industrial pollution and with very little rain and runoff, the coastal waters are exceptionally clear, and healthy reefs formed close to shore and attracted scuba divers in small numbers. When in the 1980s, ecotourism emerged around the world, some saw an opportunity for economic development. Bonaire’s offshore reefs were declared the first marine park in the Caribbean.
A key principle of ecotourism is development that does not dramatically disrupt the ecology and lifestyles of local communities. That is achieved in part by preventing consumptive use of natural resources. The marine park protected the underwater resources, but what of the land? What of the communities of Bonairians living in the few small towns and countryside, many practicing lifestyles that depend upon the natural environment.
These questions were the focus of my research. My intention was to spend a year or more, learn the language and conduct traditional anthropological fieldwork while collecting human and environmental data that could feed an emergy analysis. Qualitative linguistic discovery procedures were used to explore the grammar of Papiamentu and to learn something of the worldview of inhabitants. By the end of my 14 months, my Papiamento was good enough to also conduct formal household interviews. In total, I produced 85 systems diagrams and 22 linked emergy analysis spreadsheets, probably the most thorough emergy research of any single location in the world.
I did not attempt to publish my 700 page dissertation, though I probably should have, at least in part. I am now finally pursuing that with the ‘Ecological Ethnography’ listed below.
2001 "Social Structure and Ecotourism Development on Bonaire". Proceedings from the 2nd Biennial Emergy Research Conference, September 20-22, 2001, Center for Environmental Policy, Gainesville, FL
This was the first paper produced from my dissertation. It was presented at the 2nd Emergy Conference. It was refined into the Conservation Ecology paper below.
2003 “Understanding Complex Human Ecosystems: The Case of Ecotourism on Bonaire.” Conservation Ecology 7(3):10. [online] URL: http://www.consecol.org/vol7/iss3/art10.
Emergy analyses were used in a novel way to compare ‘scales’ of production processes. The result was that Bonaire had reached a new stable state after 45 years in which all three scales were processing similar amounts of emergy.
2014 “Evaluating Local Human-Ecological Impacts of Whale Watching Ecotourism in Taiwan.” Taiwan Journal of Indigenous Studies, 7(4):63-88.
This study was a small version of my dissertation with household and business emergy analyses conducted by my graduate research assistant. The summary analyses are better, including sustainability measures.
TBD An Ecological Ethnography of Ecotourism on Bonaire. Book ms.
