What is Sustainable Community Tourism?
Almost everyone has heard of Eco-Tourism, Spiritual Tourism, and Geo-Tourism, and in general, Sustainable Tourism. However, to our knowledge this is first time to put forward the concept of Sustainable Community Tourism with a major focus on the actual communities the people visit in their travels.
Over the last couple of decades there has been a trend where travelers are seeking more than a photo album full of pictures shot from a tour bus. Many travelers, young and old, are looking not only for a travel 'experience but to learn, share, exchange ideas, and come home after their travels knowing they have benefited the community they visited as well as gain knowledge, wisdom, and experience that will benefit their own lives and their communities.
This is a kind of 'synergistic' travel where the focus is on improving the community.
Some communities, like Kumano and Sri Lanka, have thousands of years of history of co-existence with Nature and living within the bounds of natural cycles and using only what is needed and leaving the rest for the next season or the next generation.
Other communities, like Santa Cruz, are leading the way to the future with leading edge methods of building community consensus, sound planning, and fostering a community spirit plus a local culture that places great importance on the harmony between nature and human settlement.
Instead of following the usual path of 'development' and 'economic revival', the civil sector is rather making various efforts to create vibrant and autonomous sustainable communities by focusing our efforts on ensuring the survival of autonomous self-reliant communities. This can also lead to the restoration of each region's unique lifestyle, nature, traditions, history, lifestyle, art, that grow out of diverse cultures and environments.
Sustainable community tourism embraces the idea that we can go beyond mere tourism and international exchange to include synergistic and mutually beneficial economic activities that encourage the interchange of people who have the will and common purpose of creating sustainable, happy, and healthy communities.
In the process exchanging ideas, vision, and engaging in practical projects, both visitors and residents of our respective communities can gain a new perspective on their own culture, history, and serve as a mirror that reflects back to us the inherent value in our place and culture. It can serve, over time, as a way to heal the invisible divisions that lead to alienated, spiritually impoverished communities. It can help us redefine our view of life and death as members of a greater community and reconnect us to each other, to the earth, and to our humanness thereby reaffirming our identity as purposeful members of a healthy, happy, and sustainable community.
