First arising during the industrial revolution, the movement of populations en masse to cities and urban areas with improved transport, enabled large numbers of people to leave their cities for recreation in rural, mountainous or seaside areas. It can be said that the environment of places has contributed to the birth and progress of tourism (Mathieson and Wall 86, p94). Ecotourism more than any other form of tourism depends on the environment of a destination. Of course the growth of all forms of tourism leads to modifications of the environment. Ecotourism strives to keep these modifications to a minimum. In order to do this it is important to take account of these modifications and assess what their impacts on the environment are.
There are several difficulties involved in assessing the impacts of tourism on the environment. Andrew Holden in Environment and Tourism tells us there can be difficulties in establishing a base level against which to measure changes; difficulties in separating human-induced change from changes occurring naturally; spatial and temporal discontinuities between cause and affect and difficulties due to the complexity of environmental interactions with primary impacts leading to secondary and tertiary impacts (Holden 2000 p69). More specifically to ecotourism difficulties arise due to the diversity of activities involved; the diversity of environments where ecotourism takes place, and the fact that tourists cause impacts to occur not only at their destination but also en-route.
The impacts of ecotourism upon the environment can be either positive or negative. Most of the impacts are said to be negative and, indeed, almost any change of the natural environment brought about by unnatural forces, i.e. man, is deemed to be negative. These negative impacts can range from damage to flora and fauna all the way to impacts that threaten to destroy entire ecosystems. Such impacts can be felt from a very localised to a global scale.
