That tourism can have harmful impacts on the physical and marine environments has now become well recognised. However, that tourism automatically has a
negative effect has now become something of a truism in much of the contemporary travel literature. Undoubtedly, unplanned and poorly managed tourism develop- ment can damage the natural environment, but the overall understanding of the interaction between tourism and the environment particularly within coastal areas is quite poor, with debates over the impacts of tourism development often dealing in generalities rather than the outcomes of scientific research on tourist impacts in a specific environment or on a specific species