Since the early 1990s, ecotourism has been presented as an innovative tool for linking the dual aims of conservation and development by conservation organisations and other governmental and non-governmental agencies concerned with
conservation and development. Many projects attempt to support rural communities to adopt what are deemed to be sustainable patterns of living. Yet the
projects interpret sustainable as meaning the maintenance of the communities’
way of life, which in the rural third world means a direct relationship with and
dependence on the immediate natural environment. Yet it is this relationship
that defines the marginal, impoverished status of so many in third world countries