he Background of Sustainable Tourist Experiences
Introduction
The relationship between sustainable development and tourism is the subject of this article. We shall first have a look at the backgrounds and the reasons behind the concept of sustainability. The debate on sustainable development started because many things in the world were going terribly wrong: diminishing biodiversity, a thinning ozone layer, noticeable greenhouse effects, discrimination against large populations. Eventually there were so many symptoms it appeared to be a serious disease. The principles of sustainability were originally developed as a response to these problems. In order to examine how deeply rooted these destructive elements are in our Western societies and why there is a need to take a look at our environment with different eyes, we shall put things in a historical perspective and give a brief overview of the development of the relationship between people and their environment.
The Issues
From the legal point of view it is interesting to see how the role of our environment has changed over time. We are talking about things, which form part of the collective memory of a whole society or of a group of people sharing the same environment. From a juridical point of view the way people have considered their environment and nature has changed. Roman law distinguishes in this context two important concepts: a thing or good can have no owner, or there are things or goods that belong to everybody. These concepts are known in Latin as res nullius and res comunis. The butterfly whirling around light heartedly has no owner. However at the moment she is captured, she is owned and she stops being res nullius and simply becomes a good. In the case of res comunis we think of things that belong to all of us, such as the air we breathe, the sunlight we absorb or the sea we enjoy. Those goods never have just one owner.
The more people there are on the planet, the more we can see a tendency for fewer things to belong to the category of res nullius and the goods that belong to all of us are of ever greater importance. It may be clear by now, that nature in the form of flora and fauna originally was considered to be res nullius. The human being has always organized himself in relation to his environment. Social and economic structures were set up to secure a place in nature and it is this relationship between people and their environment that has seen drastic changes over time. From the development of the first Homo sapiens, humans competed with all other animals in nature for food. Nature did not have an owner, people formed part of nature and the concept of “private property” was not yet invented. When people started to develop agriculture, they became conscious of the fact that there were things in nature exclusively for them, and that animals had to be excluded. In terms of law, the fact of exclusion forms the basis for the concept of property.
The negative influences that gardening and animal breeding had on the environment were mitigated by the fact that people (some 20 to 30 thousand years ago) felt they were part of nature. The magic of growing plants and the close links with Mother Earth were the cornerstone of their vision of the environment. From the time when people stopped being nomads and founded villages – later to become towns – the link with nature started to change slowly from that moment on. In part, this was a consequence of the conceptualization of God and the belief that the human being was His creation. The vision of the human being in the centre of the universe has led, among other things, to the development of the concept of private property. People claimed the right to possess something, from which everybody else was excluded – a development that turned out to be of great importance for the development of the Western world.
Much later in history, a need to protect res nullius to a certain extent arose, which resulted in the legal figure of state or public property: goods whose exclusive use are restricted to nationality.
As we shall see later, there are economic considerations in play as well: plants and animals in nature in many places are res nullius and as such lack economic market value; but once they are captured, cut down or shot, they are converted into goods with economic value.
From the seventeenth century on, the concepts of private and public ownership developed to such extent that property became absolute and untouchable in character, breaking the link between nature and society and consequently responsibility for the environment diminished, leading to the situation nowadays property rights include the right to destroy one’s own property. While a few centuries ago there was once an agreement on how to handle the environment, this link has been lost and with it an enormous part of social solidarity in favour of untouchable property, excluding any consideration on the conservation of nature, environme