Visit a family of gorillas on your next family vacation. (Photo: Terra Incognita Ecotours)

Have you ever looked a beautiful pristine place shining brightly on your computer’s screensaver and thought how much you would like to be there right now?

For some people, a couch, cold drink and a decent video rental make up the key ingredients for their perfect vacation. What is a vacation anyway? The dictionary defines the word as “time away from work”, but for many of us, the ideal vacation doesn’t just mean a quick escape from the job, but an escape from the day to day lives we’ve become accustomed to. Working the 8-5 jobs leaves many drained and wondering what else the world has to offer. A plastic plant gathering dust next to the computer screen we stare at all day is never going to satisfy the need for a healthy dose of nature.

Nominated as “Best Tour Operator” in the 2006 First Choice Responsible Tourism Awards, Terra Incognita Ecotours, is a tour operator that has left many clients impressed. Terra Incognita founder, Gerard Caddick, spent many years working to conserve endangered species in South America before starting a business in the travel industry. Caddick’s tours include trips to Rwanda where visitors can spend the day with wild gorillas, to Costa Rica where it is rare to leave without having seen toucans, parrots and monkeys in the jungle canopy or Borneo where orangutan’s and elephants are a common sight.

Gerard Caddick, explains what makes eco-tours special ones: “I would say that what makes our trips different is that we’re focused on taking people to natural areas to experience the wildlife and cultures that occur there. So its very different form a beach vacation or cruise. There is an educational component where you learn about wildlife and nature issues.”

The Terra Incognita website provides a list that defines an ecologically responsible tour:

Minimize impact,

Build environmental and cultural awareness and respect,

Provide positive experiences for both visitors and hosts,

Provide direct financial benefits for conservation,

Provide financial benefits and empowerment for local people,

Raise sensitivity to host countries’ political, environmental, and social climate,

Support international human rights and labor agreements.

Have this little fellow join you for breakfast. (Photo: Terra Incognita Ecotours)

There really is something out there for anyone. A jungle safari might appeal to the more adventurous while a laid back cruise would seem more appealing to someone who just wants to sit back and relax.

The difference between an eco-tour and booking a trip on your own is that an eco-tour allows the traveler to give something back to the country that they visit.

“We made the decision early that that everyone’s involvement [in the local culture and habitat protection] would be a monetary donation,” says Caddick, “On every trip that we offer, there is a component of the tour costs that goes to a local conservation organization. Our logic was that we are targeting the baby boomer generation that has more money than time. People want to do the right thing, but they don’t have the time to do conservation or volunteer work, so they provide funding and get involved in that sense.”

Some examples of where tourist dollars go when traveling through Terra Incognita include: Project Angonoka to protect the most endangered tortoise in the world-the ploughshare,which is found solely in Madagascar (http://www.biaza.org.uk/public/pages/conservation/projects/angonoka.asp),
to the Belize zoo, to the Tropical Education Center and to the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project (MGVP) where veterinarians have the risky job of roaming through the jungles and treating injured gorillas. The MGVP project can be proud of having increased the Mountain Gorilla population by 17% in the past 20 years. (http://mgvp.32ad.com/)

A lot of thought is put into where Terra Incognita donates this money. “We like to find local conservation organizations,” continues Caddick, “We never give a whole lot of money, meaning it is not in the millions, so we want to make sure that what we give is wisely spent.”

Terra Incognita’s most popular and unique tour is the trip to visit the incredible Gorilla in Rwanda: “Sitting face to face with a mountain gorilla is a life changing experience,” says Caddick emotionally, “everyone we’ve taken to see these gorillas has been moved by the whole experience. I’ve seen grown men weep. Imagine coming face to face with something three times your size and marveling at how incredibly gentle and compassionate these creatures are. The Mountain Gorilla tour involves waking up at 5am where the lodge owner knocks on your door with tea or coffee at hand. Breakfast starts at 5:30am and the group heads out to start the trek through the jungle at 6am. There are seven Gorilla families in the area, and each visitor is assigned a group. It takes 1-3 hours to reach the gorillas and one hour is spent with them when they are found. They only have human interaction 1 hour a day. After the experience, you go back to the lodge and relax till the cocktail hour starts at 6pm and dinner at 7pm.”

A major concern for travelers is their budget. As with anything, careful research will provide a travel solution for everyone.

Smart growth cluster-homes, ala Italia. (Photo: A Closer Look Travel)

Kara Black, the owner and manager of A Closer Look Travel (http://www.acloserlook.travel/), recently became focused on sustainable travel. Black decided to specialize in social change travel and runs one of the few travel agencies that specialize in eco-tourism. Black explains how varied eco-tours can be: “The prices of eco-tours are diverse; you can find luxury deluxe ecotourism or you could do a home-stay which is extremely in expensive.”

St. John Island Vacations (http://www.caneelbay.com) is an example of a luxury vacation. As with anything, you get what you pay for, and being pampered, fed, massaged and entertained at the one of the most beautiful island escapes in the world does not come cheap.

Ecotourism does not mean that your trip involves backpacking through rugged terrain or working in a rural village to earn your keep. These are options, but not what defines eco-tourism.

A Closer Look Travel offers other types of tours to individuals wishing to make a direct impact by staying with local families and working in the area to pay for their stay. Kara Black explains that “you could stay in a ghetto in Brazil or in the Dominican Republic. Of course you would be housed in fairly safe accommodations and get tours of the living conditions of the people that live there so it is not a white washed tour. You would have the opportunity to purchase a well for a family that provides much needed water, or work in a health clinic or in a school to help educate local children. An example of a typical day on one these adventures include staying on the outskirts of the poor area in a sort of Bed and Breakfast, where you take a group transport to a clinic and work on a variety of tasks like talking with parents, observing the situation and assisting in ways where you don’t need medical expertise. You listen to people who work there, learn what their issues are and end up being donors to these programs. After a morning working at a clinic you would have lunch off site and then take a group bus to say, local archeological caves. Afterwards everyone enjoys time shopping at the beach district and receives a nicer meal for dinner. These types of tours are offered all over the world such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, the Dominican Republic, South and Central America and Honduras.”

Penguins in Patagonia. (Photo: A Closer Look Travel)

There are also opportunities to work with local habitats by planting trees or monitoring wildlife. Black continues to describe a tour that would appeal to travelers who want to completely immerse themselves in nature: “In the Earth Watch expedition up the Amazon, travelers stay in huts owned by the local tribes. You get to these huts by a dug out canoe boat. When you stay in your hut you hope you can sleep in because at night you stay up late studying cicadas via black light. During the day you go on wildlife excursions, and then you come back and enjoy dinner made from food grown locally. Afterwards you will stay up for several more hours and attract insects with the black light to count them.”

Tropical forests or third world countries are not the only popular travel destinations offered through Black’s travel agency: “You can stay at a ranch in Hawaii on the side of a volcano while reforesting native trees, another one of our trips includes a stay on a hilltop castle in Tuscany where guests learn how to do all the organic farming and learn how to sustainably harvest everything. You learn a lot about the history of the area and how locals live their lives.”

Unfortunately, even ecotourism can have negative impacts if not managed properly. The psychology behind travel has changed tremendously over the years. In the past, people did not give a second though about trampling through jungles or riding jeeps across the Sahara. As traveling became easier and the world smaller, many people decided to take advantage of the situation and sought adventure in pristine jungles, deserts and oceans. Over time, these areas degraded and the environmentally conscious noted changes in the land, an increase in pollution and changes to the local society as a whole. Hotels along beaches, garbage at camp sites, eroded paths in jungles, the overuse of water at golf resorts and the displacement of locals are all negative impacts of the non-environmentally conscious tourist.

To read detailed accounts of the negative impacts of tourism visit UNEP at http://www.uneptie.org/pc/tourism/sust-tourism/env-3main.htm or Tourism Concern at http://www.tourismconcern.org.uk/index.php?page=home.

Bearing in mind that the tourism industry has grown substantially in the past 20 years, the answer to the predicaments mentioned above are to change the way we travel, rather than to eliminate tourism to certain destinations completely. In fact, 10.8 billion dollars were spent by international tourists traveling to the U.S in the month of September 2007. This huge sum is proof of what a large market tourism is.

The breathtaking highlands of Peru (Photo: Eco Tours Online)

Egyptian born Kareem Hagar tried escaping the overpopulation and pollution caused by the tourism industry by visiting sites that tourists did not know about. In an effort to preserve the few areas in Egypt that were still intact he and his friend, Anthony Chamy, were inspired to create EcotoursOnline after moving to Canada. http://ecotoursonline.ca/.

“We never really considered this product to be a business at first,” says Anthony. “Kareem and I were raised in Egypt and a lot of the places we went to as kids are ruined now. Kareem went out on his own trying to find deserted beaches and oasis in the desert in an attempt to escape mass tourism in the area- the areas just lost their charm. I started tagging a long with him and soon year after year the group got bigger as more people joined who were interested in visiting areas unknown to tourists. When the groups got to be as large as 10-15 people, we saw potential for a product.”

Hopeful that they could protect the areas that remained, the duo started up a company with the purpose of educating the public about the importance of preserving the variety of archaeological wonders and cultures in Egypt.

“We found local people with the same passion for their country,” continues Anthony, “and we used their contacts and experience to create a unique itinerary. Visitors will have the chance to spend time with family and kids. Of course we are going to see the sights-the pyramids-but that’s just a side, where seeing what the country and it’s people are really like is the main issue. Our groups have been invited to weddings and dinners. A lot of our activities will also be participative tourism. Half a day might be spent with a fisherman where we help him built a boat He gets paid for his time and can sell the boat we helped make later on. We help you find hidden treasures and by traveling with us you’re no longer a tourist, you become a friend.”

Colorful threads from Madagascar - wear these to work on Monday! (Photo: Eco Tours Online)

Chamy and Hagar knew that preventing tourism completely was not the answer to preserving an area: “We have a big responsibility with this business. People are going to travel anyway. If we don’t take them they will end up going on their own. We show them a different side of the country and educate them so they learn to travel with respect for the future. People are spending thousands of dollars when they travel and this money is usually taken OUT of the country where the money is spent. These tourists completely ignore local culture where the only contact they have are with local housekeepers or servers…A lot of people do not know how bad things are for the country. In Cancun, for example, you don’t know what you’re doing wrong when you spend 600 dollars and are sunning yourself on a major hotel’s beach resort. We want to make it obvious.”

Another argument against ecotourism is that it is just the first step in the slippery slope to mass tourism. By sending people to pristine areas, they gain popularity and more people end up visiting the area. However, by creating an industry from a rain forest by providing trails or a bird watching tower, it is in the local’s interest to preserve the area rather than to destroy it in favor of a golf course or logging.

Caddick expresses a similar opinion: “There probably is some truth to [ecotourism evolving into mass tourism]. The more popular gorilla trekking is, the more people go there, the more lodges are built and the more of an impact there is. But I think the best way to engage and empower people to be concerned and be advocates for the environment is to educate them and have them enjoy these places. We can’t just lock them away. If people aren’t inspired and touched by it they can’t protect it. [Why would they want to?] You don’t want to love a place to death, but how does one set that level? You are going to have an impact whether it is just one person or thousands, but you don’t want to see places get locked away where only scientists have access to certain areas. If no one experiences it, then no one is going to want to protect it. It is a double edged sword.”

EcoWorld’s 2006 EcoTour survey “A Vast & Beautiful Planet,” describing some of the ecotours available on the planet. Since then, ecotourism has become even more popular. This is good news, but with an increase in popularity, potential travelers need to be careful when researching their options to ensure that ecotourism is not just a name in the company but the real thing.

Another thing to remember is that even though ecotourism is not the traditional tour or what many of us are used to, it is a great and affordable option to see parts of a country we would never find on our own. Many tours also offer travelers the opportunity to change the itinerary to enjoy areas you are specifically interested in. Kara Black has the following the advice: “People should not be scared of sustainable travel options. It’s a lot like normal travel and people can have the same kind of comfort and meet a lot of the same goals but they can actually add some richness to the experience as well. You can have a luxurious experience or a rustic one. You do run into a lot of bugs in the tropics&but it can be just as comfortable as your other travel arrangements if you plan ahead. [Plus, it wouldn't be the tropics without all the cool insects]”

For a detailed list of Eco-tours visit the Ecotourism Directory at:
http://www.ecotourdirectory.com/.

It’s easy to imagine such an impressive output of gas could be harming the earth. (Photo: US EPA)

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger

What will be his legacy?

The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations.

Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the Goebbelian substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well.

Climate is always changing. We have had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a hundred thousand year cycle for the last 700 thousand years, and previous warm periods appear to have been warmer than the present despite CO2 levels being lower than they are now. More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages.

Since the beginning of the 19th Century these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we don’t fully understand either the advance or the retreat. For small changes in climate associated with tenths of a degree, there is no need for any external cause. The earth is never exactly in equilibrium. The motions of the massive oceans where heat is moved between deep layers and the surface provides variability on time scales from years to centuries. Recent work (Tsonis et al, 2007), suggests that this variability is enough to account for all climate change since the 19th Century. Supporting the notion that man has not been the cause of this unexceptional change in temperature is the fact that there is a distinct signature to greenhouse warming: surface warming should be accompanied by warming in the tropics around an altitude of about 9km that is about 2.5 times greater than at the surface.

Measurements show that warming at these levels is only about 3/4 of what is seen at the surface, implying that only about a third of the surface warming is associated with the greenhouse effect, and, quite possibly, not all of even this really small warming is due to man. This further implies that all models predicting significant warming are greatly overestimating warming. This should not be surprising. According to the UNs Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the greenhouse forcing from man made greenhouse gases is already about 86 % of what one expects from a doubling of CO2 (with about half coming from methane, nitrous oxide, freons and ozone), and alarming predictions depend on models for which the sensitivity to a doubling for CO2 is greater than 2C which implies that we should already have seen much more warming than we have seen thus far, even if all the warming we have seen so far were due to man.

This contradiction is rendered more acute by the fact that there has been no significant global warming for the last ten years. Modelers defend this situation by arguing that aerosols have cancelled much of the warming, and that models adequately account for natural unforced internal variability. However, a recent paper (Ramanathan, 2007) points out that aerosols can warm as well as cool, while scientists at the UKs Hadley Centre for Climate Research recently noted that their model did not appropriately deal with natural internal variability thus demolishing the basis for the IPCCs iconic attribution. Interestingly (though not unexpectedly), the British paper did not stress this. Rather, they speculated that natural internal variability might step aside in 2009, allowing warming to resume. Resume? Thus, the fact that warming has ceased for the past decade is acknowledged.

Whether or not someone is a climate alarmist should have no bearing on the strength or purity of their environmentalist convictions. (Read “Global Warming Questions“)

Given that the evidence (and I have noted only a few of many pieces of evidence) strongly suggests that anthropogenic warming has been greatly exaggerated, the basis for alarm due to such warming is similarly diminished.

However, the really important point is that the case for alarm would still be weak even if anthropogenic global warming were significant. Polar bears, arctic summer sea ice, regional droughts and floods, coral bleaching, hurricanes, alpine glaciers, malaria, etc. etc. all depend not on some global average of surface temperature, but on a huge number of regional variables including temperature, humidity, cloud cover, precipitation, and direction and magnitude of wind.

The state of the ocean is also often crucial. Our ability to forecast any of these over periods beyond a few days is minimal. Yet, each catastrophic forecast depends on each of these being in a specific range. The odds of any specific catastrophe actually occurring is almost zero. This was equally true for earlier forecasts: famine for the 1980’s, global cooling in the 1970’s, Y2K and many others. Regionally, year to year fluctuations in temperature are over four times larger than fluctuations in the global mean. Much of this variation has to be independent of the global mean; otherwise the global mean would vary much more.

This is simply to note that factors other than global warming are more important to any specific situation. This is not to say that disasters will not occur; they always have occurred and this will not change in the future. Fighting global warming with symbolic gestures will certainly not change this. However, history tells us that greater wealth and development can profoundly increase our resilience.

Given the above, one may reasonably ask why there is the current alarm, and, in particular, why the astounding upsurge in alarmism of the past 2 years. When an issue like global warming is around for over twenty years, numerous agendas are developed to exploit the issue.

California Attorney General Jerry Brown

What is his dream?

The interests of the environmental movement in acquiring more power and influence are reasonably clear. So too are the interests of bureaucrats for whom control of CO2 is a dream-come-true.

After all, CO2 is a product of breathing itself. Politicians can see the possibility of taxation that will be cheerfully accepted because it is necessary for saving the world. Nations have seen how to exploit this issue in order to gain competitive advantages. But, by now, things have gone much further.

The case of ENRON is illustrative in this respect. Before disintegrating in a pyrotechnic display of unscrupulous manipulation, ENRON had been one of the most intense lobbyists for Kyoto. It had hoped to become a trading firm dealing in carbon emission rights. This was no small hope. These rights are likely to amount to over a trillion dollars, and the commissions will run into many billions. Hedge funds are actively examining the possibilities. It is probably no accident that Gore, himself, is associated with such activities . The sale of indulgences is already in full swing with organizations selling offsets to ones carbon footprint while sometimes acknowledging that the offsets are irrelevant.

The possibilities for corruption are immense. Archer Daniels Midland (Americas largest agribusiness) has successfully lobbied for ethanol requirements for gasoline, and the resulting demand for ethanol is already leading to large increases in corn prices and associated hardship in the developing world (not to mention poorer car performance).

And finally, there are the numerous well meaning individuals who have allowed propagandists to convince them that in accepting the alarmist view of anthropogenic climate change, they are displaying intelligence and virtue For them, their psychic welfare is at stake.

With all this at stake, one can readily suspect that there might be a sense of urgency provoked by the possibility that warming may have ceased. For those committed to the more venal agendas, the need to act soon, before the public appreciates the situation, is real indeed.

About the Author: Richard S. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology(http://web.mit.edu). This article is reprinted here with permission from the author.