word image
Report

Capitalism, Sustainability and Tourism

799 Words / ~2 pages sternsternsternsternstern_0.25 Author Adam M. in Sep. 2010
<
>
Download
Genre/category

Report
Geo Sciences

University, School

University of Tasmania Hobart

Grade, Teacher, Year

2010

Author / Copyright
Adam M. ©
Metadata
Price 2.40
Format: pdf
Size: 0.48 Mb
Without copy protection
Rating
sternsternsternsternstern_0.25
ID# 2022







Capitalism, Sustainability and Tourism

To describe the concepts of capitalism, sustainability and the interconnections between them many questions to answer arise. First of all it is important what capitalism is and how it works. How does the concept of capitalism work and what are the important elements? What is sustainable development and how can it be described or further are there any concrete definitions of sustainability? Does the concept of capitalsim facilitate sustainable development and are there any connections between capitalism, sustainable development and tourism? I will frist introduce captialism and sustainable development and try to answer the other questions based on this introductions.

Capitalism is the basic concept of the western economic system and surley also affects our cultural life, our way of living. Due to Adler (2001) the socio-economic system is based on a few characteristic elements like “voluntary exchange, rule of law, contract and the most important one – private property”.

The aspiration towards maximizing the profits while using less ressources, however, is distinictive. Another important fact is that intervention by states should be minimized or even completely disestablished.

The term of sustainable development is wide-ranging and can contain different elements such as economy, ecology or sociology and the term in itself is in fact not clearly defined. Lafferty and Langehelle (1994) wrote that the most important document conceerning sustainability is the Brundtland Report.

However, the definition of sustainability in this report is anything but properly. Due to the Brundtland Commission sustainability is defined as: “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.

Download Capitalism, Sustainability and Tourism
• Click on download for the complete and text
• This is a sharing plattform for papers
Upload your paper and receive this one for free
• Or you can buy simply this text

Furthermore Lafferty and Langehelle allude to four different “types of openness” of meaning as would be “systemic openness, vagueness, internal vagueness and dynamic openness”. Attention should be given to all of those forms of openness as it is important to exactly define the circumstances in every case.

So, finally the concept of sustainable development is embossed by it´s openness and it cannot exactly be defined. Sustainability always depends on the issue, on the point of view as well as on the considering scale.

The question wheater capitalism facilitates sustainable development or not is a difficult one and I will now try to give an answer to it. Adler (2001) writes that capitalism leads directly to sustainable development by introducing private property to all available ressources.

He explained that e.g. a company would remain aloof from dumping a river due to other value emerging out of this ressource. In my opinion this may be true if the added value is higher than the costs of waste disposal, however, what happens if not? The character of capitalism is to maximize profit and one would rather waste the river than not if the profit would be higher.

This might be true because it is subject to law of supply and demand and enterprises have to maximize their benefits to persist competitive. A good example is the usage of oil e.g. for transport issues. Gas consumption of motors haven´t shown a significant increase in the last decades altough humanity knows this technical accomplishment for a long time.

Seen from an economic point of view capitalism might be sustainable, but what is about other sectors of our live like the ecology and sociality? Furthermore there are no mechanisms to deal with long term processes whose complete impacts are now barely discernible but will be in a few decades as e.g. global climate change.

Doing business as usual and trying to maximize benefits in tourism business would lead to countinued growth of tourists and furthermore to destruction of the bases. The connection between the concepts is that sustianable development may be able to achieve the natural and cultural ressources on a local scale to make the fundamentals for tourism available for future generations.


Swap your papers