Ethics and Sustainable Tourism -- with David Fennell - part 1

Today's Geography for Travelers Podcast is a recording of a presentation by Prof. David Fennell of Brock University at the annual meeting of the Assocaiation of American Geographers, 17-22 April 2007.  The title of his presentation is:

Ethics: We're Stuck With It [in Tourism]...Whether We Like It Or Not!
This was a 45 minute plenary presentation sponsored by my journal, Tourism Geographies, and funded by the journal's publisher, Routledge/Taylor and Francis, Ltd.

Part 1 of this podcast is the actual presentation.  Part 2 of this podcast will is the questions and answers that followed the presentation.  I will post that in about 1 to 2 weeks as a separate podcast.

ALSO - This podcast will be linked to David's Powerpoint slides on Slideshare.net in what they call a Slidecast.  You can find this Slidecast at: http://www.slideshare.net/alew.

Here is ht abstract of David Fennell's presentation from the conference program:

Trivers' (1971) theory of reciprocal altruism, emerging from animal behaviour studies, is premised on the belief that human social behaviour is said to have evolved in relatively small, stable communities where groups of people had opportunities to forge cooperative relationships over time through repeated interaction. The more time we have to engage in altruistic acts—acts that are returned in kind— the better chance for individuals and groups to set up longer term cooperative relationships. Cooperation of this sort can be challenged in tourism because of limited interactions based on restricted periods of time, with implications at the micro scale (tourist-host interactions) and at the macro scale (collective interactions within the region as a whole). Despite these challenges, ethics and trust have emerged from reciprocal altruism as mechanisms that induce both short-term and long-term cooperative relationships for mutual benefit. Implications of these relationships are discussed in the context of generating ways to improve cooperation for the tourism industry as a whole.
Keywords: ethics, reciprocal altruism, cooperation

Original Show Notes for this podcast are at: http://TravelGeography.info