TED Community » Amanda Barney

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I'm passionate about

What fuels the majority of my thinking is how the disconnection between people, and between people and the resources that help them live, causes an emptiness that people fail to fill via consumption.

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  A comment on Conversation: How can the travel and tourism industry catalyze conservation?

  Mar 17 2011: I am currently thinking a lot about the concept of Geotourism as I work on my master's thesis. Geotourism is a type of sustainable tourism that focuses on highlighting the geography of places and their living cultures. In planning for geotourism the communities/locations that are becoming destinations are asked to participate in meetings whereby they try to determine what it is they hope to highlight to tourists - these things could range from a view, to a type of cooking, a festival or a style of music. By engaging community members in geotourism there is the hope that you are creating a tourism environment that highlights why this place is worth visiting, its about conserving and sustaining the sense of place instead of creating something new or a mass tourist destination. If tourism hopes to help with conservation I think that it needs to cater to engaged responsible tourists who hope to learn something new, be exposed to a new culture or experience an environment different from their own. By engaging communities and highlighting what makes them unique, you are promoting the conservation of place while allowing it to adapt to tourists.