ABSTRACT
Chapter 2: To better understand the four pillars of sustainable tourism described in Chapter 1: “cultural tourism, geotourism, ecotourism, and responsible tourism,” it is helpful to introduce certain worldly travelers in the history of travel who practiced attributes of sustainable tourism long before it became a popular topic in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It was the intelligent and progressive Sumerians of the Fertile Crescent valley, also referred to as The Cradle of Civilization [Middle East] in about 400 BCE, who would transform the ability for people to travel easier and further. Their society invented the plow, the wheel, money, cuneiform writing, and a concept for a tour guide. These inventions led to greater business relations with such distant countries as India, caused an increased desire to visit new destinations, and produced a need for a travel guide who could more effectively impart knowledge about travel destinations. Other early societies are mentioned, before introducing the greatest Greek ancient traveler, Herodotus. In Chapter 1, a short definition of cultural tourism was presented as, “Traveling to experience the places and activities that authentically represent the stories and people of the past and present.” No one in the history of early travel better fits that definition of cultural tourism than the journeys of the great worldly traveler Herodotus. In the 5th century BCE, Herodotus (485–425 BCE) toured Phoenicia, Egypt, Cyrenaica, Greece, and areas around the Black Sea and recorded the history, heritage, culture, religions, and geography of the people living in those areas. Up until Herodotus wrote the first history and travel book called The Histories the Greek society knew very little about the larger world outside of the Greek city-states. Our next worldly traveler is Marco Polo, given the title of a “geotourism” traveler, although in his 24-year journey he also studied and wrote about cultural tourism in his book The Travels of Marco Polo. He gives a good description of “sustainable tourism” when he describes a park-like environment outside one of the palaces of the great Mongol emperor, Kublai Khan of China. After Marco we are introduced to an early practitioner of ecotourism: Charles Darwin. While his book On the Origin of the Species is well-known, it was his book The Voyage of the Beagle that made him famous and led to his greatness as a naturalist. His responsibility on this voyage was to study the natural attributes of plant and animal life and observe the culture and heritage of the inhabitants of the areas visited when opportunities arose to go ashore. Our final worldly traveler is the great aviator and first world superhero, Charles Lindbergh. Later, after his celebrated flight in an airplane across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Paris, Lindbergh became one of the most famous advocates for “responsible travel.” Also, a case study depicting: John Lawson: Father of Sustainable Travel in the New World.
