Education in the perception of environmental degradation due to tourism activities

Tourism has, by its nature, an impact on the environment. Suffice it to think of pollution due to transport, the construction of accommodation structures that are then unused, its concentration in rather restricted spaces and times. However, it is not obvious that tourism is always and everywhere a factor of degradation like a monster destined, sooner or later, to devour the resources from which it originated. In fact, since it is a pure consumption activity (unlike production activities, such as industry, agriculture, etc.), at least in theory it should only make modest changes to the natural environment and should help protect the natural environment same. However the daily experience offers innumerable examples of disfigurement of the natural features of the landscape, caused by an often uncontrolled expansion of tourism, in areas sometimes unprepared to welcome it. One of the most important phenomena in territories with a tourist vocation regards the different manifestation of the development/degradation of tourism in national and regional territory. Where sustainable development is present, communities are more sensitive to the territory growth prospects, with significant projection capacity towards the future. Other territories in which communities have invested in economic development of the tourism industry show a correlated incapacity to control the degradation resulting from the models of industrial tourism. Also the Calabria case highlights such a difference: the communities committed in sustainable tourism use deriving resources to improve the quality of life; those uninterested in quality do not show awareness of territorial degradation. Calabria, a region with a high tourist vocation due to the presence of remarkable naturalistic, landscape, historical and archaeological- museum resources, deserves to see the implementation of sustainable tourism diffusion processes, also making use of empirical and scientific researches that highlight the importance of the formation and education of individuals’ and communities’ ecological conscience. The present work intends to use emblematic cases of tourist communities as laboratories of a multidisciplinary research that allows to know and interpret data, phenomena and processes related to the relationship between tourism development and territory’s protection.