It is clear that adventure tourism can be based on nature. Some adventure lovers tend to participate in adventurous activities in order to contribute money for nature conservation. Adventures are based on nature but tourism or human leisure has become a threat to nature. For instance, hunting wild elephants reduces biodiversity and air transport contributes to air pollution. The idea is that when humans use nature for their entertainment, tourism needs to try for nature conservation (see section 2.6.3). Interestingly, Buckley has dedicated his book Adventure: tourism management (2010) to two significant athletes who have committed their life to promote nature conservation: Christina Franco who crossed the Sahara desert to protect rhinos and Wang Shi who dedicated his life for river conservation.
The Adventure Travel Trade Association (2017) highlighted their ambition as “a platform for pushing boundaries, creating movements and propelling the industry toward a sustainable future”. In this summit, two keynote speakers delivered their
Figure 7: Identifying the nature of adventure tourism of RCTs
Source: Adapted from Swarbrooke et al. (2011 36), Used with permission
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speech under the theme of sustainable tourism. One was about “building a home for future generations” by Robert Ghukasyan, the director of Time Land Scientific Foundation in Armenia. Kalavan in Armenia is a mountain village and a home for Azerbaijani refugees now. This place has become popular for adventure tourism of mountain biking. This Foundation tries to raise funds for locals to ensure that they feel this place as their home and to ensure environmental protection for future tourism.
The second keynote was on “acknowledging our coexistence and the rights of nature” by Princess Lucaj. She works for Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands to protect the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (Adventure Travel Trade Association 2017). Having these kinds of projects and discourses within the context of adventure tourism is a green light for sustainable tourism. But the lack of these sorts of practices in large scale tourism is still problematic as such effort does not cover every tourism space.
2.5 Canopy tourism
Erwin (cited in Seibel 2005 03), had announced that “rainforest canopy tourism takes place at the last biotic frontier of this planet” because world forest cover has been disappearing rapidly during the last few decades. The tree canopy is the upper part of trees and consists of branches and leaves. Canopy height and density vary according to different forest types. Canopy tourism is a journey that includes outdoor recreational activity done above the ground in the upper part of the bush and is also known as ‘canopy tour’, ‘tree top walk’ or ‘sky walk’ (Newsome 2013).
When the canopy tour is lengthier and deeper it brings more adventurous feelings.
It uses “every way to bring tourists up into the forest canopy to create an experience which is considerably different from the one on the ground” as it permits visitors to observe the ground from tree tops with a bird’s eye view (Seibel 2010 3). In fact, this style of tours above the ground are significant as they disturb less since there is less contact with the ground. Tourists can observe animal behaviours on the ground without disturbing them as well as not exposing themselves to potential attacks.
Thus, this is a safe approach for both parties, wildlife and tourists. The forest ground layer is saved from destruction by trampling or off-road trekking and it prevents soil erosion.
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Canopy tours are conducted in plantation forests e.g. redwoods in Rotorua, New Zealand or natural forests e.g. Taman Negara in Malaysia [considered as one of the oldest rainforests in the world (Seibel 2010)]. Some canopy tour operations are conducted on private lands. According to Seibel (2005 3), “no canopy tours exist in public protected areas in Costa Rica”. However, there are examples of public-private partnerships in canopy tourism in New Zealand because public-private canopy tour operators run their businesses on public lands, like RCTs. They are a private company but run their tours in DRSR in New Zealand which is governed by DoC.
Beebe (1917 85) pointed out that “yet another continent of life remains to be discovered, not upon earth, but one to two hundred feet above it…”. Sixty-six years later in 1983 Erwin commented on Beebe’s idea that “at present, we know almost nothing about it” (Erwin 1983 14). After another eighteen years Stork mentioned that “….we are only just beginning to discover this part of the world” in canopy research (2001 313). What one can learn is that the forest canopy has been touched by humans now for four decades. Biological research is the main purpose which forced humans to reach the forest canopy.
In the very first days, reaching the upper part of the giant trees was an absolutely difficult task. A ladder was used to climb and after reaching a certain height, a platform was made. Then the ladder was used again to reach the next level from the first platform to again make the next platform to reach the very top. This process was very dangerous as the ladder could slip at any point and it was time-consuming.
One had to start from the bottom to reach each canopy and there was no way to reach from one tree canopy on to another directly. Muul thought to use a horizontal ladder from the hillside to access the canopy and thus invented the first canopy walkway (Muul and Lim 1970). Though there are different types of walkways used in canopy tourism nowadays, here I use the term of ‘walkway’ in general.
The website www.canopyaccess.com, provides a database of worldwide canopy walkways (Lowman et al. 2006 123). They have developed a world map with the location of each canopy walkway. This world map is zoned according to
‘biogeographic regions’. This classification was adapted from Clemson University (Canopy access 2005). The database gives details of each canopy walkway such as the type of walkway, the starting year, type of forest and use of the walkway. This
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database also mentions that the Bukit Lanjan walkway in Malaysia was built in 1968 and that is the oldest one among all the walkways in the database.
Canopy Access’s web database would be very useful for canopy researchers if it was up to date. According to Table 4, New Zealand’ first canopy tourism facility (a walkway) was built in 2001 and the first zipline was installed in 2004. All the other canopy tourism facilities were installed after 2004. Updating the Canopy Access website stopped in 2005 and this explains that New Zealand’s canopy tourism details have not appeared on this database. One might think that at least details about the 2001 walkway should be on this website but perhaps it was used as a public pathway and not seeking promotion.