Chapter 3 Sustainability: The Great Alibi
No concept in contemporary tourism discourse has been more useful or more hollow than sustainability. It has provided ethical cover for practices that are manifestly unsustainable. It has allowed the industry to claim responsibility while avoiding it. It has functioned not as a transformative principle but as a rhetorical device for managing reputation. Sustainability has been tourism's great alibi.
The term entered tourism discourse in the late 1980s, following the Brundtland Commission's definition of sustainable development: meeting present needs without compromising future generations' ability to meet their own. Applied to tourism, this seemed to promise a reconciliation of economic development with environmental protection and social equity. The three pillars of sustainability (economic, environmental, social) would stand together, mutually reinforcing.
In practice, the pillars never stood equal. Economic sustainability (meaning continuous profitability and growth) dominated while environmental and social considerations were demoted to constraints, managed through mitigation rather than transformation. Sustainable tourism became not an alternative to conventional tourism but conventional tourism with better public relations.
This was not accidental. The tourism industry adopted sustainability language precisely to prevent more radical challenges. By claiming the sustainability banner, industry actors could position themselves as responsible while deflecting demands for fundamental change. Every hotel chain launched a sustainability program. Every destination announced sustainable tourism plans. The language proliferated while the practices it was supposed to transform continued largely unchanged.
Examine the content of these programs. Hotel sustainability typically means towel reuse programs, LED lighting, and perhaps solar panels. These measures reduce operating costs while providing marketing material. They do nothing to address the fundamental unsustainability of building resource-intensive luxury facilities in water-scarce regions to serve visitors who flew thousands of miles to arrive. The efficiency gains are real but trivial compared to the systemic impacts.
Destination sustainability plans follow similar patterns. They promise environmental protection through zoning, cultural preservation through regulation, and equitable distribution through community involvement. They rarely deliver. Zoning yields to development pressure. Regulation lacks enforcement. Community involvement means consultation without power. The plans provide a sustainability alibi while development proceeds on its own terms.
Consider ecotourism, supposedly the most sustainable form of tourism. Studies have consistently found that ecotourism operations often harm the ecosystems they claim to protect. The infrastructure required for tourist access (roads, lodges, viewing platforms) fragments habitats. The presence of tourists disturbs wildlife. The economic incentives encourage development of previously inaccessible areas. What distinguishes ecotourism from mass tourism is often just scale and price point, not fundamental sustainability.
Carbon offsets represent perhaps the most sophisticated form of sustainability alibi. Airlines and tour operators offer travelers the option to offset their emissions by funding projects elsewhere (typically tree planting or renewable energy in developing countries). The transaction allows travelers to maintain their consumption patterns while claiming climate neutrality. It allows companies to grow emissions while claiming environmental responsibility.
The problems with offsets are well documented. Verification is weak. Additionality (whether the funded project would have happened anyway) is often questionable. Permanence (whether the carbon stays sequestered) is uncertain. And even perfectly functioning offsets address only carbon, not the full range of aviation impacts (nitrogen oxides, contrails, habitat fragmentation around airports). Offsets are not solutions; they are indulgences, purchased to assuage guilt while the harmful behavior continues.
Certification schemes exhibit similar dynamics. Dozens of eco-labels and sustainability certifications now exist in tourism. Some are rigorous; many are not. Consumers cannot distinguish between them. Companies select whichever certification is easiest to obtain or most useful for marketing. The proliferation of labels creates confusion that benefits the least sustainable operators, who can claim certification without meaningful change.
The sustainability alibi also operates at the level of language. Tourism marketers have become expert at sustainability-speak: eco-friendly, green, responsible, ethical, conscious, mindful. These terms function as value signals without operational content. An "eco-friendly" tour may differ in no meaningful way from its conventional equivalent. The language creates an impression of responsibility that substitutes for actual responsibility.
This is not cynicism but strategy. Industry actors face real reputational risks if they appear environmentally or socially irresponsible. Sustainability language manages those risks at minimal cost. It allows business as usual to continue while inoculating against criticism. Any challenge can be deflected by pointing to the sustainability program, however inadequate.
Academic research has largely failed to challenge this dynamic. Sustainability studies in tourism tend to focus on improving existing approaches rather than questioning their adequacy. Researchers ask how to make offsets more effective, how to strengthen certification, how to improve community involvement. They rarely ask whether these mechanisms can ever deliver genuine sustainability or whether they function primarily as alibis.
The institutional reasons for this are clear. Research funding flows from industry and government sources that benefit from the sustainability alibi. Publication rewards incremental findings within established frameworks. Academic careers depend on industry relationships that criticism would jeopardize. The knowledge system is captured, not through conspiracy but through the ordinary operation of institutional incentives.
What would genuine sustainability require? It would require accepting absolute limits on tourism activity, not just efficiency improvements within unlimited growth. It would require honest accounting of full environmental impacts, not selective reporting of convenient metrics. It would require redistribution of tourism benefits, not just aggregate economic growth. It would require community power over tourism decisions, not just consultation. It would require, in short, the end of tourism as currently practiced.
This is precisely what the sustainability alibi prevents. By claiming the sustainability space, the industry forecloses radical alternatives. Anyone proposing actual sustainability can be dismissed as unrealistic because sustainability is already being addressed. The alibi functions as ideological closure, marking the boundaries of acceptable discourse.
Breaking through requires exposing the alibi as alibi. It requires showing that sustainable tourism, as practiced, is not sustainable. It requires demonstrating the gap between sustainability rhetoric and sustainability reality. This is uncomfortable work because it challenges powerful interests and popular illusions. But it is necessary work because the alternative is continued degradation under a green veneer.
The post-growth framework proposed in this book abandons sustainability as a goal precisely because the term has been captured. What I propose instead is restraint: absolute reduction in tourism volume and impact, governed not by efficiency calculations but by ecological limits and community consent. Restraint cannot be alibied. It demands actual change.
Some will object that this is giving up on sustainability, abandoning a valuable concept to industry capture. I understand the objection but reject it. Concepts that have been thoroughly captured cannot be reclaimed through argument. They must be replaced with concepts that have not yet been corrupted. Sustainability had its chance. It failed. We need new language and new frameworks.
The great alibi served its purpose for thirty years. It allowed tourism to grow while appearing responsible. It allowed academics to publish while avoiding challenge. It allowed consumers to travel while feeling virtuous. But alibis eventually wear thin. The evidence accumulates. The contradictions become undeniable. We have reached that point. The alibi no longer works, and we must find ways of thinking about tourism that do not depend on it.