For the Places You Love
The Geotravel Journal supports the Destination Stewardship Center in its efforts to help protect the world’s distinctive places by supporting wisely managed tourism and enlightened destination stewardship. Having partnered with the DSC, GTJ will publish select articles from the Destination Stewardship Report as vetted and edited by Jonathan Tourtellot.
The DSC was founded by Jonathan Tourtellot, a former editor of the now defunct National Geographic Traveler magazine. He specializes in sustainable tourism and destination stewardship as a journalist, editor, and consultant. It was with the support of his patient wife, Sally Bensusen, that he originated the concept of the geotourism approach as defined by National Geographic: “Tourism that sustains or enhances the geographical character of a place—its environment, geology, culture, aesthetics, heritage, and the well-being of its residents.”
Jonathan founded and ran National Geographic’s Center for Sustainable Destinations for nine years. They instituted the National Geographic Geotourism MapGuide program and the landmark Destination Stewardship surveys published in National Geographic Traveler, 2004-2010.
The DSC’s goal is to help people find the resources they need to achieve that mission. It serves as a clearing house of information, from academic literature through lay friendly blogs and functions at the intersection between stewardship of places and one of the world’s most impactful industries: tourism.
What exactly is destination stewardship? Based on descriptions by assorted international organizations, the DSC defines it as:
“An ongoing process by which local communities, governmental agencies, civic organizations, and tourism-related businesses work jointly to maintain and enhance the cultural, environmental, economic, and aesthetic integrity of their country, region, or town – and thereby care for the distinctive attributes that appeal to both residents and compatible tourists.”
If you care about great places, if you care about managing tourism so as to enhance places and not spoil them, then you care about the destination-stewardship story. Visit the Destination Stewardship Center here.
Destination Stewardship Report
Engaging with National Parks' Gateway Communities
Improving relations between a national park and its gateway communities can be tricky, involving touchy issues such as invasive species, extractive industries, air pollution, visitation levels and even dark skies. The collaborative approach employed for North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt National Park yielded actionable community ideas and opened lines of communication while upholding park goals. The technique? Accentuate the positive with the approach known as Appreciative Inquiry. Kelly Bricker’s University of Utah team explains how.
One Colorado City Shows Us How to Do it
Spurred on by the post-pandemic era of travel, tourism organizations are moving away from a singular function of marketing destinations. Some have begun to incorporate “destination stewardship” into plans, functions, and even job titles. But destination stewardship must go deeper than a job title; it means collaborating with other caretakers and stakeholders, including the inhabitants who actually live there. Sarah-Jane Johnson reports on how one of Colorado’s renowned recreational destinations – Durango – has gone about it and what the results have been.
50 Years of Cycling and Conservation
Every year, Green Destinations organizes the Top 100 Destination Sustainability Stories competition, which invites submissions from around the world that spotlight local and regional destinations that are making progress toward sustainable management of tourism and its impacts. Ailin Fei wrote this winner from a bay in France where ecotourism, estuaries, and pancake topography combine. For half a century the Baie de Somme – a popular tourist spot in northern France – has faced challenges from overtourism and environmental degradation.
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