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Peripheral Tourism, Sustainability, Ecotourism and a Light at the End of the Tunnel

Having read with great interest the contributions related to this topic, my first reaction is that a full and measured response would require a full-length book rather than just this short commentary. Hence, by necessity my remarks are highly selective in its focus and very much incomplete in terms of fully addressing these selected issues. I would, however, like to begin by taking issue with the North/South focus of the debate. As per Wallerstein (1988), it is abundantly clear that there are shades of core and periphery in every country, and that it is not helpful to categorise entire countries as being core (North) or periphery (South) in an increasingly borderless world. To effectively engage issues related to development and tourism, we must include northern Canada, the Mississippi Delta and the Australian Outback in the same spatially fragmented global periphery as the Caribbean islands and Sub-Saharan Africa. One is struck, for example, by the similarities between the history of Afro-American displacement due to resort development on Hilton Head Island and the other Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, and the displacement of AfroCaribbean people from the coastline of Antigua by those same tourism/ amenity/ globalization forces (Weaver in press). If anything, these developments give added credence to the view that the basic premises of Dependency Theory are still very much alive and possibly experiencing reanimation (Surin 1998), although obscured somewhat by new (e.g., globalization rather than peripheralization) and circumstances (e.g., War on Terror rather than Cold War).