The saying “no man is an island” is true in so many spheres of life. No one aspect of life is un-impacted by the others. Your ethics, for example, are impacted by how your parents raised you, and they in turn impact how you live your life and interact with others. They impact business practices, meal choices, clothing choices, the places you will travel to and the kind of car you will buy. Each sphere impacts the others in one way or another. Similarly, the world of business is touched by many things, as business is everywhere. Sustainability and business need to go hand in hand in a modern world, so each influences the other. Tourism is a business, but is influenced heavily by both sustainability and demand. How do we help these spheres coexist? By innovating and creating new ways of doing business and tourism.
With sustainability, tourism has had to change some practices, abandon other practices, and adopt entirely new ones. Minimizing animal tourism, for example, will affect the economy and business practices of an entire area. The tourism and business sectors must come together and find innovative ways to replace lost tourism revenue, but with solutions and features that are sustainable as well as financially viable. It’s a complicated little web, but everything is interconnected. From West Virginia, to Phuket, to Istanbul, sustainable tourism is now big business. Let’s take a look at how the three spheres work together and interact.
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Innovation
“Adapt or die ” is a saying that definitely applies to business. There’s no point in selling something that no one is buying, so you need to put your innovation skills to the test to either make your business an essential one or shift its focus to provide an essential product or service. The tech sector is as innovative as they come, and big business to boot. Things change in this sector faster than you can blink: new technology is on the rise, and older tech is falling by the wayside faster than you can say “I, Robot.” These advances in tech make our lives easier every day, and shoulder a huge amount of the burden that is finding ways to live sustainably as a population. Without tech we wouldn’t be able to store and utilize solar energy, there would be no green transportation, and no clothing that decomposes and becomes a helpful part of the earth when it’s discarded. Someone, somewhere said “We can do better than this,” and pushed forward using every bit of innovation they had to help create more sustainable ways of living on this planet.
Tech is helping us do away with animal tourism, which has incredibly negative impacts on the environment and the animals in question, by offering us more ways to experience exotic animals and pristine locations from the comfort of our homes. VR, 8K televisions, and augmented reality bring nature into our homes with no negative impact on the world around us.