Search for: All records

Islands have often been used to exile political prisoners, migrants, criminals, mentally ill individuals, and others deemed unworthy. Yet the remoteness that made islands ideal prison sites is today exploited to develop nature-based ecotourism (NBET). Given the ‘prison to paradise’ phenomenon is previously undocumented in the literature, this paper explores three descriptive cases in the Global South: Ecuador (Galápagos Islands), Panamá (Coiba Island), and Colombia (Gorgona Island). This analysis identifies how the timelines of prison activities and the manifestations of tourism are influenced by contextual factors that determine whether carceral heritage is being preserved or overwritten in each context. The paper also highlights further opportunities to elaborate on this nascent theory and emphasise specific roles for archaeologists in that future research agenda. This work will appeal to scholars interested in dark heritage, prison tourism, island studies, and protected area managers involved with heritage preservation around former prison sites. 

This paper offers paradigmatic insights from an international workshop on Ecological Legacies: Bridge Between Science and Community, in Ecuador, in the summer of 2023. The conference brought together foreign and local scholars, tour operators, village community, and Indigenous leaders in the upper Amazonia region of Ecuador with the goal of developing a vision for a sustainable and regenerative future of the upper Amazon. The conference offered three epistemological contributions to the existing literature in the emergent field of Montology, including addressing issues of (a) understanding the existing linguistic hegemony in describing tropical environments, (b) the redress of mistaken notions on pristine jungle environments, and (c) the inclusion of traditional knowledge and transdisciplinary approaches to understand the junglescape from different perspectives and scientific traditions. Methodologically, the conference bridged the fields of palaeoecological and ethnobotanical knowledge (as part of a wider conversation between science and local communities). Results show that local knowledge should be incorporated into the study of the junglescape and its conservation, with decolonial approaches for tourism, sharing language, methodology, tradition, and dissemination of the forest’s attributes. Our research helped co-create and formulate the “Coca Declaration” calling for a philosophical turn in research, bridging science and ethnotourism in ways that are local, emancipatory, and transdisciplinary. We conclude that facilitating new vocabulary by decolonial heightening of Indigenous perspectives of the junglescape helps to incorporate the notion of different Amazons, including the mountainscape of the Andean–Amazonian flanks. We also conclude that we can no consider Ecuador the country of “pure nature” since we helped demystify pristine nature for foreign tourists and highlighted local views with ancestral practices. Finally, we conclude that ethnotourism is a viable alternative to manage heritagization of the junglescape as a hybrid territory with the ecological legacies of the past and present inhabitants of upper Amazonia. 

Biocultural approaches to restoration, which recognize the unique ways of understanding of socioecological challenges by Indigenous and local communities, have gained traction in recent decades. Yet, less attention has focused on biocultural opportunities where there is no Indigenous population or traditional knowledge to draw upon. This ethnographic study inductively assesses data gathered from interviews with farm owners on Isabela Island in the Galápagos Islands, where human presence is a function of recent migration. These interviews, corroborated with archival information and participant observation, center on farmer attitudes regarding restoration of Scalesia cordata, a highly endangered plant species, endemic to Isabela. The resulting analysis identified four themes of overlap with the biocultural restoration literature: cultural keystone species, sense of place, informational pathways, and recognition of socio-ecological feedback loops. Findings indicate that Scalesia remains a valued cultural keystone species providing tangible and intangible benefits to local residents, and its survival serves as a metaphor for farmers’ own wellbeing. Thus, even locations where place-based knowledge by a native population is not evident, critical biocultural elements exist that can be integrated into restoration efforts. Farmers also exhibited clear connections between restoration and tourism in Galápagos, paving the way for the application of biocultural theory to the analysis of tourism-supported restoration efforts elsewhere. 

Latin America is where ecotourism got an early start, and where it remains best represented today. In this essay, brief comparative cases, from the Galápagos to Costa Rica, demonstrate how understanding the value of ecotourism requires consideration of the alternative economic activities and forms of tourism likely to occur in its absence. By distinguishing its relative effectiveness as a strategy for meeting human needs while protecting the environment, we can better understand why the committed application of ecotourism remains a major conservation strategy that environmentalists are promoting over the alternatives and implementing across Latin America. 

Applying justice theory in tourism studies has yielded a vibrant flourishing of scholarship in recent decades. Yet, it is still argued that a clear conceptualization of justice tourism is still lacking. Sovereignty theory has seen broad application across many social sciences in recent decades, yet despite a clear connection, the tourism scholarship has engaged minimally with the sovereignty literature. This article aims to assimilate sovereignty theory into the justice tourism scholarship by carrying out a deep historical analysis to demonstrate how destination residents negotiate chronic and acute crises in the Galápagos Islands, a place with no original human population. With global immigration projected to grow and exacerbate environmental conflicts in the coming years, the current research is well-poised to provide urgent and generalizable insights into the sociocultural underpinnings of increasing human mobility, the environmental conflicts that exist between different value systems and worldviews, and the opportunities that exist to promote improved destination management on behalf of human wellbeing in places experiencing intense in-migration. Historical analyses are thus critical to understanding the subjective and temporal nature of struggles associated with justice-centric concepts, including but not limited to sovereignty.