Tourism consumption of biodiversity: A global exploration of forest product use in thatched tropical resort architecture

•Tourism often drives global consumption of biodiversity, but is rarely acknowledged.•Thatched architecture is a key feature of the tourism experience of paradise.•Biodiverse species are consumed in commercial thatched architecture globally.•Aesthetics, tourism cycles & upkeep separate subsisten...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Geoforum 2018-08, Vol.94, p.1-11
Main Authors: Sierra-Huelsz, José Antonio, Kainer, Karen A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Architecture
Biocultural change
Biodegradability
Biodiversity
Botany
Building materials
Commodification
Construction
Construction materials
Construction planning
Consumption
Decay
Dependence
Dependency
Efficacy
Emergence
Ethnobotany
Extreme weather
Fieldwork
Forest management
Forest products
Forestry
Forests
Governance
Huts
Internet
Literature reviews
Non-timber forest products
Plant resources
Regulation
Resorts & spas
Resource management
Tourism
Tourist gaze
Trade
Tropical forest management
Tropical forests
Urban development
Weather
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Summary:•Tourism often drives global consumption of biodiversity, but is rarely acknowledged.•Thatched architecture is a key feature of the tourism experience of paradise.•Biodiverse species are consumed in commercial thatched architecture globally.•Aesthetics, tourism cycles & upkeep separate subsistence vs commercial thatch huts.•Sustainability discourse justify contrasting biodiversity management strategies. The influence of tourism on biodiversity consumption is massive, yet poorly understood. We investigate the emergence of the thatched hut as an icon of tropical tourism, exploring linkages between widespread conceptions of paradise, tourism architecture and tropical forest management. Drawing on fieldwork in Mexico, cross-disciplinary literature review and web-based research, we globally examined how ideas of paradise along with commodification of plant resources influence touristic use of plant-based construction materials. In contrast with declining subsistence use of forest-based building materials, thatched huts have become a prevalent element of tropical tourism architecture. We documented the use of 148 plant taxa in 31 tropical and subtropical countries on 4 continents. The emergence of thatched architecture in tourist contexts represents not only a scale-up in the demand of plant-based materials, but often resulted in changes in the species utilized, resource management regimes and governance, architectural uses, and often a partial or total substitution for synthetic look-alike materials. We identified four factors distinctive to the growing commercial versus declining subsistence presence of thatched hut architecture: (1) local regulations in forest product uses and building and urban development codes, (2) prevalence of aesthetic values over material authenticity and structural efficacy, (3) greater dependency on unpredictable economic and tourist destination cycles, and (4) greater maintenance needs in environments highly vulnerable to decay and extreme weather. Our pluralistic approach of examining the iconic thatch hut through diverse disciplinary perspectives facilitated identification of multiple facets of commonly overlooked forest product use and biodiversity consumption in tropical tourism.
ISSN:0016-7185
1872-9398
DOI:10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.06.004