Academic Literacies through Sustainability

Sustainable tourism’s main purpose is to create a balance between the maintenance of cultural integrity, protection of the environment and establishing social justice while promoting economic benefits. These encompass the three pillars of sustainability that include economic, socio-cultural and environmental.   Various key sustainability issues need to be considered in each of these pillars to be able to achieve sustainable tourism. In the economic pillar, the tourism operators ought to hire and source locally to ensure that income earned benefits the local community by improving their living standards. In the environmental pillar, the natural and man-made environment should be conserved. This includes water sources, forests, monuments, natural landmarks among others. People should not litter to maintain the beauty of places they visit and utilize environmental conservation strategies like considering walking and not disturbing flora and fauna. In the socio-cultural pillar, the aim is to promote the positive socio-cultural impacts of tourism while reducing the negative impacts. Here, the positive factors include the exchange of cultural values where sustainability enhances protection of the cultural heritage of a particular people and preserving local traditions. An argument can be placed that the economic pillar should be prioritized as tourism mostly brings about economic growth. However, for there to be sustainable tourism, all pillars must be balanced and prioritized equally. This is so because if there were a prolonged recession, the environmental pillar would be affected substantially leading to its destruction as everyone would concentrate on high consumption now and forget to save the environment. On the other hand, if a war could break out the environment would be destroyed too.   For sustainable tourism to be achieved, all pillars must be prioritized and balanced.