State-sponsored Greenwashing?
Recently, we published an article about THE GROVE CRETE. It spans geographical and temporal distances between Fiji in 1983 and Crete in 2022.
In the piece we are tracing the origins of the term "greenwashing", invented by a perceptive backpacker, and apply it to current-day tourism trends, basing it on our own experiences. Is it enough to install solar panels on a roof? Or is this just a modern incarnation of a sign encouraging guests to use their towels more than once?
An excerpt:
The promotion of large-scale projects by government, banks, and investors is surely due to the assumption that large resorts create more jobs and promise higher returns [...]. However, this [...] overlooks the disproportionately greater potential for small establishments to become nodes of local networks of sustainable tourism providers, creating quantitatively competitive and qualitatively better and more fulfilling indirect jobs.
Ours is a passionate call for a "small-is-beautiful"-approach, rather than "bigger is better".
You can read the entire article here on pp. 29 – 32: