Is Tourism Sustainable from Generation to Generation?

Tourism is an important activity that contributes directly to income and employment,

especially for regions with a wide range of natural and cultural attractions. However,

sometimes this contribution causes the economic and socio-cultural effects of tourism

to be ignored (Result, 2020). There are opinions that most of these negative effects are

caused by mass tourism (Akıncı & Kasalak, 2016). It is possible to state that the reason

for this is that mass tourism is seasonal; the demand is high only in certain periods and

the resources are lack.

Today, tourism is experiencing a change due to the changing reasons and

expectations of people for travel. The main source for tourism is no longer the trio of

sea, sand and sun, but rather factors such as nature, culture, history and art. Especially

natural resources and the protection of these resources, tourism's structure that takes

into consideration the natural environment creates a sustainable concept at the end.

When the world is considered as a closed system spaceship, it has to use its resources

sustainably in order to maintain its own system (Sharpley, 2000).However, with the

unconscious and economic use of nature by humans, the balance in nature has

deteriorated and both the environment and living species have been damaged. This

destruction affects not only problems such as global warming, deterioration of

ecological balance, pollution, ozone layer depletion and melting of glaciers, but also

the social and economic systems of people (cited in Pelit et al., 2015). Sustainability,

which emerged with the idea of minimizing the effects caused by these problems, is a

concept that takes not only the present but also the future into account. The importance

of sustainability has emerged as a result of increasing the environmental awareness of

people, governments and societies due to the destruction of the natural environment in

which people live (Hardistry, 2010). Sustainability was associated with the

sustainability of living things on earth in the 1980s, and this concept, which has taken

a place in vital activities, has been used in different meanings such as sustainable cities,

sustainable agriculture, sustainable growth, and sustainable tourism (Alpagut, 2010).

In addition, the concept of sustainable development was defined in the Brundtland

Report published in 1987 as meeting today's needs without jeopardizing the ability of future generations to meet their needs. The report focuses on poverty eradication, equal

use of resources, responsible consumption, and control of population growth and

development of environmentally friendly technologies (Kozak, 2020).