Coastal Services Center

While the term ecotourism may conjure up images of one or two people enjoying a pristine natural environment, the reality is that wildlife watching has become big business. Coastal resource managers in Virginia have joined forces with conservation organizations, the tourism industry, and state and local resource managers to help build a sustainable ecotourism industry.

According to a report by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Americans spent $29.2 billion in 1996 to observe, feed, and photograph wildlife. If wildlife watching had been a Fortune 500 company it would have ranked 23rd.

"This is an important coastal management issue," says Laura McKay, manager of the Coastal Program at the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. "Here we are putting forth the effort to restore endangered species, and some of the tour operators out there may not know that they ought to slow down their boats when there are whales around, or that you shouldn't throw fish overboard to get dolphins to come over. The best way to deal with these issues is to try to educate the operators so they know what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior in natural areas."

Since the Virginia Coastal Program was promoting ecotourism as part of its special area management plan for Northampton County, a significant migratory bird stopover area, McKay says her agency wanted to ensure the ecotourism industry in Virginia would be a sustainable one. To work toward this goal, they helped form the Virginia EcoTourism Association (VETA), which is dedicated to "protecting the state's natural resources; developing, promoting, and marketing a professional ecotourism industry; and promoting safe, quality experiences for ecotravelers."

Bob Callahan, current president of VETA, says the diversity of the association's members is its strength. "What makes VETA really neat is the combination of coastal resource managers, scientists, researchers, people working in the industry - it really crosses boundaries and provides tremendous resources."

McKay says she saw the need for an organization like VETA when she saw a photograph in the Washington Post of a Virginia tour operator "holding back marsh grasses exposing Willet's eggs. We saw we needed to educate people working in this industry."

The first step was to provide a grant to a biologist to create a pilot ecotourism guide training curriculum for the Eastern Shore. The curriculum explains the area's "natural history, and provides scientifically based guidelines for observing wildlife, particularly birds and marine mammals," McKay explains. "It was a synopsis of what ecotourism is, the pitfalls of ecotourism done poorly, and the benefits of ecotourism done well."

To introduce the idea of starting a volunteer guide certification program, McKay and her staff held a meeting and invited all the ecotourism industry representatives they could identify. "We saw that it would be mutually beneficial," she says. "If you are going to stay in business you have to protect your capital. For them, natural resources are the capital."

During the meeting, McKay encouraged the group to form a trade association so that the industry would have representation. "They were really quite positive," McKay says. "They came back saying they wanted to form an association, but wanted a comprehensive group that included not just tour operators, but representatives from the government, the scientific community, and conservationists."

She adds, "It was unexpected. The wonderful thing about that is we were grappling with who could do the certification, and now we have this association that has researchers and scientists who can create a curriculum, and a certification board could now be drawn from within the association because it represents all the players."

VETA was formed as a statewide organization in March 1998. Members have spent the past year and a half attaining nonprofit status, creating a mission, and defining goals. The association divided the state into nine ecological regions, and is working to have a guide certification program for each of the regions, McKay says.

Bob Callahan says creating a certification program is one of VETA's primary goals, but it's proving to be a "bigger challenge" than first anticipated. "We're building our strength and momentum to establish a certification program," he says. "Currently we're gathering information to move forward on it, and looking for funding avenues."

Callahan, who is an adventure-based therapist and adventure tour operator, notes that "as a new organization, our big focus has been getting the information out about VETA and helping people be good ecotourists." To accomplish this, the organization has become a partner in developing an annual ecotourism conference, has started a speaker's bureau, and is incorporating workshops and educational opportunities into VETA meetings. The group's opinions on issues such as jet skis and commercial developments also are being solicited by outside associations and organizations.

Callahan says VETA's most important accomplishment has been improved communication between the different ecotourism interests. "I think we enhance each other. It's exciting to sit at a table with all the different people to work on something like a plan for an adventure ecotour. We listen to each other. There are things I wasn't aware of about the environment, and there are things about the adventure world that managers didn't know. The big common bond is that we love what we do."

For more information on VETA, point your browser to http://www.veta.net, or e-mail Bob Callahan at adventure4@erols.com. You may also contact Laura McKay at (804) 698-4323, or e-mail her at lbmckay@deq.state.va.us.