As an environmentalist, I chose to write a critique on research article on ecotourism. I found the perfect article with Oliver Kruger’s article “The role of ecotourism in conservation: panacea or Pandora’s box”. Kruger himself works for the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge. As his explanative yet cliché title suggests, the article explores the pros and cons of bringing in humans to see rare places or animals. As he writes in his introduction “the dilemma of conserving nature while achieving short-term economic gains to satisfy people was faced by many countries, especially those less developed”.
Ecotourism at its cutest
The logic of his research and the paper as a whole is very solid. In the paper you can hear somewhat of warning tone that the ecotourism is not a cure all. The author manages to keep most of his biases out of the paper although the premise of the paper is a loaded question. I think this was because he took a fairly neutral approach to his research. He used every case study written about ecotourism he could find (251 of them) and evaluated the subject of each to see where they took place, what species they were looking for, and how sustainable the trips seemed to be. He then looked to see if there was a correlation between those three things. I thought this was a good method as most of his data was good from the start, and because he used a huge number of them, he was ensured that he would have a statistically diverse set of cases.
The execution of his diagrams had significant problems. His pie chart used several patterns and shades that are nearly impossible to separate with the naked eye. Furthermore on his bar graphs he compares things with different units on the same graph which is takes the reader awhile to decipher.
The format of his paper follows the traditional layout of a standard research article. He opens with an abstract and an introduction and includes sections for methods, results, discussion, acknowledgements and references. His language is very clear and, unusually for a research paper, is very active. I detest scholarly papers that are written so passively that it sounds like they were written by Yoda.
I’m not quite sure what to think of his conclusion. His ending argument is that the best way to protect the environment is to pick a “flagship animal” and to stay away from Africa and Asia. He goes until great length discussing how 63% of the case studies were deemed sustainable, then gives three reasons why no weight should be given to that number. Then why include it all? Yet overall, the paper is important and takes a pretty hard look at the greenwashing that is typically associated with ecotourism.
Full article found here