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During the twentieth century, and especially since 1950, the dominant western environmental paradigm experienced a crisis similar to what the Catholic Church underwent in the sixteenth century, with man}' anomalies and contradictions being identified that challenged its fundamental assumptions about science, progress and nature. Ironically, many if not most of these inconsistencies were revealed by science itself. For example, the field of physics demonstrated the apparently random and chaotic behaviour of subatomic particles, and revealed that that the very act of observation can change the nature of these particles (Faulkner & Russell 1997). Clearly, such findings call into doubt the universal credibility of the objective, mechanistic, deterministic world view proffered by the dominant western environmental paradigm.
At the same time, research in the fields of biology, geography and ecology shows that present levels of economic development and growth, deriving from notions of progress and dominance over nature, may be inconsistent with the world's environmental carrying capacity. Processes that support this contention include:
• the "greenhouse effect'
• ozone depletion
• the increased incidence of dangerous viral and bacterial mutations
• rampant desertification.
Some supporters of the dominant western environmental paradigm argue that technology will solve each of these problems, but critics point out that many of the problems are themselves based on modern technologies (such as nuclear power and genetic manipulation) that claim to address the problems. Critics also suggest that the damage to the environment may soon progress to a point of irreversibility, if this has not been attained ahead}'. Moreover, some of the proposed solutions may themselves drastically affect the quality of human life in a negative way — for example, some biotechnologists suggest that human waste can be converted into food through the use of genetically manipulated bacteria. In the field of economics there is also a growing chorus of criticism against the concept of unlimited economic growth and its assumption that technology's capacity to create new wealth is unlimited.
The dominant western environmental paradigm and tourism
Tourism studies have also been affected by these developments. The criticisms of contemporary mass tourism raised in chapters 8 and 9, and the cautionary platform that articulated these criticisms, are reactions against a prevalent pattern of tourism development that is seen to be a direct outcome of the dominant western environmental paradigm. As argued in the Butler sequence (section 10.2), this critique holds that the emphasis on unlimited growth produces tourist destinations that eventually self-destruct as they become overcrowded, polluted and crime-ridden, and hence increasingly less desirable to the tourists themselves.
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