Word: parkes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...programs are complete without an ecotourism element. Two years ago, Brazil unveiled a $200 million program to develop ecotourism in the Amazon region. A project to build a visitors center, upgrade trails and construct canopy walkways has saved Ghana's Kakum rain forest from logging and other depredations. The park now employs 2,000 local people and attracts 40,000 tourists a year. Receipts from about 1,600 visitors each day are keeping afloat the Xcaret ecopark in Yucatan, Mexico--and also funding the 50 scientists who work there. Off Zanzibar, the island of Chumbe is preserving its local coral...
Deep in the Peruvian jungle in Manu National Park, an area half the size of Switzerland and reputedly home to more species of animals and plants than any other region of the world, the Matsiguenka tribe is gambling with its future. After centuries of dependence on hunting, gathering and small-scale farming, the isolated native community of 300 people has entered the tourist business. Last year the tribe opened a $120,000 ecolodge, built from rain-forest materials in traditional bamboo-stick and thatched-roof style. The lodge sleeps 24 people in four huts equipped with some amenities like bathrooms...
...become "a nightmare," says Simeon Kanani of Nairobi's Technical and Study Tours. In the mid-1990s the local county council earned $1 million a month for schools and hospitals from gate receipts, but at a price. "If you have 20 to 30 four-wheel drives in the park, is that ecotourism?" asks Kanani...
Another sign of change is found in many of South Africa's national game parks, in which travelers can take a walk in the wild under the supervision of trained game rangers. Near Vendaland, in the northern part of Kruger National Park, which marks its centennial this year, Chief Joao Makuleke and his tribe have reclaimed ancestral land on which they will be allowed to operate tourist lodges in cooperation with the private sector and the park's board. In a similar land-restitution deal in the northwestern Cape's Kalahari Gemsbok Park, descendants of the San, or bushmen, will...
Happily, some of them are getting help. Three years ago, when the U.S. National Park Service was ready to tear down an aging ice-hockey rink in a lower-income section of southeastern Washington, D.C., some parents from more affluent communities banded together and raised enough private and corporate dollars to save it. Today Fort Dupont Ice Arena provides free skating instruction to some 2,500 local kids, with its $500,000 annual budget funded through admission fees, fund raisers and sale of ice time for practicing hockey teams from private schools and local colleges. Says rink general manager Fred...