Abstract
According to the World Tourism Organization (WTO), world international tourism exports accounted for US$1.5tn in 2014, up 3.7% from the previous year. International tourism is ranked fourth as a worldwide export category, and in many developing nations tourism is the number one source of revenue. Clearly there is a lot at stake in marketing travel destinations, but at the same time, travelers are now more than ever aware of the environmental impact of their travel decisions. Emerging from the massive potential for profits from the travel industry and the substantial push to protect the natural environment, sustainable tourism or eco-tourism aims to keep people exploring with the promise that they are putting the environment first. Ida Ruffolo’s The Perception of Nature in Travel Promotion Texts asks whether the promise of eco-tourism is being upheld or whether it is just another example of ‘greenwashing’: big business appropriating the language of environmentalism to sell products first and protect the environment at a distant second.
Ruffolo uses computer-aided corpus analysis and qualitative methods of discourse analysis to understand how ‘nature’ is constructed in travel promotion texts. She advances claims about the extent that travel promotion texts follow the guidelines for sustainable development set up by the WTO. The author finds that travel promotion texts present an idealized view of nature that is untouched and wild, yet innocuous for travelers. The benefit to travel destinations themselves, Ruffolo finds, is more often characterized as economic than it is environmental.
Ruffolo’s careful attention to her quantitative method, which is presented clearly and executed with rigor, would benefit scholars who wish to learn computer-aided methods of corpus analysis; she details the process of selecting texts for a corpus, the use of concordance and collocation software, and the implementation of a statistical package to test the significance of her results. Ruffolo also makes the important point that hand-coding of the texts was a necessary step in her research, although this qualitative side is not quite as well presented. The richness of discourse analysis as a qualitative method is left largely untapped, and instead, ‘discourse analysis’ generally supports the claim that perceptions of nature are socially constructed through texts. To readers of this journal, such an insight will not be news. However, Ruffolo adopts Thelander’s (2002) categorization of nature (artificial nature, untamed nature, tamed nature, and accessible wild nature) to provide a framework for her qualitative analysis which helps maintain some of the rigor of her quantitative approach. Although these categories of nature were clearly differentiated when introduced, for this reader it became difficult to follow why some excerpts belonged to one category rather than another. Ruffolo provides copious examples for each category, but little commentary that explains why certain examples fit a particular category. More focused analysis of individual examples may have provided a deeper understanding of both Ruffolo’s coding scheme and the significance of her results.
Notwithstanding this criticism, the results make it clear that travel promoters create an image of accessible wild nature to a much higher degree than they do the other categories. Ruffolo reveals that 51% of texts advance this view of nature as against a nearly even distribution of the other categories. From this vantage, nature is characterized as ‘primordial’, but interestingly it is also linguistically constructed as welcoming and innocuous. The author combines this insight with a second coding scheme that investigates the function of ‘nature’ derived from work by Hansen and Machin (2008) distinguishing spiritual, economic, recreational, promotional, and aesthetic functions. Ruffolo demonstrates that the recreational function of nature is found most often in the corpus of travel promotion texts, leading her to claim that ‘it is possible to understand that these vacations are only promoting the activity and not the landscape per se nor its protection and conservation’ (p. 78). This sums up the finding that many readers may have assumed when picking up this text, that travel promotion materials do indeed ‘greenwash’ destinations.
There is a lot to praise about The Perception of Nature in Travel Promotion Texts, including Ruffolo’s clear attention to method, her use of relevant theoretical lenses to good effect, and her well-supported insights about an interesting and important topic. However, in this short volume (113 pages of text), readers will encounter the same theories of nature discourse, discussion of methods, and findings multiple times. This reader also finds an imbalance of findings and discussion. For instance, when presenting her findings related to Hansen and Machin’s functions of nature, Ruffolo includes a separate section for each of the 10 functions, even though some have proven to be insignificant. The author then spends relatively little time discussing the significance of these findings related to the research questions that drive her work. In other words, this reviewer felt that less exhaustive description of findings and more discussion of the importance of the most striking findings that shape perceptions of nature and of eco-tourism would have benefited this book. To those who are especially interested in the specific topic of this title, such detailed presentation of findings may be useful, but the reader who is more generally interested in travel writing, eco-tourism, or the construction of ‘nature’ in discourse may wish for more interpretation on the author’s part. Those who approach this book with an interest in methods of computer-aided corpus analysis will likely be very satisfied, as Ruffolo’s approach is well explicated, replicable, and generalizable to other corpora. Although more could have been made of the results, Ida Ruffolo’s The Perception of Nature in Travel Promotion Texts remains a significant contribution to a topic that has exceedingly wide social impact, yet is relatively understudied from a discourse perspective.