Tourism often brings large promises to small places. It can bring money to forests, beaches, villages, parks, and old towns. It can make a family guesthouse viable or give a young person a reason to stay. It can help persuade a government that a forest has value standing. It can also strain the places it sells. Roads arrive before rules. Hotels take the best land. Water and waste are handled after the money has begun to flow. Wildlife, wages, and culture are folded into the business later, if they are dealt with at all. The traveler leaves with photographs. The community keeps the consequences. Ronald Sanabria spent much of his career in the gap between promise and practice. He did not treat sustainable tourism as a slogan or a marketing category. He treated it as a chain of work that had to reach businesses, buyers, governments, and communities. Tourism, he knew, was too fragmented for simple answers. The same trip might involve a hotel, a guide, a tour operator, a booking platform, a transport company, and a village association. If sustainability was to mean anything, it had to pass through those relationships. Sanabria, who died on July 1st, aged 57, was a Costa Rican engineer who became one of the most influential figures in sustainable tourism in Latin America and beyond. He joined the Rainforest Alliance in 1998, first in sustainable agriculture. Two years later, he began building its sustainable-tourism program. Over the next two decades, he worked with hotels,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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