Ecotourism is a relatively new ism that appeals to those who think about our environment constantly — even when they’re vacationing.
I had a sneaking suspicion that this level of concern for the environment is extraordinary, and did a little unscientific research to see if I could back that suspicion up with some evidence.

Here are some quick statistics: 

  • Google lists 5,100,000 results for the search ecotourism, and lists 140,000,000 results for the search tourism.
  • Yahoo lists 10,400,000 results for ecotourism and 243,000,000 for tourism.
  • MSN’s Live Search lists 3,591,720 results for ecotourism, and 108,820,445 for tourism.
  • The ratios for ecotourism results to tourism results on Google, Yahoo and MSN are 1:27, 1:23 and 1:30, respectively.
  • So on average, there are 27 more results for tourism than for ecotourism in the major search engines.
  • According to Pew Research, as of March 2007, 71% of U.S. adults are online.
  • According to the July 1, 2003 U.S. Census, there are 218.8 million adults living in the U.S. - meaning 155.3 million adults are online.

Now, let’s take all those boring stats and make one assumption that Adam Smith’s famous Invisible Hand theory of economics is in control of the internet, and the ratio of pages about ecotourism compared to the number of pages about tourism is equal to the percentage of the population who is interested in ecotourism.

That would mean of our 300 million-strong population, there are only 5.75 million voting adults, or 1.9% of our total population, who really put their green money where their green mouths are, and try to live a life of constant ecologically-friendly actions.

No wonder it’s so hard for us to keep our few remaining pristine environments clean and out of the grubby little hands of industry and legislators.