By ANNE BESTON
New Zealanders are being "green-washed" into believing tourist industry slogans while the real environmental questions go unanswered, says an Auckland University sociologist.
Dr Claudia Bell says New Zealand's "clean, green" branding is designed for the international tourist market, but most New Zealanders are probably also happy with it.
But
the image-making ignores the reality of Treaty of Waitangi land claims and the issue of genetic modification in the environment and agriculture.
"Mass tourism produces profits but incurs environmental costs which degrade the quality of the product," she said.
"The clean, green myth is appealing, innocent and apparently apolitical. We have been told it often enough to believe it - it has become a formula that succinctly offers a summary of ourselves."
Dr Bell, author of Inventing New Zealand: Everyday Myths of Pakeha Identity(1995), this week delivered the first of Auckland University's Winter Lectures. The theme this year is "Sustaining New Zealand".
She said New Zealand risked "killing the goose that lays the golden egg" by promoting nature as its prime attraction but not doing the "enormous work" required to protect fragile ecosystems and limit tourism to areas where it did not cause long-term damage.
If New Zealanders matched slogans with practice, if clean and green "were less of a mythology" and more a way of life, that would really put New Zealand on the map as a tourist destination.
The marketing of New Zealand as a remote and unspoiled wilderness has been going on since 1901 when this country was the first in the world to set up a Department of Tourism, said Dr Bell.
In the year to June, 1.9 million came here, contributing $3 billion in foreign exchange earnings to the economy.
* The Winter Lectures series runs until August 27 and admission is free. For more information phone (09) 373-7599 ext 5885.
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