- Business as Usual is unsustainable. Humanity has to figure out a fundamentally different way of coexisting with all life forms on this planet and in harmony with biophysical realities. This will involve dealing with the root causes of the challenges we face and require a transformation of consciousness. This shift is evolutionary in nature and has started but a positive outcome is not yet assured.
- At its core, the transformation requires a re-connection with Nature and alignment with her regenerative purpose: creating the conditions conducive for life to continuously renew itself and flourish.
- Humanity has sufficient knowledge and technology to make the transformation but success will need us to engage all aspects of what it means to be human – our heart, soul, body as well as our several intelligences.
- The travel and hospitality sector can ensure its future prosperity by making a vital contribution to this shift but only if it too reframes its purpose and re-designs the way it is practiced.
- The current model is extractive by nature (exploiting resources of land, water, landscapes, culture and people) without paying the full cost to host communities and society at large.
- The current model of mass tourism is dependent on volume growth. A shift towards ensuring that tourism enables all its stakeholders to flourish over the long-term would ensure greater prosperity and well-being for all.
- To become a vital force for good, tourism must aim to generate net positive benefits to the host communities on whose support and goodwill it depends.
- The shift in consciousness needed will require seeing tourism not as an industrial assembly line but as a living, breathing human ecosystem. Conscious Travel practitioners will see themselves as integral parts of nature not separate.
- A regenerative tourism economy is “place-based” and will be built from the ground up – community by community – led by Conscious Hosts who have woken up, grown up and are prepared to step up and lead by example.
- A regenerative ethos can breathe life, vitality, meaning, joy and fun into what has become a sterile, data driven, standardized, commoditized process and thereby attract and nurture a new generation of change agents.
