This book gives voice to a group of leisure scholars who are engaged in conversations about sustainability. Beginning with discussions on the relationship between leisure and sustainability and how these concepts are addressed in current literature, a case is made for continued investigation of how leisure and sustainability need to be better understood; and viewed as integrally linked. The book discusses issues related to environmental sustainability; how, at the local level, leisure is considered as a solution to a range of social, environmental, and economic issues; and the value of leisure as an asset for addressing several social sustainability challenges. This book was originally published as a special issue of Leisure/Loisir: Journal of the Canadian Association for Leisure Studies.

Providing a wide range of case studies in sustainable tourism planning, this authoritative work presents cases at both international and national levels as well as on a regional, sub-regional, urban, local and site scale. Drawing on the author's world-wide experience and with contributions from professionals in the field, this book takes a comparative approach relating to different economic, political and temporal dimensions, examining established initiatives both in the context of the standards of the time and from a modern perspective looking back. With an emphasis on sustainability, this un.

This book reviews empirical and theoretical research on sustainable development in the context of leisure management for communities. Although leading research centers are pursuing interdisciplinary research on leisure in the context of sustainable development, there are still few papers that holistically address the current challenges in this area. In addition, demographic changes have made the promotion of a healthy lifestyle essential. Doing so requires responsible behavior on the part of various stakeholders in this market. This book fills an important gap in the literature and gathers contributions from an interdisciplinary and international team of authors, whose fields of expertise include human geography, management, intersections of sustainability and leisure, behavioral psychology and tourism.

Leisure activities undertaken in nature are immensely popular. This book examines the new serious leisure concept of nature challenge activity (NCA), exploring how NCA unfolds in an aesthetically appealing natural environment with implications for consumption and environmental sustainability.

Sustainability and green topics have become a crucial element in modern economy. All sectors of the economy are concerned, also the tourism industry. This book takes an overview on developments of sustainability in tourism from a multidisciplinary view point: economy, marketing, social science, media studies, political studies. In order to under-stand the long term changes in the field it is important to include different scientific approaches.

Introduction to Recreation Services: Sustainability for a Changing World explores the meanings of leisure for people and the importance of recreation services in society. The focus is on all sectors of the recreation services field, including public, nonprofit, and private business entities. The emphasis is on introducing students to career opportunities in recreation services and the benefits as well as challenges facing recreation professionals in a changing world. The philosophy that is presented in this book is that social, economic, and environmental sustainability concerns should underlie all recreation services. Many perspectives could be taken to provide an introduction to recreation services, but this book targets recreation services embodied in specialties such as parks and recreation, sports, tourism, event management, outdoor leadership and management, and therapeutic recreation.

Sustainable mobility has become the new imperative for transport policy. There have been a number of policy attempts at sustainable mobility globally, such as the development of more efficient conventional transport technologies, the promotion of efficient and affordable public transport systems and the encouragement of environmental awareness. Such policies have so often been presented as prerequisites for sustainable mobility that they are now taken for granted. But are any of these policies really successful? To what extent do they actually contribute (or fail to contribute) to sustainable mobility? Why do some policies succeed and others fail? Using an interdisciplinary approach which brings together various theories and methodologies, this book tests each of these policies - or hypotheses, as the author sees them - with detailed empirical investigations. It also argues that leisure-time travel should be included in any sustainable mobility policies, as it now accounts for 50 per cent of all annual travel distance in developed countries. The book concludes by suggesting fourteen theses of sustainable mobility for the EU and a new model for future best practice.

Contemporary discourse on sustainability points to the need for substantial, if not radical, shifts in relations between productivity, environment, consumption and identities, in ways which bring or restore balance to the intersecting domains. The catchphrase of ‘sustainability’ has made its way into mainstream discourse on the heels of the ongoing global financial crisis and responses to global warming. The literature of leisure, sport and particularly tourism are replete with fine examples of ‘sustainability’, contributing to full ecology planning approaches. This book aims to stimulate debate and discussion within the leisure studies community about the roles of ‘alternative cultures’ in producing viable models of sustainable relations between work, leisure and environment. Key elements of these discussions, such as participatory democracy and deep ecology, have long been characteristic of cultural configurations loosely called ‘counter’ or ‘alternative’ to a voracious, hierarchical and unconscious modernity. However the leisure studies community has largely neglected their significance up until now. How are leisure, sustainable livelihoods and ‘alternative’ cultures connected, and what influence do they have? This book was originally published as a special issue of Annals of Leisure Research.

Sustainable tourism is a widely used term that has accumulated considerable attention from researchers and policy makers over the past two decades. However, there is still an apparently wide gap between theory and practice in the area. Recent scholarly research has tended to focus on niche areas of alternative tourism rather than address the broader issues and vagaries and paradoxes that appear to plague the broader notion of sustainable tourism. As such, there is a need for a new and pragmatic analysis of sustainable tourism as an overarching idea and how this manifests in practice. The Practice of Sustainable Tourism fulfils this need by offering a fresh perspective on sustainable tourism as an umbrella concept with inherent tensions. It presents a way of thinking about tourism based on the notion of finding common ground using the dialectic tradition of philosophy. Dialectics focusses on resolving opposing viewpoints by recognising they have common elements that can be combined into a rational and practical solution over time. As part of this approach, the book examines the strongly apparent tensions within alternative tourism as well as the paradox of continuing growth and other mass tourism related issues. It is divided into three parts, Part I includes chapters discussing the general concept of sustainable tourism, its history, current status and possible futures; Part II includes a range of destination case studies exploring how sustainable tourism has been applied and Part III includes perspectives from the tourism operator view. Given the international content and challenging themes, the book will be appealing internationally to students, researchers and academics in the fields of tourism, geography, sustainability and social science.