Can Ecotourism in the Global South Develop the North?

Ecotourism is often framed as a development tool in the traditional sense of bringing capital to developing countries in exchange for an exported good. Unlike most commodities however, tourism does not merely bring capital to the South, it brings people. While recognizing that the presence of Northern bodies has often been seen as a concrete example of power inequity between the North and South, in this paper I argue that the embodied nature of this exchange allows for the potential of a type of development that moves from South to North through the generation of what is termed biotic capital. Biotic capital refers to the size and coherence of 1) an environmental imaginary, 2) the individuals within that imaginary and 3) the biophysical. Biotic capital that promotes sustainability is created through the reinforcement of already existing environmental orientations as well as recruitment of tourists by messages perceived as apolitical.