You Don’t Need to Choose Between Protecting Nature and the Bottom Line: The Art of Sustainable Tourism

The following is adapted from Waking the Sleeping Giant by Jake Kheel.

After earning a master’s in environmental management from Cornell and working for several years at my great uncle Ted Kheel’s environmental foundation in New York City, I did something a little strange — something most environmentalists wouldn’t do. I took a job working for Grupo Puntacana, a resort in the Dominican Republic.

Almost immediately, I started questioning my decision. I had set out to save Nature and here I was taking a job for a private company. Grupo Puntacana, it turned out, is not just a resort. It’s an expansive group of tourism-related businesses, including hotels, an international airport, golf courses, real estate development, an electricity and water utility, a security company, and even an industrial laundry facility.

This sure didn’t seem like saving the rainforest. But it turned out to be my first taste on the sustainability frontlines and it changed my life and career.

Fifteen years later, I am still working for Grupo Puntacana, and I now can’t imagine a more effective platform for protecting the environment than working for a company.

The Environment vs. Development

My job was to lead the Grupo Puntacana Foundation, a not-for-profit funded by the company that gets its hands dirty confronting messy social and environmental challenges, while functioning like an extension of the business.

My new position posed an intellectual challenge: How to achieve the two equally important, but often adversarial goals of economic growth and environmental protection.

I soon discovered that the private sector could have a profoundly positive impact on society if its power and energy were channeled properly. Companies, I learned, could be induced not only to improve their own practices but also to make valuable, far-reaching contributions to environmental protection. In fact, it didn’t take long to convince me that thoughtful businesspeople are the key to reversing our current planetary crisis.

However, changing the way businesses like Grupo Puntacana operate would require embedding my personal passion for protecting Nature within the reality of the private sector. My single-minded focus on conservation had to be adjusted to a more versatile, flexible goal of achieving this ideal called “sustainable development.”

Rather than sacrificing my values, I would have to figure out how to protect the environment from the inside of a company out. I was forced to consider new ways to protect Nature and the bottom line. Convincing businesses to somehow help protect the environment meant mastering the subtle art of sustainability. I quickly became a disciple.

Stumbling Into Sustainability

Grupo Puntacana discovered sustainability by necessity. Founded fifty years ago by Ted Kheel and Frank Rainieri, a pair of unsuspecting visionaries, the company had evolved from a fledgling hotel made up of a few rustic cabañas in a remote corner of the Dominican Republic into a major tourist destination.

In Grupo Puntacana’s early days in the late 1960s, the term sustainable development hadn’t yet been coined. Instead, the partners used a mix of resourcefulness and ingenuity to confront their most pressing day-to-day problems.

Often the practical solutions they encountered turned out to be cheaper, while simultaneously (and often inadvertently) reducing their environmental footprint. With little income from the fledgling resort, Frank and Ted needed to be creative to keep the operation afloat. They discovered they could save money by taking advantage of local conditions and available materials, consuming less water and energy.

Grupo Puntacana’s environmental practices matured gradually over the years, transforming from a strategy to survive bankruptcy into a legitimate part of the company’s operating philosophy. The environment and the local community were integrated into the company’s decision-making process. As it became a leader in Caribbean tourism, Grupo Puntacana’s sensitivity towards the local people and concern for the environment were a key piece of its winning formula.

The Art of Sustainable Tourism

Tourism, as it turns out, is a significant driver of the global economy and a highly relevant slice of the sustainability conversation. Today, over a billion people travel around the world on a yearly basis.

Travel produces a profound impact on people, places, and local environments, sometimes positive and sometimes not. In tourism, the need to safeguard a destination seems obvious. As Grupo Puntacana discovered, sustainability in tourism can not only save money, but also help earn more money, by protecting the natural and cultural assets that drew visitors to a location in the first place.

I have spent the past fifteen years of my career trying to figure out how to transform the theory of sustainable tourism into reality. If sustainability can make at least one tourism business more successful, perhaps it can create a domino effect of positive impact for other businesses in the Dominican Republic and throughout the Caribbean.

With enough positive examples, just maybe, sustainability can go viral throughout the global tourism industry.

For more advice and examples of how you can protect both Nature and your bottom line, you can find Waking the Sleeping Giant on Amazon.

Jake Kheel is an environmental innovator whose efforts in the Dominican Republic with the Grupo Puntacana Foundation have won numerous awards and made the country’s tourism more competitive and environmentally sustainable. Jake directs the Center for Sustainability, a think tank partnering with renowned universities to conduct environmental research, and helped pioneer one of the Caribbean’s largest coral reef restoration projects. Jake frequently speaks at international conferences, including TEDx Santo Domingo. He’s been widely published, including the Huffington Post, Luxury Hotels magazine, and Harvard’s ReVista. To learn more, visit JakeKheel.com.