ROLE OF LEISURE

“The role of leisure in contemporary American society and its potential impact on the near future - 2030”

“The role of leisure in contemporary American society and its potential impact on the near future - 2030”

Introduction

It is my sincere believe that by 2030 tourism will have positive effects in changing different areas through financial investments, development or pollution. One of the decisive factor, and reason of concern is the extremely high level of carbon emission generated by the most common transportation vehicle for tourism, airplane. Another factor can be the lack of involvement and royalties to the local population of an area. It is obvious that tourism has considerable positive effects and contributes to the economic development of the areas with tourism attractions directly or indirectly. The currency contribution, the influence it has on the community's income, the business and employment opportunities it generates are only a few of the aspects that show the place of tourism in the overall economic development of a county, town or village.

Tourism

Tourism can have either have a negative or positive influence in an area and has direct or indirect effects on the economic development of the areas with sightseeing resources. The influence of tourism is the result of the interaction of various phenomena, which are divided into two categories: the former refers to tourists, population and the destination area, whereas the latter refers to tourists and decision processes. In the former category, we can say that, in accordance with the difficulties encountered by the economic, social and environmental subsystems of the destination area, one can consider positive effects those effects that do not exceed the toleration limit of each of the above mentioned subsystems and that, on the other hand, one can consider adverse effects all the effects that exceed this limit.

In the latter category, mention can be made of the fact that the effects generated by tourism vary in accordance with the tourists' decisions regarding the chosen destinations and their personal and behavior qualities. In our opinion, tourism development generates two major types of effects: one type refers to the effects on environment whereas the other refers to the socio-economic and societal effects. Both can have positive or negative effects on the local communities (Allan, 2002).

Tourism and Local Community Development

Many local initiatives have shown that local economic and community initiatives are essential for any national program aiming at economic recovering, which must adapt itself and solve a large variety of local problems and use different opportunities in order to solve them. The regional development efforts were first considered inefficient on terms of economic globalization. However, this does not mean that the local initiatives should not be supported by the state. Thus, regional development should not be considered only the task of the central government or only that of the private companies. As a matter of fact, local communities are the ones that should be involved to a larger extent.

Local development may be described as an attempt of global territorial development including ...