Development
The warmth of the waters at Cabo San Lucas, the beauty of its beaches, the abundance of sport fish, and nearby surfing motivated a great number of both foreign and Mexican vacationers to spend their vacations in large-scale tourist developments there, starting in 1974 when the Mexican government created the infrastructure to turn Cabo San Lucas into a major center for tourism in Mexico. Upon completion of the Transpeninsular Highway, tourist developments in Los Cabos often proceeded relatively unchecked. However, the rapid loss of vast stretches of desert and marine habitat has made the development of Cabo San Lucas controversial.
Until fairly recently, Mexico's unique and fragile environmental treasures were on their own and subjected to the predation of developers acting in concert with government agencies interested only in low-end tourist bonanzas. There is, however, a growing collection of activists and attorneys now involved in preserving many of Baja's desert habitats, marine mammals, and pristine stretches of coastline. A number of agencies including The Gulf of California Conservation Fund and The Center for Environmental Law in La Paz are challenging the despoliation of wetlands and other ecosystems from Los Cabos to Ensenada. In the face of a growing international public demand for corporate-driven ecological stewardship, higher-end resorts in the Los Cabos area are increasingly sensitive to their environmental impact and are taking initial steps to institute sustainable practices like reducing water usage and non-recyclable trash output.
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Famous quotes containing the word development:
“Other nations have tried to check ... the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”
—John Louis O’Sullivan (1813–1895)
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp.... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)