PAWTUCKET — How can the tourism industry be environmentally friendly when it promotes destinations reachable only by greenhouse-gas emitting cars and airplanes?

How can an industry that builds beachfront hotels and resorts be environmentally sound?

Those and other questions will be addressed tomorrow when as many as 50 people gather to take part in the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council’s Green Tourism Symposium.

Organizers say the goal is to make the travel and tourism industry aware of the impact it has on the environment and promote practices that prevent harm.

“Can we be a little bit more responsible in the way we meet?” Bob Billington, executive director of the Tourism Council said, offering an example.

“It could be as simple as, there’s 100 people in the room. Do we really need 100 bottles of water?”

“In short, what we want to say is that economic development should not be done at the expense of destroying the landscape,” Lilly Kayamba, the symposium organizer, said.

The symposium is the second green tourism event that the Tourism Council has organized through its Sustainable Tourism Planning and Development Laboratory.

The first, in November, featured such speakers as Jonathan Tourtellot, director of the National Geographic Society Center for Sustainable Destinations, and Kip Bergstrom, director of the Rhode Island Economic Development Council.

The symposium will last a half-day and consist of workshops, rather than long-winded presentations.

It will begin at 8:30 a.m., with opening remarks by Billington and Allison Rogers, Miss Rhode Island 2006, who has used her title to promote policies that combat global warming.

Presenters will include Larry Quick, principal in New Commons, the Providence-based think tank; Meredith Trainor, project coordinator of the National Geographic Society’s Center for Sustainable Destinations; Michelle White, director of environmental affairs for Fairmont Hotels & Resorts; Kristin Lamoureux, director of the International Institute of Tourism Studies at George Washington University; and Rebecca Mebane, director of conferences and meetings of the National Recycling Coalition.

The symposium is being pitched to tourism industry representatives, but everyone is welcome. The cost, $30 per person, includes lunch and materials. Signup can be done online, at SustainableTourismlab.com, or by telephone at (401) 724-2200.

The symposium will take place in the small theater on the first floor of the Blackstone Valley Visitors Center, 175 Main St.; in the second-floor classrooms of Salve Regina University, and at Slater Mill, across Roosevelt Avenue.

Billington, who has campaigned for decades to turn the Blackstone River into a tourist attraction, has a proposal for mitigating the toll that tourism-related travel takes on the environment.

“If you’re doing anything but walking or riding a bike, you’re basically creating an emission,” he said. “If you travel a ways to get here, you might want to offset your emission” by contributing a dollar to an organization, such as Help Us Re-Green the Valley, that will use the money to plant trees.

jcastell@projo.com