Robert Leaver, of New Commons, summarizes a discussion on civic tourism at the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council in Pawtucket yesterday with local tourism officials.

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

Consider two extremes of tourism: In Tombstone, Ariz., 1,100 residents host some 600,000 visitors a year who stay an average of two hours and spend just $8 each.

In the Republic of Ireland, the government maintains the rural landscape as well as a strong sense of community and history while its economy soars and it attracts millions of tourists each year.

In the first case, businesses overwhelm a community and extract every dollar they can — money that largely goes elsewhere. In the second, an entire country makes use of tourism revenues to support its historic communities, farms and landscapes.

Those two extremes were offered yesterday by tourism expert Dan Shilling as he explained to some 50 local planners and tourism officials why his concept of “civic tourism” is preferable to the industrial-age tourism that has long prevailed around the world.

“Civic tourism preserves and enhances a community rather than uses a community,” said Shilling, the keynote speaker at a conference on sustainable tourism hosted at the Blackstone Valley Visitor Center by the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council.

The council’s director, Robert D. Billington, said his challenge has been to attract visitors to a part of Rhode Island that doesn’t have beautiful beaches or great mansions. It is a place, he said, that as the heart of the Industrial Revolution, probably created the first grossly polluted river in the hemisphere.

Billington said his council is constantly questioning whether it is promoting the Blackstone Valley properly. He has been in the tourism business for 25 years, he said, and he is constantly looking for new ideas.

The state, he pointed out, committed to the related concept of geo-tourism last year. Rhode Island joined Arizona, Guatemala, Honduras and Norway by signing a Geotourism Charter with the National Geographic Society that committed the state to preserve and protect its unique assets such as Narragansett Bay and the colonial architecture in Newport and Providence.

Billington said he attended a conference organized by Shilling in Arizona two years ago, and said attendees found it so interesting they didn’t want to leave when it was over. Shilling said he has been on the road nearly constantly ever since, discussing and promoting the concepts of civic tourism.

Shilling and Billington also are organizing an international conference on civic tourism that will be held during three days in October in Rhode Island.

Shilling, who just published a book on civic tourism, said people need to appreciate that tourism is a huge part of the economy, that it is growing and that it is becoming more democratized.

Consider these changes in the last 50 years:

•Some 25 million international arrivals to the United States took place in 1950; in 2005, the number soared to 750 million.

•The number of museums in the United States grew from 2,400 in 1950 to 17,500 in 2005.

•Tourism is now the first-, second- or third-largest industry in every state in the United States. (In Rhode Island, it is second in terms of spending and fourth in terms of jobs, according to the state’s tourism council.) It is the largest industry in the world.

•While many of the parents of baby boomers never left the country, many boomers have. They have more money than any generation in history, and they want to spend it on experiences, not things. They want to travel to unique, authentic places.

The key to successful tourism, Shilling said, is that communities should benefit more than visitors or distant corporations. To make that happen, he said, takes a lot of hard work.

Communities should work to attract tourists willing to stay overnight, learn about the local culture and buy local crafts, rather than T-shirts and plastic tomahawks.

And that doesn’t mean being discriminatory, Shilling said.

It is a goal that is analogous to the business plans of public television and radio. Much of their operating funds come from appeals to the affluent, but the high-end news and music they produce is available to everyone, free of charge.

Civic tourism doesn’t mean excluding Wal-Marts and T-shirt shops, Shilling said. It means not relying solely on those businesses to support a community’s economy.

One success story Shilling cited was an organization that supports local craftspeople and their communities in North Carolina through tourism, marketing and other efforts. Its Web site is www.handmadeinamerica.org.

Another is the Hands of Harvest trails that guide visitors to crafts, food and cultural locations in Montana. Its Web site is: www.handsofharvest.org.

Another is the Phantom Ranch, the historic resort built with local materials at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. If tourism is just money, you’d put fast food restaurants in every park, Shilling said. If it is a means to help preserve a community, you allow only commercial efforts that fit their locations.

“I encourage communities to think of themselves as a national park or an Indian reservation — a sacred place,” Shilling said. “You have a right to set the terms of development.”

He also suggested that rather than following the traditional practice of evaluating only the economic bottom line, tourism ventures should be evaluated with a “triple bottom line” that also looks at the social and environmental results.

Whaling was a classic industry that only looked at monetary rewards, Shilling said, until the whales were gone.

He also rejected the notion that communities must chose between the environment and the economy.

Three states that rank near the top on environmental investments also rank near the top economically. They are Vermont, New Hampshire and Hawaii.

Three other states rank near the bottom in both categories. They are Mississippi, West Virginia and Louisiana.

“Tourism is not going to go away,” said Shilling, “So work with it.”

Too often, he said, tourism promotion is managed by the local chamber of commerce, which doesn’t necessarily have the community’s best interests in mind.

More people should be involved, he said. Museums should have politicians on their boards and museum people, natural resources managers and historians in the community should be involved with tourism.

Limited tourism funds should be spent on “product development,” not just advertising and public relations, Shilling said.

Everyone should get involved in transportation planning, he said, because many communities look the way they do because of transportation issues.

David C. DePetrillo, Rhode Island’s director of tourism, took part in yesterday’s conference, and said Shilling’s message was in line with the approach the state has followed during the last 24 years — to market cultural and natural resources and not try to turn the state into a theme park.

But he also agreed it is an approach that more people need to be aware of and work at.

“People need to be committed and they need to tell their story,” DePetrillo said. “We don’t have to re-create nature or history, but we have to preserve it.”

For more information about Shilling’s civic tourism work and copies of his book, Civic Tourism: the Poetry and Politics of Place, go to: www.civictourism.org. For more information on the Blackstone Valley sustainable tourism efforts, go to: www.sustainabletourismlab.com.

plord@projo.com