This paper highlights some of the conflicts and synergies between human and animal concerns that attend contemporary tourism practices in Sri Lanka. It asks how future tourism sustainability is to be theorised on the island, given the industry’s neocolonial dimensions and its implication in the multiple crises affecting Sri Lanka, including war, poverty, child sex tourism, and environmental catastrophe. By focusing on how these questions are foregrounded in Chandani Lokugé’s portrayal of an impoverished Sri Lankan beach community in her novel Turtle Nest (2003), it addresses what literary works might contribute to debates about tourism ethics and sustainability (both social and environmental).
The paper explores how the metaphorical conjunction Lokugé constructs between human and animal abuse in relation to tourism (involving the sexual exploitation of children on one hand, and the commoditisation of turtles on the other) exposes key tensions regarding the possible emergence of less destructive forms of interaction and exchange in this environment. The novel dramatises the possibility for future sustainability strategies, related to the experiences of characters whose environmental sensitivities are shaped partly by their negotiations of the sex tourism industry. The resulting imperatives do not preclude tourism (in less exploitative forms), but highlight how a reconstitution of perspectives on human and animal rights at both local and governmental levels is necessary to enable greater ecological sustainability. This in turn has the potential to contribute to how multiple disasters are worked through in Sri Lanka.