Final answer:
Ecotourism is the term for tourism that emphasizes sustainability, education, and minimal environmental impact, while using locally owned services. It's a conservation movement that requires careful management to maintain ecosystem preservation and avoid harmful practices, ensuring benefits to the local environment and community.
Step-by-step explanation:
The term used to describe a form of tourism that focuses on education, minimizing environmental impacts, and using locally owned services is ecotourism. Ecotourism is designed to be sustainable and help preserve the flora and fauna of endangered natural environments.
The idea is to visit threatened environments, observe wildlife in its natural habitat, and do so in a way that supports conservation efforts, provides local employment, and educates tourists about the importance of biological and cultural diversity. With conscious effort, ecotourism aims to ensure that tourism does not disturb or damage the environment, a practice that is becoming increasingly integrated in the industry, especially in high traffic sites with fragile ecosystems such as the Galapagos Islands.
However, ecotourism requires careful management to avoid the destruction of what the tourists are coming to see and ensure its future viability. It's an international conservation movement with a goal to balance human visitation with ecosystem preservation, but it must be met with rigorous standards to avoid practices that could be considered contradictory to its core values, such as greenwashing or environmentally harmful activities.