The contemporary issues of historiography of ecotourism

The article focuses on the key issues of ecotourism putting the emphasis on the studies of the European, American and Australian scholars that could be explained by a higher level of conceptualization of ecotourism in foreign historiography. The main issues of the article are terminology, social-economic and image aspects of ecotourism. Some national parks of Finland and the Republic of Karelia are presented as an illustration of some of the issues concerned. Analysis of contemporary scientific literature demonstrates disputable and ambiguous character of the term “ecotourism” and various approaches to the interpretation of this topic. The article contains the data about the first appearance and utilization of this term in Russia and abroad; it also expounds some economic models, which allow to estimate ecotourism impact to local economy. The majority of researchers stress insufficient involvement of local communities into the functioning of ecotourism and overestimated expectations of local authorities from this process in spite of growing commercialization of nature protected areas. The important role of ecotourism is to construct nature images, which could become national landscapes and ways of national self-identification, as it occurs in Finland.