I've just put the Lord Of Snot to bed, so my thoughts are a bit jumbled, but.. IMHO the term "eco-travel" is somewhat misguided. I've spent most of my adult life going walkabout
alone not to
see but to actually
meet new and different people and cultures. If you have that in mind, and you actually want to learn from them, then I guess it won't actually matter to their culture. However, a prime example of eco-travel gone haywire is Tibet, a place where every hippy reject started going after The Beatles made it fashionable. Every year a million+ chumps travel up the mountainside to trip on exotic drugs and fermented yak milk while some bald git serves up watered-out philosophy and nuggets like "The Crane flies in the moonlight, while duckballs sponge impossible!" Please donate at the door. Yank and German tourists spend fortunes travelling up north here to see "real native Same/Lapp culture" and are treated to snowscooter safaris and dinners of sauteed reindeer. With garlic and French wine.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you want
real eco-travel, you have to be prepared for hardships and a lack of luxuries that you don't want to impose on the local population. You can't go visit the One-Legged Swrofitzkapicnic Tribe in central Borneo and complain that you can't get Coca Cola or toilet paper, which it seems a lot of these supposed eco-travelers are doing. People are going to places completely unsuitable for general tourism just to come back and post on the web "Ohmygawds, they had no television and take-away! How can they survive?"
And the next time they get there you have cable TV and a McDonalds. One has to remember that enterprising entrepreneurs and big biz people are always scouting for new places to establish themselves, and if you've found your untouched haven away from everything, you shouldn't go out shouting about it!