Maximizing the Eco Tourism Potentials of the Wetland Regions through Sustainable Environmental Consumption: A Case of the Niger Delta, Nigeria

At the turn of the millennium, the management and preservation of human, animal and plant species forms a major strand of the sustainable development agenda, defined as development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of the future generation from meeting their own needs. However, one major contention which requires scholarly attention and policy discourse is the sustainable maximization of the tourism potentials of the wetlands in the periphery coastal regions such as the Niger Delta in Nigeria, the third largest wetland in the world. The paper engages in the policy relevance of eco -tourism from a Marxian political ecology perspective. Using sets of primary and secondary data sources, it examined two Islands in the Niger Delta namely; Opobo and Bonny to demonstrate incidence of under- utilization or otherwise of the tourist potentials of the islands. Findings suggest that ecotourism has not been given adequate policy attention as the Niger Delta wetlands which ought to have been tourist destinations are unsustainably consumed with deleterious crude oil resource exploration by the Multinational Oil Companies (MNOCs). The paper argues that tourism should be prioritized as a central concept in resource sustainability and proposes policy discourse aimed at ecological justice as integral to eco- tourism.