UH School of Travel Industry Management Hosts Lecture on

HONOLULU--The University of Hawai'i at Manoa School of Travel Industry Management (TIM) will host its inaugural Ambassador L.W. 'Bill' Lane Jr. Lecture on Sustainable Tourism. The Lane Lecture extends the effort to educate and raise awareness of the Hawaii community on the importance of sustainable tourism and how the concept is being embraced across the globe. The lecture, which is open to the public free of charge, will take place on January 12, 2001 at 3 p.m. at the Architecture School Auditorium located on the Manoa campus.

To kick off the Lane Lecture, Bernard Lane (no relation to Ambassador Lane) will present "Sustainable Tourism--Challenges and Opportunities for Hawaii." His lecture will address the challenges of implementing a more sustainable tourism policy at enterprise and state levels.

Lane is director of the Rural Tourism Unit and a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol in England. He is responsible for a program of courses, seminars, workshops, conferences, consultancy and research work on rural and sustainable tourism development issues. He has been a consultant to the Paris based OECD, the government of Australia, and to development agencies and tourist boards in Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Spain and the USA as well as many communities and local authorities throughout Britain. He has also worked as an advisor and consultant for several private sector travel companies and for the World Travel and Tourism Council on its environmental program, Green Globe.

Specializing in sustainable tourism management, Bernard Lane founded and serves as co-editor of the International Journal of Sustainable Tourism. He has given many seminars to universities, tourism trade bodies, tourist boards, communities and conferences in Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America. He has been intensively involved in developing regional sustainable tourism strategies and in linking heritage conservation to tourism.

Working within the multi-disciplinary Center for the Historic Environment at the University of Bristol, Bernard Lane is closely involved in heritage tourism issues. He has a special interest in the use and misuse of the tourism trail concept and organized Europe's first international working conference on trail development and management in 1998.

In addition to his tourism interest, he is a director of the University of Bristol's post-graduate, post-experience Diploma / Masters Program in Architectural Conservation. Trained as a geographer at the University of Liverpool, he worked at the University of Liverpool, University of Glasgow and University College Dublin before moving to University of Bristol in 1971. He spent a term in Finland in 1978 and took up a German government scholarship in 1984. Over the last 10 years, he has published over 50 papers in Britain, Ireland, America, Germany, Japan, and Korea. Lane is a regular broadcaster and journalist on sustainable tourism, heritage conservation and on rural issues.

Funded by the L.W. "Bill" Lane Jr. and Jean Lane Endowed Fund, the Lane Lecture is coordinated by the Sustainable Tourism and the Environment Program (STEP) at the School of Travel Industry Management. STEP was established through a generous gift of $500,000 from the Bill and Jean Lane for the "Ambassador L.W. 'Bill' Lane Lectureship in Sustainable Tourism and the Environment" in response to the growing recognition of the relationship between tourism development and environmental quality.

The mission of STEP is to promote tourism policy in Hawaii that supports beneficial social, cultural and environmental relationships in the tourism development process and facilitates the use of sustainable practices within the existing tourism industry. STEP is organized to provide research, service and teaching/training/education through STEP-UP, making a connection between the educational experience of students and the research and service needs of Hawaiian communities.

Ambassador Lane has a history of funding tourism initiatives throughout the Pacific. Ambassador Lane donated the Sunset Reference Center, located in George Hall, to the School of Travel Industry Management along with numerous scholarships over the years. Lane, who was U.S. Ambassador to Australia and Nauru from 1985-1989 and Ambassador-at-Large in Japan fro 1975 to 1976, is the retired chair of Lane Publishing Co. of Menlo Park, California, the former publisher of Sunset magazine and books. The Lane family owned the company until its acquisition by Time Warner in 1990.

Ambassador Lane has devoted decades of public service to conservation and to national and international policy. He was the first Chairman of the UNESCO "Conference on the Environment" in San Francisco in 1969, and served by presidential appointment on numerous presidential commissions and advisory boards.

The Lane Lecture is being held in conjunction with the Pacific Asia Travel Association Board of Directors meeting. A discussion session led by former Ambassador L.W. 'Bill' Lane and a panel of tourism professionals will follow the lecture. The TIM School is also hosting a reception in the Sunset Reference Center in George Hall to follow the lecture.

For further information and parking reservation, please contact Jill Lankford, STEP Program Coordinator, at 808-956-3474.