IN WELL under ten years the cruise industry has undergone a major shake-up. Since 1999, when Royal Caribbean Cruises was fined a record £12 million for dumping hazardous wastes and making false statements, cruise ships are now very aware that they can be bigger than a small town.

Their waste products, the number of passengers they carry and even their painted hulls can pose a major threat to the delicate environment of the seas in which they sail.

Nowhere is this truer than in the world’s most fragile and endangered areas. Take just three - Alaska, the Antarctic and the Galapagos Islands.

In Alaska Creative Cruising boasts that its ships, carrying just 78 to 120 passengers, “can get so close to glaciers, icebergs, wildlife and craggy shorelines that guests feel they can almost touch them”. With so few passengers the little villages and towns visited are not “overwhelmed”.

Now pressure is on to increase the number of people who visit these pristine sites - and often for good reason.

Nothing equals the opportunity of seeing the animals and the delicate flora that together make these areas so precious. So, the proponents of cruising maintain, it is education that makes such cruises worthwhile, even if the average age of British cruise passengers has gone up in the past decade from 52 years on average in 1997 to 54 last year. Without this interest the local people would be able to target the wildlife free of government or tourist influence.

Look what happened with the Galapagos Islands. When the backs of conservationists and cruise operators were turned, millions of sea cucumbers and lobsters were harvested, the marine reserve was entered illegally in search of rich catches such as shark fins and rangers found the shells of eight endangered and protected giant tortoises, believed to have been killed by poachers. This would not have happened if the cruise lines or the Government of Ecuador, which owns the islands, had had their way.

Bill Gibbons, the director of the Passenger Shipping Association, which speaks for 34 cruise lines, recently returned from a cruise around Alaska. “I think any of my members would go to an endangered area provided we would be welcome and the environment could accept it,” he says.

“In Alaska, for example, we went to Glacier Bay and were the first ship allowed in when others had been banned because seals had been seen on the ice floes. All cruise companies are very aware that they can go only to areas to which they are allowed and welcomed. Everything, from smoke emissions to waste, is now strictly controlled. We saw black bears fishing for salmon. How else would we have seen that? Everyone on board went back vowing to protect black bears.”

Yet Paul Brown, the environmental writer, whose books helped to change the way we think about global warming, is worried. He says: “I travelled to Antarctica and was struck by how few things disappear. Cigarette ends and even people’s footprints stay almost for ever because it is so far below freezing. The pressure from cruise lines to go to these areas and to push the boundaries is inevitable. It is cutthroat.”

With a typical seven-day cruise producing the equivalent of 50 tonnes of garbage, 200,000 gallons of sewage and - in a single port visit - generating the equivalent emissions of 12,240 vehicles, it is little wonder that concern is widespread.

Nor is it any wonder that fragile parts of the world are concerned about the increase in their populations. The Galapagos have seen their permanent population more than double in the past decade to cater for the number of tourists, who have gone from 20,000 to 100,000 a year.

Economic development there is now growing at an unprecedented rate and there is a huge rise in demand for fuel, goods, water and public services. These, in turn, must be supplied and serviced by more people, many bringing their own animals with them. In 1990 introduced species on the islands numbered 112. Today there are more than 1,300.

“The Galapagos are at a critical turning point,” says David Blanton, executive director of the International Galapagos Tour Operators Association. “Decisions taken now will determine whether its fragile terrestrial and marine ecosystems survive human impact.”

No wonder that Unesco recently put the islands on its list of World Heritage Sites in danger.

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