The term ecotourism has many meanings. It can refer to a genuine attempt at environmentally sustainable tourism or be used in a cynical way to try and attract greater numbers of visitors to an area. There is a need to place environmentally benign and environmentally detrimental aspects of ecotourism into a typological framework. This paper uses fundamental principles from the environmentalism and sustainable development debate to present a classification in which deep ecotourism can be differentiated from shallow ecotourism. This approach allows a clear distinction to be made between positive and negative aspects of ecotourism.