Think traveling responsibly means forgoing creature comforts? Think again. Christian Parenti surveys the latest crop of visionary resorts in the Bahamas, Dominica, and Jamaica and discovers delicious food, attentive service, and true luxury. Welcome to the Caribbean with a conscience.

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From my window seat in the little prop plane bouncing low in the sky over the Bahamas, I gazed down on the clean shallow sea. Beneath it lay fields of soft grasses, wide swaths of delicately washboard-patterned sand, and clusters of coral. The humble sea floor appeared fragile and peaceful, so far from the hubbub of Miami International Airport or the clutter of Nassau. I hoped this serenity would soon leach the stress from my bones.

The largest of the Bahamas' "family islands"—these being the relatively undeveloped, slow-paced outer islands, the places to which so many people in Nassau and Freeport trace their family roots—Andros is really its own tightly clustered archipelago, divided by channels known as bights. After the flight, a friendly van ride down a nearly deserted country road, and then a boat ride, I arrived at the splendid isolation of Tiamo, an elegant eco-resort of eleven screened-in cabins set on a long white beach that hugs the forested shoreline of a wide, shallow bight.

At Tiamo there are no Jet Skis, no pounding bass line from a nearby nightclub, no jabber from a TV set. Across the bight you can only barely make out the contours of a very small settlement. As the sun set, my girlfriend and I sat in two yellow Adirondack chairs, split a bottle of fine DOC Chianti, and soaked our feet in the salt water lapping beneath our chairs. Sunset gave way to night, and the sky filled with stars. We sank deeper into the hush of water and a gentle wind.

I came here not just for sun, sand, and surf but to explore the cutting edge of what some call sustainable tourism and others community tourism. Perhaps it could be named ecotourism 2.0: travel that combines green practice with a commitment to social responsibility. The goal of this new style of development is straightforward enough: to create travel experiences that incorporate concern for the environment and for the economic well-being of the host country. But can it deliver more than cold showers, lumpy beds, and bad granola? I wanted to see if socially responsible travel could be compatible with serious luxury—top-quality food, service, and comfort—as well as interesting experiences. And given its dependence on tourism, the Caribbean seemed a good place to pose the question.

Sustainable tourism is still a relatively nascent business in the Caribbean. In Costa Rica, Mexico, and Ecuador, governments have worked to build uniform standards, training programs, and publicity. Although the Caribbean's economy is increasingly unified, its governance is politically fragmented, with twenty-four independent states and territories. Caribbean governments tend to pay lip service to sustainable tourism while in reality there is little money to support it.

"Too often, the only economic measure they care about is the number of arrivals. It is assumed that the more arrivals an island has, the more economic benefits it accrues," said Deirdre Shurland, the director of the Caribbean Alliance for Sustainable Tourism, a business group formed a decade ago by concerned hoteliers to educate both governments and businesses about sustainable tourism. "We need to develop consistent regionwide benchmarks to measure environmental impact as well as more complex economic measures that calculate how much food is locally sourced, how much water is used, how much waste is recycled. Hotels can't do that all by themselves."