Green travel ideas from two environmentally conscious travelers

I am somewhat new to the world of green travel, unlike the founders of this blog.  Today, I decided find a few other resources to educate myself and maybe help others find out more about green travel.  These are direct from Google, of course, page 1.  I know I will find more as I look and become more informed about the travel world.  If you have a favorite blog or resource for truly green travel information, please let me know.

Casa Poniente, El Remanso Wildlife Lodge, Costa Rica: Photograph: Daniel Beltra

1.  A resource for green travel lodges from other green travel bloggers
I think I want to stay at every single one of the lodges listed here. Oh…to travel all the time. I could go green, volunteer, and just hang out in all these wonderful places.

2.  The Greening of Hotels or is it just marketing…
As a marketer and a member of the travel industry, I hope the effots of hotels are real and not just “spin.”

3. Travel and your carbon footprint (plus a site that give green and volunteer travel tips)–
Discusses the concept of travel and the carbon footprint it cause.

4.  Offsetting your travel carbon footprint by what you do at home
This suggests you can travel, be green and then lessen your carbon footprint from your own back yard.

5.  Green Travel Carnival–if you want to meet other people who care about green travel, this will do it. Of course, you can participate too, if you wish. I love carnivals for connecting to like-minded individuals.

As we have discussed before, green travel allows the eco-conscious to reduce their impact on the place they’re visiting – usually by patronizing environmentally friendly hotels or purchasing carbon-offset vouchers for flights or lodging. (Vacation is considered a time to splurge, but the A/C, jet fuel, and fresh towels add up!) In the past few years, thousands of green lodging choices have materialized in the US — from eco-camps on a wilderness preserve, to a Marriott that recycles and saves water, to a resort with solar panels. Countries with unspoiled natural beauty (New Zealand, Costa Rica, and Belize) offer green travel and sustainable eco-tourism in pristine jungles and rain forests.

When planning green travel:

• Check out green lodging from outdoorsy to upscale.
• Explore green camping and hiking in your home state.
• Choose an area that fascinates you, and learn about preserving its biodiversity.

Ways to offset your carbon footprint when traveling:

• Choose not to have towels and sheets washed every day.
• Eat food grown by local farmers.
• Use trains over planes, public transport instead of a car.
• Plant an indigenous tree.

They say, “Take only pictures, and leave only footprints.” When you travel green, you tread much more lightly.

Here are few eco-friendly lodging suggestions to get you started on planning your next green trip:

Post Ranch Inn Big Sur, California

Sadie Cove Wilderness Lodge Alaska

Habitat Suites Austin, Texas

CESiaK, Mexico

Gaia Napa Valley Hotel & Spa Napa Valley, California

FireSky Resort and Spa Scottsdale, Arizona

duPlooy’s Jungle Lodge Belize

The Ambrose Santa Monica, California

Alma Del Monte Taos, New Mexico

Finca Esperanza Verde Nicaragua

Have fun and stay green!

The New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year for 2006 was “carbon-neutral,” which gives you some sense of the fad that is carbon offsets. With the success of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, there is a rising wave of guilt about the carbon dioxide that we each produce in the course of our daily lives, and carbon offsets gave us a way to erase that CO₂ along with the guilt. “Carbon-neutral” is just a cooler, sexier, trendier way of communicating the same “guilt-free” consumer mentality that American culture is known for – e.g. “fat-free,” “low-cal,” etc.Well, the truth is, carbon offsets like those that TerraPass sells are a lot more complicated than all that. The principle behind an offset is that to compensate for your own carbon dioxide emissions, you buy a share in a project that is actively reducing carbon emissions somewhere in the world – including renewable energy projects, reforestation schemes, bio fuel production, and anything else that might be a carbon sink or prevent carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. We recognize the value of these carbon offsets while also acknowledging their limitations:

Carbon Offset Pros:

• In cases where emissions are inevitable, offsets provide a way to do something to remediate the effects.
• Offsets are a source of investment for renewable energy and other projects to mitigate climate change, therefore filling the void that some governments have left by not stepping in to regulate and/or limit carbon dioxide emissions.
• In many cases, offsets are a catalyst for change in the developing world, where renewable energy projects funded by the developed world could be the basis of a sustainable growth and development curve going forward.

Carbon Offset Cons:

• Buying offsets makes people feel that it’s okay to pollute if they simply compensate for their actions by buying credits.
• Offsets are unlikely to be as effective and permanent in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as we are in emitting the carbon dioxide to begin with.
• The industry is almost completely unregulated and therefore largely not held accountable for the emissions promises it makes.

Our Bottom Line: Although we support the idea of purchasing offsets from a reputable company to mitigate inevitable carbon emissions, we think that the term “carbon-neutral” is misleading, because it lends too much credit to the effectiveness of the nascent carbon offset industry. It also takes attention away from non-global warming related environmental issues and what we can do individually to reduce our impact and need for offsets. Carbon offsets should be used in combination with the other environmentally responsible travel practices like selecting an environmentally-friendly hotel or choosing an environmentally-friendly destination, not as an indulgence that can be bought to pardon all of our environmental sins.