Green travel ideas from two environmentally conscious travelers

For anyone tracking Conde Nast Traveler’s World Savers Congress in New York City, one of the most interesting panels was the one on The Economics of Doing Good - moderated by the NY Times’ Nicholas Kristof.

The panel was a discussion about where Social Responsibility fits into the overall vision of profit oriented corporate policy.

Everyone agrees that doing good doesn’t mean less profit, and we’re moving towards a world where profits and corporate responsibility go hand in hand.

The same applies for green travel companies, where green means a lot of positive publicity, cost savings and an additional incentive for travelers to book in. Green business is good business.

Unfortunately, the economics of doing good for eco-friendly travelers is - at present - not so good. When it comes to green travel, offering travelers the same chance to profit because they’re being good does not seem to be that easy. In fact, travelers are punished for being good.

Take for example, the issue of carbon offsets for flights. San Francisco just opened airport kiosks where you buy carbon credits before the flight. Any traveler who does not buy carbon credits ends up paying less than the good guy who bought the offsets.

Is rewarding indifference and punishing good behavior going to help save the world from climate change?

Photo CC UpTake

Last month, Travel + Leisure ran a story on its Top 15 green hotels in the world and the associated press release was picked up by a number of sources including USA Today. The list was assembled by the magazine in collaboration with Conservation International, which is dedicated to environmental preservation and issues of sustainability. Current benchmarks for the hotel industry developing a level of sustainability involve their disposal of waste, reduction of water and energy use, and improving how the businesses interact with the local community.

The list is geographically broad, drawing hotels from a wide variety of regions and five continents. What isn’t quite as varied is the level of comfort and cost–which is certainly in keeping with Travel & Leisure’s target demographic. Three of the first five hotels listed have nightly rates that start at $700 and go up from there!

I can imagine how an average reader who saw this story in USA Today or Travel & Leisure might be alarmed to find the best green hotels in the world are ones that are well beyond the means of many eco-conscious travelers. Are “green services” in the hotel industry becoming just another luxury item hotels charge massive premiums for? I don’t have the answer, because the industry is just now starting to get mobilized on its environmental initiatives.

Tune back into this space over the next week and coming months. We’ll look at what the major hotel chains are doing in terms of green initiatives, and I will be going on a site visit later in the winter to the LEED Platinum certified new boutique hotel in San Francisco, The Orchard to see first hand what this is all about.

Before I get to the substance of my post, I want to remind our readers that today is Blog Action Day, an annual event when thousands of bloggers get together to weigh in on the same topic. This year, the topic is the environment. Well done, selection committee! We’re all too happy to participate.

OK, so now let me explain my post title. I was intrigued a couple of weeks ago to see that Ecuador had used the Clinton Global Initiative as a forum to announce their plans NOT to drill for one billion barrels of proven oil reserves in Yasuni National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

The announcement was a fascinating and quite unexpected commitment from a country that could really use those oil dollars. President Correa of Ecuador announced that they would commit investment to renewable energy instead, and then the last sentence of the press release reads: “The plan also includes promotion of ecotourism and sustainable development for Ecuador’s Amazonian region.”

I have two reactions to this:

1) Wow. If Ecuador, a country that has a per capita income of 4,500 can look past it’s immediate economic needs and toward a more sustainable long-term growth model, why can’t we do the same thing in the U.S. - where per-capita wealth is more than 10 times larger? I mean, seriously!

2) More importantly, I think this story is all about travel, and the press release buried the lede. Ecuador sees an opportunity to expand on its already substantial ecotourism business and become the Costa Rica of South America with both a strong nature-based tourism draw and a significant portfolio of renewable energy. And to get back to my creative terminology, this is the “sticky green residue” left behind by all of those tourists who visited the Galapagos recently. I say “sticky,” because all those tourist dollars spent in Ecuador over the years have lodged in the mind of government officials and made them realize that they have too much to lose if they permit drilling to go forward.

Here’s a concrete example of how travel can make a net positive impact on the world’s environment.

So don’t be ashamed for taking that overseas trip. Find those “simple green choices” that you can make to reduce your travel’s environmental impact, but also take heart that you could be doing the world a lot of good by making other countries appreciate the power of the tourist dollar. That might just be the incentive they need to conserve their natural resources.

Disagree with me about Ecuador’s oil or the benefits of tourism? Leave a comment below or send us an e-mail at simplegreenchoices@gmail.com.