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LOOK AHEAD GREEN TOURIST
Tuesday, February 9
BEING A GREEN TOURIST
INTRODUCTION
One of the largest industries in this world is tourism. We each travel from our countries, and others travel to see our sites. Today vacationers travel both further and more frequently, and this has allowed the budget airlines to offer, and for us to take up, more frequent vacations.
In earlier times travellers would travel along the earth or upon the waters, using rail or marine, but now as impatience has arisen, we wish to get to our destination as rapidly and as inexpensively as possible, and this has de-centralized the patterns of travel and tourism, and a rebirth of the maxim - it is better to travel in anticipation than to arrive. For the tourist industry, as seen by government is merely a means of acquiring visitors, and thereby their money - it is an exploitative industry, used to stimulate employment and finance, borne upon the visitor's cash.
Locally, this traffic of humans, and the vehicular means of arrival brings a burden of increased carbon, and also a degradation of natural local environments as tourist footprints increase in depth and frequency. In the long term many localities have rued the day they invited travellers to visit, as the short term effects of financial stimulus have now been overshadowed by the negative impacts of high tourist numbers, and in some extreme cases, the effects have been so devastating that tourists no longer wish to visit and all that remains is a wish to turn the clock back.
Each one of has a role to play to turn back the tide of this heavy footprint, and to ensure that the destinations receive powerful potentials from the visitors. The 3 categories, Eco, Ethical and Sustainable tourism each have the potential to create a new dynamic as they are based around the intention to create benefits to both the residents and infrastructure of the local culture, but as each individual has varying understanding and empathy with their surroundings, less than perfect results might arise, creating a potential situation upon which the destination is no longer viable, nor sustainable.
THE ENVIRONMENT BEARS THE PRICE
Tourism is impacting local environments and communities, especially those once remote locations, damaging and in some cases destroying ecosystems of plant and wildlife. In addition heavy use of water for golf courses and swimming pools diverts much needed water from local agriculture, creating soil instability, and birdlife is being disrupted in its migration and nesting patterns.
The tourist industry bears a large part of the responsibility of creating standards for the tour operators and the arriving tourists. To be sustainable methods must be implemented that enable a continuance of financial input, without creating heavy negative impacts upon the area.
FLIGHT IMPACTS
Of all the impacts of tourism, the largest is caused by flying. Most greenhouse gas emissions and associated gases are being released high into to the Earth's atmosphere where it can cause most damage. One single flight from Sydney to Heathrow creates an equivalent amount of gases as used by 3 motor cars for a single year. This is compounded by the pressure and social disturbance caused by noise pollution caused by flights arriving and departing from airports and the finger of blame becomes more firmly pointed at air travel.
A figure is held that around 500,000 people are currently flying over Europe at any given time, heading both inward and outbound to further destinations, and we all accept flight as an acceptable means of transport, and bearing in mind that air travel is anticipated to increase three fold by the year 2040. Around three quarters of all flights are for non- business, hence tourism purposes, and for this anticipated growth more airports will have to be built, but will these be environmentally friendly?
So step one to becoming a greener traveller? Take less flights. But of course if you must visit the far side of the planet you will probably not have time to take a tramp steamer or a freighter across the worlds oceans. But always consider staying closer to home, and in this way, each person that flies can lift their carbon footprint a little.
FLYING ON A BUDGET
With the advent of heavy subsidies for the budget airlines the cheap flight has become the normal for everyone, and if the airlines charged the true cost travel would reduce, a reverse catch 22, maybe a 22 catch. Direct flights are less carbon heavy rather than some cheaper flights which entail two or more flights and therefore increased footprints.
CATCH A TRAIN
What a lovely way to travel, and once you have deducted all that check in time, and transport to and from the airports the train might be a preferred option, and the train uses one sixth of the emissions, and there are far more window seats, think about it. The train journey is a reasonably pleasant experience whereas I think most of us would agree that air travel, is well, foul. The train is a greener option than air travel, but hey, maybe think about a walking or cycling holiday, and even a canal boat, lazily moving at 4 miles an hour - remember the journey can be pleasant too.
NEUTRAL CARBON FLIGHTS
Sometimes flying is the only option, you just need to fly somewhere and there is no alternative. You want to be green but a train or bike ride just ain't going to get you there.
There are a few methods to help rebalance the carbon deficit you have created and you can offset your green house gases by planting trees, or paying for trees to be planted to absorb this created carbon. The maths are as follows, plant five trees if you fly from Sydney to Heathrow and this will redress the carbon imbalance, and become carbon neutral.
There are companies and schemes which have been created with the specific intention of rebalancing your carbon emissions by calculating what you have discharged and then arranging for investment in the appropriate carbon rebalancing schemes. These might be trees planted near your home, or in de-forested areas elsewhere around the world, or even alternative energy schemes. These are also used not only for travel but with regard to all your usage of fossil fuels, as a motorist and in your home.
The basic finance is that each tree costs around GBP 9.00 to plant, and an average European return flight will use around GBP 5.00 to balance the emission, so factor this into your flight ticket price.
But there is a point at which the earth will run out of space for more trees (yes), and flights will continue, so the point will be reached unless we change our flying patterns. And with the growth in wealth in both India and China, soon even more people will be able and empowered to take to the skies.
TAKING YOUR RESPONSIBILITY
Ideally, stay at home for your vacation, and travel outwards, by bicycle, but hang on, I know that is not really an option.
Lets try and introduce some basic definitions for the categories of green travel.
Sustainable Vacation - This has no negative or lasting impact upon the environment.
Ethical Vacation - This is sustainable but has additional factors in ensuring that there is fair and balanced concern for the local inhabitants, and the money that arrives is kept in the locality. For the most part the money that arrives in most tourist destinations is whisked out by government.
Eco Vacation - This involves being out of the frequently travelled loop, to be less in the familiar destinations and enter the remote and clean. We will come to this a bit later.
Each of these categories bring their own benefits but unless this is managed and steered in the correct manner can avoid the ramifications of pollution, cultural exploitation, environmental damage.
Do ask your travel agent, tell me your ethical policy. What are their considerations with regard to water, waste, and the local environments, and do they employ local staff and pay them appropriate and commensurate salaries, do they source their produce locally and more. Ask them, bully them into providing the appropriate answers.
Written and Published by Mark Golding - The Organic Home
THE LATEST GREEN BLOG NEWS, FROM TRAVEL CAN BE GREEN
INTRODUCTION
One of the largest industries in this world is tourism. We each travel from our countries, and others travel to see our sites. Today vacationers travel both further and more frequently, and this has allowed the budget airlines to offer, and for us to take up, more frequent vacations.
In earlier times travellers would travel along the earth or upon the waters, using rail or marine, but now as impatience has arisen, we wish to get to our destination as rapidly and as inexpensively as possible, and this has de-centralized the patterns of travel and tourism, and a rebirth of the maxim - it is better to travel in anticipation than to arrive. For the tourist industry, as seen by government is merely a means of acquiring visitors, and thereby their money - it is an exploitative industry, used to stimulate employment and finance, borne upon the visitor's cash.
Locally, this traffic of humans, and the vehicular means of arrival brings a burden of increased carbon, and also a degradation of natural local environments as tourist footprints increase in depth and frequency. In the long term many localities have rued the day they invited travellers to visit, as the short term effects of financial stimulus have now been overshadowed by the negative impacts of high tourist numbers, and in some extreme cases, the effects have been so devastating that tourists no longer wish to visit and all that remains is a wish to turn the clock back.
Each one of has a role to play to turn back the tide of this heavy footprint, and to ensure that the destinations receive powerful potentials from the visitors. The 3 categories, Eco, Ethical and Sustainable tourism each have the potential to create a new dynamic as they are based around the intention to create benefits to both the residents and infrastructure of the local culture, but as each individual has varying understanding and empathy with their surroundings, less than perfect results might arise, creating a potential situation upon which the destination is no longer viable, nor sustainable.
THE ENVIRONMENT BEARS THE PRICE
Tourism is impacting local environments and communities, especially those once remote locations, damaging and in some cases destroying ecosystems of plant and wildlife. In addition heavy use of water for golf courses and swimming pools diverts much needed water from local agriculture, creating soil instability, and birdlife is being disrupted in its migration and nesting patterns.
The tourist industry bears a large part of the responsibility of creating standards for the tour operators and the arriving tourists. To be sustainable methods must be implemented that enable a continuance of financial input, without creating heavy negative impacts upon the area.
FLIGHT IMPACTS
Of all the impacts of tourism, the largest is caused by flying. Most greenhouse gas emissions and associated gases are being released high into to the Earth's atmosphere where it can cause most damage. One single flight from Sydney to Heathrow creates an equivalent amount of gases as used by 3 motor cars for a single year. This is compounded by the pressure and social disturbance caused by noise pollution caused by flights arriving and departing from airports and the finger of blame becomes more firmly pointed at air travel.
A figure is held that around 500,000 people are currently flying over Europe at any given time, heading both inward and outbound to further destinations, and we all accept flight as an acceptable means of transport, and bearing in mind that air travel is anticipated to increase three fold by the year 2040. Around three quarters of all flights are for non- business, hence tourism purposes, and for this anticipated growth more airports will have to be built, but will these be environmentally friendly?
So step one to becoming a greener traveller? Take less flights. But of course if you must visit the far side of the planet you will probably not have time to take a tramp steamer or a freighter across the worlds oceans. But always consider staying closer to home, and in this way, each person that flies can lift their carbon footprint a little.
FLYING ON A BUDGET
With the advent of heavy subsidies for the budget airlines the cheap flight has become the normal for everyone, and if the airlines charged the true cost travel would reduce, a reverse catch 22, maybe a 22 catch. Direct flights are less carbon heavy rather than some cheaper flights which entail two or more flights and therefore increased footprints.
CATCH A TRAIN
What a lovely way to travel, and once you have deducted all that check in time, and transport to and from the airports the train might be a preferred option, and the train uses one sixth of the emissions, and there are far more window seats, think about it. The train journey is a reasonably pleasant experience whereas I think most of us would agree that air travel, is well, foul. The train is a greener option than air travel, but hey, maybe think about a walking or cycling holiday, and even a canal boat, lazily moving at 4 miles an hour - remember the journey can be pleasant too.
NEUTRAL CARBON FLIGHTS
Sometimes flying is the only option, you just need to fly somewhere and there is no alternative. You want to be green but a train or bike ride just ain't going to get you there.
There are a few methods to help rebalance the carbon deficit you have created and you can offset your green house gases by planting trees, or paying for trees to be planted to absorb this created carbon. The maths are as follows, plant five trees if you fly from Sydney to Heathrow and this will redress the carbon imbalance, and become carbon neutral.
There are companies and schemes which have been created with the specific intention of rebalancing your carbon emissions by calculating what you have discharged and then arranging for investment in the appropriate carbon rebalancing schemes. These might be trees planted near your home, or in de-forested areas elsewhere around the world, or even alternative energy schemes. These are also used not only for travel but with regard to all your usage of fossil fuels, as a motorist and in your home.
The basic finance is that each tree costs around GBP 9.00 to plant, and an average European return flight will use around GBP 5.00 to balance the emission, so factor this into your flight ticket price.
But there is a point at which the earth will run out of space for more trees (yes), and flights will continue, so the point will be reached unless we change our flying patterns. And with the growth in wealth in both India and China, soon even more people will be able and empowered to take to the skies.
TAKING YOUR RESPONSIBILITY
Ideally, stay at home for your vacation, and travel outwards, by bicycle, but hang on, I know that is not really an option.
Lets try and introduce some basic definitions for the categories of green travel.
Sustainable Vacation - This has no negative or lasting impact upon the environment.
Ethical Vacation - This is sustainable but has additional factors in ensuring that there is fair and balanced concern for the local inhabitants, and the money that arrives is kept in the locality. For the most part the money that arrives in most tourist destinations is whisked out by government.
Eco Vacation - This involves being out of the frequently travelled loop, to be less in the familiar destinations and enter the remote and clean. We will come to this a bit later.
Each of these categories bring their own benefits but unless this is managed and steered in the correct manner can avoid the ramifications of pollution, cultural exploitation, environmental damage.
Do ask your travel agent, tell me your ethical policy. What are their considerations with regard to water, waste, and the local environments, and do they employ local staff and pay them appropriate and commensurate salaries, do they source their produce locally and more. Ask them, bully them into providing the appropriate answers.
Written and Published by Mark Golding - The Organic Home
THE LATEST GREEN BLOG NEWS, FROM TRAVEL CAN BE GREEN
EMERALD AND ABSINTHE
Tuesday, February 2
This girl, this foolish Emerald Skies! For she errs and is human... With casual abandon she ventured into the astral world of absinthe...
And what an introduction to the world of the free traveller, one step out of the door, one single journey across the English Channel, into the arms of France, and voila! Absinthe!
That beguiling mistress of the artistic community, beloved by the creatives and the emotionally experimental, but also destroyer of rationale... oh beware her charms. In part she was responsible for the burgeoning of the late 19th Century design movements, the swirling, attenuated Art Nouveau...
For within her dreams, embraced by the mist of unreality, poor confused Emerald fell from upon high, seeing those around her transform.. from male to female, and from female to male, gender being morphed and transmogrified...
Lost within her mystical and magical land, until a hand reached in, and led her back to the land of the traveller, to enable her to step back onto her path... to travel, travel naturally. A saviour, a guardian angel Dorian Yates...
Back from the brink, and once again to stand upon the firm ground of reality.
And this lesson, learned so powerfully, and never to be repeated, except as a travellers tale.
Written and Published by Mark Golding - The Organic Home
THE LATEST GREEN BLOG NEWS, FROM TRAVEL CAN BE GREEN
And what an introduction to the world of the free traveller, one step out of the door, one single journey across the English Channel, into the arms of France, and voila! Absinthe!
That beguiling mistress of the artistic community, beloved by the creatives and the emotionally experimental, but also destroyer of rationale... oh beware her charms. In part she was responsible for the burgeoning of the late 19th Century design movements, the swirling, attenuated Art Nouveau...
For within her dreams, embraced by the mist of unreality, poor confused Emerald fell from upon high, seeing those around her transform.. from male to female, and from female to male, gender being morphed and transmogrified...
Lost within her mystical and magical land, until a hand reached in, and led her back to the land of the traveller, to enable her to step back onto her path... to travel, travel naturally. A saviour, a guardian angel Dorian Yates...
Back from the brink, and once again to stand upon the firm ground of reality.
And this lesson, learned so powerfully, and never to be repeated, except as a travellers tale.
Written and Published by Mark Golding - The Organic Home
THE LATEST GREEN BLOG NEWS, FROM TRAVEL CAN BE GREEN
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Sunday, January 31
Oh my, that is not what Emerald Skies expected! She has been taking the slow path through France, exploring the farmer's markets, scenting the spring air as it carries through from the east, and laying her restful dreams upon pillows of lavender and hops.
But, as you know, when on the road, expect the unexpected... She has encountered a beautiful wanderer, a man who has passed into this world with light footstep, and gentle words, who leaves an ethereal trail of green and happy starlight.
For, climbing the town slopes in Gordes, Provence, she met Dorian Yates, an extraordinary man, who wisely understands the soft way of the peaceful traveller. For no ordinary man is he, his understanding and witness published in a beautiful handbook for low impact journeys - 'Green Earth Guide - Travelling Naturally in France', and this beautiful book, graced with pure, living images, and an open hearted expression of his experiences is the most important and relevant guide ever published for the eco tourist, who wishes to meander though the beauty and serenity of France.
There is so much to drink in, and to inhale and breathe in this magical book, and also from Dorian, a new friend to Emerald Skies is his practical and earthy blog - Travelling Naturally...
Oh dear, Emerald has a slight crush I believe, and has fallen in love with la Belle France, with its soft and gentle ways, its herb and garlic taste, its aromatic airs, and the romantic words of the spoken man... And taken with her, in her hand, and within her heart, are the words of the green traveller... Dorian Yates... A verdant journey of the soul.
Written and Published by Mark Golding - The Organic Home
THE LATEST GREEN BLOG NEWS, FROM TRAVEL CAN BE GREEN
But, as you know, when on the road, expect the unexpected... She has encountered a beautiful wanderer, a man who has passed into this world with light footstep, and gentle words, who leaves an ethereal trail of green and happy starlight.
For, climbing the town slopes in Gordes, Provence, she met Dorian Yates, an extraordinary man, who wisely understands the soft way of the peaceful traveller. For no ordinary man is he, his understanding and witness published in a beautiful handbook for low impact journeys - 'Green Earth Guide - Travelling Naturally in France', and this beautiful book, graced with pure, living images, and an open hearted expression of his experiences is the most important and relevant guide ever published for the eco tourist, who wishes to meander though the beauty and serenity of France.
There is so much to drink in, and to inhale and breathe in this magical book, and also from Dorian, a new friend to Emerald Skies is his practical and earthy blog - Travelling Naturally...
Oh dear, Emerald has a slight crush I believe, and has fallen in love with la Belle France, with its soft and gentle ways, its herb and garlic taste, its aromatic airs, and the romantic words of the spoken man... And taken with her, in her hand, and within her heart, are the words of the green traveller... Dorian Yates... A verdant journey of the soul.
Written and Published by Mark Golding - The Organic Home
THE LATEST GREEN BLOG NEWS, FROM TRAVEL CAN BE GREEN
INTO THE EMERALD SKY
Thursday, January 28
Emerald is on the road, looking for the rainbows end, which in this first blissful step, lies beyond every corner and the crest of each hill. For she knows nothing but wonderment with every new vista.
Ahead lies the mystery of the purple door and the distant chimney smoke, for she had a dream. A dream of sacred journeys and mystic travel, no ordinary trail, but a reflection, a mirror of her true quest, for love and sacred stillness.
For though she is to travel alone, she wishes to meet fellow travellers along the way, to share experiences and receive guidance, so you, dear traveller, rendezvous with Emerald Skies, make a date, a place and a time and she will meet you. There is no ferry too crammed, no mountain pass too narrow, and no moped too rusty.
So fellow nomad, are you in Spain or Greece, South America or Iceland? Emerald wishes to meet you, and share your green travel ideas here in her journal... She will link to you, and share her connections when she can, and she can...
For she reaches her first destination, her first pause in this trans-global array of networks and here she will be meeting her very first travel friends the Travel Dudes and it will be time to share stories, pass the pleasure and watch the sunrise... Story to follow, after this dream...
Written and Published by Mark Golding - The Organic Home
THE LATEST GREEN VACATION NEWS, FROM TRAVEL CAN BE GREEN
Ahead lies the mystery of the purple door and the distant chimney smoke, for she had a dream. A dream of sacred journeys and mystic travel, no ordinary trail, but a reflection, a mirror of her true quest, for love and sacred stillness.
For though she is to travel alone, she wishes to meet fellow travellers along the way, to share experiences and receive guidance, so you, dear traveller, rendezvous with Emerald Skies, make a date, a place and a time and she will meet you. There is no ferry too crammed, no mountain pass too narrow, and no moped too rusty.
So fellow nomad, are you in Spain or Greece, South America or Iceland? Emerald wishes to meet you, and share your green travel ideas here in her journal... She will link to you, and share her connections when she can, and she can...
For she reaches her first destination, her first pause in this trans-global array of networks and here she will be meeting her very first travel friends the Travel Dudes and it will be time to share stories, pass the pleasure and watch the sunrise... Story to follow, after this dream...
Written and Published by Mark Golding - The Organic Home
THE LATEST GREEN VACATION NEWS, FROM TRAVEL CAN BE GREEN
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