Green Options

I’m coming to the conclusion pretty fast that just about every hotel will eventually be walking the talk when it comes to going green – though some are walking slowly while others are galloping as if there isn’t a minute to waste. While ecotourism continues to grow internationally, more American companies are grasping that going green can save some green too, which is also a point I make in ECOpreneuring.

A recent trip to Milwaukee, Wisconsin (to enter a few food items in our Wisconsin State Fair) found my family and I bedding down at the Hotel Metro, a boutique, high-rise luxury 63 room hotel that features numerous green aspects, from energy efficient lighting to a rooftop hot tub spa kept clean by using a salt-water system, rather than chlorine. Metro Hotel is the first Milwaukee hotel to be certified by Travel Green Wisconsin, racking up 67 points in total.

According to Richard Florida in his latest book, Who’s Your City?, the average American moves every seven years. “More than 40 million people relocate each year; 15 million make significant moves of more than 50 or 100 miles,” writes Florida. That’s a lot of carboard boxes, time and energy.

The implications for such a footloose society is further complicated by a staggering statistic: a roughly 50 percent divorce rate nationally, leading to multiple homes for what was once a single family home. Of course, second home ownership was also on the rise before the financial meltdown, increasing by 22 percent between 1995 and 2005, according to the Harvard University’s Joint Center on Housing Studies. Now we have two (or more) homes (to fill with stuff) only to later sell them, on average, every seven years.

Then when we age, we’re left with the quagmire of what to do with all our accumulated stuff. The solution for many, of course, is to jam it into self-storage lockers. Over the past two decades, self-storage has emerged as a $20 billion industry and comprises over 52,000 facilities, according to the Self Storage Association. In California, many people park their vehicles in their driveway or on the street not because of their famously great weather (no city snow removal), but because their garages are packed full of more stuff.

Florida points out that there are several key trends emerging:

Okay.  So, the shopping spree may be over.  It’s hard to pick up a newspaper or listen to a TV station that doesn’t have a story about it.  Meanwhile, advertisers keep putting things on sale to get us spending again.  However, millions of Americans are waking up with a debt-hangover and have adopted a new mantra: living within our means.  For the sustainability of our planet, let’s hope it lasts.

Whether its because of the recession, high energy prices, an awareness of the trash building up in our landfills or oceans, or because we’re without a job or forced to go on regular “furcations” (furlow based, unpaid vacations) — the equivalent of a pay demotion — many Americans are adopting a Fruglity is Freedom lifestyle that remarkably similar to a sustainable lifestyle.  It’s beginning to change what we value and how we place value on values.

Here’s a few of the Frugality Rules:

•  Paying off credit debt and possibly cutting up credit cards (after paying them off)

Once upon a time, most Americans never had credit cards — even one.  Those who did, had a fixed interest rate.  But a lot has changed, with plastic being the method of preference for millions of Americans, most of whom have more than one credit card.  All the cards these days have variable rates and all sorts of fees, too.  So, when the Fed comes around to raise interest rates to head off inflation, get ready to pay more for what you bought on credit.

In a world overdosed with negativity, Jan Joannides roots for the opposite underdog, building an organization and livelihood around showcasing the positive side of what’s working right.

As co-founder of Renewing the Countryside, Joannides created a means to showcase positive examples of rural revitalization while simultaneously serving as an inspiring example of how one’s purpose and life can passionately blend.

As I write about in the Ecopreneur Profile found in ECOpreneuring, the seed for Renewing the Countryside stemmed from Jan’s master’s thesis work in the late 1990s profiling vibrant, diversified Minnesota farms and ranches. “As I interviewed these folks, I became so deeply inspired by their story and commitment to their family farms that I wanted to get these narratives out to the public, since the media often focus just on the negative decline of rural America,” explains Jan. Inspired by a similar venture in the Netherlands, she tapped into grant funding to publish Renewing the Countryside: Minnesota in 2001, showcasing 44 profiles of successful rural enterprises.

The enthusiastic response to this book led Jan, in partnership with her husband, Brett Olson, to found Renewing the Countryside as a non-profit organization in 2002. Its mission is to strengthen rural areas by championing and supporting rural communities, farmers, artists, entrepreneurs, educators, activists and other people who are renewing the countryside through sustainable and innovative businesses, initiatives and projects. “After all,” she says, “rural America is abundant with prospering enterprises as diverse as colors in the rainbow.” Brett leads the creative side of the organization, developing innovative public education strategies and campaigns.  It’s through our work on the Rural Renaissance book that my wife and I discovered this innovative non-profit organization, an organization that had its pulse on the revitalization happening in rural areas and the net migrations afoot from urban and suburban areas back to rural areas.

There should be no secrets among those who continue to prosper in mostly non-financial ways despite the challenging economic times.  These people live (and perhaps work) following the laws of nature more than the “laws of supply and demand” of the increasingly dysfunctional “free” and global marketplace.

Here’s how to thrive in the abundance of renewable energy, organic food and a more healthy and sustainable lifestyle. While not all frugality rules, this approach to living more sustainably does require some degree of curtailment, scaling down and living within our means.  It means using credit cards less and relying on community members or family more.  However, the result can be a rich life filled with health and well-being, friends and family, more time to do the things you love to do (imagine that!), a greater sense of purpose, and, my favorite, happiness.

Below are a few suggestions to get you started or continue your journey.  Please add some of your own in the comments.  Maybe some of the BIG banks or BIG government folks might take notice that a few ideas do not involve printing and spending trillions of dollars to “spur consumption.”

•  Powering the renewable energy revolution

Times couldn’t be better for installing your own renewable energy system or improving your energy efficiency of your home or business (or both!), depending on the state you live in.  The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 extended the Energy Policy Act of 2005. These new acts extend and expand the federal tax credits available for energy efficiency and renewable energy improvements made in 2009 and beyond.  There are numerous renewable energy cash-back incentives, tax credits and low interest loans that can help ease the transition from a fossil-fuel based economy to one that thrives on solar income.  Check out the Database for State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency (www.dsireusa.org) to see what’s available in your state.

While there are some who say we will (or should) travel less in the coming years — and perhaps some of us will — let’s not forget that the travel industry is the second largest industry on this planet after the industrial-military complex. It’s vitally important to many communities, businesses and organizations, ours included. We operate Inn Serendipity Bed & Breakfast, completely powered by the wind and sun.

My first post on ecotourism presented an approach to travel that sustains, enhances or restores diverse ecological systems, preserves the economic and social well-being of the local and global community, and fosters a greater understanding on the part of the traveler of nature, culture or the community visited. It’s the “triple bottom line of profits, planet and people” I write about in ECOpreneuring, applied to the travel industry.

This type of travel usually provides the ecotravelers with authentic experiences (read: not merely heads on beds) and the travelers themselves participate in the renewal, restoration or revitalization process underway by the community, business or organization. Ecotourism is a departure from the consumption and luxury focus of the mainstream tourism industry that touts all-inclusive resorts and 4-star amenities with little or no thought given to paying livable wages to employees or producing some of their own energy on site.

Since piloting a green travel program in 2007, the State of Wisconsin’s Department of Tourism, through their Travel Green Wisconsin program, has provided a framework by which already green tourism related businesses can be more easily found while those enterprises that recognize that there’s more green in going green can follow detailed certification requirements to embark on their journey to evolve, as all organizations will need to do sooner, or later, as a restorative enterprise that follows not just the laws of supply and demand, but also the laws of nature.

It’s not just any number: 350.

Returning to 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in our Earth’s atmosphere is the level that most of the world’s scientific community agrees as the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. When industrial revolution began, it was 275 parts per million. Today, we’re far above that at 385 parts per million and continuing to rise at an accelerating pace, often contributing to the extreme weather, shrinking glaciers and numerous other effects of climate change familiar to more and more of us.

View this stunning 350.org video animation on YouTube, created by the innovative Free Range Studios, designed to reach out to the world to foster the coming together of global community to address this challenge — and hold our political leaders accountable to provide the policies that encourage the changes we must all make as citizens and green business owners.

For most ecopreneurs, addressing climate change is at the core of our triple bottom line approach to operating our green business, putting into practice ways to mitigate climate change, be it in how we use or over-produce energy from renewable energy sources like the wind and sun, serve up organic or pasture-raised cuisine from a sustainable food system, focus on a more bio-regional or local economy, and cultivate relationships with their conserving customers. Many paddle a kayak with a community of like-minded ecopreneurs, rather than try staying afloat on the Titanic dependent on increasingly expensive fossil fuels while trying to dodge melting glaciers.

I, for one, don’t remember the stagflation of the 1970s.

It was a time when prices were increasing at the gas pump and grocery store, and when the economy sputtered along with little or no growth. Some neighbors saw their wages flatten — or their jobs disappear altogether. Gold, often seen as a barometer of economic confidence, was at an all time high (adjusted for inflation). I was pre-teen in a comfty Detroit suburb with a father who worked at then stalwart, GM, so a roof over my head and food on the table was never a concern.

But here we are today, with Priuses outselling Suburbans. Oil and gold are at all time highs. Things seem far more perplexing, interconnected, global. First, there’s the perception of a housing crunch, even though fretting over a 15 percent decline in home values over the last year or two seems rather odd given the incredible run-up of many homes over the past decade, sometimes by over 100 percent.

Second, the sub-prime mortgage mess has snared many who agreed with greedy lenders that living beyond our means was okay. That more jobs are being outsourced overseas or replaced by fancy machines in this increasingly global marketplace isn’t helping either.

Even if the Federal Reserve or Congress and the Bush Administration do manage to convince the American people that they should keep on spending by splurging with windfall tax refund checks — thus avoiding a recession — the printing presses rolling off fresh greenbacks and mounting debt on a national level could result in the onset of stagflation. Oil, while swinging up and down with the speculator’s bets and value of the dollar, will continue on its upward trajectory reflecting the reality of “peak oil,” the period by which its extraction and refinement will get ever more expensive and difficult. Our economy, and those linked around the world, are based on this fuel and this fuel is largely denominated in US dollars. When the dollar falls in value, the price of a barrel of oil must increase.

So why will ecopreneurial businesses fare any different than all the rest if, in

They say everything is bigger in Texas and that certainly applies to the giant windmills that have replaced oil derricks in the rural area of Sweetwater, in Nolan County. According to the New York Times, the towers stand 20 stories high and the turbine blades are as long as a football field, and farmers can earn $500 per month for each turbine they allow built on their [...]

After the mighty industrial military complex (the companies behind the missiles and the satellites to guide them), tourism is the world’s largest industry, according to the World Tourism Organization.

While tourism is big business, much of the industry can be just as destructive as the other extractive industries (mining, lumber, agriculture), sometimes operating in the same places around the world, places like the spectacular Alaskan Wilderness or rainforests of Indonesia. Oceans containing fish or oil hidden deep below the surface in certain parts of the world, provide the setting for the popular love affair by many people, of living on floating cities called cruise ships, turning port stops into Mall of America-type shopping sprees.

Not all tourism, however, thrives on the consumptive value of mass tourism that burns through resources or exploits people for the benefit of pleasure seekers. A small, but rapidly growing segment of the tourism industry, “ecotourism” has emerged which now accounts for as much as 4 to 7 percent of the industry, depending on definitional terms. While the academics debate these definitions ad nauseum, the industry and number of ecotravelers are growing at double digit rates according to The International Ecotourism Society.

The clock strikes prime time Friday night as I send you this introductory greeting. Back in my corporate cubicle days over a decade ago, “happy hour” did not find me at the computer screen. Most likely, on Friday night back then you’d find me physically and mentally as far from my work scene as I could muster: camping over state lines, social at a party, buzzing at the local coffeehouse. While I had a enviable job and paycheck, “work” remained something I did to pay the bills and indemnify my escapist fun.