It’s called many different things, green travel, adventure travel, sustainable travel and eco travel but ultimately this type of travel can be life changing. Both for those traveling and those visited. This kind of travel experience doesn’t include time in the tanning both or getting your nails done. In fact you actually get your hands dirty. Yet sustainable travel is one of the few segments within the travel industry that continues to grow. With the rise of social media we are also seeing a rise in socially responsible marketing; and businesses that while still motivated by the almighty dollar truly do want to make a positive impact on people and the planet. customers with whom they interact.

Today marketers  are disparate to find  new ways to reach their audiences. The old forms of media advertising just aren’t as effective anymore. Television, radio and print media are on a decline as consumers are simply overwhelmed by the constant 24/7 drum beat of buy it now, but wait there’s more message. It is within this climate that sustainable travel thrives. One of the innovators in this area and the are many others is GAP ADVENTURES. Through their non profit organization, Planeterra they have orchestrated projects throughout the world where their traveling guests have worked alongside rural villagers to install solar thermal stoves, paint schools and help fund weaving projects. Planeterra also purchased a permanent home for the street children of Cusco, Peru & their families. One person who’s been active around the world in establishing these projects is Danielle Weiss. Danielle is Planeterra’s Director of projects she lives and works in South America. You can hear an interview she had with QuestPoint N The Mix before she returned to Peru last fall.

Want to pack your bags and get going? But OMG you say you don’t have the funds to travel to Galapagos, Mount Kilimanjaro or Nepal right now. In the Bay Area Marissa LaMagna has established Bay Area Green Tourswhich does An Eco Tour of the San Francisco Bay’s Green Corridor and beyond. You can make a difference in your own local community. However if you can travel or can make plans to travel Mark Twain  has said it best, “travel is enemy of prejudjice and bigotry.”

I’M LIKE A BIRD

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OREGON GETS GO AHEAD FOR THE COUNTRYs’ 1st WAVE ENERGY FARM

The Surfrider Foundation today joined over a dozen government agencies, ocean stakeholder groups, and environmental organizations in signing a historic settlement agreement with Ocean Power Technologies (OPT) in support of the construction and operation of the Reedsport OPT Wave Park.

The Reedsport OPT Wave Park is expected to be the first commercial-scale wave energy project in the United States, pending licensing from the Federal Energy and Regulatory Commission (FERC). Phases I and II of the project will consist of ten PowerBuoys installed 2.5 miles off the coast of Reedsport, OR.

The parties to the settlement agreement participated in a three-year process to develop consensus on aspects of project design, required monitoring, and contingencies for adaptive management. The Surfrider Foundation has served as a formal representative of recreational and environmental interests throughout the process.

“We believe this represents a really good approach for the development of wave energy technology,” said Pete Stauffer, Surfrider Foundation’s Ocean Ecosystem Program Manager. “Incorporating good science and meaningful stakeholder involvement in the planning and management of wave energy projects is in the best interests of nearshore ecosystems and coastal communities.”

The Reedsport settlement agreement defines a precautionary approach to development of the Wave Park that is intended to minimize impacts to the nearshore environment and existing ocean uses such as recreation and fishing. An adaptive management program that includes monitoring of ecological and socioeconomic effects will inform the management and further build-out of the project.

The Surfrider Foundation recognizes that technologies utilizing ocean waves, tides, currents and wind may offer important benefits as renewable sources of energy that will reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. They may also help to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and the dangerous practice of offshore oil drilling.

The Surfrider Foundation has developed a policy statement on renewable ocean energy, which includes a set of principles to consider during the planning or evaluation of any proposed project. Employing these principles may help reduce impacts to ocean recreation, nearshore ecology, coastal processes, public safety, aesthetics, and fishing access

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Sustainability meets fishy fashion

Junly 27 – Designer Oskar Metsavaht, a favorite of celebrities such as Madonna and Sting, has started producing a new line of environmentally-friendly leather from the skins of salmon and tilapia. Ben Gruber reports. (02:15)

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10 Energy Saving Tips for Travelers Courtesy of International Ecotourism Society

With summer vacations in full swing, travelling without the guilt is a plus.

Why not start with 10 Energy Saving Tips for Travelers courtesy of International Ecotourism Society.

1. Fly Wisely:
Air travel is often the most energy consuming aspect of your travel. Plan your trip so that you minimize air travel, and choose, whenever possible, to stay longer in a destination instead of making many short trips.

2. Travel Light:
Pack only what you need, and don’t bring things that will become waste. By reducing the weight of luggage travelers can significantly cut green house gas emissions.

3. Book Responsibly:
When choosing your hotel, tour operator, or other service providers, select ones that have good sustainability practices. Look for information on the company’s environmental initiatives; strategies, save energy and minimize waste; involvement in sustainable tourism certification program. A good place to start your search is Ecotourism Explorer.

4. Before You Leave:
Turn off lights and unplug household appliances that can be left unplugged while you are away.

5. While You Are There:
Turn off all the lights and air conditioner/heater when you leave your room, and unplug unnecessary appliances.

6. Greener Way To Get Around:
Utilize public transportation (bus, train, city car, etc.) and alternative modes of transportation (walking, bicycle, non-motorized vehicles, horse, camel) as much as possible. It’s a more sustainable way to get around, and also a healthier and more enjoyable way to get to know the place you are visiting.

7. Eat Local:
Reduce your ‘food miles’ by choosing local. Visit a local farmer’s market, shop at a locally owned grocery store and choose locally owned restaurants that buy local. Locally produced foods are a tastier and more sustainable option.

8. Save Water:
Use the minimum amount of water needed for a shower/bath, don’t let water run while shaving, brushing or washing, and check if the hotel has a linen reuse program – if so, reuse your towels and bed sheets by placing the card to indicate you don’t wish to have them washed every day, if not, request hospitality staff not to change them every day.

9. Charge Your Trip Sustainably:
Whenever possible, utilize options that do not require batteries. Buy rechargeable batteries for your essential travel items such as cameras, razors, and flash lights.

10. Offset the Unavoidable Footprint:
Contribute to a credible carbon offsetting program to support

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FELY

IVORY COAST

MUSIC SENSATION

FELY

PERFORMING

August 8 Click Here

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New solar energy process discovered by Stanford engineers could revamp production.

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AVANCIS solar installers at work

The solar module manufacturer AVANCIS has recorded a new international efficiency record.

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GREEN FOR ALL ANNOUNCES

Green jobs are a reality, and now is the time to honor the innovative companies that are creating them. With support from the Citi Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, SJF Advisory Services and Green For All have partnered to launch a Green Jobs Award Program, which seeks to identify, recognize, and promote private companies that are leaders in quality green job creation.

APPLY HERE

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Just Google QuestPoint on your mobile. Then click the link!

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Visit Pie Ranch

Gap Adventures  founder Bruce Poon Tip will share his intriguing and visionary insights on ecotourism and sustainability trends when he takes to the stage at the Ecotourism and Sustainable Tourism Conference 2010 (ESTC), in Portland, Oregon, between September 8 and 10.
The conference – co-sponsored by Gap Adventures and the non-profit Planeterra Foundation – is North America’s largest and only conference focusing on sustainability in the tourism industry and will assemble more than 500 business leaders, tourism professionals and community stakeholders to discuss practical ideas and solutions to sustainability challenges facing the sector today. The conference’s ultimate goal: reinforcing the role of tourism in building a more sustainable future for the travel industry.

“We love changing people’s lives through travel and I believe ESTC is a perfect forum to help us advance that goal,” Poon Tip, the conference’s keynote speaker, said. “We’ve proven time and again through initiatives like our voluntourism projects that sustainability and travel needn’t be mutually exclusive. Smart travel that respects local ecosystems, economies and communities not only provides a more exciting experience for our travellers, it’s simply the right thing to do.”

For the first time, ESTC will also be joining forces with the Planeterra Foundation to provide opportunities for conference delegates to roll up their sleeves for the local community. Delegates will have a chance to volunteer at Portland-area landmarks such as the Tualatin National Wildlife Refuge and the Columbia Springs Environmental Education Center, in an effort to highlight the increasing importance and relevance of voluntourism.

“These practical sessions in the field will give delegates an opportunity to participate in a hands-on voluntourism experience and gain an understanding of how giving back to the people and places they visit provides a richer traveller experience.” said Planeterra director Richard G. Edwards.

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Sustainable travel in effect

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The Streets of San Francisco Now

What is Sunday Streets?

Sunday Streets originated in Bogota, Columbia as a day to promote free, health and community oriented events. 30 years after the first program, the concept has spread around the world from Tokyo, Japan to Kiev, Ukraine. Now, it is back in San Francisco!

Letter from the Mayor

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No more BPs: we must turn our deserts into solar power

The Deepwater Horizon disaster should make us look to the sun, and start a revolution

in how we meet our energy need

• • Ulrich Beck

Why hasn’t the Deepwater Horizon spill, one of the worst ecological disasters in US history, led to a storming of the Bastille of Big Oil? Why aren’t the most urgent problems of our time – environmental crises and climate change – being confronted with the same energy, idealism and optimism as past tragedies of poverty, tyranny and war? The current state of the oil industry is reminiscent of the ancien regime on the eve of the revolution.

The Gulf of Mexico disaster has many faces. BP’s incompetence is one. But there is also the failure of legislative oversight. What until recently was praised as an economic stimulus policy is now being criticised as “collusion with scoundrels”. The BP boss, Tony Hayward, dons sackcloth and ashes and speaks of an “unprecedented series of mishaps”. At a hearing in the US House of Representatives, a Democrat congressman confronted him with the list of BP accidents and revealed another truth: there are still hundreds, indeed thousands of oil platforms in this region alone, but also throughout the world, for which the other oil majors are responsible. To beat up on BP alone is shabby. Deepwater Horizon is the symbol of the demise of a global experiment: a model of progress and development based on exploiting fossil fuels.

No one can claim they didn’t see it coming. For two centuries machines and engines have been driven by combustion and steam. Nonetheless, a generation has grown up knowing that the fossil fuel industry is burning up its own foundations. More than a century ago, Max Weber foresaw the end of oil-based capitalism when he spoke of a time when “the last hundredweight of fossil fuel is burnt up”. Yet why should a world that every day receives many times its energy needs from the sun, a free and inexhaustible source of energy, look on impassively as clouds of oil spew into the deep sea? Right now, we need the celebrated innovative power of capital and the utopian enthusiasm of engineers. “Swords into ploughshares” was the motto of the peace movement. “Deserts into solar power” should be our slogan now.

As the oil gushes forth, the truth is coming to light. “We underestimated the complications involved in drilling for oil at a depth of 1,500 metres,” confesses Hayward. Nobody possesses the necessary safety technology to prevent or respond to such a scenario. Engineers have bored to ever greater depths on the assumption that the risks could be controlled. The depressing truth is that the “residual risk” of deep-sea drilling rests on ignorance. BP estimated that, in the event the safety technology should fail, it would take two to four years for the oil to discharge completely into the sea.

Faced with this long-term catastrophe, Barack Obama has declared “war” on the dark enemy from the deep. But military thinking is no help, because the greatest dangers do not come from enemy states, but from the side-effects of economic, scientific and political decisions. What is the commander-in-chief supposed to do? Send out his fleet of submarines to torpedo the oil leak? Launch a military strike against the management of BP and its sponsors? In the war against terror, George W Bush held Afghanistan and Iraq responsible for al-Qaida. Should Obama follow his example in this Gulf war by making Britain, as BP’s assumed country of origin, responsible for the catastrophic attack on the American coast? Obama stresses the adjective “British” when speaking of the energy company, as though this were 1814 and British troops were again besieging Washington DC.

BP itself has long since been engulfed by globalisation. British Petroleum is not British. In 1998 the company merged with US oil giant Amoco and took the opportunity to abandon the adjective “British” and replace it with “Beyond”. BP, we were invited to think, was the beginning of the future without oil. And the globalised BP cannot be pinned down: it is jointly owned by Americans, its drilling rig was built by Koreans, and it pays corporation tax in Bern. Yet just as Chernobyl was dismissed as a failure of a “communist” reactor, Deepwater Horizon is now being blamed on the country with which the US used to enjoy a “special relationship”. Obama needs, in his own words, “an ass to kick”.

Postwar prosperity in the west laid the foundation for environmental awareness. Now environmental awareness must provide the basis for prosperity in developing countries. These countries will adopt sustainable policies to the extent that the affluent countries invest in their development and adopt a new vision of prosperity and growth. China, India, Brazil and African countries will not agree to any approach that tries to limit their efforts to achieve economic parity – and rightly so.

But does the future lie with a global environmental policy based on carbon trading, which amounts to the global sale of indulgences for CO2 sins? Or will we have the courage to invent and realise a new age of solar energy in which prosperity is not an environmental sin, and when everything from cows to electric toothbrushes is blamed for contributing to CO2 emissions? “It is time to introduce clean forms of energy,” Obama has said. If he can ring in an era that is truly Beyond Petroleum, Big Oil’s Bastille will be doomed.

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OBAMA ANNOUNCES $2 Billion Solar Award

Listen Here

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Intersolar North America

Taking place from July 13-15 in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West Hall, promotes the development of business opportunities throughout the U.S. solar industry. More than 550 U.S.-based and international exhibitors and 20,000 trade visitors are expected.

Facing Tough PV Manufacturing Challenges: Intersolar North America 2010 to Host Inaugural PV Group North American Fab Managers Forum

Leading Solar Cell-Makers Will Convene at July Event in San Francisco

SEMI PV Group today announced that the first annual North American Fab Managers Forum will be held at Intersolar North America 2010 in San Francisco, California on July 12, 2010. Hosted by SEMI PV Group, the Fab Managers Forum is focused on addressing shared supply chain challenges and improving customer-supplier relations across the photovoltaic supply chain.

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Lobbying for Solar

NEW YORK — Applied Materials Inc. spent $320,000 lobbying the federal government in the first quarter of the year on energy legislation and other issues.

That’s more than double the $130,000 the company spent in the same quarter a year ago, according to congressional disclosure forms, but down from $470,000 spent in the quarter before.

Applied Materials provides technology used by solar panel and semiconductor manufacturers. It lobbied the U.S. House, Senate and various federal agencies on the American Clean Energy & Security Act, which would establish a cap-and-trade system to set limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

The company also listed a House bill that would direct the Energy Department to establish a solar energy research program.

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A source of solar energy?

Megan Epler Wood’s Mission

A new generation of Ecotourism professionals

Ecotourism icon Megan Epler Wood was recently named a Fellow with the Institute at the Golden Gate. In that role as well as others she is on a mission to help inspire a new generation of ecotourism professionals. Megan Epler Wood founded The International Ecotourism Society in 1990, the first and largest ecotourism NGO in the world and was its president for 12 years. Under her leadership, TIES developed a membership program in over 100 countries, publications, workshops and stakeholder meetings that reached tens of thousands, and an international communications program that reached millions.

Epler Wood has been a keynote speaker at events in over a dozen countries. She has lectured at Harvard, Duke, Columbia Business School, and the International Centre for Responsible Tourism at Leeds Metropolitan University in the U.K. She was the lead ecotourism lecturer at George Washington University from 1995-2000. Megan lectured on ecotourism planning as a tool in economic development at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain in April 2008.

LISTEN to her recent interview with QuestPointnTheMix.com.

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