Earth Promise “21 in 21″ Interview Series – Tim Leffel, Travel Writer   Tim Leffel – Travel Writer Award-winning travel writer Tim Leffel is author of several books including Make Your Travel Dollars Worth a Fortune and Traveler’s Tool Kit: Mexico and Central America. He has dispatched articles from five continents, for a wide variety of media outlets. He frequently reviews eco-friendly items on the Practical Travel Gear blog  and is editor of Perceptive Travel , a narrative webzine featuring articles from wandering book authors.  In addition to the links just mentioned, for more information about Tim, check out http://www.TimLeffel.com   Earth Promise: What changes, or Earth Promises as we call them, have you made in your lifestyle to be more green?  Changes in home, travel, work, with your kids and community?  Tim Leffel: I’ve done a lot of standard things over the years at home, like composting, recycling, and installing compact fluorescents. Plus my little car will sit in the driveway for days without moving: I bike and walk a lot in my hundred-year-old neighborhood. I wear out things before getting rid of them and we try to recycle things we don’t want any more through yard sales and donations. In everyday conversations I try to make my daughter think about the idea of waste and conservation. I have learned to buy quality travel clothes that will last instead of buying cheap things that I have to get rid of in a year or two. EP: Were you “green” as a child? TL: Yes, but that’s because my parents were schoolteachers and we were poor! Plus we lived in a rural area without garbage collection, so we had to haul all the trash to the county dump. Not much got wasted around our house. EP: What was your first, ah ha! Green moment? TL: Seeing a pile of plastic water bottles six feet high and about 40 feet across on an otherwise pristine island in Thailand. Most of those were consumed in an hour by tourists and then tossed. I’m sure they’re all still there, but the pile is much bigger. EP: Tell me a little about what you have written about in the travel world and the environment? TL: I have some travel books out and I run the Practical Travel Gear Blog which, as its name would suggest, covers items that the average person can afford rather than $500 windbreakers and $4,000 diving watches like most magazines do. I try to review as much eco-friendly gear as I can and also mention when the green claim isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I’ve written about responsible travel for Transitions Abroad magazine (now online only as TransitionsAbroad.com) for nearly two decades, including several articles on lowering your environmental impact as a traveler. EP: I am going to say an aspect of travel and you tell me some ways I can green my experience.  First one – staying at a hotel. TL: The simplest way to be more green is to choose hotels that aren’t wasteful to start with. Small, family-run hotels owned by locals are nearly always a better choice than an international chain hotel, no matter what kind of initiatives that chain hotel has put in place lately. The price has very little to do with it, though in all fairness a true eco-resort is going to cost more than a basic hotel because they have higher system costs (such as solar panels or waste processing). Plus they’re hauling recyclables to some faraway spot instead of just tossing them into a hole or relying on local municipal services—which are usually seriously lacking outside of the U.S. and Europe.  Also remember that air conditioning sucks up a huge amount of energy and in a lot of breezy tropical beach areas it’s not really necessary if the architecture is designed correctly. EP: Air travel. TL: People get really hung up on carbon offsets and the benefits of driving instead of flying, but after a certain distance air travel is more efficient in comparison to, say, driving from New York to Buenos Aires. Drive or take a train for places you can get to in half a day and don’t use private jets, but commercial flights are better past a certain point. (Plus if you don’t buy that ticket, the plane will still go without you—unless you all boycott at the same time, for the same route.) If you can fly direct, obviously that’s better than connecting in some out-of-the-way hub in the wrong direction. But to think people will all stop flying and we’ll go back to four-day train trips across the country anytime soon is a pipe dream. Life moves too fast now. EP: Preparation for a trip. TL: If you’re going someplace where you can’t drink the tap water, get a water purifier! Boycotting plastic water bottles will have a bigger impact than anything: less waste, less production cost, and less garbage on the roadsides. (I personally love the Steripen—very compact and dead simple to use.) Buy durable gear that will last instead of travel clothes and luggage that you have to replace every two years. Know where you’re going: buy (or check out from the library) a good guidebook so you can figure out how to get around efficiently. EP: Where I travel. TL: This doesn’t matter all that much in the grand scheme of things—it’s a global world that’s all connected now. But I would argue that people in a developing country could use your travel money to better use than ones in say, France. Otherwise try to get the most use out of the energy used up on a long flight. If you’re going all the way to Bali or Sydney, spend some real time there instead of doing a quick jaunt of a week or less. Of course I would be remiss if I didn’t say traveling in your own region by car is always going to be more efficient than flying to South Africa. Some areas of the globe are overtaxed, but I’m not going to tell someone not to go to Machu Picchu or the Galapagos for the sake of preservation: it’s the responsibility of the local governments to take steps that will keep the numbers in check because we can’t collectively put aside our own desires to do that. It’s a rare person that’s going to say, “I won’t go to Ankor Wat because I’ve heard the foot traffic and hotel water they use are hurting the monuments.” EP: How can someone save money by traveling green?  Give me some examples. TL: Taking public transportation is not only more efficient, it’s far cheaper than taxis and rental cars. The smallest rental cars are generally the cheapest and if you can drive a stick shift, you’ll save money doing that in Europe while getting better gas mileage. Internationally, small, independent hotels are generally a better value than ones run by corporations based a thousand miles away—and they use less energy. Simple restaurants or street stalls that use lots of local ingredients in season are almost always going to cost less than institutions catering to the whims of homesick tourists. Moving around slowly in your travels instead of zipping from place to place to check items off a list is not only greener, it costs less. EP: You have visited many countries as a travel writer.  Which ones do you feel care the most about the environment?  What about the least? TL: Costa Rica is the model that everyone else looks to in terms of green tourism. They’re not perfect and many would argue the increased popularity is offsetting many of those efforts, but they get it right more often than most. New Zealand is probably a better example because they have more financial resources to get coordinated and preserve parkland. Iceland is blessed with geothermal energy supplying most of the country’s hot water and electricity. If they didn’t share the American obsession with big automobiles, they would be the greenest country on the planet without even trying. They could be completely carbon-free in a decade or less. There’s a lot of awareness elsewhere in Europe, but also a lot of mixed signals: an aversion to tap water in restaurants and an outright ban on more efficient farming methods for a start. The worst countries (and cities) are the ones where there is little commitment from the government. Mexico City is getting better because the mayor really cares about improving the environment, but Saigon and New Delhi get worse every year because nobody is making the environment a priority. In developing countries, the citizens have too many basic needs problems for action to bubble up from individuals like it does in richer countries. It has to start at the top or there at least has to be a clear economic incentive to be less wasteful, either a penalty or a prize. EP: Do you feel that companies related to the travel industries such as airlines, hotels, cruise ships, etc. are behind the green movement? TL: Now they finally are, but only because they’ve been whacked upside the head with it and forced to act. Last year the Explora hotel on Easter Island opened as the first LEED-certified hotel in South America. I think they’re still the only one. As of last fall there were only 13 of them in the whole U.S. What have they been waiting for? Airlines didn’t start thinking about efficiency until oil hit $100 a barrel. Cruise ships have been dragged kicking and screaming into making changes to their wasteful method of travel. I stayed in quite a few “green” hotels when I first started traveling around the world in the early 1990s, so it’s not like this concept just came out of nowhere. Most big corporations just didn’t start to act until customers forced their hand and energy costs started rising. They’ve jumped on for economic reasons and because of customer complaints, not because they were out in front of the issue.  EP: Are you seeing an uptick in the amount of “green travel” where people are conscious of making the right choices either in where they go, what they do or how they do it? TL: Yes, it’s becoming a big issue for a lot of travelers and there’s a whole sub-industry sprouting up to take advantage of that. It won’t be long before the local Day’s Inn claims to be a “green hotel” and every travel clothing company has a whole line of supposedly green products. People don’t approach it very logically though and look at the big picture of their actions. Staying at a supposed eco-resort doesn’t make much difference if you flew there on a private jet and you’re going out on Hummer expeditions every day. Taking the train doesn’t help if you chugged four plastic water bottles between you and opened six snack packs in individual wrappings on the way. Traveling by RV is wasteful no matter how energy efficient the RV park is that night. Worrying about offsetting your carbon footprint for a flight is silly if you stay at the most wasteful hotel and take taxis everywhere after arrival. The most visible and talked-about “green travel” initiatives are rarely the ones that have the most impact. EP: What is the one Earth Promise you are going to make in the future that you have not done yet? TL: I think it would be a good idea to install a rain barrel under one of my gutters to use for watering the plants outside, but I never seem to get around to it… EP: Thank you very much.  Great information! Tags: 21 in 21, carbon footprint, change, changes, climate change, conservation, earth, earth day, earth promise, earthpromise, eco-friendly, energy, energy efficient, environment, environmental, global warming, green, green air travel, green changes, green holiday, green hotel, green interviews, green living, green practice, green practices, green tips, green travel, green your travel, interview, interviews, perceptive travel, tim leffel, travel, travel writer

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