Intelligent Travel

One Japanese Airport Has Very Chill Idea

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Snow and airports typically aren't friends. Delays, cranky customers, and even crankier ticket agents are in the forecast at the check-in line after Mother Nature dumps a load of the white stuff. But one airport in Japan is extending an eco-friendly hand to its usual nemesis. Beginning in 2010, the New Chitose Airport in Hokkaido, Japan, will start collecting some of its 20-30 feet of annual snowfall and use it to help cool the building during summer months.

By using heat-insulating materials, an estimated 45 percent of the snow could be preserved. The remaining melted snow will be put to use to chill the airport's liquid cooling system. The island has been experimenting with such cooling techniques since 1998.

The northernmost and least-developed of Japan's islands, Hokkaido is known for its brutal winters and splendid skiing conditions. Capital city Sapporo holds an annual Snow Festival in February, one of the largest winter events in Japan. By taking advantage of one of the island's most abundant natural resource, the New Chitose airport will reduce its CO2 emissions by 2,100 tons per year.

Read More: IT rounded up a host of green airports worldwide last month, including Boston's Logan International Airport's wind energy initiative, which helped it earn the distinction of the first LEED-certified airport terminal in the U.S.

Photo: Winter scene in Hokkaido, via Kaz&Masae's Flickr

Saving Africa's Lions

Imagine for a moment that you are a Maasai tribesman in Kenya and your entire livelihood is invested in your livestock. One day, a lion attacks one of your cows, killing it. Enraged, you set about to seek justice and protect your cattle from further harm. But justice today is not the same as it once was. The Maasai once used spears alone to take down lions, but now, with the rise of poisonous insecticides, it's simple for you to spread some poison on the carcass while the lion has wandered away. When the lion returns with its cubs, it ingests the poison. But so does the rest of the pride. In the span of a few hours, an entire family of lions is wiped out. Your cattle are safe...for now. But there are side effects: The region's economy, dependent on tourism, becomes unstable, and the fragile ecosystem of East Africa is shattered.

This was the reality facing Tom Hill, who began his work on lion conservation efforts in the Kenyan bush 16 years ago. As a trustee of the Maasailand Preservation Trust (known as the Ol Donyo Wuas Trust in Kenya), Hill has worked on the Mbirikani Group Ranch; and he has watched the population of lions deteriorate in the Amboseli-Tsavo Ecosystem (Located at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro). The arrival of poison in the region has only hastened the problem. In 2003, he says, "We lost eight lions in one afternoon. It was the last great pride of the Chyulu Hills."

It was shortly after losing that pride that Hill and his co-founder, Richard Bonham, began speaking with the Maasai community about creating a better way to account for their losses. The MPT had long been established in the region and had relationships with tribal elders. But, Hill says, they needed to find a reason to make it worthwhile for the 10,000 people in the community to want to live alongside such beasts. "We realized that if we didn’t do something significant the lion population was going to go extinct," he says. "So we sat under trees with elders for months talking about life for the Maasai and the nature of conflict with wildlife. We tried to see how could we develop a solution that could stabilize the predator population, and save them from extinction, while saving the quality of life for the people." It was out of those meetings that they developed a novel system called the Mbirikani Predator Compensation Fund.

Taxis Go From Yellow to Green

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Toyota Prius hybrids from Iowa City's Black and Gold Cab Company

Cities across the U.S. are making a fashion statement that seems to be catching on—green is the new yellow. Taxis in many major cities are becoming more environmentally friendly by switching to low-emission vehicles. By taking this leap, taxis, which are the ultimate offenders of continuous stop-and-go traffic, will vastly decrease their contribution of carbon emissions on the road.

After reading a post from our friends at Inhabitat about Boston taxis recently taking the initiative to go green, we decided to see what other cities were making the same effort to decrease their carbon tire track.  What we found was a spread of cities and individuals offering green transportation to those in need, including locals and travelers abroad. 

Arlington, VA - Introduced to the greater Washington area as  “the first carbon-neutral [taxi] fleet in the U.S.” earlier this year, EnviroCab offers only environmentally friendly vehicles to its customers. They even go the extra mile by offsetting their carbon emissions and then some in an effort to be the first carbon-negative taxi service in the world.

Boston - A major part of the overall plan to improve the city’s taxi system, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino calls for all taxis to be replaced by hybrids within seven years.  Along with these efforts to go green, the plan also requires drivers to install credit card machines and bars the wearing of sweatpants and T-shirts on the job (which isn't exactly green, but hey, it's something).

Chicago - Here, the transition to hybrids started with the help of a little green friend, Kermit the Frog. In an energy campaign launched by Ford Motor Company, a fleet of Ford Escape Hybrids, featuring the car's spokesfrog Kermit, are providing green taxi services in Chicago.

Denver - Metro Taxi, Denver’s largest taxi service, offers a number of Toyota Prius hybrids to its customers.  Taking the term quite literally, these taxis are identifiable by their green paint jobs. But you shouldn't take the green for granted, as more recently, the Yellow Cab Company of Denver also started to
offer hybrid cabs.

Mmmm... Sustainable Sushi

A few weeks ago, we got all kinds of hungry when we posted about the new sustainable sushi restaurant, Tataki, in San Francisco. But for those of you who can't make it out to San Fran, there's now a set of guidebooks just released by the Blue Ocean Institute, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the Environmental Defense Fund that will give you a lesson on which fish should, and shouldn't, make it into your maki roll. Each org has their own version of the guide (the Environmental Defense Fund's is slightly more focused on consumer health), but they decided to band together and present a united front to make the public more aware about the role that sushi plays in the sustainable seafood movement.

"There's a lot of awareness about seafood – but not about sushi," says Ken Peterson, the Communications Director at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. "Even though people know they’re eating raw fish," they often don't relate to it the way they would to, say, dolphin-safe tuna, he says, and speculates that's perhaps because many dishes are identified in Japanese. So these bilingual guides will instruct users to consider how the fish are farmed and caught, and whether they're being threatened by overfishing. According to the guide, bluefish is on the no-go list, as the species population has dropped 90 percent in the past 30 years because of overfishing. Also on the no list: monkfish ("ankoh"), red snapper ("tai") and freshwater eel ("unagi"). Instead, try U.S.-farmed abalone ("awabi"), albacore tuna from the U.S. and Canada ("maguro") and farmed arctic char ("iwana"), which are all are more sustainable choices.

These guides will be available as wallet-sized cards and are free to download, but I think that the digital versions, available on PDAs, are great for travelers. The Monterey Bay Aquarium's can be accessed by going to mobile.seafoodwatch.org, while the Environmental Defense Fund's Seafood Selector can be accessed through m.edf.org/seafood. And the Blue Ocean Institute just launched the FishPhone program this month, allowing patrons to text the name of the fish and get a text back with its environmental assessment.

As part of the launch, the Monterey Bay Aquarium is also launching a "virtual sushi party" on Facebook today, which encourages participants to go out into their communities, eat sushi, and report back with status updates on the fish they found. We'll be happy to oblige them.

Read More: Time Magazine reports on the sustainable sushi movement. And read more about the global fish crisis in last April's issue of National Geographic Magazine.

Image by Meomi for the Monterey Bay Aquarium

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Proximity Goes Platinum

The Proximity Hotel in Greensboro, North Carolina

A few months ago, we ran this fantastic video, produced by former researcher Alison Ogden and NG Channel Advanced Media Producer Chris Keener about the opening of the Proximity Hotel in Greensboro, North Carolina. At the time, Alison interviewed hotel manager Dennis Quaintance about the steps he was taking to make the hotel achieve LEED platinum status for sustainable building design (recycled building materials, solar panels, and even waterless urinals were among the more inspired design elements). So we were pleased to hear that the U.S. Green Building Council recently awarded the platinum rating to the hotel, making it one of the greenest buildings in the country, and the first building in the hospitality industry to receive the platinum status.

This coincides well with a recent TripAdvisor survey, which found that Americans are increasingly interested in choosing green lodging options (and sustainable travel in general, in fact). So message to hotels: it's a smart idea to go green, let's see more of it soon.

Photo: courtesy of the Proximity Hotel

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Geotourism Innovators Honored at Summit

Last week, National Geographic was proud to be the host of the first-ever Geotourism Challenge Summit, which took place Oct. 14 and 15 at our headquarters in Washington, DC. The summit brought together winners and finalists of the Geotourism Challenge – a global competition of tourism-related projects that promote natural and cultural heritage while improving the well-being of local residents (you can learn more about the project from the video, above).

The three winners–the Yachana Foundation (Ecuador), 3 Sisters Adventure Trekking (Nepal), and Rios Tropicales (Costa Rica)– were selected out of a total of 321 entries from 83 countries for their innovative approaches in promoting geotourism, which is defined as “tourism that sustains or enhances the geographical character of a place- its environment, culture, aesthetics, heritage and the well-being of its residents.” Each of the three winning projects received a $5,000 award. The competition was carried out by Ashoka’s Changemakers and the National Geographic Society’s Center for Sustainable Destinations (CSD).   

Summit participants discussed a series of new geotourism initiatives. Beginning in 2009, the Global Geotourism Network plans to provide an Internet-based platform for tourism professionals and travelers to share information and tools to develop projects and set new standards for destination stewardship. The network is a project of the Montreal-based Centre of Excellence for Destinations (CED) in collaboration with the CSD.

A second Geotourism Challenge sponsored by National Geographic and Ashoka will be launched in January 2009. 

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VIDEO: Algae to Power Jets?

A few weeks ago, we reported on several new research grants which will help fund the development of algae as a source of jet fuel. Well our friends over at National Geographic News have put together a video on the subject, so you can see how the process works in all of its green glory. Thanks to the news team for giving us the clip. 

World Conservation Congress

There's been some exciting news coming out of Barcelona this week, as over 8,000 of the world's leading environmental decision-makers, including heads of states, Nobel Prize winners, philanthropists, and business leaders, have gathered there for the ICUN World Conservation Congress. One big announcement yesterday came from Ted Turner, founder and chairman of the United Nations Foundation, who unveiled the world's first Global Sustainable Tourism Criteria program which outlines a bevy of best practices that will serve as "common framework to guide the emerging practice of sustainable tourism and to help businesses, consumers, governments, non-governmental organizations and education institutions to ensure that tourism helps, rather than harms, local communities and the environment."

The Global Sustainable Tourism Criteria stems from the work of 30 international organizations, including National Geographic's Center for Sustainable Destinations, and together, this group aims to address the four major areas of interest for sustainable tourism: effective planning; maximizing social and economic benefits to local communities; and the reduction of negative impacts to both cultural and environmental heritage sites. Enumerating key points like water conservation and energy efficiency, fair labor standards, and local sourcing of food items, the criteria will serve as a tool to instruct businesses, tour operators, NGOs, and, of course, travelers on how best to find and support sustainable practices.

For Erika Harms, the executive director of Sustainable Development at the United Nations Foundation, the creation of the guidelines was a natural process that stemmed from one question: What exactly is sustainable tourism? Reached by phone from Barcelona, she explained to me that up until now, everyone you asked that question might have a different answer. And many groups were working to respond to public demands for more responsible tourism by creating their own sustainable credentials.

"We looked at anywhere from 75 to 130 certifications around the world, some of which were regional – but none were global in nature," Harms says. She explains that the launch of these international guidelines are the first step in the process. In a few years, they hope to have a recognizable accreditation process (think of a Good Housekeeping seal) that the public will be able to easily identify. "This is all done under the U.N. umbrella – which gives it that global focus – and this is critical to us," she says. "Through the U.N. we access the governments, and through governments we access the people, and that's how we'll make it happen."

We're happy to hear about this important first step.

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Wallace J. Nichols on Turtles... and Tacos

Wallace J. Nichols (right) and Jeffrey Seminoff release an adult female hawksbill sea turtle with a satellite transmitter in El Salvador

While fact-checking an upcoming story on the pros and cons of development in Baja California, Senior Researcher Meg Weaver stumbled upon the story of Adelita, a loggerhead turtle who migrated nearly 7,500 miles from Baja, California to Japan in 1996. Conservationist, academic, and activist Dr. Wallace J. Nichols helped pin down the facts of Adelita's astonishing journey and took some time to tell IT about his current projects, what he's passionate about, and where to find Baja's legendary fish tacos.

Can you tell us a bit about the work you've done with the California Academy of Sciences?

I've been a research associate at the California Academy of Sciences [in San Francisco] since 1999. CAS just reopened Sept. 27 as the greenest museum in the world. It is spectacular. I can't imagine a better place to be associated with, as CAS has a great history of sea turtle research and is the center of natural history education for our coast.

How did your interest in and love of turtles begin?

It started when I was a kid, chasing animals in the creeks and hills. We used to catch snapping turtles and paint numbers on their shells and release them. When we recaptured turtles with numbers, we'd figure out the size of the population using simple algebra. Essentially that's what we do now with sea turtles in the Pacific!

What draws you to turtles and compels you to devote your life working to study and conserve them?

There's something core about turtles that's hard to explain. I just dig them. I guess it's a combination of their shape, their tenacity, their migrations, that they're ancient animals that were on Earth with the dinosaurs (I was a big dinosaur fan as a kid), and their endangered status. It doesn't hurt that they generally like warm, sunny, remote places, and so do I.

Airports Going Green

I was interested to read a recent story in USA Today about several airports' efforts to try and "green" their facilities. To me, airports seem to be an extension of the carbon footprint we create while flying. Think of it: sitting in a terminal, eating fast food and drinking bottled water, and throwing away items we'd typically recycle because there never seem to be enough bins. So I was heartened to hear of some of the efforts underway at terminals across the country.

• Boston's Logan airport has installed a set of 20 wind turbines that will generate 3 percent of the airport's energy a year. It also has the first LEED certified terminal in the U.S., with sensor-lights, low-flow toilets, and large glass windows that allow for natural light and heat.
• Denver International and Fresno Yosemite airports have allocated some of their land to install solar panels, which they hope will offset some of their energy costs. Denver has also found a way to reuse all of the de-icing fluid that's used on airplanes during winter: It's mixed with snow and used as antifreeze or as "flushing fluid" in toilets.
• Speaking of toilets, Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson is installing both lower-flow toilets and urinals, which they estimate will save them 44 million gallons of water a year.
• Seattle-Tacoma requires that all of their concession stores' coffee grounds (that's 143 tons a year) be composted and plans to begin charging all of their concessions per pound of trash that they create (recycled goods will not be charged).

Some promising first steps for sure. Have you seen other "green" efforts in your travels internationally? Let us know in the comments, below.

Photo: Mark Garfinkel for USA TODAY