10 Tips to Be An Eco-Friendly Traveler

Until recently, most travel, both business and personal, has followed an unsustainable model. With more people traveling each year, it’s even more important now to consider how our choices affect the global community.

Here are 10 simple tips to be a more socially-aware and eco-conscious traveler. While some of these tips may seem like extra work when planning your next trip, we must remember that we only have this one planet. If we want to continue enjoying our summer vacations every year (and allow future generations to also experience the beautiful cultures, flora and fauna of our world), then we need to be mindful of how our exciting travel plans can have either a positive or negative ripple effect on the communities we’re visiting.

1. Bring your own stainless steel bottle, travel mug or reusable bag. Travel with the mantra of “waste less, use less.” Water is so very important for you and our planet, and many places offer clean drinking water so you don’t need to purchase a new plastic bottle of water every day. Just refill your stainless steel one!

2. Treat the area you’re visiting with respect. If you’re white water rafting, hiking in the jungle or deep sea diving, remember you are entering the “home” of the natural world. Just like you wouldn’t want someone to come into your house and destroy it, they also want to live in peace. Pick up trash when you see it – don’t think someone else is going to do it! And most definitely don’t leave anything behind!

One of the most common things to do during a beach vacation is collect seashells. While they are pretty, they are also a part of the natural environment and often someone’s home. Don’t remove items from the natural environment; they have a purpose and are there for a reason.

3. Explore and discover. Try out the local culture and flavors; experience and learn about the community in which you’re staying. Choose to support locally-owned businesses and restaurants, not chains. Ask questions and talk to the local people; learn who they are, how they live and what they want out of life. Respect both the similarities and differences.

4. Offset your travel with carbon credits. Whether traveling by plane, train, car or boat, it’s important to purchase carbon offsets from a reputable company to reduce the harm we create when traveling outside of our local area.

5. Research the places where you’ll be staying and choose to support hotels that are making a difference and looking beyond the typical profit-only business model. Hotels that are truly sustainable will ensure their bottom line but also provide benefits to the local community and environment. Make sure they aren’t just green washing their claim of being eco. Find out if they hire from the local community, if they recycle and/or compost, if they use reusable soap and shampoo bottles (instead of the tiny plastic ones that just create more waste). There are lots of ways to green a hotel and it’s important to know if they have more than just a towel change policy and low-flow toilet.

6. Be mindful of your interactions with wild animals. Keep a safe distance from any wild animal and do not ever approach one. Never leave out food or feed animals in the wild. And please don’t use flash when taking photographs! How would you like it if someone was taking multiple close-up photos of you and having the flash go off each time? Also, do not purchase animals to take home with you or products made from animals. Whether it’s coral, wool, seashells or alligator skin, remember — it belongs to the animal who lives and breathes, just like you!

7. Choose to not participate in programs that hold animals in captivity. While it may seem fun to “swim with the dolphins,” it is not necessarily fun for the dolphin who is held in a tiny pen for his entire life. By not supporting these “animal” amusement parks and tours, we are decreasing the demand for them.

8. Be aware of the natural resources you’re using and try to reduce whenever possible. Turn off the lights and air conditioning/fans before leaving your room, take shorter showers and use the faucet only as needed. If traveling in an area where you’re unsure if the tap water will be safe, contact your hotel and ask them if they have a filtration system so you can fill up your reusable stainless steel bottle instead of having to purchase plastic bottles (which often do not get recycled and just end up in a landfill or, worse, a waterway that leads to the ocean).

9. Give back. Contact your hotel before arriving and ask if they have any volunteer programs you can participate in or if there are any materials you can bring for the local schools or community centers. On a recent trip to Costa Rica, I brought art supplies for the nonprofit organization, Earth Equilibrium. It was an opportunity to give back and support the local communities I was visiting.

10. Act as a positive role model for other tourists. Talk the talk and walk the walk!

Hopefully when you leave the place you’re visiting, it will be in the same, or better, shape than when you arrived. And just as a quick side note, you probably noticed that all of these things can also be done in your daily life. By living a little more intentionally every day, we can continue creating positive ripples in the world and protect our precious planet for generations to come.

Chrissy Gruninger is a conservation photographer and author, dedicated to helping others see the harmony in all that exists on our beautiful, yet fragile, planet. Her weekly blog, and most recent book focus on creating a healthier, happier and more harmonious life for all.

Photo credit: dddaantje

4 Simple Reasons Why You Should Grow Your Own Food

We are very fortunate to live in a time when at any time of the day or night we can easily walk or drive to the store and have a selection of various produce available at our fingertips. With this luxury why would you want to spend your time growing your own food? I have a pretty simple answer to that: We are human. As humans, this is what we do. We grow food. It’s what we have been doing for thousands of years. It hasn’t been until the past hundred or so years that we have put the responsibility of producing food into the hands of others.

Who are these people that are responsible for growing and handling our food? And what are they doing to our food? How is treated? What are they spraying on it? Is that good for you? Is that good for the land? Who really knows? They could be professionals who have business interests more in mind than our health. What we do know is that if we go to the supermarket food will be there year-round. I am no scientist nor have I extensively studied this, but common sense tells me that this could not be good for us or for the land because it doesn’t seem natural or sustainable.

Some questions to get you thinking the next time you are in the grocery store buying food:

• Who grew that?
• How was it treated?
• How was the worker who picked it treated?
• Do these people have my best interest in mind, or are they just trying to make a higher profit?

In May 2009, I took control. I started growing my own food without any experience or land. During that time I was living on the fourth floor of a New York City apartment. All I had was my 2-foot by 3-foot fire escape that I turned into an organic vegetable garden. Despite the limited space, I was able to grow lettuces, kales, swiss chard, peppers, cherry tomatoes and a variety of herbs.

In April 2010, I moved to Los Angeles, where I started a balcony garden that I’m continuing to grow more food on. In comparison to my fire escape, the 13-foot by 4-foot balcony seems like a huge farm. Space is not an issue. If I could grow on a fire escape, you can grow given whatever space restrictions you have.

Here are four reasons to start growing your own food:

You’ll Appreciate Your Food More
By no means do I expect everyone to go out and start their own garden because I know that ain’t gonna happen. But what I do expect is for everyone to grow at least one herb or vegetable.
Why? Because it will open your eyes and change your relationship with food. It will help to re-establish that connection that we as a human race have lost. You will also appreciate the food that much more because you grew it and took care of it. Not only will you appreciate the food that you grew on your own, you will start to appreciate the food that you buy as well.

It’s Natural and Sustainable
Food supplies us with the sustenance and nutrition we need to survive. The taks of supplying us with food is not in the hands of other people. Look back at history. Civilizations were built around food. They were set up around areas that had access to fertile land to grow food. Think about everything that goes into food and what was built around it: growing, tending, harvesting, preparing, eating and sharing food. These days we just fast forward to the eating part, which we often do on the run. There is much more to food that just eating it (though that is fun).

Why if you live in the northeast part of the United States, can you get pineapple, mangoes and other tropical fruits year-round or at all for that matter? I can help to answer that question. It’s because the food is being transported from distances far away to get to you. Did you know that on average food travels about 1,500 miles to get to our plates? Now think about the oil and resources that go into getting that food to your plate.

You’ll Be Helping the Environment
We live in a great time where so much information is readily available to us at the click of a mouse. The downfall of that is that so much information is readily available to us at the click of a mouse. We are presented with all kinds of messages about how we impact our personal health and that of the environment. In reading some of the information out there, it feels disempowering to see something like the BP oil spill or the ice caps melting.

I wanted to do something instead of sitting back and letting someone else worry about the situation. It didn’t matter how small it was, I just wanted to do something. Food has always been a love of mine. I mean, who doesn’t love food? So I decided that I would grow my own. It would be beneficial to me and to the environment.

It’s Easy and Inexpensive
You don’t need to buy expensive tools and materials to start growing your own food. You can make a self-watering container for less than $5 out of recycled materials. You could turn a 2-liter soda bottle into a self-watering container or a hanging planter. These are some ideas to get you started. There are plenty of ways to make gardening cheap so you don’t have to invest lots of money. Check out my previous post on Crazy Sexy Life about Urban Gardening for the Everyday Person for more details.

Now you can get back to being human and growing your food. One plant will surely make a difference. Start growing some of your food today.

Photo credit: miss mass

Making Love a Habit

“Love and intimacy are at the root of what makes us sick and what makes us well, what causes sadness and what brings happiness, what makes us suffer and what leads to healing…I am not aware of any other factor in medicine- not diet, not smoking, not exercise, not stress, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery- that has a greater impact on our quality of life, incidence of illness and premature death from all causes.” –Dr. Dean Ornish

These words began a revolution of thinking about the critical connections between our physical well being and our level of connection in life. As a heart doctor, Ornish paved the way in demonstrating not just a mind-body connection, but a heart connection which determines our well being, ability to heal, our most basic ability to enjoy life. That our physical heart is deeply connected and influenced by our relationships is intuitive and has been understood in this light since ancient civilizations, so in some ways the scientific studies only underline what we have always known. Love is the cure as well as the illness in our world, and evolving our ability to love increases not only our chances of survival but creates a depth and meaning in life that only happen in relationships.

The healing effects of intimacy and connection extend deeply into the physical act of lovemaking. Hundreds of major medical studies have shown that an active sex life leads to a longer life, better heart health, a healthier immune response, reduction in chronic pain symptoms, lower rates of depression and even protection against some cancers. Men who have regular sex (only twice per week) have half as many heart attacks as men who only have sex once per month. In fact, a regular garden variety sex life has been shown to extend life by as much as ten years. People who enjoy a meaningful sex life are less anxious, fearful and inhibited.

If you are looking to green your lifestyle, why not start here. All the habits that you develop about sustaining your environment and home apply to your relationships. Feed your relationship with the same energy that you bring to the selection and preparation of your food shopping and cooking habits. Giving your time to composting and recycling is no different than finding the space to air out your feelings. Making commitments to simplify your life and reducing impact on the environment requires the same amount of mental energy as constructing the space and time for deep and meaningful touch in your days.

Investigating the product ingredients in the love products and toys that you use are a natural extension of a healthy lifestyle and yet one that is surprisingly overlooked. Over 90% of the intimacy products in both the OTC and Adult markets are made with petrochemicals that are used in car engines and oven cleaner. The genitals are the most sensitive tissue in the body, and many of these chemicals can react badly with itching, burning and painful sex, especially among women who have struggled with health issues. The primary preservatives in these products, methyl and propyl parabens have been found in breast cancer tissue.

Good love products should make touching, kissing and smelling each other better. They should be made with natural and organic ingredients that don’t make you run for the bath because of the nasty and sticky residue left on your skin. The products you use for love should make you feel like you love yourself and your partner. Scent is the most basic reflex we have when it comes to sexual attraction. Imagine kissing someone who smells bad to you. . Love products that capitalize on true scent are actually waking up the limbic part of your brain, where memory, sexuality and emotion are conveniently stored. The gentle nudge of scents gets that arousal mechanism going and after kissing and massaging with aphrodisiac scents, your imagination (which is a really important sex organ) lets loose. Cleopatra knew this; she was known to make love on a bed of rose petals 10 inches deep.

And just look at the sustainability benefits of making your love life sustainable- not only will you be happier and more optimistic as you take on the challenges of dealing with our quickly-changing biosphere, but you will likely be healthier and have more time to make a real difference. Greening your love has the power to extend out to the world in ways that we can barely imagine. It’s a worthy practice that can only make life more sustainable.

CSL has highlighted a few of Good Clean Love’s products…

Our Future is Vegan

We live on the road. For fourteen years now Madeleine and I have been plying North America’s highways in our ’86 diesel pick-up that pulls our solar-powered fifth wheel “rolling home” across this beautiful land. Although we only drive about fifteen to twenty thousand miles per year, following the geese in spring and fall, and presenting around 150 lectures, concerts, and workshops annually, we are able to get a pretty good glimpse into what’s happening here. For me, two things especially stand out. One—monoculture agribusiness. Huge fields of corn, soybeans, hay, alfalfa, and other grains and legumes grown primarily to feed our billions of hyperconfined cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and fish. Two—hospitals and medical facilities. They are springing up like mushrooms after the rain—in large part due to the flood of people hyperconsuming the flesh, eggs, and milk of the aforementioned creatures.

North and south, east and west, monocultures and hospitals. Drugged and poisoned land with all its inevitable results. According to recent statistics from the Department of Agriculture, a whopping 86 percent of U.S. agricultural land is devoted to just four crops— corn, soy, hay, and wheat—the main crops used to feed and fatten confined animals. By contrast, growing all the vegetables in the U.S. requires only 1.5 percent of our agricultural land! And for all the orchards and vineyards that provide our nuts, berries, and fruits, it’s just 1.6 percent! Just three percent of our farmland produces all our fruits, veggies, and nuts! Talk about small footprint! Last fall, for example, as we were driving through Iowa, and I was delivering lectures promoting veganism in cities and towns throughout Iowa (whew!!), we traveled through countless thousands of acres of soybean fields. We found out that only one small field in the entire state grew soybeans that were used for tofu and soymilk for humans; virtually the entire vast Iowa soy crop was squandered to fatten cows, pigs, and other enslaved animals who were hidden away in their stinking sheds and feedlots far from the major roads. In contrast to this, Russia has been encouraging small-scale family gardens (“dachas”), and these dachas have been an amazing success, now supplying 93 percent of Russia’s potatoes, and 80 percent of all vegetables and fruits! This could be our future as well! If we understand and act.

By reducing vast expanses of our precious forests and prairies to toxic monocultures, where only one species is allowed to grow in order to feed the mistreated animals whose flesh and secretions we are all pressured into eating, we create the ongoing conditions of psychological, ethical, ecological, cultural, and spiritual disconnectedness. These prevent us, as a society, from understanding the roots of our unyielding dilemmas. The violence on our plates reverberates through our bodies, our minds, our culture, and throughout our world. How can we or our elected representatives act wisely while the blood that is running through our veins and brains is polluted with hormone, drug, and pesticide residues, cholesterol, and the fear, panic, and psychotic depression lived by the animals we eat?

By Madeleine Tuttle

It is way beyond time for all of us in our culture to look behind the curtain of institutional denial and bring the light of compassion and awareness to our meals and what our meals require.

Everyone in our culture feels it, I think. The existential doubt, visceral and haunting, about our future. The future of our species. Of the Earth. Our way of living. We feel it, but it’s just too much—so we turn away and focus on the familiar distractions, turning up the volume to drown out the inner knowing.

Yet our sanity longs for truth. More than anything else, veganism is truth. The truth of awareness—of what we’re actually eating! Of what it takes to get it on our plates! Of all the implications of our routine actions. The truth of our interconnectedness with all beings. The truth of our radiant essential nature, free, awake, loving, merciful, and wise. The truth of the ramifications of our meals: of our devastation of oceans for fish to feed chickens and cows whose bodies, babies, and yearnings we steal. The truth of our repressed and deadened horror. The truth of our inability to make some pretty obvious connections. Eating violence and terror, we long to avoid the truth.

Everywhere, though, the truth is popping up! It’s increasingly difficult to avoid hearing and seeing the obvious. Eating animal foods destroys the Earth. Drives global climate breakdown. Drives species extinction. Drives ocean depletion and forest devastation, drug addiction, disease, soil loss, water pollution, acidification, toxification, despair, and the mentality of exploitation and elitism and war.

Like the rising sun, the truth is shining brighter every day, revealing the interconnections. Bringing healing, insight, and understanding. And we are awakening. Veganism is the stark and liberating solution to the omnivore’s dilemma, the cultural conundrum bearing down ever more relentlessly as our massive violence toward animals and the Earth and future generations ripens before our eyes.

Happiness, peace, and freedom flow from nonviolence. We are all connected, and our joy is in blessing others. I don’t know how it will happen, but this I know in my bones: our future is veganism. Our future selves are vegans – delightedly and powerfully aware of the ancient truth of our magnificence. We are not shrinking, reducing, commodifying, cruel and numb people who heartlessly destroy the Earth and the sacred web of life—who have no future and have lost our purpose by stealing the purposes of others. We are consciousness, grace, kindness, creative inspiration, joy, and understanding. When light shines, darkness simply disappears without a trace. No fight is required. Letting the light shine through, breathing deeply and fully, we partake of the infinite, moment after moment.

This, then, is the situation in a nutshell:

We are all beings of light and awareness and love, born into a culture of violence, ignorance, and exclusion. We take on its darkness and fear, and the core ritual used by our culture to effect this is our daily meals, where we are forced to participate in routine killing by eating and buying the flesh and secretions of imprisoned, terrified animals. Our path to freedom lies in freeing these animals. Veganism is the feminine wisdom of interconnectedness, the spiritual and practical key to happiness and peace for all. She is our future. She is beckoning to us.

We all live on the road—the road to vegan living and to the harmony, sustainability, freedom, and co-creative celebration shining within.

Will Tuttle, Ph.D., composer, pianist, and Zen priest, is author of The World Peace Diet and is cofounder of Karuna Music & Art and the Prayer Circle for Animals.