Recently in Best Practices Category

Steve Nash - 'The Player' from meathawk on Vimeo.

My football-fanatic fiancé (that's European football, mind you) tipped me off to a great charity event happening this afternoon in New York City's Chinatown. The second annual "Showdown in Chinatown," which is coordinated by the Phoenix Suns' Steve Nash, pits international pro soccer players against an assorted group of NBA all-stars, all in the name of raising money for Football-for-Good, Nash's charity. Football-for-Good helps bring team sports to war-ravaged countries in Africa, and aims to "develop world-class youth football (soccer) academies that are sustainable, community-centered social businesses in regions that have been ravaged by war." They're working to support "human rights and child protection, and a committed global advocate for African players, families and their communities."

This year, in addition to Nash himself (who famously plays soccer in NYC during the off-season to stay in shape), star athletes expected to attend include Claudio Reyna, Thierry Henry, Tony Parker, Javier Zanetti, Raja Bell, Adrian Mutu, Chris Bosh, Ivan Cordoba, Grant Hill, and Giovanni van Brockhurst. And there's a rumor that Yao Ming may swing by. Check out the video that Nash put together to "recruit" the players, it's a whirlwind of travel, and must have been a blast to shoot.

Kickoff starts at 6 p.m. today in Chinatown's Sarah D. Roosevelt Park and it's free to watch. But I can't help but think it's already packed, so maybe you can sit on Yao Ming's shoulders.

Video: Football-for-Good

It worked for the Wright brothers, but what can wind do for beer? Sam Boykin shares the secret of the country's first wind-powered brewpub.

It was the Outer Banks' strong and steady winds that attracted Orville and Wilbur Wright to North Carolina's Kill Devil Hills. And while the Outer Banks Brewing Station may never measure up to the Wright brothers' landmark first flight, it too is using the wind to make history. When owners Aubrey Davis and Eric Reece erected a turbine above their laid-back little brewpub on Earth Day 2008, it became the first wind-powered brewery in the nation. And for folks traveling to the Outer Banks, a picturesque, 200-mile stretch of barrier islands along the East Coast, it's definitely worth a visit.

Davis and Reece first dreamed up the idea of starting a brewpub while volunteering for the Peace Corps in Thailand. Aubrey had spent many summers at his grandparents' place on the Outer Banks, and felt it was an ideal place to launch the business.

The pair, along with award-winning master brewer Scott Meyer, came up with a business plan for an environmentally-friendly restaurant that celebrated the uniqueness of the Outer Banks and its history. They eventually convinced nearly 30 friends and family members to invest in their dream, and in 2001 opened the Outer Banks Brewing Station in a two-story, 7,700-square-foot building inspired by turn-of-the-century lifesaving stations. Some of the custom design details include a boat-shaped bar and two pathways, made from local recycled bricks, which lead from the bar to the brewpub's big bay windows.

Are you a fan of polar bears? (Who isn't?!) Well there's some good news from our friends over at the NatGeo News Watch blog:

Russia will create a new 3.7 million-acre (1.5 million-hectare) park in the Arctic, a central area for the Barents and Kara Sea polar bear populations, WWF said today.

Announcing the park, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said he hoped it would be a major attraction for tourism, and announced that he personally plans to vacation there, WWF said.

The new Russian Arctic park is located on the northern part of Novaya Zemlya, a long island that arcs out into the Arctic Ocean between the Barents and Kara Seas, WWF said. It also includes some adjacent marine areas.

Check out the entire post for more info on the park.

Photo: NGS photo of polar bear in the Russian Arctic by Gordon Wiltsie

Molly Feltner is traveling through Africa, and got the chance to experience a model sustainable hotel in Rwanda.

In my travels to various destinations in the developing world, I've often been disappointed by how some upscale resorts and hotels go out of their way to separate their businesses and guests from the local population. So I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge, located in a farming community right outside Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda.

Set on the slopes of the volcano Sabyinyo, this luxury lodge caters to well-heeled tourists coming to track the park's mountain gorillas and it supports some of the neediest members of the surrounding community. It's managed by Governors' Camp, which operates several high-end lodges and safari camps in East Africa, but is owned by SACOLA, an association of about 18,000 local Rwandans that is sponsored by the International Gorilla Conservation Programme, African Wildlife Foundation, and USAID.

When guests stay at the lodge, $50 per person per night goes to SACOLA. Since the lodge opened in 2007, SACOLA has earned enough to build more than 1,200 houses for survivors of the Rwandan genocide and other needy families, and fund sustainable agriculture projects as well. Sabyinyo also employs locals--90 percent of the staff members are Rwandan--and most of the food and all of the flowers used on the property are grown by community members.

Hitting the road this summer? Just because you're out of your comfort zone doesn't mean that your eco-friendly habits have to go on vacation too. Responsibletravel.com recently surveyed their readers about which travel faux pas they noticed most often in tourists. It's bad enough looking the part, do your best not to act it by avoiding these ill-minded actions.

1. "Littering - especially plastic bags."
2. "Purchasing illegal souvenirs or food produce."
3. "Wasting water in destinations which face shortages e.g. Spain."
4. "Leaving lights on."
5. "Leaving air conditioning on in hotel rooms when you're not in them."
6. "Purchasing mineral water in plastic water bottles when the hotel provides drinkable water for re-fills."
7. "Standing on coral reefs. It takes approx. one hundred years for one inch of coral to grow. By killing it you affect the whole eco system."
8. "Disturbing wild animals by getting as close as possible for a better picture."
9. "Throwing cigarette butts on the ground."
10. "Failing to take advantage of recycling facilities where offered."

Of course, there's hope for all of us, and lots of great ways to stay green while you're traveling. For more tips and ideas, check out Traveler's Ultimate Guide to Sustainable Travel. And National Geographic's Green Guide just launched their huge online package on having an eco-savvy summer, offering tips on what not to bring to the beach, a "How Green is Your Road Trip" quiz, and yes, even a buying guide to eco-friendly beer.

Got your own tip? Share it below.

[via Traveling the Green Way]

Photo: Vasjan Gulka, National Geographic magazine's My Shot

It's been a long time coming, but today marks the opening of one of the biggest public works projects to hit New York City in a generation. The High Line began its life as an elevated railway platform stretching through the western edge of Manhattan, delivering cows to the meatpacking district. Decommissioned in 1980 (the last train delivered a batch of frozen turkeys) it was a subject of intense debate in the neighborhood for almost two decades - between those who sought to preserve the rail line and those who hoped to tear it down and develop the land. Today it has been reopened -- and re-invisioned -- as a fantastic public park. Taking a page from Paris's Promenade Plantée, it's a park lifted above the city streets, an escape from the crowds and a place for contemplation. The design, by James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio & Renfro, features over 100 species of plants and also provides connective tissue to the neighborhood's gallery scene, incorporating art works like Spencer Finches site-specific piece, The River That Flows Both Ways, which is made up of 700 individual panes of blue and green tinted glass, each of which represent light reflected off the Hudson River. It's also been a boon to development in the neighborhood, with over 30 new projects planned for the space surrounding it, said Mayor Bloomberg this morning at the official opening. The first section of the park, which runs from 20th Street to Gansevoort St. (enter at Gansevoort), is now open to the public from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.

The New York Times is calling it "something of a New York fairy tale" and I'm dying to check it out. If you have, let us know what you think!

[Getting to the High Line]

Photo: Iwan Baan, via The High Line Blog

Forty years ago, Cleveland's river burned. Literally. The Cuyahoga River, which winds through Cleveland and Akron, was once one of the most polluted rivers in the United States, having caught fire more than a dozen times since 1868. When it burned in 1969, Time magazine described the Cuyahoga (which means "crooked river" in Iroquois) as the river that "oozes rather than flows" and where a person "does not drown but decays." Needless to say, the 1969 fire spurred environmental concerns and a plethora of environmental legislation was passed, including the Clean Water Act and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.

But where is Cleveland today? According to MSNBC, Rock City still ranks among one of the most polluted cities in the U.S. (In fact, one fifth of the top 25 air-particle polluted cities are located in Ohio. Ouch.) But the city, if ever slowly, is hopping on the green bandwagon, trying to dispose of its bad rap.

As May draws to a close, there are only a few lingering days left of Bike Month, and some good news on the bike front. It turns out that in the first quarter of 2009, Americans bought more bikes than cars, about 2.6 million vs. 2.5 million, according to Dennis Markatos, founder of Sustainable Energy Transition, in a blog on the Huffington Post.

Markatos says that even though the economic downturn has also impacted bike sales (they're down 30 percent from last year) they're still doing better than car sales (which are currently down 35 percent). What does that mean for Americans? More exercise, less CO2 emissions, and more money in your pocket since you're not paying for gas. So if you haven't taken advantage of bike month to tune up your ride, why not try to do so before the month's end?

Events are still happening this weekend in Sacramento, New York City, Colorado, Austin, and Greenville, among other cities. Visit  the calendar available at the League of American Bicyclists to find events in your area.

To get you inspired, we gathered the bicycle photos from our Intelligent Travel Flickr group. Get riding!
 

A woman dips her toes in the sand of Hanalei Bay, the top beach on Dr. Beach's annual list.

With Memorial Day behind us (I do believe the smell of barbecue is still lingering in my nostrils) it's officially the start of beach season in the U.S., and the perfect time to check out the annual list of top ten beaches tallied by Dr. Beach (aka Dr. Stephen P. Leatherman, of Florida International University's Laboratory for Coastal Research).

Dr. Beach judges the beaches using 50 criteria, including water and sand quality, safety, facility availability and environmental management. And ranking number one this year was Hawaii's Hanalei Bay, on the island of Kauai. The two-mile crescent of white-sand beach is lined with palm trees and waterfalls, and has stayed off big developers, much to the relief of tourists and locals alike. Located on the island's North Shore, it's secluded, surrounded by 4,000-foot peaks, and the bay allows for safe swimming during the summer months. I visited the beach while in Kauai two summers ago, and have to agree with Dr. Beach that it's truly idyllic.

Not that you have to travel as far as Hawaii to find a great patch of sand. This list is well rounded, featuring beaches on both the east and west coasts, including two on Long Island (where I'm from, so I can attest to their charms).

You can check out the full list after the jump, and see a slideshow of each beach at National Geographic News. Want more beach tips? Be sure to check out NG's Green Guide Summer planner for great ideas on a smart and eco-savvy summer.

The decline of honeybees--which are not native to the United States--has been a hot topic of research for some time. The bees are dying from colony collapse disorder, a condition in which worker bees suddenly disappear, and that has killed an estimated one in three colonies a year since 2006. Fortunately, many companies, from farmers to hotels, are working to save the bees.

Environmentally conscious group Fairmont Hotels has a swarm of new guests staying at the hotel chain's D.C. property. The hotel has installed three beehives on its roof, which house over 100,000 Italian honeybees. The bees are part of the hotel's culinary program, and sous chef-turned-beekeeper Ian Bens expects the bees to produce some 300 pounds of honey in the first year. The honey will be used in soups, salad dressings, ice cream, and pastries at restaurant Juniper, and eventually Fairmont hopes to turn the honeycomb into candles and soap. Canadian-based Fairmont has beehives at its Vancouver, Toronto, and New Brunswick properties as well.

In the past two years ice cream giant Häagen-Daz has donated some $500,000 to universities to promote honeybee awareness and to research colony collapse disorder. Blueberry farmers in Maine are also trying to help the dying honeybees. Jasper Wyman and Son, the largest blueberry producer in the United States, imports some 10,000 hives each year to pollinate its blueberry fields. According to president Ed Flanagan, there has been an 80 percent spike in cost of pollination in the past few years. The company just donated $50,000 to Penn State to research colony collapse disorder.

Even the 2010 Winter Olympics is doing its part. The Vancouver Convention Center, which is undergoing a huge renovation in preparations for the Olympic Games in 2010, has installed beehives on its 2.4-hectare green roof. The goal of the installation: bees bring business. According to TMCNET.com, "bees are the new 'it' endangered species and urban planners and architects across... are anxious to bolster their numbers in urban settings."

Photo: skb_inspirations via the Intelligent Travel Flickr pool

We recently touched base with Dominique Callimanopulos, founder and CEO of Elevate Destinations, a boutique travel services company specializing in high-quality, environmentally responsible travel and philanthropy, to learn more about her company, their trips, and the good work they do in the communities they visit.

What is Elevate Destinations?

Elevate Destinations is a philanthropic travel company that gives back to the communities we visit. We donate five percent of the net costs of all our trips to vetted NGOs active in conservation and community development in the destination countries. Wherever possible, we select eco-hotels and sustainable lodges that also give back to community. We incorporate community engagement and service elements into our customized itineraries. We have become specialists in the area of donor travel: bringing board members and donors from A-list international organizations to visit projects in the field. We've designed trips for Direct Relief International, EcoLogic, KickStart, The Global Fund for Children, and WaterPartners International, among others.

I see you offer trips in Latin America, Africa, India and Bhutan, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia. Which trips/regions are the most popular?

African safaris are very popular. Central America is on the rise, because it is easy to travel to. We are also getting a lot of requests for Southeast Asia and Bhutan is emerging as a compelling destination as well. This month we will also be introducing trips to Mongolia.

Molly Feltner is traveling through Africa, and shares how one group found a sustainable solution to help the impoverished residents who live alongside Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park.

In Rwanda, conservationists have discovered that you can't protect species like mountain gorillas without also looking after the people who live around their habitat. And in the area around the gorillas' home, Volcanoes National Park, where there are nearly 600 people per square kilometer, the potential for human-wildlife conflict is particularly great. I learned about challenges and some of the possible solutions from former Volcanoes National Park Tourism Warden, Edwin Sabuhoro, whom I met while traveling in Rwanda. As it turns out, cultural tourism is a big part of the answer.

In 2004, Sabuhoro rescued a baby mountain gorilla from poachers who had killed several adult gorillas and where attempting to sell the baby on the black market. The baby survived but the two young poachers received life sentences in prison for their crime. After their conviction, Sabuhoro visited with the poachers' parents to find out why they did it. One of the boy's father said "If you were starving and couldn't feed your family, wouldn't you do something desperate to survive?"

Sabuhoro did further investigation into the lives of the nearly 500,000 poverty-stricken people who live around the park and found that the residents suffered as a result of their proximity to it--animals like Cape buffalo and elephants ate their crops and trampled their dwellings, and access to fresh water, firewood, and other resources was limited because it was illegal to harvest them from the park. The locals resented the park, and saw little reason to conserve it, so wildlife poaching and illegal harvesting of trees and other plants was rife.

Every trip should have a soundtrack, so we've asked CJ Fahey with Nat Geo Music to select artists from their catalog whose songs will inspire you to get going.

Two weeks ago Nat Geo Music hosted an Earth Day concert in Rome, Italy, that brought close to 200,000 people to the famous Piazza del Popolo to hear music groups including Ben Harper & Relentless7 and Nat Geo Music's own Bibi Tanga & The Selenites. For a concert, it was a smashing success. But the occasion was Earth Day, so how did we fare with respect to our goal of raising environmental awareness, promoting eco-friendly lifestyle, and offsetting carbon costs of the event?

To offset the carbon footprint of the event we've planned to plant 1,000 trees in a park in Rome, as well as acres of trees in Costa Rica. An Italian non-profit helped calculate how many trees we would need to plant to stay carbon neutral. Between every musical act speakers and video content highlighted the Earth Day theme and spoke to simple things each individual can do to make a difference.

But when the concert ended I was crushed to see the piazza full of trash and empty drink bottles. And problems with public transportation (welcome to Italy!) forced more people than we expected to show up in cars and scooters. I wondered how many people left the concert having absorbed our environmental message. If we really cared about the environment would it have been better not to have a concert at all?

We don't just talk the talk when it comes to being green here at the National Geographic Society. We're constantly working on reducing our impact on the environment, from using compost bins in our cafeteria, to switching all desk lamps to energy-efficient CFL bulbs, to purchasing wind power instead of getting our electricity from coal-fired plants. But even we were impressed when we heard about our colleague Fabio Amador's sporty new ride. Called the Go-One, it's a three-wheeled "trike" with a removable top -- making it a convertible of sorts. Weighing in at about 50 pounds, it pedals like any other recumbent bike. Fabio (whom we can't help but think is aptly named, given his sleek, racing car-styled vehicle) received a special parking place in the NG garage and uses the trike to commute the two miles between his home and the office.

"I figured this was a great way to show personal initiative in an organization that cares about conservation," he says. "No gas, no insurance and no permits. And I wanted to make an effort to leave no carbon footprint."

We asked him to tell us a bit more about his ride.

So what does it feel like to get around in that thing?

Moving through a suburban and urban cityscape, you're very low to the ground and you're moving between cars at a high speed. You can seem invisible, though the vehicle itself gets noticed quite fast once people do see it.

What's kind of response do you get?

Mostly amazement, laughter. I've been a shy person all my life, but this is not the way to continue living anonymously. But I see it as a way for a person to motivate others to do something, whether it's fighting against diabetes or not leaving a carbon footprint. One person can change the world.

Friend of IT Molly Feltner is traveling through Africa, and just came face-to-face with mountain gorillas in Rwanda.

I've witnessed cheetahs hunting gazelle in the Serengeti, spent hours watching monkeys play in the Amazon, and swam with wild dolphins off the coast of Brazil, but no wildlife experience I've had can compare to coming face-to-face with a 500-pound silverback mountain gorilla, an animal that shares about 98% of my DNA. I met Kurira, the leader of Susa group, a 38-member gorilla family, while trekking in Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda, and found him to be a rather hospitable fellow. He didn't mind me or the seven other members of my gorilla trekking party wandering among his charges--he's been visited every day by tourists for years. After giving my group a good look over from a sunny patch of vegetation about 20 feet away, he stretched out on his back, arms folded behind his head, and let a baby crawl up on his big belly. The two played together for nearly 20 minutes.

Other gorillas gathered around us as we stood still. A big black-back male made a nest of leaves and settled in for a nap to my right. On my left a mother plucked and peeled wild celery, her twins playing nearby. After an hour, our guide signaled it was time to go--tourists only get one hour with the gorillas to limit the apes' exposure to human germs. It was a short time but the chance to see such rare creatures (there are only about 700 in the world) in so intimate a setting was well worth the $500 price tag and the effort of trekking up the volcano to find them.

It's been 39 years since the first Earth Day, and National Geographic news has a great slideshow of photographs and stories from it's not-so-humble beginnings. But what's interesting is how the day has changed over time. Elizabeth Kolbert reports in the New Yorker this week that the first Earth Day was a "raucously exuberant affair..."

In New York, Fifth Avenue was closed to traffic. People picnicked on the sidewalk; dead fish were dragged through midtown; and Governor Nelson Rockefeller rode a bicycle across Prospect Park. Students in Richmond, Virginia, handed out bags of dirt (to represent the "good earth"); demonstrators in Washington poured oil onto the sidewalk in front of the Interior Department (to protest recent oil spills); and in Bloomington, Indiana, women dressed as witches threw birth-control pills into the crowd (no one was quite sure why). All told, some twenty million Americans took part..."

Today Earth Day seems a bit tame in comparison. Yes, there are concerts and other events, but in many ways the day seems akin to Arbor Day in our minds - a nice thing to recognize - but unless you're physically planting a tree it's more a manifestation of good feelings than a call to action. And indeed, there are numbers to prove that effect: In a recent Gallup poll asking Americans whether "protection of the environment should be given priority, even at the risk of curbing economic growth," only forty-two percent said yes. And in a poll from the Pew Research Center that  asked Americans about their priorities for Congress and the new president, "dealing with global warming" ranked at the bottom of the list.

So what can you do to raise awareness and share information about protecting our environment? We've got some suggestions here at NG. We're currently running a contest called GreenEffect, which will award $20,000 to the five people or groups whose green ideas will help bring about change. Our Green Guide offers tips for everyday trimming of your consumption and energy use. Our mission is "to inspire people to care about the planet" and we're working every day to achieve that end. So read, donate, or share what we're doing here with others, and you can help make a difference.

Photograph from AP 

Boston Marathon 2009 at the halfway point coming up to the intersection of Route 16 and 128, by Paul Keleher

I'm going to go out on a limb and say it: Today is the best day of the year to be in Boston. Patriots' Day, aka Marathon Monday, is an official state holiday, a day when citizens crowd along the streets to watch some of the most elite runners in the world sprint by (and some of the no-so-elite as well - I ran the race myself back in 2001). This year was the 113th running of the race, and it was won by Ethiopia's Deriba Merga, and Kenya's Salina Kosegi. But it's by no means over for the thousands of people still running as I type.

One thing that may keep them going this year is the knowledge that among the many, many footprints that will cross the finish line - many of them will be accounted for, carbon-wise, by the race organizers, who have purchased offsets for the many buses used to transport runners to the starting line. They've also swapped out the motorcycles used to follow the elite runners with new electric scooters, and have installed a "green team" to ensure that all discarded cups, bottles, and blankets make their way into the barrels posted along the route. It's the first step, so-to-speak, that the race has taken to become more sustainable.