« Debating the Value of Green Hotels | Main | AHLA Surveying Hotels for Green Actions »
Balancing Choices in Your Life
I just returned from a ten-day car trip. We drove my hybrid SUV -- a Mercury Mariner -- to San Antonio and back to western Colorado. What a comfortable car it was to for drive such a long distance; it was much more comfortable than my Forester had been (and I loved that car). Since this Mariner is a relatively new car to me I enjoyed learning about its various features, but mostly the balance between good gas mileage and speed.
Environmentally friendly hotels, restaurants and other hospitality venues have tough choices to make in greening their operations. My hybrid SUV taught me more about that than I had been aware before. It's your turn to learn how to think about the best way to help green the hospitality industry.
As an aside, I got a chuckle at a green hotel conference I attended last month when one of the speakers was taking a quick survey about the attendees' green habits. One track he asked about was who used cloth bags when grocery shopping and who bought organic food. Then he asked who drove their SUV to the store. Now, his glee at catching what he thought were people who didn't live their environmental conviction thoroughly tickled me, so -- as an SUV driver -- I chimed in that my SUV was a hybrid. His laughter told me he didn't think there was such a thing as a hybrid SUV. My laughter said otherwise.
But anyway, I wanted to share my lessons about balancing my green choices because I think it's a perfect example of what we face daily in living an environmentally active life. Basically I learned you can't get great mileage and drive at high speeds. I know, that's no surprised, but my car has a gauge that shows me just what my average miles per gallon (MPG) is as I drive along. I got to watch as the meter went up and down, almost as the hills went up and down and my speed went up and down. But when you try to maintain a high speed up a steep hill -- heck, any hill -- your MPG drops dramatically. And I found that auto-pilot didn't help the situation and in fact almost made it worse.
It became a game with me to learn how I could maintain my speed and mgp. I learned that feathering the brake activated the regenerator which acted as a brake without wearing out the brake pads; it also regenerated the battery which would give me more battery power along the way. I further learned that dropping from 80 to 70 miles per hour (MPH) added about 3 MPG to my mileage.
As I drove along, playing my balancing game, I again realized that life is just like driving my car because we are always having to choose between greener choices and "getting places". For example, what's the best flooring? All flooring choices have environmental impacts that include cutting trees (loosing the oxygen generation provided by trees, the CO2 "eating" action of the trees, the energy and water needed to convert the tree into flooring, the transportation from the forest to the manufacturer to the distributor to you, and of course the energy of installing the wood floor), mining stone (with its associated environmental components in manufacturing it to flooring and distribution), weaving carpet, pouring concrete, and manufacturing linoleum or vinyl (with very different environmental impacts). And when you factor the longevity of the flooring into your choice you change the environmental impact yet again. When you take the impact on air quality inside the building into acc
ount, you again have a different value for the environmental impact that one choice makes.
Now take that choice and run the same sort of analysis on it for walls, furniture, finishes, driveways, landscaping, fixtures and equipment, and you have lots of balancing acts to balance. It's important to know what your ultimate environmental goal is so you can better balance your decisions.
See what a fun game my driving provided to me? And for my trip I had to balance my MPG with getting to my destination for my first appointment, and getting enough sleep along the way. All three elements in my decision were important. At different times one weighed more heavily in my decision than the others. I ultimately settled on driving 70 MPH, getting 6 hours of sleep, and getting to town early so we could see the Alamo before our meetings started.
What will your final decision be with each green action you want to take? If you take on the challenge as a game you'll have more fun with it and probably make a better decision in the long run. You just won't have a MPG meter and clock to help you with a visual aids in making your decisions.
Posted by Kit
