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When I was a kid, my parents took me to see Back to the Future. Ever since the first time I watched the Delorian speed through time, I was hooked. A few years later the sequel returned with a bona fide flying time machine. So, ever since the age of ten, I’ve had my fingers crossed that one day reality would catch up with the movies and we’d get to drive flying cars.

And soon, for the steep price of $279,000, we’ll be able to do just that. 

Part Car, Part Plane, All Groundbreaking

Released earlier this month, the Transition, a “roadable aircraft” developed by Terrafugia was shown at the New York International Auto Show. According to the Washington Post, the car has completed its first flight and a select few are slapping down the 10 grand deposit required for purchase. On its first test flight, it flew for eight minutes at 1400 feet. (Your average airplane flies for several hours at a height of about 35,000 feet.) However, the Transition won’t be able to get you out of bad I-95 traffic. Drivers of the Transition will need a runway to prepare for lift off.

The Transition has two modes: a driving mode and a flying mode. The idea is that drivers will be able to drive it to a nearby airport where they can take off. Upon completion of the journey, they’ll be able to land at their destination airport and drive it off site.

Green?

It’s a little too early to tell if the Transition will be eco-friendly, but if both cars and planes produce heavy carbon emissions, then what of the Transition’s carbon emissions? After all, this flying car is a machine that is both automobile and airplane, the love child of two of the biggest contributors to carbon emissions. What does the green future hold for new inventions like this? Undeniably, the Transition is a giant step forward from the days when we dreamt of Marty McFly’s Delorian or longed for the futuristic freedom of George Jetson’s flying car. What kind of fuel will it use? Will there be a green version? Will we one day purchase carbon credits for flying cars? As we soar into the future, it will be interesting to see.

By Marissa Cohen

Photo By lotprocars

Spring is here, or so we hear. (In Florida our weather is pretty much the same – gorgeous – all year round.) I understand that in other parts of the world, the cold is giving way to flowers and warmth. Spring means renewal: as the earth wakes up from ice and cold, so do we. Renew your eco-joy with these springtime steps.

Eco-Bags in Light Colors

Ditch the dull black and brown travel bags for fun and funky luggage in light, festive colors. Crisp white eco-friendly luggage can put a spring in your step. So can eco-friendly purses and backpacks in hues of pinks, greens, or yellows.

Declutter Before You Depart

Before you leave town, give your house a fresh sense of renewal by cleaning the clutter out of closets and garages. Go through what you find. Contact Goodwill or your local shelter and give away any old clothes, dishes, or furniture that have seen better days. Have an upcycle party and invite friends to trade their old stuff. One green traveler’s trash is another green traveler’s treasure – and if money is tight, trading items is a thrifty way to save your green.

Before You Leave, Clean

I like to tidy up before I leave town. There’s nothing more annoying to me than coming back to a dirty house, so before I leave I make sure that counters are scrubbed and bedsheets are changed. Ditch the toxic house cleaning products as well! Instead of glass cleaner or disinfectant, use vinegar. Instead of toxic scrubbing powders, use baking soda.

Spring Showers

Not only does spring bring color and renewal – it also brings the rain. If you’re hitting the road, protect yourself from blustery days and surprise showers with cute, non-toxic raingear. This umbrella is made of recycled steel and aluminum and has a bamboo handle.

Spring Friendly Travel Apps

If you need to track the ever-changing weather, check out The Weather Channel’s app – perfect for road travel. Going to be on the road? Try Roadninja – a travel app that lets you know what’s coming up off the next highway exit. You can look up exits from anywhere on the road and it’s handy if you need to find a potty or a vegetarian restaurant in a hurry.

By Marissa Cohen

Photo By notamaiar

Gay-friendly travel apps are a must-have when exploring the world. Since you’re not wasting paper, apps are green (and if you’re a real travel bug, the more greener it is to have apps that replace heavy travel books).

Fun

I really liked Gay Scout by Damron. It allows you to narrow your search according to city and then look up everything from entertainment to hotel accommodations and places to eat. This app is also integrated with Google Maps, making it easy to navigate new areas. Another good one is GayCities, newly updated in January of 2012. It includes fast access to everything from reviews to maps and more.

Equal Rights and History

If you want to make sure that your hard-earned cash is going to businesses that support equal rights, make sure to download the official app for the Human Rights Campaign. Revamped for 2012, the new edition includes thousands of LGBT-friendly businesses and it can be searched according to category. If you want to impress (or annoy) travel companions, feel free to quote some famous gays by checking the Gay Quotes app.

Must-Haves

A few years ago, I left the country and  made the mistake of calling home on an actual cell phone. Even though I only made a brief phone call, it was hardly worth the exorbitant phone bill that I received a month later. I wish I’d thought to download Skype, which would have saved me an embarrassing amount of money. Through Skype, I could have connected to the Internet and then called home using the Skype app and not a traditional cell phone. Downloading a currency converter for international travels can be an invaluable app. Geared to familes with kids but a life-saver for anyone who’s just had to go, one of my all time favorite travel apps has to be WheretoWee, a handy little app when you need to find a restroom in a new city. Another is the amazing Trip It, which collects all your travel info and stores it.

By Marissa Cohen

Photo By nrkbeta

Last time we did a gay travel app article for men. This one’s strictly for the women. Usually, there’s nothing cozier than curling up with a book or magazine, but when you’re exploring the globe or checking out some national treasures, travel apps are a handy way to get your information fix. Plus, the more books or magazines you have, the greener a choice it is to download apps, instead of wasting paper.

Travel

The lesbian version of Gay Scout, check out Gurl Scout, a practical travel app that’s divided into different cities. Look up lesbian-friendly restaurants, bed-and-breakfasts, resorts, and more. Over 7,000 businesses in more than 1800 cities and towns are listed in this fantastic app. It also works with Google Maps. Want to travel and volunteer at the same time? Go to Sweet.com and click on the RSS feed to download the latest from this eco-friendly, all-lesbian travel company. Looking for some e-books? Although geared toward straight women The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011 is great. If you’re looking for globetrotting fiction, check out Justine Saracen’s novels, all available in e-book format. Her Ibis Prophecy books follow a lesbian archeologist through the Egyptian desert. The first book in the series,The 100th Generation, was a finalist for the Golden Grown Literary Society’s Popular Choice Award. Either BellaBooks.com or BoldStrokesBooks.com has an impressive collection of more downloadable novels, perfect to read on vacation.

If you’re looking for a quiet, artsy, lesbian-friendly getaway, download travel guides for Asheville, North Carolina. (Travel Hint: Bookworms will love Malaprop’s Bookstore and Café, a lesbian-owned independent bookstore that is jam-packed with events from poetry readings to author panels.)

Culture

If you’re local to South Florida, download She Magazine, available here. Chock full of all kinds of South Florida info for LBT women, She is a great way to tell what’s up in South Florida. If you’re looking for national magazines that you can load onto your e-reader or smartphone, check out Curve or OutTraveler, the gay and lesbian travel magazine.

By Marissa Cohen

Photo By loungerie

I’ve got a lot of books in my house. Most readers that I know, myself included, have very, very mixed feelings about the changing face of the publishing industry. With the rise of Kindles and iPads, books seem to be getting pushed aside. Nothing can ever replace the feel of a worn, well-loved book in my hands.

Reading Green on the Road

I admit it – I love taking my e-reader with me on long trips. It’s a little bit less of a hassle to pack one slender e-reader as opposed to three different books. This reminds me of my transition to iPod from portable cd player. Before I finally broke down and got an iPod, not only did I lug a portable cd player on trips, but I carted a mini-folder of cds with me as well. That added at least four extra pounds to my carryon, and I really had to adore those cds to cart them with me cross-country.

I feel the same way about books, in terms of weight. If I now know that the extra weight of my suitcase or carryon can actually increase my carbon footprint (and make my luggage ten times heavier), then bringing five or six books on the plane with me is a lot less attractive.

Eco-Bookworms Need Help

However, the jury is still out about who really wins the green award, in the knock-down drag-out fight between real, actual, honest-to-God paper books and e-books.

It’s easy to build a case against books. They’re heavier, publishers aren’t always able to recycle them due to the glue in the binding, and, of course, the more books you have in your house, the more trees have been cut down.

While e-readers save trees, you’re using extra electricity. Plus, with the exception of Apple, researchers found that not many e-reader companies declare how green their readers are.

Strike a Balance

What’s greener? Books or e-readers? It depends on how much you read, really. The more you read, the greener of an option the e-reader is for you. The less you read, the more time it will take you to offset the carbon footprint of a Kindle, according to the Cleantech Group. On the other hand, if you read more than, say, twenty-two books a year, consider a Kindle or an e-reader to save all those trees. Remember, Kindles or iPads are especially handy when you’re on the road or in an airplane.
But, if you’re like me and can’t seem to imagine a happy life without real books, just become book conscious and reuse them, which is a fantastic green option. Always go for secondhand books over new ones, don’t overlook the public library, and check out great online sites to get rid of old books or trade old book for “new” old books.

By Marissa Cohen

Photo By Sutherland Shire Libraries

Car sharing is a great, alternative option to owning a car, if you live in an area that can provide other means of getting to work. Car sharing is also a nice alternative to renting a car. Many major U.S. cities offer a car sharing program.

How It Works

In most cases, you can reserve the car via phone or internet and drive the car when you need it, picking it up and dropping it off in clearly marked areas. Some people who live in cities with public transport use this option, including those who don’t need to drive to get to work. The fees are low – it’s often free, with daily or hourly rates incorporating gas, insurance, or other fees. Yearly rates are also reasonable and far less than the cost of constantly gassing up your car, or making monthly car payments.

The Benefits, Green and Otherwise

Zipcar, the world’s largest car sharing program, has been around for ages and is available in America, Canada, and the U.K., with available Zipcars in Miami, Orlando, Gainesville, and Tallahassee. Some major car companies  also offer a car sharing option. If you can rely on non-car options to get to work, car sharing might be for you. You can car share  for weekend jaunts, and you won’t be saddled with the year-round car expenses. Car sharing is also self-serve, so there’s no need to worry about rental offices. If you’re a college student and can’t afford the many fees that come with a car, several universities have their own sharing program as well, including Florida International University and the University of Miami.
Plus, the green benefits are fantastic – one shared car takes about fifteen personal vehicles off the road, resulting in billions of gallons of gasoline and oil being saved. There are no year-round gas prices, maintenance or car insurance, because that’s all picked up by the car sharing company, or included in the daily or hourly rates.

The Downside

Some car sharing programs put limits on their mileage, so if you’re looking to car share for a road trip in which you’re driving more than, say, 200 miles a day, you may want to look into other options. These programs often charge per mile once you’re over the daily limit, where as with traditional rentals, a three-hour road trip may be expected. Also, carsharing programs don’t clean the cars in-between users, so if the previous driver was a slob, you’ll be recycling their trash. While many car sharing programs don’t allow pets or smokers, there’s no guarantee that the previous driver won’t have bent the rules, which might be annoying for allergic green travelers.

Even with those slight issues, car sharing is a sustainable and eco-friendly alternative to car ownership and car rental.

By Marissa Cohen

Photo By Lightpattern Productions

In order to protest the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Wikipedia was among the many websites to black out during the week of January 16. No matter what your political beliefs are, the fact that several websites went dark starting on Wednesday, January 18th marked a gigantic internet protest.

It also led to hundreds, if not thousands, of college students unleashing their full-fledged panic on Twitter , worrying that they’d never get their homework done without the help of Wiki.

Where Would Green Travelers Be Without Technology?

Along similar lines, what would the lack of technology do for green travel? Let’s suppose for a moment that all personal computers and iPhones went down for one week.

Would Twitter would be alive with panicked green travelers bemoaning the loss of their GPS-systems?

Getting back to nature completely is powerful, but could we do it?

What if every last person took one day a week to turn off everything and then went out into the world to find something interesting to do that didn’t involve a phone, a computer, or a tablet? If America’s student population seems confounded and terrified by the temporary lack of Wiki, where would that leave green travelers? While there’s plenty to be said for the information age, what do we have left when information goes silent?

Brush Up on our MapReading Skills

How many of us are conditioned to reach for a map app instead of having an instinctive directional knowledge? Being without personal technology would give us the chance to get back to the travel basics of map reading (although once we get the personal technology going again, this travel app won an EPA award in late 2011).

Talk to People

If we’re left without our personal technology, we might have to ask directions from total strangers. Even if we’re not usually techzombies wrapped up in our phones or iPads, relying on a sense of community might be a rusty skill for some of us, and might make us feel as new for us as for some of those Wiki-starved college students who seem to have forgotten how to use a library.

By Marissa Cohen

Photo By huronbikes

Renowned theoretical astrophysicist Stephen Hawking celebrated his 70th birthday on Sunday, January 8th and, while some people might celebrate their birthday with cake or perhaps some nice, swanky presents, Hawking ditched tradition and asked for something else entirely: space colonization.

One Hundred – to One Thousand Years – or Out?

Stephen Hawking basically asked the world to think about space colonization. He was quoted as saying “We wouldn’t survive another thousand years on our fragile planet.” He something similar a few months ago, saying that it will be hard for humans to avoid serious ecological issues in the next century  and he’s saying it again, asking the world to explore other planets so that, when Planet Earth goes boom, we’ll have somewhere to go.

Wow.

Mars or Bust?

I’m not sure if we should file this under green travel by way of Star Trek, or into the deepest corner in our own Ray-Bradbury-inspired night terrors. But to me, this sounds an awful lot like the brilliant, world-renowned author of A Brief History of Time is telling us that, unless we change the way we live life on earth right this very minute, they’ll be zilch left in a thousand years. It sounds like the premise to a terrible B-movie, except it’s real.

No pressure with the green thing, though, guys. Feel free to ignore carbon waste and gleefully drive everywhere. We might just all have to move to another planet at some point and became neighbors with E.T., that’s all.

What About Balance?

I know that a few weeks ago we ran several pieces on balance and controlling green guilt. I still believe in striking a balance. I still believe that’s true. But when one of the world’s most brilliant scientists says something like that twice in a two month period well, it’s clear to me that we need to up our ante a little bit. We can’t give up.

By Marissa Cohen

Photo By NASA Goddard Photo and Video

“Sometimes it feels too complicated to go outside. Maybe we should all just watch nature movies on YouTube. That way, we wouldn’t have to worry about the environment.”

While waiting in line at a local bookstore, I overheard a 30-something man make that statement.

Ouch.

The person who made that remark was obviously joking, but I was amazed. Something made him say it. Maybe he was feeling lazy about the environment. Maybe he felt too responsible. Maybe he’d just come back from a hiking trip, got eaten alive by red ants, and thought the safest way to deal with nature was to avoid it completely. But I was utterly shocked – and intrigued. Imagine if we all did that – an entire society, avoiding going outside and just watching videos (about exactly what we’re avoiding) on the computer! How Ray Bradbury of us, Bookstore Guy.

There it is, folks! Step right up! Our green guilt and our obsession with technology, wrapped up in his three little sentences. As technology continues to grow and our awareness about green issues grows, my fear is that, one day, our knowledge base will tip us into permanent guilt or exhaustion or laziness, and we will be so busy experiencing nature through technology and social media that we’ll have forgotten what it means to experience nature for its own sake, in real life, away from the ease of keyboards and touchscreens.

When my dad was a kid, his parents had one room that no one was ever allowed into. They called it the Good Room. In the Good Room, old couches were covered with plastic sheets and seldom-used antique dishes forever collected dust in the cabinet. Even modern families have different versions of the Good Room, but across the board, the idea is the same: What do we put in the Good Room? Stuff we’ll never use or are scared to use, because we’re terrified we’ll accidentally destroy it. It didn’t matter if my dad wasn’t going to play Frisbee with great-aunt Sally’s good china or not. The Good Room was off limits. Is nature becoming the new Good Room, too “complicated” to interact with, because we’re afraid we’ll wreck it?

I hope it hasn’t because that will defeat the purpose of any kind of eco-awareness. I hope that we can continue, unlike my Youtube-watching friend, to get involved with nature and have respect for life outside our front door. I hope we can continue to learn about and protect our oceans, beaches, parks, and forests while still being a part of an active, ever-changing world – and while still enjoying in person what we’re trying to protect, not from behind the “safety” of a computer screen.

By Marissa Cohen

Photo by Joost J. Bakker IJmuiden

I listened to a story on the radio this week. It was about a commercial for some kind of handheld device that touted its interconnection by advertising the fact that you could read your email while on top of a mountain. As the announcer pointed out (and as I’m agreeing with him here) why would you want to?

If you’re on a vacation like that, if you’ve got your green sleeping bag and hydration pack, if you’ve managed to protect yourself from the cold and trained for months in order to climb up a mountain, and if you’re currently looking out at a panoramic vista of sky and clouds and wonder, why on earth would you want to stop, switch on your iPhone and check what’s happening in the office that day?

We’re curious? We’re creatures of habit? We’re compulsive? We’re information addicts? Sometimes, yes.

Last week I wrote a few posts about some really amazing travel apps for e-readers and phones. My heart soared in delight – because who doesn’t love being green and saving a little money on your travel literature, while at the same time conserving paper and other resources? Plus, I’m an admitted information addict.

My appreciation for Smartphones, e-readers, and apps is mountainous, no pun intended. I love knowing that so much data can be collected in one place. Throw in a fairly intuitive design and a good mapping app, and most people are thrilled and ready to hit the road, myself included. If technology helps us to go green (as in the case of paper-saving apps), so much the better. However, spite of my love of technology, I wonder how much technology is too much, especially when trying to balance a green lifestyle. Paper-saving devices and the ins and outs of green vacations (and greener ways of life) can merge unless we set some guidelines for ourselves.

Green travel is all about balance. Once you’ve downloaded the travel apps, bought your carbon offset credits, and unplugged appliances before heading out for a few days, what happens next?

Here’s what should happen next

If you’re hanging out by the ocean, please take a few minutes to turn off your Smartphone. If you’ve somehow managed to get reception while on top of a mountain, please ignore what might be going on in the office back home and focus on the view. Be sure to connect, not to the device – which may have played a part in helping with directions or providing entertainment on the road – but to the peace and reality of what’s around you. That’s what should happen next.

Photo by analog_chainsaw

by Marissa Cohen