To make matters worse, I'm also away from my natural environment - the minimalist lifestyle I've carefully crafted over the years. At home I can bike or ride to work because of residential choices I've made. I know exactly where to go to get the healthiest food - both from stores and from restaurants. Even my sailboat purchase was a balance between convenience and environmental impact.
Now, I know what you're saying - and you're right - with the right amount of preparation I could have constructed a minimalist vacation. I could have started to socialize my family members on choices, taken a bigger role in planning our events, and I could have worked harder to identify and control more aspects of our experience.
But I didn't. So now the line between what is easy and what takes effort has moved away from my baseline. Instead of taking up the slack between my standards and those of the mainstream consumer society in which I find myself, I'm just going with the Florida norm. And I'm not impressed.
Let's start with food: fish (including sea bass) is still offered in restaurants with little indication of origin or method of capture. No mention is made of organic - let alone local - food, including Florida's domestic wine. Most convenience stores offer the same mass-produced junk you see anywhere in America. Even if there are some businesses that are focused on these issues, the issues themselves aren't important enough for businesses to address them - even with small steps.
Trash is another pet-peeve: neither the convenience stores nor the hotel where I am staying offer recycling bins (let alone a composting bin). At an upscale shopping area in North Naples, I was horrified to see a plastic bag floating right next to posh boats and condos. Even the beach was tarnished - I couldn't walk fifteen feet without seeing cigarette butts and random paper trash tucked into the bushes.
Transportation is also problematic: while this part of Florida has some of the best maintained roads I've seen anywhere in the United States, the mass transit options seem very limited - in all the travel literature I read about popular destinations I only saw options that targeted larger groups, not smaller families. While I saw a lot of bikes in downtown Naples, I couldn't imagine trying to navigate Highway 41 from my hotel down to any of the places I'd like to each or shop.
But not everything is negative - I was lucky enough to stumble on a recent news report that lists local establishments that are making strides to recycle. Everglades National Park has recycling containers, bike tours, and kayak rentals. The grocery chain Publix offers small - but clearly labeled - organic food sections. They also have a beautifully appointed spread of fresh seafood that was labeled to indicate the country of origin. Even more impressive, the grocer in charge of the display even knew which items came from Florida (mussels, clams, pink shrimp, and grouper). I even found a restaurant that is unabashedly organic without being strictly vegetarian - but they close too early (7:30) for our feeding schedule.
I talked about this dilemma with GG - she just happened to be passing by Naples today - as we walked along the beach and enjoyed a warm, stormy sunset. After tossing a few ideas around, we realized that tourists present as much an opportunity for a sustainable Florida as they do a challenge. What if every rental car included complimentary fabric grocery bags and the road maps included recycling drop-off points? What if travel websites had an indicator for which hotels had met sustainability benchmarks or carried sustainability certifications? What if every hotel provided a condensed, updated list of local establishments that met environmental standards?
Notice that most of these ideas incorporate current resources - many grocery stores offer fabric bags for sale. Florida does have a small (but growing) list of certified hotels. And there are many independent sites that track local foods, recycling resources, and transportation alternatives. The key is to make these resources easier to incorporate into the existing tourism infrastructure. I believe that while individual businesses play an important part by pursuing initiatives out of self-interest, I think that a broader effort on part of the official tourism organizations to integrate and expose these innovations to "mainstream" tourists is probably the best way to provide a beneficial feedback loop. And that's exactly what GG and I are hoping to support by writing this blog.
One final note: I'm not absolving anyone (including myself) of personal responsibility. The links above reflect (a small amount of) research I should have done as part of my vacation planning, not as a token post-facto attempt at satisfying my own guilt. Any mistakes, oversights, and outright inaccuracies are my own - which just shows how difficult it is for a modern tourist to wade through volumes of information and effective, rational decisions.
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