intelligent travel write about taking a Low-Carb(on) NYC Weekend with Teens Part I and Part 2, featuring where to stay, eat, play, and how to get around the low-carbon way.

The Wall Street Journal looks at Obama’s Green Pitch for High-Speed Trains.

According to a recent TripAdvisor survey over three-quarters of survey respondents say they want green travel and try to incorporate “green choices” into their travel plans.

Check out this Affordable, eco-conscious luggage from Jane Marvel.

Terracurve reports San Francisco’s Orchard Hotel earns LEED Certification as the city’s first and only certified ‘green’ hotel.

inhabitat writes about Barcelona’s Brilliant Energy Efficient Flower Market.

planet green looks at  American Airlines’ New, Greener Jet.

National Post writes about plans to create a New Cycling Path along the  Iron Curtain.

MNN offers suggestions for Carbon offsets for summer air travel.

Take the Green Globetrotters Quiz.

Ecotourism Trips lists the The Top Five Australian Eco Resorts.

Forbes looks at the World’s Cleanest Countries.

ecosalon has put together a A Multi-City Guide to Earth Day Festivals and Events.

This week’s green city guide: Athens, Georgia.

The new issue of the magazine published by the National Wildlife Federation (National Wildlife) features one incredible series of photo spreads by the 2008 Conservation Photographer of the Year, Florian Schulz. The pictures, taken from his book Yellowstone to Yukon: Freedom to Roam, bring to life the best of the American and Canadian West: incredible viewscapes and vistas, wildlife freely moving in its own habitat, an astonishing sky lit by lightning and the Northern Lights. The book includes essays by some of the Rocky Mountains’ most well-known writers: David Quammen, Rick Bass, and others.

But even more interesting is the article attached to the photos, which discusses the decade-old attempt by a group of scientists to build a wildlife conservation corridor all the way from Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, through the northern edge of the Yukon Territory.

The project, called the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative or Y2Y, has studied issues such as habitat fragmentation through roads and development, and the impact of various human activity on wildlife populations throughout the proposed corridor.

It’s a fascinating project, and expands tremendously our already outdated ideas of how we preserve wilderness and habitat. When Yellowstone National Park was formed, for example, its borders were based more on its natural beauties than on the entire range used by animals such as elk and bison that draw so many visitors to the area. The work of many has led to the formation of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, which is working to protect an area that reaches far beyond National Park boundaries.

The photographer Florian Schulz came from Germany and fell in love with the West. His other love, photography, has not only become the work of his life, but through this book and others will have a huge impact on the public’s awareness of the issues facing some of the world’s most amazing ecosystems, and what they can do to help preserve them.

I had to stop and take a photo of this T-shirt at the Wichita airport, on my way to spend a couple of days exploring Hutchinson, Kansas on a blogger’s familiarization tour.

Looks like at least one of my kids just got his/her souvenir from this trip.  Or maybe I’ll get one for me and my teen daughter can wrassle me for it!

Meantime, I’m running around getting some behind-the-scenes stuff for you from the largest collection of space  artifacts outside the Smithsonian, admiring a gorgeous downtown Art Deco theater and spending time 650 feet under the Kansas prairie surrounded by salt deposits.

Are you from the Hutchinson area or know someone who is?  The town has a lively Facebook group, too.

(Update June 2009 – I’ve decided that my Hutch posts warrant an additional disclosure line since some readers might not understand the term “blogger fam tour.” The Cosmosphere and Hutchinson CVB paid for my lodging and expenses while I was in Hutchinson. They did not tell me what I could or could not write about. I paid my own airfare to/from Kansas.)

The drum of traffic assailed my ears constantly. The cars’ exhaust collected in pockets of stench that seemed to race around the city competing with noise for a shocking assault on the senses. I’d come to Bath looking for a whiff of the Regency period depicted in Jane Austen’s novels. Instead I found a blurting city that made me want to crawl into a small hole. The only consolation was that, nearly two hundred years before, it had had a similar effect on Jane Austen herself.

People who think they don’t like Jane Austen’s books – that is, people who haven’t read them – associate the author with a rose-tinted view of love and the marriage market. Anyone who has read her books knows better. This was a woman with a finely refined wit, a bubbling sense of humor, and a keen eye for unveiled reality. For those skeptics unwilling to read further (those who still think of Austen as a sappy starry-eyed romantic), let me put the matter of romantic marriage to rest with this quote from Mansfield Park: “In all the important preparations of the mind she was complete; being prepared for matrimony by an hatred of home … by the misery of disappointed affection and contempt of the man she was to marry. The rest might wait.”

If you don’t find that funny, I give up. But on to Bath.

Jane Austen disliked Bath, a fact I was marginally aware of before making the pilgrimage. She lived there for several years with her family after her father retired, and some critics argue that she found the place so depressing she was unable to work. It is certainly true that her two novels set in Bath do not place the city in a glowing light. Anne Elliot of Persuasion, perhaps Austen’s most sympathetic character, finds Bath oppressive, noisy, and gloomy; while Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey (a satire of the popular romantic gothic novels of Austen’s day) loves everything about the vibrant town – but that is part of her character, a simple and good-hearted, easily persuaded country girl with a bent for romantic literature.

The Bath of the modern day doesn’t seem to have changed much in the last 200 years, excepting some expansion and the inclusion of railroads and cars. It’s noisy, and smelly, and makes one want to run away to the countryside. In Austen’s time, Bath was a spa town centered around the Pump Room, where wealthy sufferers of gout drank its foul-tasting waters, and the Roman Baths, whose curative powers were famed. These visitors required shops, restaurants, theaters, concerts, balls, amusement, and society. One modern writer says, “Bath was second only to London as a Mecca for wealthy hedonists.”

In other words, kind of like Miami today. Only with more clothes.

The cream-colored stone buildings that I walked around on my visit look grand and attractive to a modern eye, but at the time they were built must been somewhat similar to ex-urban and suburban developments of modern times: cookie cutter McMansions gobbling up green space. It’s still a nice-looking city, even if jam-packed with tourists, cars, and buses. The Pump Room and Roman Baths are still open to visitors. The Pump Room is now a stylish restaurant, and, although you can walk up to the water counter and taste the famous, practically undrinkable water yourself, there’s not much of a Regency feel to the place where so much intrigue happened in Northanger Abbey and hearts fluttered in Persuasion.

But it’s really the smell and the noise that get you. The stone buildings trap the whining and vrooming of cars among small canyons of streets, bouncing enough high-pitched and thrumming sounds around to give you a headache so penetrating you wish you’d gone to a nightclub to deserve it.

For the smell, blame the geography. Bath is snuggled right down at the bottom of the Avon Valley, which gives it stupendous views of the surrounding Cotswolds hills, designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. And it is, with that sensation of gentle, fertile, rolling green that makes the English landscape satisfy the nature-lover’s heart right down to her toes. But it also means the city sits under an inversion layer, which traps all sorts of noxious gasses for residents and visitors to breathe. Obviously, there wasn’t any petrol-burning traffic in Jane Austen’s time, but inversions don’t care what kind of pollutants are produced, as long as they stay right where they are. Like the smoke from coal-burning fires, which couldn’t have been pleasant to re-breathe each day.

With all this, can I recommend a trip to Bath? For me, it was a necessity. I’m a rabid Jane Austen fan, and it’s a life goal to breathe in her world, no matter how much it stinks. The architecture of the city is truly stupendous, ranging from a massive 16th-century Norman church back to Roman archaeological sites, and forward to the harmonious 18th- and 19th-century cookie cutters and bridges built using the local golden-colored limestone. The most famous of these is the Royal Crescent, which, brooding as it does over part of the city and its own huge park, is rather overwhelming, if not necessarily beautiful.

At the Jane Austen Centre on 40 Gay Street you can see something of how the great humorist lived. It’s set up as a replica of a house she and her family resided in down the street. And you can sympathize with the country girl plopped into the middle of this great noisy place.

However, it’s a theory of mine that writers write best given adversity. That’s not to say they write best while in adversity. But some of Jane Austen’s best and most incisive work uses Bath and its society as a backdrop. Released from its smell and noise after a few years of not writing much (if working at all), she was able to look back on the time and, like all great writers, get her revenge by showing the place and the people in their true light.

Earth Promise, a online community that’s dedicated to bringing people together who want to take better care of the environment, is running a “21 in 21″ Interview Series in Honor of Earth Day.

Our own Tim Leffel, editor of Perceptive Travel Magazine and guiding light for this blog, was chosen as one of the 21 to be interviewed.  Tim has been writing about environmentally friendly travel way before it was in vogue to do so, so it was great to read  more about his ways of  green living and traveling.

Excerpts from the interview:

Earth Promise: What was your first, ah ha! Green moment?

Tim:  Seeing a pile of plastic water bottles six feet high and about 40 feet across on an otherwise pristine island in Thailand. Most of those were consumed in an hour by tourists and then tossed. I’m sure they’re all still there, but the pile is much bigger.

Earth Promise: Do you feel that companies related to the travel industries such as airlines, hotels, cruise ships, etc. are behind the green movement?

Tim: Now they finally are, but only because they’ve been whacked upside the head with it and forced to act. Last year the Explora hotel on Easter Island opened as the first LEED-certified hotel in South America. I think they’re still the only one. As of last fall there were only 13 of them in the whole U.S. What have they been waiting for? Airlines didn’t start thinking about efficiency until oil hit $100 a barrel. Cruise ships have been dragged kicking and screaming into making changes to their wasteful method of travel.

Tim’s got some interesting and informative things to say about  green travel, so I’d suggest you head on over and have a read of  his Earth Promise interview.  

Other interviewees so far include Stefani Newman (Eco-Writer and Founder of teensygreen), Raquel Fagan (Executive Editor at Earth911.com), and Traver Gruen-Kennedy (Chairman at Alliance for Sustainable Air Transportation) with more to come.