“Don’t let the vacation ruin the destination.”

These words of wisdom hail from environmentalists who have legitimate concerns about ocean pollution due to cruise ship dumping.

Cruise ship vacations have gained in popularity in the last decade, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, which states that the industry has grown nearly twice as fast as any other means of travel during that time frame. And, at the same time, the average ship size has been growing at about 90 feet every five years. Ships used to average about 3,000 passengers, but today some carry as many as 8,000.

So with larger ships carrying more passengers, there is mounting concern about how this growth will affect the ocean’s marine life and water quality.

Recently the World Wildlife Federation’s Baltic Sea chapter recommended that area ports upgrade their facilities to cope with contamination from cruise ship sewage. The WWF said that Baltic-area ports are not keeping their facilities up-to-date in terms of disposing of cruise ship waste and suggested that the money being made by cruise ship tourism be spent upgrading the facilities, according to a report in the Environmental News Service.

“We find it unfair that so many ports are profiting from cruise line tourism but are not prepared to take care of their waste,” said Pauli Merriman, director of the WWF Baltic Ecoregion Progamme, in the ENS report.

In one week, a single average size cruise ship can generate about 200,000 gallons of sewage as well as 1 million gallons of gray water (the runoff from showers and kitchens), says Friends of the Earth Clean Vessels Campaign director Marcie Keever.

“That amounts to about 50 swimming pools-worth of polluted water,” she says.

Cleaning up pollution from cruise ships uses technology that separates the solids from the liquids and uses reverse osmosis to get rid of the pollutants. The solids get incinerated with the ashes either being dumped on land or at sea beyond 3 to 12 nautical miles. On land, the human manure can be recycled as nutrients for soil.

In the U.S., says Keever, there are no regulations for dumping sewage from vessels beyond three nautical miles from shore. Beyond three miles, cruise ships are allowed to dump raw, partially treated, or treated sewage.

As for port-side dumping, she says, “the dumping of treated sewage (using 30-year old-technology) is allowed in many ports except for states that have created no-discharge areas or agreements…. California is one of the places with anti-dumping laws, as are Alaska and Maine. Washington and Florida have voluntary agreements with the cruise industry but those agreements don’t go any further that U.S. federal requirements in most cases.”

– Laura May

Set atop a ridge overlooking the southern end of the Appalachian Mountains, the Len Foote Hike Inn at Amicalola Falls State Park in north Georgia offers a sweeping view of the foothills, the lights of the old gold-rush town of Dahlonega and distant peaks to the east. The 20-room lodge, celebrating its 10th anniversary in October, also offers a close-up view of how thoughtful design and day-to-day diligence combine for low-impact living.

The Hike Inn was built for those who love the outdoors, but aren’t so crazy about sleeping on the ground. Guests arrive on foot, hiking a five-mile trail that takes you through a deeply shaded forest of oak and pine, tulip poplar and maple; through tunnels of rhododendron and patches of pungent galax, a broadleaf evergreen groundcover. Your steps will be lighter, though, knowing that a hot shower and hot meal are waiting for a you at the end of the trail.

The inn, named for the naturalist who inspired the Mark Trail newspaper comic strip, was designed to provide accommodations “somewhere between a tent and a Holiday Inn,” says architect Garland Reynolds of nearby Gainesville, Ga.

Traditional Japanese inns inspire the steeply pitched roofs and deep eaves, Reynolds says. And there are practical concerns: the eaves provide shelter from rain and snow as you move from the bunkhouse to the bathhouse to the mess hall and on to the Sunrise Room, the social center of the inn where guests gather around a wood stove, reading, chatting or playing one another in a collection of board games. The covered deck off the Sunrise Room (pictured above) is the place to stand, coffee cup in hand, to welcome the crimson streaks of daybreak.

The inn’s design also is aimed at preserving as much of the wooded landscape as possible. The four buildings that comprise the inn were built on pilings to minimize grading. Composting toilets are used, in part, because building a septic tank leech field would have meant cutting down many more trees. And the trees that had to be felled provided firewood to heat the inn for its first four seasons.

The 20 rooms in the bunkhouse are Spartan, little more than an 8-by-10 foot wood box with bunk beds. There is a wall-mounted fan and a ceiling light – burning, of course, a compact fluorescent bulb. There is no electric outlet to charge your iPod or cell phone. Cell phones, in fact, are banned on the grounds.

When the inn was built, there was no heat in the rooms. Electric space heaters were added later, a concession to winter nights at 3,100 feet. Some guests that first winter spent the night in the lobby or Sunrise room where you find the woodstoves.

The bathhouse offers two showers for each gender. There are also wall-mounted hair dryers. There are five composting toilets, each in a separate water closet. Or should we say waterless closet?

The use of composting toilets cuts water use by more than 200,000 gallons a year, compared to a traditional system. More importantly to most guests, they aren’t yucky at all. An extremely effective ventilation system sucks out any odors. The only downside: there is a bit of a breeze on your bum.

A solar hot water system atop the roof of the bathhouse helps heat the 60-degree well water and cuts propane use by about 30 percent, says the inn’s general manager Stan Krajeski.

Likewise, 24 photovoltaic solar panels installed in 2002 on the southern side of the roof of the Sunrise Room have cut power demanded by 30 percent.

Krajeski, or another staff member, point out all the design features – and show you the worm beds – during a tour given before dinner each day.

“We hope the tour will instill some ideas how you can conserve energy and green up your house a little bit,” Krajeski says.

All the steps taken at the Hike Inn earned it Gold Level Certification in Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC).

The tour is interesting, but the best part of the evening is dinner.

The changing schedules of fall foliage may be a headache for nature lovers who time their forest vacations to maximize viewing of autumnal reds and oranges. But they could be good for the environment those travelers set out to enjoy.

According to a new article in the journal Global Change Biology, a team led by Michigan Tech forestry professor David F. Karnosky has established that increased levels of atmospheric CO2 “act directly to delay the usual autumn spectacle of changing colors and falling leaves in northern hardwood forests.”

Studying forests in Wisconsin and Italy and using an elaborate system that allows researchers to control the concentrations of carbon dioxide and tropospheric ozone within a given wooded area (the project was launched to help answer questions listed here), the team found that longer periods of green leaves resulted from higher CO2 levels. And longer green periods mean more time in which trees can soak carbon up. (Other researchers have already asserted that increased CO2 leads to earlier growth in the spring as well.)

Karnosky describes the phenomenon as “a good-news story for our region’s forests,” since trees have longer periods of productivity before taking a break for the winter. While the experiment was too brief to suggest how mature forests would behave in the long term, it’s surely welcome news for sustainable foresters to hear that what threatens the planet in one respect is at least helping their young trees grow more quickly — putting a dent in the very problem that keeps them green.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media