Is 'Green' a Dirty Word?

Travel columnist Christopher Elliott wrote a thoughtful piece at MSNBC yesterday about the fate of green travel. He says that the concept of green travel is dead. Or that consumers are tired of paying more for it, at least.

While airlines are busy offering carbon offsets (for an additional fee) and hotels are peddling new recycling programs, Elliott writes that consumers are expecting companies to conduct these activities by default. Think about it.

I was eating my birthday dinner at a great restaurant on Saturday when our server commented that "by the way, we recycle all our wine bottles." Gee, thanks. I guess I expected that the restaurant du jour had been recycling its waste for as long as I have.

As Elliott points out, the server's comment elicited an image in my head of kitchen staff sneaking bags full of empty wine bottles into the restaurant's back-alley dumpster when no one was looking. I am glad that in 2009, the server can proudly say "we now recycle."

The hotel industry has long prided itself on water conservation efforts. At least a decade has passed since I started seeing the now-ubiquitous bathroom sign asking guests to hang and reuse their towels to save water from unnecessary washing. I have obeyed this command ever since. I am not a happy hotel guest, however, when pulling back the hotel bed covers and finding remnants of a past guest between the sheets. While water was saved in this process, I never saw the sign asking me to leave my linens for the next guest (nor would I expect to do so).

So, even we greenies have our limits, but I believe we are fair in expecting businesses to perform random green acts by default. In other words, it's becoming patronizing to be told by an airline that we can pay more to offset carbon emissions or that a cruise ship is taking steps to reduce the human crap it is pouring into the sea (but still doing so).

Do you agree that "green" can be a dirty word?