Time to take the Highgrove Road

by Yeoh Siew Hoon

Just the day before, I had been listening to some of the world’s most powerful men in the hospitality industry talk about how they needed to get their facts right or else risk being the “bad boys” of global warming.

The next morning, I hopped on a flight that would take me from Shenzen to Kunming to Lijiang, in Yunnan province, in China, of which a lot was also talked about by the same hoteliers and investors.

On the flight, I read Vanity Fair’s 2nd Annual Green Issue. By the time I finished, I felt so guilty I wanted to go home and crawl into bed.

I thought about the carbon footprint I was making just by these three flights I would take today. (I will come to that later)

That’s not taking into account my daily activities – brushing my teeth with my electronic toothbrush (needs energy to use as well as charge), going to the bathroom (the average flush uses three and a half gallons), taking my shower (one third of the world’s population lacks access to freshwater) and putting on my cotton clothes (cotton production is an intense energy-sucking process).

In my handcarry are my energy-guzzling cellphone, Blackberry, laptop, two cameras and one iPOD. The magazine tells me that for every call or message I send on my cellphone, I am helping to kill some of the last wild gorillas on earth.

Our electronic appliances “contain thin strips of metal called capacitors, which control voltage and store energy. These capacitors are made of tantalum, a metal extracted from a mineral composite called coltan.

Coltan is found in only a few places in the world. Eighty percent of it is found in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Some of the richest deposits are in the same national parks in eastern Congo where the gorillas dwell”.

You get the picture. Everything we own comes from somewhere. Everything we do has a chain reaction. We are all connected, not in a touchy-feely way, but in a harmful-wasteful kind of way.

Then I read about Prince Charles, the prince “whose time has come”. For 20 years, people thought he was a green nut, talking about organic farming and sustainability.

Today, he is hailed as a “thought leader” by Al Gore, the man who failed to get the top job, made a movie and brought the subject of climate change out of the scientific arena into the mainstream.

Prince Charles is proposing a programme called “Accounting for Sustainability”. His idea is that if a can of soup can list calories, why can’t it list the environmental costs of getting that can to market?

He is starting that process with his own Duchy Originals,which today makes 200 mostly organic products, generating $2.3 million profits for charity.

He is also having his own carbon footprint measured. His Highgrove estate uses “green electricity” – from solar panels to carbon-neutral boilers to eco-efficient insulation.

Now comes the transportation bit – his Jaguar and Land Rover are being retro-fitted to run on biodiesel. He plans to take trains instead of cars whenever he can. He also plans to fly commercial instead of chartering private jets.

This year, under scrutiny by the media, he cancelled his holiday in Klosters – “he would save the carbon emissions by staying at home”.

Last month, the BBC ran a programme called “The Ethical Man” in which a reporter had his family’s lifestyle monitored and measured. It resulted in them taking the train instead of a plane for their family holiday.

Meanwhile, the newspaper I am reading tells me that 16 major cities have signed up to a US$5 billion plan to reduce emissions. These include Bangkok, Berlin, Chicago, Houston, Johannesburg, Karachi, London, Melbourne, Mexico City, Mumbai, New York, Rome, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Tokyo and Toronto.

(By the way, the newspaper and magazine I am reading comes from the world’s third greatest industrial polluter, behind the manufacturers of chemicals and steel.

From 2002 to 2005, the global consumption of paper rose by more than 20% from 300 million tons to about 366.

In the US, 62 million newspapers are printed a day and 44 million thrown away. In a week, the equivalent of 500,000 trees are dumped into landfills or incinerated.)

I don’t know about you but I feel there’s a massive tectonic shift taking place in our industry, that’s going to change, well, everything – from the way we fly our planes to how we plan and manage our destinations, run our companies, build our hotels and run them. (A hotel in California has removed the Bible from the side drawer and replaced it with “An Inconvenient Truth”.)

And it’s going to change the way people travel and want to behave. Will longhaul travel decline in popularity? Will destinations who care not for the environment be shunned by the aware? Will mega resorts be avoided in favour of smaller, more intimate, lodges and resorts?

You see, the developed world has moved from the age of greed to the era of guilt. We are feeling guilty. We know now what we’ve done, and we want to atone for our sins and we want you – big companies – to help us assuage that guilt.

Catch up with Yeoh Siew Hoon every week at The Transit Cafe – www.thetransitcafe.com