Want to satisfy your wanderlust for pristine nature and authentic culture in a conscious way? Then get onboard a luxury eco cruise!

These days a cruise can be a dirty word with the horrendous pollution that commercial cruise ships create. But lucky for eco-adventurers, now your visit to a delicate ecosystem won’t actually damage it. These three cruise adventures to the Galapagos Islands along the Mekong River, and through the Peruvian Amazon, show the industry how luxury, nature, and sustainability can truly co-exist. Savvy eco-travelers can have the experience of a lifetime and travel to exotic destinations with these companies leading the way in responsible ecotourism practices.

Rest assured, you’ll still get all the travel perks of luxury cruising: one-stop planning, expert guides on board, unique itineraries, amazing up close and personal views, fabulous meals, private excursions, and best of all… you only have to unpack once.

1. Aqua Expedition: Aria Amazon, Peru

This three- to seven-night eco cruise takes you on an extraordinary adventure through the Peruvian Amazon full of natural wonders. Think early morning bird watching, close encounters with pink dolphins, flying fish, jungle walks, squirrel monkeys, exploring tributaries in skiffs, and shooting stars at night. And that was just the first day.

Fresh from a revamp in 2015, the Aria Amazon is full of plush lounges and a stunning observation deck. Even when you’re inside, you’ll never miss a river view with its floor to ceiling windows. The boat itself was the masterpiece of Peruvian architect Jordi Puig. With sixteen Design Suites, four interconnect for families, this stunning floating luxury eco hotel offers guests chic understated comfort that seamlessly blends with nature.

Guests are spoiled with five-star Peruvian cuisine created by executive chef Pedro Miguel Schiaffino. Don’t be late for dinner served al fresco or in the dining room as menus include ingredients found only in the Peruvian Amazon. While guests relax and enjoy the wonders of the Amazon, the crew and Aqua Expedition team work behind the scenes with local environmentalists to preserve the health and bounty of the Amazon. One recent endeavor was helping to restore the threatened taricaya turtle population.

2. Aqua Expedition: Aqua Mekong, South East Asia

It’s your choice to cruise up or down stream on the Aqua Mekong for seven to three nights along the magnificent Mekong river through Vietnam and Cambodia. While on the water, you can relax in the outdoor pool, indulge in a traditional Southeast Asian massage in the spa, or soak up the sun on the observation deck.

Stay on board or head out for an excursion. Bike along the banks of the Mekong, tour the jungle with a local guide, and explore remote Buddhist monasteries and traditional river villages. You can even kayak to a floating market where traditional silk weavers sell their wares.

You get all this and sustainability programs. Besides being fuel efficient, the ship engines are virtually smoke-free to minimize impact. Expedition skiffs have ecologically sound outboard engines certified by the California Air Resource Board. And local initiatives include conservation, education, community outreach, sustainable job creation and philanthropy partnerships.

3. Ecoventura: MV Origin, Galápagos Islands

Based in the stunning Galápagos, award-winning Ecoventura works hard to create and maintain a safe and sustainable fleet of luxury expedition yachts where adventurers and nature enthusiasts can experience one of the world’s most diverse ecosystems. Its newest, the hybrid MV Origin, has onboard hammocks, lounges, and panoramic stateroom windows.

With its Smart Voyager voluntary ecological certification, carbon emissions are both offset and reduced. Its dedication to support the community isn’t just hype. For a decade, Ecoventura has partnered with Gotitas de Esperanza (Drops of Hope) and sponsored teachers’ salaries at the local high school. It also works with the non-profit, Pack for a Purpose, where guests bring much-needed supplies for local community needs like health and education.

You can choose between two unique seven-night itineraries full of custom guided walks and hikes, snorkeling, sea kayaking, and zodiac rides to explore mangrove estuaries, coves, and caves. Bring your camera everywhere. The wildlife viewing opportunity is one of the best in the world. You’ll see whales, dolphins, orcas, sharks, and massive schools of golden rays. Not to mention the famous Galápagos giant tortoise.

If you’ve never snorkeled with marine iguanas or sea-lions, this is your chance. The world’s smallest penguin is also a must see. When it’s time to relax (even wildlife sleeps) enjoy the open bar, sumptuous meals, and soak in an outdoor Jacuzzi while the sun sets.  And if you prefer an “all women adventure week“, well, Ecoventura offers that as well.

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Images courtesy of Ecoventura and Aqua Expedition 

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Will the plight of Lonesome George inspire you to be an Agent of Change?

The concept of slow food is worldwide and growing, but is the concept of slow fashion equally on the radars of today’s consumers?  There certainly seems to be a disconnect from ever growing fast fashion collections versus consumer sentiment for the environment and the harsh conditions for global garment workers. Perhaps this movement just needs a mascot. Slow food has the snail, and thanks to a mission driven apparel company based in the Galapagos Islands, now slow fashion has one too.

As the last surviving Pinta Tortoise from the Galapagos Islands, Lonesome George’s solitary plight is a cautionary tale of extinction unfolding as a result of human actions and mismanagement of scarce resources. Inspired by his story, company founder, Eduardo Balarezo, began Lonesome George & Co. to educate a new generation to try to prevent similar situations from happening at a time of dire and rising extinction rates.

Eduardo Balarezo with his company’s namesake.

“While many companies are choosing quick fixes to support social issues, we are focusing on the root of the problem and how we can prevent these issues from the ground up,” said Balarezo last week in San Francisco as he officially unveiled the Academy of Agents of Change, an experiential education built around Lonesome George & Co.’s proprietary Mind.Shift.Impact business model that invests 10% of every apparel sale and incorporates rigorous Outward Bound and Ashoka Youth Venture programs.

The Academy is specifically designed to turn Galapagos youth into social entrepreneurs by teaching them the hard-core skills necessary to have a meaningful social impact in their community. “We’ve found a unique way to create community impact that is sustainable, replicable and scalable and we encourage other companies to adopt our strategy.”

The tradition of developing countries utilizing the fashion industry to thrive is not new – In the history of the United States, firms producing ready‐made apparel, hats and shoes were responsible for the U.S. economy’s impressive growth starting as early as the 1800s – Balarezo’s hope is to create long-term sustainable impact as well. As speedy as the evolution of environmental change to his home in the fragile Galapogos may be, Lonesome George’s languid pace makes him the perfect mascot for a new spin on slow fashion.

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ColumnRead a book. Sustain your mind.

In yet another new chapter of “What’s Going on Upstairs,” it seems that scientists have had a virtual breakthrough in figuring out what fiction does to our brains. Recent studies show that reading about a made-up event can trigger the same neuro-bells and whistles as does taking part in an actual event. That is to say, when we read, “See Spot run,” we in some ways experience Spot running. With this in mind, given that it’s Earth Month, let us consider how certain stories can make us feel as if we’re soaring through the air, splashing in the sea or, for the more grounded among us, happily playing in the dirt.

But first, let’s agree with our friends in the lab (no deniers here). There’s no doubt that certain words and well-crafted sentences can have a similar effect on our minds as does the smell of fresh-baked bread, taking us to a time and place far beyond where we are when the reading experience occurs. And that’s the point, right? We often read books to escape our current experience and trade it in for another. Moreover, in many of the best novels, place functions as a character in and of itself, complete with attributes that go beyond backdrop to both embody and tease all five senses; whether it be Paris or Pi’s pontoon, the venue of a novel informs how we “feel” about a story and allows us to “go along” with the action.

So let’s celebrate novels that take us outside – tales that get our tails off the couch, out of the library and up from our lounge chair (yes, a beach read implies that you’re outside, but you know what we mean) and take us someplace else—namely, someplace without a roof. Enclosed please find deserts, jungles and mountains, oceans and rivers, blue skies and lush valleys…

1. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather (1927)

A natural and majestic silence pervades Willa Cather’s story of Bishop Jean Marie Latour and Josh Vaillant’s humble mid-19th century journey from the Midwest to a newly established Catholic diocese in New Mexico Territory. From the onset, as the two travel first to the Gulf of Mexico before heading out into the Native American frontier, Death Comes for the Archbishop captures a feeling that is pristine, nascent and dry – a pure presentation of the American West on the eve of conquest. Reading the novel, you get a deep sense of (mis?)guided faith as you witness the two men’s plodding entrance into a new and largely undisturbed world. Every village, mesa, path and stone along the way is offered up for examination and contemplation. In contrast to later, typical Western novels where the outward thrust is violent and clumsily unobservant, Cather allows us to clearly see the trail upon which our nation was to tread.

2. The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac (1958)

Dash, gallop and hop-skip from San Francisco to the Sierra Nevada with Ray Smith (Kerouac) and Japhy Ryder (based on the author’s friend, Zen Buddhist and Beat poet Gary Snyder) as they whoop and hike their way out of city life in a search of transcendence. Booted and ruck-sacked, these are perhaps Kerouac’s most “holy” characters. The plot of The Dharma Bums rises up, almost panting, as Kerouac’s signature freestyle prose is ideal for delivering the air and sounds of those epiphanies that only happen in nature. Even at rest, you’re there with them to catch your breath: “The yard was full of tomato plants about to ripen, and mint, mint, everything smelling of mint, and one fine old tree that I loved to sit under on those cool perfect starry California October nights unmatched anywhere in the world.”

3. Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach (1970)

“It was morning, and the new sun sparkled gold across the ripples of a gentle sea.” This is the poetic and unforgettable opening to this beautiful tale of rebellion, self-seeking and joyous aerial defiance. Jonathan Livingston Seagull flies both with and against the wind, and has touched millions of readers in that unforgettable, “I remember exactly where and when I read it” way. Richard Bach’s simple tale of the young hero bird is perhaps the closest you’ll ever to come to flying without leaving the ground. Each time he ascends from the confines of the earth, he takes us along with him to feel the assistance and challenge of every breeze and gust that affects his every… single… feather.

4. The Clan of the Cave Bear, Jean Auel (1980)

Twenty-thousand years fail to distance us from the rich natural textures and challenges described by Jean Auel in her story of a chance coming together of a Cro-Magnon girl and a tribe of Neanderthals. You can almost smell the dank caves, primal mud and lush forests of the prehistoric landscape that hosts Ayla and her adoptive clan, as they navigate the edge of the era’s Ice Age. The first of the author’s Earth’s Children series, The Clan of the Cave Bear was based, according to Auel, on a great deal of research, with resulting language that allows us to trust (some have said too much so) the story’s historical backdrop and crawl into the cave of prehistory to enjoy a page-turning plot that, given the success of the series’ ensuing novels, may likely leave you craving more.

5. Water Music, T.C. Boyle (1982)

The first novel of the always funny and insanely observant T. Coraghessan Boyle, Water Music is an historical and satirical examination of two sadly misguided, yet somehow majestic and even glorious tragic heroes—conman Ned Rise and the great adventurer Mungo Park. Taking place largely in Imperial British West Africa, the novel’s lavish language and plot are as twisted as its main characters who come together in the late-1770s/early-1800s in a quest to find fame and fortune—and the source of the Niger River. Tapping into the imagination of discovery, the relationship between the reader and the novel’s landscape—notably the river itself—is cemented early on and lasts through to the (fabulously) bitter end. Guaranteed you’ll find yourself more than once wiping the sweat off your brow in heat of the African day.

6. Galápagos, Kurt Vonnegut (1985)

Back to the sea. That’s where our “big brains” have gotten us in this ghostly accounted, post-apocalyptic tale of the last humans (among them Mick Jagger and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) and the evolutionary de-evolution that follows our gravest mistakes. What have we become? Wiser perhaps, but mercifully less brainy, the new humans of Galápagos are flippered creatures who hunt with their snouts, and are generally less capable than their ancestors who were, needless to say, occupied with ill-advised tasks like bomb making and facilitating global warming. Like all great Vonnegut tomes, we’re treated here to his rare form of fanciful pessimism, which in some weird way rings optimistic. A maestro of simplicity and irony, the author’s language transports us ethically and emotionally in terms of our relationship with our natural world.

7. Ishmael, Daniel Quinn (1992)

With the natural world embodied in the form of a giant Gorilla/Socratic instructor, Ishmael is Daniel Quinn’s philosophical manifesto as much as it is a novel. The story retells history through a stunningly fresh and clear lens that exposes, point-by point, the illusion of human greatness and superiority as a fantastic and cataclysmic lie. Zeroing directly in on the Bible and the great stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, the book’s teacher unfurls for the narrator new explanations and interpretations of events and roles that allow him (and us) to rethink humanity’s relationship with the environment. While this story doesn’t so much take us outside, per se, it offers a new view of who we are here on this earth and our role in sustaining what is not ours.

8. Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer (1996)

A biography that reads like a mystery (sorry for foray out of fiction here, but you can file this one under “you cannot make this stuff up”), the great chronicler Jon Krakauer invites us to join him in his effort to understand the life of Christopher McCandless. Later made into a truly great movie (in 2007), Into the Wild takes us along on the 24-year-old’s life walkabout, which culminated in his disappearing into the Alaskan wilderness with a 10-pound bag of rice. The journey is one of self-actualization attained by pushing, poking and prodding the natural world a in way that calls upon the painful alchemy of exposure and danger. Somehow this cautionary tale both beckons and warns, presenting the dichotomy of risk and reward in a way that leaves us breathless and wondering what self-discovery is worth.

9. Last Night in Twisted River, John Irving (2009)

Probably too often (and sloppily) referred to as the American Charles Dickens (and a more symbolic and postmodern writer than he would like to admit), John Irving is known for plot brilliance and character development nonpareil. His powerful talents, when turned upon the natural world and how we negotiate it – namely here, New Hampshire’s Androscoggin River and the logging professionals who work on its shores and in its waters – are a literary force to be reckoned with. Last Night in Twisted River’s time on and along the water drives the story forward with Irving’s characteristic power and engagement. While there, we are inside the camps, towns and forests of the Northeast for the plot-developing twists and turns of the author’s 12th and perhaps most natural world-oriented novel.

10. State of Wonder, Ann Patchett (2011)

Reading this story of a Minnesota physician who chases her past and future up the Amazon River, one cannot help but think of the great Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (if you haven’t read it, think Apocalypse Now without the napalm). Indeed, we feel in our guts the upriver suction that possesses Marina Singh as she searches for answers surrounding the fever-caused death of a colleague who succumbed while searching for a mysterious and brilliant pharmaceutical specialist who has disappeared into her “research.” Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder is a page-turner (the plot flows as deliberately as the river itself), and you’re sure to feel the heat and bugs and hot rain as you see “civilization drop away again and again” into a jungle that breathes a single color: “The sky, the water, the bark of the trees: everything that wasn’t green became green.”

Editor’s note: News & Culture contributor Scott Adelson’s biweekly feature, InPRINT, reviews and discusses books new and old, as well as examines issues in publishing.

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InPrint: On the Road, Again – Revisiting Jack Kerouac

InPrint: Les Histoires De Paris & Two Novel Additions

Top image: Zach Welty

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When would you not want an upgrade? And when would a downgrade be a good thing? When it comes to endangered species and sites, the ability of a list to focus energy and dollars on those (un)lucky enough to make the cut render these questions quite tricky. The bottom line is coin, and sad designations can mean a world of difference.

UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee (WHC) held its 34th session in Brasília, Brazil, over the past week and, among other announcements, let the world know that while Florida’s Everglades has once again become a site worthy of its “In Danger” moniker, Equador’s Galapagos Islands no longer fits the bill.

This endangered list isn’t just any old endangered list. For starters, it’s a U.N. deal. Under the 1972 World Heritage Convention, the WHC (which names sites that are of “outstanding universal value”) can inscribe on its List of World Heritage in Danger “properties” whose nations have requested immediate assistance and for which protection had been deemed to require “major operations.” This pretty much means two things: money and dollars. First off, a site that makes the list qualifies for cash from the World Heritage Fund. It also gets what amounts to a giant – and we’re talking giant – shout out to the international conservation community to respond to specific needs asap. According to UNESCO, the “mere prospect of inscribing a site on this list often proves to be effective, and can incite rapid conservation action.”

The Everglades National Park was inscribed this time around at the request of the United States due to “serious and continuing degradation of its aquatic ecosystem.” It’s the second time the Everglades has made the list, its first time being in 1993 after Hurricane Andrew and “a marked deterioration in water flows and quality resulting from agricultural and urban development.” The site was removed from list in 2007, but now “water inflows have been reduced by up to 60 percent and nutrient pollution has increased to the point where the site is showing significant signs of eutrophication, loss of marine habitat and a subsequent decline in marine species.” The Everglades, says the WHC, has the largest mangrove in the western hemisphere, the largest continuous stand of sawgrass prairie and the most significant breeding ground for wading birds in North America.

Meanwhile, (mostly) south of the equator, the Galapagos Islands were taken off the list due to progress in protecting the archipelago, despite UNESCO itself objecting.

“The state of conservation report presented by UNESCO did not suggest that the site should be removed from the danger list, that was a decision the committee made,” UNESCO spokesperson Sue Williams tells OurAmazingPlanet. “They’re free to make up their own minds.”

OAP goes on to quote Johannah Barry, president of the Galapagos Conservancy, who acknowledges some “inroads” against the islands’ problems, but said he’s “concerned it might appear like everything’s all better now.” Aside from the continuing onslaught of tourism which has a negative impact on the site, Barry points to the influx of “alien plants, animals and diseases in recent years, from West Nile virus and parasitic flies that are killing off the islands’ finches, to domestic dogs and cats that maim and kill the archipelago’s marine iguanas.”

All told, the Galapagos retains its international panache when it comes to conservation efforts. “Just because it has come off the list doesn’t mean UNESCO doesn’t pay attention to it anymore,” OAP quotes Williams as saying. “If there’s a deterioration of the situation, it could very well be the site could be re-inscribed on the list.” Meanwhile the Everglades is getting a huge boost by regaining this unfortunate designation. Still, the musical chairs regarding various endangered lists is a high stakes game which conservation groups are rightly paying very close attention to. Out of site, out of mind (or out of pocketbook, as the case my be), could be a death knell to a site less well-known than, say, the Galapagos.

Images: michaelrperry, chaunceydavis

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