SANTA BARBARA, CALIF. -- It was like discovering that Paris Hilton bicycles through her neighbourhood every Sunday morning collecting bottles and cans for recycling.
I'd always thought of Santa Barbara as a high-gloss, devil-may-care kind of place. After all, this affluent city, just 150 kilometres north of Los Angeles, markets itself as the American Riviera and boasts enough celebrity sightings, multi-million-dollar homes and chi-chi shops to suggest its residents -- and those who come to play -- spend their days in self-centred indulgence.
But in a land of peroxide blondes, Santa Barbara has impressively green roots. The story goes that in 1969 a devastating oil spill occurred off the coast here. The late Senator Gaylord Nelson visited the area and, spurred on by what he saw, spearheaded legislation to declare April 22 as a national day to celebrate the planet. From Santa Barbara's oily beaches, Earth Day was born.
Sitting on West Beach today, shifting crystals of white sand through my fingers, it's hard to imagine the devastation. To my right, in Santa Barbara Harbor, locals buy spot prawns at the Saturday morning Fisherman's Market. To my left, visitors walk the wooden planks of Stearns Wharf, a 135-year-old pier that's home to touristy restaurants and the child-friendly Warner Sea Center (as in Ty Warner, of Beanie Babies fame). Behind me, cyclists, rollerbladers, runners and tourists in surrey-style peddle cars cruise the palm-studded promenade that parallels the seashore.
Across the street from the beach is my hotel, the Harbor View Inn. This low-slung, four-diamond property participates in Santa Barbara's Car Free Experience initiative (santabarbaracarfree.org), which offers discounts on lodgings, activities and the Amtrak Pacific Surfliner service to Los Angeles for travellers who arrive without a car or who park their wheels for the duration of their stay. The city has also recently launched a website -- http://www.greensantabarbara.com -- devoted to environmentally smart travel. Here you'll find tips on green lodgings, transportation and cuisine, as well as itineraries focused on food, eco-tourism, quintessential activities and art, architecture and design.
Although the Harbor View Inn offers recycling and the option of reusing towels and linens, what makes it a sound environmental choice is its location within walking distance of the beach, downtown core and downtown-waterfront shuttle, an electric shuttle bus that, for a 25-cent fare, takes visitors most places they want to go.
Top of my list is State Street, the downtown's main drag, lined with an eclectic mix of shops, restaurants and galleries. Armed with a free map from the visitors centre, I follow the Red Tile Tour, a 12-block, self-guided walking tour. Highlights include the chapel at El Presidio de Santa Barbara State Historical Park, a former Spanish fort founded in 1782, and the County Courthouse, built in the Spanish-Moorish revival style and featuring a mural room and exceptional views from the clock tower.
Another must-do on my list is the Santa Barbara Zoo. While my inner child loves the lions and tigers, my green-traveller side is impressed with the zoo's environmental initiatives, including a solar-powered giraffe barn, a bioswail (a grassy trench) that naturally filters the zoo's runoff, reclaimed water used for irrigation and restaurant flatware that looks and feels like plastic but is made from potatoes, a renewable resource that can be composted.Watching the Humboldt penguins gobble sustainable seafood, I chat about the motivation behind environmental do-gooding with Chris Briggs, a member of the zoo's Green Team. "Part of our mission is to educate the public about preservation and conservation," says Briggs. "So we've got to walk the walk, talk the talk."
I decide to stop walking and try touring on an environmentally friendly Segway, a scooter on steroids that boasts zero emissions and zero need for gas. I spend the first 30 minutes of my city tour inside the Segway warehouse learning how to stop, start and balance my machine. One wall is marked with black skid lines. "We call that the wall of shame," co-owner Jerry Mahoney explains. "One woman was just not listening to me when I explained how to stop." I listen more carefully, then follow Mahoney on a tour through the city's passageways, streets and gardens.
Later, I hop on an electric bus (Santa Barbara is reported to have the largest fleet of electric vehicles in North America) for a 10-minute ride to Mission Santa Barbara. This vanilla-and-pink mission, established in 1786, still serves as a church and friary. That explains the Franciscan friar who bustles past in the mission garden, his brown robe with rope belt billowing behind.
