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Speak Up! Ask for green travel at your favorite events

Environmental organizations like SpaceShare may do the work, but we don't have power to create change. In today's economy, consumers often have amazing power. A few comments from you, buying a ticket or registering for a conference, can have a great impact.

Quick intro

Ask them if they carpool! When you hear of the conference, when you buy a ticket or register, ask to talk to the person in charge of carpooling & recycling. Mail the organizers this introduction to SpaceShare, or simply encourage them to look over www.spaceshare.com/green

Give them a grade!

Here is a guide you can send to an event before it happens or take with you, fill it out, and hand it in with the event survey. Print this checklist.

Two keys are particularly helpful:

  1. Let them know that carpooling or room-sharing or flight-networking would help you get there. In any organization, the environmentalists will "get it" when asked to set up carpooling; letting the organization know the very simple message that "I am a customer and I want it" gets through to the business side.
  2. Ask to talk to whomever is in charge of making the event green. Usually, no one is in charge, and that is half the struggle. As a customer asking who makes the decisions about carpooling and recycling, they owe you an answer, and that may bring them over that threshold, assigning someone the job. Most events are not "brown" because they've made the decision not to care; rather they are brown because they haven't thought about what they can do to be green. If someone is simply in charge of thinking about greening the conference, the rest is downhill.