When: Tuesday, November 30, 6:30pm – 8:00pm
Where: Monona Public Library, 1000 Nichols Road, Monona, WI 
Topic: Green Travel

Lynne Diebel and Pat Dillon, authors of Green Travel Guide to Southern Wisconsin, share small footprint fun with green lodgings, local fare, silent sports, low impact events, and more. Joel Knutson, who works to protect a sea turtle habitat in San Jose del Cabo, shares his insights on sustainable travel as adventure: Getting your hands dirty in foreign sands.

Lynne: I’ve always lived in the Upper Midwest—Minnesota, Illinois and mostly Wisconsin—the landscape I love, the place that imprinted on me as a child and never let go. Being outdoors is my favorite way to be: hiking, canoeing and kayaking, canoe camping, vegetable gardening, outdoor photography. My husband Bob Diebel and I raised our four children in Stoughton because after spending our college years in Chicago we craved small town life and easy access to the natural world. Since I retired from teaching high school, I’ve co-authored four books: ABCs Naturally, Paddling Northern Minnesota and Paddling Southern Minnesota, all published by Trails Books; and Green Travel Guide to Southern Wisconsin, published by UW Press.

As an advocate of both land and water conservation and silent sports, promoting green travel is a natural for me. I don’t want Wisconsin’s amazing natural beauty wasted and diminished by over-consumption and over-development, and I believe many Wisconsinites agree. So I want to help these kindred folks discover vacation destinations that protect our environment, inns and eateries whose owners have always embraced this attitude. I compare these people to my parents, who would never have labeled themselves “green” but who lived by what we now call a “green” philosophy because that’s what they believed was right.

Pat: I grew up in a rural village outside Milwaukee within a mile or two of fourteen lakes. We never traveled. Mostly I rode horses in open pastures alongside grazing Guernsey cows that seemed never to be in a barn. Later I high-tailed it to Milwaukee and Chicago yet planned most weekends to be back in Wisconsin. Eventually I moved back and raised my twin daughters (Maura and Nina) in a rural village along the Badfish Creek in Rock County. That’s where I learned that good land and community stewardship begins with supporting neighborhood artisans and food producers, and this became my focus as an independent writer. I now live on the west side of Madison with my dogs Woody and Bella, my cat Nimbus, and a rotating door of college-age girls. I think Wisconsin may be one of the coolest places to live on the planet.

Joel: I use my ongoing work supporting a sea turtle habitat protection project based in San Jose del Cabo as a template to emphasize three major themes: (1) International travel is still the most rewarding in many respects, and presents amazing opportunities for hands-on work far beyond just an ‘eco-travel’ tour; (2) Anyone can do it, and can do it sustainably on a budget that is still far less than many domestic travel excursions; (3) The inspiration and lessons derived by working with micro-level groups overseas is precisely the shot in the arm a lot of us need to give the proper perspective in solving the “intractable” problems we face stateside.