San Francisco - Gold. Wild West gunslingers. Free-loving hippies. California has always had something special. Led by San Francisco, the sunny state on the US West Coast is becoming the country's eco-centre, which is also pretty special in the land of throwaway plastic containers and cardboard burger boxes. When it comes to environmental protection, people in the San Francisco Bay Area are in accord. They separate trash, install photovoltaic roofs, go shopping with fabric bags and drive hybrid vehicles. Environmental consciousness is a local tradition, said Mark Westlund, spokesman for San Francisco's Environmental Department. "The first eco-programmes go back to 1932," he noted.
Today, nearly all of the city's 900,000 inhabitants separate their refuse into recyclables, compostables and trash, which go into blue, green and black containers, respectively.
While Europeans often seem to practice environmental friendliness with clenched teeth, Americans have a laid-back approach. The shuttle limousines at the airport are elegant hybrid vehicles. Eco-restaurants are trendy, their chefs are stars and eco-hotels tickle design lovers.
Gavin Newsom, San Francisco's mayor, said he aimed to make the city "as green as possible as fast as possible."
San Francisco's some 500 municipal buses are either hybrids or fuelled with biodiesel. Environmentally friendly taxis are subsidized. Large supermarkets and chain pharmacies are banned from distributing plastic shopping bags to shoppers. The number of bicycle paths has been doubled.
Tourists opting to cycle should also hire a tour guide at one of the city's many bicycle rental shops. With the guide's help, even leisure-time cyclists can manage to roll down Russian Hill safely and slalom through the crowds at Fisherman's Wharf without accident. The ultimate cycling experience is a ride over the famous Golden Gate Bridge.
The American city ranked the "greenest" by the online community SustainLane.com is Portland, Oregon, not San Francisco, whose lack of affordable housing and high earthquake risk relegated it to second place. Second place is not to be sneezed at either, though, and Westlund wants tourists to notice. He said he hoped the "City by the Bay" would become "an international destination for green tourism."
Many local hoteliers like the idea and are increasingly building "green" hotels or renovating existing hotels to make them environmentally friendly. The Orchard Garden Hotel near Chinatown, for example, is a boutique hotel built in 2006 to national standards for "green" buildings developed by the US Green Building Council (USGBC), a Washington, DC-based non-profit organization.
In 2007, the Orchard Garden Hotel became the first hotel in California and third in the country to receive the USGBC's LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) "green" building certification. A key LEED criterion is energy-saving design, construction and operation.
The vintage-style Hotel Carlton, near Union Square and the Theatre District, also has a LEED certification. One of San Francisco's first "green" hotels is the Hotel Triton, located two blocks from Union Square.
Eco-minded tourists can visit Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, site of a famous former federal penitentiary, on the Hornblower Hybrid, the nation's first hybrid ferry boat. Launched early this summer by Alcatraz Cruises, the catamaran utilizes wind power, solar energy and diesel engines and looks quite sporty besides.
Speaking of sports, a visit to the United States would not be complete without taking in a baseball game. San Francisco is the home of the Giants, a Major League Baseball team that plays at AT&T Park. The stadium, on the waterfront near Fisherman's Wharf, uses solar panels to generate electricity.
So far, the Giants have also retrofitted one of the stadium concession stands selling garlic fries, a popular California snack, to reduce gas and cooking-oil consumption; the fries come in compostable containers.
For environmentally conscious lovers of finer cuisine, there are places like the Dosa on Fillmore Street. The hip South Indian restaurant's furniture is made of bamboo and coconut wood, and the ingredients of the food are, the restaurant says, "primarily organic, bio-dynamic, natural, free-range and sustainable." The Dosa is packed with diners.
"People in California are more interested in chefs now than actors," remarked Anjan Mitra, who runs the Dosa with his wife.
Another popular dining spot is The Moss Room at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. There the chef is Loretta Keller, who uses only produce from organic farmers around San Francisco. The Millennium Restaurant, whose executive chef is Eric Tucker, is an elegant vegetarian eatery on Geary Street that cooks with organic produce "whenever possible."
Those convinced of the benefits of organic food can learn in the Bay Area how to prepare it, too. In Sausalito, a small city across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, is the Cavallo Point Lodge, a luxury resort hotel. Set in historic Fort Baker, the hotel is home to a restaurant boasting a Michelin star and a cooking school that only uses products from organic farms.
A good place for sweets is the Love at First Bite cupcakery and bakery in Berkeley, a city on the east shore of San Francisco Bay. The bakery's owner, Pat Powell, stirs batter and whips cream for her goodies, whose organic ingredients ease any guilt that her customers may feel while indulging themselves.
Internet: www.visitcalifornia.de, www.onlyinsanfrancisco.com.
