On my last trip I was struck by my hotel room. In the bathroom there was a note that you often see in hotels: Please hang up your bath towels to help us conserve water and energy and help the environment.

 

A positive message, to be sure. So my wife and I hung up our towels -- and housekeeping ended up washing them anyway. OK, not everyone's on the same page. But beyond that, I thought of something I often think about with hotels -- why is it so chilly when you first enter? I like it warm, admittedly, but hotel rooms tend to be cranked way to the cold side. And this was in humid San Antonio. What has to be the added energy use -- not to mention added cost to the hotel, and ultimately us -- to keep it so?

 

I think part of the problem, or at least part of the evolution, in how we think about environmental management is that we're good at only pieces of the puzzle. We might do well at recycling our waste, but we drive around the gas-guzzling SUVs. We might turn our home thermostats down when we're not there, but we keep using light bulbs that are energy inefficient.

 

There's been the talk of a national boycott of buying gas on May 15. The grass-roots intention is to reduce consumption and create pressure to lower gas prices. Those goals are admirable. But to whatever extent people will participate in that, they're likely to just fill up the day before or the day after. It's hard to believe there'll be any real impact on gas consumption.

 

It's human nature to try to simplify a challenge and make it more palatable. We want to be healthier, so we cut down on carbs but eat fatty bacon to make up for it. Or we ignore the exercise part of the equation all together.

 

Our environmental consciousness both for business and our personal lives has gotten better. But we need to keep the big picture in mind. Doing one thing good but ignoring another can just cancel out the entire effort.

 

Until that happens on a broad scale, we're putting band-aids on the problem. Those band-aids are important, but they aren't the whole answer to making us environmentally healthy.

 

Allan Gerlat is editor of Waste News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.

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