Combining information with inspiration and practical, insider’s knowledge, the book has been called “a one-of-a-kind guide for the passionate traveler.” Contributions are organized by themes such as “Moveable Feasts,”  “Secret Gardens,” and “Paying it Forward.” To Myanmar With Love is edited by Morgan Edwardson, with photographs by Steve Goodman.

Freelance writer Laurie Weed contributed to three of the nine Asia books in the series, including this one. You can find To Myanmar With Love at Book Passage and other independent bookstores throughout the Bay Area.

Today’s additions brings the total number of sites on the list to 553 sites in 107 countries, UNESCO announced during its International Coordinating Council of the Man and the Biosphere Programme (MAB-ICC) meeting on the Island of Jeju in Korea. Ten of the sites are in Asia, with Europe getting six and the rest divided among Australia, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas.

Biosphere reserves are areas designated to serve as places to test different approaches to integrated management of terrestrial, freshwater, coastal and marine resources and biodiversity. As a result, they are sites for experimenting with and learning about sustainable development.

Sites added to the list this year include Great Sandy, a terrestrial, coastal, marine area in Australia which is home to the largest rainforest stand on sand in the world.

Similipal, India, is a tiger reserve in the eastern Indian state of Orissa, which used to be the hunting ground of the Maharajah of Mayurbhanj, while Swabian Alb, in Germany, is covered by beech forests and orchards and housed a military training area that was closed to the public for over 100 years until recently.

Other approved sites include Giam Siak Kecil – Bukit Batu, Indonesia, a peat land area in Sumatra featuring sustainable timber production and two wildlife reserves which are home to the Sumatran tiger, elephant, tapir, and sun bear, and Tasik Chini, the first site in Malaysia designated as a UNESCO designated biosphere reserve, which is a sanctuary for many freshwater species.

The other new sites are: Lagunas de Montebello (Mexico), Flores Island (Portugal), Geres-Xures (Portugal and Spain), Shinan Dadohae (ROK), Altaisky (Russia), Vhembe (South Africa), Fuerteventura (Spain), Lajat Biosphere Reserve (Syria), Desnianskyi (Ukraine), Delta del Orinoco (Venezuela), Cu Lao Cham – Hoi An (Viet Nam), Mui Ca Mau (Viet Nam), Mount Myohyang (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea), Biosphare Bliesgau (Germany), Pachmarhi (India), Nokrek (India), and Jabal Moussa Biosphere Reserve (Lebanon).

Paul Hawken is a longtime friend of CharityFocus, renowned entrepreneur, visionary environmental activist, founder of Wiser Earth and author of many books—most recently Blessed Unrest. He was recently presented with an honorary doctorate of humane letters by University of Portland, when he delivered this superb commencement address to the class of 2009.

University of Portland, May 3rd, 2009

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” Boy, no pressure there.

But let’s begin with the startling part. Hey, Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation—but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement.

Basically, the earth needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of operating instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, and don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food—but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: YOU ARE BRILLIANT, AND THE EARTH IS HIRING. The earth couldn’t afford to send any recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refuge camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen.

Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true.  Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.

Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown—Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood—and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, and non-governmental organizations, of companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.

The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. Think about this: we are the only species on this planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe - exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”

So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a 20 deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.

This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, challenging, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hopefulness only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.”

727 Hotel in Costa Rica

The fully outfitted, meticulously detailed, two bedroom, Boeing 727 fuselage suite. We have refurbished a vintage 1965 Boeing 727 airframe, which in its prior life shuttled globetrotters on South Africa Air and Avianca Airlines (Colombia). Our phoenix is now ready for its future duty as the most exclusive hotel suite in Costa Rica.

We salvaged this airframe, piece by piece, from its San Jose airport resting place. We carefully transported the pieces on five, big-rig trucks to the jungles of Manuel Antonio where they have been resurrected into a unique jumbo hotel suite. Our classic airplane, nestled on the edge of the National Park in our Costa Verde II area, is perched on a 50-foot pedestal. At this height, you will enjoy scenic ocean and jungle views from the hard wood deck built atop the plane’s former right wing.

Kitchenette Dining Foyer in 727

The plane’s interior is Costa Rican teak paneling from the cockpit to the tail. Furnishings are hand-carved, teak furniture from Java , Indonesia Our 727 home features two air conditioned bedrooms—one with two queen sized beds and the other with one queen sized bed, each with its own private bath-a flat screen TV, a kitchenette, dining area foyer; an ocean view terrace; a private entrance up a river rock, spiral staircase; and 360 degrees of surrounding gardens.

Enjoy an evening on the terrace while sipping a glass of wine and observing your tree top neighbors: sloths, toucans, and monkeys.

Wing Balcony

Our refurbished Boeing 727 home is not the only such dwelling in the world: We were inspired by a Forbes Magazine article about a company offering hurricane-proof living via surplus Boeing 727 airframes! Of course, we were intrigued and found some new ways to introduce convenience and luxury to this very prosaic bit of aluminum scrap. We are sure that you will agree with us!

The following is an excerpt from an article entitled “Riding Out the Rough Seas: Some New Ideas for Success,” by Karen Weiner Escalera, principal at KKWE group and one of the leading marketing/PR experts in luxury travel, hospitality and lifestyle (KWE represents a variety of resort, destinations and other travel-oriented entities).

Escalera writes, “We must focus on niches and micro niches for our markets, products, delivery of these products and distribution channels. It’s no longer sufficient to pitch products to a broad category, such as the family market. Tomorrow’s success stories will cater to new subsets of a mature family niche, such as gay/lesbian parents, teens, single parents, active families, multi-generational travelers, multi-cultural families, and family reunions. And then there are the new travel niches, from grief tourism (visiting Holocaust sites and Ground Zero), to danger tourism, slum tourism and glamping (glamorous camping). For example, in late 2008, Slovenia was quick to capture an offshoot of eco-tourism, beekeeping tourism. Months later the Fairmont Royal York’s urban beekeeping initiative in Toronto not only began supplying honey to its restaurants, but also nurtures the local, endangered bee population. Even famous London retailer, Fortnum and Mason, has recently begun to produce its own honey from its rooftop beehives, collecting pollen from chestnut, lime trees, and flowering plants from the best addresses in London.

“As Jitendra Jain, editor of hotelemarketer.com, articulates, “experience engines” will be the next big innovation in trip-planning—online engines that will host all the building blocks of the entire travel experience. Travelers will be able to search and bundle destination information, flights, accommodation, attractions, geotagging (interactive maps with site-specific data such as photos, video, websites, RSS feeds, coordinates etc.), social networking, media and consumer reviews and pairing of travel companions. Not only will a customized itinerary pop up containing all of those elements, but we’ll be connected to dozens, or hundreds, of like-minded fellow prospective travelers with the same interests who will be going to the same destination and looking to meet online first.’ ”

Entire article and more articles related to trends in travel and tourism are here.

From Litquake:

Lewis Black in conversation with Marc Maron
June 28, 8 p.m.
Herbst Theater, Van Ness @ McAllister
San Francisco

For its biggest fundraiser of the year, Litquake proudly presents comedian, actor, author, and Daily Show contributor Lewis Black, live and uncensored! This will be the curmudgeonly comic’s only Bay Area appearance to promote his bestselling book Me of Little Faith, just released in paperback. In a freewheeling onstage conversation, Black and comedian/radio host Marc Maron will gleefully dissect politics, religion, and other American foolishness. Audience Q&A and booksigning to follow.

Tickets are $25 general admission, and $75 for VIP reception with the two stars after the show. All proceeds will, of course, benefit your favorite literary festival. For advance sales, go to cityboxoffice.com.

About Litquake
Litquake, San Francisco’s annual literary festival, was founded by Bay Area writers in order to put on a week-long literary spectacle for book lovers, complete with cutting-edge panels, unique cross-media events, and hundreds of readings. Since its founding in 1999, the festival has presented close to 1,400 author appearances for an audience of over 32,000 in its lively and inclusive celebration of San Francisco’s thriving contemporary literary scene. Litquake seeks to foster interest in literature, perpetuate a sense of literary community, and provide a vibrant forum for Bay Area writing as a complement to the city’s music, film, and cultural festivals. Dates: 10/9-17, 2009.

What I think is most interesting about Trazzler is that, as a travel writer, you can submit a short post to Trazzler that links to your longer articles elsewhere on the web, and thus drive traffic to your other articles. In fact, Trazzler encourages this: “You are always free to republish anything that you submit to Trazzler or to submit previously published (copyright-friendly) material that is edited to fit Trazzler’s style. Published Trazzler trips always come with a prominent credit/byline for the author, appear on a profile that you can customize, and look professional, so please feel free to use them to promote yourself and your writing.”

Here’s how they describe themselves: “Trazzler helps would-be travelers answer the question “Where should I go?” Trazzlers meander through a world of trips—hand-picked, concise, compellingly written slices of life that pull the reader into a real experience: a hotel stay, walk, adventure, spa, restaurant, ice cream stand, pony ride… really anywhere that travel can take you. And that’s where you come in. Each Trazzler trip is dominated by a photo that sets the scene so that your writing can tell the rest of the story. Our travel-writing philosophy is different from anything else out there.

“The rules that govern our relationship with writers are different too. Here are a few of them:
1. Start from the premise that the quality of the content matters.
2. Rely on a combination of free and paid writing.
3. Surface the best writing.
4. Reward the best contributors with real freelance writing contracts.
5. Dedicate at least 15% of our budget to pay writers and editors (the same as The New York Times).”

Travel writing that helps to sustain or enhance the unique and valuable character of a place—its environment, culture, aesthetics, heritage, and/or the well-being of its residents.

Categories:
Best Travel Article or Essay for Planet Earth
Best Travel Book for Planet Earth

Deadline: September 1, 2009
Prizes: $200 Gold, $100 Silver and $50 Bronze in each category

As Bradley Weiss wrote in “The Untold Travel Story: A Travel Writer’s Guide to Sustainable Tourism and Destination Stewardship” for National Geographic magazine, “The tourism industry does not merely make use of the destinations on which it depends, it interacts with them. It can sustain them. It can ruin them. Sometimes, it can save them. If carefully managed, tourism can alleviate poverty and provide an incentive for wildlife conservation, historic preservation and cultural enrichment.”

The Best Women's Travel Writing 2009

I hope you’ll join the fun as authors (including myself, Laurie McAndish King) read from the Travelers’ Tales anthology, The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2009.

Thursday, June 11: We’ll be reading at Get Lost Books in San Francisco (1825 Market Street) at 7 p.m.

• Bonnie Bruinsslot is comforted — and then some — by a handsome young Italian man.
• Pamela Alma Bass considers love and loss in San Miguel de Allende.
• Francesca de Stephano discovers pain, pleasure, and porcini mushrooms in Liguria.
• Kathryn Kefauver loses her privacy in Laos — but gains something equally valuable.
• Laurie McAndish King hunts lions on foot, and without a gun, in Botswana.
• Stacey Tuel inspires a Mexican housewife to rediscover her youthful exuberance.

Thursday, June 18: We’ll be at Books, Inc. in Laurel Village (SF) at 7 p.m.. Join us for a glass of wine and to hear Pamela Alma Bass, Francesca de Stephano, and Laurie McAndish King read.

Sunday, June 28: You can hear us at Diesel Books in Oakland at 3 p.m. Publisher Larry Habegger and editor Lucy McCauley will join us, as will Ken Matusow and Millicent Susens, with their stories from Travelers’ Tales The Best Travel Writing 2009.

• Pamela Alma Bass considers love and loss in San Miguel de Allende.
• Carol Beddo remembers her love affair with an Ethiopian in Addis Ababa.
• Diana Cohen learns about pottery — and secrets from Spain’s dark history — in an Andalucian village.
• Laurie McAndish King hunts lions on foot, and without a gun, in Botswana.
• Ken Matusow discovers the central African playground of the Mbuti pygmies a people who seek a life of harmony with nature.
• Millicent Susens finds affirmation in rural Colorado that the unexpected event is often the most meaningful.
• Yvette Zhu braves a 1,550-mile motorbike course through China.

The stories are funny, inspiring, exciting … and true. And in these days of “staycations,” they may be just the thing to sooth your travel bug.

Janice Cook Newman

From Janice Cook Newman: Just posted the first essay from one of my students in the Afghan Women Writers Project. It’s heartbreaking & lovely. Read it, and please help spread the word. We want to get these women’s voices out there.

“When I was child I wished to be a doctor like my uncle, who wears a white shirt and everyday checks on lots of ill people. But one day, all of my wishes were destroyed. It was the day the Taliban came to our country, Afghanistan…”

[And, from your editor, Laurie McAndish King: I'm experimenting with using Apture links in this post. If you click on Janice's name above, there should be three related links. Try it!]