Time Special Plugs ‘Eco Tourist’ Spa with Air Conditioning
Weeks earlier, the same magazine warned of dire consequences from greenhouse gases.

By Ken Shepherd
Business & Media Institute
April 18, 2006

     If you want free advertising for your top-dollar vacation resort, find a way to “go green” and book a room for a reporter from Time magazine.

     On the heels of Vanity Fair’s “Green Issue,” the newsweekly just released a special Summer 2006 “Style & Design” edition that promotes “Green Living” as “the new luxury.”

     “The success of eco-entrepreneurs,” wrote editor-at-large Kate Betts, is “proof that green living is becoming an increasingly natural instinct.” Betts’s special edition profiled organic grocery chain Whole Foods and a “Who’s Who” guide of “14 forward-thinking individuals” who “are reinventing the rules of design with environmentally friendly flair.”

     In that vein, Time’s Lisa Clausen profiled the Daintree Eco Lodge & Spa in Queensland, Australia, as evidence of how so-called ecotourism doesn’t have to be a weekend of roughing it in the wild.

     “Most industry watchers say the category’s basic tenet is minimal environmental impact combined with some contribution to education and conservation,” Clausen wrote before glowingly describing the Daintree resort as “part eco-experience, part spa indulgence.”

     Surely Clausen doesn’t consider Daintree a resort with “minimal environmental impact,” can she? After all, she admitted half of the resort’s guests are from overseas. Has she forgotten about all the greenhouse gases those airliners belch into the atmosphere flying in and out of the Land Down Under? And what of the electricity-hogging air conditioners or the amount of heat needed to power the Jacuzzis?

     She can’t mean to say that after her own magazine warned us all to “Be Worried. Be Very Worried” about climate change.

     The Business & Media Institute recently documented Time’s extensive one-sided presentation on global warming.