Travel Right

We love to travel as I’m sure a lot of you do as well. Travel is often associated with large carbon footprints. So how do we make sure we do our part to make it as eco-friendly as possible?

We have some tips in one place to help you get started:

1. Green tags

At some airports, you have the option to offset your carbon footprint by buying ‘green tags’. For example, if you bought a green tag for $18 (NYC to LA), you’re basically donating to clean power in order to offset your carbon footprint for that flight. Not all green tags are created equal. Make sure that you buy  directly from the company providing the clean power service and not a third party seller.

You can calculate how much carbon footprint you’re generating through a calculator here. You can also buy green tags through TerraPass or some travel companies like REI Adventures already build this into their packages.

2. Bike sharing

Bike sharing is now offered in most major cities including London, Montreal, Paris, Amsterdam and Netherlands. It’s also coming to NYC soon which we’re personally very excited about. This program lets you rent a bike for a day and has multiple convenient locations for returning the bike. It is a fun, cheap and eco-friendly way of discovering a place.

You can find out if the place you’re traveling too offeres such a program here.

3. Handy dandy smart phone

You can use your phone for not only taking amazing photos of your vacation but also to have access to maps, restaurant reviews, translation guides and much more. And to charge all this activity, why not use a portable solar charger?

4. Sleeping tight

If you are staying at hotels, make sure to request no daily change of sheets (we most likely don’t do it in our homes), re-use your towels, and switch off the lights when you leave the room.

Or, better yet, stay at someone else’s house through Airbnb. Not only you might end up staying at a super cool residence, smaller houses are much easier to keep in line with sustainable practices, which is much harder for larger hotels.

5. Supporting local wherever you go

Don’t forget to check out local farmer and vintage markets for delicious picnics, and cool gifts to bring home. Sometimes, we got our best tips for exploring through locals at these markets, so make sure to strike up conversations.

Happy Earth Day!

We only have one planet to call home. This video reminds us how stunning this place is.

Creative Journey of an Engineer: Meet Chris Perez of Citygram

It takes a lot of courage to be an artist. Everything you create is out there in the world for judgement and criticism, and each new work starts that process all over again. Being an artist requires a certain sense of pride, an acute self-awareness, but most of all it requires you to make something. Taking that first step is sometimes the hardest, but often times the most rewarding.

For me that process started by simply applying for a writing position posted on Apartment Therapy. At the time, I was an electrical engineer at a big tech company, and I thought this might be a fun hobby. The position required me to take my own pictures, and because of that I learned more about photography. I instantly fell in love. 

I also had the chance to meet people who boldly called themselves artists, writers, and designers. I fell even more in love with them. These people had talent, but most of all they had an understanding of themselves – their innate skills, their passions, their ability to effect change in the world. These people truly inspired me. 

I feel we are living in a very unique time, perhaps we are even a part of a new golden age – one in which we aren’t bound by what we can do or limited by who we can reach. This is the age of responsibility, the era of community, and the time for the unprecedented. Once my eyes were opened to it, I eventually quit my full-time job so I could be a part of it. 

I’m looking forward to the journey ahead, the new experiences and friendships that await. But most of all, I’m looking forward to making art with the people around me.

Chris Perez photographs for Madesmith. He’s the founder of Austin based Citygram. Chris is deeply passionate about the creative community in Austin. Support his Kickstarter campaign here. 

Distinctly My Town: Brooklyn

We’re starting a new series here that focuses on distinct art and craft of a particular place in the U.S. Some of this craftsmanship is now extinct, some is headed that way, but fortunately for us, a small subset is seeing a regeneration. With these short articles, we hope to shed light and build a list of some of these special crafts and old world workmanship. Let us know if there is something in your town that you’d like for us to cover. 

First up… Distinctly NYC, are the wooden water tanks that are quickly disappearing from the new building construction. They are in almost every NYC visitor’s photo… definitely an object to admire and not take for granted. There are only 2 companies left in the area that make these water tanks from wood. One of them, Rosenwach has been around since 1865. They even mill their own wood in their original Brooklyn workshop. In order to keep their staff busy year round, Rosenwach has ventured into other areas such as facade lifting, building cooling units and fixing sprinkler systems. It’s competition Iseeks Brothers on the other hand had to move production to Pennsylvania in order to stay in business.

Image 1: Michelle Molinari

Image 2: Robert Banat via inhabitat.com. Tom Fruins plexiglass water tower in Dumbo.

Maker series: The shoemaker

The Shoemaker is a film about master shoemaker and repairer Frank Catalfumo who’s lived in Brooklyn his entire life. Catalfumo served in World War II and opened his shoe shop upon return from the war. Despite being 91 years old, he works five days and week and has no intentions of sitting at home.