One local tour operator is giving clients—both locals and visitors alike—a unique green tour experience. Bay Area Green Tours offers the inside scoop on the extreme measures that local businesses are taking to minimize their impact on the environment.
One of Bay Area Green Tours’ most popular events is its Moveable Feast. Every month, guests enjoy the tasty organic offerings of three sustainable restaurants in a single night, and meet the chefs who prepared the food. Photo courtesy of Bay Area Green Tours
By Bill Picture
Published: February, 2012
One local tour operator is giving clients—both locals and visitors alike—a unique green tour experience. Bay Area Green Tours offers the inside scoop on the extreme measures that local businesses are taking to minimize their impact on the environment.
"What we’re seeing now is a second generation of environmentalists coming into its own," said Marissa LaMagna, founder of the East Bay-based company, which offers guided tours of just about every kind of sustainability-minded project, from urban farms and eateries to construction sites and a wide range of goods- and services-based businesses.
"This new generation is taking the previous generation’s ideas, dusting them off and applying new technology to improve upon them and expand on them," LaMagna said. "It’s very exciting."
Changing minds is the mission of Bay Area Green Tours, according to LaMagna. "And there are still a lot of minds out there that need changing," she said.
Much of the time, LaMagna’s clients are just regular folks with a green curiosity that needs satisfying. In many cases though, the Bay Area Green Tours team brings green awareness to business owners and students. In the process, the company hopes to prove that green business models can actually work and improve the bottom line.
In still other cases, Bay Area Green Tours helps sustainability-minded business owners convince their teams to go the extra mile to comply with newly implemented green policies and programs. To accomplish this, LaMagna shows middle managers and worker bees what a big difference for the environment a little extra thought or a few extra minutes can make. Some clients have even gone back to their workplaces after a tour and demanded of their bosses that more action be taken on sustainability.
"One person even quit a job after a tour," LaMagna said. "It can be very empowering to see solutions really working."
Bay Area Green Tours currently works with Kaiser Permanante’s Union City campus to organize staff tours of nearby organic farms as part of the healthcare provider’s Health Education Program, which educates Kaiser employees and their families about the benefits of sustainability and healthy eating. LaMagna offers these farm tours as part of an ongoing collaboration with the Marin Agricultural Land Trust and Brentwood Agricultural Land Trust.
Teacher to tour guide
When asked how she came up with the idea to conduct tours that showcase green ideas in action in her own backyard, LaMagna replies that Bay Area Green Tours is really a culmination of everything she loves—environmentalism, activism and teaching.
"If you want to go all the way back, I guess my interest in the environment started at Christian Science summer camp in upstate New York," she explained. "There was no running water or electricity; we canoed and hiked, and learned to live off the land. It was amazing."
Her love of nature and interest in preserving it instilled as a youngster, the Manhattan native went on to spend her early twenties living on an organic farm in Ohio and protesting enemies of the then-budding environmental movement. "I once helped close down an incinerator," she said proudly.
LaMagna first arrived in San Francisco on the day of the Moscone-Milk assassinations, and soon after helped organize a group of anti-nuclear weapons activists before returning to New York several years later to earn an M.A. in education. She then taught elementary school, high school, film, vegetarian cooking and yoga in the Big Apple.
She returned to the Bay Area in the late nineties and settled in Berkeley, immediately getting back to teaching and environmental work. In 2004, she founded Studio Rasa, a green-certified community arts and wellness center in Berkeley that promoted environmental awareness and sustainability.
Bay Area Green Tours, which began as a one-off tour of East Bay green businesses organized by LaMagna for the 2008 Green Festival, has since allowed LaMagna to marry her passion for teaching with her passion for the environment.
"If you think about it, being a teacher is a lot like being a tour guide," she said. "You’re exposing your audience to a new experience. For me, I noticed that all around me there were people doing incredible things to save the environment; and I wanted to share that with others."
The goal, she says, is to inspire her audience not only to put to work the solutions to environment-plaguing problems that they learn about on her tours, but to seek out new solutions as well. "If a teacher is really good, he or she can get their students to look at the world in a new way," she said.
The word is out
Word is spreading quickly about Bay Area Green Tours. LaMagna was recently hired to lead a group of high school students visiting from Asia on a tour of green sites; and it’s getting harder and harder to score a seat at her monthly Moveable Feast event. The Moveable Feast is a three-stop meal that allows guests to enjoy local and sustainable food from three restaurants in a single night—one course per restaurant—and meet the chefs who made the food.
Bay Area Green Tours’ rotating lineup of tours, many of which are researched and led by U.C. Berkeley undergrads studying environmental topics, also includes organic winery and brewery tours, and visits to green-certified businesses, buildings and construction sites.
For the second year in a row, LaMagna is working with Berkeley High School to conduct tours that complement its Green Academy’s existing curriculum. She’s now in talks with Richmond Workforce Development to do the same for students of the Richmond Builds and Solar Richmond programs, which provide job training in the solar industry to high school and college students, as well as adults enrolled in job retraining programs.
"These tours are a great way for people to experience these things," LaMagna said. "It’s one thing to read about it in a book, but there’s no question that experiential learning is the best way to learn."
LaMagna also points out that many of the people, particularly business owners, whom her tour groups meet during an outing are forward-thinkers and leaders—the first to take steps toward sustainability that were not yet proven successful when they took them. "And I think it’s important that we teach people not to be afraid to take risks," she said, "because the people who take those first steps are usually the most successful." For more information, visit www.bayareagreentours.org.
A tour of the green highlights along San Francisco’s Embarcadero includes a ride on Golden Gate Pedicabs. The man-powered carriages are not only a fun way to see the sights, they’re also more environmentally friendly than the traditional tour bus, particularly for short jaunts with lots of stops. Photo courtesy of Bay Area Green Tours
Promoting sustainable Bay Area businesses, such a TCHO, San Francisco’s only artisan chocolatier, is one of Bay Area Green Tours’ goals. Bay Area Green Tours hopes to inspire other business owners to go green by showing them that a green business model not only helps the environment, but can also improve a business’ bottom line. Photo courtesy of Bay Area Green Tours
