Palm Desert, Calif., sizzling green
By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
Considering how the desert challenges our green aspirations, it’s surprising there’s not already a reality show: Extreme Green — Finding eco-friendly solutions in hostile places.
OK, so the title could use some work. The facts remain - the desert is great for producing heat and making solar power. But when it comes to human habitation, it’s an air conditioning-dependent, rugged place.
They understand that in Palm Desert, a small city in Southern California’s Coachella Valley, which gets about 350 days of sunshine a year, endures four months of 100-degree-plus weather and would make a good candidate for the Extreme Green pilot show. Palm Desert both wrestles with, and accepts its environs.
“Palm Desert has a long history of interest in the environment both in energy conservation and saving water and respect for the environment,” said Lauri Aylaian, director of community development for the resort city of 50,000.
Let’s start with transportation.
Look around the town and you will see tourists on the main drag, El Paseo, browsing the shopping district from courtesy golf carts, residents running errands in golf carts and golfers in, yup, golf carts zipping around the environmentally conscientious Desert Willow resort.
In the 1990s, (practically prehistoric times in terms of the recent green movement), Palm Desert began a test program using the golf carts as a way to keep the town pedestrian friendly, avoid traffic jams and reduce exhaust fumes. The slow, emissions-free electric travel became so popular that city leaders later went to the state and won enactment of a law making it legal to use golf carts on the majority of roadways in Palm Desert.
“You can get to most places in the city using your golf carts, about the only thing you can’t do is go on state highway 11 that runs through town,” Aylaian says.
Not only was Palm Desert an early adopter of green travel, its neighboring Desert Willow Golf Resort, is greener than one might realize just looking at it, Aylaian says. The resort’s two golf courses use native landscaping on the land surrounding fairways, …
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