It's tricky. Unless you're making your trip by foot or on a bicycle, green travel is a difficult thing to accomplish. Airplane and car travel is notoriously non-green, hotels are full of tiny single use bottles, packing thousands of people into natural and cultural wonders has a decidedly non-green impact in wear and tear, consumption, and waste. Conscientious travelers buy carbon offset or pick sustainable providers, but green-washing has made it hard to tell, when it comes to travel, what's really green and what's marketing.

Even the gear you pick for your eco-warrior vacation can have bad side effects - I read just this morning about how Goretex, so popular with treehuggers, has environmentally detrimental side effects. There are no easy answers, and fewer easy questions.Determining if a travel destination or provider is green means more than a note suggesting you reuse your towels.

“You should ask tour operators and hotels questions about their impacts,” says Ronald Sanabria, director of sustainable tourism at the Rainforest Alliance, which also offers green certifications to the travel industry. “Ask about their environmental policy, the percentage of their employees that are local residents, whether or not they support any projects that benefit the local community and if they are certified.” Also, find out how they support conservation, what kinds of policies they’ve put into place to conserve energy or water or manage waste, how they educate their visitors about conservation and local culture, and how they monitor their practices.--Elliot

You probably don't want to bother with all that when booking your two week trip to France or the family trip to the seashore.And if you're doing corporate travel, you've likely got little control in the matter. Even when you do have the time or inclination to tackle the question, the options turn out to be daunting.

With BlogHer in San Francisco this year, I thought it might be fun - and greener - to take the train from my home in Seattle. It's an overnight train trip. I thought, I'll book a sleeper and make an adventure out of it. Guess what's a lot more affordable? Flying. I can bring my husband along for the cost of traveling solo on Amtrak. The two of us can drive to California and back camping along the way, for much less than the train.

It's frustrating. Airplanes, poisonous. Hotels,wasteful. Even your gear is toxic. Options...meh. What's a greenie to do?

My favorite sources for information on green travel are Intelligent Travel, the National Geographic blog devoted to sustainable travel, and Go Green Travel Green.They're thoughtful without being too cynical and they do a lot of the homework for you. There are a number of group travel organizations that work hard to create sustainable adventures, Sustainable Travel International and Crooked Trails are just two of them - I feel quite comfortable recommending them as I've had a chance to talk with their founders about their travel values. And on a more nuts and bolts level, Fodor's has 10 Tips for Greener Travel and they've published a green travel guide.

At our house, our dual nationalities mean we're not giving up the long haul flights any time soon, plus, we are cursed with wanderlust and live to travel. Our solution to the difficulties of green travel is to make the effort to live greener all around. We are hopelessly failable in our efforts; we've been known to drive to the store when the weather is crappy and we're always forgetting to bring our own bags. But we're quite aware that it's not enough to just green our travels - we have to green our entire lives if we want to make any kind of difference.

It's all fine and well to buy your carbon offsets, jet off to that fabulous eco-lodge, view the spectacular wildlife, throw some money at a good cause... but if you get home and go back to commuting solo in your Hummer every day, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference.

Pam blogs about travel and other adventures at Nerd's Eye View. The delightful treehugger pic is from Eva8.