Green Acres

Help renew the environment on your next vacation.

By Mary Bolster

If you spend a weekend at Inn Serendipity (www.innserendipity.com) in Browntown, Wisconsin, you can tell your friends your vacation actually helped renew the environment. Owners John Ivanko and Lisa Kivirist have thought of everything: They'll even purchase a certificate for you from Trees for Travel, which will plant a tree to offset the CO2 you used to get to their place via plane, train, or automobile.

This two-bedroom inn ($100 to $115 a night) is a model of sustainability. You name it, they've got the latest eco-friendly version. (See "Mindful Manor," below, for details.) All the meals are vegetarian, and come mostly from the inn's extensive organic garden.

Although the business isn't making the owners millionaires, it is allowing them to take exceptional care of the land. "We're a new kind of farmer," Ivanko says. "We're more concerned with the stewardship of the land and the health of the soil than with what we're making per acre." Ivanko is now helping others go green. He and Kivirist wrote Rural Renaissance, a book that tells you how to make the move from urban to rural (www.ruralrenaissance.org).

Today there are more sustainable inns than ever, a trend that can be tracked at www.greenpages.org, a directory of socially and environmentally responsible companies that includes listings of eco-friendly B&Bs.

Now it's easy to make your next vacation as good for the earth as it is for you.