Fresh Greens

I spent a day of this past weekend at a nearby amusement park. Though summer trips to parks across the country for an afternoon of sunburn, screaming your head off on the coasters, and eating sticky funnel cake are a grand, old American tradition, it's pretty easy to see that amusement parks aren't very green. Noticing the garbage cans full of disposable plastic products and the massive amounts of energy required to power coasters and rides made me wonder what green initiatives amusement parks had to offer. The answer: very few.

Hershey Park leads the pack with one 30,000 kW-per-year-producing wind turbine and solar panel combination, which was donated by a renewable energy company. Busch Gardens and Sea World offer grant money to conservation groups. Disneyland's train runs on biodiesel, but the company said that they could not do green initiatives that might ruin the magical make-believe of the park. "Our culture is that we want to be very careful about those pieces that we put on stage, and we don't want to take that feel of the show away from the guests," said Frank Dela Vara of Disneyland Environmental Affairs. Universal Studios Hollywood offered free parking to clean vehicles on Earth Day only. Extensive Googling turns up nothing about green initiatives from Six Flags, Knott's Berry Farm, Cedar Point, or Dollywood.

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