"Green hotels are what I will stick to the rest of my life." Taiwanese-American Wen Chang, 64, has built up a chain of hotels in California that he has christened "Gaia" (after the Greek Mother of the Earth), but which also sounds like the Taiwanese term for "family business."

(Sam Ju Li-chyun/photos courtesy of Wen Chang/tr. by Christopher J. Findler)

So, what's a green hotel? Let us take you across the Pacific to California where we find: oak tree branches swaying above the banks of the Sacramento River... birds soaring overhead in their early autumn migration... swans slipping over the surface of a pond... a bark-colored two-story building blending in so well with the surrounding forest that it's hard to tell where one stops and the other starts....

The scene ends with a shot of the sign over the door that reads "Gaia Anderson Hotel." This is part of the "green hotel kingdom" of Wen Chang, an ethnic Chinese residing in the US. We watch as he greets some swans with a wave of his hand while he walks toward us.

Wen Chang, 64, is from Taiwan. After founding the first green hotel in America in California's Napa Valley, more recently he has been attracting attention once again as he extends his chain of hotels, stressing environmentalism and energy conservation, into other parts of California. This past August, he returned to Taiwan to share his "green miracle" with local hoteliers.

Chang's environmental hotels are all christened "Gaia," the Greek name of the goddess of the earth and the source of all life. Chang's goal: "Man and nature in a sustainable relationship, living together in harmony." To realize his ideas, to incorporate green architecture into his hotels, and to minimize the impact of their construction on the environment, he personally involves himself in their planning and design, the choice of building materials, architectural styling decisions, and the construction process, as well as in their operational management.

He believes that in this era of climate change and global warming, the Gaia hotels' success reflects the awakening of environmental consciousness among the public. It represents the attainment of a common consciousness among humankind.

Wen Chang went to the United States in 1970 to study, live, and work. In his more than 30 years there, he has seen what he calls "the ugly, self-serving side of American business and society." The Gaia hotels embody not only his own personal mission to "be green," they are also his way of "extending an olive branch to commercial society in America." To him, profit and environmentalism were once mutually exclusive pursuits-you couldn't have one with the other. Today, however, the one causes the other to thrive.