spotty rain: calm: 83ºF

Enter this botanical garden. The first thing you’ll see is this sign: “THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING.” In the smaller print below the sign gets more specific: “The Garden is a tobacco-free campus. This includes all indoor and outdoor areas, sidewalks and parking lots. Please extinguish your cigarette here.” The sign is mounted on a pedestal at an adult’s eye level. It’s big. It’s positioned so that it blocks the sightline to a much photographed Niki de Saint Phalle sculpture in the entry fountain.

When leaving the Garden, visitors see the backside of the No Smoking sign. On the reverse are reasons not to smoke. “Smoking is bad for the environment” is the main point. A list of bulleted specifics follows: every hour 4 miles of paper are used to roll and package cigarettes; tobacco farming uses lots of pesticides; and tobacco growing leads to soil depletion. Contrast these reasons with the reasons for not smoking on a pack of cigarettes: “Smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and may complicate pregnancy.” Two very different slants, but in a place like this it’s no surprise that global conservation trumps personal health.

The message to save the environment by putting out your cigarette comes at no cost to the botanical garden. Garden visitors who smoke have already bought and paid for the cigarette they are being asked to snuff out. And the Garden benefits by eliminating the mess of butts ground into the walkways or flicked into flower beds.

Something feels lopsided though: Botanical garden: 1; Visitors: 0. If the environment is the overriding issue, this botanical garden needs to do its part too. How about stopping the sell of bottled water, for example? Vending machines all over the garden sell bottled water. So does the café. Yet some environmentalists call bottled water “the moral equivalent of driving a Hummer.” In a new book called “Bottlemania,” author Elizabeth Royle writes that environmentalists say that it takes 17 million barrels of oil to make water bottles for Americans – enough oil to gas up 1.3 million cars for a year.

Since June, two American botanical gardens have stopped selling bottled water – the Chicago Botanic Garden and the Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh. Garden officials in Chicago say replacing bottled water with tap water is “a major step in the Garden’s vision for sustainability and in its ongoing efforts to address global environmental issues. By making the decision to stop offering bottled water at our facilities, we are conserving water and energy, reducing waste and carbon emissions.” In Pittsburgh they say they want “to educate our visitors with ways in which they can reduce human impact on the environment." Eliminating bottled water is another example of us going above and beyond our dedication to green buildings." Both botanical gardens have installed more water fountains. They also sell reusable plastic bottles and offer free paper biodegradable cups that visitors can carry with them on their walks.

If the botanical garden where I walk would do the same what would they stand to lose? Last year the Chicago Botanical Garden drew about 800,000 visitors. This botanical garden has about the same annual attendence. The Garden in Chicago sold about 96,000 bottles of water last year. If this Garden sold about same number at $1.50 a bottle, they would have grossed about $144,000 in water sales. For a botanical garden that has an annual revenue of more than $41 million, the loss from bottled water sales would hardly be noticed.

Some visitors would applaud the Garden for banning smoking and disposable water bottles. Others would resent Big Brother Botanical telling them what they can and can’t do. They’ll stay away deciding that personal choice is more important ogling flowers. I think this botanical garden will ultimately side with its mission of trying to sustain the natural environment and decide to eliminate sales of bottled water. Although it wouldn’t surprise me if the announcement comes after the peak of summer sales.