Outlawing of Airbnb ironically highlights hotel health hazards, human herding

Thursday, June 06, 2013 by: Michael A. Bedar, MA
Tags: Airbnb, hotels, homes for rent

(NaturalNews) Traveler, consider:

• Do you prefer to sleep on a bed not slept-in by thousands of people before you?
• Does your body thrive better where no disinfectant chemicals have been heavily applied?
• Does being surrounded by hundreds of televisions (including the one right behind your head on the other side of the wall in the next room) throw off your electromagnetic field?
• Do you choose not to stomach the GMO and processed foods at "complimentary" breakfasts at hotels?
• Are aware it is less stressful and healthier you to enjoy the friendliness and care of an individual who has made their home a healthy sanctuary?
  
  
• Thus, traveler, have you begun successfully and healthfully using Airbnb for your travel accommodations?

If so, you're likely to be up the creek now that the regulatory government is involved.

Why? Because Airbnb has now been officially made "illegal" in New York.

Through a law that was supposed to "protect against landlords running illegal hotels from their property" (read: protect existing hotel hegemony despite the above health and ecology hazards), an Airbnb host in New York City has been fined $2,400 for using the Airbnb website, as it was designed.

"Down with creative individual solutions!"

Airbnb came to the host's defense, but the host lost the court case anyway.

Airbnb, in a statement, said the ruling is a concern for those who want to occasionally rent out their own homes: "It is time to fix this law and protect hosts who occasionally rent out their own homes. Eighty-seven percent of Airbnb hosts in New York list just a home they live in--they are average New Yorkers trying to make ends meet, not illegal hotels that should be subject to the 2010 law."

Instead, the "rules" (tyrannical dictates?) will now make it even harder to travel, to find a homely, personal place to sleep among people who trust other people, and to avoid:

• Mega-corporation provided "breakfasts"
• Industrial, flame-retardant coated rugs
• VOCs in paints
• Chemical waste-products masquerading as fragrant soaps
  
• Intake of allergens and toxins from cheap rubber and vinyl shower curtains
• Off-gassing window curtains
• Conventional cotton sheets which come from cotton crops, which is the most intensely insecticided crop grown in the world
• The hustle-bustle of the human act of traveling to visit a city having been turned into a rigid business operation, where you are just a room number
  

Using Airbnb, you can screen the potential home you would stay in for your exact specifications, moral stances, sensitivities, social and environmental preferences with a willing local where you are visiting, and get to know your unique host before you arrive.

Even if you simply choose not to support in the mega-hotel institutions that host pharmaceutical, biotech, western medical conferences, and yet not stay in a run-down dirty motel either, you are born having that innate freedom and right. Nevertheless the "law" appears to infringe on your freedom of mobility.

Safe travels.

Sources for this article include:

1. http://www.foxnews.com
2. http://easyhealthoptions.com/general-health/toxins-in-hotel-rooms/
3. http://www.rncentral.com
4. http://www.national-toxic-encephalopathy-foundation.org
5. http://www.panna.org/resources/cotton
6. http://www.usatoday.com
7. http://www.achooallergy.com/blog/allergens-shower-curtains/

About the author:
Michael Bedar MA, BS, is a researcher, writer, and holistic wellness counselor. He is the associate producer with a founding role in the documentary, "Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days" and is the writer-director of "EcoParque." He now distributes approximately 50 film, ebook, and audio titles through YoelMedia.com. He manages a holistic health practice, facilitates local and online natural wellness and spiritual growth programs, and juices regularly. He helps people live in healthy homes, support their natural fertility, encourage their optimal nutrition, and come into their full presence. He is the Co-Director of Tree of Life - Bay Area, and he has an MA in Live-Food and Spiritual Nutrition from the Cousens School of Holistic Wellness. Bedar's BS from UCSD is an interdisciplinary concentration of Environmental Chemistry, Law and Society, and Design Anthropology.