Sustainability

Innovation often does not look like a brand new technology, but like a smart new combination of existing technologies. Solar panels have been around a long time, long enough for President Carter to famously put them on the roof of the White House and for President Reagan to infamously take them down. There’s also nothing new about crowd funding, where a group of people collectively pool their money together in order to finance a shared project.

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I'm looking forward to attending the unconference at Compostmodern, where sustainability and design meet. As an urban farmer/user experience designer, I love this fertile ground where disciplines aren't so disciplined, and people aren't afraid to get their hands dirty.

I mean this literally – I'd rather meet people over compost than coffee.

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CivicActions client Rare Conservation has a first of it's kind Masters Program for Conservationists, available in 4 languages. "Students from areas of highest biodiversity around the world implement an entire social marketing campaign designed around a specific conservation goal, by mobilizing constituents in their communities." The degree requires positive impact.

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I was fortunate to have a chance to see Paul Romer talk on Monday night, after a nice dinner at Greens with Jim Kiles. Paul Romer is very well known for his work in the field of "new-growth theory". We were in for a treat. At the Long Now event at Fort Mason in San Francisco, Romer unveiled his "Economic Theory of History" and talked of his upcoming Bridge Cities Institute.

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I like many others was completely blown away by Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest. The last 3rd of the book is a compendium of non profit and non governmental organizations around the world that are working on social justice, human rights, sustainability, environmental and indigenous people's issues as well as many others. Hawken's describes these groups collectively as a movement, the largest movement in the history of the world. A movement that is decentralized and global.

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As folks might know, I'm a bit of an eco-geek.  I've been talking about my carbon footprint for a few years now and can remember when it might cause someone's eyes to completely glaze over.  But then we learned about An Inconvenient Truth, a new island was discovered after part of Greenland's ice sheet melted, and Al Gore and the IPCC one the Nobel Prize.  We all know that

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ChangeTheMargins.com is a small campaign for small change that collectively could have a big impact.  The idea is to get people, manufacturers and even software companies to change the margins on the printed page.  Seems pretty simple right?!  We all forgo the generous standard 1.5 inch margin for a more economical .75 inch margin (i would say lets go to .6!).

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Last week, CivicActions launched a new website, SolveClimate.com. The site tracks solutions to climate change. Not little stuff like changing light bulbs, but the big solutions that will have immediate and measurable impact on the pollution causing climate change: green building codes, carbon caps, increased fuel economy. The premise of the project is that American's are really all in this together.

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A few months ago I blogged about the Greenpeace KleerCut Campaign targeting Kimblery Clark (maker of Kleenex and other paper products that are made of old growth timber). Well, some Greenpeace activists struck again, this time in Chicago, keep up the good work!

When I was in college, I read what is still one of the most impactful books of my life: Material World by Peter Menzel. What was most impactful about this book to me was that it was mostly images depicting the possessions of people all over the world, outside of their homes. This made it both visibly impactful (since I could no longer ignore the huge difference between even what I owned as a scraping-by college student and what people in developing nations possessed) but also spiritually impactful, as I read about the families and how they made do with so little.

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