I Need to Wake Up

From Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth: "I Need to Wake Up"



or Watch here on YouTube

Winner of the Oscar for Best Original Song (and the movie won Best Documentary)

RENT An Inconvenient Truth on Netflix
BUY An Inconvenient Truth on Amazon

MBAs with a green tint

There was a nice article in the paper today about our dear friends at the Presidio School of Management.

Run by eco pioneer Hunter Lovins, Presidio is one of only three of these green programs in the country. I have several friends who have already gone through the program, and many more currently enrolled. Watching their evolution and progress has been incredibly impressive. Most of these people were already successful in business and I was shocked to hear they would be hanging that up to return to school. Their gambles have been paying off.

Although Presidio is only one of three, it appears to be part of a larger trend among MBA programs to incorporate ethics, environmentalism and social values into their curricula, propelled by such factors as the late 1990s corporate scandals and growing awareness about climate change.

organicAWARDS for 2007

The beginning of the year is always a busy time. Project deadlines and new clients always seem to come at this time of year. With all of this going on, I forgot to mention we have annouced our organicAWARDS winners for 2007.

The organicAWARDS are presented each January to recognize other leaders in the design industry who have adopted an innovative and green approach to their work. Since these are things we discover over the course of the year through our own research, none of the winners know they were even in the running. I like surprising people with good news!

Our award selections this year demonstrate the tremendous innovation and interest in being green coming out of the design industry.

Another mention of the awards is here.

organicAWARDS Official Site

Laser Graffiti

Laser Tag is a new project from Graffiti Research Lab.


The idea is that you use a high-powered laser pointer to trace a pattern on the side of a building, a camera captures that pattern, some software processes the capture, and a projector displays the graffiti-ized pattern back onto the side of the building, more or less in real-time. The effect suggests a way to virtually paint our surroundings with light.

opportunity meets readiness...

A thoughtful article on how to make it as an actor by Jenna Fischer, the actress who plays Pam on The Office.
"I have a great acting coach who says that success in Hollywood is based on one thing: opportunity meets readiness. You cannot always control the opportunities, but you can control the readiness. So study your craft, take it seriously. Do every play, every showcase, every short film, every student film you can get. Swallow your pride. Be willing to work for nothing in things you think are stupid. Make work for yourself. Make your own luck. Don't complain. Hopefully, the work will find you if you are ready."

Worth reading even if you're not an actor. I often tell my students they should be jumping at the chance to design ANYTHING, no matter how big or small.

A voice of environmental sanity in the White House?

What Are You Doing Here?
He heads Treasury, not the EPA, but Hank Paulson is investing time in making this White House greener.

Paulson is a rare species inside the Bush administration. Environmentalists see this White House as a bastion of backward thinking; Bush has angered them (and America's allies) by sometimes questioning the science of global warming. Yet Paulson cares deeply about climate change: during his seven-year run as chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, the investment bank issued a policy paper backing the science on warming and promoting investment in alternative energy.

It was Paulson who encouraged the former oil executives in the West Wing to embrace ambitious targets to cut by 20 percent the amount of gas Americans are forecast to consume by 2017 (part of the plan outlined in Bush's State of the Union). Of course, now they just have to tell us HOW to do that!

via MSNBC

The Bush Administration is going down in history as the Worst Environmental President according to the NRDC, Global Warming poster boy (and hopefully Presidential Candidate for 2008) Al Gore and many, many other respected organizations.

If you want to learn more, be sure to check out:
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s wonderful accounting entitled Crimes Against Nature.

Edward Flattau's piercing analysis of the Bush Adminsitration in Peering Through The Bushes.

Bush Greenwatch is a project of Friends of the Earth which provides information on the Bush Administration's assault on our environment and public health.

Environmentally friendly cleaning products

There is a great story in the NY Times on using environmentally friendly cleaning products in your home, especially around babies.

Childrens' immune systems are not developed as fully as adults, making them more susceptible to these chemicals. A recent look at Childrens asthma rates and Childrens autism rates inidicate how toxic our interior environments really are.

My friend Stephanie Dietz has a wonderful company called Verde Green. They provide green office and home cleaning services. In our office, we use Seventh Generation and Method Home products and encourage our clients to do the same.

NY Times Story

Would California Split from the Union?!

In the NY Times today was a great article about Schwarzenegger considering separating Cal-lee-forn-ya from the rest of the United States. After all, the advances we have been making in universal health care to global warming (See AB32) indicate the path less travelled compared to the Medieval thinking of the rest of the country.

As the article reminds us, "the bigger the nation, the harder it becomes for the government to meet the needs of its dispersed population..."

In one of my favorite books, Ecotopia, that premise is a reality. The book describes a near and probable future where the Pacific Northwest secedes from the United States to form its' own country, Ecotopia.

We had the author, Ernest Callenbach, speak at The Commonwealth Club just last year. He is one of the sweetest people you can imagine, and spoke about the 20th anniversary of the book. I compare him to Wells, Huxley and Orwell (also favorites!).

A few years later, Callenbach wrote a prequel entitled, Ecotopia Emerging, which is even better as it shows HOW the transition was made. Right now, the HOW is just what is needed.

The Pharos Lens: a lifecycle labelling tool

The Pharos Project is a graphical green labelling system. In the same spirit as the FDA's nutrition labels, Pharos would go on all building materials. Consumers can look at the label and get a visual indicator of the environmental impact.

A project of the good people at Healthy Building Network, Pharos is very well researched and thought out. The framework they created is very complex, but Lifecycle Assessment is a complex subject.

There are three main categories:
1. Environment-Resource
2. Social-Community
3. Health-Pollution

which are then broken down into specific indicators:

1. Environment-Resource
Water: Net Use
Energy: Embodied
Energy: Renewable
Materials: Renewable

2. Social-Community
User Exposures
Solid Waste
Water Quality
Air Quality
Climate Change
Toxic Releases

3. Health-Pollution
Occupational Safety
Consumer Safety
Fair Compensation
Equality
Community Contributions
Corporate Practices

For an explanation of how the label works, go here for the full label or here for the categories.

Pharos is not the first rating system I have seen to use a graphical display. Reveal, offers a cleaner and numeric system to rate the greeness of materials. I like both of these, but the real test is how normal consumers will react. Which would you use?