Coming to Austin in March and April: Radical Urban Sustainability Training by Rhizome Collective. [Link to Virtual Tour]
RUST is an intensive weekend workshop focused on skills related to building autonomous communities in today's cities. We will share the cumulative knowledge gained from the past seven years of building the Rhizome Collective, an urban sustainability and community organizing project based in Austin, Texas. The training will have both hands-on and lecture/discussion components. The interrelatedness of sustainability and struggles for social justice will be emphasized. The many innovative sustainability features on display at the Rhizome Collective will be used as teaching tools.
Green Products
Metropolis Magazine, after repeating a quote from Ray Anderson that says
No one should be claiming sustainable products. There is no such thing yet in terms of zero footprint. What you can do is demonstrate reduced footprint.
offers a set of articles that represent 7 Steps in the Lifecycle of a Green Product.. The mag also has an overview of "What It Means to be Green," which is really a couple of lists of eco-design and eco-labeling terms.
With Randy Jewart from Austin Green Art, I interviewed Paul Hawken and Bill McKibben for Worldchanging. Their latest books (Blesed Unrest and Deep Economy) are IMO the best recent writings about sustainability, and their nonprofit organizations (Wiser EarthNatural Capital Institute, which has created Wiser Earth, and Step It Up) are working effectively to facilitate sustainability. [Link] We talked about transforming the way people think – since the article was published, I had a conversation with one of my Solar Austin colleagues, who'd read the article and said he thought real changes would be driven by policy. I don't think that policy changes readily, though, unless we transform our thinking, especially our economic thinking... starting here in the U.S., which is still a leader and could probably pick up some lost credibility by taking the lead in moving to a sustainability economy.
I chuckled when I saw this piece by Jamais (about the carbon footprint of his trip to Colorado – to talk about carbon footprints. What's funny is that, because he's so well identified now with the "cheeseburger footprint" concept, he's adopted the cheeseburger standard for ongoing analysis.
Let's do the math. According to Terrapass, my flight out to Denver and back ran about 867 pounds of CO2, total (per passenger). In the course of filming in a variety of locations, we drove two vehicles -- a standard pickup truck and a minivan, carrying a sum of six people and a huge amount of gear -- about 250 miles apiece. According to EPA estimates, pickups and minivans of appropriate size and vintage emit anywhere from 8 to 12 tons of CO2 over the course of driving 15,000 miles; call it 10 tons for easy math. 20,000 pounds of CO2 for 15,000 miles equals 1.3 pounds per mile, so 500 miles equals 666.7 pounds of CO2. That brings us to 1533.7 pounds for transportation alone; add in the incidentals of the day (power to charge the camera batteries, meals, and such), and we can reasonably estimate 1,600 pounds of direct CO2 emissions as the result of the day's activities.
Or, to put that into more familiar terms, that's about 160 cheeseburgers, a bit more than the average American's annual consumption.
This made me think about Popeye's pal Wimpy and his monolithic cheeseburger consumption... somehow we have to replace the SUV with Wimpy as our symbol for excessive carbon spew.
Last notes on the Clean Energy SummitI made a couple more posts on the Clean Energy Venture Summit this week, at Worldchanging and at the Supernova Conversation Hub. The conference closed with a discussion featuring Matt Nordan of Lux Research and Bruce Sterling, who said the emerging new clean energy industry has "a hard row to hoe – you have to get your head around this kind of immediate, fast transition. Success is not an accident coming from a place that likes to keep itself weird." 418 people attended the conference, all excited to be sniffing the foundation of a new business paradigm, though Bruce made the great point that it's not really so much as a business shift as a global cultural change. The conference was all about business, research and development, science and technology – but all these are driven (and constrained) by culture. (Not only that - I'm looking for a clean energy conference that focuses on policy, on the legal and regulatory environment and how it needs to change in order for the best-case possibilities to manifest. Bruce and Jasmina joined David Armistead, David Swedlow, Josh Parker and I after the conference ended to talk more from a cultural angle. Bruce asked a question that we all took seriously: What would it take to bring every green pundit in the world into Austin? Bruce called this idea the "Buckminster Memorial Big Brain Superdome."
(Photo: Bruce and Matt Nordan talk... "the science and science fiction of clean energy.")
Maximum PotentialYesterday we visted Pliny Fisk at the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, followed by a conversation about regional economic development with Angelou Economics - quite a contrast. The "we" who made the visit, other than yours truly, included David Armistead, Bob Murray, Josh Parker and my co-consultant, David Swedlow. The five of us are engaged in a conversation about the growing need for paradigm shift in economic thinking, with sustainability as a key factor. One thing we learned from Angelos was that many business and policy people hear the word "sustainability" as anti-business (whereas we see, in sustainability, a source of business opportunity). Much to ponder these days.
Carbon load eco-visualizationFrom information aesthetics, "a data visualization artwork based on data from a building monitoring system that gathers electricity, condensate, & chilled water usage figures in real time. the purpose of the eco-visualization is to make key environmental performance data publicly accessible & easy to understand for everyone." Imagine planting massive lcd displays with this kind of dynamic imagery outside factories everywhere so everybody and his uncle's brother will exactly how much carbon is spewing.
Worldchanging in the GuardianGood review of the Worldchanging book in the Guardian. I especially like this quote from Alex: "Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in western popular culture, but in reality, our cynicism advances the desires of the powerful: cynicism is obedience." [Link]
Cross-posted from the Polycot blog.
At Worldchanging, Sarah Rich writes about Design for Social Innovation, noting a Business Week "backlash" piece that "discussing the possibility that the term 'innovation' has really passed a tipping point of overuse and lost some of its poignancy."
... the article points out that there is a distinction between throwing the word around and achieving real, measurable improvement through forward-thinking design. It's not so much that consumers don't want innovation in their products as they don't want to be told something is "innovative" when it's really just retooled or modified for a change in user perception.
Sarah expresses concern that the word "sustainability" is also losing it's meaning, as it "is now so commonly splattered across pages and screens in the public's view that it's hard to know if anybody sees the words 'sustain' and 'ability' inside the buzzword."
No doubt we use both innovation and sustainability all day long at Worldchanging, but hopefully that key distinction is there. It's possible to hold a buzzword to the integrity which initially brought it into common usage, but the more it becomes a tool for selling product and roping in followers, the more caution must be employed. You can't coin a new term every time a useful word starts to lose its meaning. While plenty of jargon exists in the green sphere, the reality is that we are looking for ways to keep ourselves going, to empower ourselves and each other, and to find inventive ways to create conditions that foster longevity for the planet.
There's an inherent problem, I think, in trying to make concepts seem new, contemporary, and sexy so that they'll sell. "Innovation" means new, but saying that something is innovative=new it doesn't necessarily imply that it's effective. If you want to use Web 2.0 technology, for instance, because it's "innovative," you could be overlooking more effective technologies that lack the Web 2.0 buzz. At Polycot, we focus on clear requirements and best technologies. We use innovative technologies (such as Ruby on Rails), not because they're new, but because they're more efficient and effective given the requirements for the site.
For many "sustainability" is somehow associated with "being green," but the real meaning of the word is less clear. According to the dictionary, sustainable means using a resource without depleting or permanently damaging it. One key to sustainable thinking is making the distinction between income (which is renewable) and resource (which doesn't renew and can be depleted). I thought I learned this distinction many years ago, but it's proved easy to forget. For instance, I inherited a small amount of money once, and I should have put it away and regarded it as a resource, spending only income (interest) it generated. Instead I spent it as though it was income, and now it's gone with no hope of recovery. I also, with you, inherited a planet, and I'm dipping into its limited resources rather than learning to use only what's renewable. Fossil fuels are a resource, for instance, that we spend every day, and that will eventually be depleted. It's also possible to "spend" land until it's depleted.
Just to reiterate, though I knew how to treat a particular cash resource, I didn't use it wisely. I believed that it was easily replaced, but it wasn't. We make the same mistake every day, in assuming that our planetary resources can be replaced, even though we know what sustainability means, and we may know the difference between income and resource. Years from now we (or our children or grandchildren) may ask, "What were we thinking?"
Maybe the answer will be that we were too busy innovating to get serious about sustainability.
Ideas, not stuffRussell Davies wonders whether we can change our lifestyle focus from "stuff" to ideas. [Link]
Our fundamental issue, I guess, is that people are consuming too much. By which we mean too much stuff. Physical stuff. Stuff that requires energy to be made and un-made. So we wouldn't mind people consuming per se, if they consumed less actual stuff and consumed more that was made only of ideas. Which, of course, is what a lot of branding tries to do - and is often criticised for - we try and add value to a product by adding abstract, non-physical stuff; ideas, associations, images, memories. And the transmission of these things involves some energy, but less than creating a lot of physical stuff.
So I'm wondering whether we can persuade people to consume more branded ideas and less branded stuff, in the same way we might sometimes be able to substitute connected technology for cars.
Think about packaging as an example. At the moment we try and sell stuff by wrapping it in an expensive, wasteful but desirable bit of packaging. What if the packaging could be kept to a minimum but the sales imperative could be served through a desirable idea embedded in the product, with a minimum of physical stuff?