Green Design » Events

New Yorkers to Create PreFab Parks for Park(ing) Day

Sean Conroe — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:21:55 +0000

What comes to mind when you picture “livable streets?" For me, the phrase conjures up consciously-designed, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, where people -- not cars -- are priority.

But what if we were to take the phrase "livable streets" literally?

Park(ing) Day 2009 allows us to do just that. What began in 2005 as an attempt by a San Francisco art collective to highlight the lack of public space in urban areas has now turned into an international event. Once a year, artists and activists take to the streets and transform 9’ by 18’ rectangles of urban real estate into bite sized parks, effectively creating a livable street.

This year, Park(ing) Day is slated for September 18th. As an added bonus, New York City will be challenging the creative minds to design a "POP.Park, a prefabricated, on-the-go park that can be taken anywhere and set up in a matter of minutes. To see if your city is involved, scope out the map to find out.

As this event grows in size and popularity, it provides a unique way to continue raise awareness of diminishing public space while raising questions on how we've come to let the automobile dominate our every day lives. Even though the event is a mere 24 hours, the premise behind Park(ing) Day has lasting effects that helps to advance our efforts to create vibrant, healthy and walkable communities that are designed for the 21st century.

We want to know what you have planned for Park(ing) Day! Be sure to keep us posted by uploading some pictures (or better yet -- video) to our Worldchanging Photopool on Flickr!

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Sean Conroe in Events at 10:21 AM)

New Yorkers to Create PreFab Parks for Park(ing) Day

Sean Conroe — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:21:55 +0000

What comes to mind when you picture “livable streets?" For me, the phrase conjures up consciously-designed, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, where people -- not cars -- are priority.

But what if we were to take the phrase "livable streets" literally?

Park(ing) Day 2009 allows us to do just that. What began in 2005 as an attempt by a San Francisco art collective to highlight the lack of public space in urban areas has now turned into an international event. Once a year, artists and activists take to the streets and transform 9’ by 18’ rectangles of urban real estate into bite sized parks, effectively creating a livable street.

This year, Park(ing) Day is slated for September 18th. As an added bonus, New York City will be challenging the creative minds to design a "POP.Park, a prefabricated, on-the-go park that can be taken anywhere and set up in a matter of minutes. To see if your city is involved, scope out the map to find out.

As this event grows in size and popularity, it provides a unique way to continue raising awareness of diminishing public space while raising questions on how we've come to let the automobile dominate our every day lives. Even though the event is a mere 24 hours, the premise behind Park(ing) Day has lasting effects that helps to advance our efforts to create vibrant, healthy and walkable communities that are designed for the 21st century.

We want to know what you have planned for Park(ing) Day! Be sure to keep us posted by uploading some pictures (or better yet -- video) to our Worldchanging Photopool on Flickr!

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Sean Conroe in Events at 10:21 AM)

Camping at Tällberg – Epilogue

Alan AtKisson — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:50:21 +0000

My tent is back in the closet. The great circus tent used for the Tällberg Forum’s plenary sessions is undoubtedly on its way back home to Italy. The Tällberg Companion — the little book with schedules, participant bios, and general wisdom about how to survive the five-day, change-the-world marathon meeting that is the Tällberg Forum — is up on the shelf, next to the Companions of previous years. I notice that it is half the size of the others, a little resource efficiency case study in its own right. (It is also a growing trend to have business cards that are half the usual size.)

View from my campsite, with a neighboring duck

Now that it’s all over, what do I actually think about my experience this year? Many of the people who work with the Tällberg Foundation are, or are in the process of becoming, my friends. This puts an obvious damper on criticism, and biases one toward expressions of (truly well-deserved) gratitude and admiration for the amazing show they put on. They work extremely hard, all year, in cramped offices, to pull off this annual miracle of big thinking, heartfelt community building, and truly soaring artistry.

At least ten of the conversations I had were truly important ones, in which agreements were struck, friendships were deepened, or doors were opened to something new. You can undoubtedly tell from my log — “log” is such a better word than “blog”, don’t you agree? as though we were all ship’s captains sailing the internet — which elements of the Forum’s content struck me as most valuable (e.g., Drew Jones & Co.’s climate game), or which speakers I responded to most (e.g., Nyamko Sabuni).

But what could have made Tällberg more satisfying this year? Because I am always left wanting a little bit, or even a lot, more. Nor am I alone in this; I heard a number of variations on this comment from participants and presenters alike. This is not a criticism of the organizers; I think they created a wonderful conference, rich with content, well-structured, well-presented, a very good mirror of the state of the sustainability movement today. They deserve accolades and laurel wreaths.

Nor, of course, is it a critisicm of the participants. Nearly everyone I met was already working very hard to “address the challenges,” doing whatever it was they do, from creating social enterprises in war-torn countries, to trying to help their company address the realities of the 21st century in a socially responsible way. Some people added to their already-overstretched workloads while in Tällberg, creating new initiatives on climate change or principled philanthropy. Truly, the amount of energy and dedication in evidence, from the 40-year veterans of sustainability work, to the 20- and 30-somethings just emerged from Masters programs and seeking their place of greatest impact, was a joy and a comfort to behold. The “Army of Sustainability” that I write about in The ISIS Agreement has been growing and solidifying quickly in recent years, and Tällberg is one of those spots on the planet where you get a chance to see that, in the flesh.

And yet … this year’s Tällberg Forum left me feeling a bit down, for some reason. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; as my friend Joanna Macy has been teaching for decades, sometimes we have to into the despair of our situation, the feelings of grief and sorrow that are evoked, to find the new energy we need to rise to a great challenge.

First there were the hard facts from science — disappearing fish, acidic oceans, images of drought, the climate challenge, this increasingly clear view of the “long march” humanity must now make, from here to sustainability. Something like this: if all goes *well*, then we and our immediate descendants will be struggling to stop global warming, restore ecoystems, adapt to climate change, and save people from crushing poverty, for the next ninety years.

No one can credibly pretend any more, as some of our movement’s rhetoric tends to convey (at least implicitly), that some magic basket of techno-fixes, stimulus packages, and lifted chins on TV is going to create a revolutionary rescue for planet Earth and its human civilization in the “next ten years.” This is “cathedral-building,” as many have called it, the kind work that takes generations, and where those who started it only live to see the foundations in place, a couple of walls raised. But they end their lives knowing that the project itself is so deeply embedded in the hearts and politics of the people, that what they started is sure to be completed, and will one day stun the world.

Such thoughts were often the talk of Tällberg, both from the stage and around the margins. But I am not sure, still, whether even we have really grasped the urgency of the situation. Here, I use the word “we” carefully (it is usually used very uncarefully in these contexts to mean “the whole of humanity” or maybe just “humanity’s decision-makers) to mean we, the community of people who devote their professional time to sustainability issues and global futures. My own little experiments with camping and low-impact eating during this gathering are hardly more than symbolic, in terms of change; and in fact they were driven more by the pleasures of being in a tent by the lake, and saving a great deal of money, more than by that nagging sense (and nearly all of us in this business have this sense) of ethical duty to the planet and its people. And yet, even my little experiment in lighter conference-going was a piece of exotica in this crowd. We talk, all of us, of the great need for change, and we dedicate our lives to making it happen. But to what extent are we, really, willing to do more than symbolism to reduce the accumulation of destructive demands and behaviors that have (to cite just one statistic) reduced the population of glass eels in the Atlantic marine system to less than one percent of their previous levels, in just one generation’s time? (Source: Silent Sea, Isabella Lövin) We are willing to work extremely hard, clearly. We communicate intensively. We strategize and search for leverage points and buy organic foods. But are we willing to live differently? To create societies and economies that run differently? To manage our wealth (for most of us at Tällberg were wealthy, relative to the whole of the world) differently? Are willing to give anything up, in return for the knowledge that the cathedral of sustainability will be built?

I will be sitting with such thoughts all summer, as I press forward with work on a new book (that last in the three-book series that started with Believing Cassandra and The ISIS Agreement), having to do with how we humans think about the future. I was trolling for help with that book at Tällberg, and got some; I’ll be “blogging for help” as well in the times ahead.

Meanwhile, I have one small complaint worth sharing. I was sorry my friends from the Nile Basin — our workshop attendance was smallish to small — did not get more of the attention I thought they deserved. Their inter-governmental process is both enormous and inspirational, but it was barely noticed in the Tällberg talk-show context (though they did get some Swedish TV and radio time). This relative inattention was a real-world example of that climate game we played, described in an earlier Episode in this series, where the poorer nations — who suffer directly and decisively, right now, the deadliest impacts of global warming — were given very little voice and visibility, while the rest of the climate-change world talked ppm and models and abstract targets. Our workshop conversations on the Nile were high level and meaningful, so I hope my colleagues’ trip from East Africa to central Sweden proves materially useful to them in some way. But I am afraid most people are returning from Tällberg still not knowing much about the reality of sustainable development issues and challenges in this crucial region, the cradle of modern humanity.

And I also have one great hope. There did seem to be some genuine energy gathered around mobilizing the Tällberg community even further, in directions it has been mobilized previously — to push for (and here I come talking ppm as well) 350 as the necessary global target that our best scientific understanding says that we need (see www.350.org), and this new effort to “take the Tällberg tent to Copenhagen” and push all the harder, with all the voices that can be mobilized, for the best possible agreement there.

Not that I think one should pin great hopes on Copenhagen; but I pin great hopes on more and more committed mobilization, in every sector, to address every issue we have before us. This truly is a great rescue operation — people, species, ecosystems — and I hold out hope, relentlessly, that it can be done, because I have seen parts of it done, in my own lifetime. I grew up in the “save the whales!” era; today, compared to that time, and despite the many threats and losses, many whale species are in fact recovering. I grew up in a world where the best experts expected populations to swell to 12 billion or more, of whom a quarter or more would be likely to starve. We already have reduced population growth rates enormously, and avoided much foreseen famine with technological, policy, and economic innovations (some of which have created their own problems, but that is life). We have already capped CFCs and begun to heal the ozone layer. There are many few nuclear weapons in the world than there were a generation ago (still too many, but there is still serious progress there). These things happened, and are happening, because people at all levels of the world’s power hierarchy became seriously engaged and dedicated years of their lives to make them happen.

I saw a lot of that energy at Tällberg, from the youngest to the oldest, from heads of state to school children, and seeing this steadily growing upsurge of human energy and intelligence and love on display is the chief gift of that time.
Note: This is the final installment in a six-part series. You might want to read them in sequence.

This piece originally appeared in AllanAtKisson.com.

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(Posted by Alan AtKisson in Events at 2:50 PM)

Camping at Tällberg – Epilogue

Alan AtKisson — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:50:21 +0000

My tent is back in the closet. The great circus tent used for the Tällberg Forum’s plenary sessions is undoubtedly on its way back home to Italy. The Tällberg Companion — the little book with schedules, participant bios, and general wisdom about how to survive the five-day, change-the-world marathon meeting that is the Tällberg Forum — is up on the shelf, next to the Companions of previous years. I notice that it is half the size of the others, a little resource efficiency case study in its own right. (It is also a growing trend to have business cards that are half the usual size.)

View from my campsite, with a neighboring duck

Now that it’s all over, what do I actually think about my experience this year? Many of the people who work with the Tällberg Foundation are, or are in the process of becoming, my friends. This puts an obvious damper on criticism, and biases one toward expressions of (truly well-deserved) gratitude and admiration for the amazing show they put on. They work extremely hard, all year, in cramped offices, to pull off this annual miracle of big thinking, heartfelt community building, and truly soaring artistry.

At least ten of the conversations I had were truly important ones, in which agreements were struck, friendships were deepened, or doors were opened to something new. You can undoubtedly tell from my log — “log” is such a better word than “blog”, don’t you agree? as though we were all ship’s captains sailing the internet — which elements of the Forum’s content struck me as most valuable (e.g., Drew Jones & Co.’s climate game), or which speakers I responded to most (e.g., Nyamko Sabuni).

But what could have made Tällberg more satisfying this year? Because I am always left wanting a little bit, or even a lot, more. Nor am I alone in this; I heard a number of variations on this comment from participants and presenters alike. This is not a criticism of the organizers; I think they created a wonderful conference, rich with content, well-structured, well-presented, a very good mirror of the state of the sustainability movement today. They deserve accolades and laurel wreaths.

Nor, of course, is it a critisicm of the participants. Nearly everyone I met was already working very hard to “address the challenges,” doing whatever it was they do, from creating social enterprises in war-torn countries, to trying to help their company address the realities of the 21st century in a socially responsible way. Some people added to their already-overstretched workloads while in Tällberg, creating new initiatives on climate change or principled philanthropy. Truly, the amount of energy and dedication in evidence, from the 40-year veterans of sustainability work, to the 20- and 30-somethings just emerged from Masters programs and seeking their place of greatest impact, was a joy and a comfort to behold. The “Army of Sustainability” that I write about in The ISIS Agreement has been growing and solidifying quickly in recent years, and Tällberg is one of those spots on the planet where you get a chance to see that, in the flesh.

And yet … this year’s Tällberg Forum left me feeling a bit down, for some reason. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; as my friend Joanna Macy has been teaching for decades, sometimes we have to into the despair of our situation, the feelings of grief and sorrow that are evoked, to find the new energy we need to rise to a great challenge.

First there were the hard facts from science — disappearing fish, acidic oceans, images of drought, the climate challenge, this increasingly clear view of the “long march” humanity must now make, from here to sustainability. Something like this: if all goes *well*, then we and our immediate descendants will be struggling to stop global warming, restore ecoystems, adapt to climate change, and save people from crushing poverty, for the next ninety years.

No one can credibly pretend any more, as some of our movement’s rhetoric tends to convey (at least implicitly), that some magic basket of techno-fixes, stimulus packages, and lifted chins on TV is going to create a revolutionary rescue for planet Earth and its human civilization in the “next ten years.” This is “cathedral-building,” as many have called it, the kind work that takes generations, and where those who started it only live to see the foundations in place, a couple of walls raised. But they end their lives knowing that the project itself is so deeply embedded in the hearts and politics of the people, that what they started is sure to be completed, and will one day stun the world.

Such thoughts were often the talk of Tällberg, both from the stage and around the margins. But I am not sure, still, whether even we have really grasped the urgency of the situation. Here, I use the word “we” carefully (it is usually used very uncarefully in these contexts to mean “the whole of humanity” or maybe just “humanity’s decision-makers) to mean we, the community of people who devote their professional time to sustainability issues and global futures. My own little experiments with camping and low-impact eating during this gathering are hardly more than symbolic, in terms of change; and in fact they were driven more by the pleasures of being in a tent by the lake, and saving a great deal of money, more than by that nagging sense (and nearly all of us in this business have this sense) of ethical duty to the planet and its people. And yet, even my little experiment in lighter conference-going was a piece of exotica in this crowd. We talk, all of us, of the great need for change, and we dedicate our lives to making it happen. But to what extent are we, really, willing to do more than symbolism to reduce the accumulation of destructive demands and behaviors that have (to cite just one statistic) reduced the population of glass eels in the Atlantic marine system to less than one percent of their previous levels, in just one generation’s time? (Source: Silent Sea, Isabella Lövin) We are willing to work extremely hard, clearly. We communicate intensively. We strategize and search for leverage points and buy organic foods. But are we willing to live differently? To create societies and economies that run differently? To manage our wealth (for most of us at Tällberg were wealthy, relative to the whole of the world) differently? Are willing to give anything up, in return for the knowledge that the cathedral of sustainability will be built?

I will be sitting with such thoughts all summer, as I press forward with work on a new book (that last in the three-book series that started with Believing Cassandra and The ISIS Agreement), having to do with how we humans think about the future. I was trolling for help with that book at Tällberg, and got some; I’ll be “blogging for help” as well in the times ahead.

Meanwhile, I have one small complaint worth sharing. I was sorry my friends from the Nile Basin — our workshop attendance was smallish to small — did not get more of the attention I thought they deserved. Their inter-governmental process is both enormous and inspirational, but it was barely noticed in the Tällberg talk-show context (though they did get some Swedish TV and radio time). This relative inattention was a real-world example of that climate game we played, described in an earlier Episode in this series, where the poorer nations — who suffer directly and decisively, right now, the deadliest impacts of global warming — were given very little voice and visibility, while the rest of the climate-change world talked ppm and models and abstract targets. Our workshop conversations on the Nile were high level and meaningful, so I hope my colleagues’ trip from East Africa to central Sweden proves materially useful to them in some way. But I am afraid most people are returning from Tällberg still not knowing much about the reality of sustainable development issues and challenges in this crucial region, the cradle of modern humanity.

And I also have one great hope. There did seem to be some genuine energy gathered around mobilizing the Tällberg community even further, in directions it has been mobilized previously — to push for (and here I come talking ppm as well) 350 as the necessary global target that our best scientific understanding says that we need (see www.350.org), and this new effort to “take the Tällberg tent to Copenhagen” and push all the harder, with all the voices that can be mobilized, for the best possible agreement there.

Not that I think one should pin great hopes on Copenhagen; but I pin great hopes on more and more committed mobilization, in every sector, to address every issue we have before us. This truly is a great rescue operation — people, species, ecosystems — and I hold out hope, relentlessly, that it can be done, because I have seen parts of it done, in my own lifetime. I grew up in the “save the whales!” era; today, compared to that time, and despite the many threats and losses, many whale species are in fact recovering. I grew up in a world where the best experts expected populations to swell to 12 billion or more, of whom a quarter or more would be likely to starve. We already have reduced population growth rates enormously, and avoided much foreseen famine with technological, policy, and economic innovations (some of which have created their own problems, but that is life). We have already capped CFCs and begun to heal the ozone layer. There are many few nuclear weapons in the world than there were a generation ago (still too many, but there is still serious progress there). These things happened, and are happening, because people at all levels of the world’s power hierarchy became seriously engaged and dedicated years of their lives to make them happen.

I saw a lot of that energy at Tällberg, from the youngest to the oldest, from heads of state to school children, and seeing this steadily growing upsurge of human energy and intelligence and love on display is the chief gift of that time.
Note: This is the final installment in a six-part series. You might want to read them in sequence.

This piece originally appeared in AllanAtKisson.com.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Alan AtKisson in Events at 2:50 PM)

Camping at Tällberg – Episode 3: An Evening of Standing Ovations

Alan AtKisson — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:52:08 +0000

Gro Harlem Brundtland is relating stories from her childhood — as a Norwegian refugee in Stockholm during World War II, leading her little brother safely across streets, and the unexpected apology she received from her father, when she was 12 or 13, because he had cut her off in a debate and declared her simply wrong.

It’s lovely to hear these stories from this living legend in the sustainability movement. She is making an argument for “principled pragmatism” — which she claims not to fully understand. This is Scandinavian modesty, as she is one of principled pragmatism’s most successful political exemplars.

She’s been Prime Minister of Norway twice, the second time during a banking crisis in 1986. Economists advised her then, she says, and wisely. Economists are in poor repute these days, but she notes that it was political leaders, lobbied by interest groups, that created the conditions that created the crisis.

Of course, she was also chairing then the Commission that bears her name at that time, more formally the World Commission on Environment and Development. That led to the famous definition of sustainable development, the Rio Summit, even the IPCC and Kyoto Protocol emerged from this original whirlwind of global analysis, based — this is an important point to her — on the findings of a vast fleet of scientists from 30 countries.

“Hardly anything that has happened since that report was published in 1987 has come as a surprise,” she tells us. She is a satisfied map-maker: “The report designed a way of thinking, which, as I see it, is still valid. Only by adhering to the principles of sustainable development will we survive on planet Earth.”

Brundtland’s experience as a member of the Palme Commission (on international security, and including representatives of the US, UK, and Soviet Union – not an easy group to bring together in the early 1980s) gave her the confidence to take on the WCED. “What brought the parties together were facts, and joint understanding of facts.” This built common ground, and this is the approach she has taken every since. Now she is working on the International Commission on Nuclear Disarmament and Non-Proliferation — trying to drastically reduce nuclear weapons in the world.

She reminds us of the SARS epidemic, which taught the world how to put aside differences and quickly cooperate to contain a global crisis. This is a note of hope: we know how to do this in general terms. Now she’s linked over to climate change, and I learn a new statistic: “9 out of 10 natural disasters are now related to climate change,” partly thanks to the increasing population of humans in cities in low-lying, climate vulnerable areas. So disaster preparedness, the containing of epidemics, and

She points us to Green Korea 2009: a national vision for the coming 60 years. They are dedicating 30% of a multi-billion dollar stimulus package to green measures, “the highest in the world.” She tells us to look at that, and to remember that energy efficiency is priority number one, in every sector.

Brundtland is off her notes now, and — more interestingly — talking about the lack of financing for sustainable development of all kinds. The old patterns and level of financing are “not in any way sufficient.” We need mechanisms that automatically tap 1, 2 or 3% of the whole carbon trading system. Because there, there’s going to be big money, and even 1% of that money is large. I don’t trust parliaments,” she says, to come up with this financing; the mechanism needs to be global, and automatic.

She wraps up her speech — which, like her career, somehow has blended homespun Scandinavian wisdom with high-flying global politics — with a believable summary on her attitude regarding humanity’s capacity to address these multiple challenges. “I certainly think we can, we must, and we will.” (Hint: This is a clue for those who are wondering what the actual agreement in my book The ISIS Agreement is all about.)

A slow but steady wave of standing occurs during the applause after after her speech.

Now, Nyamko Sabuni, Sweden’s Minister of Integration and Gender Equality, is beginning what proves to be a beautiful speech. “Don’t worry,” she says, “I’m not going to claim that gender equality will stop global warming.” She notes all the wonderful changes that have happened in health, technology, education and opportunity in the last hundred years. “None of that would have happened,” she says, “if there had not been high quality educational opportunities … for the world’s men.” A slow ripple of laughter starts in the crowd. “Imagine where we would be now if women had had the same opportunities.” Laughter and applause.

She is preparing us for a key message: that our capacity to meet the world’s challenges are slim if we do not ensure that women’s ability and energy is put the to task, by giving them the education and opportunity they deserve.

And her speech, I have to say, just gets better from there. (Watch it at www.tallbergfoundation.org, click on video on demand.) She quotes an 11-year-old Pakistani girl worried that the Taliban will drag her society back to the stone age, and Sabuni asks, why does an 11-year-old girl understand this, and not all those men?

Brundtland received a standing ovation because she speaks so wisely and directly, and she has earned the honor of service over time. Sabuni, unknown to this crowd before today, simply earns her standing ovation with the power of her rhetoric.

Finally, John Liu — who keynoted the same conference I did on Borneo a couple of months ago — gets the task of closing up, and he does this brilliantly with his video-assisted speech about the possibility for truly large-scale ecosystem restoration, with a Belgium-sized case study from China, the Loess Plateau, birthplace of the Han Chinese ethnic group (the world’s largest) and a place that as been completely devastated ecologically, for a thousand years. Now it’s green. He shows how this can be done in Africa and elsewhere, just by altering — radically, but sensibly — the way we do agriculture. (Check out his work at www.earthshope.org.)

Standing ovation again … this one fueled not by history, or powerful rhetoric, but by hope.

*

At the Tällberg Bar, I take a beer with my friend Audace Ndayizeye, from Burundi, a former Executive Director of the Nile Basin Initiative. The crowd is buzzing, dancing. My friend M. walked by: encouraged to break dance, he has split a seam in his pants. He comes back with new ones, and heads back to the dance floor. It’s that kind of night. A bit tired, I just watch, happily.

It’s fun to chat with all these wonderful folks, but I’m longing for my tent and sleeping bag. The sun is making another one of those blue-orange-brilliant light shows on the lake. And I’m working on a couple of new songs …

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(Posted by Alan AtKisson in Events at 8:52 AM)

Camping at Tällberg — Episode 2: A Bad Problem Problem is Actually Much Worse

Alan AtKisson — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:41:38 +0000

It’s morning. I had a wonderful, quiet time by the Lake, sleeping, writing, playing guitar. (The photo was taken just after midnight, from my tentsite.)

But now I walk (late) into the big tent of the Tällberg Forum. Global reality hits me like a desert wind. “The problem that we already thought was bad is actually much worse.” “The causes become the consequences, and the consequences become the causes.” “I want to be optimistic, but the situation really is quite pessimistic.”

Johan Rockström is leading a panel discussion on climate change. V. Ramanathan of Scripps Instituteconfirms what I’ve been reading, and trying to tell people, for several years now: global warming is already much worse than we thought, because the heat inputs from the sun have been so reduced by particulates in the atmosphere, so-called “global dimming.” He had calculated that, given the heat-trapping effects of greenhouse gases, global temperatures should already have risen 2.5 degrees. Why haven’t they? All those particulates in the atmosphere are “like glitter on the blanket of greenhouse gases.” They reflect solar radiation back into space. Wash the air of those particulates, and temperatures would rise dramatically. (We saw this happen already in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States. Planes stopped flying, people stayed home, the skies cleared … and the overall temperature in North America rose by a one degree Celsius in only three days.)

That’s what “a bad problem is actually much worse” means.

Rockström has steered them over to thoughts on the deep interconnections, and of course, this makes the picture even bleaker, as we learn about the acidification of the oceans, nitrogen loading, etc. The panel also includes Sybil Seitzinger, director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program: she deconstructs the beautiful meal served for dinner last night, and its cost in terms of nitrogen, water, land degradation, and greenhouse gases. Also Youba Sokona, who heads the Observatory of the Sahara and the Sahel: his quote was the one about causes and consequences, as he sees climate stress causing migration causing land stress causing … etc. etc.

Ramanathan, it turns out, is the optimist in this group. “We don’t want to bring any more bad news and paralyze people. But world leaders have still not [grasped] the urgency of the situation,” says Ramanathan. He talks of his personal commitment to find solutions, e.g. about conversions from wood to biogas for cooking, and all its positive impacts on health, women, global warming, and poverty. He tells us this in response to Rockström’s reflection on the changing role of science: “Science is hesitating in communicating the latest findings,” says Johan, “because it’s so depressing.”

Johan puts a picture of Frodo, from the Lord of the Rings, up on the big screen. Science has been suffering, he says, from the “Frodo Syndrome.” The planet itself is the “one ring” that rules it all. But this knowledge of the planet’s is a tremendous weight for the scientists to carry, and like Frodo, they have often preferred to be invisible. They have to come out, be more visible, and speak for what is necessary if we are to avoid the cascading effects of system collapse.

The session ends with a short dialogue with an economist, Klas Eklund of a large Swedish Bank. Can there be a response to Seitzinger’s recently expressed dream, of a truly integrated global model, with social and physical science both collaborating to understand human/planet interactions and future scenarios more completely? Eklund things so, and says, “There should be a Rockström Report” (like the Stern report). “No, there should be an Eklund Report,” says Rockström, that reimagines contemporary economics in a way that moves us beyond the fascination with growth. No, we economists just want to think about economic factors, says Eklund, and incentives and such. “So, we work together,” says Rockström, and ends the show.

*

Outside, the day is fine, fine, fine. Siljan glimmers blue. I walk with Johan to our next destination, a “Reality Check” session on global water. We discuss the generally difficult economics around sustainability work in these days. The same topic is coming up over and over again: many of us are experiencing that we and our colleagues have never been in greater demand, never had more of a sense that our work was timely, influential, needed. The impact of the various models, studies, training programs, reports, etc. generated by sustainability researchers and practitioners is rising dramatically.

At the same time, the money to do this kind of work has been drying up in some regions, and rather suddenly. Ironically, mostly the regions in questions are the so-called “rich” world, not the “developing ” world. Government budget cut-backs. Companies delaying or canceling initiatives. Foundations reeling from the shrinkage of their endowments. I’ve talked to several colleagues whose institutions (private companies, non-profits, institutes, whatever) are going through painful lay-offs. I’ve even heard of leading global experts, truly key people in their fields, whose work is quite essential and extremely sought after now by top political people, are scrambling for a few thousand dollars just to keep going, their personal economies and business economies both heading for their own “tipping points.”

Researchers and consultants having trouble getting paid to do the work that right now desperately needs to get done is, compared to the global challenges we face and the suffering of people already affected by things like climate change and water scarcity, a veritable “drop in the bucket.” And yet … aren’t we in danger of missing, as a world, a key leverage point, a key moment of opportunity? Isn’t sustainability expertise the one thing we need more of in a financial crisis driven by unsustainable behavior?

*

Speaking of things drying up … the Minster for Water and Irrigation of Keyna, Charity Ngilu, has now opened this “Reality Check” session on the global water crisis. “Water stress” is defined as having less than 1500 cubic meters per person per year. Kenya has just over 600, and is expected to have only 225 by 2025. “Communities are fighting over water,” she tells us, and provides moving stories as well to illustrate that from her own country. (Water rationing is already a reality in Nairobi, for example.) And she’s worried about the rising risk of international conflict over water.

The fighting and the conflict will only increase, if we do not have the sort of super-green-blue revolution then described by Johan Rockström. I can’t possibly capture the flow of data here — the river of information is flowing too fast — but it is eye-opening. In brief, we have enough water to feed 8 billion by 2050, but only if we completely reorganize global water management. Rain water is central to agriculture (irrigation is really a small part of global water use), and agriculture is the lion’s share of water use globally. So we have to rethink how we manage the rain that comes to the land, capture more of it for growing our crops … just when climate change is disrupting rainfall. And in the world’s more vulnerable regions. To illustrate the difference between stable ground flow and storm flow — which is what climate change is creating more of — he describes chocolate milkshakes running down hillsides … and carrying the soil with them.

Magda Hafny, an expert in water use ethics from Egypt, then takes us to a different level: values, judgments. How we decide, regarding water use. These are ethical questions in addition to scientific and technical and economic ones, and Jakob Granit of the Stockholm International Water Institute (and formerly of the World Bank) re-emphasizes the same message. He also puts more of a management perspective on it. He expands further on the opportunities and challenges (e.g., Africa has only developed 7% of its hydropower resources, Sweden has developed 80%; but, the development is creating exponentially more “dead zones” in the coastal zones of the world, from nutrient run-off.

*

As I stare off into Siljan’s deep blue, the conversation, a bit lulled now, is moving into questions. There is an awful lot of beautiful water out there in that lake. The colors shimmering on it last night, in the midnight sun of midsummer, were unreal, dream-like.

I’m called out of my reverie by a question from a woman who lives in Nigeria. “How can we do something practical about this?” she says. “Where I live, fertilizer is like gold. People who have it, have power. I don’t know what to do.” Johan peps her up with talk of integrating urban sanitation systems with the production of organic fertilizer, as they do in Mexico City now (translation for my young children: we can use human poop and pee to help grow more food).

Soon we’ll move into a series of workshops on the Nile Basin as a global case study in managing a big, common resource. I’ll be writing less about that, because I have to manage the sessions. But I’ll keep the flow of words from Tällberg — this writing helps me process the vast flood of incoming information — coming as steady as I can.

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(Posted by Alan AtKisson in Events at 8:41 AM)

Three Degrees Conference

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 26 May 2009 22:01:20 +0000

by Eric Hess
Climate law and human rights conference, right in Seattle.

Next weekend there's quite an impressive lineup at the University of Washington School of Law. From photographers to bloggers, and all types in between, the Three Degrees conference is bringing together a great body of minds to talk about climate change and human rights.
The brief details:
When: Thursday May 28 and Friday May 29
Where: University of Washington School of Law
Find out more about the lineup, topics, and cost here.
PS. We want to give a shout-out to the conference organizers, UW law students Jeni Krencicki Barcelos and Jen Marlow, who spent a summer doing excellent research work for Sightline and Washington Environmental Council. If the 2009 Washington legislature had gotten serious about cap and trade then their excellent work on the legal mechanics of dividends and rebates would no doubt be in the spotlight now.
PPS. Also props to Sightline friends Alex Steffen and Yoram Bauman who are among the excellent lineup of speakers.

This piece originally appeared in Sightline Institute's blog, The Daily Score.

If you are in Seattle, be sure to stop by the conference! As Eric mentioned, Alex Steffen will be speaking at the conference. He is currently scheduled to present from 2:30–3:15 p.m. on Friday, May 29

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Events at 2:01 PM)

EPA Climate Hearing In Seattle

WorldChanging Team — Thu, 21 May 2009 00:10:02 +0000

By Anna Fahey

May 21: A public hearing about EPA greenhouse gas regulation.

In April, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a finding that greenhouse gases pose a threat to human health and welfare. Based on rigorous, peer-reviewed analysis, this is a first step in beginning to regulate global warming pollution.

"This finding confirms that greenhouse gas pollution is a serious problem now and for future generations. Fortunately, it follows President Obama's call for a low carbon economy and strong leadership in Congress on clean energy and climate legislation," said Administrator Lisa P. Jackson. "This pollution problem has a solution - one that will create millions of green jobs and end our country's dependence on foreign oil."

The ruling initiates a 60-day comment period before any proposals for regulations governing emissions of heat-trapping gases are published.

On May 21st Seattle will be host to one of only two EPA public hearings in the entire country.

Local citizens and advocates concerned about climate and energy policy -- as well as public health -- have organized a rally to coincide with this all-day hearing. Here are the details:

When: 12:00 Noon, Thursday, May 21st.
Where: Seattle's Bell Harbor International Conference Center -- 2211 Alaskan Way, Pier 66, Seattle, WA (Map).

This piece originally appeared on Sightline Institute's blog, The Daily Score.
Photo credit: flickr/macinate, Creative Commons License.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Events at 4:10 PM)

Time’s about to run out on our auction – have you bid?

Alex Steffen — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:31:16 +0000

Our auction is wrapping up, with less than an hour left to bid on some items.

Purchases will benefit Worldchanging (and help us reach our $100,000 challenge grant -- so every dollar you spend will be matched by our benefactor). They're partially tax-deductible. The items themselves are cool, including Burtynsky prints, SxSW Platinum Passes, tickets to LIFT, PICNIC, eTech, and amazing trip packages to Cape Town for Design Indaba and the Arctic for a polar bear science adventure. And they are all screaming hot deals: almost everything is going for less than half its retail value.

Here's the eBay link: http://shop.ebay.com/merchant/worldchangingseattle_W0QQ_nkwZQQ_armrsZ1QQ_fromZQQ_mdoZ#item335186144d

Go bid on stuff you want, but please also spread the word: folks are about to walk away with a lot of amazing deals!

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Events at 7:31 AM)

Time’s about to run out on our auction – have you bid?

Alex Steffen — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:31:16 +0000

Our auction is wrapping up, with less than an hour left to bid on some items.

Purchases will benefit Worldchanging (and help us reach our $100,000 challenge grant -- so every dollar you spend will be matched by our benefactor). They're partially tax-deductible. The items themselves are cool, including Burtynsky prints, SxSW Platinum Passes, tickets to LIFT, PICNIC, eTech, and amazing trip packages to Cape Town for Design Indaba and the Arctic for a polar bear science adventure. And they are all screaming hot deals: almost everything is going for less than half its retail value.

Here's the eBay link: http://shop.ebay.com/merchant/worldchangingseattle_W0QQ_nkwZQQ_armrsZ1QQ_fromZQQ_mdoZ#item335186144d

Go bid on stuff you want, but please also spread the word: folks are about to walk away with a lot of amazing deals!

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Events at 7:31 AM)

Next on the Auction Block: 2 Tickets to the 2010 Etech conference

WorldChanging Team — Wed, 13 May 2009 20:36:56 +0000

Bid now to win 2 Tickets to the 2010 Etech conference. Conference dates TBD

ETech, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, is O'Reilly Media's flagship "O'Reilly Radar" event. ETech gathers together the world's most interesting people to bring to light the important and disruptive innovations that we see on the horizon, rather than the ones that have already arrived. ETech hones in on what's going to be making a difference not this year, or maybe even next year, but around the corner as the market digests the next wave of hacker-led surprises. Since 2002, ETech has put onstage the blue sky innovation, from thought leaders finding ways to solve the world's ills to hackers modding, breaking and building for the fun of it, from P2P and swarm intelligence to social software and collective intelligence. Radical and unknown at the time, today many of the ideas first seen at ETech are on the tongues of investors and business pundits -- and in the hands of consumers, fundamentally changing the way we live, work and play.

Street value: TBD - $1490 in 2009
Current bid: 500.00 (as of 12:30 p.m. PDT 05/13/09)

The Worldchanging Ideas Auction will end Friday, May 15, at 10 a.m. PDT. Check out our ebay store to learn more about what we're offering, from cutting-edge art, to tickets to leading ideas conferences around the world, to a chance to visit polar bears up-close! All proceeds from the auction will benefit Worldchanging. Please browse, please bid, and please tell your friends!

Read about ETech in the Worldchanging archives:

ETech 2009 roundup
ETech 2009: Adobe on Sustainability
Emerging Technology 2008

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Events at 12:36 PM)

Next on the Auction Block: Two Platinum Passes to SXSW

WorldChanging Team — Wed, 13 May 2009 19:34:26 +0000

Bid now to win Two Platinum Passes to SXSW, March 12-21, 2010 in Austin, Texas

SXSWeek brings together three unique industries. The Platinum Pass allows for access to SXSW Interactive, SXSW Film and SXSW Music.

The SXSW INTERACTIVE FESTIVAL celebrates the creativity and passion behind the coolest new media technologies. In addition to panel sessions that cover everything from web design to bootstrapping to social networks, attendees make new business connections at the three-day Trade Show & Exhibition and enjoy a full menu of exciting evening events.

The SXSW FILM CONFERENCE AND FESTIVAL explores all aspects of the art and business of independent filmmaking. The Film Conference hosts a five-day adventure in the latest filmmaking trends and new technology, featuring distinguished speakers and mentors. The internationally-acclaimed, nine-day Film Festival boasts some of the most wideranging programming of any US event of its kind, from provocative documentaries to subversive Hollywood comedies, with a special focus on emerging talents.

The SXSW MUSIC AND MEDIA CONFERENCE features a legendary festival showcasing more than 1,800 musical acts of all genres from around the globe on over 80 stages in downtown Austin. By day, the Austin Convention Center comes alive with conference registrants doing business in the Trade Show and partaking of a full agenda of informative, provocative panel discussions featuring hundreds of speakers of international stature. In its 23rd year, SXSW remains an essential event on the music industry calendar.

Street value: TBD
Current bid: $520 (as of 11:50 a.m. PDT on 5/13/09)

The Worldchanging Ideas Auction will end Friday, May 15, at 10 a.m. PDT. Check out our ebay store to learn more about what we're offering, from cutting-edge art, to tickets to leading ideas conferences around the world, to a chance to visit polar bears up-close! All proceeds from the auction will benefit Worldchanging. Please browse, please bid, and please tell your friends!

Read about SXSW in the Worldchanging archives:

SXSW: Blogging While Black
Don't Miss: Plutopia at SXSW

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Events at 11:34 AM)

Next on the Auction Block: 2 tickets to the 2010 Design Indaba Conference

WorldChanging Team — Wed, 13 May 2009 19:18:39 +0000

Bid now to win 2 tickets to the 2010 Design Indaba Conference in Cape Town, Feb. 24 - 26, 2010.

Leading international creatives have been unfolding new worlds of possibility and inspiration at the annual Design Indaba Conference since 1995. Designers, executives, fanatics and delegates have come to see the experience as an idea tonic. The 2010 edition runs in February at the Cape Town International Convention Centre, South Africa and will host more than 30 international industry pacesetters. The Design Indaba conference has sold out for four years in a row by attracting the world’s brightest talent. Design Indaba has become a respected institution on the creative landscape and one of the few events that celebrates all the creative sectors.

Street value: $1100 ($550 per ticket)
Starting Price: $500 (as of 11:30 a.m. PDT on 5/13/09)

The Worldchanging Ideas Auction will end Friday, May 15, at 10 a.m. PDT. Check out our ebay store to learn more about what we're offering, from cutting-edge art, to tickets to leading ideas conferences around the world, to a chance to visit polar bears up-close! All proceeds from the auction will benefit Worldchanging. Please browse, please bid, and please tell your friends!

Read about Design Indaba in the Worldchanging archives:
Notes from the Road: Design Indaba and Doors of Perception

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Events at 11:18 AM)

Reader Report: Historic Green in New Orleans

Morgan Greenseth — Tue, 05 May 2009 16:24:39 +0000

It's been a month since I found myself filthy and sweaty from painting walls, ripping out nails and putting up shelves. Yes, I was making home improvements, but not to my own. These simple changes were part of a larger community project for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, called Historic Green.

Historic Green, a group, associated with the US Green Building Council (USGBC), has a mission is to transform communities by using educational and charitable activities that integrate historic preservation and sustainability. The organization holds an annual Spring Greening event in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans.

I joined the group for their second annual event this past March 10-20. More than 400 individuals, members of university groups, and non-profit workers came from all corners of the United States to lend a helping hand. The volunteers brought a range of skill levels, from those who had little to no building experience, to professional architects and construction workers. The organizers took advantage of this diversity by planning a large variety of projects, from cleaning up sidewalks, to putting on a fresh coat of paint, to deconstructing homes, to planting gardens.

Volunteers freshened up St. Claude Avenue by weeding, picking up debris, painting, rapairing buildings and walkways, and creating rain gardens to soak stormwater into the ground. Some installed radiant barriers in historic homes to reduce energy use and save residents money. Others restored various homes on Dauphine and St Maurice streets by clearing debris on site, repairing concrete walkways, replacing rotten or damaged structural wood members, framing new walls, installing insulation, and weather-stripping doors and windows.

Historic Green organizers and volunteers are also working to transform many of the derelict buildings in the 9th Ward into community spaces. A handful of designers held a charrette to generate ideas on how to transform the Louis Armstrong Elementary into a new community arts space. A former Walgreens will soon become a worship space and community gathering place, and the warehouse used as the hub for Historic Green, is slated to become a community center where residents will hold job trainings, create a library, prepare meals for the homeless and elderly and host community meetings.

Historic Green recognizes that preserving, restoring and building a sustainable community requires an understanding of the place and of the people who live there. The planners introduced volunteers to the local culture through tours of the city and events like crawfish boils and post-work gatherings. Speakers, including Majora Carter, discussed their current work, inspiring us to take what we've learned back to our own communities. The mixing of events helped connect us with people and big ideas.

Although Historic Green is a post-disaster relief event for New Orleans, I found the rebuilding can also be a model for the rest of the nation, and as a volunteer I learned new strategies that I can continue to use at home. We learned how making big changes to the built environment can not only decrease our energy use, but also improve our landscape and the ways in which we interact with each other.

I found Historic Green's work to be particularly worldchanging for its focus on restoration and retrofits. It was wonderful to see that Historic Green is so dedicated to restoring the intricately detailed homes instead of quickly demolishing and rebuilding yet another condo complex. It's much better to create quality housing and public spaces by restoring historic buildings sustainably -- especially in a city so famous for its past.

To learn how you can help or attend next year's event, go here.

Photo credits: Valarie French & Morgan Greenseth

Editor's Note: We encourage "Reader Reports" -- submissions from members of Worldchanging's global audience who volunteer to write up their notes from travels, conferences, workshops and other worldchanging happenings they participate in. If you'd like to contribute your own report, please email editor[at]worldchanging[dot]com.

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(Posted by Morgan Greenseth in Events at 8:24 AM)

ETech 2009 roundup

Jeremy Faludi — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:20:17 +0000

Mary Lou Jepsen (Pixel Qi) on stage at ETech 2009.
Photo credit: James Duncan Davidson

Last week in San Jose was ETech, O'Reilly's emerging technology conference. It was a fantastic conference, and a pity I could only spend a day and a half there; but here are some highlights (including a couple I watched online after the conference was over, which you can do, too.)
Alex and I both spoke; he's already mentioned a couple quips of his that made the rounds. My talk was a list of priorities for green design, which I'll be posting as a series of articles later, but which for now is available here.

Tim O'Reilly, head of O'Reilly publishing and instigator of the conference, began the conference with a call to action for technologists to work on things that matter, work on solving the big problems of our time. And not in the sense of work for nonprofits or aid organizations -- they're great and important, but you can't have solutions be a side dish in the world's economy, technology, and society. Improving humanity's lot and the world as a whole should be the main entree, so we can aim our careers and companies squarely at the heart of things. Historically, people have assumed that you can't make money that way, but we've seen that assumption go from specious to laughable in the last decade. The big problems of today -- energy, transportation, buildings, etc. -- are all places where there's a great deal of money to be made by having a game-changing solution. (Or even an incrementally better solution.)

Mary Lou Jepsen, formerly of One Laptop Per Child and now of startup Pixel Qi, talked about bridging the digital divide and how doing so actually helps drive high-end electronics as well. This should be no surprise to anyone who's seen the OLPC's XO laptop; for the last couple years I've wanted "normal" laptops to have screens as good as the XO -- daylight readable, and at a fraction of the power. Why has it taken laptop makers ten years to figure out the importance of daylight readability?! Thankfully, this is exactly what Pixel Qi is for -- making that display technology more widely available, better, and cheaper. Jepsen made an excellent point that technology innovation today works like trickle-down economics. All the smart people work on the highest-end tech for the richest users in the tiny top of the pyramid. Innovating at the base of the pyramid, however, drives much more massive change, just like tax breaks for the middle class stimulate the economy more than tax breaks for the super-rich. When you innovate at the bottom of the pyramid, you make the pyramid simultaneously wider and taller. Just as OXO GoodGrips kitchen utensils were designed for an extreme user (senior citizens with arthritis or dexterity problems) but radically improved the mainstream market, the XO laptop was a design for extreme users (off-grid, where low power consumption is king) that is now starting to revolutionize mainstream computing and portable electronics. Finally, she showed that the base of the pyramid is an extremely recession-proof market; you could consider it a market in perpetual recession, that can't get any lower, and if you make things affordable there, they're affordable anywhere; and in a recession they may be the only things that are affordable anymore. Jepsen's final big point for the future was that the CPU wars are over -- even mediocre speeds these days are faster than most of the market needs. Today is the age of the screen wars. LCD, OLED, e-paper, and Pixel Qi's on unique reformulation of LCD.

Andrea Vaccari of the Senseable City Lab at MIT gave an enticing though ultimately not fulfilling talk on bringing city-scale data into real time. I only say it wasn't fulfilling because it had such great premises but didn't seem to have follow-through. For instance, the project Real Time Rome mapped real-time population density across the city of Rome by locating cell phone calls, and overlaid that data with public transit route maps to see how well they correlate. This is a fantastic idea, and provokes interesting possibilities like having the frequency of buses on a given route changing based on where people are at the moment, or maybe watching real-time data for a few months and moving bus routes to better match trends. But they didn't do anything with the data yet, haven't even done analysis to make recommendations. They did do a great job of the info-porn, though, showing example after example of excellent data visualization for that and other projects, such as NYTE globe encounters, Los Ojos Del Mundo, Raster Cities, and more. Then there was the art piece Digital Water Pavillion, which was also fun.

The urban homesteading talk by Mark Frauenfelder of MAKE magazine was fun, mostly because it's nice to see modern hipster high-tech geeks getting into gardening, canning, and making your own yogurt like my mom does back in rural Wisconsin. So much of geek culture throws out the past, ignoring it as being irrelevant to the technological synthetic world that we live in today; but no matter how fabricated, how designed, and how technological our world is, it still rides on the back of the world made of plants and dirt, of animals and our own hands, of sunshine and thunderstorms. We need to not forget it, not just stay acquainted with it, but be involved and deeply engaged with it.

Two other particularly interesting talks were RedMonk on Smart Grids and Adobe talking about its sustainability initiatives; see the separate posts for notes on both of these:

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(Posted by Jeremy Faludi in Events at 1:20 PM)

Don’t Miss: Plutopia at SXSW

Sarah Kuck — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 23:20:51 +0000

If you're headed to Austin, Texas, this weekend for the infamous rock festival SXSW, be sure to stop by Monday evening's event "Plutopia." The event, co-founded by Worldchanging team member Jon Lebkowsky and Derek Woodgate of The Futures Lab, uses music, art and performance to encourage attendees to imagine an infinite number of possible future utopias.

Plutopia 2009's theme is 'Living Systems,' and will feature entertainment from local, national and international performers and speakers from the fields of futurism, technology, sustainability, media and art, including:

Music
Ian MacLagan and the Bump Band, Hipnautica, Black Pig Liberation Front, Exstus, Tolera Storm, DJ John Gomi and Beatimprint.

Sustainability
Urban Roots, Austin Green Art, Edible Austin

Performers/Speakers
The Heather Gold Show, Bruce Sterling, Transhumanist philosopher Natasha Vita-More

Art
70 art installations and exhibitions with artists from Austin, San Francisco, New York, Britain and Thailand. Notable artists include Stanza, Max More, Allucquere Rosanne Stone and Christian Kerrigan.

Plutopia will take place on Monday, March 16, 2009 from 6 p.m. to midnight at Palmer Events Center in Austin. The event is free to SXSW badge holders, and is open to the general public. Tickets are $10 and can be purchased at plutopia.eventbrite.com. A portion of the evening’s proceeds will benefit EFF-Austin and Urban Roots.

If you make it to Austin, be sure not to miss this one-of-a-kind event! Plutopia 2009 will be asking attendees to think about what constitutes a "living system." Why not start the discussion now? Leave your answers below.

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Events at 3:20 PM)

Calling For Reader Reports: Spring Conferences

WorldChanging Team — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 22:45:35 +0000

As much as we'd love to, we can't be everywhere that interesting discussions, conferences and events are taking place, even nearly as often as the opportunities pop up.

We do, however, have a uniquely intelligent, connected and engaged audience. And yes, we're talking to you. Since one of our main goals is to get smart, visionary people around the world to connect with one another, we encourage you to share your experiences with the Worldchanging community by posting thoughtful submissions.

Since last summer, members of Worldchanging's global audience have been volunteering to write "Reader Reports" from conferences, workshops and other world changing happenings they've attended. Because of them, we've been able to publish insider coverage from events like GreenBuild 2008 in Boston, the Third International Conference of the Congress for European Urbanism in Oslo, and the World Cities Summit in Singapore.

We love hearing and publishing your take on these events – both because we like to let others know what happened at these meetings of great minds, and also because we like to know that our readers are getting out there and swapping big and brilliant ideas with the best thinkers on the planet.

We've started a wish list of cool conferences, coming this spring, which we're dying to get an inside scoop on. If you're attending and would like to contribute your own report, please email editor[at]Worldchanging[dot]com.

Ecosystem Services: Marketing Environmental Solutions
March 12 - 13
Charlottesville, Virginia

Remaking Suburbia
March 12
Melbourne, Australia

The Future of Utilities
March 17 - 18
London, United Kingdom

Sustainable Energy Alternatives & their Impact on Low-Income Community
March 19
Greensboro, North Carolina

Sustainability 2012: Shaping an Environmental Legacy for World Cities
March 25-27
London, United Kingdom

MIT Sustainability Summit
April 24
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Blue, Green & Gold: the future of water, finance and the environment
April 27-28
Zurich, Switzerland

Sustainable Development 2009
May 13-15
Cyprus, Cyprus

If you'd like to write for Worldchanging in any capacity, we'd love to hear from you! Send your ideas to editor[at]worldchanging[dot]com.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Events at 2:45 PM)

Compostmodern ‘09

Jeremy Faludi — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 20:08:28 +0000

Next Saturday in San Francisco is Compostmodern, one of the now-increasing number of sustainable design conferences. As Alex mentioned last November, it includes several Worldchanging types, such as Dawn Danby and Joel Makower speaking, myself in attendance, and allies Allan Chochinov and Emily Pilloton, among others. It will also feature Saul Griffith, a rapidly-rising star in the sustainability world; Eames Demetrios, Nathan Shedroff, and others. Past Compostmoderns have been good, and this one promises to be even better.

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(Posted by Jeremy Faludi in Events at 12:08 PM)

Live Blog from TED: Pattie Maes Invents a Sixth Sense

Ethan Zuckerman — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 21:36:58 +0000

Pattie Maes of MIT’s Media Lab wants to give you a sixth sense. You probably want it… but it’s still a little clunky right now. And requires you to wear plastic market caps on your finger. But it’s really cool.

Maes reminds us that we pull in information about the world with our five senses, and make decisions based on this sensory input. These days, we often have an additional sense - our ability to use networked information to add to our knowledge. At TED, we’d really like the ability to meet someone and immediately Google to figure out who they are. Or at the supermarket, we’d like to overlay data about environmental and corporate responsibility on top of the products we buy. We can access this information, but it’s inconvenient and socially awkward to do so.

The solution to social awkwardness? Hang some devices around your neck and stick colored caps onto four fingers. The system includes a wearable camera, a mirror and a battery-powered projector. This allows the wearer - currently grad student and hacker Pranav Mistry - to project information onto surfaces. He’s able to manipulate this information by moving his colored fingers - they re tracked by the camera and allow Pranav to manipulate the data, driven by his mobile phone.

The system looks a bit like Jeff Han’s multitouch interface and the Microsoft Surface computing, but points out that this is a solution that works on any surface. You might use it to reframe your shopping experience, projecting a rating from Amazon onto books in books in a bookstore, or adding reviews from a favorite critic. You might enhance a newspaper with a projected video clip, or project a word cloud associated with someone onto their chest as you talked with them. And, of course, it’s trivial to project a watch on your arm.

There’s no doubt in my mind that this is an exceedingly cool hack. Whether anyone will be wearing to wear it outside of the lab probably has something to do with how it’s designed, and how we construct social rules about what’s acceptable and not to enhance with information in a real-world environment. I can’t really imagine having the ability to project information onto people’s chests being socially acceptable - but I would love for it to become true.

More about the ideas behind this interface - which Maes declined to give a catchy name - at her page on “fluid interfaces“.

This post is part of a series from the TED 2009 conference held in Long Beach, California from February 4-8th. You can read other posts in the series here, and the TED site will release video from the talk in the coming weeks or months. You may also want to follow the conference via Twitter or through other blogs tagged as TED2009 on Technorati.

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Events at 1:36 PM)

Poznań, Days 6 & 7: More Cash for Adaptation?

WorldChanging Team — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:04:28 +0000

Amanda Chiu reports from the 14th Conference of Parties (COP 14) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Poznań, Poland.

Photo courtesy Amanda Chiu

Protest march on Saturday, the Global Day of Action for Climate Change.

"Contact groups" have been meeting since late last week, meaning that international climate negotiations have now gone behind closed doors. One of the key negotiations, and arguably the most important decision that might come out of Poznań, revolves around the Adaptation Fund and Article 9 of the Kyoto Protocol - the review and possible updating of the treaty.

Under Article 9, Parties to the Kyoto Protocol will, "periodically review this Protocol in the light of the best available scientific information and assessments on climate change and its impacts, as well as relevant technical, social and economic information.... Based on these reviews, the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol shall take appropriate action."

One of the areas under examination is funding for adaptation projects - efforts by countries to address and adapt to the wide-ranging impacts of climate change, from rising sea levels to worsening droughts. Currently, the Kyoto Protocol calls for a 2-percent levy on all funding used to support projects under the treaty's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a tool that allows emitters in wealthy countries to ‘offset' their own emissions by investing in emissions-reducing projects in the developing world. That 2 percent is automatically put into the Adaptation Fund, which supports adaptation projects in developing countries that are Parties to Kyoto.

Negotiators are currently considering extending the 2 percent levy to the treaty's two other emissions-reduction "mechanisms": Joint Implementation (essentially, CDM projects for the former Soviet transition countries) and the emissions trading system. This could occur during either the first Kyoto commitment period (ending in 2012) or the second (beginning in 2013).

Aside from the 2 percent CDM levy, the Adaptation Fund currently has only one other funding source: voluntary contributions from individual countries. By extending the levy to all three Kyoto mechanisms, the cash flow to the Fund grows. The timing of implementation is also important, as it relates directly to the time-sensitive nature of adaptation. Already, many countries are seeing changes due to climate change and need help now.

Environment ministers and other key government officials are now arriving at the conference, and high-level negotiations commence on Thursday. Because Party delegates have not been able to agree on an outcome for the Adaptation Fund discussion as of yet, negotiations on this topic are expected to make their way up to these tables.

On a different note, I attended an eye-opening "side event" on potential low-carbon pathways in India's energy future, sponsored by the Delhi-based NGO The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). (Side events are events put on by groups accredited with the UNFCCC and run concurrent to the official meetings.) Panelists included TERI Executive Director Leena Srivastava, R.K. Pachauri (TERI Director General and Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), Nobuo Tanaka (Executive Director of the International Energy Agency), and Harlan Watson (Senior Climate Negotiator of the U.S. Delegation to Poznań). Pachauri is also a contributing author to the upcoming Worldwatch report State of the World 2009: Into a Warming World and will be attending the State of the World 2009 briefing in Washington in January.

Srivastava painted an interesting portrait of what India is and could be. The country has a population of more than 1.1 billion and an installed electricity generating capacity of around 150 gigawatts (GW), compared to the United States, with a population of just under 306 million and approximately 1,000 GW. Over half of India's rural population does not have access to electricity, and already this system is over-taxed. Oil reserves are extremely limited, a cohesive transport infrastructure for natural gas does not exist, and coal reserves are expected to last only another 40 years.

Despite all of this, energy demand continues to grow with development. Given current rates of consumption, TERI projected that India would exhaust its domestic fossil fuel reserves by 2016 or 2017, pressing that it does not have the luxury of time to wait until after these dates to transform to a new energy-secure path. If India still relies on fossil fuels by then, it would have to depend almost solely on energy imports, a serious breach of energy security.

In TERI's most ambitious scenario for energy transformation, two-thirds of India's electricity sector, roughly 800 GW, could be served by solar energy (both photovoltaics and solar thermal) by 2031 or 2032. Large and small hydropower could produce almost 200 GW, followed by wind at slightly over 100 GW and nuclear at 100 GW. Other fuels could be used to a lesser extent. Fossil fuels would account for a much smaller portion of the pie.

To reach this scenario, India would unwaveringly go beyond its "common but differentiated responsibilities" defined under the Kyoto Protocol, and bring its "equitable right" of 2 tons of emissions per capita down to a far more rigorous 1.3 tons per capita by 2031. As a result, carbon dioxide emissions in 2030 would be about 75 percent lower than under the business-as-usual case, and total systems costs would be about 11 percent lower.

This article originally appeared on the Worldwatch Institute, for which Amanda Chiu is the MAP Sustainable Energy Fellow.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Events at 1:04 PM)