Yesterday was a challenge to find the bright side of things. But proving that I am in fact a PR guy, here’s how I spin it:
I decided decades ago to have a happy life, and it was an excellent decision. I see days like this as merely a reminder of that resolve, even if I do feel rather heavily tested at the moment.
The pundits have dubbed today “CyberMonday,” meaning we good little sheep are to go bravely forth over our modems and contribute to the global economy, from the comfort of our homes and offices.
Well, sorry, but I’m not playing. I did participate in Small Business Saturday, whose focus was on buying local. But I feel no need to glorify online commerce.
I’m actually a strong advocate of buying local when it’s practical. Local purchasing means money stays local. The people employed by locally owned stores spend their own money right here in my community. And the jobs I help create reduce unemployment right here where I live. And the culture of locally owned bookstores, artist venues, hardware stores and such makes my community a more desirable place to live. That’s the kind of abundance I wish to encourage.
Mind you, I’m not a purist. I do buy online. I do even buy from chain stores sometimes. I do see the occasional movie at the mall (though I see a far greater number at my local independent cinemas). But today, as millions rush to their workstations to undermine the lcoal economies, I can bloody well keep my wallet away from my computer. If I buy anything today, it will be at a local store.
I’ve always said that if we could get most of our hot water from the sun in our antique (1743) house in cloudy, cold Massachusetts (which we do), it should be easy for most of the country to heat water with the sun.
Taking that philosophy much farther, Paul Brazelton’s Minnesota family has just done a deep-green retrofit of a 1935 house—and yanked out the furnace. With frequent temperatures of -20F and spikes well below that, this is a brave thing to do.
But not unproven. Energy visionary Amory Lovins also lives in the snowbelt (just outside Aspen, Colorado). While he doesn’t see the temperature extremes of a Minnesota winter, his no-furnace house was designed and built back in 1983, with technology we’d now consider quite primitive—and he grows bananas in his sunroom. And thousands of Passivhaus Institute-certified EnerPHit homes have been built in Germany and Scandinavia (also not known for balmy winters).
The Brazelton project will be the first certified EnerPHit home in North America.
As a social media user since 1995, and someone who trains others in social media, I’d been wanting to see “The Social Network” for months. Last night, I got my chance.
And I was disappointed. It’s a courtroom drama without drama, a jumbled series of flashbacks seen through testimony in two different lawsuits combined for a single hearing: One from Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss, upper-class preppie twins who came up with a Harvard social networking concept and brought Mark Zuckerberg in as a partner, only to have him modify the concept into Facebook, leaving them behind—and the other by Eduardo Saverin, his best friend and first investor, for cheating him out of his position and his percentage.
The movie begins with the messy breakup that first inspires Zuckerberg to hack into Harvard’s computers and create the original “Facemash,” illegally placing pictures of most of Harvard’s entire student body on a website, and chronicles how this led to the Facebook 750,000,000 of us use today.
I already knew a lot of this backstory and perhaps that colors my dislike of the movie—because it is in fact a fascinating history. It’s well worth a magazine article, and many have been written. But as film, it left a lot to be desired.
While it was (barely) interesting enough to watch to the end, it lacked drama, focused for the most part on unlikable characters (not just Zuckerberg but the Winklevoss twins, Napster founder Sean Parker, and even Harvard’s then-president, Larry Summers in his one scene). The men are scheming crooks, except Saverin—and pretty much all of the women in the film are portrayed largely as brainless bimbos—except, ironically, Erica Albright, the one who breaks up with Zuckerberg at the start of the movie, who he calls a bitch on his blog, but is one character whose motivations are clear and justified.
Maybe once or twice a year, I actually get an unsolicited bulk e-mail that is targeted, relevant, and has a subject line that makes me open it. nd while I absolutely detest spam, I don’t object to this. If I am exactly the right audience for an offer, it’s not spam; it means a company is doing its homework and compiling a list of actual prospects.
This morning, I got one with the subject, “recycle related/reuse and swap search engine.” Since I write about the environment and have a 40-year commitment to encouraging reuse, I opened the e-mail.
This is an excerpt:
ecofreek.com is a search engine that searches the web for free and ‘for swap/trade’ items people no longer need from over 45+ major sources, providing the most diverse and accurate results anywhere in the world.
Also included are items for trade like books, sports equipment, antiques, automobiles, bicycles, motorcycles, CDs/DVDs, computers, property, seeds/gardening supplies, and lots more.
We also encourage people to exchange and re-use items though our search engine and also our ‘places to give things away’ section. Feel free to recommend us new resources as well, we have a section we link to other environmental/green sites.
We hope you enjoy your experience at our site and welcome any and all feedback.
Please contact me for any questions about our site/service or working together.Sincerely,
Nicole Boivin – Founder
She also included her personal e-mail and phone number.
So I went over to look, and I like what I found (mostly).
As a longtime participant in Freecycle.org, I was interested to compare. I found several major differences:
1. The search engine is elegant and allows you to choose a geographic area ranging from your own town or US state to anywhere in the world. Freecycle restricts you to your own community.
2. Ecofreek is web-based, rather than e-mail-driven, which means you can search for what you want instead of just posting a wanted or offered notice and hoping for response.
3. Freecycle is about gifting. While gifting is an option at Ecofreek, swaps are also encouraged.
I did get very weird results when I clicked a suggested link (not a database result) for free samples of Kashi. And I do see that this site will need to be prepared to deal with people spamming the message boards (I saw one or two noncommercial spams). But I think it’s a good addition to the frugality and environmentalism toolbox.
And I will write to Nicole and ask her how I get listed in the environmental section she referred to.
I am always thinking of you, my readers–so when I saw this in this morning’s Help a Reporter,
I stopped what I am doing to tell you about it. I know nothing about this other than what is below,
but it certainly seemed worth passing on. If I lived in the Tri-State area and had kids the right
age, I’d enter myself.
HARO is a no-charge service that sends reporter queries three times a weekday.
You can subscribe at www.helpareporter.com.
I suggest you respond with two or three bullets and a sentence or two about your qualifications–
let them follow up later)–the faster the better.
Please respond to the reporter *using the address in the body of the request* (I wouldn’t mind
being copied but if you only send to me, I won’t forward it) with HARO as the first word of the
subject line.
Remember–I didn’t write this and can’t answer any questions about it. All I know is what’s below.
18) Summary: CASTING: How green is YOUR family?
Category: Entertainment and Media
Media Outlet: Anonymous
Deadline: 7:00 PM EST – 8 December
Query:
How green is YOUR family? A NYC based media company is casting
three families in the tri-state area to enter an eco-friendly
challenge! We are looking for outgoing families who are
comfortable on camera. Shoot dates will be mid-to-late January
for two days in your home.
Here’s the deal! Each family will name one of their children
(age 6-10) as team lead, and under the guidance of a green
expert, each family will be asked to create solutions to (1)
save water, (2) save energy, and (3) reduce waste at home, in
their neighborhoods and in their schools. Each family will be
compensated; however points will be awarded for each activity
and the winning family will appear on Better TV and receive a
$25,000 savings bond for their child’s college education.
Does your family have what it takes to win this challenge? Write
a brief description explaining why, grab your favorite family
photo, and submit to greenfamilycasting@gmail.com
A government is finally taking action against Monsanto, which has a long history of abusive practices involving genetically modified crops.
In this instance, the company stands accused of stealing brinjal (a kind of eggplant) and developing GM varieties in an attempt first of all to extract biodiversity riches from the local populace without compensation, and second, to mislead others about whether they were engaging in GM once they had it. In the past, Monsanto has had a particularly disgusting habit of letting its GM crops contaminate other farmers’ fields, including organic growers, and then suing the victims for using its seed without permission. I am glad to see a government finally going after this corporate bully that plays fast and loose with our food safety.
Lots of bloggers have picked up this story, but it doesn’t seem like the mainstream media have paid attention. I finally located a mainstream media report: an English-language public affairs show on French TV covering India’s lawsuit against Monsanto.
Let’s hope this action is the first of many similar actions of governments protecting their people against these outrages.
I keep waiting for one of these Great Defenders of Property Rights—you know, people like Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, and O’Reilly—to step forward and make some noise about the way the police wantonly destroyed property of individual occupiers and resources belonging to the community as a whole during the evictions last week. Among other things, a 5000-volume library was destroyed. I can’t see any reason for this.
Of course, I don’t expect the right-wing pundits to make any noise about the shameful treatment by police of some of the occupiers, such as the outrageous incident on the UC-Davis campus, where police used pepper spray in the faces of peaceful, sitting protestors—something that has one professor calling for the chancellor to resign. But since protecting private property has been so near and dear to their hearts over the years, I hold them to the same standard when the property being destroyed is that of their opponents.
According to a new study by Environmental Health Perspectives, biking instead of driving for trips under five miles turns out not only to be healthful, cleaner, more fun, etc.–it’s also apparently good for the economy to replace car trips with bike trips.
As a long-term bike fan (and sometime bike commuter all the way back to high school), I’m not surprised.
(via @undriving)
Two commentators demonstrate why solar continues to be viable, and why the dramatic and very public failure of Solyndra has nothing to do with the viability of solar.
On Huffington Post, Graciela Tiscareño-Sato writes, in “A Teaching Moment About the Green Economy,” of several brilliant entrepreneurs who are helping us take big steps toward a green economy, emphasizing multiple benefits such as saving cost and carbon and creating jobs at the same time. Her examples (all from the Latino world, incidentally) cover the building industry (specifically, solarizing schools in California), fashion, eco-consulting, and more.
And in the New York Times, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman points out that Solyndra’s failure was directly related to the success of solar. Solyndra’s model was based in high prices and scarcity, but as solar becomes more popular, the energy equivalent of the computer industry’s Moore’s Law kicks in; we get ever-more-powerful, cheaper, more effective systems as the quantity goes up. Solyndra couldn’t compete with the new low-cost solar providers. (Note: this is a different aspect of the same article I blogged about yesterday.)