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The bio I never planned to write...

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a (bike) writer with a camera self-portrait
In 2009, after 13 years of wordsmithing and playing in a rock & roll band accompanied by a series of eclectic day jobs, I set out to be a freelance journalist with the broader vision of inspiring people to be more creative and caring stewards of this little round ball we all find ourselves on.

I started a blog so I could experiment with story ideas and hone my writing chops, and much to nobody's surprise called it A World of Words. I also began posting right here in this blissful ocean of orange.

Out in the world, I found that people's stories and actions became more real and immediate — not only for them, but for me — when I was capturing them on camera.

My point-and-shoot Panasonic Lumix turned out to be not only the perfect companion for documenting things like people on bikes while riding my bike, but its Leica lens yielded pictures of unexpected depth and clarity.

Many of my diaries began to naturally morph into photo essays, allowing the pictures and words to gently dance with each other toward the heart of the story.

Over time, and with much expertly guidance from my bestest photo buddy, my work became more refined and took on its own unique voice. Events I was covering, like Sunday Streets San Francisco, requested to use them for their promotions. Publications such as Grist, Architecture 2013, and Reader's Digest wanted to commission my photos. A bunch of pictures from my Cinque Terre post made it into an exhibit on eco-tourism in a German architectural gallery.

So I thought it was time to officially "out" myself as a photographer and launch a photo site where I would curate a few galleries with what I believe to be my strongest and most meaningful work. When my bestest photo buddy saw what I was doing, she spontaneously shouted out: "A writer with a camera!" That really stuck.

Trying to explain why this was important enough to spend time on while I have so many other things on my plate, the best I could come up with was a rock & roll metaphor:

If my Flickr stream represents the live jams, A Writer with a Camera is my first studio release.

Below the orange eyeball a few photos from the front page gallery, along with the essays they're gleaned from, posted here over the years. Enjoy the trip down memory lane...


Lessons for building an ecocity culture

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Quick: Name a few cities that come to mind when you think of France...

Paris? Bien sûr, but you can do better than that. Cannes? Mais oui, you've been reading the entertainment pages. Marseille? Bordeaux? Lyon? Toulouse? C'est magnifique, you have passed your geography test.

Such a wealth of cultural meccas, and yet, the place most likely to resemble the city of the future is still left off most people's must-know-and-visit list.

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Île de Nantes. Photo: Jean-Dominique Billaud

Please follow me below the orange croissant for a journey to Nantes, the upcoming Ecocity World Summit, and the role of creativity in shaping the cities of the future. This article was originally published at Matador Network, with a few extra links & photos added by Yours Truly.

Sunday Streets SF: Love me Tenderloin Edition (photos!)

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Two weekends ago, San Francisco's migrating street party known as Sunday Streets found itself a warm spot right smack in the middle of the city's Tenderloin neighborhood. It was, as always, as much a celebration of human-on-human contact as it was human-on-bubbles.

Small ones...

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and large ones...

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With about 20 city blocks closed to automobile traffic, from Grove to O'Farrell and Larkin to Jones Streets, it was the usual large, temporary, public space affording people to bike, walk, run, dance, and have fun in the middle of the street in unlimited ways.

There was, of course, lots of music...

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scooting...

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face painting...

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a round of asphalt Jenga...

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and even a game of street hoops...

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And yet, what makes this traveling road show so unique in a place like San Francisco is that whatever neighborhood plays host to the festivities is sure to bare its distinctive soul.

For example, there is no other hood that brings out the kind of low rider pride as the Mission does...

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and you're most likely to run into these guys at an Embarcadero Sunday Streets.

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The Tenderloin has its own unique story and character. Follow me below the fold for a few more impressions of this storied SF neighborhood as it unfolded out in the open streets on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

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Hummingbirds: Biking the Solar Roofs of Southern Germany, to See the Change You Wish to Be

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My mom and stepdad live in a small village between Lindau and Wangen in the Allgäu region of South Germany, not far from the Swiss and Austrian borders. It's a long story of how they settled in the foothills of the Alps and I in the hills of San Francisco, but for the last decade or so I have been making the trip to this rural area of Germany almost every year. During this decade, and in fact for much longer than that, very little has changed in this rather traditional, agricultural patch of Earth.  

Cows munching on grass and flowers in endless meadows...

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Farmers going about their business...

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Locals buying fresh food directly from their farmers...

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and people hanging out in the pedestrian zones and marketplaces of their medieval home towns...

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And yet, there is one thing that has changed in this sleepy place. In fact, the entire landscape has been completely transformed in the few years I've been coming here. One of the Allgäu's most visible and distinct landmarks, its steeply pitched, gabled roofs, have morphed from the quiet, shingled beauties of yore...

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into shining symbols of 21st century technology and the country's Herculean efforts to transform its energy grid...  

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Please join me on a bike tour of these solar roofs below the orange cloud. I believe they are a fitting tribute to Hummingbird's spirit -- to do what we can, against all odds and conventional wisdom. In this case, it is the grassroots activists and "environmental idiots" fighting for a clean energy revolution for over 30 years, shifting hearts and minds, little by little, all the way up to top levels of government, that have made what was thought to be deluded and impossible not too long ago into a common cause among all citizens, liberal or conservative.


"Hummingbirds" Blogathon: September 9-September 13, 2013




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In May 2006, the late environmental activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai addressed 7,000 international educators who had gathered in Montreal for the 58th annual conference of the National Association of Foreign Student Advisers (NAFSA). Here is the story she shared with them.

One day a terrible fire broke out in a forest - a huge woodlands was suddenly engulfed by a raging wild fire.  Frightened, all the animals fled their homes and ran out of the forest.  As they came to the edge of a stream they stopped to watch the fire and they were feeling very discouraged and powerless.  They were all bemoaning the destruction of their homes.  Every one of them thought there was nothing they could do about the fire, except for one little hummingbird.

This particular hummingbird decided it would do something.  It swooped into the stream and picked up a few drops of water and went into the forest and put them on the fire.  Then it went back to the stream and did it again, and it kept going back, again and again and again.  All the other animals watched in disbelief; some tried to discourage the hummingbird with comments like, "Don't bother, it is too much, you are too little, your wings will burn, your beak is too tiny, it’s only a drop, you can't put out this fire."

And as the animals stood around disparaging the little bird’s efforts, the bird noticed how hopeless and forlorn they looked. Then one of the animals shouted out and challenged the hummingbird in a mocking voice, "What do you think you are doing?" And the hummingbird, without wasting time or losing a beat, looked back and said:

"I am doing what I can."
In this time of escalating climate change, this is our challenge.

To refuse to surrender to the apathy of denialism and fatalism.
To be fierce in our defense of the Earth.
To continue to fight in the face of overwhelming odds.
And always, always, to do what we can.

Because it is only by each of us doing what we can, every day, that we will save the Earth – for ourselves, and for the generations to come.  Like the hummingbird.


Our Daily Kos community organizers are Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, boatsie, rb137, JekyllnHyde, citisven, peregrine kate, John Crapper, Aji, and Kitsap River, with Meteor Blades serving as the group's adviser.  Photo credit and copyright: Kossack desertguy and Luma Photography.  All rights reserved.  Used with permission.

The Dark Side of Consumerism: What Landfills and Nursing Homes Taught These Indian Villagers

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Glamorized consumer culture has serious side effects—and to help people in remote Indian villages understand this, one filmmaker brought them to the West. Here’s what they thought of the dark side of Western lifestyles.

Nomadic Picnic.
Nomadic picnic, Khardung village, Ladakh, India. (Photo: Prabhu B Doss / Flickr)

Note:
This article was originally published in YES! Magazine, based on research and an interview I did with author and filmmaker Helena Norberg-Hodge, the founder of the International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC) that has sponsored villagers from the Himalayan desert region of Ladakh to go on "reality tours" to experience what everyday life is really like in the West.

Is Google making the world wiser?

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Just in time for the unfurling of Google's mysterious barge, a 50-foot-tall, 250-foot-long shipping container structure that looks to be a sort of floating technology theme park, I thought I'd post some excerpts from a fascinating dialog this summer between several Google employees about their differing worldviews. The full discussion is posted here through the eyes of Kuku Mon, one of the participants who first contacted me after I wrote What's the Matter with the Google Bus and whom I've had several thought-provoking email exchanges with since.

And just as there are those who try to measure happiness with a formula, there are also those who measure progress by the sheer number of years lived.

- Kuku Mon

A couple of notes first:
  • I'm using Google as the main protagonist because it's probably the most visible, powerful and wealthy representative of the Silicon Valley Tech Complex, and also the one most openly claiming to make the world a better place. Just as there are about 40 other companies shuttling their employees from SF to Silicon Valley in exclusive luxury buses, Google is not the only tech company in pursuit of remaking society while turning their founders and executives into gazillionaires. In a way, Google just functions as a symbol for Silicon Valley values that are ever more influential not only in our personal lives but in much broader cultural shifts as well as public policy decisions. My hunch though is that Kuku Mon's discussion with his colleagues could have taken place at any number of tech companies.
  • I'm not anti-technology and not asking to go back to the stone ages (though I suppose Neanderthal bashes by the bonfire were a lot more fun than Google Hangouts or sharing Facebook updates at a meetup), but I find it important to take a critical look at that which we find ourselves engaged in almost non-stop these days and which is reshaping our communication and culture in drastic ways. Sure, humans have used technology since our ancestors first carved their stone chisels, but we've come a long way since and our tools are becoming ever more sophisticated in scope and impact on the planet. If we can't talk about the downsides of our total immersion into the world of screens and gadgets –€“ like having to depend on (mostly fossil-fueled) electricity for almost every little thing we do, enjoying cheap and instant access to (mostly trivial) information on the backs of other people and at the expense of the environment in distant lands, and most of humanity turning into unhealthy couch potatoes, to name just a few –€“ because we're using technology to do it, then we're even further along in becoming a pixel-worshipping borg than I thought.


"€œWhat you call need, I call suffering."

Roshi Joan Halifax in response to Zynga Co-Founder Eric Schiermeyer, who insists that people need more information technology in order to further the evolution of human consciousness.

The pivotal question, in my mind, is not so much whether the Googles, Facebooks, and Twitters of the world are providing valuable services, but whether their outsized presence in all aspects of modern life and the speed they are adding to consumption and all trans- and interactions while accruing fantastic wealth for themselves is helping to solve the world's most pressing problems. You know, the ones that really matter, like poverty, inequality, resource depletion, and climate change.

Moreover, I think it's fair to ask about the moral fabric of corporate entities with the mission to map every corner of the world, publish every word ever written, and extract every aspect of our personal lives for commercial purposes. Does this global, almost godlike sphere of influence dressed in do-good rhetoric come with a responsibility to engage in deeper philosophical discourse on what kind of society we're aspiring to be? Whether faster and bigger is always better and whether progress can be measured in algorithms?

I think it does, and that's why I relished the dialog between Kuku Mon and his colleagues. While most Silicon Valley titans may still be far from a Patagonia level of corporate self-reflection, there seems to be a genuine interest at least among some to look at growth from a more philanthropic angle, beyond IPOs, click rates, and quarterly profits, which I think is what we'll need to shift towards if we're serious about sustaining the human adventure on planet Earth into the foreseeable future. Reading A battle of worldviews gave me hope that instead of the world asking Is Google Making Us Stupid? Google might devote more of its energy to the question, "Are we making the world wiser?"

And if we at Google don'€™t talk about these issues, who else will? The world listens to us. We have a tremendous responsibility to the planet that we exert so much influence on.

- Kuku Mon


Is there an app for that?

The following are some of my favorite excerpts, with Kuku Mon's commentary in blockquotes and my responses below...

Pope Francis: "Thou shalt not frack!"

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Pope Francis posing for photographs holding up anti-fracking t-shirts following a meeting with a group of Argentinian environmental activists to discuss water and fracking issues. The shirts read “No To Fracking” and “Water Is More Precious Than Gold.”
Pope Francis holding up anti-fracking t-shirts following a meeting with a group of Argentinian environmental activists to discuss water and fracking issues. The shirts read “No To Fracking” and “Water Is More Precious Than Gold.”

Meet the Newest Anti-Fracking Activist: Pope Francis.

I haven't seen this covered prominently here, but thought it's worth a mention when the guy with a direct line to 1.2 billion people's ears says that it's not cool to frack. This week the Twitterverse went ablaze when Pope Francis met with Argentine filmmaker Fernando “Pino” Solanas (La Guerra del Fracking -- The Fracking War) and environmental activist Juan Pablo Olsson at the Vatican to discuss fracking and water pollution. Olsson posted the photo of himself, Solanas and Pope Francis.

Next Up For Pope Francis: Anti-Fracking Activist?

Finally, a logical pope. If your belief tells you that God gave us the Earth to be stewards of, then injecting millions of gallons of water and chemicals into the ground to fracture massive rocks for their extra oil and gas and in the process threatening the air we breathe, the water we drink, the communities we love and the climate on which we all depend, seems like a really bad idea.

For a pope who has demonstrated that he is able and willing to connect some serious dots by coming out against poverty, inequality, and bigotry, stepping into the environmental arena is the next logical move. After all, it is the poor and underprivileged who have not only been taking the brunt of industrial pollution and environmental degradation that comes with the fossil fueled life but are also at the forefront of suffering the consequences of climate change. He reportedly told the group he "is preparing an encyclical about nature, humans, and environmental pollution."

I'm really digging on Francis who is actually living up to his name as the patron saint of the poor. What I didn't know is that St. Francis was named the patron saint of ecology by John Paul II in 1979, because of his theological connection to poverty.

“It is my hope that the inspiration of Saint Francis will help us to keep ever alive a sense of ‘fraternity’ with all those good and beautiful things which Almighty God has created,” Pope John Paul II later explained. “And may he remind us of our serious obligation to respect and watch over them with care, in light of that greater and higher fraternity that exists within the human family.”
And, of course, simply by pissing off Sarah Palin you know you're moving humanity in the right direction.
According to one report of the meeting, His Holiness's concern was "clear" when hearing about the Chevron deal in Argentina and other environmental disputes in the region. On Tuesday, Sarah Palin said she was shocked by the pontiff's "liberal" statements. Wait 'til she hears about his new role as the face of Argentina's environmentalist movement.
What I'm thinking is why stop here? What if Francis became known as the Solar Pope? Advocating for Creation Windows and Heavenly Energy, like his Lutheran brother, Pastor Peter Hasenbrink, whose church in Schönau Germany has 431 solar modules on its rooftops, generating more than 40,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity each year, enough for eight churches of its size.

Pastor Hasenbrink & Bergkirche

Follow me below the fold for a few statements from my interview with Pastor Hasenbrink about tying Christian theology into environmental action. Lutherans in Germany have long been on board with the Energiewende, but their Catholic brothers and sisters are starting to get into it too. So this is some of the "theosolar" language Francis could use.

President Obama comes to San Francisco ATM, Climate Activists sing him a song

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President Obama came to San Francisco today for a Democratic National Committee fundraiser at the SFJazz Center - and a couple hundred of climate activists welcomed him in their own creative way, by singing him sweet songs.

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Even though we didn't get to see him outside his limo, he seemed to have noticed as several hundred of us tried to get his attention. At his fundraiser, he commented on the serenade he received.  

I always have fun in San Francisco.  (Applause.)  There’s always something going on.  Even in the ropeline -- (laughter) -- I had some folks sing to me; had a guy who took a photo with me with the shoes with the little toes in them.  (Laughter.)  I am sure that's the first time that's ever happened to a President.  (Laughter.)  And they looked very comfortable.  But that doesn’t happen in Chicago.  (Laughter.)  There have been at least five protests that I don't know what they’re protesting, but they’re yelling something.  (Laughter.)  That's sort of par for the course in San Francisco. I knew it was something.
Well, what we were singing was "Barack Obama, Barack Obama, stop Keystone right now" to Steams'"Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)."

It was all in all a very lighthearted affair, nobody hates the President and he has every right to poke fun at a bunch of protesters, seeing that he's probably the most protested man on Earth. And how could you possibly not smile when presented with this sight....

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But of course, underlying all the silliness we all know that we are dealing with some serious serious trouble when it comes to climate change, and I can't help but think the President is aware of it. At least he's said as much in the past, and we were just out there reminding him about what's truly important as he was shmoozing it up with the Very Important People in San Francisco.

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So 350.org, Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth, Sierra Club, Credo Action, 350 Bay Area, OccupySF, and a bunch of others had organized this rally to disrupt "business as usual" and send an undeniable message to the president: STOP THE MADNESS: No tar sands! No Keystone XL! Climate Action NOW.

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Because you know, as much as the rich and powerful like to laugh at those of us whose only way to exert any kind of influence is to go out into the streets and hold silly signs and sing silly songs, they tend to forget that we're ultimately all on this little round ball together.

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My feeling is that President Obama ultimately gets that climate change is not a joke and that building the Keystone pipeline would seem like an insane thing to do for anyone serious about weening ourselves off fossil fuels. However, he probably has a lot of Very Important People whispering in his ear all the time, telling him that he can't just take away our god-given right to consume more and more oil. So that's why we were out there, gently reminding him about what's up.

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Just in case he didn't hear us sing, some more impressions of how the day unfolded for those of us on the outside, below the orange melting ice cap.


How I Learned to Stop Wasting and Love the Trash

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Each year, Americans generate 389.5 million tons of municipal solid waste, 69 percent of which gets landfilled. As Edward Humes breaks it down in his eye-opening opus Garbology, that's about 7.1 pounds of garbage per person per day, 365 days a year.

Collectively, Americans generate 18 times the weight of the entire adult population in trash each year.

Individually, each of us is on track to generate 102 TONS of trash across a lifetime.

The waste we create is literally bigger than ourselves.

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Looking in the trash mirror on America Recycles Day. Photos by Sven Eberlein.

There are a few municipalities that have done a great job at diverting waste from landfill through composting, recycling and creative reuse of materials, most notably San Francisco's landmark Zero Waste efforts, which I've written about here.  

And yet, as a nation, we recycle barely a third of all the material goods that flow through our hands. We trash 40 percent of our food supply every year, valued at $165 billion, the single largest component of solid waste in U.S. landfills. The fact that 97% of all food and food scraps end up in landfills instead of being composted — accounting for almost a fifth of all U.S. methane emissions — is dwarfed only by the sad notion that the wasted food could feed millions of Americans.

While it has become somewhat fashionable to dismiss this garbage crisis as an old-school environmental issue on par with saving the ozone layer, the reality is that the way we deal with the material world is at the root of all the issues deemed more noteworthy, from resource depletion and toxic air& water pollution to environmental justice, soil/food quality, and the biggie, climate change. By dumping, burning, and otherwise taking precious materials out of their natural cycles, we are disrupting the very mechanisms by which life on Earth is made possible.

To put it more bluntly, our buying, consuming and throwing away an ever growing number of industrially produced and packaged things is trashing our own nest.

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Which one of these would you like to soon throw away, son?

Throwing away precious resources is not just an environmental issue. In Mississippi, where fewer than one in five people recycle and only around half of residents even have access to a community recycling program in their area, $210 million a year worth of materials is thrown in the garbage and $70 million spent to bury it in landfills. In vast parts of the U.S., even if you would like to treat your used materials with more respect, there's no infrastructure for it.

A 2011 Ipsos poll found the top barrier to recycling for Americans is it’s not convenient where they live. That’s exacerbated in a rural state like Mississippi, where the nearest bin might be 50 or more miles away.
Clearly, something has gone awry in the modern American mindset that we would not only accept this glaring imbalance on our ecological spreadsheet but choose to throw away billions of dollars worth of precious materials.

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So you're going to bury these in a big hole in the ground. Really?

The question is, why would we do something as irrational as trashing the planetand missing a great opportunity to boost the economy?

The answer, luckily, is not as complex as one might think.

In Mississippi, the two biggest obstacles are access and education — and it’s not at all clear which is the chicken and which is the egg.
In other words:
  • Chicken: People don't recycle and compost because there's no infrastructure that makes it easy to do so.
  • Egg: There's no recycling and composting infrastructure because people don't understand the benefits of it and thus there's no demand.

As so often with these dilemmas, it's hardly ever one or the other, but usually a little bit of both. In this case, it's probably fair to say that a good municipal recycling and composting program goes a long way in creating a citizenry that recycles and composts, just as a public that's educated about waste issues is more likely to lobby their representatives for better recycling facilities.

No matter how far a city or region has come in their resource recovery efforts, making a serious move towards zero waste on a broad national and international scale can only be accomplished if a new generation of citizens can learn to internalize the consciousness and habits required to keep valuable materials out of landfills and incinerators.    

America Recycles Day is one such learning opportunity, as I witnessed first hand at Davis Street Resource Complex in San Leandro, CA a couple of weeks ago.

Follow me below the orange wiggler for a few impressions from that day. May they shed some light on how more Americans might be led to proclaim:

How I Learned to Stop Wasting and Love the Trash

 

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From Soap to Cities, Designing From Nature Could Solve Our Biggest Challenges

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Can a boat be designed to clean the water? How does a spider manufacture resilient fiber? We need products that don’t harm us or the environment, and nature’s already done the research.

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eco-triptych_20Last week I wrote about the benefits of recycling, composting, reusing and reducing in How I Learned to Stop Wasting and Love the Trash. In it, I mentioned that one of the most challenging problems in the recycling process is that many products currently on the market are made with materials that can be downcycled at best.

While we can try to constantly be on guard and personally avoid certain products altogether, leaving the dodging of poorly designed mass-produced items to conscious individuals seems like an uphill battle.

What if companies used materials and manufacturing processes that aren't bad for the environment and considered a product's entire life cycle? What if we didn't have to fear everything going through our hands as a threat to our health and the planet's ecosystem? Is it even possible to make certain things without toxic side effects, and if so, is it too much to ask manufacturer's to do so?

The answer, at least for the most part, is yes, and I'd like to share this article I wrote for YES! Magazine about a year ago about two models that have already provided many of the answers on how to design and produce in better alignment with the planet's natural mechanisms: Cradle to Cradle and Biomimicry.  

Follow me below the orange spider web to get the full scoop on these two exciting disciplines.

50 years from now, will people remember the health care website or the effects of climate change?

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In another powerful article just published in Rolling Stone Magazine entitled Obama and Climate Change: The Real Story, Bill McKibben makes the compelling case that the President and his Administration, to put it mildly, aren't doing enough to deal with the devastating reality of climate change.

When the world looks back at the Obama years half a century from now, one doubts they'll remember the health care website; one imagines they'll study how the most powerful government on Earth reacted to the sudden, clear onset of climate change.
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He argues that instead of becoming a leader in weening the world off fossil fuels, the United States, while taking some positive steps like investing in green technology, better mileage standards, and stricter EPA regulations on coal-fired plants, is fueling the global warming machine.

He quotes the President himself from a speech he gave in Cushing, Oklahoma last year.

"Over the last three years, I've directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We're opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We've quad­rupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We've added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth, and then some. . . . In fact, the problem . . . is that we're actually producing so much oil and gas . . . that we don't have enough pipeline capacity to transport all of it where it needs to go."

A solstice message from ancient roots

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It is quite puzzling that cultures across much of the northern hemisphere have chosen the season when the earth's tilt provides for much darkness and quiet as the time to be out and about, shopping for gifts, frequently tripping over each other in the pursuit of the last minute deal. Wouldn't it be more intuitive, even logical, to adapt to the earth's rhythm, shed our external leaves, tune into the winter landscapes of our mind, and embrace the more scarce but meaningful treasures in it? To look inward, appreciate what we have, and make connections on a non-material plain?

On the other hand, it makes a lot of sense that a society engaged in a mad race to avoid silence and reflection has left no resource unextracted and no marketing plot untouched to throw the proverbial kitchen sink at dreaded entities like mystery, uncertainty, and impermanence. I have trouble coming up with a better reason for why we're so hooked on an economic system hell-bent on perpetual growth and material distraction other than this debilitating fear of the gloriously rich and expansive world within us — a world that encompasses both our greatest hopes and dreams as well as our deepest wounds and worries.

Could it be that our inner demons are wreaking havoc on the outer world because we're afraid to dance with them?

As the planet's finite resources are shrinking and the effluents of our material consumption are rapidly altering the Earth's atmosphere, I'm at once perplexed at why we would want to keep speeding up our daily trans- and interactions, yet also eternally optimistic about our capacity to be more aligned with the natural ecosystems of this little round ball we all share and depend on.

The mere act of looking and listening is often all it takes to reclaim a healthy realignment with the rhythms of the natural world, and just this week some old friends of mine appeared on my cosmic radar to remind me of those simple beads of wisdom.

Hop over the orange oca to get the real dirt on Farmer John...

The 6 words that summarize why American-style bare-knuckle capitalism is doomed

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This is not from The Onion, but from yesterday's business section of the San Francisco Chronicle:

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I'm trying to find the right analogy to wrap my mind around this head-slapping double-whopper of hamster-wheelin' futility. My geography professor once coined the expression "We celebrate what we obliterate" for when humans do things like paving over a creek or mowing down a forest then calling the developments "Creekside Mall" or "Forest Hill Apartments."

In this case, the corporate overlords have exploited and terrorized their workforce to a point where people are even afraid to take a weekend off for fear of looking like slackers and losing their jobs.    

Whoa! Hold on there, young banker. Your boss wants you to kick back and stop working so hard. That's the message from Bank of America, which recently issued a memo advising its analysts and associates to "take a minimum of four weekend days off per month."
Along come all these stress-inducing studies that say 80 hour work weeks and 4 hour sleep nights are just a bit unhealthy. I mean, who woulda thunk??? She looked so energized while getting her 7th cup of espresso at midnight!!!
This growing pressure to relax isn't limited to junior bankers trying to get ahead in a shrinking industry. In fact, a major source of stress on U.S. workers right now is the onslaught of data about the costs of being so stressed and sleep-deprived.
It's not that we would want people to have humane working conditions because they are, um, human beings, but after a (presumably stressful and overtime-inducing) cost/benefit analysis the CFOs came to the conclusion that irritated, sick or dead employees are less productive.  
You're more likely to crash your car, drink too much, blow up in a meeting, divorce your spouse, and fall prey to everything from a cold to a heart attack. Just being around a stressed person, so-called secondhand stress, can leave you feeling more stressed. For most Americans the main source of that stress isn't their finances or love life or lousy neighbors. It's their job. Specifically, it's the workload from their job. (The kind of workload that prompts a Bank of America associate to, say, work over the weekend.)
To summarize this recipe for disaster:
1. come up with an economic system based on perpetual growth
2. devise corporate entities that are legally bound designed to put quarterly profits above all other considerations, whether they be social, environmental or just plain human dignity.
3. Squeeze every inch of productivity out of your workforce to maximize short-term profit by creating a culture of either voluntary or fear-based "live to work" mantra.
4. Realize that productivity rates are declining because of natural limitations to the human body.
5. Pressure employees to take an occasional weekend off to boost productivity
6. Find that employee is too preoccupied with work to know what to do with free time.
7??? Mandatory Meditation? Party Pills? Quiet Quota? Angst Algorithms?

o~O~o~O~o~O~o~O~o~O~o~

crossposted at A World of Words

Have billionaires infiltrated the Occupy movement to revive Occupy movement?

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File under "you just can't make this stuff up."

In less than a week, we get 3 billionaires in seeming self-parodies featuring themselves as both gloating celebrants of poverty and inequality and innocent victims of horrible billionaire oppression.

First, we're treated to Kevin O'Leary, host of some inane trash TV show called Shark Tank, saying that 3.5 billion people living in poverty is "fantastic news" because it gives them all inspiration to be just like those 85 billionaires who now have the same amount of wealth as the bottom half of the global population.


Amanda Lang:
The wealth, this is according to Oxfam, of the world’s 85 richest people is equal to the 3.5 billion poorest people.

Kevin O'Leary:
It’s fantastic. And this is a great thing because it inspires everybody, gets them motivation to look up to the 1% and say, “I want to become one of those people, I’m going to fight hard to get up to the top.” This is fantastic news, and of course I applaud it. What can be wrong with this?

I went down to the demonstration, to get my fair share of pipeline truth...

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Rally against Keystone XL pipeline outside the US State Department Office at 1 Market St. in San Francisco, February 3rd, 2014.

Yesterday saw an unprecedented mobilization against Keystone XL, the proposed pipeline that would open the flood gates for the most carbon-polluting oil on the planet and further legitimize humankind's unbridled addiction to the climate-wrecking fossil juice.

Within 48 hours of the State Department's supplemental environmental impact statement (SEIS) on Keystone XL, nearly 300 vigils unfurled from sea to shining sea, bringing together 550 organizations, from CREDO and the Rainforest Action Network to The Hip Hop Caucus and Overpass Light Brigade, to the Sierra Club and 350.org.

While many think that the SEIS reeks of tar sands industry executives' cologne and gives President Obama one more excuse to say “yes” to the pipeline, there are also powerful arguments to be made about why the study gives plenty of reasons to reject Keystone. It's up to us to remind the President of the latter.

The rally in San Francisco was raucous as usual, setting the tone with about 400-500 people fully committed to giving the State Department and President Obama, who will have the final say on this matter, an earful.

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However, it is particularly heartening to see nationwide vigils held in cities and towns across the country, from Belfast, ME to Edinburg, TX and from Stillwater, OK to Hailey, ID. This dirty oil, if extracted, piped, and burned, will harm our neighbors near and far, and people everywhere are waking up to the fact that the only winners in this game will be the oil industry executives.

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The fact that thousands of people mobilized into a decentralized nationwide impromptu crowdsourced uprising speaks to the passion and people-power behind this movement, and should make President Obama think long and hard whether he really wants to align himself on the wrong side of history.

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Here in the City of St. Francis, we thought we'd sing the message loud and clear across the country, in memory of the late great Pete Seeger.



But this is just the beginning. Tomorrow marks the opening of a 30 day public comment period on the final environmental impact report for the Keystone XL Pipeline, which will get plenty of coverage here on Daily Kos.

If you're in San Francisco, people will kick off the festivities at UN Plaza tomorrow morning at 8:30am, delivering our public comments to the new SF Federal Building at 9am.  

Follow me below the abandoned orange pipe clamp for a few more impressions from last night's vigil...


A Public Service Announcement

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This is your planet.


The Earth and the Moon



This is fossil fuels.


Tar sands of Alberta



crack 'em in the furnace => => =>

Coal power plant


This is your planet on fossil fuels.




a dry California landscape
January 2014

California's Drought Could Be the Worst in 500 Years

The Golden State is in the midst of a three-year drought—and scientists believe that this year may end up being the driest in the last half millennium, according to University of California-Berkeley professor B. Lynn Ingram. Californians are scared, with good reason: Fire danger in the state is high, and drinking-water supplies are low. According to the United States Drought Monitor, most of the state is experiencing "extreme drought," the second highest of six rankings. About 10 percent of the state is experiencing "exceptional drought," the highest possible level. As of this week, 17 communities are in danger of running out of water, forcing some to buy it or run pipes from other districts.

Photo: A dry California landscape. JonDissed/Flickr/Creative Commons

Ice chaos in Slovenia
February 2014

Slovenia Is Still Frozen Solid: 'This Is Crazy, Really Crazy'

Three days of blizzards and a freak ice storm have inflicted "the worst devastation in living memory" in the small Alpine country of Slovenia as life in half of the country is frozen in place.

Photo: Ice chaos in Slovenia. Domen Svetlin, via Facebook


January 2014

Australia's record heatwave: melting bottles and fainting ball boys

Australia is in the grip of an extreme heatwave which has forced beach life guards to work at night and left players and ball-boys hallucinating and complaining of “inhumane” conditions at the Australian Open tennis championship. The worst-affected cities have been Melbourne and Adelaide, which are facing daily temperatures of up to 113F (45C) for the rest of the week.

February 2014

A 'Catastrophic' Ice Storm Makes Its Way Across the South

The storm is predicted to mow over the Southern states today and tonight and then turn north to deliver more snowy grief up the Atlantic coast, with a possible 5 to 10 inches in Washington, D.C. People in its path are bracing for the worst. South Carolina has declared a civil emergency for expected power outages and hazardous road conditions. The NWS bureau responsible for Atlanta, a city just now recovering from another unusual winter storm, is stressing the danger with an urgency not far removed from the infamous Hurricane Katrina "Doomsday Statement."

Photo: Woodstock, GA. Icy, slippery roads, less than 5mph speed. William Brawley/Flickr Creative Commons

View from the top of the Olympic ski jump in Sochi, Russia
February 2014

Why Is It So Warm in Sochi Right Now?

A heat wave hitting Sochi this week could make the 2014 Winter Olympics the warmest in history. Temperatures in Sochi soared to 61 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday and are forecast to hit 63 F on Thursday. The heat wave also pumped up temperatures in the mountains 40 miles from Sochi, where the outdoor events for the 2014 Winter Olympics are held. While the winter warmth isn't unusual for Sochi, many former winter Olympic venues may not be cold enough to host the games by mid-century. The reason: global warming, a recent study found.

Photo: View from the top of the Olympic ski jump in Sochi, Russia (i.imgur.com)

On the road to Cairo, Casablanca, and Medellín, Ecocitizen World Map in hand

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Hola! Bonjour! As-salam alaykom! Hello!

EcoCitizenWorldMapProjectLogo72It's been a busy four months since I went into woodshed mode to help create the Ecocitizen World Map Project, a portal where citizens can map their communities and share first-hand information for a holistic assessment of their city's ecological and social health. The one thing I've probably missed the most while wading through oodles of HTML, CSS, and GIS has been some good old fashioned ruminating from the spaces between soil and soul. So, I'm taking this opportunity to yak it up about the project and share a few stories and visuals of Medellín, Colombia, one of our initial three pilot cities. (with Casablanca and Cairo completing the awesome triad!)

Speaking of Medellín, we'll be officially launching this groovy tool for sustainable urban development that links community crowdsourced information to national, regional, and global data sets at the upcoming 7th World Urban Forum from April 5-11th.

More about that a bit further on, but as anyone who's ever been deeply immersed in a multifaceted project can attest to, the danger of making sense only to yourself while sounding like a babbling cryptogram to everyone except the people you're working with increases proportionally with each additional hour you spend with your head buried in jargon and code. So at the risk of being a bit long-winded but in the hopes of reclaiming my ability to some day carry a normal conversation at a social gathering again, I will use this opportunity to pretend we're sitting at a pub and you're asking about that crumpled map sticking out of my pocket.

As my favorite author once launched into a story: "All this happened, more or less.”

What the heartland thinks of the Keystone XL pipeline, in one image

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This image, which lies on the proposed pipeline route that crosses the Ponca Trail of Tears, was created by the farmers, ranchers and Native American tribes of the Cowboy and Indian Alliance in collaboration with artist John Quigley. Taken on Art and Helen Tanderup's farm, by Lou Dematteis.
My friend and photographer extraordinaire Lou Dematteis went to Nebraska to document the heartland's artistic resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline.

Two days ago, on Saturday, April 12th, he snapped this image of Art and Helen Tanderup's farm located on the proposed pipeline route that crosses the Ponca Trail of Tears outside Neligh, Nebraska.  

The 80-acre artwork — the latest protest environmentalists and landowners have employed against TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline — was created by the farmers, ranchers and Native American tribes of the Cowboy and Indian Alliance in collaboration with artist John Quigley.

Opponents carve anti-pipeline message into field

#ArtIrritatingLife

Postcard from Medellín: A Big WUF for Urban Equity

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medellin_128“Is this your first WUF?” is a question commonly asked at the World Urban Forum, a gathering for, by, and about city people that was first convened by UN Habitat in Nairobi in 2002 and descended on Medellín, Colombia last week for its 7th incarnation. While the answer coming out of my mouth was always either “Yes” or “Sí” with a few stray “Ouis” and “Jas” mixed in, the feeling I had for most of the seven days inside the colorful pavilions spread across the Plaza Mayor Convention and Exhibition Center was one of Déjà vu, if not kinship.

After all, the question of how we are going to arrange the two percent of planetary space in which 70 percent of humanity is projected to live by 2050 in a sustainable and dignified fashion has been on my mental drafting board since before the Stone (Temple Pilot) Age. And here I found myself in the presence of 22,000 people of all ages and ethnicities, from every pocket of the world, passionate about co-creating the kinds of urban spaces that can exist in harmony with the little round ball we all call home.

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Holy Coaly! Stanford University bids farewell to the coal industry. Largest endowment to do so!

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Okay, so no more excuses about how kooky it is to think divestment from fossil fuels could really happen on a large scale.

Fossil Free Stanford Statement on Coal Divestment

Today, the climate movement won a groundbreaking victory. In a striking acknowledgement of the need for a bold and immediate response to climate change, Stanford University is divesting from the coal industry.

The Stanford endowment, valued at $18.7 billion, will now become the largest in a growing group of funds to partially divest from fossil fuels.

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Thanks to continued pressure from students who formed Fossil Free Stanford in November 2012, going door to door petitioning, making their case in classes, dining halls, and residences getting 78% of student participants in a recent undergraduate referendum to vote in support of divesting from fossil fuels, Stanford's Board of Trustees followed their bold lead. They said as much in their statement.

Stanford’s statement announcing the move credits students with providing the impetus for divestment, stating that “Fossil Free Stanford catalyzed an important discussion” and thanking students for their “thoughtful work” on the issue. Stanford’s decision is a clear testament to the power of the student movement for divestment and the broader movement to combat climate change.
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