If not us, WHO? If not here, WHERE? If not now, WHEN?

These are the questions that gave birth to the Bay Area Urban Alliance of Sustainability three years ago. With a mission to "Inspire and integrate the sustainability movement,” and a vision to "Support the transformation of the world into a harmonious social, economic and natural environment for the benefit of all," UAS is working to connect local green organizations and individuals through programs centered around networking and community education — essentially giving people a platform where they can access and collaborate with others in the local green scene.

Being a volunteer-run organization, the easiest way to get directly involved in UAS is through volunteering or becoming a member.

As a member you get a number of benefits, including an individual, hour-long sustainability consultation about easy ways to reduce your eco-footprint. You can find out more about anything from feasible food options to green jobs in your local area. You can also ask about other help topics or discuss various green solutions you’ve seen or been involved in.

Also, if enough people sign up in your zip code, UAS will organize an area-specific potluck to connect you with other green people in your neighborhood.

Members also have access to sustainabilty consultants via phone and website. Check out www.uas.coop for the e-newsletter, or to find out more on collaborative green solutions in the Bay Area.

OK, cut me a little slack… I’m not nearly as bad about cheesy musical allusions as some…;-)

More green goings-on in Chicago this weekend — seems like that’s often the case lately! On Saturday, The Habitat Project, along with a whole slew of other organizations, is hosting Wild Things: A Chicago Wilderness conference. This one-day event is open to all (you can register at the door), and they’ve even organized events around attendees level of expertise:

You are invited to a day-long conference that brings together the region’s best experts, most dedicated volunteers and anyone interested in nature. Technical presentations and interactive workshops will explore the latest in natural areas preservation, wildlife protection and monitoring. The conference is organized in “tracks” designed for everyone from beginners to experts. There is special focus on empowering citizen scientists, stewards and advocates with information, networking and good ideas.

Wild Things will feature more than 80 large and small-group sessions drawn from real-life experiences with everything from the nitty gritty of habitat management, botany, and zoology to advocacy, education, art, culture, history and backyard and neighborhood ecology. It’s a great opportunity to listen, ask questions, and contribute to the effort to conserve the natural ecosystems and habitats of the greater Chicagoland area.

The schedule is jam-packed, regardless of which track you choose, and it looks like there’s a good mix of sessions focused on the academic and the practical. Sounds like a can’t-miss event if you’re in area. I’ve got work to attend to on Saturday, but would love to hear back from anyone who does attend.

Categories: chicago, event, conference, wildthings, wildlife, nature, greenspace

Strategic consumption is the recognition that the immediate, or tactical, effects of our purchases are of such limited power as to be essentially meaningless. Bill Rees, who coined the term ecological footprint, says individual behavior changes in the absence a broader strategy for creating change are pointless: “We’re all on the same ship and what we do in our individual cabins is of almost no consequence in terms of the direction the ship is going.” But we’ve all got to buy things, and we quite rightly would rather that our dollars do as much good as they can. Hence the concept of strategic consumption: the practice of basing decisions not only on the immediate qualities of a product or service, but also on the changes buying them is likely to have in the broader world. Strategic Consumption: How to Change the World With What You Buy — Can we “buy a better future?” The green product industry says we can, if we buy the “right” things. But there are plenty of reasons to believe they’re wrong. Make This Earth Day Your Last! — This year’s Earth Day brought in an unprecedented frenzy of consumerism in the holiday-spirit of environmental concern… (more)

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Purchasing Green at 4:04 PM)

Web sites and online tools for swapping used items seem to be springing up on a fairly regular basis, and that’s a good thing sustainability-wise: why throw out a used item if someone else can get some value out of it? The newest addition to this group is SwitchPlanet, and founder Chris Samarin has come up with a pretty unique model for facilitating the trade of items that current owners don’t want, and others do:

Use more…waste less! The idea is simple but the end result is amazing. Members save money by trading the things they already have but no longer use to get the things they need. One person gets rid of something taking up space in their home and another person benefits by filling a need…so everyone wins.

Most importantly SwitchPlanet was built to help an even greater need. Because SwitchPlanet is free to use members are given the option to donate any amount they choose every time they receive something for free on the SwitchPlanet Network. These donations are put into a SwitchFund that is then distributed among selected charities and non-profit organizations.

“I want this thing to be huge so the positive impact it has on society is also huge,” states Founder, Chris Samarin, “If we can get millions of people using the site and donating on average $1 per month, wow, we can sure help a lot of people if that happens.”

The donation idea is a new twist, at least to me. Users pay to ship items they’re giving away, but get items they request for free, so SwitchPlanet encourages them to contribute what they’d normally pay (even if it’s just shipping and handling) to one of the charities with which the company’s partnered. Think of it as “paying forward…”

Additionally, SwitchPlanet uses an internal currency: users “pay” for items with SwitchBucs. A user earns the credits for sending out items, and “pays” for things s/he wants with the currency. Users don’t have to trade actual items this way, and “refunds” can even be issued if a transaction doesn’t go as planned.

SwitchPlanet is currently in private beta, but Chris tells me it will be going public very soon. If you’d like to get in on the tail end of the private test, let me know, and I’ll pass your information along to Chris — he’s told me sustainablog readers are welcome to try out the system before launch. Right now, the system is only set up for CDs, DVDs and games, but other items will be added to the mix shortly.

This looks very cool! Guess I’ll need to dust off some of the things I don’t use…

Categories: swapping, trading, barter, switchplanet, web, donations

Around the world, small island nations whose existence is threatened by climate change and other environmental dangers are pioneering innovative technologies to both help the environment and foster economic growth. At the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) meetings last week in New York, participants discussed a variety of environmentally friendly technologies that island nations can use to develop their economies in more sustainable ways—from tidal energy and sea cucumber harvesting to new methods to revive coral reefs. Thomas Goreau with the coral-growing company Biorock stressed the importance of bolstering struggling coral reefs, which are dying in many areas because of global warming, pollution, and other human impacts. Reefs are valuable not only because they attract fish and tourists, Goreau noted, but because they protect shores from erosion and the impacts of strong waves. He described how his company is promoting the use of underwater steel structures that, when charged with an electric current, can help coral communities grow at 3 to 5 times the natural rate. Tests using the swimmer-safe structures show that the resulting corals can survive in water temperatures 16 to 50 times higher than in surrounding reefs, providing a possible solution for coral survival in… (more)

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Sustainable Development at 3:30 PM)

Sale of Carbon Credits Helping Land-Rich, but Cash-Poor, Tribes
New York Barges Into Sustainable Urban Farming
It’s Good To Be in the ‘RED’
China to Push Use of Solar Water Heater
Leaders Believe Sustainable Prosperity is Possible

(more)

(Posted by David Zaks in News and Views at 6:40 PM)

Just finished reading a fascinating post at The Oil Drum that Prof. Goose emailed out on Friday. Titled “Climate Change, Sabre Tooth Tigers and Devaluing the Future,” writer Nate Hagens thinks about the inability to generate wide-scale action on peak oil (the focus at TOD) and climate change. Digging deeply (for a blog post, anyway) into both evolutionary biology and economics, Hagens ultimately comes to the conclusion that the pay-off isn’t close enough for us: we’re “wired” to focus on needs and desires that bring relatively immediate rewards. If we’re going to move people to action, we have to create a means of marketing these issues that creates emotional triggers for immediate action — getting people to think about it won’t work on its own. That’s a really quick and dirty summary, but it’s an issue that most of us here should be familiar. Read the post… it’s full of ideas that all of concerned about environmental challenges need to consider.

The big question, of course, is what to do about it: how do we address long-term changes with results that we likely won’t live to see? Is it simply a matter of marketing? Seth Godin brought up the problems with the term “global warming” last year, and that seems particularly relevant to this discussion. On the other hand, if we try to reframe these issues in such a way to produce more desire for immediate action, are we playing right into charges of “chicken little” pronouncements? It’s a conundrum, and a new one: we’ve only been able to make these kinds of predictions (with any accuracy) for a very tiny portion of our history as a species; for most of our collective existence, we’ve focused on the here and now.

I could ramble on, but I think I’ll leave it at that, and open it up to the rest of you.Whaddaya think?

Categories: climatechange, peakoil, evolution, biology, economics, science

Last summer, we ran an interview with Paul Kephart of Rana Creek Habitat Restoration and Living Architecture, a known leader among “green roofers,” with a huge portfolio of gorgeous and impressive living roof projects. At that time, we asked him about the developing plans for the new California Academy of Sciences’ rooftop, which had been touted as one of the most ambitious of its kind to date. From my perspective, the project addresses how to restore and encourage biodiversity in the urban sectors; what a great message, what a great venue. You know the Academy has a long tradition of exploring and explaining the natural world, and they have thousands of living organisms in collections and have been classified under the roof. Now the opportunity is to take that kind of experimentation in science and apply it in the built environment and as part of structure. The roof crowns a building designed by Renzo Piano, which sits near the recently reopened De Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. An article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle calls it “one of the world’s most ambitious biodiversity experiments.” Indeed, Kephart told us last year that his team was undergoing a painstakingly… (more)

(Posted by Sarah Rich in Green Building at 10:04 AM)

Here’s a rather excellent article in UK newspaper The Times from Ben Macintyre “Writer at Large”:

“As a child, I sat on a whale every day. Many years before I was born a 50-ton sperm whale had washed up on the Scottish coast near to where I grew up, and one of my relatives had cleverly fashioned a stool out of one of its enormous vertebrae. To a child, that bone-stool was a thing of wonder: a fraction of a creature of impossible vastness. I would scan the sea, imagining the great beast from which my seat had come, dreaming that another whale might one day burst the surface. It never did.”
…

“The whaling debate was stranded and picked clean long ago. It is a rotten thing, riddled with bad science, exploited loopholes, petty politicking, bribery, blind nationalism and human greed, both gastronomic and economic. But perhaps more alarming still, the whaling debate bears disturbing parallels with the looming battle over climate change, another issue on which the clarity of science is being hopelessly clouded by politics and narrow self-interest. The world has had 60 years to protect the whale for all time; there is nowhere near that long to find a way to rebalance a warming world.”

Whale hunting: a saga of cheating, bribery and greed »

TAKE ACTION: Given the science and evident abrupt climate changes, Kyoto successor agreement must be negotiated now that includes mandatory emissions reductions for all major emitting economies

More than 1,000 government delegates are now meeting in Bonn to try to break gridlock in international climate change negotiations amid widening public concern and widely evident global warming impacts. This is the first time government climate delegations have met since the U.N. sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a spate of reports this year, drawing on the studies of some 2,500 scientists, which predict grim consequences of global warming if swift action is not taken. These climate change policy-makers must be challenged to develop a strengthened Kyoto regime as soon as possible that transitions the world to low carbon societies. Current Bonn talks are preparing for a meeting of environment ministers in Bali, Indonesia, in December. It is essential formal negotiations are launched in Bali to widen and strengthen the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol as soon as possible. With the strengthened science, evident climate impacts now, and the rapidity of their advancement; negotiations must commence immediately, or at the latest in Bali in December, for a strengthened and expanded Kyoto system to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This can not wait until 2012 when the present Kyoto protocol expires. As was done to successfully address the ozone hole under the Montreal Protocol, timetables must be advanced and mandatory participation in emission cuts expanded if the world is not to burn. TAKE ACTION