A couple of events happening this weekend came across our radar over the last few days, and we thought you might be interested

Tonight in San Diego, the newly-formed Eco-Investment Club will hold a "Greenmeet" at the Hotel Solamar (downtown). International real estate investment strategist Gary H. London, of the London Group, will be speaking about his recently-published article “Green Economics as Applied to Development." Gary will be joined by Kyle Cross and Ruben Robles of Destino Real Estate; they will speak on "Wholesaling Green Propeties."

Tickets for the event are $25 for the general public, and $10 for club members — details and ticketing information are available at the Club's website. We're especially pleased to announce this event, as Eco-Investment Club founder Yeves Perez will soon be joining the Green Options writing team!

On the other coast, in New York City, Tomorrow Unlimited will present Jennifer Leonard, a designer and writer who co-authored Massive Change, and Sarah Rich, a solutions-based journalist who co-authored Worldchanging: A Users Guide to the 21st Century in a discussion entitled "Sustaining Change." Jennifer and Sarah will explore ideas about making the ideas of sustainability sustainable themselves for the long haul. They’ll also discuss ways their own thinking on sustainability has changed since completing their respective projects. In doing so, they’ll ask questions about the role of innovative design and technology in our global future, confront the trendiness of contemporary environmental thinking, and consider the importance of change itself for the long-term viability of the sustainable movement.

Our guest blogger, Sheryl Canter, is an Online Writer and Editorial Manager at Environmental Defense.

If you have a garden, you know the climate is warming. In temperate zones, the last frost in spring comes earlier, and the first frost in fall comes later. The longer growing season may allow you to grow vegetables you never could grow before. But you also may have noticed your weeds are more aggressive, insect pests are more of a problem, and pollen plagues you all summer long. You're not imagining things!

For over 40 years, gardeners have relied on the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map as a guide to what they can grow in their area. But the USDA zone map hasn't been updated since 1990, and gardeners have seen detectable shifts since that time.

In 2003, the American Horticultural Society (AHS) updated the zone map with a grant from the USDA, and published a draft of the new map [PDF] in The American Gardener. Based on temperature information from July 1986 to March 2002, the map showed widespread warming, with zones edging northward.

The USDA rejected the new map without explaining why, and said they would update it themselves. Four years have passed and still they have not released a new map. But the National Arbor Day Foundation has just released one, current for 2006. Like the 1990 and 2003 maps, the Arbor Day map is based on 15 years of data. The changes between 1990 and 2006 are dramatic; the U.S. is clearly getting warmer.

We speak frequently about the tension between small personal steps and large systemic changes, but we don’t offer explore the hardships and joys of the big things we do as individuals. Take transit — no, literally take transit in much of North America, and you will discover a mode of conveyance that is generally greener (much greener if traveling within a dense city) but at least on occasion far more inconvenient: checking timetables, waiting for late buses and trains, dealing with the crazy and homeless, moving at the mercy of large bureaucracies. There is a quiet heroism to those of us North Americans who not only don’t drive, but don’t even own a car and thus go everywhere they go by public transportation. Enter Transitman! Seattle artist (and my close friend) Christian French spent a stint as artist-in-residence for the public transportation agency Sound Transit. In the process, he decided that what was most interesting was not the routes the agency was building, or the new railroad cars that would run on them, but the people who would decide to ride in them. To dramatize the hard, quiet work demanded of those riders, French created a persona, TransitMan, a superhero… (more)

(Posted by Alex Steffen in Arts at 5:36 AM)

Editor's note: This week, Ecotality blogger Steve Caratzas takes a look at a recent New York Times article that outlines Thomas Edison's green thinking. This post was originallly published on June 3, 2007.

The New York Times has a terrific article about Thomas Edison, and his unparalleled impact on our daily lives, as well as our current (you should pardon the pun) environmental situation.

No individual deserves more credit, or blame, for America’s voracious electricity consumption than Edison, who conceived not only that generating station but also the notoriously inefficient incandescent bulb and a slew of volt-thirsty devices.

However, Edison was also a green visionary of sorts, whose ideas about sustainable energy encompassed windmills and an energy-self-sufficient home.

Anna Dumitriu is the Director of the Institute of Unnecessary Research and an artist whose work is deeply grounded in scientific research. I met her a few weeks ago at the Mobile Music Workshop in Amsterdam where she was presenting Bio-Tracking, a mobile phone-based exhibition using GPS and a software called Socialight which enabled the placement of virtual sticky notes around various locations in Brighton. Anna sampled various locations in the city for bacteria and molds, revealing this unseen world to us through digital micrographs. Luciana Haill, Ian Helliwell Ollie Glass and Juliet Kac created a series of sound works to accompany the images. Microbiologist John Paul wrote scientific text descriptions of the microbes. The use of GPS to map the locations where the microbiological swabs were taken brought together the microscopic and the macroscopic, drawing a thread between the satellites orbiting the earth and the bacteria at our feet. Visitors could download the software and wander around the sites receiving SMS, sound files and images to their phones. Due to the nature of Socialight the exhibition is still live and can be viewed now. I was so impressed by Anna’s enthusiasm and the sense of poetry she brings to… (more)

(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 5:33 AM)

Want to improve the indoor air quality in your home or office? Get a houseplant.

Plants can absorb air pollutants and can alleviate some "sick building syndrome" symptoms such as headaches and eye, nose or throat irritation which may be caused by inadequate ventilation, chemical contaminants (ie. VOCs, carbon monoxide) or biological contaminants (ie. mold, pollen).

You don't have to overdo it. One plant for every 10 sq yards of floor space should be plenty.

Over the past month or so, we’ve been running a series of posts highlighting many of the core ideas we discuss on Worldchanging. While it’s not necessarily a complete kit of concepts for envisioning 21st century sustainability, each tool, model or idea in the series plays an important role in the conversations we have on the site and with all of you. Below is the full list of 21 principles collected in one place for future reference.

Principle 1: The Backstory
Principle 2: Ecological Footprints and One Planet Thinking
Principle 3: Cradle to Cradle and Closing the Loop
Principle 4: Life Cycle Analysis, Embodied Energy and Virtual Water
Principle 5: Ecosystem Services and Ecological Economics
Principle 6: Transparency
Principle 7: Strategic Consumption
Principle 8: Leapfrogging
Principle 9: Social Entrepreneurship/Base Of the Pyramid
Principle 10: Collaborative Innovation and Creative Commons
Principle 11: Socially Responsible Investment, Patient Capital and Carbon Disclosure
Principle 12: Philanthropy and NGOs
Principle 13: Product Service Systems
Principle 14: Density, Compact Communities and Smart Growth
Principle 15: Carbon Neutrality and Climate Foresight
Principle 16: Offsetting
Principle 17: Environmental Justice
Principle 18: Sustainable Food
Principle 19: Clean and Renewable Energy
Principle 20: Citizen Media
Principle 21: Imagining the Future
(more)

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Sustainable Design at 5:32 AM)

©Greenpeace/Newman

I grew up without eagles.

I was a child of the 60s, and the place where I spent most of my youth was upstate New York in the United States.Largely agricultural, the area was heavily sprayed with pesticides. The marshes at the north end of Cayuga lake were sprayed with DDT. Because of this, as a child, I thought of eagles and herons as exotic species that featured in picture books, and lived far away. Not so. Eagles, herons, and a handful of other raptors and large bird species once ranged across upstate New York. But by the time I was a child, they were all gone.

It took a Zoologist named Rachel Carson to figure out why. Because before she wrote Silent Spring, there was nobody charged with noticing. There was no Environmental Protection Agency. There were no eco-activists. If the US Department of Agriculture wanted to cause widespread collateral damage to birds and aquatic wildlife in its relentless pursuit of eradicating perceived pests, who was to raise a hand in protest?

The book Rachel Carson wrote so profoundly awoke a complacent public, it changed the world. The EPA, Greenpeace, the Endangered Species Act, and the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts in the US are arguably all direct decedents of Silent Spring, along with bans on dozens of chemicals she targeted in her pages.But Silent Spring wasn’t about chemicals.

What Carson exposed was more: a corporate, government, and social blindness to consequences, to linkedness, to the basics of balance and response in natural systems.

Continue reading Thank you, Rachel Carson…

That chilling (irony intended) headline is from a New Scientist article someone just sent me (thanks Tom). From the story:

The world’s recent carbon dioxide emissions are growing more rapidly than even the worst-case climate scenario used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, say researchers.

Continue reading “Recent CO2 rises exceed worst-case scenarios”…

Former Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is the sort of visionary African leader everyone on stage and in the crowd would wish for Africa. She’s challenged with summing up four days of discussions on “Africa, the next chapter”. She tells us we’re seeing changes in Africa that we never thought would happen. We’ve seen annual growth of 5%, in some cases 6-7%, up from 2%. External debt has been massively reduced. Countries are building up foreign exchange reserves, shoring up their currencies. Private investment flows are increasing, remittances to Nigeria are skyrocketing, and there’s a net inflow of capital. But Africa needs jobs. 62% of Africa’s population is under 24. We have to figure out how to make these people productive. Nigeria is now building an opinion research organization, a way of listening to citizen voices, which she notes is a rare thing on the continent. The top issue in every survey? Jobs. Just a few years ago, she tells us, we couldn’t even talk about “the next chapter” for Africa. There was negative economic growth. There’s been an amazing transformation, and this is something that’s allowed us to have our debate about aid versus the private sector. “It has… (more)

(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Sustainable Development at 5:31 AM)