Terrence Williams from UC-Davis (Team Fate) plug-in hybridI had the opportunity last week to visit General Motors' headquarters in downtown Detroit for an event with the ChallengeX program. ChallengeX is a program co-sponsored by GM and the US Department of Energy. Teams from universities across the US (and one from Canada) were given a stock Chevrolet Equinox to use as the base vehicle platform and were challenged to improve its efficiency and reduce its fuel use. "Seventeen teams have been challenged to re-engineer a GM Equinox, a crossover sport utility vehicle to minimize energy consumption, emissions, and greenhouse gases while maintaining or exceeding the vehicle's utility and performance."

This is a multi-year program, which has already gone through two years of evaluations and awards. And, while the initial information I had about the program was that this was the conclusion of the challenge, I learned that there is going to be a fourth year to the program, which will focus on consumer acceptability issues.

The top three programs for this year's competition were Mississipi State (1st place), University of Wisconsin (2nd place), and Virginia Tech (3rd place). The vehicles went through a multi-day testing at GM's proving grounds, and were judged on numerous criteria. More information about the ChallengeX results can be found on GM's FYI blog.

Nice looking truck, isn’t it? And it runs well too, without an engine, radiator, or those other amenities, although there is a five-speed manual transmission. You’re looking at a Florida man’s lifelong dream: his first electric vehicle.

62-year-old Kenneth Watkins is an electrical engineer in Orlando, Florida. Ken said he’d wanted to build an electric-powered vehicle for years, but raising a family came first and now that everyone’s grown, he has the time and resources to make his dream come true.

He bought the truck off a used car lot for what he said was a good price, since the engine was in pretty bad shape and the truck was anything but a “prize”. Nonetheless, it was “just what I wanted,” so he drove it home and began stripping the engine compartment.

What do you do when you’ve got a problem like communicating the need for renewable, efficient energy to hundreds of millions of people? Harness the web, of course.

SmartPower, a nonprofit marketing organization that promotes clean energy, used YouTube to form the Clean Energy Challenge. The aim was to create an ad for SmartPower around the belief that “clean energy is real. It’s here. And it’s working.”

After reviewing 150 submissions (not a ton, but not bad for such a wonky topic whose actors have virtually no chance of finding a mate on national TV), the $10,000 winner has been chosen. But in the true style of any reality show, the final results are drawn out over several days. The top 10 ads were posted on June 10th and for every day until the 18th one ad will be removed, finally leaving the “last ad standing” on Monday.

The winner will be announced via webcast at 5:00PM on June 18th and all finalists voted off are highlighted on the SmartPower Blog.

Image courtesy of the Wakarusa Music Festival

More and more buzz is being generated in the music industry about artists greening up concerts and venues greening their practices. I was able to see some of this first hand while spending four days at the Wakarusa Music and Camping Festival in Lawrence, KS, this past weekend.

Lured by the temptation of such acts as Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals, Son Volt, Yonder Mountain String Band, Widespread Panic, and my personal favorite, the John Butler Trio, my husband and I set out for an extended weekend of camping and concerts approximately 45 minutes west of Kansas City at Clinton Lake State Park. We were pleased to find multiple efforts at sustainability from the moment we got to the venue.

When driving into the park, after receiving our wristbands from festival organizers, volunteers handed us two plastic bags: a clear bag for trash and a green bag for recyclables. Dubbed "Recycalusa" Wakarusa's recycling efforts extended to glass, aluminum, cardboard, and plastic. Wakarusa even urged festival-goers to bring canned beverages, not bottled, because the market for glass recycling was far smaller in Lawrence than for aluminum. There was a Recycalusa booth where festival-goers could take their green bags, sort their recycling, and win prizes such as band merch.

These Satellite Images Document an Atrocity
Towards A True Price For Energy
Plastic That Heals Itself
Green Jobs, Good Jobs On The Way?
Greener Jet Fuel

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(Posted by David Zaks in News and Views at 8:25 PM)

Editor's note: I had hoped to actually complete this series last week, but my administrative duties got the best of me. So, here's part two on my trip to Bentonville, Arkansas, for Wal-Mart's media day and shareholders' meeting. You can find part one here.

After finishing up at Sam's Club, our next stop was the Bentonville Supercenter. Like the Sam's Club we visited, the Supercenter was fairly new: it had opened in May, 2005. Like the store we'd just come from, this one also sported ample skylights and bright white walls, and had a definite "upscale" feel. One of the executives who met us on the tour confirmed this was intentional for the particular store… a part of the company's "store of the community" concept.

That idea perked my ears up, of course — wouldn't a "store of the community" be carrying local foods and produce in the grocery section? That question was answered before I got to ask it: yes, a handful of produce items were purchased from local farmers. We also saw plenty of evidence of Wal-Mart's organics push as we walked through other areas of the store's grocery section.

Saturday I went to a discussion entitled Sustaining Change as part of the Creators Series hosted by Tomorrow Unlimited. The talk featured Jennifer Leonard, designer/journalist and co-author of Massive Change, and Sarah Rich, journalist and editor at Worldchanging.

In refreshing presentations that conventional power point users should take notes from (using simple slides, single quotes and vibrant images), both Leonard and Rich told of their own personal histories and what influenced them in their work. Leonard began in journalism as a music and arts critic, then moved into design. Rich has a fashion background and moved into the green sphere through exploring the world's relationship with food. Today both are focused on solutions based journalism, and strive to tell success stories and innovations rather than focusing on the problems people face.

On the topic of Sustaining Change – or keeping the enthusiasm for green going after the buzz wears off – a large part of making that possible, Rich explained, is to educate people. Not just in a conventional sense of expanding K-12 education around the globe, but also creating an awareness of the relationships between people and their environments or surroundings.

In this episode, the second of six from Luminous Green, Jennifer sits down with Maja Kuzmanovic, “a generalist interested in inciting small miracles in everyday life.” Throughout the 1990s Maja collaborated with scientific institutes, as well as roamed the field as an independent artist/researcher. She worked in MR, VR and online, infusing digital technologies with physical movement, narrative alchemy and audiovisual poetry. For her works, Maja was elected one of the Top 100 Young Innovators by MIT’s Technology Review in 1999. She founded FoAM in 2000 and has since functioned as FoAM’s PI, eco+media artist and head chef. Her leadership skills have been recognized by the World Economic Forum, awarding Maja with the title “Young Global Leader” in 2006. She received her BA in Design Forecasting (HKU) and MA in Interactive Multimedia (HKU/University of Portsmouth).

Download as MP3 (19MB)MP4 (23MB).

* Subscribe to Jennifer’s weekly podcast through iTunes! (Simply click “subscribe to podcast” under “Advanced” and in the pop-up window paste http://feeds.feedburner.com/worldchanging_fulltext and hit enter.)
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(Posted by Jennifer Leonard in Media at 3:38 PM)

This weekend I spoke at The Creators Series in New York, an event organized by the new curatorial and media group, Tomorrow Unlimited. The program brought together fifteen individuals from various creative disciplines to talk about what’s emerging in their fields, and collectively speculate on where things are headed. Of the six categories of creatives, I found the “Participatory Filmmaking” grouping to be particularly interesting from a Worldchanging perspective. Matt Hanson, Chris Doyle and Martin Percy formed a complementary trio of innovators using film to change cultural conversations and challenge existing frameworks for making and experiencing film. Matt Hanson presented his work-in-progress, A Swarm of Angels, an “open source cinema” project that proposes creating a £1 million feature film with distributed models for financing, screenplay development and distribution. The project invites contributions from a limited group of collaborators, with the amount of creative input correlated with the amount donated. Over a series of phases, Swarm will bring together 50,000 individuals to complete their goal. A Swarm of Angels is a third way between the top-down approach of traditional filmmaking and the bottom-up nature of user-generated content. A way for anyone to influence the creation of a professional £1 million+ ($1.8M… (more)

(Posted by Sarah Rich in Communications and Networking at 12:54 PM)

Whole Foods LondonThe Brits have never been known for their culinary instincts, but Whole Foods is putting this to the test. The mega retailer opened its doors last week to lots of eager consumers and a flood of press. Everyone has a point of view of Whole Foods’ impact on the ethical consumer, true level of sustainability and “Whole Paycheck” pricing. The big question is how Whole Foods will fare in a country where the standard dietary guidelines of meat and two veg translate to potatoes with potatoes on the side.

In March, I wrote Whole Foods would usher in “trickle-down organics”. By emphasizing the luxury in eco luxury, Whole Foods would only encourage growth in the growing organics sections of Marks and Spenser, Tesco and Sainsbury. Within public dialog, we are seeing this. However, it’s not necessarily being seen as an elevation of non-ethical supermarkets. As one reporter from the Times pointed out, it’s more about the downfall of Whole Foods and other social entrepreneurs:

But however socially responsible these entrepreneurs remain as individuals, we can’t pretend that, once a critical mass has been reached, and they go public, that their companies are that different from say, Wal-Mart or Tesco (especially now that Sir Terry (Leahy) is so competitive, I mean so green, that he is carbon-labelling and has copyrighted the Tesco Wholefoods brand).