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)

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)

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)

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)

If there’s a document that summarizes the spirit of African 2.0 that Emeka is trying to showcase at this conference, it’s Carol Pineau’s film, “Africa: Open for Business“. She tells us that her reason for making a film focusing on African entrepreneurship was her frustration as a journalist. She covered wars and famines, but she couldn’t sell a story to her editors about cellphones on the continent. She tells us that an African can-do ethic gives Africa amazing potential: “As an American to put a nail into a board and they’ll complain they don’t have a hammer. Ask an African and they’ll find a brick, or a shoe. Imagine what that spirit can do for African business.” She shows us three clips from her movie: a Nigerian clothing company, making fashions for children called “Rough and Tumble”; Alieu Conte’s hugely successful mobile phone company in the DRC, which has had more than a 1000 times return on investment capital; the remarkable Somali airline Diallo Airlines, which operates in a country without a government (In his clip, CEO Mohammed Olan notes, “It’s sometimes a blessing not to have a government: corruption is not a problem because there’s no government.” That line… (more)

(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Business at 8:52 PM)

Airline Industry Calls for a ‘Zero-Emissions’ Future
Competitors Start Engines In $10M Race For Fuel Efficiency
Big Solar: Stirling Energy Systems
From Turkey Waste, a New Fuel and a New Fight
Environmentalist Dreams of New York Rooftop Farms

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(Posted by David Zaks in News and Views at 8:18 PM)

We carry its marks, but the machine age is dead to us — oh, the assembly lines roll on in Mexico, the coal stacks still smoke in China, giant container ships still ply the seas bringing cars and appliances and laptops and clothes, but the ability to shock and disorient that the machine age once possessed is gone from the world of pretty much everyone with the hardware to read this. We feel no more historical vertigo considering the Machine than we do the Dawn of Agriculture, and few if any of us wake up in the morning with a sense of deep angst about the move from hunting and gathering to sowing and reaping. There may be, as Gary Snyder says, no such thing as a post-agricultural civilization, but we already live in societies that take agriculture so much for granted that we feel those who live by any other means to be nearly alien. The same will very soon be just as true for industrialization. To see this new reality, one need only look backwards. The other night it rained hard here in Seattle — in big warm drops that pinged off the skylight and drummed on the… (more)

(Posted by Alex Steffen in Features at 2:43 PM)

Posted by Dave (in Anchorage, Alaska)

Humpback whale with seabirds, off the coast of Alaska
© Greenpeace/Walsh

Well, the whale blog is coming to a hiatus – not a permanent end, just a hiatus. It’s been a crazy few months, with the expedition to the Southern Ocean, the launch of whales.greenpeace.org by our team in Argentina, and finally, the International Whaling Commission meeting in Anchorage, Alaska. There’ll be plenty more happening later this year on the issues of whales – stay tuned to www.greenpeace.org for developments.

Last weekend, after the IWC craziness had ebbed away, and the frustration of listening to national delegates talking the most shocking rubbish (don’t worry, most of those delegates were on the pro-whaling side), I hit the road to Homer, on the Kenai Peninsula. With me were Maarten, our Dutch cameraman video maestro (you may remember his dulcet tones from shows like “Ocean Defenders TV” and other video clips) and Junichi, the Greenpeace Japan whales campaigner.

Homer’s an interesting place – especially as half the town is built on what is essentially a sandbar, and contains a bar called the Salty Dawg (“A drinking town with a fishing problem” reads a sign inside). The Esperanza will be making an appearance in Homer in the near future, but we headed out with a boat from Rainbow Tours (no connection to the Rainbow Warrior that we know of) to see some whales.

Continue reading You can watch a whale a thousand times, but you can only kill it once…

As Bruce Sterling says in Tomorrow Now, “The future is a process, not a theme park.” What that means for Worldchanging, is that we don’t practice imagining the future in order to be right, we imagine it in order to think more clearly about the systems in which we find ourselves embedded. We think about the future not in order to predict it — that’s essentially impossible in any meaningful sense — but in order to see more clearly the ways in which we can act today to influence it. By using tools and modes of thought which encourage our foresight, we can anticipate new threats and opportunities, and better apprehend the nature of the tools we have at our disposal for acting in the face of those threats and opportunities. Imagining the future, then, paradoxically makes us more innovative and effective in the present. But imagining the future helps us with another important task, as well: remembering our duty to the people who will come after us. Many of the best things about our society are the legacies of people who came before us and made the conscious choice to leave the world a better place. On the other… (more)

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Imagining the Future at 2:04 PM)

Worldchanging board chair Ethan Zuckerman is in Africa, covering the TED Global conference. -ed Ory Okolloh asks, “what’s image got to do with it?” She tells us that our images of Africa focus on the negative stuff – the poverty, the corruption and the disease. People assume that as a Harvard-educated African, these aren’t issues that are personal for her. But she tells us, “I know what it is to grow up without money. The bellweather for whether our family was broke or not – when things were good, we had eggs and sausages, when they were bad, we had porridge.” It was difficult for the family to save, because her parents supported an extended family. But they made a decision to enroll her in a school they could barely afford, a private Catholic school. “I got kicked out pretty much every term,” when the family ran out of money. “Why don’t these guys just take me to a cheap school – it’s embarrasing.” Her dream high school was the Kenya school, a national school, but she missed the cut by a single point on the national exam. Her father suggested they go speak to the headmistress to see if… (more)

(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Empowering Women at 10:51 AM)