Editor's note: Please welcome Green Options' newest writer, Elizabeth Redmond. Elizabeth is a sustainable designer working in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her past experiences include working with her sister Sara Snow on a Discovery Health TV series called Get Fresh with Sara Snow, where she researched sustainability and built environment content.

I asked Elizabeth to give me an "elevator pitch" of her focus here at Green Options. Her response:

Today's green products and services seem to be an eclectic collection of "lighter tread". I propose that we begin to design and interact with products and systems that encourage heavy treading, where a heavy active footprint is one step in the right direction without a half step in the other. My objective is to tell you how things work, and enable you with the information to make responsible, and conscious decisions about society, lifestyle, health, and sustainability.

More than tornadoes, hurricanes, snow, or cold weather itself, heat is the number one weather related cause of death in the United States. So urban dwellers (that means half of us in this world) beware! Much of our urban heat is due to a phenomena called the Urban Heat Island effect. An Urban Heat Island is a metropolitan zone that is warmer than the surrounding, less developed area. The EPA reports that "On hot summer days, urban air can be 2-10°F [2-6°C] hotter than the surrounding countryside”. What does this mean? It’s going to be a hot summer, but luckily we can do a couple of things to help cool your stroll down the sidewalk.

First, how does this phenomena work? It is all about the energy transfer of solar radiation to our built environment. Lets go back to high school physics and review. All you need to know is that heat from the sun (radiation) gets stored in our constructed impervious and dark surfaces such as concrete and pavement (insulators). During the day these surfaces of high heat capacity collectively act as a massive heat energy reservoir. (I.e.: concrete can retain nearly 2000 times the heat as an equivalent volume of air). Next, the heat on the surface of these materials mixes with the already hot air and you experience a hot gust that feels dense enough to chew on (convection).

Update from Daniel at the summit –

As G8 leaders are just sitting down for their last lunch, a special G8 menu has mysteriously appeared at the G8 media centre. They have served us nice cake and coffee here over the last few days. But the G8 leaders clearly were not content with sipping champagne behind the security fence and served up a different menu to the rest of the world. After a cocktail they sat down to “eight prawns grilled under a warm climate” and they finished off their meal with a “Not so Easy to Digestif”. I wish our leaders put as much effort into saving our planet as some wonderful NGO colleagues put into this funny spoof!

The G8 did not deliver what they needed to. But I leave Heiligendamm more upbeat than I expected. Greenpeace did a wonderful and dramatic action, that – as one TV presenter today told me – “produced the best Greenpeace pictures in years”. We raised the temperature on climate change and now have a real fighting chance to achieve progress at the next climate conference in Bali in December. The G8 failed the world, no question about it. But the G8 also felt the pressure from the real world – from all of you. We live to fight another day. Please help us build up the pressure further. You can start by joining our energy revolution
.

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

(more)

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

Blood Diamond exposed to the movie-going masses the horrors of the diamond industry's operation in the West African country of Sierra Leone. Four West African countries, Angola, The Congo, Guinea and Sierra Leone, where the diamond trade is bloodiest, produce about 20% (PDF) of the world's rough diamonds. The growing global market for diamonds reached nearly $70 billion dollars in 2005 fueled largely by the insatiable appetite of US consumers who purchased $33 billion dollars in diamonds that year.

The movie has helped to bring energy and attention to reforming diamond operations with the goal of reinvesting more diamond money into the infrastructure and economies of these ruined nations. At the New York International Diamond Conference in February earlier this year an idea emerged to apply Fair Trade standards to the diamond industry in Africa as a first step toward reformation. During the conference Ed Zwick, producer of Blood Diamond, issued a passionate calling out of the diamond industry that inspired quick action.

The Rapaport Report, a leading diamond industry publication, wasted no time in working with the government of South Africa, the Fair Trade Labelling Organizations International and private diamond companies in bringing to market the first Fair Trade diamonds. The diamonds were on display last weekend at the Rapaport Fair Trade Conference held in Las Vegas.

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)

"Mr. Green" poster design by Von Glitschka

Sustainability is becoming a pressing concern to the graphic design community. Designers are buzzing about it as they try to green their own practices and make sense of it all. In order to tap into this buzz, I organized a round table virtual discussion with several people involved in the design industry to chat about green design and the growing sensibilities of sustainability in our field.

"Green Design Dialogues" was born as a way to build the green design community and learn from each other. Our first discussion, via instant messaging, was May 25th. We touched on a broad range of topics relating to green design, which I will report on in a series of "Green Design Dialogues" posts in coming weeks. This week, I'll introduce the crew involved with our first Green Design Dialogue and relay each designer's experience with green design before summarizing our discussion.

Involved in the chat were designers from various backgrounds. Bryn Mooth joined us from HOW magazine, a wonderful graphic design magazine that has recently started covering more green topics. Dani Nordin, founder and principal designer at The Zen Kitchen, brought to the discussion her experience with running a small design studio that focuses on green design. Eric Benson is a Professor at the University of Illinois and the creator of the wonderful green design resource renourish. Eric Karjaluoto works at the interactive services firm smashLAB in Vancouver, and was involved in creating Design Can Change, an excellent call to action for the design community. Jess Sand is an independent designer and writer at her communications studio Roughstock Studios, who also writes a great blog on "sustainability for the rest of us," Small Failures. And of course, your humble Green Options design writer, Megan Prusynski, brought everyone together for the chat.

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)

Worldchanging board chair Ethan Zuckerman is in Africa, covering the TED Global conference. – ed Tanzanian President Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete took the stage with Dr. Larry Brilliant of Google.org and Bruce McNeighbor of Technoserve. Dr. Brilliant announces his support for “Believe, Begin, Become,” a national business plan competition, modeled on the successful experiment Google and Technoserve operated this past year in Ghana. He emphasizes the importance of job creation and business development as critical parts of economic development. Brilliant describes the program as “tried and tested” in Africa and Latin America, where it accompanies investment with intensive entrepreneurship training. He notes that Databank, a Ghanaian investment fund, has launched a $2 million “3B” venture fund to invest in these businesses over five years, investing between $50,000 and $150,000 in businesses that are recognized in the contest. Bruce McNeighbor outlines a timeframe for the project – it formally launces next week in Dar es Salaam and will start training entrepeneurs and helping them craft concepts into business plans over the next five months. At the graduation ceremony, 10 will be awarded capital, and 20 will be awarded certificates to allow entrepeneurs to purchase business services in Tanzania. President Kikwete acknowledges a… (more)

(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Social Entrepreneurship at 9:45 AM)

Rokia Traoré welcomes the assembled crowd to the first session of TED Global 2007, “The Africa You Don’t Know,” with a beautiful Malian song. I’m thrilled to see Chris Anderson joined on stage by my friend Emeka Okafor, the remarkable Nigerian entrepreneur, thinker and blogger who’s put together this program. Emeka is clearly nervous to be on stage, co-hosting with Chris… but he deserves the honor given the amazing work he’s done. Euvin Naidoo, the VP of Standard Bank in South Africa, welcomes us home to Africa. He invites the crowd to shout out the worst we’ve heard about Africa: corruption, famine, AIDS, slave trade. “But this is about Africa, the story we’ve not heard.” Africa is on a turnaround, in terms of how it manages its public image and how it manages its destiny. Naidoo’s background is in turnarounds, beginning his work with McKinsey in South Africa. As a graduate student in the US, he wrote a case study on turnaround, focusing on Nelson Mandela – this became part of a book called “Confidence”, written by Rosabeth Moss Kanter. Naidoo has tremendous pride that an African story was used as an example of turnaround for US corporations. Naidoo uses… (more)

(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Energy at 8:50 PM)