SalvaEco

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
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(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)

The aviation industry may one day be powered by algae. Manufacturing giant Boeing says that a biodiesel alternative made from algae could be the aircraft biofuel of the future.

Last month, in an 8-page document plainly titled "Alternative Fuels for Commercial Aircraft", Boeing presented their estimation of the alternative fuel sources that could 'relieve worldwide pressure on crude-oil derived fuels' and drive air travel to carbon neutrality.

The biofuel debate has largely glossed over the 'friendly skies' while high fuel prices continue to take their toll on the industry. No biofuel we have yet can step up to the plate. Ethanol collects water and corrodes the engine and lines while biodiesel freezes up in cold weather (ie: cruising altitude). Don't forget pilots' general resistance to change and a life and death dependency on reliable fuel, and aviation biofuels don't have a leg to stand on.

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)

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

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(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.