Green Year

“Nothing ever slows her down and a mess is not allowed…”

Huh, oh, sorry, caught me singing.  OK, so check this house out, as photographed by my friend Peter Bennetts; (he lives in Melbourne, and we first met on a tiny little rock called Tuvalu while both there working on stories about climate change, he with a writer for Outside, me for Sierra.  He’s also published, with Tony Wheeler of Lonely Planet, the lovely and troubling book Time and Tide, detailing Tuvalu’s loosing battle with climate change.)

Talk about function and form getting mashed up–take a look at that big gorgeous bulb there:   A second skin flows from the eaves, across the ceiling, to the interior walls, gathering bulbously in the heart of the living room as a rainwater-storage tank. “Water-catchment capacities in Victoria have fallen to alarming levels,” Morgan says. “Restrictions have been applied, and much of our state has been burning this past summer. In this context, the water tank is the most significant element of the house, symbolically taking the place of the hearth as centerpiece.” Since the house has no air-conditioning, the steel tank’s main function is to cool the living room passively. It also supplies rainwater for toilets, irrigation, washing wet suits, and occasionally drinking. It’s both a practical and an ambient element of the room: a tap of the knuckles gives a good indication of the water level, while the sound of water dripping into the tank can be heard after a rainfall.”

The house, in other words, has inverted the traditional dynamic of being a hardened shield against nature, and instead works collaboratively with it. Very. Clever.

Plus, Aussie.

Two marks.

Read the rest and see more of Peter’s photos here. 

You may have heard about Apple’s recent black eye for their green record.

It’s part of Greenpeace campaign out of Europe to Green Apple, which is a lovely idea. Their little smooth white sleek fetish inducing products do, alas, eventually break. And when they do, it should be easy to recycle them.  There’s a good story about it at Inhabitat, which you should be reading, anyway.
C’mon, Jobs–if a Texan like Dell can do it, sure as hell you can. Get them hamsters down in Cupertino spun up, figure it out, expand your value proposition even further, and see if you can’t swab up just a wee bit more market share.

Let the blowback begin. After fits and starts and plenty of navel gazing, a simple dinner with friends in Redwood City allowed us to get outside our  mental culdesac and realize our instincts were right. As Patrick put it, when asked if having innovators at Burning Man would somehow diminish his experience, “no, sounds great, i’d love to learn about that stuff. and if people have a problem with it, fuck em, you know? because if we don’t do something about climate change, there won’t be an event to go to.”

Word. Burning Man is a globally unmatched collection of early adopters, innovators, and change agents. It’s among the most fertile mental soil on the planet, and if we’re going to make a difference in the fight against climate change, then it only makes sense to bring the best, newest, most promising ideas to the desert and share then ( albiet in a non-commercial, non-commodified, un-branded way ). Delay or sticking our head in the sand simply won’t do.
We’ve had huge response so far. Melody Haller of the Antenna Group has, not surprisingly, several of her company’s clients who’re interested in bringing their widgets out to the playa for people to see and kick the tires of. But not all are interested, as it’s an interesting value proposition, to be sure. One CEO, who’ll remain anonymous, replied to her invite  ” Melody, Have you been to this event before? As far as I know it is a drug induced orgy from what my friends have told me who have attended. Is this something corporations want to be associated with? “ 

The answer, for many, is a resounding yes.
AG and I have both had a pretty significant shift on this in recent days. Too much time on Tribe, ePlaya, and other digital echo chambers have caused us to, temporarily at least, loose site of the big picture.  Her latest missive on it is here.

So, let’s start talking about some cool stuff you’ll see on the playa this year. The folks from Chlorophyll Collective have some mind-bending ideas on how to make algae eat generator exhaust and create biodiesel, a sort of snake eating its tail tale that may not be so far out there; an outfit called LiveFuels is proposing to do just that on a commercial scale (and are also an Antenna client–small world, non?)
Today and tomorrow from 12-3 Chicken John will be showing off his gasifier truck outside Ritual, giving rides and raising cash to buy a pelitizer so Ritual can become the first coffee shop anywhere to run on its own garbage.  The truck is part of a fleet of vehicles that are the demon spawn of the Mechabolic.

And of course we’re building a massive, 60kW solar array to power the man base complex, as part of our planned solar work that will hopefully when it’s done included 210kW permanent solar in Gerlach, and 90kW in Lovelock, courtesy our partnership with MMA Renewable Ventures. 

Meanwhile, from the “it doesn’t have to be green to be green” file, check this thing out. The Swarm is autonomous. The Swarm demonstrates emergent behavior. The Swarm will know you are there. The Swarm runs on green electrons. Hella cool, yo.

More to come.

After a slow start, the New York Times is closing fast on climate change, pouring out information, resources, links. This morning’s are but one good example.

Meanwhile, trouble at the ranch. After launching our Green Man pavilion message, we took it back down–after it became clear that not everyone was on the same page when it came to issues of branding at the event, even virtually. It seems some don’t care if branding of “good” products exists, while others care passionately about their existence anywhere in the burnesphere, to coin an awful phrase.  TBD at a board meeting today at 2, stay tuned.

What is Burning Man, when you get down to it? Alt world escapism?  Incubator for new social constructs? Just a fine place in the middle of nowhere to fuck some shit up with friends? Does it, to put a point on it, mean anything, and if so, what?

I’ll not even think of presuming to answer, but I invite you to read the following:

Burning Man is a uniquely evolving experiment - the only event in the world of its size/kind that is entirely created by its participants. The organizers and volunteers that help produce the event are an equal part of that creative process, and after long reflection, the Man Base team has decided to reach out to people that are presenting innovative, realworld solutions to the environmental crisis we’re all facing, and ask them to participate in creating the Green Man pavilion.This is one of the bigger chunks of the machinery that’ll make the Green Man either fly, or crater.

It is a dicey prospect, fraught with risk, inviting these folks and trying to figure out how to showcase the ideas without the branding. Are we selling out, inviting the Trojans into our citadel? Will this, as some have already suggested, be the crack in the wall of lawyers and money we’ve created around outselves that has thusfar kept the big bad marketing world out? Is burning man getting too serious for it’s own good?

Dunno. Hope not. I’m not even sure we know what it is we’re doing yet. We’re calling it a world’s fair or expo because that’s the language we have available. Before someone mashed up the words “theme” and “camp” we didn’t even have the concept of a theme camp. So world’s fair, expo-that may not be what this turns out to be.

We’re going to put a whole lot of smart people and good ideas in the middle of the playa and see what happens.

Could be nothing.

Could be something great.

We’ll see.  Your comments and thoughts invited.

So Ray Allen and I need to go to Lovelock on Wednesday, to meet with the Pershing General Hospital and explain why we want to build them 90KW of solar power for free. Which means flying to Reno. Which means pollution, carbon, all that bad stuff the solar power is designed to offset.

Enter Terrapass. I’d heard of them before–you buy some offsets, fly a little less guiltily. But this was the first time I’d seen ( noticed? ) them embedded in the sales options at Expedia. So, I clicked and bought two. Easy, peasy.

But what, exactly, had I purchased? According to their site,
“TerraPass purchases and retires Green-e certified renewable energy credits from wind farms across the country. These wind farms generate electric energy that might otherwise come from the burning of coal or oil. In this way, Wind Power takes CO2 emissions out of the energy producing cycle. And that combats global warming.”

Hmm. Is that additive? I mean, does it make a real difference? Decide for yourself, a good place to learn more is right here. As for me, I’ll keep buying them–if NOTHING else, they’re a small reminder that their are hidden costs for all the jetting around I do, a bill my ( gulp ) kids are gonna have to pay.

Quick thought, while looking at the copious, delightfully packaged goods set out for guests at your average posh hotel ( all conveniently branded with the logo of their in house spa):

If you use anything-shampoo, conditioner, soap, whatevs, take it home when you leave. It’ll offset your need to buy more just a little bit longer, and the odds are much higher you’ll recycle the packaging when you’re done. Otherwise, the housekeeping staff, on stiff orders to present each guest with a pristine set of their own, will chuck anything that’s been opened, even if the seal was just broken.

And please tell me you’re not leaving the towel on the floor so they’ll replace it. You do? Shame on you–at home you prolly use towels a half dozen times between washes, you can do the same here.

I’m taking one: I’m just too damn tickled about the story on the fracking front page of today’s SF Chronicle not to post it here, too.

I know, fire pits ain’t good for nuthin’ cept creating carbon, and we should probably do some offsets or something, but that comes later.

Today, we celebrate that in San Fran Freak Show you can get the federal government to help pay burners to create public fire art, and the fact that I’ll be helping, in my own small way, to leave a lasting mark on this city I love.

By now you’ve likely seen or heard of the Obama1984 mashup ad, pairing pro-Barack sympathies with the old Apple 1984 ad, with Hillary Clinton standing in for Big Brother. Well done, I must say. Notice–the woman is wearing an iPod, nice touch. North of 1 million views, and counting.
This repurposing of content for political ends reminded me of what happened when GM had the idea of letting customers at the content for their new Chevy Tahoe campaign ( chronicled by Wired Magazine ); they ended up with heaps of clever customer generated ads, many lambasting their gaz guzzling ways.
(For a great analysis, shot by shot as well as historical/social context, of the brilliant, original spot ( directed by Ridley Scott, of Alien and Blade Runner fame) check out this story by Sarah Stein.)

This story is interesting for two reasons. One, to see just how out of touch the mainstream media is with open source content generation ( read how the New York Time refers to it has having “gone viral,” like it’s a disease or something, yet fails to drill down at all on the substantive implications of this kind of new media. Yawn, NYT. You can do better.)
And two, and more germane to our purposes, because it’s one of the first widespread uses of advertising content rejiggered for political aims. My hope: people see this, and start creating more mashups that take the carefully crafted messaging of the corporate consumption overlords, and use them instead to create opportunities to reflect on just what we’re doing to our little world, and how we might yet save it.

For almost all of my adult life, I’ve been an ardent opponent of capitalism. It rapes the land, displaces families, tears apart our communities with nary a thought, so long as it improves the bottom line. Sure, there’s innovations, many of which I adore and couldn’t imagine living without, but always with a sense of guilt: love my cell phone, and know that it was made in part with virtual slave labor in the cobalt pits of the Congo. It’s roughly analogous to how I feel eating meat–I feel vague dis-ease, but not enough to change my habits.

But I’ve recently had a profound change of heart. Capital isn’t evil by nature, indeed it has no nature, other than to self propagate. Whether it’s selling old growth trees, or hemp bracelets, capital doesn’t care, it only wants to grow. Give it a positive outlet with a decent rate of return, and it’ll run it to ground.

As proof, I offer this. Goldman Sachs doesn’t want to do the right thing, they want to do the thing that makes money. And if squeezing a tree shakes loose the cash, well then they’ll squeeze em.

Capital. It’s what makes the difference. What we need to do, rather than complain about it, is support mechanisms ( like carbon trading credits ) that monetize solutions. Do that, and we’ll change the world. Don’t, and we’ll kill it. It’s really as simple as that.