Network and community effects are always more powerful than individual efforts. Building communities around Green profiles makes a lot of sense. Treehugger here asks about whether people will be willing to put up with more intrusive but smarter metering. It seems to me that if social software teaches us anything its that people are more than willing to share information about themselves. Privacy is an incredibly complex thing and depends utterly on context and intention. makemesustainable is trying to tap into our willingness to share, to make us more sustainable.
Yesterday I wrote that at RedMonk has yet to formulate a policy to lower our carbon footprint, but I also said that tracking our travel via the DOPPLR service was one potential route to reporting on our footprint. Arguably using DOPPLR already contributes to better environmental effects- if it saves one piece of travel by allowing trips to be “batched” then we all benefit. DOPPLR already knows how far I have traveled this year- about 36,421k miles.
What is declarative living? Its the willingness to share. It will likely be a huge benefit for greener living. DOPPLR at first glance looks like a service for traveling more, but with the right tools in place we can travel less. Which is nice- with any luck we can all spend more time at home with those we love.
And that’s something you don’t hear from me too often. According to the New York Times the US will now be able to buy local cereal crops when administering aid, rather than shipping US surpluses abroad. Grain dumping overseas is a bad thing- it punishes local farmers by wrecking market prices, and uses up unnecessary food miles. This article explains the problem in some depth.
Small changes can lead to large effects, while unintended consequences are a problem for any policy area. So its very good to see the US administration making it easy to buy local crops at times of extreme need. Buying local helps the economy in ways dropping in grain never could - and we use less oil. This is aid through the grassroots.
That’s my new name for Yet Another Carbon Calculator.
Great discussion about offset calculators on an earlier post…
Global Action Plan looks to be a very interesting organisation, predicated as it is on grassroots and behavioural change. According to Kable, GAP is currently doing some very interesting research which will be shortly published under the name The Inefficient Truth - what happens, for example, when government mandates force inefficiencies (what will be the environment impact of national ID card infrastructure, for example?). GAP looks really interesting but if its serious about fostering a conversation it needs to start using some social software tools- a blog would be a good first start. I would be willing to help the organisation on the front, voluntarily.
Forget Richard Pim’s garden wall made of wine bottles. Here’s a much more serious idea for the drinks companies like Cadbury Schweppes, Pepsi and Coca Cola - pick up on the spirit of the beautiful ideas by Dutch designer Nienke Vording and stop shipping vast quantities of bottled water around the country, which then all get chucked into landfill.
Instead, sell gorgeous reusable water bottles - indeed promote designers to create all kinds of personal reusable bottles. Then install ‘water stations’ into local shops and other locations. Offer either tapwater (still or gassed-up, either of which you pay for) or mineral water from tanks (which you pay extra for). But charge a bit less than you would for bottled water.
And don’t cheat and only distribute water from the tanks. That’s as absurd as the huge logistics operation that underpins the water cooler industry, which busily expends energy shipping water barrels into every office building in the land.
Of course, in the Greenmonk spirit of innovation from the roots up, this could be done without the support of the major drinks distributors…
Here is why.
My problem with Whole Foods as a customer is more prosaic- the food miles involved in getting their produce to market. But CEOs that have enough time on their hands to try and hurt other company’s share prices using forum posts, rather than focusing on customers and business problems, should reassess their priorities.
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