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.

 

How cool is this? In perhaps the ultimate example of ‘upcycling’ Richard Pim of Herefordshire has built a 19ft wide, 11ft high Garden ‘folly’ – or perhaps more modestly described, a shed – out of 3000 old wine bottles.

Pim got the idea after drinking wine in his garden, and holding the bottle up to the light and watching it sparkle:

“I thought ‘that’s it, I will make it out of wine bottles’. I had no problems getting hold of bottles. Most of Herefordshire knew what I was doing so I have had lots of donations. I have also drunk a good few myself.”

Ultimately, what matters about this is not that it is just a great example of recycling, but that it looks truly fantastic – imagine what the light will be like inside on a sunny day! If we get more green ideas like this, and perhaps fewer of the “we’re green” type ads we’re currently being bombarded with by huge corporates in the UK, the world will be a better place. More info at spluch.

Drinking yourself green? Cheers to that.

SUVs have never been so much vehicles as statements on wheels. Statements about affluence, “family values”, rugged individualism (ironic given the herd buying) and so on.  Research, amplified by Malcolm Gladwell in his article Big is Bad, shows SUVs aren’t even safer than smaller cars, questioning their family friendly status. But today the New York Times has a story about the new desirability of the Toyota Prius. The Prius, it argues, is gaining sales because, not in spite of the fact, it looks a bit different. Its the “new SUV”. People want to make a statement about green values, less reliance on fossil fuels and so on. Its easy to dismiss such behaviour as faddism, or just another ticklist item for the painless green lifestyle. But Greenmonk would like to be a lot more generous. Whatever works, basically. If we’re thinking green, even if its for appearance sake, that’s a good thing. Will car companies compete on the basis of looking more green? If it leads to smaller, lighter, more fuel efficient vehicles then I certainly hope so. I can only hope the Highlander is a massive flop though. What do you think?

Claiming my technorati blog. Technorati Profile

It seems we’re going through a purple patch of the ‘greening’ of design right now – from Bill McDonough’s now well know ‘Cradel to Cradel ‘ design ideology (watch the great video from TED here for a 20 minute insight) through to GM’s plug-in Chevy Volt – a car designed around its ‘green’ powertrain. The sign that sustainability has really ‘arrived’ on the designer agenda is best summed up by this month’s issue of Wallpaper* Magazine – the uber-trendy lifestyle magazine, beloved of architects and designers the world over. The May issue is crammed full of sustainability-friendly content, with editor Jeremy Langmead devoting his leader column to explaining how the online eco-edit design exhibition lead to a total re-evalutation of currating an exhibition – cutting carbon footprints and bringing things together on-line, rather than flying lots of people and things around the world.

So design is green a-g0-g0 – great – but here’s the rub: designers, who are generally billed as ‘problem solvers’, have actually created many of the problems in the world that we’re now rather belatedly looking to fix. The key question we as designers (in the wider sense) need to be asking is can we continue to ‘design’ our way out of the problem by simply making more stuff? I implore you to read Allan Chochinov’s brilliant “1000 words : A manifesto for Sustainability in Design” over at Core77 for more on this.

Like Cote I am already somewhat bored by the green data center frenzy but I do think the broad structural changes and new methods and approaches we’re finding in the software and Internet industries are extremely relevant to the environmental problems facing us all. Open source really does change everything. So does powerful cheap social software. In some cases those things come together, such as on the WordPress blogging platform, used by this site. It seems to me that there is no way that top solutions are going to work when we face such huge challenges. Greenmonk Associates will be designed to foster and support and amplify bottom up change agency. We want to create some stars of alternative thinking. We want to track interesting initiatives.

For those of you that don’t know me I am James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk, the first open source industry analyst firm. We have taken methods and approaches from open source and applied them to the market research and advisory business. I like to think we’ve been pretty successful. The skills and hopefully some of the contacts I have made over the years will hopefully get involved. Greenmonk is supposed to be a collaborative effort. Its not my baby, its our baby. My first partners are the guys over at The Movement Design Bureau. Mark and Joseph are both really smart, and are scarily obsessive about the future of movement (wait til you hear Mark start talking about walking machines and so on). Obviously transportation, mobility and environmental impacts are extremely closely linked, but the guys also do some work in related spaces. Some of that work will find its way here.<p>What is an example of a classic Greenmonk story? The town of Modbury in Dorset that just banned plastic bags outright. The supermarkets won’t do it (although they will kick in some lip service). The government won’t do it (the good old mantra of “choice”). In other words Modbury is a poster child for a grassroots revolution. Modbury rocks.

I was pleased to see Shai Agassi post today about where do big ideas come from, because it struck a chord about bottom-up change and innovation. That said, Shai is taking a pretty corporate view. Greenmonk is somewhat more interested in broader cultural changes. Its not that Big Companies won’t be a huge part of working out our environmental problems, rather that I think responsibility will be pushed to the end points.<p>People are braver than companies or governments. People are far more willing to make sacrifices than companies or governments. It is people that will come up with the ideas that are necessary to change our behaviours. And that is why GreenMonk Associates is going to be all about people.

And that’s about it for now, from an intro standpoint. If you want to readup about the Open Source water initiative, before I point to it tomorrow, then go here.