In February, Changemakers launched a global search for innovative solutions to often complex issues facing rural development and sustainable agriculture, from food security to sustainably scaling-up production.
Sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the competition uncovered 455 ideas from around the globe. The judges have settled on ten finalists and now it is up to you and the Changemakers community to vote to select three winners. But hurry: the voting closes on July 8th.
The energy bill passed the House on Friday, but the proposed cap and trade system and new incentives for renewable energy are still a long way from going into law as the Senate needs to pass its own version. As we transition to the next round of negotiations and lobbying, stakeholders from the White House to industry trade groups, environmental organizations and cleantech companies have been weighing in on the version that won approval in the House — and on where they’d like to see it go from here.
Since Friday’s vote, President Obama has continued his support for the legislation, as well as his efforts to win over lawmakers. (He phoned wavering legislators last week to help the bill clear the House.) This weekend during his radio address and media interviews, Obama called for senators to "come together" around the legislation, which he said "will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy." In an interview with a group of reporters, Obama also said the bill would provide "clarity and certainty" and would "end up being much less costly, much more efficient; technology is going to move much more rapidly than people anticipate."
Imagine sending 10 top designers out into the world to make something. Now imagine you give them just three criteria: it has to be wonderful, desirable, and...sustainable.
That's exactly what the Nature Conservancy did to create what is now an exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt museum in New York.
The designers, ranging from Yves Behar and Isaac Mizrahi to Maya Lin and Paulina Reyes from Kate Spade in New York were sent out to Nature Conservancy project sites from Maine to Alaska and from China to Bolivia. Each designer used materials found in the place and even employed local people to help fashion such useful objects as handbags, furniture, rugs, and jewelry.
Among my favorites from the exhibit: Maya Lin's red maple Terra Bench, Abbott Miller's FSC-certified wood chair, Mizrahi's salmon leather dress and matching shoes, Reyes'/Spade's wooden tiled handbag, and Ezri Tarazi's bamboo-totem wine racks and speaker tubes.
I also rather liked Hella Jongerius's failed experiment to find a design application for chicle latex from the Maya Forest of Mexico. You've got to admire her valiant efforts to transform this material, once the basis for most chewing gums, into a surface design element or even bonding material.
The exhibit is on view at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York through January 4, 2010.
You might think now is a terrible time to start a bank. The banking industry has gone from tailspin to government-owned in the past 8 months.
The collapse of one major financial institution after another -- either through mergers or failures -- has made the very profession seem like, well, something to avoid like swine flu.
But for the founders and principals at a new start-up bank that received its charter this past March, now is the perfect time to start a bank. If, that is, you're starting a bank based on a different value system.
Enter Sandy Wiggins and Frank Baldassarre. Of the two, Frank is the only one who resembles a banker, and that's because he is, and has had an extensive career as a banking professional with such regional institutions as Fox Chase Bank of Exton, PA, and First Financial of Downingtown. Sandy was the charismatic chairman of the US Green Building Council and has three decades of experience in the building industry.
Together, they are launching e3bank, set to open for business this fall and currently embarking on a $30 million private offering to shareholders willing to put up a minimum of $5,000. Their goal is to have a large number of shareholders, most of whom have made a modest investment.
"We don't want to have a single large investor who could call the shots and control too much," Wiggins told me in a recent interview. "We want to be inclusive, so we've made the minimum investment low enough to democratize ownership in e3bank."
So they are seeking a steady stream of small, $5,000-10,000 investors through what is, in part, a social networking campaign, trying to reach more people who understand and believe in the idea of a bank with a triple bottom line.
In fact, according to Wiggins that triple bottom line (enterprise, environment, and social equity) is the single greatest distinguishing factor for e3bank. They will couple that with world-class online banking service that "will be unlike any online banking experience on offer in the US," Wiggins says. "Think about it as Web 2.0 for the banking industry."
E3bank will have a limited building-based footprint. "It won't be your traditional branch bank, more like a resource center," reports Wiggins. "A place for public discourse and information about sustainability. A cross between a comfy living room or local cafe and an Apple store."
They will be few in number and location because, as Wiggins says, "The greenest building you can build is the one you don't build."
E3bank won't just be about atmosphere, Wiggins relates. The bank will offer a range of financial services designed to increase their customer's returns while reducing their customer's environmental footprint. They will also focus on what Wiggins calls "values-based financial incentives," such as interest rates to encourage sustainability choices and providing feedback on customer spending habits.
For instance, the bank will attempt to categorize expenses automatically online and recommend energy efficiency options for customers who have consistently high gas or electric bills.
Their "Green Assist" program is perhaps their most exciting innovation. Designed for residential and small business customers, e3bank will provide an energy audit, fund energy efficient and renewable energy projects, and automatically process all available subsidies, rebates, and tax incentives, as well as connect them with pre-screened contractors in their community.
One goal of the bank is to be a community bank, says Wiggins, "but a community bank of like-minded individuals rather than geography." They'll be coming together around the value system the bank espouses rather than proximity to some branch office.
It's an experiment worth watching. Can a bank tow the triple-bottom line? Other banks, such as Chicago's ShoreBank, San Francisco's New Resource Bank, and some community development corporations among them, have tried for a double bottom line approach. And only one, Triodus Bank in the Netherlands, has experimented with a third dimension, although ShoreBank is attempting to enter the green market as well.
E3bank has the potential to revolutionize the banking industry at a time when the banking industry is in dire need of an extreme makeover.
Ultimately, the goal of e3bank is to support the new green economy and a more sustainable economy and, as Wiggins puts it, his will be the bank for "everyone who cares about a sustainable world."
April showers had given way to, well, May showers; and some of the warmest days of the year had produce intense clouds of pollen that were producing equally intense allergy symptoms in every one I met.
Dramatic and even extreme changes in weather patterns are one of the expected changes of a warming world. Seidl offers several others, including some terrifying possibilities involving insects, disease vectors, and pathogens. Oh my.
Seidl has written a book that is equal parts nature memoir, climate witness journal (a new genre!), and environmental impact study. Ultimately, it is a book that is both scientific and personal without being either dry or cloying. A none too difficult feat.
Seidl is an accomplished ecologist and field scientist, and her book is informed and made informative by fact and research.
But Seidl is also a mother and her observations are infused with a mother's concern and love for her children and their world.
The two aspects are complementary and together make for an engaging mix. Seidl explains the science of climate change as well as the potential impacts. She does so by bringing the impacts home in a way that makes it accessible to her readers.
Early in the book, in fact, she identifies this as a concern of hers:
"From my window I see no glaciers. I don't live near the ocean nor has my family's trip to coastal Maine been put on hold. The forecast of the scale of change that the earth will experience in the next century is unfathomable, and yet we are asked to believe it now because the risk of not believing is too grave."
From her window, in her farm, in her hollow in rural Vermont, Amy Seidl witnesses changes to her local climate and asks us to bear witness, too, in ours. Not to stand idly by and let it happen but
"to look to the landscapes where we live and ask: how they are signaling what the future holds; how do they contain indicators of the oncoming flux? By seeing these signals and rediscovering life in the landscapes where we live, we will expand our relationship to life itself and wake to what it means to live in a warming world."
Amy Seidl has written a powerful and approachable book about our 21st Century dilemma and a call for "a new set of values" with which to deal with it.
[This post was built from a press release by NOAA. My apologies, I'm traveling and wanted to make you aware of this new report.-GS]
Climate change is already having visible impacts in the United States, according to a new and authoritative federal study assessing the current and anticipated domestic impacts of climate change, and the choices we make now will determine the severity of its impacts in the future.
The report, "Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States," compiles years of scientific research and takes into account new data not available during the preparation of previous large national and global assessments. It was produced by a consortium of experts from 13 U.S. government science agencies and from several major universities and research institutes. With its production and review spanning Republican and Democratic administrations, it offers a valuable, objective scientific consensus on how climate change is affecting -- and may further affect -- the United States, according to a press release.
"This report stresses that climate change has immediate and local impacts – it literally affects people in their backyards," said Jane Lubchenco, under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "In keeping with our goals, the information in it is accessible and useful to everyone from city planners and national legislators to citizens who want to better understand what climate change means to them. This is an issue that clearly affects everyone."
The study finds that Americans are already being affected by climate change through extreme weather, drought and wildfire trends and details how the nation’s transportation, agriculture, health, water and energy sectors will be affected in the future. The study also finds that the current trend in the emission of greenhouse gas pollution is significantly above the worst-case scenario that this and other reports have considered.
Scott Edward Anderson is an award-winning poet, change agent, clean tech investor, and social capitalist.
He has been a vice president with Ashoka, the global association of leading social entrepreneurs, and previously served in a variety of management positions with The Nature Conservancy. He is co-founder of the Renewable Energy Business Network's Mid-Atlantic Chapter.
He was part of the first cohort of John Sawhill Conservation Leadership Fellows and is currently a Senior Fellow with the Environmental Leadership Program, occasionally writes for GreenBiz.com among other publications, and formerly served on the advisory board of Green Microfinance, LLC.
The Green Skeptic is a blog devoted to challenging assumptions about how we live on the earth and protect our environment. We have four focus areas: global climate change, social entrepreneurs, microfinance, and clean tech innovations.
"If you are into the green thing and dig the written word, Green Skeptic is the blog for you. Scott is passionate about conservation and has an awesome command of his craft." -Hitchhiker's Guide to the Blogosphere
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