the greener side

Clean energy turn-ons

Remember those cloying Herbal Essences ads in which petite librarians orgasm over washing their hair? City Hippy, among many, laughs out loud at that campaign for the poser, non-organic, multinational shampoo. But Clairol laughs all the way to the bank.

"Is there a way that we can get people feeling about solar energy like those women felt in the shower with that shampoo?" wonders the CEO of ICP Solar, a Canadian company. "In my mind, they have targeted the absolute most important factor in the success of a product..customer satisfaction." Soon, alternative marketers will stop scaring people off with the grunge-and-goody-two-shoes image and start sexing up clean energy.

It should be easy enough with solar power. Wait, a commercial is coming to me. It starts like this: Turn-offs? (Insert a belching smokestack.) Turn-ons? (Insert a cute, pink fur and shiny pants-clad brunette dancing in the sun.)

That's who was showing off her boyfriend's Solar DJ getup in Berkeley, which I spied last weekend. David Quattro has hooked up a movable music feast, a truck with solar panels to power booming speakers. You can rent the portable, sunshine-powered service for parties. It can store a full day of electricity and lets you dance in the dark for 8 hours too. Check out photos of how the Solar DJ works here.

Sustainable superstores

When the sun comes up over Santa Monica boulevard (hated song spinning in my head) around Halloween, it will shine on a new Whole Foods store that won't sell anything you can eat—unless rosa mosqueta face lotion counts. Instead, the Austin, TX-based chain's "lifestyle" shop will be stocked with household wares, clothes, books, music, and other green dry goods that are easy to find online but not on the street. Will Whole Foods conquer the world? It's coming to London. Sustainablog wonders if Whole Foods is the first green superstore, putting to shame Wal-Mart's dabbling in sustainably-built megacenters.

On a related note, rumors are buzzing that Rainbow Grocery, a vegetarian wonderland in San Francisco, is thinking about opening a biodiesel fueling station. Green fuel isn't a sure thing for Rainbow, but Mission District-dwellers who drive 1980s-era diesel Mercedes would readily fill up their shopping carts and their cars there. Pit stops to fuel both bellies and gas tanks have deep American roots. Mini-McDonald's and BP gas stations share the same space. Might as well take that tradition to the next, cleaner level. But there are concerns that one-stop Goliath shops will corporatize the quirky, once-cozy sustainable marketplace.

Since it opened 30 years ago as the offshoot of an ashram, Rainbow has been at the forefront of the natural foods movement, for which the $130-per-stock-share Whole Foods can be grateful. Rainbow even uses solar panels and gives each worker a stake in the operations. The store's site points out:

Interestingly, the natural foods business has become a competitive industry, one that strongly mimics the industrial agribusiness complex against which many of the first community food stores rebelled.

The same thing will surely happen with alternative fuels as they become mainstream. But without becoming mainstream, cleaner technologies can't do massive good. Hopefully, boutiques can always backlash against the megastore mentality. One good sign is that organic co-ops are enjoying big success.

Solar housewarmings this weekend

Put on a green sunvisor and prepare to envy your neighbor's house this Sat. Oct. 1. It's National Solar Tour Day, organized by the American Solar Energy Society. There are solar tours in most states, lots of course in Northern California and Florida. Absent from the list are some big cities--Chicago, Detroit, and Miami--as well as the Dakota states, Wyoming, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Alaska, and Mississippi. But the show's still going on in Louisiana.

What's left of the U.S., post-prophecies

More cataclysmic Earth changes are in store for us, and soon. At least that’s what so many cocktail conversations center around these days—all of those spine-tingling “what ifs” over how scorned Mother Nature will lash out.  Blame Gulf Coast calamities, gas gouging, and even those housing bubble murmurs for preoccupying Americans with the catastrophic possibilities of nature. West Coasters shake over “not if but when” quakes, such as the San Andreas upset that's due, oh, every century or so--which would be, um, next year.

What will the planet think of next? Here’s your answer, already drawn out in these future maps. Photoshop helped me crudely overlap the predictions of Nostradamus, Gordon Michael Scallion, Chet Snow, Doris and Aron Abrahamsen, Ashton Pitre, and George Shaffer.

For example, California was supposed to splinter into islands, and Colorado would have enjoyed oceanfront property by now, if Scallion were right. Nonsense, says Pitre; the Mississippi will merge the Great Lakes for a 50-mile-wide gush down to the Gulf. Oh, stop arguing you guys. What if we just say that you're all correct? Then every colored-in zone (left) will be under water within this century.

Admit it, don't you want to be a prophet too--the one who sensed it all well in advance (but only pinpointed it ever-so-clearly in hindsight)? Here's my wisdom: buy land in Appalachia, or sprint to Canada now. Only the gray areas in the map below remain unscathed by prophecy.

Be a small-time green venture capitalist

Hey, big green spender: unoll the wad from your non-conflict-diamond-studded moneyclip. Alternative energy stocks are hot. Want to plunk down more than you've already stashed into SRI mutual funds? You can become a venture capitalist and help environmentally-friendly startups without having multimillions, says the Christian Science Monitor. All you need is a mere $10K. And net worth of a single million (not counting a home). Find overlooked “gems” before they go public or get bought out. Community development venture capital (CDVC) investing doesn’t guarantee any return, but it’s a one-time-only foot in the door on optimistic companies.

Tracking green, social funds

Are you betting that ethical, environmentally-minded companies will out-thrive rivals that are blinded by short-term, dirty thinking? Maybe you’ve already dropped money into a fund such as Portfolio 21, or hope to--once you get a job, pay off credit cards/student loans, or at least skirt bankruptcy.

Even if you live hand-to-mouth and month-to-month now, it can't hurt to learn about sustainable investing before you hit retirement with no security blanket. Where to start? Most "socially responsible investment" (SRI) mutual funds pad a piddling 10 percent of their holdings with companies explicitly dedicated to fair environmental and labor practices. These great SRI blogs can tell you that and more:

• SRI Notes is now associated with the Center for Responsible Business at the Haas School, U. C. Berkeley. A recent post examines how game theory punishes cooperators and rewards criminals: "We can't all be cheaters, can we?"
• A South African-Bostonian SRI firm product manager writes SRI-Extra.
• TriplePundit envisions "an 'integrated bottom-line' approach to looking at business from the next generation of MBAs."
• A San Francisco venture capitalist writes Cleantech Investing.
• AltEnergy Stocks has been tracking the ups and downs of green companies for 15 months.

Granite counters? Don't insult me.

From the pale new cork floor up to the IceStone recycled glass counters, the Washington Post recently described one D.C. couple’s installation of an eco-friendly kitchen. They cut corners to install nonpolluting products and shunned trendy granite, since mining is depleting its supply. They gave away old appliances and lucked out by finding discounted wheatboard cabinets, but had to pass on a $93/foot recycled glass tile splashboard.

But few green architects would even glance at a less-than-60--square-foot kitchen. Chris Donaghy, a designer who worked on the two-butt kitchen, pointed out that eco-aware remodelers have "less disposable incomes than our regular clientele. They tend to be teachers, scientists, environmentalists." And journalists, right?

There’s a big opportunity for small-scale contractors to profit from their craft by helping intelligent-but-underpaid professionals green up their homes.

Tune into City Hippy each week for a recap of "No Waste Like Home," BBC's green home makeover reality show.

Sensing urban pollution

Maybe out of habit someday, you'll cross the street and check both a street light and the pollution meter on the corner. That's one dream of Danish artists and scientists, who hope that cities will use biosensors to publicly display how healthy (or not) the air is at any given moment (found through We Make Money Not Art).

An onoing project in Vienna measures the air quality every 10 seconds and posts the results (left) in busy spots around town. The meters rate smog and ozone levels "from poor to very good...motivating the population to contribute themselves to improving air quality in their city," says the Austrian city.  Seems more practical than the color coded terror meter on our side of the Atlantic.

In London, the Urban Pollution Monitoring Project built 3D models (right) to pinpoint carbon monoxide levels, block by block. And Germans have discovered a healthy use for tobacco:  planting Nicotiana (PDF) to measure airborne pollutants. Here's a link to a dozen European clean-air projects.

SmartMobs points out  MIT's SENSEable City project. Creations include tsunami-proof housing, as well as a project to map cell phone use that "allows the city to be sensed and displayed in real-time as a complex, pulsating entity."

National disasters

I couldn't resist pointing out that as Common Sense Technology pointed out, "The whole country is now a disaster." That's according to this map on the main page of FEMA's website. This looks funny at first, but really, the government has named 40 states as emergency zones. The decade-old blog Common Sense Technology is doing a wonderful job tracking the role of technology in the Katrina catastrophe and cleanup.

Thinking outside the trash can

Many schools struggle to afford textbooks, so a cheap (or free) source of old National Geographics, pipe cleaners, and other detritus is a lucky find for any hard-up art teacher. Before you fail to cash in on half a paint can, a tangled knot of rainbow telephone wire or that 1984-era faux wood TV through a yard sale, Craigslist or eBay--and get tempted to chuck the stuff on the street—see if some artsy teachers want it.

You can always donate defunct junk through Freecycle, Goodwill, Salvation Army, or an auction--but it’s hard if things are half-broken, torn, or stained. That’s where half-bent, creative do-gooders prove their highest function--as recyclers. This morning, $15 poorer, I left a warehouse enriched with two bags of junk. Junk with “potential” for a diorama that is, courtesy of SCRAP (Scroungers' Center for Reusable Art Parts) a mecca for San Francisco salvagers. (Either I’ll use the tile chunks, buttons, and clip-on earrings--or it’ll all guilt-trip me from the closet.)

A bunch of SCRAP-like centers opened in the 1970s. Generation Green runs recycled art workshops in California's East Bay, where your kid can learn about solar energy by making a shiny sun mandala. Trashopia's nearby in Contra Costa County.

Some art-scrap centers are self-sufficient, like the Hudson Valley Materials Exchange, which demands a “social and environmental conscience about the sources of our funding.” NYC has the Materials for the Arts. The St. Louis Teachers' Recycle Center holds workshops and organizes an electronics pick-up service. There’s a MECCA art thrift shop in Salem, OR. The Baltimore-based ReDo lists organizations in every state that “recover thousands of tons of building materials, equipment, furniture, food, and industrial materials.” Is your town dry? SCRAP shows you to be a copycat.