the greener side

Update: Where's the new news?

I just updated this map of emerging online news sources that I made earlier this year for the Community Media Workshop. Now it includes environmental news sites such as InvestigateWest, Great Lakes Echo and Facing South.

As struggling local newspapers continue to abandon the printed page, foundations, entrepreneurs and journalists are launching "hyperlocal" and watchdog news Web sites. Where and who are they? What do they tell us about the new media landscape?

Check out the panel about nonprofit news at last weekend's conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists.

Please comment with new additions and subtractions to the international map!  

View Where's the new news? in a larger map

Green is good. Green is healthy.

So take that, Gordon Gekko--er, Ivan Boesky. I poked around the Cleantech Forum a bit this week. Lots of gray and navy blue suits there, with few of the jeans-and-polos found at dot-com dealmaking events, but it was relatively laid back nevertheless when you consider all the money-matchmaking involved. The $3.6 billion poured into the emerging clean tech sector in 2006 is twice the 2004 amount for North America and Europe. There are billions and billions of dollars just waiting to anoint the next clean, green, money-making machine. Startup CEOs and scientists were snapping  wishbones, crossing fingers, trading cards.

Want to gobble up clean stocks? Be on the lookout for the IPO of some yet-unpopular, cleantech cousin of Google! But which company will it be? One that can print thin-film solar panels? A large-scale  maker of biofuel blends? A startup that's making LED bulbs cheaper?

I wandered around some booths and learned about Group IV Semiconductor, backed by $10 million and working to make silicon-based, energy-efficient LED lightbulbs that might sell for a mere $3 a pop by 2010. Cheaper, white LED bulbs could be the holy grail of bright, low-energy lighting. SpringStar is working to get rid of things that bug you without pesticides with gizmos that mimic insects' mating calls and perfumes. However, there's no bedbug treatment yet because mimicking their stinky pheromones would make your boudoir smell pretty skanky. Engineers at Lawrence Berkeley Labs are building air quality sensors that they hope they can shrink to fit in or on cell phones. Here's more show-and-tell.

In the adjoining rooms, each panel seemed to be running nearly an hour late. At a talk about corporate market drivers, Ali Iz of G.E. said his company has been snapping up great money-making green businesses, but it needs to figure out how to support innovation that's not yet profitable without spending hundreds of millions of dollars.

PG&E, the villain of Erin Brokovich, has greened nearly every bus station in San Francisco with ads for its eco-friendly efforts in recent months. During the Cleantech Forum, PG&E let loose that it's donating a year of office space to hot startups Adura Technologies (makes wireless lighting sensors) and GreenVolts (working on cheaper, more concentrated solar panels). I planned to make it to the mayor's announcement about launching a cleantech S.F. business campus near the former PG&E plant, but I was interrupted by friends who were wine tasting a block away. Cabbing it home two champagne flutes later, there was no hybrid to flag down. But that could change soon too.

What's next? If you're dying to get rich off of companies built to keep the planet from dying, then scroll down and look in the left column for my updated "Green Money" links of lots of cleantech-related blogs. The tickers at Sustainable Business can be useful too.

 

Mac attack

There wasn't as much sustainable stuff at Macworld as there was even last year, except for the Greenpeace protestors outside, and big booths showing off Google Earth/Sketchup software and MacKiev's cool satellite weather application. I did learn that the way to measure the purity of the silicone in your iPod cover is to stretch the plasticky material. If it's clear, as pictured here, good news. If it's milky, clouded with white, then yuck. However, although there aren't any phthalates in silicone, it stays in the ground forever once you toss it.

On another note, Apple's ad campaign for its latest invention is ripping off Christian billboards circa 1999. Can God sue?

Look at my footage below: the oglers at Macworld are venerating the new iPhone as if tears and blood were streaming from its Magic Touch screen, imparting a telepathic message of eternal life and everlasting forgiveness. Instead, the gadget comes with a mortal battery, it demands a contract with a devilish telecom, and nobody's even touched it. Get real, people. It's a phone...oh yeah, and a music player and an "breakthrough Internet communications device." It can't feed or clothe you or detoxify your drinking water. Before I leave this earth, maybe I'll see a crowd like this one oohing and ahhing and elbowing over some new invention that actually helps people and the planet.

Maybe I'm forgetting that Apple's inventions just might usher in world peace! After all, as singer John Mayer said after Steve Jobs' keynote address--in the greatest WTF?! moment of Macworld (apart from the media's frenzied stampede up the escalators): "You know, Steve Jobs and Apple are making life more fun. It's the exact opposite of terrorism." Golly.

Give me your tired, poisonous electronics

Back in October, I trekked to Burlington, VT, for an annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists. Plus, one of my bestest friends, Amani, lives within a two-minute jog of the conference center, so I got to hang out with him. Lo and behold, I even ran into Nicole from high school as she spoke about green labeling on products and foodstuffs.

Arguments and emotions were intense in more than one conference discussion, especially those about nuclear power, climate change, and government secrecy. I'd have so much more to show (such as the hydrogen car fueling station) and tell if I'd remembered to bring my camera battery charger. Luckily, though, plenty of journalists did what comes naturally, so you can listen to MP3s of the heated debates and check out slide shows here.

At least I typed up some notes about the well-attended panel on toxic trash. You can blame Moore's Law for chips doubling in power and dropping in price every two years or so, feeding the mad cycle of obsolescence in consumer electronics. Want a phone with a video camera? You'll probably throw away last season's model that only took still pictures. Some 4,000 tons of gadgets and appliances get tossed each hour around the world.

''We're going through the largest industrial expansion in the history of the world,'' said Ted Smith, former executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.

Lately, however, big stories are piquing the public's interest in electronics waste. For instance, IBM electronics factory workers suffer high rates of cancer. We hear about iPod maker FoxConn's labor rights violations. The SVTC's Toxic Sweatshops report shows how prison labor is used to make shiny, new digital toys.

''It's not a good guys versus bad guys kind of issue," says High Tech Trash author Elizabeth "Lizzie" Grossman, whose book took an axe and gave the electronics industry so many whacks.

The Electronics Industry Alliance's Richard Goss agreed. "There's no desire by industry to use mercury or lead," he said, adding that the alternatives are dubious both in terms of practicality and safety. For instance, what if we learn later, after phasing out lead solder, that the substitute solder falls apart and millions of products need to be recalled? Wouldn't that be a bigger disaster than simply managing and recycling the known toxicants responsibly?

Goss noted that even while Europe bans heavy metals and brominated flame retardants from electronics, there are many exemptions. Flat screen monitors like the one that might be in your lap are allowed to contain 5 milligrams of lead. But that's far better than the four to 6 pounds of lead in boxy CRT monitors that were necessary to shield us from radiation back in the day. Plus, LCD monitors use 10 times less energy than cathode ray tube boxes.

Plastics containing DECA, a brominated flame retardant, are also exempt from Europe's ROHS rules, although manufacturers are phasing out this endocrine disruptor. But little is known about the ingredients in these plastics because NO epidemiological studies exist about BFRS, said Kellyn Betts, an editor at Environmental Science and Technology.

"This is one of the hottest research areas that we write about," she said.

Europe banned BFRs Deca, Penta and Octa. But because the United States and Canada have such high fire safety standards, BFRS and PBDES are 10 times more common in the bodies of North Americans than in people in the rest of the world. Omnipresent, these substances travel in dust, leaking from our supposedly sealed personal computers, televisions, and so much more.

"'They're everywhere,"' Betts said--probably in the cushions you sit on, the carpet underfoot, the drapes you toss open when you rise from the flame-retardant-soaked mattress on which you sleep. And these poisonous flame retardants wind up in our tissues and breast milk.

Next year China will introduce a good housekeeping seal on the bottom of all iPods, cell phones, TVs and all such electronics big and small, with a date stamp spelling when the safety of chemicals contained therein might start to seep outward, said Mark Schapiro of the Center for Investigative Reporting during another panel. He's working on a book to detail that and much more about how the U.S. is no longer the standard bearer for environmental, chemical, product safety (although Californians are fighting the powers that be, as usual).

The European Union and China are going much further to take precautions to protect people and ecosystems from potential hazards. Their new laws will change global industries, so we'll see the effects trickling down, but still the lower standards Stateside could mean more poisonous products for Americans. Just as China is shipping formaldehyde-laced lumber banned there to our shores, so we'll probably see an influx of junky, expired electronics shipped here, oozing chemicals that can cause cancer and monkey with our reproductive systems.

Gambling on a green future

Eyeing a sustainable future and willing to bet on it? If green mutual funds aren't slow enough for you, then dig up $200 and place a Long Bet. This project of the Long Now Foundation, makers of the 10,000 year clock, lets you gamble online with noted geniuses and famous futurists.

On the dim side, today's featured wager, placed by knighted astrophysicist Martin Rees, foresees that one event of bioterror or bioerror (rising "from inadvertance rather than evil intent") will wipe out a million souls by 2020. So far the odds are 50/50--the same odds Rees gives our species for lasting another century.

Other predictions are on the brighter side: Also within 14 years, could solar energy be as cheap as fossil fuels? Will the average household keep a room to make a self-sustaining water supply? Will we make huge strides toward clean energy within a decade? And when will people stop denying global warming? To add your wager to the public debate, just don't expect to get your money back; all proceeds will go to charity.

On the Maker Faire

The Maker Faire was a like a 4H show where the majority of people held masters degrees and the only pork was at the BBQ stand. No better time than Earth Day for the first Do-It-Yourself fest put on by O'Reilly's Make Magazine. At least a third of the exhibits dealt outright with green technology--converting a VW to veggie oil, building a backyard wind-powered generator, knitting with bamboo fiber, and the like. But really, the whole shebang was about sustainability--feeding that particular, mad strain of the American psyche that prefers tinkering, hacking, and modding over consuming things as they come.

The crowd was equal parts San Francisco and Silicon Valley--cultural creatives and super-empowered dorks, childlike adults and adult-like kids. People were pretty much passionate about everything open source, yet laid-back. And of course there were dweebs. The single, long line to get in early Saturday afternoon showed a larger than anticipated turnout. Two men behind me agreed.

A: I’m surprised these guys get their girlfriends to come, the ones that have girlfriends.
B: We went to the Home & Garden Show, the one where you can bring your wives.
A: One thing I won’t be going to is a cat show.
B: Just because cats don’t give a shit.
A: A dog show’s bad enough.

The fairly-balanced gender ratio didn't surprise me. How many other mixers bring together women who write software to print 4D steel paperweights with guys who stitch 'n bitch?

The pair behind me continued to blather about the idiocy of having only one ticket booth there (though at another recent, worse-organized outdoor event a "stupid" woman at the counter couldn’t multitask between two queues). A. mentioned a female friend who hunts for meteorites in the Arctic ice ("You drive and then you actually see them because it’s just ice and you see rock, what else is it?"). Then he brought up Stirling engines, reminisced about crouching below railroad trestles as a kid to feel trains thrash by inches overhead (not as stupid as seeing how close to the train you can be, he defended himself). That reminded B. of riding trains between Nepalese and Indian border towns as a child and how "the poor people" waited alongside the tracks to collect a basket’s worth of coal by the day’s end. Both fussed about how fussy women are at meals.

 Near the front of the line, an imperious little boy, 8ish, ordered the green column from which he swung, "Get off my kingdom." What kind of maker (or taker) he’ll grow up to become is anyone’s guess, but I bet I enjoy more free time than he does already.

Not a moment too soon, we entered the gates of the San Mateo County Expo Center. First action spotted: middle-aged geeks gliding along the lawn in a game of Segway Polo (I guess this one’s Mr. Apple Steve Wozniak).

Most of the exhibitors' projects have been shown off in Make's pages--ordinary geniuses including unemployed college students, house husbands, and single-moms with several jobs:

  Hand-crank computer historians, steampunk robot engineers, birders, felters, screen- and Gocco-printers, free radio renegades, stencil artists, 1820s time travelers, IKEA shopping cart chairmakers (left), rotary cell phone talkers, makers of mini-blimps whose personalities mimic whales, spud gun power shooters, biodiesel and hybrid and electric engine modders, knitters, a backyard monorail rider, door-unlocking subcutaneous RFID chip self-implanters, surfriders, designers of precision-perfect hardwood puzzles, multicolor LED lamp inventors, fair use freaks, thimble musicians, hydroponics planters, clothes swappers, stop-motion animators. And of course, a faire couldn't earn its "e" without some Medieval element (right).

The point was to make, not just take it in. And people were just jumping in, whatever they could get their hands on. You could bring old gadgets for recycling, or tote old clothes for the Bizarre Bazaar  and Swap-o-Rama-Rama. Hack your remote control’s infrared to turn on the lights in the room rather than the TV. Play with a robot giraffe or turn your body shape into a constellation of stars on the wall. Spin the LED- or circuit-board-encrusted wheels of your bike. We first stopped at a table where you could craft a solar-powered insect to crawl.

The few commercial areas featured small businesses, some quirky like MyPacifiers, which are labeled with your baby’s name so you won’t stick the sucker in the wrong pucker. Santa Rosa’s electric car and bike company, ZAP, is starting to market portable electric gadget chargers that power iPods, laptops, and camcorders on the go. Each is named after a noted river, like the Mississippi (is the threat of flooding the selling point?). Next month the company will sell a thin-film solar-powered backpack to rival the Juice Bag.

Only afterwards did I hear people refer to the fair in any jaded and blasé way. If you read too much about tech, you probably didn’t spot anything mind-shattering or new there, but that didn’t even matter.

How could I resist feeling a personal sense of awe: that it’s been years since I’ve haven't felt any elbowed annoyance, any sense of collective cultural disappointment, any horror at resigning to mediocrity, claustrophobia, or pandering, in such a big crowd of people? This hive hums well.

Find more pictures here and here and here. technorati tags: maker faire earth day recycling DIY

Media get greener

Was that signature chartreuse hue emanating from the eerie walls of Prada stores a Gilded 90's warning of the haute greenness set to overwhelm popular culture? Mass marketing and media outlets are glowing green, striving for a rosy ecological outlook. Even Superbowl ads were "super green" this year. Is this cooling trend sustainable, or another bubble set to culture-pop?

Working behind the scenes in Hollywood, the Environmental Media Association gets star power to spotlight ecological issues. You'll soon see green beaming from checkout lines when Vanity Fair focuses on sustainability (and shoots green bloggers) for Earth Day, and a recycled-paper Elle features ecologically correct products when its May issue hits the stands in April. 

As for the paperless world, if you associate Steve Case only with the lame, CD-wasting AOL.com, you might rub your eyes at  his Revolution venture, which declares, "Change will come, and we aim to accelerate it." Revolution is behind the Lime network, a window to a green world on the web, TV, and radio.  The website features terrific wordsmiths like Amanda Griscom Little. Sirius satellite plays Lime content on radio channel 114, such as Danny Seo's "Simply Green," Josh Dorfman's "Lazy Environmentalist", and a plethora of self-helpy shows involving psychic/angel/miracle elements.

Efforts to make the idiot box less moronic include Lime content via the Dish network, such as the "Orgasmic Organic" cooking show and documentaries including "The Next Industrial Revolution." Then there's the monthly "Sierra Club Chronicles" on progressive satellite Link TV. Dish TV features Current TV, Al Gore's hard-to-locate DIY network offering some green content, as Sustainablog explains. "Building Green," a "This Old House" for the global warming century, is coming to PBS this summer. Canadians are getting the Code Green reality show this spring, following 12 homeowners racing to spend $15,000 each to reduce their use of energy and natural resources. Mr. "Super Size Me" Morgan Spurlock tried living off the grid on FX's "30 Days," which is gearing up for its second season. Alas, as Exuberant Pantaphobia points out, a producer behind many ecological shows on the Discovery Channel is leaving, and as far as I can tell, the BBC green makeover show "No Waste Like Home," loved by City Hippy, doesn't have another season.

Update, 3/6: As for truly grassroots media, don't forget the Internet. Treehugger TV just debuted on Google Video and Youtube. You can use these and other sites to seek and find oodles of eco-related shorts, shows, and home movies. Google Video has way more content with the keywords such as "environment" or "recycling" than "offroading" or "nuclear," but guess where the action is?

On the big screen, Sundance featured "Who Killed the Electric Car?" and Al Gore's global warming opus, "An Inconvenient Truth." Check out more than two dozen movies, most traditional nature documentaries, at the DC Environmental Film Festival next month. Santa Monica hosts the Inspiration Film Festival in Santa Monica in April.  What new green media things am I missing?

Zaadz' seeds of green social networking

It's embarrassing that I joined Friendster years ago in a morbid bout of "where-are-they-now" curiosity, yet I was too square for the now-unkinky Tribe and I proudly raise my cane about skipping MySpace and Facebook. (Ha! it's also embarrassing that I misspelled "embarassing" for half the year in this post.) Ah, youngsters. Any term ending in "-ster" clogs my large intestine. Nevertheless, curious again, I'm outing myself for having signed up at Zaadz, a social networking site for cultural creatives, after a nice reader pointed it out. The profiles of 1,453 active "Zaadsters" each list two astrological signs--hence many stargazers/yogis/techies /Reiki-people/Burning Man devotees with interests that include green building, evolution, and felting. One guy describes himself as "a love light Padawan;" one woman calls herself a "psychoactive bodhisattva." Get it?

Will Zaddz' mission to fuse capitalism with world-changing attract swarms of green people? Zaadz is marked by an absence of cynicism, so even its form buttons are polite (right), but users such as this one gripe about censorship. To join, you must agree to either respect the "sacred space" or leave it. Hm. The site's only in private beta (testing) mode, so expect quirks. Tagging and other web 2.0 plans are in the works, as are hopes for Zaadz-branded spas and books. For now, you can peek at people and search a bank of quotes by some of "the world's greatest thinkers (59 of the 60 most-quoted are male)."

Ditch your batteries: fuel cells are here at CES 2006

CES 2006 may be shorter on green tech than I expected, though there's good buzz here about fuel cells. For example, the little Medis fuel cell can charge an iPod to play for 60 hours, or a cell phone for 30 hours of talking time. It's expected to cost $20 and hit stores this year. Among other emerging fuel cell tech at CES: a Panasonic laptop. But you can't take it with you on flights.

The fuel cell tech I spent the most time with is the costliest one. Did you ever wonder how TV news crews could get any work done in Iraq war zones, during Hurricane Katrina, or in the midst of other disasters where electricity's out of sight? Jadoo Power wants your mind turn to its portable fuel cell system. Its $2,500 kit can charge a professional camera, laptop, or emergency radio without using the hazardous chemicals or e-waste of old school batteries. (See its guts at left with the case off, and below right with the case on.)

Carnival of the Green #5

Cheers to Great Green Goods for last week’s recap of the highlights in the green blogosphere. This fifth Carnival of the Green--a roving weekly display of what's on the minds of green bloggers--started with a bang. Francois, aka the Radical Libertarian, submitted his "top 10 list of signs you are a Greenie." Noted among his "top 4 activities of greenies" was: "Having sex and making children... while believing that human activity is inherently harmful. Perhaps they think it's okay as long as you can brainwash your children to become "caring" Greenies like they are." (Not what green bloggers such as Common Ground have in mind when we talk about making sustainability sexy.)

Triple Pundit fired back with this message for the Radical Libertarian: "Although amusing, these complaints expose a woefully outdated way of looking at "environmentalism" that is held by those who choose to see extremists as representative of the entire movement, and possibly mask their own concern for wellbeing with an aloof front." Thanks to Nick for taking the words out of my mouth.

Speaking of gratitude, George at Dirty Greek lost sleep cooking for 24 hours but relished his organic Thanksgiving meal. The morning after, many green bloggers rolled out of bed with the intention to observe Buy Nothing Day rather than race to the mall for the busiest shopping day of the year.

Others geared up for holiday gift giving by looking at greener ways to shop.

• Green LA Girl urged us to "Fuck Amazon—Buy Local!" and cited a study finding that “local stores returned $68 for every $100 to the local economy, while chain stores returned only $43 of $100."
• City Hippy spotlighted green shopping at a discount.
• Greenthinkers posted a fun gift idea guide.
• Dee's Dotes put up an evolving list of "out of the norm holiday gift giving ideas that are more friendly to our planet."
• Great Green Goods picked out ways to wrap presents without wasting paper.
• Urban Eco came up with a handy Eco-Electronic Buying Guide.

The gadget on my gift wish lift? The battery-free Pedalite bike light found by Unplugged Living. For a faster, green two-wheeler, check out plans by Micah Glasser of Event Horizon to build an electric motorcycle with the chassis of a Suzuki GS500E.

If you celebrate Christmas but don't want to breathe in pesticides along with the aromatherapeutic pine when you bring home a tree, check out the Blue Voice's guide to organic tree shopping in "How Toxic Are Thy Branches?" And don't leave wildlife out in the cold this winter; TreehuggerMum provided parent-friendly tips on feeding backyard birds in chilly climes and times.

Catch up on news you may have missed at Groovy Green, which summarized "This Green Week in U.S. Politics." Look for Carnival of the Green #6 at Jen's Green Journal next Monday. Find out more about the carnival through its founders, City Hippy and Triple Pundit.