Capitol Green Girls

I wanted to plug a fellow blog site that's help making the world a safer place for Green.

Capitol Green Girls is a blog about Conservation meeting Commerce. The authors have a particular insight into the ENGO community, environmental businesses and environmental legislative developments in Washington, DC. CGG also serves to unveil greenwashing in our fair city of Washington and its environs. Greenwashers discredit those trying to make real progress towards long term sustainability, and as a result, undermine the health of the planet.

Consider subscribing to Capitol Green Girls.

Thinking about Ecological Integration - Fungi

Consider the fungus. 

Fungi are the natural world's ultimate recyclers - returning the energy and resources trapped in waste and death back into the ecosystem.  The fact that they can even decontaminate brown fields (i.e. parcels of property contaminated with poisonous or toxic waste), makes them something of a meme-model for ecological regeneration.  Recycling waste (material, water, etc.), restoring and renovating under-performing buildings and even downcycling all grow (no pun intended) out of this meme.

Moving humanity and our economic systems out of an ecologically dislocated state, and back into an ecologically integrated state, requires us understanding this sort of meme model.  Why?  Because if you want to play the game well, you need to understand the rules first.  Our current way of living is massively inefficient and ineffective at transforming potential energy into realized outcomes.  We constantly fight uphill to accomplish what we want, and leave piles of detritus in our wake: detritus we rapidly disown and remove from human ecosystem.  If we want to do things better (even do them sustainably) and are looking for a role model, looking to Nature is the place to find it.  Our socio-economic systems are only a few thousand years old, the planetary ecosystem is several billion.

Do you think that perhaps the later might have had more time to work out the kinks?  Hmmm.

The fungi meme-model invites us to look at every item of waste as a new potential opportunity.  Our grandparents chide us for the things we so callously discard, instead of repairing or finding new uses for.  Their justification is frugality, but the outcome is still particularly fungal.  They minimized waste in their lives, and ensured that things that left their own material ecosystem had been broken down to the greatest point possible.  Building upon that, if we ensure that everything that leaves our lives does so at the termination of its effectiveness to us, and transitions into its appropriate economic/ecologic niche for renewal (like a recycling facility), we become more intentionally ecologically integrated - and therefore much more effective organisms.

Equilibrium Nova Podast #1!

Equilibrium Nova Podcasts

For your listening pleasure. A discussion about the Unsustainability of Post-Newtonian culture, on an Einsteinian planet that isn't a giant, logical, controllable machine.

Reflections on the Green Innovation in Business Unconference May 27, 2010 – Washington, DC

Having recovered from putting in my eleven hours at GIBU on Thursday (yes, 8AM – 7PM thank you), I wanted to offer some reflections on what came out of it.

For those not in the know, the GIBU is an amazing workshop that travels to multiple cities throughout the US which allows participants to discuss sustainability issues that are relevant to them and work collaboratively towards their solutions. This was year two for GIBU, and for me (which qualified me as a wily veteran, I suppose). I frankly favored the format this year over last years – primarily because we were given the expectation of a final product at the end of the day which helped drive fruitful, goal-oriented discussions.

(what’s an unconference?)

As a brainchild of the Ashoka Foundation and EDF, the focus of the workshops is on innovative solutions to real challenges. I spent my day facilitating a discussion on Sustainable Education (which should come as no surprise, really). What was particularly interesting is that it evolved from a high-level focus on training at all educational levels (from kindergarten to professional) into a project designed to radically reinvent public education at the K-12 level. The idea that came out was a “School without Boundaries” – a learning lab that would teach environmental science, Green practices, local farming, energy system maintenance in addition to the core curriculum of math, English and the like, but that required no school building.

Essentially a potentially mobile learning environment, localized within a community, that would inculcate the skills necessary for the students to effectively participate in a resource, energy and ecologically constrained 21st century. With a heavy emphasis on learning through service, students would help improve their own communities ecologically and economically. Furthermore, it would also equip the students with the necessary skills to actively compete in a global Green economy – which is particularly crucial when we realize that over 60% of all American students never receive a college degree. All in all, such a school is a hands-on, collaborative engine for the rapid dissemination of sustainably-oriented learning into society that would also make the communities in which it was embedded more sustainable.

I’d say that qualifies as an innovative solution to a real challenge.

The question that struck me was how to take such a model and apply it to a professional environment. Yes – it would be easy to dismiss such a notion as impossible, until you realize that in order for businesses to stay competitively sustainable in the 21st they must have methods to on-board near-continuous improvements in their ecological impact.

The business of staying-in-business is already highly dependent upon skill improvement and professional development – and the demands to adapt are quickening even for “traditional” skill sets. Add the critical need for sustainable or Green skills and knowledge, and business of staying-in-business will require a significant on-going commitment towards sustainability education; whether it’s bringing training in from outside the organization, or from the company-wide implementation of ideas developed internally. Human enterprise must make strong investments in its own survival in order to last during the difficult times of the 21st century. And in an Age of Information, levels of knowledge enterprise-wide will differentiate the fit from the also-rans.