CivicActions

Earlier this week I met Brent Schulkin at EcoTuesday who shared about his Carrotmob vision: organizing consumers (via Flash Mobs) to make massive group purchases at companies who make environmentally friendly choices.

After a bidding war between local businesses, K & D offered to use 22% of the day's gross profits to upgrade their store to be more environmentally-friendly and energy-efficient.

Below is a short video of today's action (sans after-party):

What's my connection to mountaintop removal? Quite intimate, as I learned from entering my zip code into ilovemountains.org. The site identified my local electricity company's participation in mountaintop removal in the Appalachian states—showing the specific mountains (I've?) destroyed, as well as testimonials and photos from coalfield residents. Is that the impact I want to make here on earth? Did I do that? ilovemountains' online campaign employs the following smart strategies:

• Brings grassroots organizations together to maximize impact (7 organizations from 5 Appalachian states collaborated on the campaign)
• Personally engages visitors to the site (by showing the far˜reaching impact of daily local actions)
• Provides content that supports the diversity of its users, contributes to coalition-building, and frames issues in new ways ("Go Tell it on the Mountain" is an interfaith page where users can contribute prayers; an online "National Memorial for the Mountains" uses Google Earth; users can absorb their preferred type of content—video, photo, written testimonials, interactive tools).
• Provides clear calls to action (support the Clean Water Protection Act by writing to congress)
• Increases visibility and media coverage with star power (Willie Nelson)
• Uses web tools to support and spread their message (YouTube, Google Earth, online pledges, "myconnection" tool)—note that this strategy supports the other strategies, it doesn't serve as an end in itself!

Help end mountaintop removal: support this important campaign!

Sign the petition demanding that political reporters ask the presidential candidates about climate change.

In my ongoing campaign to think and be carbon neutral, and spread the message far and wide, I asked the DrupalCon Boston organizers to post information about offsetting the carbon footprint associated with traveling to DrupalCon in March.

I hope that individuals and shops will consider purchasing offsets for their DrupalCon associated travel, as well as other travel.

As folks might know, I'm a bit of an eco-geek.  I've been talking about my carbon footprint for a few years now and can remember when it might cause someone's eyes to complete glaze over.  But then we learned about An Inconvenient Truth, a new island was discovered after part of Greenland's ice sheet melted, and Al Gore and the IPCC one the Nobel Prize.  We all know that th

ChangeTheMargins.com is a small campaign for small change that collectively could have a big impact.  The idea is to get people, manufacturers and even software companies to change the margins on the printed page.  Seems pretty simple right?!  We all forgo the generous standard 1.5 inch margin for a more economical .75 inch margin (i would say lets go to .6!).

I had a recent mishap involving a cup of tea and a keyboard. So i had to buy a new one. Thus began a bit of an odyssey then ended at the SaturdayHouse in SoDo with a big box and this video:

Last week, CivicActions launched a new website, SolveClimate.com. The site tracks solutions to climate change. Not little stuff like changing light bulbs, but the big solutions that will have immediate and measurable impact on the pollution causing climate change: green building codes, carbon caps, increased fuel economy. The premise of the project is that American's are really all in this together.

A few months ago I blogged about the Greenpeace KleerCut Campaign targeting Kimblery Clark (maker of Kleenex and other paper products that are made of old growth timber). Well, some Greenpeace activists struck again, this time in Chicago, keep up the good work!

The LCV is raising money to run two advertisements for the presidential race. The ads don't favor any particular candidate, rather aim to raise possibly the most important issue facing American's today: How will we change our country's policies to preserve the habitability of our planet for future generations.