The social institutions we have today are largely inadequate for solving our problems. Rather than focusing in problem solving, I would like to recommend we shift our focus to problem setting - the way in which we go about determining what the issues are and how to explore what the solutions should be. [...]

Grist’s David Roberts has posted an excerpt from an interview with Dr. Hermann Scheer, a leading advocate for renewable energy. (New Scientist conducted the interview, but requires a subscription to access the full interview.) Dr. Scheer is a physicist, member of the German parliament, and General Chairman of the World Council for Renewable Energy.
In [...]

The role of community has perhaps been most glaringly absent in recent years in the realm of political organizing.  Many of us grew up experiencing politics as a solitary confessional in the ballot box every few years (if we voted at all).  The internet has helped change this, exemplified in the email sharing behind MoveOn.org’s [...]

Recently, the NBC station in San Francisco briefly mentioned an intriguing new organization called Carrotmob and showed a clip that appeared to be from the video below. What makes Carrotmob so intriguing is its community-based approach to promoting environmentally responsible actions by businesses. As the video below demonstrates, it does this by building a network [...]

One thing that makes change difficult is the challenge of thinking about something new. It is much easier to imagine things we’ve seen before. This is where new visualization tools like Walk Score come in.
They allow us to see things in a different way.

Technorati Tags: green living, urban design

On Sunday, I had the good fortune of seeing a documentary called A Convenient Truth: Urban Solutions from Curitiba, Brazil, which was released in 2007. It was shown as part of a film and discussion series entitled Positive Films for a Positive Future at the public library in Albany, California, which I find to [...]

Treehugger Radio has a great new podcast of an interview with Dr. Wangari Maathai (right), who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her leadership of an unprecedented international tree-planting effort that has changed many lives and strengthened communities in the course of its work.
After explaining some essential services that trees provide (controlling rainfall, [...]

Wealth is about more than the size of your pocketbook. A better measure might be the size of your address book. Better still, the depth of bonds shared among the people listed there.
Our pop culture media is filled with imagery of wealth in the form of material stuff - the latest gadgets, a [...]

This week, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) launched a new website called McCainpedia to amass and distribute information for its campaign against Senator John McCain. The site is likely to find a measure of success in providing material about McCain’s record to sympathetic bloggers and to journalists looking for what is literally the “party [...]

Last night I attended a panel discussion on environmental justice at the Berkeley Public Library. One of the speakers on the panel was Timothy Burroughs, Climate Action Advisor for the City of Berkeley. He has the exciting job of getting the city’s mandate to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (to an aggressive target of [...]