Continue the journey

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Bookmarked: Thomas Friedman

The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman has been the book to define the current American society in which the realities of globalization, terrorism and the slow fall of the US have arisen. Packed with insight, realism and fragile hopefulness, it has given a name, problem and solution to the things the US faces as a nation.

Because of the power behind his words and impeccable instinct, I am excited about his new direction: Green. This New York Times piece of his has been making rounds and hints at things to come from Friedman. It is long and has a lot of information, but all of it is important and he writes in a manner that I believe everyone can enjoy and appreciate. Bookmark this, because we will be reading this in the future, either in happiness or sadness at the accuracy of Friedman's vision.

Reaching Out

Have any of you started something good or know someone who has? An organization, club, event or anything? I'd love to hear about the experience and what you learned. If you're interested in an interview or to write something up, get in touch with me and we'll work something out.

I got a few ideas for posts, so I hopefully have more unique content soon. Lastly, feel free to share any comments/criticism/ideas with me too. Thanks to everyone for checking us out!

Sustainable Sun

I did an article at EcoGeek about Sun Microsystems and Dave Douglas, their resident VP of eco-responsibility said:

[T]his is just good business. "Energy responsibility is about to become a society-wide business imperative," he says. "All my projects have measurable business benefit. You might say the 'eco' in my title is for economics as well as ecology."

Sustainable business really is Good business.

Read it here (CNN Money)

Taking Control

Mahatma Ghandi once said, "you must be the change you want to see in the world." I only took notice of this quote because the project director at my work always had it tagged to the end of her emails. Despite its direct simplicity, this sweet and uncomplicated phrase resonated with me; its significance heightened by corresponding to a prevalent theme in my personal relationship with Mr. W.

When I met W, I was at most a conflicted, confused and emotionally taut person. My fragile brink of tearful oblivion could be at any time tipped over and sent crashing. This hanging balance kept me from doing many things that I wanted to do, but most importantly that needed to be done. When overwrought with mental distress, we let things fester and accumulate from fear--fear of confrontation, and fear of unpredictability.

W is an inspiration. He encouraged me to regain control and take responsibility for the state of my existence. And from there, I learned to do things in order to make life happen, from sending in applications and filing taxes to aspects of grander proportions.

So with this inelaborate philosophy in hand, small changes are only the beginning of my conquest. There are many things wrong in this world, but I learned that dishes don't wash themselves. Therefore when we don't like something, the only thing we can do is to change it.

My first steps of change involve a ticket to Cambodia, a small digital camcorder, and a research design for truth, and the untold stories--the things that never get heard from the people drowned in contemporary social jabber. The further we get away from a forgotten era, the harder it will be to remember it. The longer we wait, the more people age and die off with these stories--stories that, I believe, would offer great insight into the fine line between life and death; hope and despair--stories that people would never hear otherwise--stories that come from the survivors themselves.

I am planning on entering a "First Citizen Journalism Contest" sponsored by an upcoming independent media source. Albeit I have no real journalist experience, I do have something that needs to be said, heard and contemplated. I want to offer explainations, and promote discussion and awareness. I want to show why things are the way they are, how it happened and why it is important to never forget.

I want to make a difference; I want to be the change that I want to see in the world.

Details/progress update pending.

My First Rally – Step It Up 2007 (Seattle, WA)

Continuing my journey to become a force of change, I attended Step It Up 2007 and it was a great success. News coverage of the event estimated over 1,300 people showed up for the march from Occidental Park to Myrtle Edwards Park. The purpose of the event was to get congress to cut carbon emissions by 80% by 2050. This number is commonly lauded as the amount needed for us to stabilize where we are now with the climate crisis and seen as a reachable goal with less than 2% reductions every year needed.

The numbers can be debated but consensus on the problem of climate change has become nearly unanimous and that could be seen by the support for the rally last Saturday. I met up with fellow UW students in Red Square, and after taking a group photo, we all bussed down to Occidental Park to meet up with the main Seattle cause. Reaching our stop, we walked down to the park, passing rows and rows of Seattle PD and their motorcycles, awaiting to escort us. From afar, I saw a large crowd already there and the energy already was palpable. The view comforted me, with a large cross section of Seattle all coming together to march for the planet. It reminded me of Green Drinks, feeling not so much at home, as at ease and proud of the people I live near.

Music, along with signs, filled the air, building up the level of excitement as the time to begin the walk neared. Eventually, volunteers gathered around and started directing us to the march. A row of children led the procession, carrying a sign with our cry, "Step It Up Congress, Cut Carbon 80% by 2050." The march was lively, despite Seattle rain, with various chants and cheers keeping the beat of the cause as we walked along against the piers on Elliot. A few people on the sidelines held signs and shouted support; a special toddler held a sign reading "I hope I can snowboard when I grow up."

A group at Myrtles Edwards Park welcomed us warmly with an audience of applause on our arrival to the solutions fair. A brave person stood in the cold water, dressed as a polar bear and reminding us of what might happen in the future (bringing many smiles too though). Various organizations set up tents and tables with information on their green contributions and educating park goers on their activities. Electric and biodiesel transportation populated the fair, and it was nice to see up close the kinds of alternative transportation being made. Everything from the vegetable oil powered trucks to 100 mpg cars were on display. Other green organizations, from The Sightline Institute to Patagonia to Grist participated in the event also.

CFLs, the twisty lightbulbs of choice today, were handed out and a photo captured a group of us holding them up proudly under the now shining sun. The weather clearing up after the long march, a reward for those that made the trek. Afterwards, I left for home, unfortunately missing out on the speakers lined up for the rally, including Ron Sims, Jay Inslee, and Greg Nickels, among others. The important thing is that the local government is supporting the event though.

Overall, I felt that the day was successful, not just for me, but for the green movement in general. Hopefully events like these will propel the importance of our planet forward and help build the momentum needed to get people and the government to change. At this point though, I am already excited to see what is next.

See more reports of the Seattle event.

A Quote

The heart has its reason which reason does not know.
-Blaise Pascal

Photo credit: rude girl ♥ rsm via FlickR

Conan O'Brien's 2000 Commencement Speech

Conan O'Brien, my favorite late night host, gave a hilarious and inspiring commencement speech at his alum, Harvard, in 2000. This made rounds when it was first done in 2000 and for good reason it is resurfacing again because even reading it over for the second time it still is entertaining and inspiring. It's a long read, but trust me, it's worth it.

Tags

Hello readers! In case you have not noticed, I am tagging anything that I am personally doing with Start Good. I hope the tag grows into a "section" of sorts that you can look for inspiration to push you to Start Good based on my own experiences. I hope my fellow and future writers will make use of the tag to share their experiences of spreading good. Also look for other tags of anything else you are interested. Eventually every tag should have a good amount of news related to it, allowing you to find what you need, quickly!

We may be moving to a more permanent, paid-hosting location soon, but I'm still not sure if I want to do that. Keep a look out here for more though!

Green Drinks

Energy and enthusiasm sum up Green Drinks. I have never felt so good about the people around me. It is a bit odd, but I really have not talked to anyone passionate about the environment face to face other than with a professor I had almost 2 years ago. Joining EcoGeek opened up a new world to me and was a huge boon to my green motivation. This did the same but was on a different level. Being around green conscious Seattle-ites just felt right.

Although I still went through my (unfortunately) regular shyness phase, I had a lot of great conversations with some very interesting people. I met a woman who started an organization called DenCity Research to provide green housing to Iraq veterans. The idea came up from an epiphany she had that many Iraq vets come back with a passion for reducing dependence on foreign oil and also many return homeless. I also met a college student promoting Kale as a food (Eat Your Kale) via T-Shirts, a green architect, a software engineer that was looking to move from corporate to green and a chocolatier.

Ahh chocolate. Autumn, the woman I spoke with, really wanted me to blog on EcoGeek about the company she works for but I have yet to think of a way to make it fit with our audience, but hopefully a small shoutout at my humble startup will suffice for now. The company, Theo Chocolate, is the only organic and fair trade chocolate producer in the United States. Impressive, huh? There has been a lot of controversy about cacao beans, the fruit seeds that are the source of chocolate, since often they are harvested with child (slave) labor. Anyway, they sell all across the US and online also. She mentioned that they give many tours, with free samples, so I think I'm going to schedule an excursion with some friends to check it out.

Well, Start Good Mission: Green Drinks went well. I hope it only gets better!

Photo Credit: Gillo via Flickr

Green Drinks

My journey towards starting good starts with this blog, but also in my community. This weekend I am going to join Step It Up, as mentioned below and then today I am going to my first Green Drinks. Green Drinks is a casual, group of people that meet once every month to connect with other people in the green industry. The website describes it much better than I can, especially without having gone!

Green Drinks International

Every month people who work in the environmental field meet up for a beer at informal sessions known as Green Drinks.

We have a lively mixture of people from NGOs, academia, government and business. Come along and you'll be made welcome. Just say, "are you green?" and we will look after you and introduce you to whoever is there.It's a great way of catching up with people you know and also for making new contacts. Everyone invites someone else along, so there’s always a different crowd, making Green Drinks an organic, self-organising network.

These events are very simple and unstructured, but many people have found employment, made friends, developed new ideas, done deals and had moments of serendipity. It's a force for the good and we'd like to help it spread to other cities. Contact your local node to get the latest info about coming along.

You can also email edwin [at] greendrinks [dot] org if you want some tips on how to set up Green Drinks in your City.

The one in Seattle is at 6:00PM at 5th and Madison, a new building that was created with sustainability and efficiency in mind. I'm a bit warry because I'm timid around strangers but it should be a good experience regardless.

With Step It Up, I hope I can gain some insight on the pulse of Seattle and climate change this week. Also, I think it will be interesting as I am using Facebook as a tool to get people to go to Step It Up this weekend, we'll see how successful I am with it. My results will be posted here after the event, along with a review and critique of Greendrinks and a critique of myself!

Random Good

Inside the Monkeysphere
An interesting look into how we, as humans, think and view the world and others. The site uses monkeys to make learning about the limitations of human understanding a little more fun. Although it is "fun", the implications of what is being said is enormous. Unfortunately, we are predisposed to being closed-minded and it takes conscious effort to not succumb to that.

Timebucks
Timebucks is a unique business that hopes to capitalize on people's skills and services they need by providing a way to trade services. Using "time-bucks" as funds, people earn "time-bucks" by either purchasing them or by providing services to others. "Time-bucks" can also be bought for $1 a unit, with a standardized pricing of 15 "time-bucks" for all services. So why is this good? Because the motivation is to help others, instead of profit from them. Think social capital instead of monetary capital. Also the "time-bucks" can be donated to non-profit organizations and a small amount is used to keep themselves sustained.

Step It Up
April 14th is going to be a big day for climate change as many prepare to rally in various communities. The message this year is "Step it up, Congress! Cut Carbon 80% by 2050!" The site helps individuals to organize and plan their own events and has sign-ups for others to join in. I expect a pretty big showing this year across the country since the build-up over climate change has been rising dramatically, especially with Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth getting so much media coverage.

What Start Good Means to Me

It's undeniable. The internet has revolutionized human existence, and with it, somewhere thirteen years ago in a small corner of the universe, I was clicking through my 56.6 k portal to "the world." My, how things have changed. As the internet transformed and evolved, so did I. Like many things in life, the web is what you make it. For me, it unknowingly gave me a voice that people actually listened to, and an identity amongst the masses. It started with a humble little thing called Xanga. A friend introduced it to me my junior year of high school and I ended up leaving it pretty much dormant for the first two years. Suddenly, I was a freshman in college and I realized it was the only thing that could alleviate the pressures of class, work and social life. It became a hobby, a stress reliever and a companion during some of the hardest times in my life.

Initially, xanga was a rhetorical dump of my daily habits and occurrences, but I didn't feel satisfied just regurgitating the events of my day. Over the next two or three years, I transitioned my online "agenda" into obvservations, opinions, critiques and general life lessons that I was able to filter through my daily routines. Miraculously, people read, people paid attention, but most importantly, people listened and identified.

And this was when I knew there was something more to blogging than dear-diary's. If my small speck of the web was able to generate a handful of loyal readership, imagine the possibilities of something more structured, independent, and on a grander scale. My greatest driving force behind xanga was the desire to plant seeds of thought and change in people's heads. As a student of mass media, I found that the more I learned about my concentration, the more I became pessimistic about society at large--and the more I felt that there needed to be a change--change in thought, cultural perception, values and beliefs. You could say I want to change the world. I'm not going to lie, I do.

So what does Start Good mean to me? It means an online space for people to learn and share from one another, all with the goal of making society a better place. A place that transforms ignorance into knowledge, that brings awareness for the world around us, something that shows there is more to life than all-about-me. I hope that Start Good becomes an environment that facilitates respect and appreciation not only for our individual selves, but for the people we often overlook, or don't care to look at.

Everyone has a story. And every story has a lesson to be learnt.