ECO

By Nancy Scola

Inside each of the more than one million 3G iPhones sold so far, you'll find a lithium-ion battery. No big surprise there. But what's different here from early model iPhones is that the batteries are not soldered in place. That's good news. It means that when your iPhone has a dead battery, you can simply get a new battery, rather than sending the whole thing back to corporate HQ, or dumping it in the trash. And speaking of trash, there's more good news on that front: an unsoldered battery makes a phone easier and more economical to dissemble and recycle.

A quick project seen last month at the RCA Summer show. This one is by Design Products (platform 11) graduate and engineer Benjamin Males:

The Static Obesity Logging device, part of Target set of projects, can be installed almost anywhere. The casing of the innocent-looking device conceals a computer, digital and analogue inputs and outputs and a camera. The system is able to remotely calculate Body Mass Index and communicate the data via wired and wireless networks.

Growing up in West Texas, Larry Martin became well accustomed to the challenges of living off the land. Raised on a cotton farm outside the small town of Sweetwater, he recalls defending his family's crops from sandstorms after a hard rain. More often, he hoped the region's brutal droughts would not burn the cotton to death.

Cotton farming in West Texas is a constant battle against the elements. "In college, I saw a lot of farms were going broke," Martin said. "A lot of people work all their life and didn't have much to show for it."

Stewart Brand writes up Ed's talk thusly:

Photographer Edward Burtynsky made a formal proposal for a permanent art gallery in the chamber that encloses the 10,000-year Clock in its Nevada mountain. The gallery would consist of art in materials as durable as the alloy steel and jade of the Clock itself, and it would be curated slowly over the centuries to reflect changing interests in the rolling present and the accumulating past.
Photographs in particular should be in the 10,000-year Gallery, Burtynsky said, “because they tell us more than any previous medium. When we think of our own past, we tend to think in terms of family photos.”

There’s nothing like a meeting on the future of journalism to get you concerned about the future of journalism. While there are some brilliant and exciting ideas discussed at conferences like the Knight Foundation-sponsored meeting I attended yesterday, there’s also a very clear sense that some of the very basic questions surrounding the future of journalism remain unanswered. The biggest of those questions seems to be, “Who’s going to pay for it?” and I’ve not heard any very compelling new answers to the question lately.

The venerable High Country News -- one of the leaders in North American rural lands reporting for a couple decades now -- has a new website, designed by our friends at ONE Northwest, and it pretty much rocks. Go there and you'll learn some things about the big open.
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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Media at 9:11 AM)

News of hero reports caused a stir around the Worldchanging office yesterday. The creator, MIT doctoral candidate Alyssa Wright, hopes that her project can help build public confidence, raise property values in areas where goodwill is prevalent, and just plain improve the collective world view, by collecting and mapping citizens' reports of courageous acts performed by regular folks in New York City.

Wright says she was inspired by the See Something, Say Something campaign, New York Metro Transit's effort to inspire citizen vigilance in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001 (the campaign, officially titled the "Eyes of New York," first launched in 2003). As the Hero Reports site proclaims:

The Texas highway department says no.

I thought this was interesting.  The Texas highway department – Texas, no less! -- says that
roads simply don’t pay for themselves:

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation supports a huge range of journalistic programs, ranging from experimental efforts in community journalism to massive players in the media ecosystem like National Public Radio. 180 of their grantees are in Chicago today at a meeting hosted by Knight designed to build connections between grantees and encourage cross-fertilization of projects. (The Rising Voices project of Global Voices is supported by the Knight Foundation, which is why I’m here.)

By Carey King

Moving toward a sustainable, or renewable energy-based economy, stresses the views of how people value their time and exertion. Our system of economics puts value on products and services that allow people to spend less time and/or exertion while performing a task. This value system is exactly why fossil fuels have been the driving factor for increases in accumulation of material goods and leisure time over the course of the industrial revolution.

Should we add one more gas to the Kyoto list?

Time to head back into my pillow fort:

Nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) can be called the missing greenhouse gas: It is a synthetic chemical produced in industrial quantities; it is not included in the Kyoto basket of greenhouse gases or in national reporting under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC); and there are no observations documenting its atmospheric abundance...With 2008 production equivalent to 67 million metric tons of CO2, NF3 has a potential greenhouse impact larger than that of the industrialized nations' emissions of PFCs or SF6, or even that of the world's largest coal-fired power plants.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation supports a huge range of journalistic programs, ranging from experimental efforts in community journalism to massive players in the media ecosystem like National Public Radio. 180 of their grantees are in Chicago today at a meeting hosted by Knight designed to build connections between grantees and encourage cross-fertilization of projects. (The Rising Voices project of Global Voices is supported by the Knight Foundation, which is why I’m here.)

As we've mentioned, we are working on the upcoming launch of our new locally focused blog, Worldchanging Seattle.

Though we know you read Worldchanging from all around the globe, we think that local insights could add value to what you find on our main site. We'll be covering local and regional news, and also taking some of the topics we tackle on Worldchanging and discussing them on a local level, to see how these big-picture concepts apply at the city scale.

A few recent headlines from Worldchanging Seattle:

How-to: Eat Local

Check out this cool Lego wind turbine, for your budding bright green boy or girl!

via
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(Posted by Alex Steffen in at 9:04 AM)

Readers in San Francisco have the opportunity tomorrow to hear Worldchanging Chairman Ed Burtynsky deliver a Long Now Seminar. Ed will be talking about his ideas for long-term intergenerational communication through art:

There should be a gallery that collects, displays, and sifts such works over centuries and millennia, and develops ways to preserve them. That is exactly Burtynsky's plan--- a 10,000-year Gallery to accompany the 10,000-year Clock. His presentation will explore and demonstrate the idea.

I'd bet this is going to be a hell of an interesting talk.

By Janette Crawford

In late June, less than two months after we lamented its closing, clothing manufacturer Nau announced its re-birth. It had been purchased by a socially progressive outdoors clothier in Santa Barbara, Cal., called Horny Toad.

Two new reports offer useful tools for thinking about the future, both focused on the United States and both needed.

The first report, Analyses of the Effects of Global Change on Human Health, Settlements and Welfare comes out the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and details the ways in which climate change may exacerbate a number of problems we don't usually think of as environmental. Among their findings were these key impacts:

* Heat: Almost every part of the country will experience higher average temperatures, but the impacts of increased heat will be particularly acute in urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest and across many areas of the West. The rapidly aging U.S. population as well as children and the poor will be particularly vulnerable to health impacts, such as cardio-vascular and pulmonary disease as well as higher death rates.

Normally, I try to think in planetary terms and avoid parochial nationalism, so it's somewhat ironic that today a global perspective actually leads me to believe that what happens in America over the next 18 months is the most important global uncertainty we face. As we choose how to confront a host of planetary problems -- especially climate change -- will we have an America that leads or drags?

Al Gore stood up and showed what an America determined to lead would look like last week when he delivered a sharp speech calling for a bold policy -- the complete conversion of our electrical supply to renewable sources within ten years:

A quick note to anybody who's online today or checking their RSS feeds: if you've been meaning to take our survey, but haven't had a chance, now's the moment. We're cutting the survey off at 1,000 responses, and we're at 958 now.

We'd love to hear your ideas for improving the site, get your feedback about how you use the site, and learn a little about who you are and what you do. But if you want to participate, now is the time!

Click Here to take the survey

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in About Worldchanging at 11:17 AM)

One of the house projects we've been working on at home is replacing as much of our lawn with garden beds as makes sense. We do want a little bit of (unwatered, organic) lawn, for sitting, but we're planting most of our mid-sized urban lot in vegetables, herbs and bird-/butterfly-friendly flowers. We aren't talking the 100-yard diet, and we definitely have a ways to go before you could call our backyard a wildlife sanctuary, but just removing some the grass has already made us feel more comfortable in our home.

We're not alone. One of the biggest underground cultural shifts in North America is focused in some vague yet powerful ways on the question of sod. Big, perfectly smooth, green lawns have become for many of us, a symbol of unsustainability that rivals the SUV.

By Kathryn Cooper

Whether at the local, national or global level, the plan for a switch to renewable energy involves two crucial pieces: policy and technology. As I discussed in my previous post, many of the discussions at last month's 7th Annual World Wind Energy Conference focused on the need – and best-practice strategies -- for firm political policy. Certainly, without effective policy, even the best technologies may not reach their potential. But policy relies on an infrastructure of effective tools to get the job done.

Pulse of the Nation is a new web based initiative to get New Zealand voters engaged in the build up to this year’s general election, through the development of an active online political community.

“We really want to lift the taboo on talking about politics in a way that doesn’t necessarily involve having to say who you choose to vote for” says the game’s producer and ‘virtual electoral officer’ Craig Neilson.

Pulse of the Nation is the brainchild of Jimungo, a New Zealand company specialising in game design for the web. The new website is based on a game platform where communities of players are asked to predict the outcomes of sporting events. Players compete against friends, family and other community members and can win prizes.

Pulse of the Nation will run a virtual election every two weeks up to New Zealand’s next general election later this year.

As gas prices climb and electricity prices follow, people looking for alternatives are turning to the wind. The popularity of wind energy is growing, but the turbines themselves are shrinking in size and cost, making affordable, personal wind power a reality.

Is wind power right for you? Absolutely, if you have the space and the resources, say Mike Bergey and Andy Kruse, co-founders of Bergey Wind Power and Southwest Wind Power, respectively.

A couple years ago, I wrote a piece Why We Need An X Prize for Eco-Friendly Air Travel, encouraging a competitive approach towards innovating a way to slash air travel emissions:

Air travel presents one of the stickiest problems we face.

On the one hand, in a rapidly globalizing world, we need to fly to do business, build networks and see loved ones. Indeed, to many people (including myself, to be honest), the ability to travel easily and keep a global community is one of the greatest accomplishments of our civilization.

On the other hand, air travel is frying the planet. While air travel contributes only 3% of humanity's total CO2 emissions (making them a problem only a few times larger than, say, coal fires), air travel is growing at an astounding rate. ...