Open Architecture Network

It's exciting to witness development of increasingly efficient wind power technologies (to see Popular Science's geek-worthy eye candy on that front, click here and here). But what can we do with our old wind power equipment as the early models become outdated?

U.S. company Aeronautica Windpower has a solution. As Renewable Energy World reports, the Massachusetts-based firm plans to recycle wind turbines that have been rendered obsolete by newer models.

According to the company's industry research, over 10,000 machines that were installed during the mid ‘80s and ‘90s may soon be replaced by larger, more modern turbines. That's a lot of generation capacity that would otherwise be scrapped.

"While big machines make sense on a wind farm, these ‘mid-scale' machines are perfect for agriculture, schools, villages and other commercial and industrial applications," said Brian Kuhn, VP of Marketing for Aeronautica Windpower.

Although Kuhn admits that not all old machines are fit for reuse, the ones that can be refurbished offer a significant cost savings over a new turbine (they estimate sale prices between US $80,000 to 120,000). That will open up the option for wind power to a mid-scale market, where Kuhn says he feels there are a lot of potential buyers. He estimates that the lower cost of a recycled machine allows the owner to recover his or her initial investment in as little as 4-5 years of resulting energy savings.

What's also great about Aeronautica's model is that it shows we shouldn't be afraid to adopt new energy technologies while they are still in their early phases. Yes, we will continue to see the emergence of newer, better turbines in the years to come. But our energy situation is too much in need of immediate change to let the pursuit of perfection stand in the way of doing the best we can with the technology available now. Quite the opposite: As Aeronautica's model shows, the existence of old models, when handled resourcefully, will enable windpower technology to spread more quickly into areas that would not have been able to access it otherwise.

Photo credit: Flickr/Kris Griffon, licensed by Creative Commons.

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(Posted by Julia Steinberger in Energy at 10:00 AM)

The largest part of the pharmaceuticals and chemicals we take go through our bodies and eventually end up in waste water. As water and waste treatment plants haven't been designed to filter them, the content of our medicine cabinets are eventually passed into the water supply. In London, tap water comes from surface water which implies that traces of our medicine can end up in our drinking water. This results in local differences in tap water, based on the food and drugs we ingest.

Tuur van Balen, one of the graduates of Design Interactions at the RCA, decided to explore this issue in a project which imho had the perfect balance between speculation and solid anchorage into reality.

The way people live and behave in each zone of London can be reflected in the quality of the tap water. Tap water in London Notting Hill very probably benefits from the high density of organic shops found in the area. Tap water in the city of London is presumably enhanced with all kinds of stimulants, from caffeine-rich drinks to cocaine. Golders Green which houses an important Jewish community can be expected to 'produce' a very fertile water due to the low concentration of people taking anti-conception [or birth-control] pills.

Back in January, at the opening of the department work in progress show, Tuur presented My City = My Body, the first chapter of this research into future biological interactions with the city and more precisely into how the increasing understanding of our DNA and the rise of bio-technologies will change the way we interact with each other and our urban environment. He offered tap water to the visitors of the show and asked them to donate a urine sample along with their postcode. The samples, their biological information and postcodes were then added to a map of London which reveals potential local city-body ecologies or biotopes.

The mapping of tap water creates separate territories within the city. Could these areas be the biological counterpart of gated communities?

The next step is a website which helps London inhabitants describe, speculate on, map and share what they think are the unique characteristics of their tap water. The map thus created reveals potential local city-body ecologies, or biotopes. The system will also generate a custom-made label which you can download if you want to sell your own tap water.

Filling the bottles in the City...

That's what the designer did. He went to the hip and organic-addicts frequented Broadway market in Hackney to set up a stall, offer people to "buy" bottles of tap waters, branded with the London area they came from and engage in a discussion about the possibility of new urban biotopes.

selling tap water on Broadway Market from Tuur Van Balen on Vimeo.

You can find various websites which details the quality of various tap waters. But most of the systems employed to analyze water do not check for say, anti-depressant substances or cocaine. What if biotechnology could provide us with cheap detectors?

With the help of bioengineer James Chappell, Imperial College, Tuur developed the concept for a Urban Biogeography tool. The instrument would enable anyone to study the distribution of urban biodiversity over space and time by monitoring sewage. With the tool, a tiny amount of sewage can be pumped up and scaned for different pharmaceutical and chemical traces, without having to lift a manhole cover.

Using synthetic biology and in particular the biobricks tools, bacteria are programmed to become cheap biosensors. The bacteria-sensors, housed in the small transparent compartments, change colour when oestrogen, antibiotics, Viagra or Prozac are detected in the water. Since synthetic biology is both open source and modular, this instrument can be redesigned to detect other chemicals by any Urban Biogeographer, even amateurs as the technology is becoming increasingly accessible. The set of data thus obtained can be used to influence healthcare or property prices in the area, that of course would be the ideal scenario...

All images courtesy of Tuur van Balen.

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 8:27 AM)

By Britt Bravo

"I think there are many different ways in which you define leadership. As a feminist, and as a feminine feminist, I truly believe that we don't do a very good job in the United States of believing that you can lead by serving, and I think the United States needs to think deeply about being in service of the rest of the world." -Kavita Ramdas, President and CEO, Global Fund for Women.

Kavita Ramdas is the President and CEO of the nonprofit, the Global Fund for Women. She has been the recipient of many awards, including Fast Company's 2007 Social Capitalist Award, and the League of Women Voters' Women Who Could Be President Award. I had the opportunity to interview her on March 6th for the Big Vision Podcast, and have included an edited transcript of the interview below. It's long, but I hope you'll take time during your coffee or lunch break to read, or listen to her inspiring words. I think it's worth it (:

Kavita Ramdas: The Global Fund for Women is the largest independent, publicly supported grant-making foundation to advance women's human rights internationally. It works in over 160 countries around the world. I think what makes us unique is that we are really investing in women's leadership and women's creativity in developing local solutions to some of the world's most challenging problems.

Britt Bravo: I think one of the things that make the Global Fund special is how women can submit grants, the lack of bureaucracy involved, and maybe you can talk a little bit about how you choose the people who are funded.

KR: The Global Fund for Women has an extraordinary commitment to keeping our doors open so that as many organizations working to advance women's human rights internationally can really gain access to resources that they so desperately need. Therefore, we are the only foundation I know of that will accept requests in any language, and in any format.

You can email us, you can fax us, you can write to us in Kiswahili or in Arabic, and it will be our responsibility, using our wonderful network of supporters, volunteers and paid translators, as well as our incredibly language proficient staff, to be able to respond in a way that makes it accessible, no matter how remote a corner of the world your organization happens to be based in.

I think my favorite example of that is a women's group from the highlands of Bolivia who wrote to us maybe seven or eight years ago. They were a group of illiterate women who dictated their requests to a priest in the village, who then hand wrote the request. They wanted to create a literacy program for themselves because now there was a school where their children could go to school, but they felt embarrassed that they couldn't support their children because they themselves were illiterate.

I remember that the letter was signed with five thumbprints of five illiterate women. Three years later when we received a report back from the group about how they had done, there were five shaky signatures.

To me, that sort of sums up something very special about the way in which we try to make these resources accessible to women-led initiatives that are often some of the most creative that we are seeing on issues ranging from the environment, to health, to education, to building peace and sustainable communities around the world.

I think the biggest challenge for us is trying to make hard decisions. Each year we receive over 3,500 proposals from women's organizations all around the world. Many of them do really meet our basic criteria of being women-led, of reflecting the work of a group of women, rather than just one or two individuals, and of really tackling critical human rights challenges and societal challenges in which women are playing key roles. We simply don't have the resources to be able to fund all of those, and we need to make some hard choices.

In that context, something else that sets us apart is the use of a very extensive advisory network that the Global Fund uses as our eyes and ears on the ground, women and men from many different parts of the world who are based in the countries where we are making grants to support and advance women's human rights. They help us by going to visit the groups, by recommending groups to us, and by talking about some of the broader challenges that face women in the particular context that they are in.

Those advisors also help us set some priorities, which we use then to sort of say: OK, if we only have this much money for Latin America, and we know that the women of Haiti and Colombia, because of the violence and because of the poverty in those two countries, are in particular need, and our advisors from all different parts of Latin America have said that to us, then we are going to prioritize requests from those countries.

And yes, it may mean that a group in Argentina, that is certainly deserving by our basic standards, may not get a grant this year, so that we can support very worthwhile and important requests from a group that has even less access to resources in Haiti. Those are some of the ways in which we try to make those decisions.

BB: How do you know that you are successful? How do you know that you are making a difference or an impact; how do you measure that?

KR: I think we all want to be able to get a sense of how the investments that we are making in women's leadership, in women's empowerment, and in women's real innovation around some of the world's most pressing challenges, whether that is HIV/AIDS, or whether it is violence against women, or whether it is economic underdevelopment, what kind of difference we are making. I think it is always a challenge for any organization to be able to really assess what difference their own investments have made to the outcomes that they want to see.

The Global Fund tries to measure those results, not so much by our own standards, but by the standards that the groups that we support set for themselves. In the case of the women I spoke about earlier, they really wanted to measure their success by being able to read and write and sign their own letters, and write their own reports. The measurement of success was the annual report that we got from them three years after the signatures, which had originally been thumbprints, that now had signed signatures. For them, that was a measure of change and a measure of impact.

I think an area in which we are constantly striving to improve is to be able to do more of an amalgamation of what is the collective impact of many, many, many, many of these kinds of investments. Maybe the best way to give you an analogy for that is when you drop a stone into a pond, it creates a ripple effect. You can see the ripples kind of spreading out, but you don't know whether one ripple caused a tadpole to swim a different direction, you don't know whether a bird flew away because the ripples made it change its mind, you don't know whether a flower that might not have grown in that place now is growing in that place.

I think that is an area in which in our new strategic plan we are really committed to strengthening that understanding of how do all these efforts collectively contribute to stronger, more sustainable, more democratic communities. We have sort of an instinctive sense that they do, and we have many anecdotes that give us a sense of what change this is creating, but I think we need to do a better job of being able to balance both the quantitative numbers, that we can actually put together, with some of these qualitative stories, and that is an area in which we are continuing to try and do more work.

BB: You said that the advisers you have are always giving you the lay of the land to tell you what are the issues that are most pressing, or which areas need the most assistance. What are those issues or areas right now that you are seeing really need the most help?

KR: I think a major concern, from the very founding of the Global Fund, has remained a concern despite the fact that this year we celebrate our 20th anniversary of grant making, and that is access to the financial resources necessary to take the work that women do on a daily basis in their communities to the next level of impact.

One example of that I could give is that the organizations that we fund, collectively in the last 20 years have access to maybe annually something like 75 million dollars (philanthropic dollars) that they have the ability to use and pour into the work that they are doing.

If you compare that to the budgets that we spend in just one day on fighting a war in Iraq, or the cost of an F16 fighter jet, you get some sense of how inordinately skewed those are. But even if you don't compare it to those kinds of investments, but simply investments in philanthropy, a recent study that just came out from the Foundation Center showed that it is about 5.8 to 5.9% of total philanthropic resources each year that actually directly go to benefit women and girls, and that includes both domestic and international grant making.

When you think about the 90 billion odd dollars that go each year in support of philanthropy, you can see that there is still a lot of work to be done. So that is one critical area, just simply access to the resources themselves.

A second critical area for women in general across the world, whether it is in the former Soviet Union, or Eastern Europe, or in what we know as the developing world, or refer to as the developing world, is the ongoing question of violence: violence inside the homes that affect women from the time that they are born, even whether they can be born in countries like India and China where female infanticide and sex selective abortion are commonly practiced, all the way to domestic violence, violence that happens as a result of things like honor killings, violence that happens as a result of spousal abuse. All of those forms of violence combined with violence outside the homes.

Women and their children are disproportionately victims of outside violence as well. If there is a war, or if there is an ethnic conflict, or if there is a civil war within a country, women and their children are the majority of those who tend to be displaced. They are the majority of those who actually experience physical violence. Increasingly, rape of women is being used as a tool of war, not just in large scale wars as we saw in the Serbian and Bosnian conflict, but as we saw recently in Kenya and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

So violence continues to be a really significant challenge that women face, and the women's rights groups that the Global Fund for Women supports worldwide focus on how to both educate the public and the general community and families about why violence occurs, what are the root causes, how can we shift behaviors and patterns, how can we use negotiations to end violent conflicts, and also to teach that violence only breeds more violence because mothers understand that children who have been victims of abuse in turn are much more likely to either be abused themselves, or to grow up into abusers.

That same lesson I think women have taken to a whole different level in being on the forefront of peace work internationally. I just saw a remarkable film made about a grantee organization that the Global Fund had supported for many years in Liberia. A truly remarkably story of very every day mothers and daughters in Liberia who were just so sick of the civil war between Charles Taylor, and then the rebels in Liberia, being funded with Sierra Leone diamonds essentially, that they mobilized an entire community of women around peace.

My favorite scene from the movie is these women, all ages, all sizes, going to surround the peace talks in Ghana, which were essentially going nowhere. They had been sitting for two weeks and nothing had happened, no one was willing to really make a compromise, and the women joined hands and they locked the men, it was all men who were actually in the peace negotiations, into this room and said, "We will not let you out until you come up with a deal."

When you hear something like that, I think you begin to get a sense of the power that women actually have to collectively mobilize. Even though they are the victims of violence, I think they are also the most creative in imagining solutions, and defining solutions to ending violence. We have seen that in other places as well such like in Rwanda, and in the Middle East and numerous other places.

I think a third major issue that women face is not the challenge that women's organizations face in terms of funding, but just the poverty itself that women and children find themselves in. Women and children are 70% of those who live on less than $2 or $1 a day. They are disproportionately vulnerable to malnutrition, to all kinds of abuses that follow from extreme poverty: sexual exploitation, selling of their own bodies as a way in which to survive, what is often called survival sex, the entire vulnerability to trafficking, the lack of economic security. I think a large number of women's rights mobilizing efforts are really focused around building and strengthening economic independence for women.

What we know, when you asked earlier about impact, is there have been enough World Bank studies to show that when you ensure that a mother or a women in the household actually has control over increases in income, that shows up almost immediately in the increased well being of everybody in the household, whereas the same thing is not true if you are talking about increases in male income.

I would say that those are some of the challenges that the women's movement faces today. I think another major one is the challenges that have come from globalization. Women now form the majority of those who are migrants in the world. The challenges around how women's poverty is exacerbated by a process of globalization, which on the one hand gives them new opportunities, and on the other hand takes away certain kinds of economic securities that they have known in the past. We have been seeing an increased attention that women's rights groups have been bringing to this whole question of globalization and migration, and how women workers are being affected by this.

Lastly, I would say the fourth issue that I think remains a very, very critical factor for women, and a very high priority, is the environment. Women and girls are really on the frontlines of where the rubber hits the road in terms of the destruction of our natural resources and our natural environment, and people tend not to think about that.

I think in the United States, the environmental movement is seen very much as a movement that is about protecting species, and is in a way almost a privilege of an upper class white elite. That isn't the case in the developing world. In the developing world, or for that matter actually, in poor communities across the United States, poor communities disproportionately bear the brunt of environmental degradation. They are often in the places where toxic dumps, and other kinds of dumps are housed.

And women in the developing world, who are responsible for the collection of fuel and water, they know firsthand that if you have deforested a region, they have to walk not two miles or three miles in search of firewood, but maybe 10 miles or 15 miles. They are the first to know if water sources are polluted because they are the ones who go to fetch the water. They are the ones who wash their clothes in the river and they know what the state of the rivers are.

So, it is not surprising, again, that we see women stepping up as leaders in environmental activism and a resistance to the total destruction of planet earth.

I remember a very wonderful woman from Sierra Leone, Sarandabba, saying to me, "You know in a war, women are raped, but Mother Earth is also raped. We know what it is like to be raped, and we don't want our Mother to be raped." I think that would be the fifth area that I would highlight as being a really critical one that has emerged as a real priority for women and their communities.

BB: Why do you do the work that you do, what brought you to this work? There are any number of things you could take this passion and use it towards, but what causes you to do this work?

KR: For me it is very simple. I think I was very fortunate to be inspired by my "she-ro", who is my mother, and by her mother, my grandmother, who is an extraordinarily independent, feisty 93-year old.

My mother believed very deeply that being privileged middle class Indians, the community that I grew up in India, required us to have a commitment and a sense of giving back to the communities that we grew up in and around, and to really seeing those communities. I think it is very common, particularly the poorer the country that you live in, if you are privileged within those countries, sometimes to make it through the day you build up a hide so thick that you inure yourself to the suffering that you see around yourself.

My mother did a good job of stripping away those protective layers, and forcing us to look at, see, understand and question, why the vast majority of Indians lived under the poverty line and didn't have access to resources. She made it almost impossible for me not to look at those questions. I didn't necessarily know what I was going to do about them then.

I also think I do this work for my daughter. If I am inspired by my mother, I am also driven in some sense by the next generation. I believe very deeply that the choices we make and the opportunity to really achieve gender equality in the 21st Century are the kinds of decisions which our daughters will look back at and say, "I am able to do this because my mother was there, my mother did this, she stood up for it, she fought for it."

I think in the United States, it is rare these days to remember the sheroes. It is a good thing we are doing this in Women's History Month. I think if I asked an average American woman walking on the street who Jeannette Rankin is, they wouldn't know who she was. They wouldn't know she was the first women to be elected to the US Senate. They wouldn't know she was a pacifist who twice voted against the United States going to war, both in World War I and then again in World War II. They wouldn't know she had stood with Gandhi in his resistance to the British, and supported his policy of nonviolent resistance to British colonialism.

Women like Jeannette Rankin, women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, women like Alice Paul, women like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and Gloria Steinem, and this extraordinary list of giants on whose shoulders we stand now in the United States, have made it possible for us to take our rights for granted.

I am quick to remind people in the United States that those rights were fought for. 70 years ago you and I would not have been sitting here having a conversation about doing things internationally, much less being able to even open a bank account in our own names. Those are the same struggles that women are facing in other parts of the world today.

I really want to be a part of making a difference for the future of my daughter, and having her live in a world where all people and all children, girls and boys, women and men, really have the opportunity to fully realize their human rights. I think that is what really motivates me to do this work.

BB: You just published an article in The Nation where you were talking about how you are getting all these emails from feminist leaders saying, "This is why I am supporting Clinton," or "This is why I am supporting Obama," and the point that you made, which I thought was wonderful, was you felt that the arguments were missing any sense of how our decisions affect the well being of people across the planet.

I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that, because I feel like that's such an important point that's really being missed in all this coverage and discussion of who is the best candidate.

KR: First, I want to point out that the feminist movement in the United States actually has always been strongly internationalist. People like Robin Morgan, people like Gloria Steinem, many people before them as well, always had a deep sense of international solidarity. I think Robin Morgan coined the phrase "Sisterhood is global." People like Charlotte Bunch at the Center for Women's Global Leadership, spoke first about women's rights being human rights.

I don't want us to get confused. I think feminists in the United States have always had a strong sense of international solidarity. I think what's different is that overall the United States is insulated from the rest of the world, and our politics are particularly insulated from the rest of the world, so that although we think about international solidarity and global solidarity with the women's movement when we are focused on, "women's movement issues," we don't seem to bring that same sense of connection when it affects something that is seen as being primarily a domestic issue, which in this case is the Presidential elections.

Having said that, I do believe that America straddles this very interesting place, where on the one hand it sees itself as a leader in the world, and it sees itself as an exceptional power in the world, but then it's sort of ambivalent about whether or not it actually wants to take on that mantle fully. In the same way that I think it's ambivalent about what I believe is its greatest strength which is, like Barack Obama if you will, that the United States truly is a microcosm of the whole world in a way that many other countries can't even dream of being.

Almost nowhere else in the world can you go and find the range of nationalities, ethnicities, race, language and backgrounds that you have here--not to mention the delicious food. Yet, I think this is a country profoundly ambivalent about whether or not that is a good thing and a strength, or whether it's somehow eroding the core, puritanical Anglo-Saxon values that define this country, which in itself is a bit of myth because this is country with a strong Native American tradition that far predated the Anglo-Saxon visitors who arrived here. In fact, some of the earliest roots of the democracy that the United States is so proud of are actually rooted in that Native American tradition that we rarely stop to remember.

I think my comment in The Nation was really more about that. Was really to say, we can't at once be the most powerful, forceful, military, economic and other might in the world, and then not be conscious and aware of the fact that something like the election of who will lead this country has profound implications for the rest of the world, particularly profound in the aftermath of eight years of a Bush administration that has been really seen by the rest of the world as being completely cavalier in many ways, about its sense of being in community with.

I think there are many different ways in which you define leadership. As a feminist, and as a feminine feminist, I truly believe that we don't do a very good job in the United States of believing that you can lead by serving. I think the United States needs to think deeply about being in service of the rest of the world. How does it serve the rest of the world? How does it serve its own people? That was what I was alluding to in my article, wishing for the sake of the women and girls, who we feel deeply connected to here in our work at the Global Fund for Women, that there would be some of that greater consciousness displayed and evident. I talked mainly about the Democratic candidates, but certainly I would hope for the same for anyone who is running on the Republican side as well.

BB: You do a lot of interviews. What do you wish people would ask you?

[laughter]

What is the thing you think, "I wish they would just ask me about . . . I want to talk about this."

[laughter]

KR: It's interesting, I always find that I learn something from the ways in which different people ask questions. It always makes me think about things in different ways. I think certainly one thing that, as the leader of an organization that has to raise every penny I give away, I do sometimes wish people would ask me about, "How can I contribute to the Global Fund for Women? What could I do to raise more money for you? How could the Global Fund for Women be in a more secure financial position?" Somehow that's never the question I get asked.

[laughter]

How about this? "I've just come into a fortune, and I'd love to be able to make sure the Global Fund for Women never had to worry again about how to raise money. Could I make a contribution?"

[laughter]

Those might be some of the questions I'd love to get asked.

BB: So, how can people who are listening support the Global Fund for Women? How can they help to support you, and help you be more financially stable, and all those things?

KR: Well, I think people like yourself who work in the media, and who are journalists and who blog, can do a great job of telling the story of why investing in women is such a remarkable way of making change in the world. Whether your passion is the environment, or whether your passion is building peaceful and sustainable communities, or whether your passion is girls' education, or whether your passion is health, there's probably no better way to get to your outcome than to make significant investments in women's well being, and women's empowerment and women's human rights. I think that's one thing people could be doing, spreading the word, those of you who that do that for a living.

For others, I think it is thinking about making contributions. I hear very often from people that they feel like, "Well, what difference will my small contribution make?" I like to remind people of the fact that for $50 you can put a young girl through school in Afghanistan for a year. That's less than the cost of one latte a day per month for the next 12 months. It's something worth thinking about.

So, when you say, "I'm not John D. Rockefeller, I'm not the Gates Foundation. I really don't have money to give to the Global Fund for Women," I'd like you to think about the young girl who sent us her Bat Mitzvah check for $25 and said, "I didn't know there were parts of the world where girls like me couldn't go to school, and this is my gift to the Global Fund for Women."

Writing us a check, making a donation, think about whether you can get your corporation to make a gift or sponsor the Global Fund for Women, buying a table at our 20th anniversary event coming up in New York in June, there are so many ways to make a difference.

Lastly I think by doing what Eleanor Roosevelt called, "The work of human rights that start in small places close to home." I am always a big believer in that. Walking your talk around human rights. This year, 2008, is the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Mary Robinson, who was a former President of Ireland, and a former Commissioner for Human Rights at the UN is working with a group called, The Elders, that includes Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu and Ela Bhat from India on really raising awareness about this historic anniversary--60 years of a charter that truly is a reflection of our shared human values.

What do you know about the charter for human rights? When did you talk about it recently? How do you manifest that at home? Do you ask your son to clean up as often as you ask your daughter? Does your daughter get to go on golfing trips, or other non-traditional things, or go to a baseball game with her dad? And does your son get to do stuff that maybe is considered traditionally gendered as female? I think taking those steps at home are also things we can be doing to make a difference.

So on a multiple set of fronts, there is much you can do to support the Global Fund for Women and we hope that you will raise both awareness and resources to make a difference in women's lives.

Britt Bravo: This work that you do, the goals are so long term, it is not like it is all going to be solved next year, and you have been doing this work for a long time. How do you sustain yourself, how do you keep yourself going, how do you keep yourself inspired?

KR: Actually that is the easiest part of this job. Every day you come into the Global Fund for Women and there is one more new story about some amazing women's groups that have done some amazing new thing, or have taken on some big challenge.

Last year, we had this fantastic experience of not only Michelle Bachelet winning the Presidential election in Chile, thanks to women's groups organizing and supporting her, but Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf winning the election for President in Liberia, again, also because women were hugely involved in mobilizing around her.

We had at the end of the year, the incredible success of Mexican women's rights groups that have been working for, it must be close to 12 years now, on the decriminalization of abortion in Mexico. They got a win. Finally, Mexico City passed legislation that made it possible for abortion to be legal in the first 12 weeks of a pregnancy, groundbreaking for a Catholic country like Mexico. It hasn't happened in Latin America's history.

It is not that we aren't seeing the wins. The year before that, women in Morocco won an amazing change in the law. Until then, women had been considered minors under the law. You had to have a husband, or a father, or a brother accompany you for almost any significant act, from opening a bank account to getting your own passport. That has completely changed and Moroccan women are taking that information and doing massive street theater programs and education programs to take it out into communities.

I think every day we see evidence of how this work is actually bearing fruit, how it is making a difference in the lives of individual women and girls. Whether it is somebody writing to us and saying, "I was able to say no to a forced or an arranged marriage," or "I just completed my last year of secondary school and I was able to do that because a women's group gave me a scholarship to go," or "My mother didn't make me go through cutting, through a female genital procedure where my genitals where cut, because she learned from a women's organization she was involved with that it was harmful for my health."

There are thousand of different ways in which I think I get sustained and get replenished, and I am full of a sense of hope and possibility. So I don't think that's really the issue. I think the much more draining challenge is really the challenge of being on the side of trying to run and manage an organization within a sector in the United States.

I recently heard Akaya Windwood of the Rockwood Leadership Program say, "I'm not going to call these nonprofit organizations anymore. We should call them social benefit organizations." I am very inspired by that. I really think the role that social benefit organizations play, both here in the United States, but also across the world, is truly pioneering work and deserves to have both much more respect, and far more resources invested. And that's the area in which, if anything, I feel a sense of sometimes being drained, but I am deeply fortunate to work in a field where I get replenished all the time.

BB: Is there anything else that you want to share with listeners that you haven't gotten to talk about, that you want them to know either about the work that the Global Fund for Women does, or about women's issues, or anything else that you would like to share?

KR: I think that I'd encourage all our listeners to think about not using the term "women's issues" anymore. I don't believe there is any such thing. I don't believe that 51% of the world's population, which is what we are, doesn't care about all the critical issues that affect us. I believe that women have the right to express an opinion on all issues, and I will strongly challenge us to speak out and speak up against the ghetto-ization of the few issues that somehow we are supposed to care about, and then the more serious ones, like the military and the economy and the war will somehow be left to those other people.

These are issues that should affect and concern all of us who care about free, open and democratic societies. Without the voices of 51% of the world's population, our chances of making this world a better place for all of us are about zero. So that is something I'd love to be able to share. No more "women's issues." All issues are issues we care about, women's right to speak on all issues, you've got me there.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Empowering Women at 11:08 AM)

I think pretty highly of John Robb. I don't always agree with him -- and sometimes I think he's way off base -- but I think he's really grappling with the new realities of violence, conflict and system instability in our times.

In particular, I find his on-going series of posts on Resilient Community a source of both worry and insight.

First, the insight. John's posts themselves tend to focus on work-arounds for brittle infrastructure, things like smart local networks (sort of the information equivalent of energy smart grids), community scrip and local fabrication. There are some really thought-provoking ideas here, new thinking applied in new ways, many of which fit well with a strategy of increasing neighborhood survivability. The world is getting bumpier, and preparedness, learning and innovation are called for.

But I worry as well about the role these sorts of ideas seem to often end up playing in the public debate. At the very least, I see these sorts of ideas playing into a misinformed understanding of the possibilities of localism, one which has the potential to seriously drain needed energy from efforts to stave off collapse. At the worst, I see it playing into an insane survivalism, one that's quite oblivious to the real nature of big systems failures.

Because, it bears repeating again and again and again, responses based purely on localism and scaling-back can't save us now. We need to remake our material civilization. If we don't do that, no amount of community preparation or personal bunker-building is going to save our bacon. If we don't avoid the tipping points, we're headed into an atmospheric singularity, which will likely involve cascading systems failures and a total inability to meaningfully plan our own lives.

Resilience is a great strategy for making sure our communities are capable of withstanding the bumps we're facing in order to keep generating solutions which can be used to avoid the crash; but if the crash comes, individuals and local communities are not going to be in any position to weather it through their own actions, no matter what they do.

Prevention is the only cure worth talking about here.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Collaboration at 10:38 AM)

"So, what do you think about the IEG report?" I was g-chatting with my friend Smita the other night when she brought up the World Bank. "What IEG report? What's the IEG?" I replied, showing my ignorance of the latest Bank goings on (and of the acronym – it stands for Independent Evaluation Group). Smita sighed. "I'm surprised you haven't heard. I'll forward you an e-mail from this listserve I'm on. Take a look."

That's how I found out about Doing Business: An Independent Evaluation. Released on June 12, the report criticizes Doing Business' (DB) reliability and robustness, suggesting that top-ranked countries may achieve high scores due to the absence of regulation, not necessarily the presence of smart, socially-beneficial regulation. Furthermore, the report found "no statistically significant relationship" between the DB indicators and any kind of economic outcome such as investment, gross domestic product growth or employment.

For those interested in business' role in fostering sustainable development, the IEG report ought to prompt some serious reflection. I know it's been on my mind since I read it. After all, I've been promoting the Doing Business reports for years to scores of colleagues, companies, development agencies and NGOs interested in base of the pyramid strategy. Perhaps it was naïve of me to assume that – as a World Bank / International Finance Corporation report – the DB indicators are robust and well-vetted. The IEG says they’re not – which calls into question a lot of my advice.

There has been some discussion of Doing Business: An Independent Evaluation both in the press and the blogosphere. Bob Davis at the Wall Street Journal gives a good, general overview, noting that the report prompted some serious self-reflection within the Bank’s management. In the blogosphere, Rainer Falk of the European Civil Society Roundup weighs in, noting that
By rewarding countries having the lowest level of regulation, DB frequently gave some of its best scores to countries known as serious violators of workers' rights, including Belarus, Georgia and Saudi Arabia, all have which have severely restricted or even prohibited trade union activities.
Ouch.

More scathing commentary at IFIs Choike, which reports that
one executive director at the lending agency has suggested that the new critique be included as part of the Doing Business report so users would know not to take the rankings too seriously.
Of course, the Doing Business blog weighs in…right? No. Nothing. Just a lousy reference to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (great book, but why here?)

When it comes to transparency and accountability, the DB Blog's silence here is deafening. Simeon Djankov – I'd expect more from you. Just because the news isn’t complimentary doesn't give you a free pass on writing about it. You created the Doing Business series – and you have a blog – which means you have a platform to defend your methodology and results. I'm listening…but until I hear a serious defense, I won't be using Doing Business when discussing the BoP.

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(Posted by Robert Katz in Big Systems - Global Institutions, Governance and History at 7:40 AM)

Summer has finally arrived here in Seattle. And the abundance of daylight means more time for things like barbecues, lawn sports, cool drinks and, of course, great summer reads. To create the perfect Worldchanging summer reading list, full of smart, beach-worthy must-reads, we asked for a little help from our friends. Here's what some of them are reading:

Reviews from Jay Walljasper
I worry that summertime as a distinct season when "the living is easy" is slipping away from us. The deluge of things to get done doesn't seem to slacken in the hot weather anymore. We could blame air conditioning or the i inexorable spread of workaholism, but whatever the cause, this is not a sign of progress. The lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer-- as another old song goes-- is something worth preserving.

But as the temperature rises here in Minneapolis, I am still committed to "chilling" and whittling down the big stack of interesting-looking books on my bedside table.

I am now right in the middle of Tom Hodgkinson's The Freedom Manifesto: How to Free Yourself from Anxiety, Fear, Mortgages, Money, Guilt, Debt, Government, Boredom, Supermarkets, Bills, Melancholy, Pain, Depression, Work, and Waste, from the iconoclastic editor of Britain's wonderful Idler magazine. His crazy ideas of what it would take to live a truly free life-- untethered from corporate control, consumer urges and unnecessary government meddling-- actually are just simple common sense that we would all be wise to heed more often in our daily lives. From Aristotle to Oscar Wilde to E.F. Schumacher, he reacquaints us with the views of thoughtful observers of the human condition with valuable counsel on the meaning of life

I have also dived into Eric Weiner's The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World, which is a travelogue of places around the world from Bhutan to Icleand that have some claim of being happier than average. So far Weiner seems to continue the theme of Hodgkinson's book with the heretical but increasingly obvious observation that there is more to happiness than economic gain and the amassing of material goods.

And because it's summer, I am also looking forward to lapping up some frothy fiction. At the top of my pile right now is Patrick Dennis's 1955 bestseller Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade, about a fabulous-beyond-belief eccentric Aunt who rescues a boy from his middle-class life and shows him the world is an amazing place if you look at it the right way. I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about how to reform the world so it's a healthy once in a while to cast earnestness aside and indulge in something with seemingly little socially redeeming value. But who knows what I might find. Maybe Mame was the forerunner to Tom Hodgkinson.

Jay Walljasper is a fellow of On The Commons, a group devoted to restoring the meaning and value of the commons to the world today. He is also Senior Fellow at Project for Public Spaces, editor-at-large of Ode magazine, and a blogger on green cities for the National Geographic Green Guide. His most recent book is the The Great Neighborhood Book: A Do-it-Yourself Guide to Placemaking.

Reviews from Terry Tempest Williams
The Legend of Colton H. Bryant by Alexandra Fuller
A deeply moving, unsentimental account of a young roughneck who works the oil fields near Pinedale, Wyoming, and pays with his life. If you want to see what the human face of the Bush-Cheney energy policy looks like, this is a heartbreaking read. Required reading for all those who love the American West and fear the loss of both our communities and wildlands.

Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance by John Berger
John Berger is a poet with seering eyes and an unnerving capacity to see the world we live in and make breathtaking connections through his patterned mind. This small book is an astute rendering of America as an Imperialist government and the ripple affect this kind of tyranny is having around the world. He frames his dispatches on democracy around his impressions of
time spent in Palestine. Deeply moving, poetic, visionary. "I am writing at night, even thought it is day."

Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West by Wallace Stegner
I am rereading this American classic on John Wesley Powell and his journey into the Colorado Plateau through the Colorado River. At a time when climate change is on everyone's mind, this exquisite, hard-edged narrative of water in arid country speaks to the "corkscrew path of humanity" and how we face change through a heightened awareness of landscape, culture, and the imagination. A good read in Wallace Stegner's centennial year.

Animate Earth: Science, Intuition, And Gaia by Stephan Harding
As an Oxford-trained ecologist, Stephen Harding, understands the interrelatedness of life, but he has found a strict rendering of science is not enough. Building on James Lovelock's theory of Gaia as a self-regulating organism, he writes in two minds creating a third way of understanding the world, that of a conscious global citizen that recognizes "a reverence for life" must permeate both theory and practice. A future-looking template for how we can both survive and perceive the life we are a part of in the 21st century.

Four Portraits and One Subject: Bernard DeVoto. by Carl Hiaasen
I love this book, I love this writer, for his irreverence and clear-headed instincts as to why saving wild places like the Everglades is also about saving our souls, no matter how twisted we may be. Funny, smart, and revelatory.

Reviews from Alan AtKisson
The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winter
An indescribable but delectable mix of science fiction, historical fiction, and emancipatory fiction, involving a good bit of non-fiction and a familiar species that is trapped in a cycle of planetary consumption and destruction; a new species of "Robo sapiens" that redefine the boundaries of sex; an insider's account of the last days of Easter Island; and the tantalizing possibility that giant asteroids that kill off worlds full of dinosaurs (as happened on our planet 65 million years ago) may not be accidental. A novel full of despair, longing, consumerist critique, poetic language, frequent citations from the logbooks of Captain Cook, and the smallest glimmer of hope at the end of it all.

The Enchantress of Florence: A Novel by Salman Rushdie
It is a truism that fiction is sometimes truer than reality. This is because fiction is more beautiful, or rather is constructed to appeal to our sense of beauty, while reality is simply the things for which we have evolved a sense of beauty in order to have some pleasure and peace in our sensory experience while dodging man-eating tigers and diseases and other awesome, but not beautiful, aspects of the universe around us. In any event, the new Rushdie novel is one of the most beautiful texts I have encountered in my memory, a joy like unto the joy of first reading Marquez' 100 Years of Solitude. Along the way one learns a good bit of useful history, the contours of which continue to frame our war-in-Iraq, Pakistan-is-unstable world. But mostly, one is seduced. In this case, seduction is highly recommended.

The City of Words (CBC Massey Lecture) by Alberto Manguel
These moving, erudite lectures on the meaning of language, on the meaning of meaning, on what writing could possibly mean in a world that tends to ignore even the prophets and seers it most celebrates, have captivated me from the first page, and I look forward to reading them slowly over the course of a Swedish summer as I prepare to promote a book of my own, in the hopes that it might actually mean something.

Reviews from Adam Greenfield
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World by Elaine Scarry
Scarry's 1985 meditation is, among other things, a breathtaking indictment of torture as weapon and instrument of policy, and it has never been more timely. The particularly sad thing is realizing that we now find ourselves in a place where the rejection and condemnation of torture is not a prima facie obvious position for an American politician to take.

Blindsight by Peter Watts
Watts' hard-nosed novel of first contact tries a little bit too hard, but winds up delivering a genuinely unsettling message about the relative costs and benefits of sentience. I have a feeling this one'll stay with me for a while.

Typological Formations: Renewable Building Types and the City: A collection of student projects from the Architectural Association's Diploma Unit 6.
By and large very pleasing but primarily of interest to me in that it demonstrates how deeply the rhetoric of digital production (and especially that of scale-free generative processes) has penetrated the thought of the generation of architects just now coming on line.

Urban Politics Now (Reflect)
by Edward Soja, Juliet MacCannell, Neil Smith, Dieter Lesage, and contributor Slavoj Zizek.
Trying to find a place for good old-fashioned small-d democracy in a globalized terrain simultaneously riven by neoconservative Kulturkampf and subjected to the pressures of neoliberal competition. (Here in the United States, of course, our cities also have to deal with a persistent disinclination to invest in public infrastructure.) Features heavy hitters like Edward Soja and Slavoj Zizek - my kinda beach reading.

Reviews from Colin Beavan aka No Impact Man
Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment by Martin Seligman
A primer on happiness psychology. Important because the true definition of effective use of environmental resources is whether or not the use of those resources contributes to quality of life. Understanding what makes people happy--not money beyond a certain level, not stuff--is crucial to designing an ecological culture where people are even more satisfied than they are now.

A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander
If we are to find a way to move away from car culture we must build our cities and towns so that people are much happier there than they are a car trip away. A Pattern Language examines the elements of building cities not to accommodate cars but to facilitate meaning, purpose and communities.

Reviews from Uleshka Asher
A Newcomer: Art Space Tokyo by Ashley Rawlings (Editor), Craig Mod (Editor)
Two of the people I respect a lot in Tokyo (and good friends...), Craig Mod, graphic designer and Ashley Rawlings, editor have put tons of love and care into selecting 12 of the most interesting
and engaging art spaces in Tokyo, stuffed the book with comprehensive maps and tips what else to do once around the area, interviews with the curators, artists, etc. that make this book a rich guide to the Tokyo and Japan art scene in general and a great tool to explore the city through that book alone (if anyone ever wants to come to the big T.) Lovely design with care and an eye for detail make it a total must have piece in my opinion.

A classic: Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin (1931-1932) by Anais Nin
Well, what can I say about this one! Fascinated by this strong female character Anais Nin and her revelations in her diary. In this chapter of her life, she discovers a wilder, more experimental love to a man outside her marriage to Hugo - Henry Miller and also starts to explore her bisexual side through the love affair with his wife, June. I especially like this book because it shows the different shades, phases, depths and angles of love. It demonstrates the variety in HOW you can actually love and proves it possible to love more than one person openly and honestly at the same time. Thumbs up for honesty, passion and a true piece of life revealed.

A book people should know about: The Tao of Detox: The Secrets of Yang-Sheng Dao by Daniel Reid
Nothing too new, but certainly very valid today are Daniel Reid's thoughts, research and practical methods on how to detox our bodies and live in harmony with a world that is very much polluted already and probably doesn't get better that soon. It teaches a healthy balance of how to eat good, moderate and stay away from illnesses. I am guessing this is good for everyone but especially for nations in which most people are used to taking medicine to fight of illnesses, therefore polluting the water and natural resources around them even further, rather than realizing that they have to "work" with their bodies - this is a must read. A contemporary western-eastern-philosophy mix and practical approach can only make this planet a better place if people actually read, act and decide to live a healthy, balanced, un-polluting life for themselves - and our planet.

Uleshka works as an editor, curator and motivational force with a background in design. Based in Tokyo since 2001, she founded the online bilingual design magazine PingMag in 2005 where she worked as Editor-in-Chief. After setting up a solid base for this design platform to flourish, she has broadened her editorial skills to work on various projects including the book Pecha Kucha Night: A Celebration for Klein Dytham architecture. Currently she is involved in carrying through various interviews for cultural and design oriented podcasts, is the host for interesting folks talking at TAB talks @ Gotanda Sonic in Tokyo, writes various design books for Gestalten.com and - Uleshka started singing in a band...uleshka.com

Reviews from Elisabeth Eaves
The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird by Bruce Barcott
I studied economic development in school, and then I became a writer. If there’s one thing I learned along the way it’s that it’s damn difficult to tell a compelling story about the international legal wrangling that goes on between corporations, non-governmental organizations, and third world governments.

Bruce Barcott has thus pulled off an amazing feat. He manages to tell a development story – about building a hydropower dam in Belize – that is never dull. It helps that he focuses on Sharon Matola, a zookeeper who led the fight to stop the dam in question, fearing it would destroy a scarlett macaw habitat. Barcott also manages to be balanced, taking the reader inside the workings of the Belizean government and Duke Energy as well as the National Resources Defense Council.

I read the book while I was in Honduras, Belize’s neighbor and home to its own share of scarlet macaws, which are spectacular up close. (You can read about my trip here. So I may have been particularly disposed to like the book. But it’s a very well-crafted yarn by any standard.

Napoleon's Privates: 2,500 Years of History Unzipped by Tony Perrottet.
Pretty much what it sounds like – a look at history through the naughty bits of famous people. You’ll never be without a strangely memorable cocktail party story again.

Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry.
If you’ve never read the 1974 true-crime classic, you’ve got a treat in store. Very hard to put down. And The Sea Will Tell – nautically-inclined true crime by Bugliosi – is also a great, as far as I can recall. I read it 10 years ago and can’t believe it took me this long to pick up another Bugliosi book.

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steve Coll.
A history of the family that starts when Bin Laden père was just a boy, and climbs out of his deep desert valley in Yemen to go make a name for himself in Saudi Arabia. Well-researched and well-told.

Other than that I’m making my way, one by one, through the works of Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham. I’ll be sad when I finish.

Elisabeth Eaves is a staff writer at Forbes.com and the author of Bare: The Naked Truth About Stripping (Live Girls). She’ll be spending the summer in New York City.

Reviews from Micki Krimmel
Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations is hands-down the seminal book on social media. Filled with case studies and thorough analysis, this book is a must-read for anyone who works with online communities or has an interest in how burgeoning communications technologies are changing our world. I found myself underlining full pages.

Reviews from Gabriel Metcalf
Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism by Sheldon Wolin.
The main argument, from the preface:

"For centuries political writers claimed that if -- or rather when -- a full-fledged democracy was overturned, it would be succeeded y a tyranny. The argument was that democracy, because of the great freedom it allowed, was inherently prone to disorder and likely to cause the propertied classes to support a dictator or tyrant, someone who could impose order, ruthlessly if necessary. But -- and this is the issue addressed by our inquiry -- what if in its popular culture a democracy were prone to license ("anything goes") yet in its politics were to become fearful, ready to give the benefit of the doubt to leaders who, while promising to "root out terrorists," insist that endeavor is a "war" with no end in sight? Might democracy then tend to become submissive, privatized rather than unruly, and would that alter the power relationships between citizen and their political deciders?"

Nongovernmental Politics by Michael Feher (ed.)
The opening words of the opening essay:

"To be involved in politics without aspiring to govern, be governed by the best leaders, or abolish the institutions of government: such are the constraints that delineate the condition common to all practitioners of nongovernmental politics. What these activists seek to accomplish ranges considerably: providing humanitarian aid, protecting the environment, monitoring human-right sand civil-liberties violations, adding new entitlements to the list of fundamental rights and liberties, defending the interests of corporations' stakeholders -- workers, suppliers, consumers -- and expanding public access to knowledge are only the most frequent among their pursuits..."

Gabriel Metcalf is the Executive Director of San Francisco Planning and Urban Research

Reviews from Eric de Place
“Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation” by Edward Chancellor.
It’s a history of finance and it’s gripping. No, seriously, it is. Starting with the Dutch tulip bubble, the book traces the history of financial speculation from the earliest capital markets right up through the Japanese real estate bubble of the 1980s. You can’t help but find parallels to today.

Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change by Reid Ewing, et al.

I can’t believe I haven’t read this book yet. It’s the magnum opus on the research between urban development and climate change. This is pretty much required reading for geeks with my kind of job.

Seven Wonders for a Cool Planet: Everyday Things to Help Solve Global Warming (Sierra Club Books (Sierra))
Sightline’s latest book, which I contributed some research and writing to. It’s so short you can read it before you fall asleep on your beach towel.

Whiteman by Tony D’Souza.
It’s the semi-autobiographical account of Tony’s years in Africa, told in a sequence of summer-reading-size vignettes, one of which was published in the New Yorker as a short story. The book won a batch of awards, as it should have, including (I think) Nerve Magazine’s best sex scene. (Full disclosure: Tony is a friend of mine from grad school. He’s a wild man, and I mean that in the best possible way.)

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon.
I haven’t actually, you know, read this book, but everyone – everyone – tells me I must. So that’s what I intend to do. It’s by one of the creators of “The Wire” and, as you’d expect, it’s the story of crime and corruption in Baltimore.

Suggestions from Sarah Rich and Alexis Madrigal
The Endless City

Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects by Tom Igoe

Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are by Rob Walker

Sarah Rich is a contributing editor to Worldchanging; Alexis Madrigal is a science writer at Wired

Suggestions from Simran Sethi
In my multi-tasked life, the idea of reading books for pleasure is both delicious and, sometimes, inconceivable. So, I’ve started slowly.

New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories from America and Beyond edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas
(This book) is my evening touchstone. I have held on to this library book well past its due date because it’s a gem, chocked full of super short stories from amazing writers like Nadine Gordimer and Tobias Wolff. If your head is brimming with thoughts and you usually move on to a new task after a few minutes, this book is for you. You’ll be able to squeeze in some beautiful, inspiring, and/or heartbreaking nourishment for the soul before your monkey-mind takes you away. Here’s an excerpt from one of my favorites, “A History of Everything, Including You” by Jenny Hollowell:

“First, there was God or gods or nothing, then synthesis, space, the expanse, explosions, implosions, particles, objects, combustion, and fusion. Out of the chaos, came order. Stars were born, and shone, and died. Planets rolled across their galaxies on invisible ellipses and the elements combined and became.

Life evolved or was created. Cells trembled and divided and gasped and found dry land. Soon they grew legs and fins and hands and antennae and mouths and ears and wings and eyes—eyes that opened wide to take all of it in: the creeping, growing, soaring, swimming, crawling, stampeding universe. Eyes opened and closed and opened again; we called it blinking.”

The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy by Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, Rachel Stein
The Environmental Justice Reader lights my social justice fire. This collection of essays on grassroots activism informs The Good Fight, my environmental justice series for Sundance Channel, and will shape the next round of my Media and the Environment course at the University of Kansas. Environmental rights are civil rights. “Going green” isn’t just about reusable water bottles, installing solar panels or buying hybrids, it’s about ensuring everyone has access to the basics: clean air, healthy soil, and safe water.

Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System by Raj Patel
This is another strong justice book. I have not (yet) read it. Sustainable food systems are my passion and this book clearly illustrates that we have a long way to go which is sad and overwhelming. Every time we open our mouths, we’re feeding (or starving) communities all over the world. I’ll admit I passed this on to a friend because I was so depressed by the info in the first chapter, but I repo’d it because it’s indispensable food for thought. Ignorant bliss is short-lived.

You Are Here: Exposing the Vital Link Between What We Do and What That Does to Our Planet
This book, by Thomas Kostigen, was a gift from. . .Thomas Kostigen! I started reading it because I felt I had to, I continued because I wanted to. Tom’s writing is smart, funny, and masculine. He takes us around the world and moves us forwards and backwards in time to really understand the impacts of our actions and consumption. The journey is definitely through his eyes, and sometimes I felt his assumed “we” didn’t include me, but overall I think this is one of the most interesting eco-books to roll off the presses this year.

Simran Sethi is a contributing environmental correspondent for CNBC and the Lacy C. Haynes Visiting Professional Chair at the University of Kansas School of Journalism and Mass Communications. Sethi is writing a book on environmental justice for Harper Collins and is the contributing author of Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy, winner of the bronze 2008 Axiom Award for Best Business Ethics book. She is the host of Sundance Channel's environmental programming The Green and the creator of the Sundance web series The Good Fight.

Reviews from Alex Steffen
The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World.

I'm only half way through Thomas Campanella's book on urbanization in China. In part that's because it's a somewhat academic book and sometimes slow going, but it's also because I'm finding so many ideas worth pondering. What happens to China's cities is one of the world's great questions, and Concrete Dragon is the book to read.

I'll be reviewing it in greater detail later, but Douglas Farr's Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design With Nature is pretty much the state of the art in building cities that have a future.

I recently completed both Charlie Stross' Halting State (Ace Science Fiction) and Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. They're both about the downside of technology, and the looming of a police state, and how insight into tech is no longer just a geek skill -- it's an essential part of keeping our societies free. They're also great fun.

I'd have to throw in behind Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations as well, if only because it's the first book I've read that treats the really portentous changes being created by social media in a way that average people can understand, without either diminishing or hyping those changes. And Clay's a damn fine writer.

Valzhyna Mort's book of Poetry Factory of Tears (Lannan Literary Selections) is phenomenal, if uneven.

I just got a review copy of the latest issue of Laphams Quarterly, Book of Nature, full of classic thought on the relationship between humanity and the planet. I'm also looking forward to reading Finnish Summer Houses, and dreaming of summer days with nothing to do....

How about you? What are you reading this summer?

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Columns at 1:40 PM)

Can we imagine a day when, having sorted out our recyclables and compost-ables, then responsibly earmarked our "still perfectly good" stuff for reuse, we'll have no trash left to drag to the curb? What are the solutions that will take the developed world from our current rates of over-consumption to zero waste?

British Columbia, one of Canada's most progressive provinces, faces some difficult decisions. Estimates warn that the Cache Creek landfill, where Vancouver sends about 1/3 of its garbage, will fill to capacity and close by 2010; current disposal rates will also fill the Vancouver landfill by 2038. And sourcing new landfill space in a sensitive geographic strip of densely populated land bordered by mountains and ocean is nearly impossible. In response, Vancouver is pursuing an ambitious citywide zero-waste goal. Last week, I attended the annual conference hosted by the Recycling Council of British Columbia (RCBC), one of the hardest-working groups out there in the realm of waste solutions, to learn more about the region's plan.

The strategy encompasses a lot of programs, and over the course of the conference, analysts, city officials and guests from successful organizations like San Francisco's Bay Friendly Landscaping and Gardening offered ideas for ramping up recycling compliance from businesses and individuals, and increasing composting of organics. Both programs are strong in British Columbia (Vancouver currently diverts about 52% of its municipal solid waste into recycling streams), but could be much stronger with more consumer outreach and education and better enforcement of recycling and composting policies, among other approaches.

There are deeper, more paradigm-shifting strategies for shrinking the waste stream, and British Columbia offers a leading model of what some of those strategies look like. Its Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR, also known as Product Stewardship or producer take-back) program sets a global example of public-private collaboration in this area. Its plan covers a rapidly growing list of products (the goal is to add two new product categories every three years), and has seen impressive success in getting producers to cover the costs.

Presenters Monica Kosmak and Laurie Gallant

On the first afternoon of the conference, representatives from both industry and the local government convened in a panel to discuss getting from Vancouver's current model to the goal of 100% EPR. Landfill diversion consultant Laurie Gallant posed questions to the panel that had been raised by her recent study on EPR strategies. Main opportunities for improvement, it seems, lie in increasing public awareness and making it both easy and attractive for consumers to comply (in Gallant's words, "make it as pleasant for me to return my TV as it was for me to buy it."). One idea from the audience that caught my attention was Helen Spiegelman's, suggestion of a central resource recovery park. The visible and accessible neighborhood destination offered one-stop EPR drop-off and processing (the design she referenced was proposed by Eric Lombardi at Colorado-based Eco-Cycle).

Image credit: Eco-Cycle

Others at the conference reminded us that reuse is another potent strategy, and one that we frequently overlook. A few B.C. organizations offer a progressive approach to reuse that seems to be working. On the e-waste front, Free Geek Vancouver has grown immensely since its 2006 founding, and is currently able to reuse about one-fourth of the 15 tons of discarded equipment they receive every month (and as the first Canadian non-profit approved as an e-steward by the Basel Action Network, they deal responsibly with the rest). Also through reuse, nonprofit Computers for Schools now provides about one-fourth of all computers going into Canadian schools annually. And the RCBC connects old residential and industrial goods with new users easily, through its Materials Exchange, "a dating service for waste."

Still, says Free Geek Vancouver founder Ifny Lachance, these programs only begin to address what could potentially be done in terms of repair, reuse and more long-lasting design, if our society placed more value on durability of goods, rather than short-term disposal solutions. We're on board with Lachance (and not just because her name is so cool!), and have long advocated fixing rather than replacing our products. Repair programs have an added benefit: while minimizing waste, they also frequently build community, like Worldchanging Canada editor Mark Tovey noted in his post on bike co-ops.

Singer Raffi with Keynote Speaker Annie Leonard

Finally, we reach the topic that no one really wants to talk about: how will Vancouver handle the residual garbage that remains after these preferable programs have diverted as much as they can?

Landfilling is one option for managing residuals. Some communities choose to incinerate their garbage, but because burning trash is now known to release some of the most potent toxins known to humans, this method is widely opposed. But Vancouver citizens now face a newer, albeit controversial, option: a plasma gasification plant. Euphemized as a "Waste to Energy" solution, the plant offers the fourth "R" – recovery – in the form of recovering the energy stored in the garbage that B.C. residents cannot, or simply will not, properly divert from the waste stream.

Slate's Brendan Koerner offers an overview of how plasma gasification works here. Plasco Energy Group, a Canadian company, is offering the Vancouver area its own plasma gasification plant, which they say will generate power from garbage with zero emissions, producing clean air and potable water as byproducts. Plasco also promises to cover the system's expected $150 million startup cost, which they say will make the project "zero-risk."

Assuming that we will have at least some residual garbage to deal with for the foreseeable future, is gasification a smart way to handle it?

Well-intentioned people have strong opinions both for and against gasification. Objections to the plant include the point that Plasco's technology is not yet well tested, and Vancouver's environmental status as an extremely sensitive airshed. Christina Seidel of the Recycling Council of Alberta offered a very reserved and pragmatic presentation on the issue as it pertains to municipalities. First, it's important to see the bigger picture of the plant's role in waste management. As she put it, "No matter what you call it, it's disposal." She pointed out that the Zero Waste International Alliance explicitly excludes strategies of burning or burying garbage, and that both gasification and landfilling should be seen as transitional strategies at best en route to the ultimate zero-waste goal.

She's right, and most of the conference attendees agreed: ultimately, a zero waste goal requires upstream change, not downstream technology. Although better, safer ways to handle our residuals are necessary short-term solutions, true sustainability requires a system that echoes nature's efficiency and sees resources where we currently see only waste. If we approach the life-cycle of our goods in a different way, we can design residuals out of the process (Look here and here for some great examples of these emerging technologies). When we reach that point--when waste equals food either for the earth or for industry--we will truly be a closed-loop society.

Stanley Park

Photo credits: Julia Steinberger

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(Posted by Julia Steinberger in Columns at 1:04 PM)

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Revital Cohen's final project at the Design Interactions department looked at how cross-breeding man with machines or other species can open up new design opportunities and a space for debate (see her previous project the Telepresence Frame.) I realize that most of the readers are familiar with this concept of 'design for debate' but to avoid any misunderstanding, let's just remind that design for debate explores how design can be used as a medium to draw attention to the social, cultural and ethical implications of new technologies. The resulting design proposals do not provide answers, but they make complex issues tangible, and therefore debatable (via).

Revital's Life Support project looks for way of disconnecting people from the therapeutic machines and cold technologies they are harnessed to. Assistance animals - from guide dogs to psychiatric service dogs and other emotional support animals - unlike machines, can establish a natural symbiosis with the patients who rely on them. Would it be possible to go a step further and transform animals into medical devices?

This project proposes using animals usually bred commercially for consumption or entertainment as companions and providers of external organ replacement, offering an alternative to inhumane medical therapies.

The first part of the project revolves around a concept of Respiratory Dog. Today greyhound racing remains a very lucrative business. Tens of thousands of these dogs are bred annually in an attempt to create the fastest dogs. Most of them are killed if at any time it is determined that they don't have potential to be good racers. The dogs are a mere commercial product and because they constitute a major expense, many of them are killed as soon as it is determined that they don't have value anymore as a racer at a track.

Greyhound race. Image Valkama

In 2003 alone, an estimated 7,500 to 20,000 greyhounds were euthanized simply because they couldn't run fast enough. There are more heart-breaking (even for me who could never be accused of being dog's best friend) facts about their sad existence on the PETA website.

In Revital's scenario, a pedigreed greyhound spends the first twelve months of his life being trained by the racing industry to chase a lure. Over the next three to five years the dog spends his days at kennels and is taken racing weekly to make profit for its owners.

So far, nothing new. However, as soon as its time has come to retire from the racetracks, the greyhound is not euthanised (as happens nowadays to thousands of retired greyhounds), it is collected by the NHS and goes through complimentary training in order to become a respiratory assistance dog.

When training is completed, the greyhound is adopted by a patient dependent on mechanical ventilation and begins a second career as a respiratory 'device'. The greyhound and its new owner develop a relationship of mutual reliance through keeping each other alive.

A new apparatus is used to converts the greyhound's lung movement into mechanical ventilation: the dog is fitted with a harness and placed on a treadmill where it will start running, stimulated by the same mechanical lure employed in its previous training. The treadmill functions as the interface and on/off switch. The harness uses the dog's rapid chest movement to pump a bellows that pushes air into the patient's lungs.

A second scenario envisions substituting a dialysis machine with a sheep. The concept is inspired by several advances of science such as the creation of cows and sheep cloned to have human blood in their bodies. Much research is also carried out to design animals which would carry organs compatible with humans. When one organ would be needed for transplantation the animal would probably be killed to provide the precious body part.

On the other hand, current, mechanical, dialysis treatments are far from being perfect.

Revital's scenario imagine that, in the future, a patient suffering from kidney failure would give a blood sample to lab scientists who then isolate in the genome the regions that code for blood production (bone marrow tissues), and immune response (the major histocompatibility complex), extract the genome from the nucleus of a somatic cell taken from a sheep and substitute the corresponding regions of the sheep's genome with the DNA from the patients' genome.

This recombinant DNA is then inserted into the nucleus of a pre-prepared sheep egg cell. After cell division in the egg is initiated, the egg is implanted into a surrogate ewe which will eventually give birth to a transgenic lamb.

During the day, the dialysis sheep roams in the donor patient's back garden, grazes to cleanse its kidneys, and drinks water containing salt minerals, calcium and glucose.

At night, the sheep is placed at the patient's bedside. The transgenic sheep's kidneys are connected via blood lines to the patient's fistula (a surgically enlarged vein). During the night, waste products from the patient's blood are pumped out of the body, filtered through the sheep's kidney and the blood is returned, cleaned, to the patient.

This happens over and over again throughout the night. The day after, the sheep urinates the toxins.

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 9:57 AM)

Falling in Love with the Internet All Over Again

Sometimes relationships get a little tired.

Maybe you’ve been taking that faithful old World Wide Web for granted? Reading Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations will help you fall in love with the Internet all over again.

Clay Shirky clearly and compellingly describes the many ways that people are taking advantage of web 2.0 and the new social networking technologies.

But, I found Here Comes Everybody to be far more than simply a book about the Internet. Subtitled The Power of Organizing without Organizations, the book is committed to alerting the reader to the possibility of a distinctly new kind of society that the Internet has made possible. Shirky convincingly argues that the Internet is creating not just a networked and interconnected world, but is catalysing the emergence of a post-organizational society.

Check out the video of Clay Shirky’s keynote address at this years Web 2.0 conference (he also posted it here on Worldchanging). To hear him talking personally in more detail about the ideas in Here Comes Everybody, then check out the Authors@Google video presentation.

Having Vocabulary Helps

If you’re a sociologist you may be familiar with ideas like ‘social capital’ and the ‘transaction costs’ associated with various kinds of social and group interactions. However if you’re like me, and trained as a designer or some such, then you probably won’t have any vocabulary to even begin to think about how groups of people organize themselves, let alone talk with other people about it.

Here Comes Everybody provides page after page of useful terminology, and simple but revealing mental models. Most importantly these are bought to life with examples (mainly from the web) that are interesting, funny and thought provoking.

In particular the book distinguishes between the social process of ‘organizing’ (something I do) and the formal entity called ‘organization’ (something I belong to). Shirky does this by describing the origins of the hierarchical model of management, and what that innovation made possible. But most of Here Comes Everybody is spent thoroughly exploring the inherent limits in the management model of organizing human activity, and how the Internet is making interesting new alternatives possible.

In other words, there are many things that no conventional organization (be it a private corporation, a non-profit, or a government agency) is ever going to undertake because they are simply cost too much and offer no clear or reliable benefit. An obvious example of this from Here Comes Everybody is the photo sharing website Flickr. What business could afford to spend endless person-hours taking, tagging, and distributing photographs for free? But add the Internet, digital cameras, broadband, Flickr, and just add humans. All of a sudden the equation looks quite different.

The Flickr example is typical of the way Shirky writes in Here Comes Everybody. Each story operates at a number of levels. First there are the facts, the narrative, and the recognisably human desire to express our selves. Second is the technology, both the cleaver innovations but also the accidental and the law of unintended consequence. And thirdly there is the systems view, the meta-model, and the sociological theory so that we get to see what connects all these stories together.

A Big Heart

I could go on about the big ideas of the book, but what I really want to notice is that Here Comes Everbody is a big-hearted book.

What moved me about the book was not so much the great content, but the humility and humanity of the writing. Clay Shirky’s deep curiosity and engagement with the reality of people doing what people do is compassionate and non-pathologizing, whether its kittens with speech bubbles, or ‘Buffy’ fans, or ice cream activists. Here Comes Everybody remains intensely interested in how people are using new technologies to do what people have always done: share, have conversations, collaborate, and act collectively (or at lease try to).

As someone who struggles with what I perceive as the banality of a lot of the content that is posted on the web, I appreciate Shirky’s ability to suspend judgement and notice and appreciate deeper patterns.

Take the story of the “Pro-Ana” girls for example. A group of mostly teenage girls who use the web to exchange tips about how to not eat. Yes, that’s right, “Pro-Ana” means pro-anorexia. The web-site that unwittingly facilitated the emergence of the group understandably shut them down, but of course once they had found each other, setting up their on their own was easy. More than just easy it was now ‘free’.

While the ‘appropriate’ response is to condemn the “Pro-Ana” girls, Here Comes Everybody goes with them on their journey. They are just one example of what is now possible for people who find themselves in a minority, who live in geographically or otherwise distributed groups, who want to share information that is useful to them, and who live in social settings that are unhelpful or actively antagonistic to their aspirations. These people can now have access to the most basic of human needs: community.

No Cost Group Formation

Imagine the ‘transaction costs’ if you wanted to connect with other like-minded people around a specific interest without the Internet and social