Jon Stahl's Journal

If anyone can explain to me the theory of change behind Earth Hour, or how it actually builds power for the climate change movement, I’d love to hear it.

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Copenhagen was doomed to failure from the day that Obama decided to do health care in 2009 and not climate legislation. Enviros should have recognized this and responded by de-emphasizing the strategic importance of Copenhagen, and focusing their limited resources to prepare for 2010.

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Center for a New American Dream has a nicely done “Alternative Gift Registry” tool (currently the #4 Google result for “gift registry”!) that allows you to create gift registries that de-emphasize consumerism (used goods, donations to charity, experiences rather than stuff, etc.).   This is a great example of a nonprofit advocacy group coming up with [...]

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Back in November, Alex Steffen of Worldchanging.com delivered a bravado two-night set of talks at Seattle Town Hall, exploring a hopeful vision for a prosperous, sustainable future and the opportunity that cities like Sattle have to lead this transformation. They’re now available online, and I certainly plan to load them up on my iPod ASAP. [...]

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Washington state’s Environmental Priorities Coalition has released their 2010 Environment Priorities.  These are the key issues that the entire Washington state environmental movement are going to drive forward via team offense. The three 2010 environmental priorities are: Safe Baby Bottle Act This act would phase out BPA in baby bottles, food and beverage cans, and [...]

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Paul Krugman has a great column on climate change today.  This leapt out at me. “For three decades the dominant political ideology in America has extolled private enterprise and denigrated government, but climate change is a problem that can only be addressed through government action. And rather than concede the limits of their philosophy, many [...]

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“With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet.” – President Barack Obama, Inaugural Address Wow, he just drew a parallel between climate change and nuclear war.  And you know what, he’s right.  Both are fundamental, existential threats. I’m so [...]

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Starting tomorrow, January 1, 2009, Washington state residents will be able to recycle computers, monitors and TVs at no cost, thanks to the e-waste producer responsibility laws we passed in 2006.You can find collection sites here, or read more about the program here.This is a big step forward for responsible recycling in Washington!

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Congrats to the WalkScore team for being featured in today’s Sunday New York Times! Founded in July 2007 by Mike Mathieu, the chairman of Front Seat Management in Seattle, WalkScore works with Google Maps and census data. Type in a street address on the site, and within seconds a list and map appear showing the [...]

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We launched our biggest Plone-powered website ever last night: High Country News. We’re still recovering from the final push, but we’ll offer a detailed technical writeup soon. In the meantime, check out how elegant and powerful a Plone-powered newspaper website can be. Send design-related love notes to HCN’s technical director Ryan Foster.

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Reading about the floods on the Mississippi makes me think of John McPhee’s masterful 1989 book “The Control of Nature” in which he talks about New Orleans’ three hundred year battle against the Mississippi. In this age of hurricanes and floods, McPhee’s work is still visionary and clear-sighted. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

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I’m certain there are least two dozen of you who have been wondering, “Hey didn’t you just go on a big vacation?” and “Where are the goddamn photos?” Wonder no more: we got back from the Lake District a week ago.  We spent 10 days hiking around the fells and dales and staying in hostels.  [...]

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… the leader of a successful, social-mission business to be a bit smarter than this: For seven years, Mr. Mackey had an online alter ego.Using the pseudonym Rahodeb — a variation of Deborah, his wife’s name — Mr. Mackey typed out more than 1,100 entries on Yahoo Finance’s bulletin board over a seven-year period, championing [...]

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Ben, Anil, Anil’s colleage Dan, Molly and I celebrated the 4th today with a great hike up Perry Creek to Mount Forgotten Meadows. As always, I’m proud to live in a country that has such great protected public lands. May they always remain wild and free for everyone to enjoy.

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Transitman! To dramatize the hard, quiet work demanded of transit riders, Seattle artist Christian French created a persona, TransitMan, a superhero who takes public transportation as his superpower. Then he actually donned a superhero costume and spent a lot of time commuting and traveling and documenting the travails of a man in tights dedicated to [...]

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Alex Steffen muses about innovation and green philanthropy in a network age. Worth a read — his big questions resonate strongly with our experiences here at ONE/Northwest.

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WWF Canada have commissioned this very clever billboard, which casts a shadow on itself that creates a shadow-animation of rising waves, to dramatize the reality of climate change.Obligatory YouTube video, which is itself a very smart way to get more mileage out of the stunt.  (Although with only ~21,000 views so far, YouTube is hardly [...]

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Or does WiserEarth, Paul Hawken’s new web 2.0 community mega-wiki-directory project, seem an awful lot like a reimplementation of Idealist.org?

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In one week, my dear friend Bill Bradlee and his co-conspirator David Kroodsma will hop on his bicycle in Boston and begin Ride for Climate USA, 6,000+ mile bike ride across the country and back to raise awareness of global warming, encourage action and promote solutions.  Or as I like to call it, “Bill and [...]

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This sounds like a very creative and effective use of Google Earth as an environmental advocacy tool.  Environmental advocacy group Appalachian Voices has joined to Google to deliver a special interactive layer for Google Earth that tells the stories of over 470 mountains that have been destroyed from coal mining, and its impact on nearby [...]

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