"Burning oil on the Gulf of Mexico," from the TEDxOilSpill expedition, June, 2010, photo credit: James Duncan Davidson; For more information on June 28 event: http://www.TEDxOilSpill.com

Despite my general rule that once a day is designated for a cause, the cause is likely lost (or at least in serious trouble), I found myself rooting mightily last Saturday for Solarday. Missed it? It is only in its second year, but with global aspirations and the power of the sun on its side.

The power of new sun that is, not the fossil kind captured by plants millions of years ago and transformed into oil, coal and gas. Old sun is best left underground, underwater, under salt seals, in mountains and far, far away from tail pipes and smokestacks. Old sun warms the Earth in all the wrong ways. New sun offers a way out of Dodge.

The “teachable moment” in the Gulf, now stretching into its third month and threatening to stretch for years, frames the debate in the starkest of terms: oils spills versus sun spills. Which one would you prefer to soak up?

We have loads of clean / cleaner energy options beyond solar (photovoltaic, water heating):

• wind power (macro and micro)

• wave power

• fuel cells (e.g., the Bloom box)

• efficiency (less is more, more for less, instant savings and sure-fire competitive edge)

• biofuels (check out Willie Smits’  on tapping sugar palms sap for ethanol - no tree-cutting required)

• Bill Gates’ scheme for what he promises is  better, safer version of nuclear

• distribution (distributed power generation and smarter grids)

Every week journals burst burst with news on ever-niftier applications for existing technologies (the solar light bulb) and breakthrough improvements, such as MIT professor Daniel Nocera’s efforts to biomimick photosynthesis for “personalized energy,” all the while improving water use and quality:

Energy start-up Sun Catalytix aims to scale up Nocera’s work in the lab for real-world application.

DEMAND: THE OTHER PART OF THE EQUATION

As Nocera points out, unless we get a hold of demand, energy supply is always going to be a game of catch-up – as it is for resources of every kind. Casting the issue in terms of per capita usage actually provides a perverse incentive for over-population.

Rather, the question isn’t how to most equitably divvy up a finite fossil fuel pie, but how much energy is needed for people to live happy, healthy, productive, environmentally-compatible lives.

The education of women in developing countries, which has been shown to correlate to family-planning, along with easier access to contraceptives, are key for a successful global energy strategy.

Business-as-usual means that “every three years, a new Saudi Arabia needs to be discovered and exploited just to maintain the level of output,” according to Antony Froggatt, a senior research fellow at British think tank, Chatham House and co-author on a new report co-produced with insurance giant Lloyd’s of London on business-smart energy strategies: Sustainable Energy Security: Strategic Risks and Opportunities for Business.

Global energy use is expected to climb a staggering 40% over the next two decades. Even if there were no risks or downsides to deep water drilling and tar sand mining, this would be a tall order to fill. “In an energy insecure world, resilience is an absolutely key function,” says Froggatt.

So how do we put more “bounce” back in the system?  Clearly not by continuing to pour money into vulnerable pipelines, pirate-friendly tanker ships, inefficient central power generation plants, “dumb” grids and top-down one-size-fits-all answers driving an ever-depressing downward spiral, greased by oil spills.

How do we transition to the dazzling variety of better technologies that are either already on the shelf or on the near-term horizon? This is a business and logistics question, not a technical question (which is not to say that substantial and steady R&D funding isn’t required – it most definitely is).

If the Chatham House report is right, things will start to get really dicey by 2013, when China’s domestic oil production is expected to peak and competition for global supplies becomes even more fierce.

REINVENTING FIRE

Few people have been as tenaciously focused on saving the world from its fossil fuel addiction as Amory Lovins, chief scientist and cofounder of the Colorado-based “think and do tank,” Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI). For over 30 years, Lovins, a geek’s geek, has relentlessly and with trademark statistic-laced cheer, shown how saving energy is almost always cheaper than generating it (“negawatts” and “negabarrels”) and how thoughtful design can translate, often immediately, to the bottom line.

When Detroit declared that cars were as efficient as they were ever going to be, Lovins set about reinventing the auto as a “Hypercar,” experimenting with carbon-composite plastics (light-weighting and saves on “paint shop” costs), LED lights, hydrogen fuel cells, better insulation to cut A/C needs and low drag design.  While the team was at it, they did away with the steering wheel in favor of joystick, too. Voila! 100 mpg.  Many of the technologies (though, so far, not the joystick) have been adopted by major manufacturers (video).

Green building design has always been a central part of the RMI’s work, starting with Lovins’ own home, The Banana Farm, nestled in the Rockies of Snowmass, CO. The most ambitious project so far: a $13.2 million retrofit of the Empire State Building, designed to save just under $4 million in energy costs per year.

As impressive as these projects are, they are the warm up for what may very well be Lovins’ masterwork: Reinventing Fire. RF, a new research initiative just getting underway,  builds on work from an earlier project, “Winning the Oil Endgame,” a business-driven road map for weaning the U.S. off oil by 2050. Lovins explains in this TED talk from 2005:

For Reinventing Fire, once again Business is targeted as the engine of change, with competitive edge as the carrot motivating Business. CO2 and pollution reduction are almost incidental benefits. Rather, RF aims to make virtuous circles possible: Do the right thing and all kinds of good things follow.

With the clear-headed cunning that comes from decades at the front lines, the RMI team has carefully chosen its battles:

In the web of interconnections spanning how energy is produced, transported, distributed and used, all the points along the way are fair game for intervention. But decades of research into how energy moves from fossil-fuel sources to uses have revealed key leverage points in four sectors: transportation, buildings, industry and electricity.

Although RF’s focus is on the U.S., the lessons can be applied anywhere and everywhere. The good news only gets better.

SMALL PEOPLE POWER

There is no need for the rest of us to wait on the sidelines while Business gets its profit-priorities in gear. Plenty of revolutions – maybe most – start with “the small people,” as English-as-a-second-language-challenged BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg dubbed us.

In addition to seeking out energy-smart products, insulating our homes and lobbying for more and better public transportation options, we can begin to think more about what we eat and where it comes from.

Much of what appears an America’s dinner plates took thousands of miles to get there. Calves born in Florida might be “finished” in a feedlot in Nebraska and shipped as hamburger to a grocery story in Illinois. Fresh fruits and vegetables are no longer about the bounty of season, but flight logistics. The loss of shrimping in the Gulf from the oil spill doesn’t only mean lost jobs, it means more imports from overseas.

From running farm machinery, to inputs for pesticides and herbicides and, of course, shipping, an enormous amount of fossil fuel goes into food. It is time we put a fork in it: “Small people for locally or regionally-produced food!” If we can up the percentage to just 25% of our collective plate, not only would it force a change in production logistics, but we would be healthier for our efforts. A lot of vitamins get lost in transit…

The urban agriculture movement, which puts farms in the middle of cities, shortens the loop about as much as it can be shortened. As pioneered by MacArthur fellow Will Allen at Milwaukee- based Growing Power’s flagship farm, fish can be added to the harvest through a closed loop aquaponics set up where plants filter water while fish fertilize plants (see TrackerBlog post: “The Farm Next Door”).

BP: BEYOND PROPOGANDA

In a recent interview with the New York Times, the wife of a Gulf coast oil worker spoke about her conflicting feelings between the need for  jobs right now and the high environmental costs of drilling.

“I mean, eventually we might figure out a way to switch over to something else for us to use for energy,” she said. “But is it going to be affordable for everybody?

If we remain loyal to oil, it is a sure thing that it will not be affordable for all. There is simply too much global competition, too much geopolitical risk and no deadline for “eventually.”

Jon Stewart / "The Daily Show": Presidents promising energy independence...

Imagine what the present would have looked like if Nixon (!) had delivered on his promise for energy independence by 1980. Or his successors been a bit more successful pushing green alternatives. What wars might have been averted? What industries would be creating jobs? What would Nigeria look like? And what hole in the ocean floor wouldn’t be gushing?

There is no time left for “eventually.” You want that better future back? Let’s go get it.

RELATED READING/VIEWING:

• TEDxOilSpill: June 28, 2010 – livestreaming from Washington D.C.

• “The Spill, the Scandal and the President” by Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone

• “Obama’s Sherriff” by Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone

• “Far From Gulf, a Spill Scourge 5 Decades Old” by Adam Nossiter, New York Times

• “Energy (R)evolution: A Sustainable World Energy Outlook” - Greenpeace website / pdf report

]]> http://trackerblog.trackernews.net/2010/06/20/the-future-fossil-fuels-are-so-yesterday/feed/ 0 J.A. Ginsburg Bookmark and Share oiltedxoilspill oilpresdailyshow http://trackerblog.trackernews.net/2010/02/10/treesandcharcoal/ http://trackerblog.trackernews.net/2010/02/10/treesandcharcoal/#comments Wed, 10 Feb 2010 02:10:01 +0000 J.A. Ginsburg http://trackerblog.trackernews.net/?p=1201 ]]>

Haiti Timber Re-Introduction Project (HTRIP)

On link between environmental health & public health; Rebuilding Haiti from the soil microbes up; A humanitarian aid petri dish; Jared Diamond’s checklist for collapse & Haiti as vision what could be in store for the rest of us; Charcoal cartels, Amy Smith’s better answer & Nicholas Kristof’s compost toilet tour

Small farm plots on hilly terrain had been stripped bare of soil-stabilizing cover (2/3 of the the country is on land that slopes 20% or more). No soil means no food means malnutrition means disease, illness, death.

“Practically every medical problem in Haiti is poverty-related,” notes Dr. Vehnita Suresh, the hospital’s CEO. “The never-ending cycle of deforestation lead(s) to more ecological damage, more compromised farming, more poverty and more hunger. It goes on and on and on.”

Public health and environmental health are so tied together, you simply can’t have the former without the latter. “We can go on giving health-care forever,” says Dr. Suresh, “It would never really touch even the brim of the problem here.”

So they plant trees. The Haiti Timber Re-Introduction Project (HTRIP) has begun to reverse centuries of devastation that literally skinned the country alive, leaving hillsides such as the ones surrounding the Artibonite Valley where the hospital is located barren and bleak.

Documentary on The Haiti Timber Re-Introduction Project, the Hopital Albert Schweitzer's reforestation effort

In the aftermath of the earthquake, reforestation has taken a back seat to the urgency of treating the injured (you can donate directly to support the hospital’s work). But over the long term, any real “Hope for Haiti” means planting trees – literally rebuilding the country from its soil microbes up.

AVOIDING COLLAPSE: LAB HAITI

Haiti has been teetering at brink of breakdown for as long as anyone can remember, but it took the quake to focus  global attention, sparking an unprecedented outpouring of support and a largely spontaneous explosion of technical can-do innovation. From CrisisMappers and Crisis Commons hackers to the collaborative Haiti Rewired network, Twitter hashtag-enabled mash-ups and teams of volunteer architects, engineers, doctors,  veterinarians and other professionals, this has been an all-hands-on-deck emergency.

In a sense, Haiti has become a sort of petri dish for humanitarian action. The stakes couldn’t be higher. If, somehow, this “Exhibit A” for all that Jared Diamond says spells doom for a culture/country’s prospects is rescued from the abyss of complete collapse, the implications go far beyond Haiti.

Haiti, in all its deforested, polluted, cartel-corrupted, disease-riddled impoverishment, is a vision of our planet’s future if we continue to devour natural resources beyond replenishment, downplay the seriousness of climate change, spike efforts at family planning and ignore the integral importance of environmental health. As goes Haiti, so go we all.

“The most important thing we need to do about the world’s environmental problems,” says Diamond, “is trying to forget about there being any most important thing we need to do. Instead, there are dozen things and we’ve got to get them all right.”

EDEN WRECKED

The Haiti/Dominican Republic border; Completely deforested on the Haitian side; "Charcoal cartel" beginning to make inroads on the Dominican side

Where did all the forests go? The stats are as numbing as the satellite photos are stark:

• 1492: Columbus stops by. 75% of what would become Haiti covered in trees

• 1664: The French West India Company formed. Millions of trees chopped & harvested to create massive plantations. African slaves by the tens of thousands are imported to provide labor.

• 1825: French agree to recognize Haiti’s freedom, won in 1804, in exchange for 150 million francs (later reduced to 90 million). This puts the country in deep debt from which it never recovers. Much of the country’s timber wealth (mahogony) ships out for a song.

• 1940: An estimated 30% of country still forested

• 1970: Only 10% forested. People depend on charcoal made from wood for cooking. By contrast, government subsidizes gas stoves in the Dominican Republic

• 2010: Less than 1% forested. “Charcoal cartels” start chopping down trees across the Dominican border. Eroded land silts up lake, floods key road to Port-au-Prince. $40 million need to build alternate road.

LOW TECH / LOW COST: SOLUTIONS IN PROBLEMS

In a twist of dust-to-dust poetry, some of the answers to Haiti’s most intractable problems can be found in the one thing that Haiti has in abundance: waste.

About 10 years ago, MIT D-Lab founder Amy Smith, took a group of students to Haiti, where they were inspired by a local entrepreneur who had developed a way to make charcoal briquettes from scrap paper.  Smith’s team improved the process, using agricultural waste as feedstock. In 2006, she presented the results at the TED conference.

The upsides are stunning: No trees cut. A better product. Makes money for the producers. And since charcoal generates less smoke than wood, fewer cases of cooking fire smoke-induced acute respiratory illness, the leading cause of death for those under 5 years old in developing countries.

The process continues to be improved. Here is a step-by-step DIY field demo by Smith:

SHIT HAPPENS – THAT’S GOOD NEWS

SOIL, a small American non-profit operating in Haiti, has a plan for turning one of the country’s foulest, most intractable public health issues into a plus: transforming smelly poop into fragrant fertile compost. “Instead of potting soil, potty soil.”

Composting toilets themselves are nothing new, but developing a sustainable community-supported model for their use is – and  key to the group’s over-arching mission to reduce poverty via “liberation ecology.” With the likes of Partners in Health co-founder Paul Farmer and The Land Institute’s Wes Jackson on their all-star advisory board, they have a better shot than most at getting the plan to work.

In March, 2009, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof took a tour with SOIL staffers Sasha Kramer and Sarah Brownell:

SOIL’s approach parallels MacArthur genius Will Allen‘s vermiculture-based urban farms. The flagship 3-acre Growing Power farm, located just a few blocks from Milwaukee’s largest public housing project, is a stunning example of ecosystem-thinking applied to intensive agriculture. And it all begins with worms chowing down on municipal waste, turning garbage into fertile black gold. Allen also weaves in aquaponics – a freshwater closed loop fish-operation (perch, tilapia). Plants are nourished by fish-poo water, which filters down back to the fish. Could such a system work in Haiti? It certainly seems worth investigating.

HIGH TECH HELP

Tree-planting, briquettes, compost toilets and urban farming don’t require a lot of complicated moving parts or all that much money. Their simplicity is an essential part of why they might make a real difference. But high tech tools can help make these good ideas even more effective.

• Mapping: Tools to track and predict deforestation, including illegal logging, and to help identify good sites for reforestation projects.

• Communications: Connecting charcoal briquette producers with ag waste sources and with customers; Web-based how-to guides on how to make charcoal briquettes, tree-care tips, etc.

• Fundraising: M-giving and other philanthropy tools, e.g., develop a game where players grow a cyber-forest – download proceeds to support a real forest.

RELATED READING / VIEWING:

“After the earthquake: Haiti’s deforestation needs attention” by Moises Velasquez-Manoff (Christian Science Monitor)

“Agroforestry and sustainable resource conservation in Haiti: A Case Study” by Nathan McClintock

U.S. Senate Bill 1183: Haiti Reforestation Act of 2009 introduced by Senator Dick Durbin

“Haiti and the Dominican Republic: One Island, Two Worlds” by Jared Diamond (excerpt from “Collapse”)

“Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” by Jared Diamond (book)

“Jared Diamond on why societies collapse” (TED talk – video)

The Charcoal Project (website)

Growing Power (website)

“The Farm Next Door: Urban Agriculture, Biomimicry, Aquaponics, Why Worms are Priceless & How Will Allen Aims to Fix the World” by J.A. Ginsburg (Trackerblog)

“Google Earth boosts deforestation monitoring capabilities” by Rhett A. Butler (Mongabay.com)

The last-minute, cobbled-together, non-binding, specifics-lite COP15 “accord” managed to unify almost everyone in disappointment, though perhaps not in surprise. Many, including climatologist James Hansen and economist Jeffrey Sachs, have for months called the drawn-out politically-driven process “broken.” When there was no time to waste, time was wasted. The representative from the fast-sinking island of Tuvalu noted forlornly that the fate of the world was “being decided by some senators in the U.S. Congress.”

Really? Just a handful of senators? A few people out of a few dozen determining the future of six billion? If true, then as a species perhaps we deserve ourselves – though our fellow travelers on this blue dot planet certainly deserve better.

Tom Friedman, never one to shy away from clever turn of phrase, has called on “Father Greed” to save us from the political inertia letting  Mother Nature run amok. He wants to see a sort of green tech “arms” race between the U.S. and China, the two largest emitters responsible together for spewing half the greenhouse gases mucking up the atmosphere. To the winner will go economic advantage, an innovation edge and millions of jobs.

To the loser – well, there are no losers. With the world’s two largest economies leading the way, Friedman is certain the rest of the world will follow. Developing countries will build low-carbon energy infrastructure from the get go and a variety of disasters will be scaled back, if not altogether averted:

• Global CO2 levels will steady at safe-ish levels

• There won’t be quite as many record-breaking snow-storms, floods, droughts and famines

• The advance of vector-borne diseases into temperate zones will slow (anything that involves a mosquito, gnat or tick)

• Glaciers will return to an appropriately glacial crawl, slowing their retreat, possibly advancing and assuring millions of people living down-slope of reasonably predictable seasonal water supplies

• Oceans won’t turn lethally acidic, so corals and the fish that depend upon them will survive

• Oceans won’t rise as fast or as high as worst-case predictions, which will spare islands and coastlines from worst-case devastation

• Fewer forests will be blistered by drought, so won’t be incinerated in super-hot, soil-scorching mega-fires

• Fewer species will go extinct

• Climate refugees will number in the tens of millions instead of the hundreds of millions by 2050

The good news will be less bad news, which doesn’t have either much political cache or headline appeal, which is why the cynically optimistic Friedman is banking on greed: “(T)he way you get big change is by getting the big players to do the right things for the wrong reasons. If you wait for everyone to do the right thing for the right reason, you’re going to be waiting a long, long time.”

Time? Who’s got time?

_________________________________________________

RELATED READING / LISTENING / VIEWING

• “The Fate of My Country Rests in Your Hands” (GOOD blog post / video)

• “Jeffrey Sachs: ‘Copenhagen expectations unlikely to be fulfilled’” (EarthSky podcasts / audio)

• “Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity” by James Hansen (book website)

The 360 Paper Bottle

Leave it to an 8 year-old. Specifically, the 8 year-old son of Jim Warner, managing director of design consultancy Brandimage, who took one look at a plastic bottle his dad had helped create and said, “Oh. You make trash.”

Once the sting of that nasty little unvarnished truth wore off, Warner set to work to make not just a better bottle, but a better approach to bottling altogether. And with the 360 Paper Bottle, he may have hit the eco-ball straight out of the cradle-to-cradle design park.

The bottle,  introduced as a spec project to generate some buzz for the firm in 2008,  generated an “extreme response,” says Warner. Hundreds of calls winnowed down a handful of companies and organizations (details intentionally sketchy at this point) who have partnered with Brandimage to bring the bottles to market, possibly as early as sometime in 2010.

Among the 360′s many virtues:

• Not actually made out of paper but pulp, which can be sourced from almost anything fibrous such as bamboo, sugar cane or banana leaves.

• Local production plants can source local materials, generating local jobs and commerce.

• A shorter distribution chain means less transport-generated CO2

• The bottles designed to be become their own multi-unit packaging: a six-pack literally sticks together.

• A radical re-think of the bottle top: paper & with handy hook

• Bottles can be shipped flat to be filled closer to their final destination, reducing shipping costs

• They are compost-friendly

SAVES BIRDS & OCEANS

Perhaps the biggest virtue of all is simply that they are not plastic. They do not require a special recycling facility for processing – they can be tossed in a compost pile. They do not release Bisphenol A (BPA) as a carcinogenic byproduct. They will not contribute to Great Pacific Garbage Patch or any of the other spirals of death swirling poison in the Earth’s oceans. They will not kill innocent albatross chicks by bloating their bellies with bottle caps, their parents having been fooled by the colorful faux food as they fished in once fertile waters.

So, Mr. Warner…What else does that insightful son of yours have to say?

______________________________________

RELATED READING / VIEWING

SEAPLEX: Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition (website)

Agalita Marine Research Foundation (website)

“Captain Charles Moore on the seas of plastic” (TED talk – video below)

“We’re Poisoned! – FDA is killing us *Plastics* Bisphenol A” – an interview with Dr. Frederick vom Saal, Edocrine Disruptors Group, University of Missouri (video below)

Midway Journey: (documentary project blog – Chris Jordan, Manuel Maqueda, Bill Weaver, Jan Vozenilek, Victoria Sloan Jordan)

It was a wonderful little bubble while it lasted. Getting up before dawn. Dressing in easy-to-peel layers for whatever the day might bring. Walking over to Boynton-McKay, a diner of rare perfection, where the wi-fi was as reliably good as the pancakes (a boon in connectivity-challenged Camden…) Ascending the stairs and more stairs of the town’s famous 19th century Opera House. A few minutes to mingle-navigate among tables of nibble-food before settling down for a morning of things worth thinking about.

But first, a little music. Logan Richardson’s soulful, playful, questioning sax riffs on “America the Beautiful” one day. Zoe Keating’s clear, deeply layered, architecturally precise, transcending cello pieces another. How lovely to start each day by not thinking. Just being. In the moment. Together. Brilliant.

And then it was off and running, from economics to education, urban decay to urban agriculture, environmental catastrophe to conservation hope, design theory to food design, cardboard robots to paper diagnostics, communications to comics, art to dance to music. To, to, to…

But as the last note of the Mark O’Connor-anchored jam session finale faded into festive applause and we trundled off in buses through the rainy dark to a cavernous transportation museum for one last party, the bubble had begun to weaken and thin. Faces, now familiar, circled by against an improbable backdrop of vintage automobiles, sci-fi bicycles and disconcertingly disembodied airplane parts.  A few final conversations and business cards. Some hugs and toasts. Promises to keep in touch, follow up, finish that thought. We stayed up until we couldn’t. By morning, the bubble was lost in the dazzling clarity of a New England fall day. One by one we left the the small town – Maine’s answer to Brigadoon – journeying back to the chaotic urgency of our daily lives. With each mile down the highway to Boston, and each minute in the sky back to Chicago, I could feel experiences recasting into memories, ready for sorting and analysis.

TAKE-AWAYS

Throughout the conference, Michelle Riggen-Ransom, Rachel Barenblat, and Ethan Zuckerman were absolutely brilliant live-blogging the talks and I recommend reading their posts, along with Kristen Taylor’s, on the PopTech blog to get a more detailed view of goings on.

Among the overarching themes: the serendipity of the amateur and the common sense of a cross-disciplinary approach. In short, the easiest way to see outside the box is to be outside the box.

Take, for example, the tale of the $12 computer (can be haggled down to $10). PopTech 2009 fellow Derek Lomas, who was working in India on”ethnographic design research on uses of mobile phones in urban and rural contexts,” found just such a miracle browsing a crowded electronics marketplace. It’s bare bones – hooks up to a television for a screen and runs on the 8-bit chip that powered 1980s-era Apple II computers and Nintendo game systems. So “vintage” is the tech, patents have run out, making it, for all intents and purpose, open source. Funded by a $180,000 MacArthur grant, Lomas and his collaborators the Playpower Foundation are developing software that combines educational aims with game-playing appeal. “It occurred to me that if this platform had just a few decent games, and one good typing game, it could be economically transformative,” notes Lomas, “because touch-typing can make a difference between earning a dollar a day or a dollar an hour.” Why invent an answer from scratch when you can assemble one cheaper? Innovation through shopping…

______________________________

Another theme: The most effective way to to trigger change is to provide a better alternative to the status quo.

For preventive medicine pioneer Dean Ornish, the shift from the “fear of dying to the joy of living is the key to the healthier future. For materials scientist Neri Oxman, it is moving from a Miesian reality where each building material has a specific function (steel for support, glass for light) to one inspired by Nature, where a single material yields a range of benefits (e.g., the structure of an egg shell evolved to provide strength as well as gas permeability). For clinical psychologist, Naif  Al-Mutawa, it is tackling Muslim stereotypes through the compelling comic book stories of Muslim superhero kids (“The 99″). Better is better.

MIT architect Sheila Kennedy, who has helped spearhead PopTech’s portable lighting project, points out the importance of opening up a space to new ways of thinking.  FLAP – Flexible Light & Power – is a Timbuk2 messenger bag outfitted with small solar array, battery and LED. A removable panel lined with reflective material amplifies the light from a tiny bulb cleverly tucked into a strap. AfriGadget’s Erik Hersman recently took some prototypes to Africa for field testing. But no matter whether a bag design turns out to be a viable answer or not, the thinking has shifted: Solar is not just for roofs and calculators any more. Now you can literally wear power on your sleeve.

______________________________

photo: Growing Power

Which segues into a third theme: Just add sunshine. Three ideas presented at the conference that are either dependent upon or inspired by photosynthesis have the potential to help significantly move the dial on climate change.

• Will Allen is a teacher and an inspiration for the potential of urban agriculture. His suite of Growing Power farms in Milwaukee and Chicago are designed as a series of nested ecosystems. Vermicomposting – turning garbage into wildly fertile worm castings – is the lynchpin. You start by creating soil so rich, it doesn’t require petro-based chemical additives.  From aquaponics set ups to raise fish by the thousands to a biodigester for converting food waste into energy, everything that can be harvested or recycled is. It is cleaner, healthier, oil-independent food system, with local “farm to fork” distribution networks designed to turn urban “food deserts” green.

• Willie Smits has plans for a similar polyculture fix, only rainforest-size. Trained in forestry, Smits career took a turn when he came across a sick orangutan in a Borneo market. Saving orangutans meant saving habitat, an increasingly difficult task when easy profits for palm oil led to wholesale conversion of ancient forests into modern superficially-efficient monocultures. Beyond the staggering loss of biodiversity, forest clearing fires, especially in peat-land forests, have led to “CO2 volcanoes,” spewing vast amounts of sequestered greenhouse gases skyward. Smits’ fix centers around the sugar palm, a short tree common in second-growth forest, which thrives only when grown as part of a polyculture and has a talent both for sequestering carbon (deep roots) and gushing a liquid that can be turned into sugar or ethanol. Smits has come up with a way to process the quick-to-ferment “juice” efficiently off-site. With the “juice” as the economic anchor, a suite of other forest products can also be sustainably harvested. Recently Smits set up a company, Tapergy, to implement his ideas. Notably, both Smits and Allen focus on jobs. Commodity monocultures destroy jobs and communities. Urban agriculture and tropical agroforestry create them.

• Chemist Daniel Nocera, by contrast, doesn’t want to raise plants but mimic them to generate vast amounts of energy. His epiphany: Plants routinely rebuild the mechanisms for splitting water in their leafy “fuel cells.” Scientists’ decades-long quest to find stable catalysts was not only futile but utterly misguided. Instead, his lab developed a resilient catalyst that could rebuild itself, making it possible to create both a better, cheaper fuel cell and process dirty water into drinkable water.

NEXT…

Perhaps the most exciting announcement at the conference was about a new fellows program for scientists, which takes us back to cross-disciplinary common sense. As the speaker list already demonstrates, science is an essential part of creating change for the greater good.

The further promote and support collaborations, some suggestions:

1) Develop a session or a workshop focused on tech transfer, focusing on both the legal and marketing angles.

2) Add data visualizations to the program and on the website showing connections between speakers. With such a multi-disciplinary list, connections transcend program groupings.  For example, Smits could just as logically been grouped with Michael Pollan and Will Allen.

3) Open the PopTech Creative Reuse Workshop at 8 a.m., one hour before the conference. Put out coffee as bait for early risers. I completely missed the workshop. The daily speaker sessions tended to go long, so there wasn’t much time to scoot over afterward. During breaks, the tendency was to mingle, network and nosh on site. Restaurants chosen for lunches were all located in the opposite direction.

4) Develop an online book store search-able by title, author and subject.

Now to wait for the videos to post, just in time for the long winter cozy season…

Blame it on the birds. And the elephants, lions, biochar, Indonesian agroforestry, dirt batteries, mechanical caterpillar waves, global maps, messenger bag-cum-lighting systems, a cyber-dance experience and one very lovely essay about migration. But not too far into the first day of PopTech, the conference’s “Reimagining America” theme disappeared. Which was fine. It seemed too limited for a confab about Big Thoughts, even here in a small, charming  American town (that could use a little reimagining itself – connectivity way, way too spotty). In any case, you can’t really reimagine, or even imagine, America without including the rest the world in the equation.

And nobody brought that point home with more heart-wrenching eloquence than Chris Jordan with his slide show of photographs of dead albatross on Midway Island, killed by a diet of plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Photograph after photographs of birds, heads twisted by pain, guts split by a bounty of all too familiar bottle caps – perky shades of reds and blues favored by marketers – had the audience in shock and *this* audience in tears. This wasn’t an isolated occasional bird tragedy, but the picture of a extinction-in-progress. And because it took so darn long for anyone to discover the Garbage Patch, a ghostly-insidious man-made chemically-enhanced primordial soup the size of at least a couple of Texas’s (Texi?), it is far too late to do much about it – at least for the albatross (“Midway Journey” project blog – notes & videos).

Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Save the microbes! Save the plankton! Save the food chain!  Who knows? We might just save ourselves, too.

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The day was filled with jolts of Overwhelming Problems paired with Glimmers of Hope.

John Fetterman, the myth-come-to-life mayor of Braddock, PA, a bankrupt rust-belt town that had been all but written off. A strikingly tall bald figure, with dates tattooed on his massive arms to remember the victims of violent crimes (thankfully, no new tattoos in over a year), Fetterman’s unvarnished recitation of all that had gone wrong coupled with some very basic ideas of what can be done had the crowd on a can-do upswing. Renovate those $5,000 homes (average price – since the recession, they’ve lost value). Add artists. LOTS of artists. Plant urban gardens. Hold lots of family-friendly it-takes-a-village-to-make-a-village. Clear debris and make a park. Then came news of a major hospital closing, which will not only take jobs from the area, but leave the population – mostly poor and minority – in a health-care desert. It is hard to make money taking care of poor people. So much for the greater public good or, for that matter, public health.

I began to wonder whether some of the health solutions being tested in the developing world -  many driven by cell phone tech – wouldn’t be appropriate here, too? (e.g., PopTech Fellow Josh Nesbit’s FrontlineSMS: Medic & Hope Phones).

Indeed, one of the conference’s most intriguing themes to emerge so far is this concept of two-way innovation: developed to developing world and vice-versa. (Note to makers of One Laptop Per Child: I really really REALLY want one of those computer screens designed for use in full sun…)

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On the Glimmers of Hope front, the PopTech Fellows were batting it out of the park. From Jason Aramburu‘s efforts to commercialize biochar, a carbon negative solution that also improves soil fertility, to Eben Bayer’s nifty mushroom-mediated compostable alternative to landfill-choaking styrofoam, Aviva Presser Aiden and Hugo van Vurveen’s “dirt batteries” and Emily Pilloton’s no-nonsense determination to enlist an army of young designers to come up with Better Answers, there was a sense that it’s still not too late. We can, just maybe, turn this thing around and not go down the climate change tubes.

FLAP – Flexible Light and Power – a prototype of a portable lighting system stitched into a Timbuktu messenger bag – also caught the crowd’s imagination. Designed by MIT’s Sheila Kennedy, it’s a simple idea that could radically change the way we think about solar deployment, opening up the space to all kinds of new ideas. No longer would solar be consigned to rooftop panels or a strip on a pocket calculator. It can almost literally be woven into the fabric of our lives, turning us into portable “plants,” photosynthesizing as we go about our daily business. (More from Erik Hersman on field-testing the design in Africa.)

Indonesia-based Willie Smits also has big plans for photosynthesis, with a scheme that would not only reforest the world’s rain forests, but generate jobs and an array of crops, supply power to poor villages, restore biodiversity and wildlife habitat and dramatically reduce demand for foreign oil. Smits “Tapergy” plans is an integrated system that works with Nature to increase the productivity of land while capping CO2 “volcanos” that result when millions of acres of land, particularly peat-lands, are cleared from monoculture oil palm plantations. (read more about Smits work in “Trees for Trees” post – page down to section on “You Had Me at Organgutan” – includes videos)

There was much more to Day 1. But Day 2 is about to begin. So, connectivity willing, follow on twitter: #poptech / @trackernews.

• Get people to donate old cell phones to a recycling company
• Get recycling company to assign each phone a value
• Use value to trade for refurbished phones
• Donate refurbished phones to clinics in developing countries to use for sending health-related text messages
• Good begets good

Stanford student Josh Nesbit, who came up with the scheme, spent last summer at a tiny hospital in rural Malawi armed with 100 refurbished phones ($10 per), a used laptop and some free software called FrontlineSMS for managing text messages. Could he set up a phone network to deliver more and better health care to the 250,000 people living in the region served by the hospital?

Phones were given to a group of volunteer community health workers who support the hospital’s two (count’em two) staff doctors, traveling dozens of miles by motorbike and on foot each day to meet patients. It was the first time some of them they had ever used a phone. $500 was allocated as the annual budget for messages (10 cents per = 5,000).

The wins were immediate and sizable. In the first six months, the hospital saved $3,000 in motorbike fuel, shaved off 3,500 hours in staff travel time, while doubling the number of TB patients served. Nesbit, pumped by such a simple triumph of tech-for-the-greater good, now wants to scale up the project and duplicate it Bangladesh, Burundi, Honduras, Uganda, Lesotho and additional clinics in Malawi. Which means phones. Lots of phones.

But Hope Phones may prove to be an even better idea than he realizes.

MOBILE PILE-UP

As amazing and essential as cell phones have become, their disposal is a logistical and hazmat nightmare. Even in a down economy, well over a billion cell phones and smartphones are sold each year. According to the EPA, between 100 million and 130 million discarded phones are sitting in drawers in the U.S., mostly because people don’t know what to do with them. (Some estimates peg the annual number “retired” handsets at 155 million, which translates 426,000 per day. Taking current recycling numbers into account, then rolling over the surplus from year to year, the number of stashed phones can probably be measured in the hundreds of millions.)

If nothing else, it is a giant waste of energy. According ot the EPA: 

If Americans recycled 100 million phones, we could save enough upstream energy to power more than 194,000 U.S. households for a year. If consumers were able to reuse those 100 million cell phones, the environmental savings would be even greater, saving enough energy to power more than 370,000 U.S. homes each year.

Most Americans, of course, want the upgrade, not last year’s model. The average life expectancy of a phone in the U.S. is a fleeting 18 months. Still, they are more than good enough for sending basic SMS messages, so it’s a matter of getting them to where they’re needed and wanted.

Photographer Chris Jordan's presentation at the 2008 Greener Gadgets Conference

PHONE LOBOTOMIES

Probably the single biggest hurdle keeping donation numbers hovering at an uninspiring 20% is the fear of identity theft. Stories of sensitive, embarrassing and occasionally downright dangerous information turning up on a refurbished phones are not, alas, the stuff of urban legend. A recent survey by a recycler found that a gobsmacking 99% of the phones sampled still had prior owner data – and the “smarter” the phone, the more kinds of data are stored.

If you aren’t terribly techy and can’t bear the detailed torture of user manuals, take your phone to a retailer and ask for some help removing the memory/SIM card and resetting. Then donate.

THERE’S GOLD IN THEM THAR PHONES…

Along with silver, palladium, copper and tin. There isn’t very much of anything in a single phone, but there are so darn many phones, it adds up. A ton of ore from a gold mine typically yields only 5 or 10 grams of gold, but a ton of cell phones (~10,0000) can produce 300 to 400 grams. For the last several months, Sony Corporation has been testing out a recycling program in Kitakyushu, Japan to extract high quality metals from mountains of electronic waste dubbed “urban mines.” 4,400 pounds of raw electronic “ore” (all kinds of electronics, not just cell phones) yielded 39 grams of gold, 164 grams of silver, 73 kilograms of copper and 8 grams of palladium. Unfortunately, unless the labor-intensive extraction process can be improved five-fold, it doesn’t pay.

Yet anything that keeps phones – and their toxic batteries – out of landfills is a plus. Both are full of chemicals known to leach into groundwater. In a few states it is illegal to toss a cell phone.

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HEART OF DARKNESS (ELECTRONICS  EDITION)

Getting rid of cell phones turns out to be the easier half of the cradle-to-grave equation. Sourcing some of the metals required to to run a phone – or an MP3 player or any number of electronic miracles – can be ethically treacherous. Cell phones, however, have been singled out as the poster-gadget in a campaign to stop black market mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has helped fuel violence by funneling millions of dollars to warlords while condemning hundreds of thousands to virtual slavery.

Crew after documentary film crew has slogged through the African jungle for the last decade to haul back footage of scenes from Dante’s worst nightmares. In the middle of nowhere, in wilting tropical heat, surrounded by every kind of creature that bites and stings, far from clean water, healthy food or bare-bones medical care, an estimated 700,000 “artisanal miners” (according to USGS figures) hack away at rock, often working deep in airless mines, hoping to strike cassiterite, coltan or wolframite before it literally strikes them. Mine safety isn’t on the agenda and injuries are common. Many of the miners are children. Ore is carried out in sacks that weigh more than the people whose backs they break.

CONFLICT MINERALS

Cassiterite (a tin ore), coltan (an ore from which tantalum and niobium a.k.a columbium are extracted) and wolframite (a tungsten ore) have been dubbed “conflict minerals” and are the target of an international effort spearheaded by human rights groups to get electronics manufacturers to support an independently verifiable system for tracking supply chains. It’s a hot issue. In just the last few months, the U.N. released a new report, while the  Congo Conflict Mineral Act 2009 (S.891) was introduced in the U.S. Congress.

Maybe not. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't care. A lot.

Now a group called “Enough!,” (a project of the Center for American Progress) has  launched “Come Clean 4 Congo,” a campaign to raise awareness via a YouTube-sponsored video contest: “You may not realize it, but you’re cell phone is fueling the deadliest war in the world.”

Well…

Maybe not. Beyond the breathless hyperbolic weirdness of ranking wars by deadliness (do you think the millions of people caught in the cross-hairs and refugee camps of Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Sudan would feel much relief to know that whew! at least they’re not victims of the deadliest war?), it turns out the DRC supplies a very small percentage of the minerals in question.

According to USGS statistics:

• In 2008, Congo supplied just under 1% of the world’s tin.

• Australia, Brazil and Canada supply the lion’s share of the world’s tantalum and niobium (aka columbium), which are the minerals extracted from coltan.  Congo’s contribution is so small, it is lumped with “other countries” at the bottom of the “World Mine Production, Reserves, and Reserve Base” lists. (However, according to “Enough!,” the figure may be as high as 30% due to a halt in Australian production)

• Congo is lumped with “other countries” for tungsten mining. China dominates the global market with ample reserves.

"In Search of Coltan" / Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting: 80%? The true figure is closer to 30%, according to activist group Enough! - possibly much less.

Even if the 30% tantalum figure is accurate, it still much lower than an oft-cited statistic that 80% of the world’s coltan comes from eastern Congo. That stat opens a popular documentary produced the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which was first broadcast on a program with Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria.

What gives?  How can this massive horror continue if there isn’t all that much money to be made? Why don’t the electronics manufacturers simply declare themselves conflict mineral-free and steer clear of the DRC?

Perhaps part of the answer is that war comes cheap in Congo and lives come even cheaper. The miners work to survive, to barter for food. They have few, if any, other options. Those hauling ore through the jungle are lucky to keep a little profit after paying off rebels and soldiers en route. Smugglers make money from importers willing to turn a blind eye to save customs fees. Guns are easy to come by. Rich is a relative term.

“Enough!” and other humanitarian organizations actually do not want to stop mining in Congo, nor do they want to see foreign companies abandon the country. It is one of the few opportunities for trade and income. Instead, they want supply chain transparency to make it easier to identify, isolate and root out illegal operations. That may be easier said than done. The technology exists to “fingerprint” ore samples and link them to specific mines, but it is a pricey process. Once the ore is refined and mixed with ore from other mines, it is impossible.

Ironically, in the corruption-warped day to day reality, the status quo offers perverse security. In the 2008 French documentary “Blood Coltan,” a middleman dealer filmed via hidden camera justifies his business by noting that miners wouldn’t have any work at all if he weren’t there to buy the minerals. Despite the bone-chilling amoral cynicism, he has a point. It is not enough to call for a halt to the conflict-mineral trade without also providing alternative livelihoods and the safety in which to pursue them.

Even with legal operations, mine working conditions are likely a low priority in the DRC and in other countries such as China where some of these minerals are sourced. Conflict minerals is a first bold volley in the battle for ethical e-sourcing.

DO THE RIGHT THING

Whether or not my adorable, talented app-happy iPhone – the Swiss Army knife of the 21st century – has blood on its screen, the point is it could.

The point, as Daniel Goleman explores in his new book, “Ecological Intelligence,” is that the supply chain of even a simple glass bottle has nearly 2,000 links. Everything has a bit of everywhere.

The point, as Jaqueline Novogratz explains in her new book, “The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World,” is that we are connected in ways we can’t even imagine. (The title refers to a sweater she loved as a girl, outgrew and donated to Goodwill. Years later, she met a boy wearing the very same sweater – name tag and all – on the streets of Kilgali, Rwanda, where she was working on a micro-finance project.) Our actions, as well as our failures to act, have ramifications.

The point is to pay attention and try to do the right thing.

That’s not always such an easy call. Except when it is. Recycle electronics. Donate old cell phones. Help a clinic in a developing country. Make Josh Nesbit’s day.

Hope Phones.

MORE READING / VIEWING:

“Congo Fighting Revives Tainted Phone Fears,” Jack Ewing, BusinessWeek

“Blood Coltan,” Tac Presse Productions

Even those of us best described as “mechanically-challenged” can grasp how these inventions work — which is a big part of the point. In fact, it is #4 on Smith’s list of “Seven Rules for Low-Tech Engineering”:

Create “transparent” technologies, ones that are easily understood by the users, and promote local innovation.

Personally, I have given up hope of ever understanding all the nifty features on my too-smart-for-its-own-good cell phone. But I know I could master that corn-shucker (the “Design on $2 a Day” video includes a segment on it — note to MIT: video embed codes please…)

Rule #7 also focuses on the critical user-interface issue, but with a emphasis on design as an iterative, rather than a static, process:

Provide skills, not just finished technologies. The current revolution in design for developing countries is the notion of co-creation, of teaching the skills necessary to create the solution, rather than simply providing the solution. By involving the community throughout the design process, you can help equip people to innovate and contribute to the evolution of the product. Furthermore, they acquire the skills needed to create solutions to a much wider variety of problems. They are empowered.

My friend Ed Jezierski at InSTEDD is attempting to apply this low-tech philosophy to high-tech, setting up an “innovation lab” in Cambodia (full disclosure: TrackerNews is also a project of InSTEDD). To jump start the effort, he helped put together a one-day tech event in September – Bar Camp Phnom Penh — for which 200 people registered and 300 showed up. Clearly, Ed’s tapped into something big. Now the challenge is to make the dream real by putting together a lab where local talent develops software solutions for local and regional needs (in this case, with a focus on health systems). “All technologies go obsolete — so for true sustainability you need to assemble a team of people that will invent the ‘next thing’ — and give it the skills, capital and opportunities to do so,” he explains.

If it works, the Cambodian lab would also serve as a prototype for labs in other developing countries. Given the infrastructure hurdles (electricity, connectivity, etc.) if the concept can make it in here — to paraphrase Frank Sinatra — it can make it anywhere.