The Good Human

Do One Thing: Pick Up After Your Pets.

david — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:30:44 +0000

This week’s Do One Thing is inspired by two of my neighbors, who let their dogs out on the grass to poop – and then they leave it there. I took it upon myself to make signs and put them on the lawn, but with people this careless, I doubt it will make a difference. Dog feces that isn’t picked up can be a health hazard, never mind just a simple annoyance on the bottom of your shoe. Feces contains high levels of bacteria, which percolate down into underground aquifers and also get washed down storm drains, both of which can eventually contaminate our drinking water and/or rivers. There’s a good reason we have sewers and septic tanks to contain our waste. So please – pick up after Fido when he does his business outside!

(Your neighbors will appreciate it, trust me…)

Please don’t miss the Change.org petitions over on the right hand side of the site. Topics like offshore oil drilling and the Climate Bill are awaiting your support!

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Greenwash Of The Week: Nourish – Bottled Water For Babies.

david — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 13:30:19 +0000

“We nourish our most precious resources. Our children, our time, our health, our world. That’s why we created Nourish. It’s a purified spring water bottled two ways, formula-ready for baby and spill-proof with a sippy top for toddler.” Sure, Nourish says that it can nourish your children, but by making disposable plastic water bottles for babies, it’s pretty clear they don’t want to nourish our health or our planet. Know what would really nourish your children, your time, your health, and your world? Something that you buy once, fill with filtered tap water, and reuse over and over and over again – without throwing it in the trash. Try a Klean Kanteen or a Sigg bottle, both of which come in small sizes for kids and babies.

Spring water in plastic bottles for babies. Um, yea…right.

Please don’t miss the Change.org petitions over on the right hand side of the site. Topics like offshore oil drilling and the Climate Bill are awaiting your support!

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10 Ways Geolocation Is Changing The World.

david — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:00:12 +0000

This post was written by Rob Reed. He is the founder of MomentFeed, a location-based marketing, strategy, and technology firm.

Location technologies are transforming how we experience, navigate, and ultimately better our world. From the global to the local, here are #10Ways geolocation is a positive force for good.

Social media has changed the world. It has revolutionized communications on a global scale, and the transformation continues with every status update, blog post, and video stream. The global citizenry has become a global network.

Since becoming widely adopted just a couple years ago, social media has supercharged social action, cause marketing, and social entrepreneurship. Indeed, the true value hasn’t been the technology itself but how we’ve used it. Today, a second wave of innovation is defining a new era and setting the stage for change over the coming decade.

Mobile technologies will extend the global online network to anyone with a mobile device while enabling countless local networks to form in the real world. We’ve decentralized media production and distribution. We’re doing the same for energy. And we’ll continue this trend for social networking, social action, and commerce.

The combined forces of smartphones, mobile broadband, and location-aware applications will connect us in more meaningful ways to the people, organizations, events, information, and companies that matter most to us—namely, those within a physical proximity of where we live and where we are. Can location-based services (LBS) change the world? Here are #10Ways:

1. Checking in for Good: If Gowalla and Foursquare have taught us anything, it’s that people respond to simple incentives. By offering badges, mayorships, and other intangible rewards, millions of people are checking in to the places they go. Apps like Whrrl take this a step further and enable like-minded “societies” to form on a local basis. The next step is for these apps to add greater purpose by encouraging more meaningful checkins and offering corresponding badges and stamps, thus mapping the cause universe. Or for a dedicated app to be developed that rewards conscious consumption, social responsibility, and civic engagement. Yes, the CauseWorld app features a cause element, but it’s not about cause-worthy places.

2. Eating Locally: Sustainability demands that we source our food as close to its point of production as possible. Many so-called locavores subscribe to the 100-mile diet, which requires that one “eat nothing—or almost nothing—but sustenance drawn from within 100 miles of their home.” Given the difficulty of accessing and verifying this information in order to live by this standard, there’s a geo-powered Locavore app. It gives you info on in-season foods, those coming in-season, farmer’s markets, and links to recipes. This rather simple app is clearly just the start. In time, location-aware apps will guide us not only to the grocery store or farmer’s market but through them. All the while identifying foods based on our particular diet or sensibility.

3. Political Organizing: In the next presidential election, politics will not only be local but location-enabled. We saw the power of social media in Obama’s 2008 landslide victory. In 2012, location-based apps and technologies will play a central role in how campaigns are organized, managed, and ultimately won. Much of this will be visible through mobile apps and location-aware browsers. Activists and volunteers will be more empowered. Voters will be more engaged in the moment, right down to casting their votes. Behind the scenes, though, we’ll see massive new sets of data available to campaigns for targeting, empowerment, and optimization. The party, candidate, and/or cause that has the best handle on geolocation will have a measurable advantage. (The Elections app will soon be updated for 2010.)

4. Finding Green Businesses: The web has effectively replaced the paper Yellow Pages as a way to find local businesses and services. However, this “stationary web” experience is quickly being supplanted by the mobile web and mobile applications, which give us access to this information when we most need it. The Yelp and Around Me apps are popular ways to find restaurants, coffee shops, or hotels wherever you are, but what about green-rated businesses? Greenopia has transformed its printed, local guides into a dynamic, nationwide mobile application that lets you find local, green-rated businesses in any category. No more paper and a much better experience. The Green Map app is another that facilitates discovery and connects us to local green environments.

5. Traveling More Efficiently: We’ve had access to GPS navigation systems and static traffic information for some time, but only now are we seeing the full potential of these technologies. With access to more detailed traffic information that is specific to your route and updated in real time, we can minimize congestion and maximize traffic flow (as much as physically possible). The new turn-by-turn MapQuest 4 Mobile app is a good start, as you can get traffic alerts specific to the route you program. However, user-generated information from apps like Trapster and Waze can crowdsource more specific details, such as whether to avoid an intersection due to a toxic chemical spill. Or, if you want to avoid automobiles altogether, Google Maps makes it easy to use public transportation and take a bike.

6. Scanning for Ethical Products: With online shopping, we’ve become accustomed to reading reviews and making comparisons before we buy. This can now be done in the physical world through games like MyTown and services like Stikybits. By scanning a product barcode using a smartphone camera, you can unlock a treasure of additional information (not to mention deals) that can help with your purchase. This might include where it was produced, how far it traveled, the reputation of the manufacturer, chemical contents, carbon footprint, or the full lifecycle analysis. Location-aware applications can also transform commerce itself by giving us better access to local inventories and locally-produced goods. Whether it’s fruits and vegetables or books and electronics, if something can be found within blocks of your current location, it makes no sense to ship it from afar.

7. Networking Neighborhoods: One of the hottest categories in geolocation is neighborhood networking. The vision for many of these apps is to strengthen the very fabric of our communities. With DeHood, you can keep track of what’s happening in your neighborhood, share your favorite places, and grease the wheels for actually meeting people. After all, if you’ve made contact through the app, it’s a lot easier to say “Hello” in the real world. Blasterous is another that lets you share information locally, whereas BlockChalk does this on an anonymous basis. Finally, NeighborGoods uses your street address to facilitate one-to-one borrowing and trading of useful stuff. In the end, making connections with your neighbors can lead to safer, more productive, and more sustainable communities.

8. Tracking Environmental Disasters: The size and scope of environmental disasters appears to be growing. In 2008, we had the Tennessee coal ash spill, which was billed as “the largest environmental disaster of its kind in the United States.” And that was before we realized it was three times bigger than originally estimated. More recently, the BP oil spill set daily records for “largest environmental disaster in the U.S. ever.” In each case, geolocation technologies can be used by engaged citizens to monitor and track the effects. They can be used by response teams to coordinate containment and cleanup efforts. Ultimately, these technologies can be used to accurately measure the size and impact of a disaster in order to better understand its damages and costs.

9. Viewing the World Through an Eco Lens: Augmented reality (AR) follows geolocation as one of the hot trends in mobile technology. It enables you to view the world through a smartphone camera (or similar device) and see layers of geo-specific content or information. One of the most popular apps is Layar, an augmented reality browser/platform that lets you choose specific data layers or experiences. The potential for green- and cause-related content is tremendous. You might view green-rated businesses, LEED-certified buildings, or virtual GHG emissions as they enter the atmosphere. Combined with smart meter technology, you could see the most efficient and inefficient homes around you in real time. And for the cynics among us, you could view our mountains, forests, rivers, and oceans as they once were…before the effects of climate change and so many environmental disasters.

10. Capturing the Moment: Better access to information about what’s happening around us—right now—can dramatically improve quality of life. This sense of “geospatial awareness” is possible through today’s smartphones, whereby a piece of content or information—a moment—is captured and preserved based on the unique time and place in which it occurred. It is essentially to document spacetime. Protests, natural disasters, sporting events, parties, political crises…real-time information about anything happening anywhere at any time, as well as the history of what happened. This will take several years and a number of different applications to realize. In the end, though, it will revolutionize how we access and consume content. It will complete the democratization and decentralization of news and information…based on time and location.

Cautionary note: Privacy is the single biggest issue in the LBS industry. It’s important to understand what information you are sharing with regard to your location and with whom.

Author’s note: We’ll be hosting geolocation events for Social Media Week in Los Angeles this September. This is the third in Max Gladwell’s #10Ways series of distributed blog posts. It was published simultaneously on as many as 300 blogs.

Please don’t miss the Change.org petitions over on the right hand side of the site. Topics like offshore oil drilling and the Climate Bill are awaiting your support!

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How To Know If You Are Being Greenwashed.

david — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:04:14 +0000

Doing some research on my weekly greenwashing feature, I came across this informational post over at Sourcewatch that outlines the rules of thumb you should watch for detecting greenwashing. I thought it was so perfect and dead-on that I would share it with you guys. We as consumers (and just regular old citizens, really) are being bombarded with “green” by companies looking to cash in on the eco-minded among us, like it’s some kind of passing fad. Fortunately, it’s not – but that doesn’t stop companies from trying to greenwash us instead of just doing the right thing in the first place. According to Sourcewatch, “greenwash campaigns are designed to defuse skepticism of journalists, politicians and activists.” Plain and simple, they are just trying to fool us… and it’s up to us to learn how they do this and how to avoid it at all costs.

Follow the Money Trail: Many companies are donors to political parties, think tanks and other groups in the community. Ask about all their donations, not just those they boast about in glossy documents such as the corporate social responsibility reports.
Follow the membership trail: Many companies boast about the virtues of their environmental policy and performance but hide their anti-environmental activism behind the banner of an industry association to which they belong. Find out what industry association companies are members of and check and see what their policies are.
Follow the paper trail: Most companies, or their trade associations, will make submissions to government and other inquiries on a wide range of issues. Often these submissions will be posted to a website. They will also send lots of letters to politicians and government agencies, which can be accessed by Freedom of Information Act searches. You will probably discover that instead of lobbying for tougher environmental standards, they are busy trying to weaken the ones that exist.
Look for skeletons in the company’s closet: Every company has major problems that it doesn’t want the public and regulators to know about. Check for information on the company with watchdog groups and in the media and compare that with what they disclose.
Test for access to information: Many companies will make lofty claims about their commitment to transparency and providing information to ’stakeholders’. Don’t just take them at their word. In their reports they will probably refer to environmental impact statements, reviews, audits, monitoring data and other information. If it relates to an issue you are interested in, ask to see it. And remember that ‘commercially confidential’ is just corporate speak for ‘no’.
Test for international consistency: Most companies will operate to different standards in other countries. Check and see whether their operating standards and procedures are consistent.
Check how they handle their critics: Some companies go to extraordinary lengths to try and silence their critics. This can involve everything from legal threats to funding and collaborating with police and military forces.
Test for consistency over time: It is common for a company to launch a policy or initiative and then starve it of funds.

You guys have seen me write about plastic water bottles made from plants, a Sustainable Brands conference with participants like Walmart and Clorox, and a Dow Chemical “Live Earth” event – and those are the “easy” to spot examples of greenwashing. It is becoming more and more prevalent in our lives, and it’s up to us to notice it, publicize it, and call out those companies trying to trick us with their marketing gimmicks.

Please don’t miss the Change.org petitions over on the right hand side of the site. Topics like offshore oil drilling and the Climate Bill are awaiting your support!

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