Imagine

This video made my day. It’s small, it’s real, it’s brilliant.

It’s a great example of how media is changing from something through which to disperse information to becoming a tool for (collective) action. It’s a little long, but worth the patience.

“As citizens and as consumers, we may not be able to wield a great deal of power. But when we do things together, our power is ridiculous!”

Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.

Filed under Sustainability, Shopping, Climate change | Comments (2)

Is Green the New Cash Cow?

It is evidently striking that there are many, many companies and services that offer a ‘green edge’. I personally am very sceptical about such arrangements…but should we be?

If a normally non-green service can donate money to a worthy cause or initiative then should we be backing them over ‘conventional’ services. The question I think we have to wrestle with is this….”WE KNOW that its (normally) just cynical PR to get us to buy their product/service over that of a rival company…rather than a real desire to help make the world a greener place”. So do we allow ourselves to get suckered in?

Well. I think the best advice is always read the small print. Try and check out who they are affiliated with (if you are not sure, you could always talk with the Ethical Research Association). You probably wouldn’t be too happy if you were buying green car insurance from a company backed by Exxon! However, in general I think it is a good idea to use their affiliation as a rule of thumb. If they are affiliated with say WWF, Rainforest Alliance, RSPB etc (or an organisation that is a real bona fide environmental organisation) then you should use that service over a similar no green affiliated service. Well known green charities do not lend their names to ’shady partners’! However, if the so called green service is offering glib claims, like British GS did, of how their service is carbon neutral or helping to save greenhouse gases etc…then beware!

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Guest Editor: Henry Coppola - Help save the environment, and have fun doing it.

Are you tired of the boiler plate, run of the mill action emails steadily filling your inbox? Sure you want to help out—you want to change the world, end the war, save the environment, and so on—but does it have to be so boring? Skim the petition, enter your information and details, maybe email some friends; rinse, repeat.

What if instead of the standard request to sign a petition or donate to the cause, you were asked to play a game? Does an interactive and entertaining way to make a difference online sound too good to be true? It isn’t. Environmental action games of various shapes and sizes for all sorts of causes have been popping up all over the web and are beginning to make appearances in many online activists’ inboxes. You can help save whales, learn to reduce waste, calculate your carbon footprint, and my personal favorite–learn about and help bring an end to overfishing.

These games range in complexity and scope and can vary widely in the levels of entertainment and education that they provide. Many of the more entertaining games function in a simple arcade style, there are several games in this mode based on fishing practices in which you control a fish attempting to avoid various hazards and fishing gear. Other environmental action games work on more of a simulation model where the player makes a series of choices and is presented with the consequences of their decisions. While informative, this style doesn’t lend itself to repeated play or function as an interesting break from the daily grind, the way some of the action games do–with features like high score tracking and an increasing level of difficulty as you progress.

The best environmental action games are entertaining, re-playable, and informative. Whats the point to a game that isn’t any fun? Perhaps more importantly how can you create change without educating your audience? When these two qualities are combined to create an effective environmental action game the drudgery of filling out petitions and sending emails can be alleviated. You can have fun while making a difference online!

Three environmental action games to try:

• Whales Revenge is currently the leader of the pack, having generated over 1 million comments to date largely because it’s so fun to play. Its a bit like Missile Defense except with harpoons instead of bombs and bubble blasts instead of missiles. While Whales Revenge has done a remarkable job of collecting signatures and will help you wile away some time, you won’t learn anything by playing it.
• The Garbage Game has you make personal choices regarding a variety of common disposables, then you get to play garbage commissioner for New York City and decide where all that waste and recycling will go. This game is both interesting and informative, but it won’t have you coming back for more.
• Ocean Survivor lets you take control of a bluefin tuna cruising the seas and trying to avoid ending up in a net or on a hook. This game is fun to play, tracks high scores (you get to leave your name just like on Ms Pacman back in the day), and will also teach you about the fishing practice that eventually snags you.

What green games have you played recently?

- Henry Coppola

Filed under Guest editor, Campaigns, Nature & wildlife, Marine & coastal, Art | Comment (0)

Big Green Competition

One of the reasons why I haven’t been writing regularly enough for GreenGuysGlobal has been the amount of work that I’ve been doing on my friend of GGG site, Life Goggles.

We’re a green product review site, so to celebrate our redesign, we’ve launched a massive eco product competitions. Currently there are 83 prizes with a total value of $3,721 / £1,860 but this is going up all the time so might be higher by now.

Prizes include those from Guest Editor and green store, Nigel’s Eco Store, shaving products from Male Organics, Bulldog grooming products, a fairtrade soccer ball, lots of gift certificates, books, hats, make-up, bags, shoes, gadgets - plenty of items for men, women and children.

We’d love you to stop by and enter, you’ve a great chance of winning something green.

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Be green, get rid of your car

One of the greenest things you can do on a personal level is to stop using your car. Yes, wouldn’t that be nice. It all works out in that green version of reality I aspire to. Incidentally this is the same version of reality where a horse delivers my vegetables from a local farm.

Recently on the way back from holiday in Cornwall, my car’s engine died. The repair quote, £5800. I love my car, for one reason only, it emits 121g/CO2 per Km and I get 61 miles to the gallon. That’s 550 miles (approx 880 km) for £40. I don’t have £5800 lying around, and if I did I wouldn’t want to spend it on a car.

After a bit of research, I worked out that for the cost of my monthly fuel and insurance bill, I could go to work by train for the same price. Food shopping would be possible by using local shops and on-line shopping. My CO2 footprint would drop, my mountain bike would be given a new lease of life, and my doctor would love me for my new exercise regime. I had turned a nightmare situation into something positive.

But all was not well. With exams to sit, and a house move on the horizon, I couldn’t get away from a niggling feeling in the back of my mind. How I would cope without a car? I should add that during this time, someone I knew was also admitted to hospital, and the inconvenience of not having a car also became emotional. Not having a car was not going to be easy.

But then the answer came. I could resurrect the car with a second hand engine. Alleviating my guilt by the fact that I was still recycling (albeit still feeding my addiction to oil) I scoured the internet. My lifeline came from a engine part recycling website called 1st Choice Spares. Thanks to a good friend, before I long I’d worked out t that I could buy a recycled engine and get it fitted for a total of £1500. Less than it would cost me to get another used car of the same efficiency.

The engine took a while to arrive. It took a while to fit. During that time I lived out my green commute dream by train and cycle. The days were a lot less stressful, no idiots on the road to contend with, and I even caught up on my reading. My thigh muscles burned for the first couple of days, but all round I felt good and virtuous.

Fortunately I was never sold monthly ticket, because South West Trains were planning to strike. (This was subsequently called off). Daily tickets got me by, until a couple of weeks later, I got my car back. The price of diesel had risen, but it was nice to have it back.

I had a lot of time to think about the decision I was making. The fact that I was reading George Monbiot’s book, ‘Heat’ made my decision all the more poignant. Was it the lack of cheap reliable public transport, or the lack of clean cars that annoyed me? Who should I blame for the corner I found myself in. I felt disenchanted with the government for not doing enough to make public transport cheap and I felt angry that car makers for not doing enough to force me to buy a greener vehicles.

So what did I do? Well I channeled all that anger. I lobbied the EU parliament along with thousands of members Friends of the Earth to ask them to impose tough CO2 limits on the production of new cars, and made myself a note to talk about the train ticket price issue with my MP next time I saw him (this would have been another thing difficult to do without a car).

In reality we can all turn the lights off, buy green goodies and follow the grassroots movement for environmental improvement, but we still have to convince those that can make changes to the national grid or make deep structural improvements. With all the good will in the world, we still have to convince our leaders that there is no further wiggle room, otherwise everything we do today will be nothing but tokenism. It’s going to take governments and international agencies to make bold, unpopular decisions to save humanity from disaster.

Today I got stuck in a traffic jam.

Yours,

A guilty car owner.

Filed under Transport, Pollution | Comment (0)