The Green Appeal

City Mouse Country Mouse

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 18:00:00 +0000

A few of my friends from Boulder have more than once commented on their preference of oceans rather than mountains, claiming to endure a peculiar sense of claustrophobia caused by the omnipresent rock faces and glaciers hovering among the clouds. "Landlocked" is the official diagnosis. Not surprisingly, they have mostly relocated to the east and west coasts -and good for them too, no one wants that kind of looming entrapment mucking about.

For me, however, it's the in the city where I feel the most trapped. As much as I like people and crowds, and the bustle that often accompanies them, I much prefer to be among them in the open spaces of parks, sidewalks, bike paths, amphitheaters, etc. Rather than the tightly closed spaces of elevators, cars, buses, subways and cubicles. I like to look up and see stars at night, and occasionally confuse clouds as part of the mountain terrain.

But it comes as no surprise that this blog was started in a city. In Pittsburgh nonetheless. Nor do I think it was by pure happenstance as I was packing my things to return west that I opened Henry Miller's "The Air Conditioned Nightmare" (a collection of essays concerning his cross-country trek to discover America) to surprisingly find this opening:

"It was in a hotel room in Pittsburgh that I finished the book on Ramakrishna by Romain Rolland. Pittsburgh and Ramakrishna - could any more violent contrast be possible? The one the symbol of brutal power and wealth, the other the very incarnation of love and wisdom. We begin here then, in the very quick of the nightmare, in the crucible where all values are reduced to slag." -his tirade, in true Miller fashion, only goes on from there.

Had I remembered this bit of text or had I any sense of foreshadowing I doubt very much I would have ever ventured into the city. Perhaps too, I would have left sooner had I taken heed to the one question I was asked more than any other, particularly after having mentioned I had come from Boulder, "Why Pittsburgh?" Of course, the question came in various forms, all with an utterance of surprise and disbelief. Yet, my answer was always that I had a friend there. No other reason. Nor is there a better one I think. And need there even be one?

Thankfully I left having made a few more. And though I often detested my time there, I don't regret having lived and worked in the 'burgh for those two years. I speak of them almost as though they were more than a decade ago. When in fact I've only just now turned the corner from that chapter in my life.

To digress a moment, today I came across this brief interview with Enrique Penalosa, a name I wouldn't know had it not been for Dr. Paul Simpson, who I met in Pittsburgh, and who in no small way inspired the creation of (and has contributed to) this blog.

My role in the 'burgh, chiefly at the advertising agency I worked at, seemed one of necessity, though I can't especially say it was thought so in the minds of very many. Yes, it was strictly a matter of circumstance that I came to coin the phrase, "Sticking out like a green thumb." Something not likely to happen here in Boulder. In Pittsburgh, as far as I know, I may have very well been the only independent environmental blogger in the city.

Earth Day

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 04:55:00 +0000

For my part, I donated a couple pair of old shoes to be recycled into athletic track and field surfaces. The reSolution Shop at Fifth Ave. Place in the Highmark Building was accepting old shoes and glasses, cell phones to be given to a women's shelter, and blue jeans to be used to make insulation. It was all part of another environmental awareness event organized by Highmark. Participants included Bike Pittsburgh and The Rachel Carson Homestead to name a couple.

And of course, I voted in Pennsylvania's primary election today. If you're wondering exactly what are the environmental policies of the top three presidential candidates, check out this article at Newsweek.

In other news, The Green Appeal will be relocating to Boulder, CO. this summer. Pittsburgh has been good, but the West is the best. See you there.

Ad Busted! Macy's Greenwash

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:25:00 +0000

You'll be hard pressed to find anything that's certified organic or made of sustainable materials in this store.

TED

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 14:41:00 +0000

TED: Technology, Entertainment, Design -Ideas worth spreading.

Without exception, absolutely scintillating! Go watch!

The Absurd and The Ideal

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 01:16:00 +0000

A couple weeks ago I finally finished setting up a contract with a "document management" company to begin recycling in our office. It was a joyous day. Not only did it mean the program would be returning and I wouldn't be the one carrying the load, but another office in our building was also involved, and after more than a year of hassling them, so was building management.

At first glance it didn't seem like such a complicated matter, and essentially it isn't. Except of course nothing has gone as planned, and so far my office is the only one to have actually gotten any bins. First of all, this program differs from the one the city runs. For curbside pickup and at the drop off centers around town containers can be commingled, but paper products need to be separated. Well, the program through this third party is exactly the opposite. Office paper, newspaper, junk mail, magazines can all be thrown in together, but containers have to be separated, excluding glass, which they don't accept.

The one thing I've learned from two years in the corporate world of dealing with vendors who want a piece of our action, is that most (not all) of the time the sales people they send in don't actually know anything about what they're selling. Once you say you're in, they turn you over to someone else. Not that this is the case here, but simply put, I've been given no explanation to the divergent processes. Not to mention, I've been told by a very reliable source from a company across town that they use the same third party, but that they commingle their containers. The only trouble is I've sworn to confidentiality.

The cost is anything but exuberant, less than $100 a month for a pick up every two weeks. Still, the coordinator I was working with at the other office, for one reason or another, has yet to get approval for the program. As for the building, it was bought last year from a company based in Dallas, TX. And I was told two days ago that it is up for sale again and that the current owners have told management to put all contract negotiations on hold, so no recycling for the lobby, etc. The upside, however, is that today they sent out an email to the building tenets explaining some of the details for the program, and stating, as it has been mentioned in two of the local papers, that city government, after having made recycling a mandate ten years ago, is finally going to start enforcing the law with fines to businesses who fail to comply.

Will it be the same old song and dance?

The Bicycles And The Apex

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 02:47:00 +0000

Well, I've got some updates on recycling in the office, and some stories about places and people that have been an inspiration to my environmental sensibilities, but for now, as I get back into the swing of things, I present this poem, circa 1965, by George Oppen:

The Bicycles And The Apex

How we loved them
Once, these mechanisms;
We all did. Light
And miraculous

They have gone stale, part
Of the platitude, the gadgets,
Part of the platitude
Of our discontent.

Van Gogh went hungry and what shoe salseman
Does not envy him now? Let us agree
Once and for all that neither the slums
Nor the tract houses

Represent the apex
Of the culture.
They are the barracks. Food

Produced, garbage disposed of,
Lotions sold, flat tires
Changed and tellers must handle money

Under supervision but it is a credit to no one
So that the slums are made dangerous by gangs
And suburbs by the John Birch Societies

But we loved them once,
The mechanisms. Light
And miraculous...

What Have You Changed Your Mind About?

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 16:56:00 +0000

Having been without a personal computer for the past few years, until just last summer, I was oblivious to the simple perks (RSS feeds, itunes U) and vast potential of the world wide web -just this winter I connected (for free!) with friends in Seoul over my first video chat using Skype.

Gen-Xer makes peace with the world of technology, which future generations will have never lived without -it's charming in a clownish sort of way.

Surfing the web a month or so ago I came across my now favorite web-contributer Kevin Kelly. How I happened upon him I can't even remember, but if you want news and insight on ground-breaking, barrier-pushing and cutting-edge technologies, theories and institutions, you'd do well to visit his site. You can still read The New York Times, but you won't find it nearly as exciting.

This year Mr. Kelly posed the Edge Annual World Question: "What have you changed your mind about?" Mr. Kelly's answer? That Wikipedia actually works! An answer pertinent to our cause here at The Green Appeal, can be found on the same page as Mr. Kelly's (click his name above) from futurist Peter Schwartz, concerning the importance of nuclear power.

Previous questions: 2007, What are you optimistic about? 2006, What is your dangerous idea? 2005, What do you believe is true even though you can't prove it?

Sign me up for the cybernetic micro-processor nano brain implant that will help me read and process all this before breakfast is ready!

Life As We Know It (Beat The System)

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:16:00 +0000

The healthy life of a blog it seems to me is dependent on a couple factors, first it must be updated consistently, at least once a day; secondly it must serve some use. With well under 2000 hits in more than a year, The Green Appeal seems in a difficult position to argue that it manages to meet either of those criteria. Obviously it fails the first without question. And while I have no doubt that it's (I've) made a difference in at least one reader's life, and this is by no means a plea for friendly reassurance, the second, I feel, remains up for debate. What is it that The Green Appeal has to offer that other eco-sites don't, say for example, if you'll excuse the pun, the well-oiled Grist, or the slightly oily No Impact Man?

King Corn Trailer

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 04:08:00 +0000

FOOD NEWS: A Conversation with Curt Ellis

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 04:00:00 +0000

FOOD NEWS: A Conversation with 'King Corn' Filmmaker: Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 03:58:00 +0000

FOOD NEWS: Part3: Conversation with King Corn Filmmaker Curt Ellis

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 03:58:00 +0000

Southern Hospitality

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 04:06:00 +0000

In an exciting turn of events, the YERT crew will be staying with my family for a few days as they pass through Nashville, TN. Too bad my dad and I aren't there, since he's actually visiting me in the burgh. So a big thank you goes out to my mom and my sis! Is this what is referred to as a family intervention?

Environmental Oncology

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 20:19:00 +0000

According to National Cancer Institute and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences data, environmental factors cause between 80 and 90 percent of all cancers. A recent event held at Fifth Avenue Place downtown was highlighted with a visit by the Director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at The University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, Devra Lee Davis. Ms. Davis also happens to be the best-selling author of When Smoke Ran Like Water and more recently The Secret History of the War on Cancer. The event was organized by The Green Appeal's friend Phyllis Barber, who is the Sustainability Coordinator (a title I wish I had) for Pittsburgh's Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield. Other guests included The Green Building Alliance, Urban Land Institute, The Rachel Carson Homestead, and Sustainable Pittsburgh.

The great aspect of this event was the community outreach, with its various participants bringing an array of environmental health issues (environmental oncology, watershed preservation, green building, sustainable development and conscientious diets and consumption) under one roof, providing visitors with several inlets to the larger umbrella of environmental stewardship, visitors who may have otherwise been more tentative to attend a conference on one particular subject. Say for example, global warming, which in the media too often consumes every other environmental topic by its headline grabbing politics, thus unfortunately continuing to polarize American culture. I find it extremely disheartening that people, particularly popular figures in the media, continue to expend energy attempting to debunk human-caused climate change, it's a line of argument which seems practically a non-factor, in that such a train of thought apparently runs parallel with rejecting any notions concerning the concept of pollution.

Kevin Kelly and The Encyclopedia of Life

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 17:22:00 +0000

A couple websites of interest:

Kevin Kelly is the author of several books, particularly Out Of Control, The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World was required reading for the cast of The Matrix. It's available to be read online.

Currently he maintains Cool Tools, a reader-contributed blog about all that's hip. I came across the site a couple days ago when I found this article in Wired magazine by David Byrne. Mr. Byrne interviews the likes of Brian Eno and Thom Yorke -turns out Radiohead just did a study of their carbon footprint left from their tours. The greatest contributer? The travel done by the concert goers.

Mr. Kelly has had a hand in several projects over the years including an effort to categorize every living organism on the planet. He says he didn't get very far, but thankfully other people have taken over: The Encyclopedia of Life

Then there's this questionnaire testing how much you know about your local watershed.

The Mysterious Disappearance...

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 04:57:00 +0000

It's been two months since my last post, and thus two months since I took away the paper recycling bins at the office. Though I did naively hope that the (in)action would elicit some sort of proactive response from my coworkers, I knew ultimately little would be done and that I'd mainly have to face some confused faces.

The first couple of weeks makeshift bins began to appear in the previously designated areas, which I quickly removed, knowing that, like the normal bins, they would pile up till I took them "away." For a short moment I entertained the idea of letting the mess grow out of hand so as to give people a real physical example of the collected mass of waste we accumulate; as I've occasionally had inklings of aspiration to make a instillation piece out of our waste, hoping to transplant it during my weekly trips to a nearby gallery SPACE. The idea being to actually close the gallery to the public as a contaminated space, or landfill, thus forcing them to view it from outside the large open glass facade, where over the duration of the exhibit facts and warnings would be placed to disseminate information. The mess would grow weekly till it became practically unbearable and uncontainable within the gallery, at which point an intervention would be held and the public would be invited to participate in a clean up. I went as far as placing a phone call and leaving a message with the curator, but I left it at that, as I feared having to answer to the possibility of confidential information, emails, artwork, invoices, etc. from my company being made public. More than a few times my imagination ran away with possible scenarios and implications unfolding; should I ask their permission, or should I ask for forgiveness, and how long could I hide it from them, would I be fired, what kind of stir would that cause in the press?

But I digress.

Slowly it became obvious to my coworkers that the recycling was no longer being provided and I was often, and still am, though less frequently, stopped in the hallways and asked whether or not we were still recycling. It was a question, the phrasing of which I took some exception to, being careful to clarify that yes, I had stopped recycling paper. Filled with consternation, inevitably their next question was, "Why?" Why indeed. How was it that the treehugger was giving up? "I'm tired," was always my short reply. I was literally tired of, and from, lugging all that weight across town every week -too, it was a lonely excursion during which I was left with the entirely different, yet equally heavy weight of my thoughts, which were balanced by two opposing notions, one concerned with the importance of my actions, and the other with a growing resentment toward the lack of support I was being given other than an occasional bit of lip service.

As the conversations lengthened with more questions and answers, it became quite obvious to me how poorly over the past two years I related the actual facts of my endeavor, or maybe how little people actually listen. Some people didn't know that I had to drive across town, that I was simply bringing it down to the building's loading dock where the waste is collected; strangely these were people who have worked in the office longer than I have and that I know have been down to the loading dock enough times to know there is no such collection system. Others didn't even know I was the one who was doing it -this is partially due to the problem of turnover. And still to some I imagine it was like nothing had ever changed, ever.

Essentially, the people who made the effort to approach me with their gratitude when I began were the same people to approach me when I stopped, they were still thankful for my effort, and every one of them remarked how unfortunate it was that the program would not continue. "That's too bad," they would say. And it is too bad. There were also the select few who still offered to help and never followed through. One person had gone as far as trying to put together a petition for the office to sign, but when I mentioned that it looked like I would finally, on their invitation, be meeting with building management about a program, the petition was never mentioned again, nor has the meeting happened.

Meanwhile, my new devil may care attitude has eased my daily anxieties and obsessive compulsiveness over the whole issue, and afforded me a certain freedom from the burden of my guilt. A few years ago, it was an epiphany of sorts I suppose, I came to the belief that humanity's nature is essentially based on our need to be innocent. So is it really any wonder that it's our redeeming qualities which bring us so near our spiritual maladies? Not something I think in our daily experience which we prefer.

Stan Brakhage - Comingled Containers (1996)

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 22:00:00 +0000

"This 'return to photography' (after several years of only painting film) was made on the eve of cancer surgery -kind of a 'last testament,' if you will...an envisionment of the fleeting complexity of worldly phenomenon." -Stan Brakhage

Business As Usual

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 21:26:00 +0000

This story begins two years ago (21 months to be precise) when I first arrived in Pittsburgh. After a couple weeks surviving by the good graces of my friend Justin, who I had known in Colorado and come here to stay with after trekking it up from my residency in Florida, I landed a telemarketing job, which I abruptly quit after a one week stint. A week or so later, on the same day there was the possibility I could have been sent to operate an elevator, I was sent to an ad office downtown to fill an assistant position in the mail room -and there I have remained.

A few days into the job and the myriad amount of waste was undeniable. A few weeks later, after having asked some questions, I took it upon myself to place some used cardboard boxes by the four main copiers. A co-worker made a recycling sign that I taped to each of them, I sent out an office-wide email, and so began my recycling efforts for an office with two floors and more than 120 people.

The (24 story) building's loading dock has a massive dumpster and three other smaller bins that are meant strictly for cardboard. For the first few weeks I dumped our paper in one of these, knowing that it was a very strong possibility, though I was keeping it separate from the cardboard, it would end up in the landfill since this was not a site specifically designated for paper. Co-workers had been approaching me, thanking me for the effort and offering help, though only a few have ever followed through, but one who did, happened to have a truck she said I could use, as I don't own a car. I soon found a used-paper wholesaler who would take our waste if I dropped it off, they'd shred it and sell it off to god knows who or where -I never asked.

Newspaper and magazines were a no-no for the wholesaler, though he did me a favor and took ours since it was a minimal amount, a little bit in the mix wouldn't hurt, it was kind of their way of skimming from the top. Cardboard was the premium material, it was so good they could afford to pay for it, about fifty cents a pound. I usually walked away with enough for a coffee and bagel.

While the wholesaler was generous to the point that he offered to take my cans and bottles as well, though they'd literally pile up in the corner till he had enough to sell those off to some business acquaintance, I could sense that he was bit annoyed with my questions and my quiet insistence to drive onto the scale to weigh our waste. The scale, a metal platform embedded within the concrete parking lot, was clearly meant for much larger vehicles, not semis, but certainly dump trucks. Once a week for a month I drove my co-workers Dodge Dakota onto the scale, once when I arrived, and again after I unloaded around the back of the building, a warehouse where the shredding was done by five or six guys. The paper would amass in a pile in the center of the floor where, with the help of a bulldozer, they'd shovel it into a pit, where one or two of them would then direct it onto a conveyor belt that rose up dumping the paper through the shredder and into a compressing bin, where it would finally be loosely wrapped for shipping.

Every time I arrived I had to go into the office to let him know I was there, and then wait a few minutes in the car for him to come to the scale. He always obliged, but I could tell he felt he was too busy to be bothering with such a small truckload; only it was a task I felt necessary in order to know just how much waste was leaving our office (though obviously much more was being produced). That first month, and the only month I've taken any measurements, I recycled over 400 pounds. On average, as I can safely assure that the waste collection has increased as we've gone along, that's roughly 8,400 lbs (a few tons) in almost two years.

However, I stopped going to the wholesaler because I wanted to start recycling commingled containers as well and felt, though he had offered to take them, that I had trouble this man enough, and it wouldn't do for me to take the paper one place and the containers another, so I have since been making weekly trips to the low-tech drop-off center. For a time I used my co-worker's Dakota, then one day I was suddenly not allowed to drive anyone's car from the office. Making trips with the recycling was not the only time this was necessary, as I was often being asked to run errands to pick up various supplies. The decision I assume had to do with the president's concerns about insurance -I was never told specifics. My boss, who owns a small Ford SUV, thankfully started making the trips with me; we did this for a couple months and I was glad to have the company, but it wasn't good to have us both out of the office, and it was costing her money for parking. Luckily Flexcar started its operation.

After essentially going it alone for all this time, a few weeks ago, much to my pleasant surprise, I got a phone call from a complete stranger working for another company a few floors above who had heard of my actions and wanted to help pressure the building management into taking some responsibility. As I talked with her (and I don't find it ironic at all that's she's from San Francisco and not a local Pittsburgher) about my experiences I must have sounded rather skeptical. Last winter I had walked into the building manager's office and literally told her all I wanted for Christmas was a recycling program. It was a sweet moment to be sure, but a year later I'm still being told some variety of, "We're working on it."

Part of the issue concerns the fact that the building was put up for sale some time ago, though I understand it will be under new ownership beginning next year. This has been a stifling factor in many ways. It not only seems to have somehow contributed to the stalled efforts of recycling negotiations, but it's also put a damper on my attempts to maintain and update amenities in our office. Our lease expires in less than two years, and as ironic as it may seem, having been through three layoffs, there is talk of expanding to another floor, or moving entirely to a new building. With our executives unsure of where we'll be in two years, they're understandably unwilling to pay for some updates, like cleaning the carpet, or replacing the lighting fixtures which continually burnout or brownout, costing us thousands of dollars in maintenance every year.

Having just read a recent article in BusinessWeek about the trials and tribulations of Aspen Skiing Company's Sustainability Coordinator, Auden Schendler, it's becoming evident to me that, even as a person with such a title, unless you actually work for a company that specifically deals in environmental sustainability, you're going to be blessed with responsibility, but absolutely no power to help you claim it; you can be sure there will be no specific operating budget for which you will be responsible and allowed to use as you see fit.

It's not necessarily a naive point of view to believe that this kind of trust and cooperation could one day become a widespread practice for eco-friendly ventures in the common workplace. Employees, unless working under a vigilant and watchful eye of a micro-manager, are often trusted to do their job with little supervision; this in fact provides a good standard measure for an employee's personality and commitment to the company -for whatever reason it may be, a person's motivation or lack thereof becomes quite apparent when they're essentially left to their own devices, those who flourish under high stakes will continue to raise them, while others will simply continue to take what they're given because they're workin' for a livin'.

One word can describe the notion that this kind of business ethnic can be more widely incorporated: incentives. Yes, to some it may seem a slightly sad necessity, but for the most part it's certainly true. The environmental movement, though it's continuously in the media limelight, essentially continues to be a grassroots production -in a way this is the essence of Paul Hawken's book Blessed Unrest, the green revolution, though happening worldwide, is a semi-voluntary endeavor being made by independent and unconnected individuals and organizations. Yes, the scientific data of human caused climate change is indisputable; yes, people are changing their lifestyles; yes, companies are changing the way they do business; but as Hawken has explained time and time again, you can look at the people involved and feel optimistic about our chances, but if you look at the data and are optimistic, you're not looking at the data.

If our efforts to curtail global warming are to equal and offset the disastrous rate of ecological decline we are witnessing at this point in history, the green movement can longer afford to be spearheaded from the ground up; we must begin to get leadership from the top down, from our elected officials, be they local or national, and from many many more business owners, large and small. I don't know how many times, when discussing my efforts, that I've been told, "These things take time." My response is simple, "It wouldn't take time if the boss said we're going to do it."

The current environmental crises isn't something that will work itself out in a positive manner given time, which is exactly how the cookie is crumbling, because I can assure you, as Schendler relates in the BusinessWeek article, there is rarely a day that goes by when I'm not teased about "making a difference" and related to from a myopic viewpoint which condescendingly refers to me as a "treehugger." The green movement may be on everybody's lips, but lip service it remains, as it seems to me it is widely and blatantly given little serious consideration by the majority of our culture.

All that being said, I have to now admit, as it may have been slowly becoming noticeable -my spirit has been fading. And so this past Friday, after having started as I said almost two years ago, I decided I was going to reduce my recycling efforts, and no longer collect paper and magazines for weekly trips to the drop-off. I'll continue to recycle cardboard in our loading dock, and also collect containers, which I'll drop off on a more limited basis, as they accumulate much slower than paper.

It's a decision I've yet to fully comprehend beyond the fact that it's evident I'm physically tired from lugging of all that waste to and fro, and emotionally drained from the continual isolation I feel within a company whose leadership feigns support for my actions, yet quite simply, for one reason or another, abdicates its responsibility.

Still, whatever regret I may develop won't come from any fear of power, considering I feel they have absolutely no right to scorn me for discontinuing a practice I alone started and carried out; but I do know my efforts are/were appreciated by my co-workers and they'll certainly be disappointed, which just may prove to isolate me further. Though I've made no announcement, one person did already notice the recycling boxes weren't by the copiers and asked me about it. When I told him I wasn't going to do it anymore, he was understanding and rather pleasantly thanked me; he also expressed his wish, as many have before, that the building provide the service.

As I packed the Flexcar with the recycling that day, I stopped, as I always do, to talk with the security guard in the loading dock, an older gentleman who was at one time an architect for industrial farms in the Midwestand, and I told him that this was going to be it for a while. He was rather confounded and exclaimed, "I thought if I could count on anybody, I could count on you." Sadder words have rarely been spoken. I told him I was tired, and that, though we both jokingly knew it to be naive, I hoped it would serve as a bit of reverse psychology and move other people to action. You tell me, what are the chances?

Northside Farmers Market

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 23:36:00 +0000

Every Friday evening during the fall the Northside Farmers Market in West Park is open for business.

From work downtown we walked across the Roberto Clemente Bridge, one of the three sisters bridges hovering solemnly over The Allegheny River, we passed PNC Park on our left, home of The Pirates, made a quick right by Fox Sports Network, and before we knew it we were asking, "How much for the apples?"

Overheard at the market:

"Alright sir. Thank you. You keep smiling now. You're a good man. Keep smiling and laughing, it's a great stress reliever. It'll add years to your life. Have a good night now."

And:

"Where the watermelons?"
"Well Mam, they're out-of-season. We have those in August."
"But they got watermelons in the grocery store."
"Well, those are probably from Georgia or some place. Everything you see here is from Western Pennsylvania and we got a different growing season. We got pears, apples, grapes, pumpkins. You like pumpkin pie?"
"Oh yeah, I like pumpkin pie. We'll get a pumpkin."

We didn't buy a pumpkin, but we ran into our friend Jessica from yoga class and her family and they bought a pumpkin, we think they're going to carve theirs though. We did buy a basket of apples, two ears of corn, some muenster cheese, grapes, a cucumber, a tomato, a squash, and some peanut butter cookies all for about $12! -if you notice, the cookies didn't make it into our picture.

The Green Heart of Pittsburgh

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 19:03:00 +0000

Yesterday we enjoyed a wonderful night at The Phipps Conservatory in support and celebration of their recent partnership with The Green Building Alliance and their combined success in becoming the nation's greenest garden! -sounds a little ironic doesn't it? Having recently accepted The Living Building Challenge, their hope is to one day surpass the LEED platinum standards by generating their own energy with renewable resources, and capturing and treating all of its water on-site. With the use of radical roof designs, symbiotic heating systems, energy blankets, and earth tubes all partially powered by a fuel cell, we'd say their well on their way!

Corporate Report Cards

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 18:36:00 +0000

Though there remains debate over setting governmental standards for environmental sustainability practices, companies and institutions across the nation, and the globe, are voluntarily stepping forward with information and processes in hope of establishing concrete ideals concerned with measuring our progress toward accepting responsibility for pollution and climate change.

Check out the reports:

Global Reporting Initiative
Ceres
Carbon Disclosure Project

RiverCubes

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 19:19:00 +0000

"The stuff of RiverCubes is human-made: wrested from nature, wrought to our will... Used for a time, then discarded when no longer “useful” or “valued.” Where does this stuff come from? Where does it go?? These questions guide a strategy I call Artful Trash Management. From a human ecology point of view two facts distinguish this region: we live in one of the most reliable watersheds in the United States yet are among the least compliant with the Clean Water Act. We also accept landfill from neighboring states with higher population densities: our land wealth “affords” revenue & waste streams. RiverCubes provoke reflection on these and related issues. Our common approach to everyday stuff that we no longer want is to place it out of sight: in the trash, in landfills, in rivers and lakes... These RiverCubes were rescued from that fate, and are offered for public viewing with mischievous pleasure. This map names names and indicates collection sites. The Cubes have traveled the city, incited performance events, and want to live near where they were collected. They are works of philosophy, labors of love, and belong to the rivers. Helper Brothers & Sisters Unite!"

Bob Johnson
Artist's Statement
Pittsburgh, PA
June 2004

baraka

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 19:02:00 +0000

Green Drinks International

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 14:38:00 +0000

Every month people who work in the field or are generally concerened for the environment meet up for libations at informal sessions known as Green Drinks. Check out your local listing, with one hundred happenings across the US, and even more worldwide!

It's Not About The Car

noreply@blogger.com (Sean MacInnes) — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 14:51:00 +0000

Just a few days before they hit the road this past 4th of July, The Green Appeal sat down for some friendly and compelling conversation with Mark Dixon (right), and Ben and Julie Evans, the trio otherwise known as Your Environmental Road Trip.

We've meant for some time now to publish this, but for one reason or another it kept getting pushed back till we realized this would be a great article with which to celebrate The Green Appeal's 1st birthday!

The conversation may have happened two months ago, but it's far from out-dated. In fact, it's filled with very optimistic forward-thinking. And we certainly hope you look foward, as much as we do, to hearing from YERT throughout the year.

GA: How did you meet?

Ben: Mark and I met in a singing group in college at Stanford, but we were in the group at different times.

GA: Like a barber shop quartet?

Ben: Like a barber shop deca-sextet, a sixteen member men’s a Capella group with a comic flair. So we met there through reunions and just crossing paths at various events.

GA: What kind of songs did you sing?

Mark: Everything from pop to barbershop, R&B, classical, jazz, show tunes, gospel, the works.

GA: How did you and Julie meet?

Julie: During a show. We were doing Annie Get Your Gun in Long Island.

Ben: She was Annie and I was the gun. We were playing opposite each other in the show, falling in love on stage and off stage. I think part of what drew us to each other was our connection with the planet, a deep-seeded love of the earth.

Julie: I think it became really apparent really fast –I met Mark on the phone. He had even met my parents before he had met me.

GA: Was there a moment, an epiphany, let’s do a road trip?

Mark: Yeah there was. I was in the middle of a ten day meditation retreat a few months after I had left my job to transfer into something new with an eye toward sustainability and environmental awareness.

GA: So you came to this place of total peace and serenity.

Mark: Really. I kind of sorted through all my stuff for about five days and once that was kind of cleared up I was literally in a peaceful place and I was able to just let things drop in and one of the first things to drop in was a fifty-state year-long road trip to explore sustainability and to share it with people, that emerged from that reflective space.

GA: Do you practice meditation regularly?

Mark: Every day.

GA: So you had the idea, how did they become involved?

Ben: It’s sort of a parallel world. Meanwhile Mark’s meditating, and we kind of came into the environmental shift a little more recently, I had been sitting on all these ideas, like the kind of house I wanted to build and this restaurant I wanted to have, sitting on all these ideas, but not really doing anything with them. Mark and I would write periodically and one day he sent out this email to a bunch of friends saying he’s doing this environmental brainstorm session out in Palo Alto, and I was like oh my god that sounds awesome, I wish I could be there, because I’m thinking of all this stuff too, it’s my inner most passion, but I’m in New York City, so have fun without me and let me know how it goes. A couple months later he wrote saying he thought it was going to manifest itself as this road trip and was anyone interested? So I said, “Yeah dude, please.”

GA: How long have you been officially planning?

Mark: Since August of 2006. The idea was conceived last June.

Julie: And Ben wasn’t going.

Ben: I wanted to go really badly, as soon as I heard about it I knew I had to do this, but I ran it by Julie and she was like, we live in New York dude, we have a life here and jobs, sorry. So I was like, aggh. So I brainstormed with Mark about how I can do this and stay in the city. For a while it was like the road trip with a New York correspondent, kind of like city mouse and country mouse.

Julie: And then Ben was trying to find the other person to go with Mark, trying and trying, and me hearing him try for months.

GA: So you didn’t want to go?

Julie: No I didn’t want to go, not at all.

GA: Now you seem totally enthusiastic.

Julie: Well, I better be now. You know, nine years in New York trying to be actors, and being actors, and I’d just had my first off-Broadway show when this was all coming into being.

Ben: And who was Mark? Who’s this guy?

Julie: Right. Who’s this young guy who wants to drive around the country for a year? He must be young, like 21 or something. It was a lot to think about, being in my first real paid production, finally after nine years something is starting to happen in New York for me, this is why I came here… then months went by and the show closed and I didn’t want to audition as much as I should have been, I was sort of starting to pay more attention to what they were doing. So then we had to deal with finding a foster home for our cats and extracting ourselves from New York, and it turned out it wasn’t as difficult as I thought.

GA: So you still weren’t really enthusiastic even though you had this compassion for the environment?

Julie: I was enthusiastic about the idea, I just wasn’t sure about all the goings-on, or sure how I was going to deal with being in a car for a year with two dudes –and I’m still not. But I do feel like it’s meant to be. I have little freak-outs, but I never feel like this is the wrong thing to be doing. You know the freak outs are going to happen.

Ben: I had one this morning.

GA: Let’s talk more about the actual trip. I sent you that email and you said finally something in West Virginia, so I’m thinking you have places in mind you want to visit.

Ben: The Dakotas are a little sparse.

Mark: We have at least something in every state. We also have a person or two or ten to stay with, in 90% of the states. We’re not in trouble. We’ll figure it out.

GA: Are you staying with friends or people you’re meeting due in part of the trip?

Mark: Oh yeah.

GA: You know, drop some names, like people should definitely know this guy.

Mark: Well we’re hitting the green festival in San Francisco, the bioneers festival in Marin.

Ben: And we’re definitely hitting the cherry blossom festival in D.C.

Mark: The trip was kind of dictated be season, so we’re not in a snowy place in the winter or a scorching hot place in the summer. I did a two-week test trip in October of 2006 and found the best way to find places to go and meet people was to actually go places and meet people, because you get this crazy snowball effect. By the time I finished my two weeks I had fifty places to visit across the country from people who would just say, oh you have to go here and here. The emphasis of planning the trip hasn’t been nailing down the most famous people in the country, but identifying the core elements of preparation logistically, making sure we have places to stay, making sure we have a direction for our expression of YERT to the public. We’re absolutely fearless the schedule will happen; it’s already starting to happen. We have an event planned for the 9th, and the person setting that up mentioned to us that Governor Rendell and Al Gore will be at an event that day –and maybe we could visit them as well. We don’t have the bandwidth to pick up on those kinds of things, but the people we’ll be meeting with do.

GA: I know in the video you did for Treehugger.com, it seemed like it was kind of gorilla, you had your signs, save the North Pole, send snow to the North Pole. Are you planning on doing more of that?

Ben: It’s definitely going to be kind of a gorilla effort, there’ll be stuff that is planned, but one of the nice elements about the trip is that it’s going to be improvised on the spot, grab the camera and shoot. The other thing also, yeah it’ll be great if we can hook some big fish so to speak and sit down with some interesting and important people, but I think a lot of the trip is about talking with ordinary Americans, and finding the regular people who are doing extraordinary things. There are lots of people out there and you’d never know what they’re doing in their back yards. We want to tap into what regular people are doing so people know others just like them are taking it into their own hands and doing these incredible innovative things to be more sustainable. It’ll be every bit as much about the little guy as the big guy, giving a voice to people who aren’t being heard.

Mark: And by showing these people we can make all these innovative eco things more normal. I feel like just seeing somebody you can identify with, to see it right in front of you, it makes the activity a bit more normal.

GA: It brings it down to earth.

Mark: Yeah. So the next time you go to the store you’ll think twice, “Should I buy this regular battery or this rechargeable battery?”, because you know somebody just like you somewhere else has already made that decision to buy that rechargeable battery instead. It’s the culmination of all those little things that I think will make a big difference. Plus the big people are already getting air time -us putting them on the air is more of an ego trip for us.

GA: I guess when I said big name, I meant famous people, someone doing something we should know about. My concern too, was to help publicize your trip. Okay, so the videos. How did you come about that video for the Treehugger.com contest? Obviously you guys have a theater background.

Mark: Well I’m not a professional actor, but I’ve been doing whatever comes my way.

GA: How much of the video did you plan? And do you have skits planned for the road?

Ben: That video just popped into my head one day, I was sitting at the table with Mark and I said, dude we should do this video about these two idiots who try to keep the ice caps from melting by shipping snow up there –you know, what an idiotic idea. So we ran with it. I think during the year we’re just going to try to remain open, the goal is to pull people in with humor.

GA: How did people respond to the video? There was a comments section, but the judges were pretty famous people.

Ben: It got second place out of a hundred entries, so they obviously responded really well to it.

GA: The judges didn’t leave comments?

Ben: Someone somewhere liked it.

Mark: We did exchange emails and learned that Ed Begley Jr. wasn’t able to visit with us, he was really cool about it, but he was under contract with his show.

GA: How prepared are you for contingencies?

Ben: Mark is our contingency man. If there’s one thing that he excels at it’s planning for contingencies –not to jinx us.

Julie: It doesn’t matter, we’ll role with it.

Mark: We have back up cameras, a back up laptop, and a back up video team.

Ben: We just had the hard drive on my computer fail; it crashed two days ago, right before our pre-launch party. It had everything on it, and sadly it wasn’t backed up.
Tough lesson learned.

GA: Was it a major set back?

Mark: It wasn’t catastrophic. We lost about a week of work.

GA: Did you lose contact information?

Mark: Thankfully, that’s backed up on my computer.

Ben: We also make use of some Google tools.

Julie: If Google ever crashes, we’ll be in trouble.

Ben: Us and much of the Western world.

Mark: We store a lot of our information online.

GA: Who suffers from the worst road rage?

Ben: We haven’t figured that out yet.

Julie: I don’t think we’re going to have much road rage, the beautiful thing about this car is where a person would normally get road rage, idling in traffic, the car turns off and runs on the battery, it’s like you’re sitting in a lake.

Ben: It’s like you’re suddenly driving the world’s nicest golf cart. When you hit a traffic jam you actually get excited, oh, now we’re going to get 80 miles to the gallon.

Mark: And peace and quiet. Ben is signed up to be our primary driver, but we’re all going to spend a little time driving. We’re all pretty mild-mannered, plus we’re driving a vehicle that’s branded, you can’t really piss people off when you’re driving a branded vehicle, it’s got our website all over it, and we don’t want YERT to represent road rage. We want YERT to represent friendliness.

Ben: I can’t drive like a New Yorker.

Mark: If he starts driving like a New Yorker he’s going to hear from me, and vice versa.

GA: You guys have a lot of patience, because that’s the reason I got rid of my car, it’s not the only reason, but…

Julie: We also are going to be reporting how our gas mileage is doing on the website. So in order to keep that down we have to pay attention. The hybrid has a little tool that tells you the kind of mileage you’ve been getting for the last fifteen minutes you’ve been driving. So if you start driving like a lead foot your mileage goes way down. So you really have to practice gentleness, you got your eye on that and it’s telling you you’re at 42 miles a gallon and you don’t want to go any less than that.

Ben: Hybrids don’t respond well to road rage.

Mark: It’s amazing how much fuel efficiency you can gain just by changing your driving style. You can take your vehicle into an entirely different class just by easing up a bit.

GA: Obviously, all the issues of environmentalism are important, but is there one specific aspect that you are drawn to?

Julie: I think we’re all different.

Ben: There’s a bit of overlap, we all essentially speak the same language.

GA: I know Julie you’re interested in education.

Julie: I’m super interested in kids, and wildlife and trash. To me they all go together as far as preserving the environment, keeping the wild wild.

Mark: A big one for me is simplicity. So many problems can be solved, can be entirely eliminated by focusing on simplifying your life and habits and needs. Simplify and localize and you can change the world. As we travel I’d like to explore the ramifications of those two principles. I have a hunch that simplifying and localizing your life will just make it really joyous –what a goal!

Ben: Well, it turns out Mark and I have the same interests. But I’m also interested in the social dynamic, the psychological angle of why there’s this huge gap of what we understand, what we know we should do, and what we’re actually doing.

GA: What do you think it is; do you have any inclination?

Ben: It’s interesting how many people really don’t know. We found somebody in Rochester who had never heard of global warming.

GA: That was on the video.

Mark: Well, it was 15 degrees outside.

Ben: I couldn’t believe it.

Julie: There’s also something about man versus the environment that’s very American, pioneers coming from the beginning having to really battle against the environment to survive. There must be something in us that makes us feel that we have to subdue nature, that we are not a part of nature. That still exists in us. I know we’re going to find that.

Ben: Some of it is very legitimate. We did evolve in a world of kill or be killed. I think we just have to recognize when we’ve gone way overboard on the killing.

Mark: Our very sustenance comes from a balanced eco-system; we are nothing without our relationship to nature. We think we’re independent, and we’ve gotten so good at protecting ourselves from that reality by overextending our means

Ben: We’ve isolated ourselves. There’s a disconnect between our actions and the consequences of our actions, and I think that’s largely at the heart of what we know we should do and what we’re actually doing.

GA: The bottle goes into the can, the can goes into the truck, the truck goes out to the woods, and no one thinks about it.

Ben: All the actions we take every single day, most of the time most of us are completely oblivious to what gave rise to that action and to the consequences. We’re completely unaware of anything on either side of this little moment in time. We’re so removed.

GA: It’s so strange isn’t. I’m working in an office, and everyone is so focused on the task in front of them.

Ben: Obviously civilizations like the Native Americans were very interested in forging a relationship with the environment, because their everyday life depended immediately and viscerally on the environment around them.

Mark: Another little comment about that coming from Jared Diamond’s book Collapse, he found that one of the important factors in the ability of a society to actually collapse was the buffer between the reality of the land and the leadership. The greater the buffer the more likely it was that they would make decisions that would cause a collapse, and currently we’re at a height of isolation.

GA: What do you think, politically, is happening and needs to be done?

Julie: In my heart of hearts I hope Al Gore runs again.

Ben: I feel that’s there’s definitely a large part of the population that feels like we screwed up, we’re sorry, will you please come back and run the country, even though the majority voted for him in 2000. We’ve lost eight years. We’ve taken huge steps backwards environmentally and we’re paying for it through the nose.

GA: It’s so bizarre that that EPA case made it all the way to the Supreme Court and then Judge Roberts wrote in his dissent he didn’t think it was something the court should be deciding, when in fact it seems like the very thing the court should be concerned with.

Julie: Isn’t the government supposed to be protecting its citizens? And isn’t the environment something we need to protect in order to protect the citizens? It’s obviously not a religious issue. It’s our sustenance. It’s our everything.

GA: It does seem like the one issue that would really galvanize everyone.

Ben: Right, everyone breathes air. Everybody drinks water. Those are not partisan activities. Living and breathing and having a healthy place to live is the least partisan, most unifying thing there is. If there’s one thing that can bring us together it’s the one thing we all depend on and it is the planet –there’s nothing partisan about that at all. It’s ludicrous when people try to frame it as a liberal or conservative issue; it’s a human issue, a planetary issue, a life issue. There are only certain things the government can do, that’s part of the frustration, individuals can make a lot of progress on this and we should, but at a certain point there are large projects and policies that cannot be done without the support of government.

Julie: As you know with trying to recycle at your building, there’s nothing that mandates that things need to be recycled from large corporations –that’s a lot of waste.

GA: There actually is a city mandate in Pittsburgh; every business is required by law to recycle. I’ve called and talked to the recycling department and I think there are two people who work in it.

Ben: That’s a great point. There’s getting new policies in place and then there’s enforcing them. Even the policies that we do have, that haven’t yet been trashed by the current administration, a lot of times those are not being enforced.

GA: It’s really almost disgusting that they’ll say it’s the environment or the economy. It seems like environmentalism would create an enormous amount of jobs.

Mark: The environment is the economy. It’s just a step removed from the current economic measurements. The GDP measures a subset of the system, and it happens to measure a subset that when it improves a certain elite benefits tremendously to the detriment of the environment and to the people who are not tapped into that element. I don’t believe fundamentally in communism or socialism as an alternative to what I feel is a really neat system of free market democracy, but it’s not a free market. There are tremendous biases through omission in the way the regulations are set up that don’t account for the full waste stream, that don’t account for the environment, that don’t account for the people who are effected by the process of the product stream.

Ben: There’s not true cost accounting.

Mark: If you do do true cost accounting everybody wins, a free market totally works, but until we can free that up, we’ll have to put crutches in place to make it work better, particularly when there are so many lobbyists per congressperson –that really skews the perspective of the government. Companies are treated like people, but they don’t act like people.

GA: Did you see The Corporation? If a company were actually considered to be a person, it’d be schizophrenic.

Ben: Pathological. They are encourage by law and are responsible to the shareholders, and if you’re not profitable you get fired.

Mark: There’s an institutional incentive to devastate to environment.

Ben: A huge incentive to pillage basically.

Mark: When you think about Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart was so successful, because it was able to outsource what many people may consider core elements of a company, sufficient employee healthcare and benefits, the race to import and export products wherever they have to go, through all these things they’ve managed to create a flourishing business by letting the people handle the repercussions of their actions.

GA: Do you think people hear all of this that we’re talking about and they feel overwhelmed and they’re moved to non-action?

Ben: All of us have found ourselves at that point. You have to worry about your day to day activities and you shut out politics, or whatever, because you have to trust the people elected to protect you and the environment to do their job. You can’t do everybody’s job.

Julie: It’s also important to understand poor communities are in survival mode. They shop at Wal-Mart because they can afford to eat there. They eat McDonalds for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, because they can afford to eat there. You’re asking those people to eat organic, buy a hybrid, but all of these things are not on their radar. And they don’t have land to have their own garden. This is a whole other issue. Being green is almost a privilege to those who can afford it.

Ben: The irony is that so often the seemingly green solutions are difficult for those in lower economic strata to access; but you go one step beyond that and the truly green options are often times completely free, like riding a bike for instance, or gardening.

Mark: But sometimes the land isn’t zoned to have a garden in your front yard. People are struggling to start gardens because zoning ordinances or housing boards are against it, and you could possibly be sued, even for putting up a clothes line.

Ben: And you know we definitely appreciate the irony of driving around in a hybrid SUV for a year telling people to simplify there lives. And one of the other elements of the trip we haven’t talked about is the challenges. We have a challenge of striving to produce zero waste, but it’s going to be tough, so we’ve limited it to one shoe box per person per month. We’re also going to try to eat locally and organic as often as possible to minimize the impact of the trip. Another idea we have is to bring our own compact fluorescent light bulbs.

GA: So while you stay at someone’s house you swap out their light bulbs while you’re there?

Ben: Exactly.

Julie: But also, we’re going to try to just go up and down with the sun and limit our use of artificial light, which will be much easier in Alaska.

GA: So how many states have you already visited in your lives?

Ben: I’ve been in every state.

Julie: I have not been in South Dakota, or Wyoming.

GA: Are you guys going to Hawaii?

Julie: In October.

Ben: We’re going across the bridge.

Mark: All of our carbon is being offset by Planktos, including our flights.

GA: They’re sponsoring you guys?

Mark: Pretty much. All of our carbon footprint during the trip will be offset. We also have 10,000 miles of offsets from DriveNeutral, plus we all have our TerraPasses for our other cars and our flights last year. We’re practically double covered.

Ben: We might drive an eighteen-wheeler instead. At the same time we fully recognize that the best thing to do is to not ever produce the carbon in the first place. There’s a great movie out called CheatNeutral, just Google it. The premise is…

Julie: Don’t tell him. It’s serious, and it pokes fun.

Ben: It’s the kind of movie we’d enjoy making; it’s right up our alley.

Mark: We don’t want a monopoly on using humor to tackle environmental topics.
Grist has that already.

Ben: In print. We want to help open the door and show people you can get your message across using humor, and there are other people who are doing it.

Julie: It just takes the edge off of hippiedom. There is that little bit of Middle America who when we stood outside of Exxon with our signs drove by and yelled, “Get a job!” Oh, yes, thank you, we’re hippies, we don’t work, and we’re so serious all the time. Being able to laugh at ourselves, it helps soften people who maybe have a hard set opinion of who environmentalists are.

Ben: We’re guaranteed to look like total dorks to people. We can seriously dork-out.

Julie: We can be idiots for the cause.

GA: It’s great. You’re making yourselves very vulnerable, that takes a lot of courage.

Ben: Or stupidity.

Julie: A little bit of both.

Mark: It’s kind of who we are.

Julie: Not me.

Ben: Julie’s not a dork. But she reminds us that we are once in a while. She was one of the cool kids in school.

Julie: My school would not agree with that assessment.

GA: Earlier you mentioned a traveling library, so there are books you’re brining with you, like field guides?

Julie: Cradle to Cradle, Silent Spring.

Mark: Books that are core to the experience, that have either meant something important to any one of us, or that we haven’t read, but feel are landmark books, maybe 35-40.

Julie: We’re going to have that on the website, like what we’re reading now.

Ben: We’re also going to try and trade with people on the trip.

Julie: Like a bookmobile. And there’s not that much fiction in the library. I have one fiction book that my mother made me take.

Mark: I’m just going to download fiction to my iPod.

Ben: There are some current administration policies that make good fiction reading though.

Mark: Like Dick Cheney not being part of the Executive Branch of government –did you hear about this?

Julie: What? Who does he think he is, Mickey Mouse?

GA: When did this happen?

Ben: When and why?

Mark: He was trying to claim he wasn’t part of it so they couldn’t subpoena him for documents, something like that, I don’t know the full story.

GA: That’s just the president.

Mark: And this is after he claimed Executive Privilege to not show records from the energy planning meetings. So he’s been getting lambasted and lampooned in so many articles. Fortunately we have The Daily Show.

GA: How was the send off party here in Pittsburgh? What’s (councilman) Bill Peduto like?

Ben: Sweet.

Mark: So supportive.

Julie: What a gracious dude. He says he’s going to do YENT, “Your Environmental Neighborhood Trip”. He said he was seriously going to steal our idea.

GA: So how come Mayor Ravensthal wasn’t there?

Mark: We didn’t invite him.

Ben: He’s a pretty young guy isn’t he?

GA: Twenty-four I think. I was surprised he wasn’t there at Mercy Hospital for the Global Warming Conference. I mean Senator Casey comes to Pittsburgh, you’d think the mayor would welcome him, or that it’d be an important enough event to be there anyway.

Ben: Then there’s the whole Tiger Woods thing. He totally snuck in like any fanatic would do.

Julie: He stole an Event shirt.

Ben: He’s the Mayor; he could have just made a phone call and set up a meeting with Tiger at the US Open -his city is hosting the US Open. But he bypassed that option and totally crashed. People were pretty pissed because they had paid like a thousand dollars to have face time with Tiger Woods and the mayor snuck in through the back door dressed up like a waiter. But that’s all off the record.

Julie: So yeah, he didn’t come to our event.

GA: How did you all end up in Pittsburgh?

Mark: I decided to move to Pittsburgh, because my sister and her husband live here, so I could live here for free while I figured out the road trip. And what I found was that the Pittsburgh environmental community totally embraced the idea of YERT, but there were some huge compelling stories like this being the 100th anniversary of the birth of Rachel Carson just half an hour away, one of the most groundbreaking environmentalists of all time. The stories of heavy industry, the greatest industrial giants of the last century lived in and around Pittsburgh, and because of all the pollution and degradation it was evident earliest in Pittsburgh what industry could do the environment. So I think Pittsburgh was forced to wake up earlier than other places in the country, otherwise it would be completely unlivable; and they’ve since been shifting toward sustainability and setting an example that I think other cities across the country can use, you don’t have to give up your industrial and labor histories and heritages, they can be embraced and still allow for a powerful environmental shift in remaking a city.

Ben: I knew Mark was moving to Pittsburgh and right around the same time I hooked up with an artistic director who was able to bring one of the shows I’d been doing to a theater in Pittsburgh. Mark was actually leaning towards New York initially. And in New York, well we wanted to launch on Independence Day, a lot of people are trying to remake it as energy independence day with a new sense of freedom for the environment, but in New York, 4th of July is so enormous and New York is so overwhelming, and to get on the radar is next to impossible.

Julie: I’m glad it happened this way, because Pittsburgh is such an American city. Whereas New York, San Francisco, L.A., they’re kind of little separate worlds.

Ben: It’s pretty cool city. For a city this size it’s got a decent cultural and arts scene, some interesting architecture which I love, fantastic hills and rivers, it’s laid out interestingly, plus you can actually afford a house with a great view of the city, which people could never dream of doing in New York. So you can afford to live here and have all the benefits of the city.

GA: So why do people keep moving away?

Ben: Good question. To be fair to New York…

Julie: There ain’t nothing like it.

Ben: Once you’ve lived in New York and experienced it, every other city kind of pales in comparison.

Julie: It is alive 24-7. And it’s kind of hard to be lonely there.

Ben: Once you’ve lived New York every other city seems kind of like a town.

Mark: I lived in Tokyo for a year and it’s the next closest thing in my experience. But some people never get tired of what New York has to offer and others do, and I think Pittsburgh offers a place for people who have had enough urban life in the middle of so much noise.

Ben: It all comes at a price, and sometimes the price is too high. You know you miss having a yard.

GA: I’ve found people here to be extremely uninterested in anything unusual that’s out of their normal realm of reality. I don’t find them very curious.

Mark: That’s why we’re using humor.

GA: I was in the car one day with a couple of co-workers and we crossed the Rachel Carson Bridge and I mentioned it and they had no clue, and when I told them they didn’t care -this woman helped shape American policies. Then I met some guy in a bar, we started talking politics, and he cursed her name.

Ben: In a way that’s why Pittsburgh is still very representational of America, you have all facets of life here, there are the closed minded non-adventurous myopic working types and then you have these pockets of progressive thinking.

Mark: I’m curious to know if that guy in the bar had read her book.

GA: I asked him, “Do you recycle?” He said no.

Mark: Well if he knew that the government was willy-nilly spraying millions of acres with pesticides that devastated the infrastructure and that they were pumping money into the industrial military complex that was now making toxins instead of bombs, it’s difficult to curse her name for pointing that out and bringing that to light? Is he pro-waste? Is he pro-toxins?

GA: You can say that, and if he were on a panel in front of hundreds of people, it would probably be pretty obvious to him and he may change his mind, but in the privacy of a bar where it’s just him and his buddies and me and my buddies, you know.

Julie: At our launch party there’s was this guy there named Water and he was talking about having to persuade some cattle ranchers to let some bison come through at a certain time and be allowed to graze as they moved through and were naturally migrating. He said never in his life has he tried so hard to get someone to listen and just come up against a wall, no matter what he said, or implored reason, this person never budged? So I asked him what did he do and he said, “I can only do what I can do.” Because I was asking, what happens when we run across these people?

GA: Put ‘em on the internet!

Mark: It’s amazing what you can do with a little shining light –we have that with our cameras.

Ben: But it’s an LED light.

Mark: Sometimes you just have to show things and let them speak for themselves.

Ben: I think where the environmental and the comic meet is that disconnect again, there’s something inherently comical about that disconnect between what we know and what we do, there’s something tragically hilarious there.

GA: Thanks so much.