Clean Technology Update

I got an mass email from Marc Gottschalk who is a member of the Clean Technology and Renewable Energy Practice of the Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati Professional Corporation.

 

If anyone is interested the California Clean Tech Open final awards event will be held at The Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco the afternoon/evening of Monday, October 29, 2007. At the current time some free organizational capacity building courses are being provided to the finalists to help them develop their business plans.

I would have liked to have participated, seeing it as an opportunity to feature the Integrated Farming & Waste Management System developed by ZERI volunteer George Chan, but I found the entrance fee of $250 too high for my budget.

The really useful news is on the solar front, a new $50M fund is being made available through California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to fund solar R&D and deployment.

For more information, please contact Peter Mostow at (415) 947-2051, Kevin Fox at (415) 947-2042, or Jason Keyes at (206) 883-2577.

More details here.

Tuesday, August 14th – San Francisco, CA: Living Green in Today’s Consumer World

Here is an interesting group in the Bay Area. Like oneVillage Foundation the Pachamama Alliance appears to have a two pronged mission, promoting sustainable development in USA, while also helping helping the indigenous people in Equador.

Their upcoming meeting on the 14th features Lawrence Axil Comras (turns out he participated at planetwork 2004 see his bio there). He’ll be discussing what it means to be green in our consuming patterns. He will address how we can deepen the level of what we each are already doing to make changes in our everyday lives.

His background of expertise comes from his experiences as CEO of an online green products store – Green Home Environmental Store. An effort that grew out of the recognition that consumerism is one of the primary forces harming the world. However he like many of us began to realization that it was not enough to be against consumerism or the capitalist system but to cleverly redesign the systems that promotes waste and overconsumption, thus reversing those negative trends of overconsumption that are pushing the earth’s systems to the brink of failure through business evolution and innovation rather than social unrest (which is not to say that none of that will be necessary). When we recognize this paradox and respond as socially conscious consumers by buying well-designed, environmentally superior products, we can all make a difference in our own lives and in small way make the movement forward towards a better and more conscious global economy. To RSVP, click here…

This is another reminder of the good news is that the green movement has reached a tipping point and there’s a green alternative for just about every kind of product on the market.

What remains to be seen is:

• how these kinds of changes will manifest into wide scale social and economic and political changes
• what the potential implications will be on the status quo
• how those who have a vested interest to defend the status quo will react to this.

Currently critics seeing the current “green revolution” such as James Howard Kunstler can persuasively argue that the mainstream establishment has embraced green technologies because they are packaged in a relatively benign form that is not threatening to conspicuous consumption. Such a superficial, feel good green approach (often labeled as “corporate greenwashing” by progressives) as is now being packaged via the mainstream media will probably have a very limited impact in actually addressing the world urgent issue like global warming, decreasing water and oil supplies and increasing pollution.

Yet the key is in designing built environments and production system that offer a seamless approach to sustainable development that promotes relocalization in a way that is fun and exciting to the local people giving them the power to determine their destiny and to be innovators in their own lives. At the same we need to figure out how to do this in a way that provides a much higher quality of life than is the case with the mainstream lifestyle which increasingly seems to be reaching the law of diminishing returns.

The key for this to happen is for more people to make the connection between their personal health, their personal environment and the impact of those decisions on the larger world in which us 6.5 billion humans share with the rest of the world’s creatures.

Making the Case for Localization in the Bay Area

I would like to make an extra effort in the coming months to revitalize the BASAC concept that led to the formation of Bay Area Sustainable Action Coalition (BASAC) discussion group.

I do think there is a strong link between oneVillage Foundation’ s (OVF) attempt to create a global sustainable development strategy and the transformation (The idea of Silicon Valley Transformation has been a hallmark of OVF’s two pronged global sustainable development strategy) of the Bay Area towards a major effort to retool its infrastructure and production systems so that they are dramatically reducing ecological impacts from the currently grossly unsustainable levels of activity and consumption today. Its really a way of balancing the need for global change with practical actions towards sustainability that will have an impact in the way we live our lives in the Bay Area.

Singularity, BioCybernetics and the Sustainability Movement

I have been keeping track of this idea of “Singuality” a term and concept popularized by Ray Kurzweil. Building on this concept the Singularity Institute of Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) is planning a major two-day event “bringing together 16 prominent thinkers to examine a historical moment in humanity’s history – a window of opportunity to shape how we develop advanced artificial intelligence.”

Tom Abate of the SF Chronicle in a report from the Singularity Summit describes Singularity well:

Borrowing a term from physics, singularity suggests a horizon beyond which we can’t see. It describes the point at which some form of intelligence spawned by technology gains the ability to rapidly improve its own programming — becoming so powerful that we cannot predict what it might do. At that point, its capabilities could exceed even the power of our imaginations.

Tour to Feature Cohousing Communities in the North Bay Area

For those interested in more community oriented living, a tour in the North Bay Area on Saturday, August 11th, from 9am to 4pm will feature 3 Co-housing commuities in Petaluma, Cotati, Santa Rosa and cost 35 dollars.

Musings on Arcology and Upcoming Califia Sketchbook Contest

The recent Califia Sketchbook contest got me thinking about my Arcosanti days where I spent many hours talking with those inspired by the place (as well as frustrated by it) and the vision it represented.

Green Century Institute formed to evolve the vision of Arcology for the Bay Area. Thus what better a term to use than that of Califia, representing the idyllic yearning to live in a more compassionate, sustainable and uninhibited world driven by free spirits rather than fear, weapons and/or dollars and cents? This idea of Califia captures what California and the Bay Area mean to many who are attracted to the place.

Hexayurt, Mechabolic and The GREEN MAN PAVILION

The San Francisco Bay Area is a hot bed of activity for the Burning Man crowd. Recently Katherine Steele of the Urban Permaculture Guild posted something in the Permaculture SF Discussion Group about the Green Man Pavilion at Burning Man. This led to an interesting debate about the merits of Burning Man and those who participate in it at the Permaculture SF yahoo discussion group. Indeed many are critical of the fact that the event is a huge effort that climaxes with the destruction of a massive wood structure – Burning Man. The more conservative and prudish greens see Burning Man as a wasteful celebration of hedonism, while more uninhibited, free living folks see it as a way to “retribalize” – if but for just a week – and take some time out from their modern lives escaping into the desert.