Since reading it, I experience little pangs of sadness every time I see a squirrel scampering around on concrete or a bird pecking in the gutter for food. I get especially deflated when I see a bird, dead, on the ground in front of a tall building made mostly of glass and metal. It ruins my day, and this happens way too often; I’ve counted at least five dead birds in the past week alone (it probably doesn’t help that I live in Chicago, land of skyscrapers).

One sighting I found particularly poignant was in front of a Patagonia store, which ironically, sells lots of outdoor equipment and apparel. Within the course of the two blocks that the store spanned, there were two dead finch-type birds on the ground.

I went in and asked them to put up a sign or something in the window to ward off other potential bird-victims; I hope they honored this request. But in case they didn’t … Patagonia on North Clybourn Avenue in Chicago … this one’s for you!

I searched around online to find a free hawk graphic which can be posted in a window to deter birds from flying into it, but I didn’t find anything. So I decided to make one for anyone to use!

Here are some .PDFs of various sizes that can be downloaded and printed out on a sheet of paper. Post some today in your window and save a bird, or perhaps a whole family of birds!

• Black, 8.5 in x 11in
• White, 8.5 in x 11in
• Black, 11 in x 17 in
• White, 11 in x 17 in

Misterjalopy, who wrote the BoingBoing post, hinted at the need for an egg buying cheat sheet, and so I decided to use the information presented in the article to pull something together in Illustrator:

I’m sure it’s not exhaustive, but it is certainly something I will find useful when I’m in the grocery store, and I hope that other people will use it as well. It was a fun little project, and also a good information architecture and visualization exercise.

Download the (foldable, egg-shaped, credit-card-sized) .pdf here. If there are any suggestions or corrections, please let me know and I’d be happy to crank out another version!

Happy Hens … Happy Eggs … Happy People

I’ve written before about the need for access to information about environmental impact and sustainability at the point of purchase, and this is a great example of a company that puts this very valuable information right out in the open.

I like how TJ’s is not hiding behind vague and misleading terms such as “all-natural.” Ambiguity leaves the conscious consumer unsure as to whether the food is organic or not, and whether the chickens which laid them had access to the outdoors or just had a glimpse of the outdoors from inside the barn in which they were cooped up. Ultimately, a company benefits from a consumer-base which is fully educated in their decision making, and chooses to come back to a particular store because items are clearly labeled, obviating the need for any guesswork (or guilt) associated with the origins of their food.

Ideally, we’d all live in a place where adjectives such as “organic” and “humanely raised” didn’t need to be called out as a special case, because all food was raised and processed in a manner which is kind to the animals and healthy to the humans who consume them. But we don’t.  So if eggs aren’t organic, or if beef doesn’t come from cows who freely roamed in pasture … then that’s fine… but the price should reflect the quality of the product. It’s all too common for corporations to greenwash consumers into spending money with marketing gimmicks which leverage the current eco zeitgiest.

I would hope that other companies follow  — and continue to push the boundaries — of this transparency exemplified by Trader Joe’s (and I’m sure they’re not the first to have done this). Eventually, I’d love to see a tag attached to each and every piece of produce or livestock that I eat which tells me where it came from, how far it travelled to get to my grocery store, what agricultural practices were used in raising/growing it, etc. To a limited extent, they have these for clothes already … why can’t they have it for food (it’d get stuck in your teeth, maybe?!?)?

Update 9/18/2008: Great article in the New York Times about egg labeling.

Do you enjoy making your friends feel badly about themselves by explaining to them in very complicated terms how, for example, their choice of tic-tac flavor can have severe environmental impacts on bird migration patterns? Also, do you like saving the earth? Then this is the site for you!

Treewala is a project by an organization called Greenwala. Their goal is “to provide a destination where people can learn to be green, brag about being green and even gain rewards for being green.” I think this is a noble goal, and they are off to a great start. The premise of Treewala is simple: you attempt to define ecology-related vocabulary terms, such as “plantlet” or “multiple use” (don’t worry, you slacker, it’s multiple choice, not short answer ). For each one you get correct, you earn a leaf. And for about every twenty leaves you earn, they plant a tree in a place called Los Gaviotas in the eastern plains of Colombia.

So how does it work? No, the good folks at Treewala are not emptying out their pockets on account of your expansive knowledge of obscure ecological terms. It works off of ad revenue: each time a new question is loaded, a banner ad is displayed on the bottom of the page. Greenwala must be getting paid for impressions, so each new question you see means a couple more fractions of a cent towards planting a baby tree!

I think this site is great. I’ve always been a fan of informal learning, especially so when it has to do with environmental consciousness. I’d be curious to see how the site’s business model fares over time – do enough people click on the links for this to be sustainable? Also, I’m interested in what the patterns of use look like: is this something people would do throughout the day? Only on their lunchbreak? Or are people just too busy during the workday to take these quizzes. So here’s where I think the mobile context is really relevant. I often look to my phone to fill small gaps in time – waiting on a line or for the elevator, bored at a meeting, etc. – and these time-filling interactions normally consist of me pressing Send/Receive on my GMail acccount or fiddling with settings. If it were possible to put a Treewala-like portal on my mobile phone, either web-based (think WAP or iPhone web app), J2ME, or any other development platform that could support dynamically-provisioned advertising, then I think this would make for a supremely fulfilling (both on a personal and and environmental level) time-wasting experience.

Want to know what a co-fire is? Go on over to Treewala to find out!

While he was, of course, referring to having green skin, the same adage holds true today, though the meaning of green has changed since then. If the zeitgeist of our time is not “being green,” then I don’t know what it is. More than ever, individuals seem to be trying to take environmental factors into account when fulfilling their wants and needs, and corporations are painting themselves as being eco-friendly to exploit this sentiment.  But buyer beware: while many companies are indeed making strides in earnest to lessen their impact on the environment, others resort to greenwashing in order to trick consumers into buying their products or services on account of environmental friendliness. Many great sites exist to help consumers evaluate the validity such claims, but as we all know too well, the mobile web isn’t always there when we need it – e.g. when I’m at the grocery store – and it is at these points of decision that such information is most valuable.

A notable example (and I’m sure there are others) of  technology usage for aiding consumers in acquiring information at critical decision points is Stonyfield Farm’s collaboration with ClimateCounts.org, which provides information via SMS about companies’ practices w.r.t. climate change. Neat idea, though their directory seems to be pretty sparse. Try it!! Text “cc” and the name of a company to shortcode 30644.

Update 8/12: The company whose sms platform technology enables the ClimateCounts service, Mobile Commons, is also used by other environmental-minded organizations, such as FishPhone (SMS ‘FISH’ followed the name of a fish to 30644 to get instant information about the sustainability index of that fish) and Bon Apétit (SMS ‘LCD’ and the name of a food to 69866 to receive a carbon emissions score for that growing/transporting that food). Innovative use of SMS, and very cool, useful services for getting this kind of information in a mobile context. I’d love to see more of these. 

I know that there is a growing body of academic work devoted to leveraging technology in unique ways to support health-related decisions. Part of my Masters thesis work was about helping individuals afflicted with Diabetes make better decisions about their daily activities, by actually capturing photos or recordings of questions at the point-of-decision (e.g. “is it bad to eat this granola bar with my blood sugar so high?”), and then communicating this to their nutritionist. 

I think that the always-on ubiquity of mobile phones provides a perfect opportunity to apply this same kind of model to decisions about environmental health. I often find myself in the grocery store wondering what the heck are the shades of difference between “free range,” “access to pasture,” and “organic.” And I think that many people would do good by the environment if they were empowered with the correct information to do so, even if it did entail spending a couple of dollars more. And what better way to get unbiased information (at least from a corporate perspective), then to ask other people who have been in the same situation as you? Why, crowdsourcing, of course!

Twitter is all the rage these days, but I have a hard time believing that other people actually care when I go to the bathroom, what I had for breakfast this morning, how cute I think my cat is, or any number of other whims I may be tempted to pick up my mobile phone and tweet about (though, given the insane popularity of the service, I’m obviously wrong about this ). Where I personally think that such a service can be useful, however, is in tapping the knowledge and experience of other Twitterers in getting instant answers to these kinds of questions. Unfortunately mobile browsing is not the most optimal experience when it comes to getting quick and easy answers to targeted questions. But being able to tap into the Twittersphere, to reach tens or hundreds or even thousands of others who may be able to answer, in real time, burning questions like “Is it worth paying two dollars a pound extra for beef from cattle that have been sung to?!?” This … is a powerful thing. 

Now, Twitter is really based on a one-to-many model of communication: someone posts a tweet, and multiple people receive it. It is not set up for those multiple people to tweet directly with one another via a broadcast model of communication. Enter a nifty little service called GroupTweet which serves as a relay, broadcasting direct texts from a Twitter user who follows a certain account on to all the followers of that account.

I’ve been long wanting some kind of mobile-accessible service that will let me ask these kinds of questions and receive real-time answers, and the combination of Twitter and GroupTweet seems like the perfect combination to achieve this. To this end, I’ve set up a Twitter account, called inagreenpickle, which I’ve also registered with the GroupTweet service. Here’s how it would work:

1. If you run up against the same kinds of green pickles as I do, and are a Twitter user, then you’ll register on Twitter as a follower to the user inagreenpickle. I’ll also follow you (this is necessary for GroupTweet to work).

2. When you have an appropriate question,  send a direct text to the Twitter user inagreenpickle. You can do this via text message using the syntax “d <user> <insert question here>” For example:
   d inagreenpickle Accck! No bags! Buy new tote, paper or plastic?”

3. If you receive a tweet that raises a question that you can provide some intelligent insight into, then you can either send a direct message back to inagreenpickle with your comments to respond to the whole group, or do an @reply to the user who sent the message. I’m not sure if GroupTweet supports broadcasting of @replies, but I’ll update this when I find out. 

Update 8/12: The options here seems to be either (a) direct message back to the person for a private conversation, (b) direct message to inagreenpickle to have your answer bounced directly to the group, or (c) @reply to the person who asked the question to have your answer register with Twitter as a reply. Since inagreenpickle is following you and the person you replied to,  I believe that the reply will show up in the public timeline. Option (c) seems to be the best one, as it will create a sense of threaded conversation.

4. While it’s nice to have people from all over the place chime in with their experience, one of the tenets of the whole environmental movement is to act locally. So tweet local. Whether it’s soliciting local businesses or buying local produce, leverage the collective knowledge of green-minded people in your community by starting a local group to address these little green pickles. 

See Twitter’s excellent help pages for more information on accessing Twitter from your mobile phone.

Any feedback/suggestions on how to mobilize this , or pointers to any existing forums which attempt solve this problem, would be greatly appreciated!

Update 8/12: There is, unsurprisingly, much interest and many requests and proposals out there for implementing groups in Twitter. LazyTweet is essentially an aggregator of Tweets sent to the Twitter username lazytweet. It is premised on the idea of the LazyWeb, which is the idea that if you’re too lazy to look something up yourself, you can just ask the web and maybe someone who knows the answer will respond. There is also a very thoughtful proposal for IRC-style channels on Twitter via the use of hashtags (i.e. #chicagogreenpickle) to create “ad-hoc assemblages of people with similar interests” who can follow a particular conversation via that hash tag.

Some may argue that adding this kind of support may violate the primary Twitter ‘rule’ of simply answering the question “What are you Doing?” but I’m a firm believer that technology is merely an enabler and should not be bound by such philosophical constraints. Like the internet itself has, I hope that Twitter will organically grow to fit whatever niche its users find it most suited to, even if this represents a variation from the framers’ original intent.

(While I specifically pick on the debate over Fiji Water, the company actually does much more than many others towards promoting sustainability in the area of Fiji (the Yagara Valley region of Viti Levu) and pledged to make their operations carbon negative by the beginning of this year. They also have an ambitious plan for even loftier goals of sustainability by 2010. If nothing else, they’re raising awareness.)

A couple months back, I came across a teeny writeup in Good Magazine for a product called “Soda Club USA,” which purportedly lets you make fizzy water in the comfort of your own home. After that summer, we definitely missed the accessibility of good, cheap sparkling water, and buying incredibly expensive bottled water, such as San Pellegrino, is not a sustainable solution from either an economic or environmental perspective. Upon reading the writeup, I immediately ordered a Soda Club USA.

For $130 (sale price, though they always seem to have some kind of sale going on), you get four special hermetically-sealable, reusable 1-liter plastic bottles, the soda maker itself, two carbonating cartridges capable of making 120 liters of soda each (!!), and a variety pack of soda flavors (lemon-lime, cola, root beer, etc.). When you’ve squeezed every last molecule of CO2 from your carbonation cartridge, like an old-timey milk service, the Soda Club USA truck will come to your house and the congenial, mustachioed soda man will replace your empty cartridge for $20.

 You use the water that comes straight out of your tap (possibly run through a Brita, depending on the quality in your area), so this part is essentially free. The soda maker uses no electricity or batteries — all it does is really is serve as an interface/control between the bottle and the carbonator cartridge. This is the other great benefit
 - you get to decide how many bubbles you want in your water! This thing is hand-powered, so the number of times you press the carbonation button determines the amount of CO2 that is released into your water. Want just a light tingle on the tongue? That’s just one zap.  Want to feel the bite in your sinuses? Try four or five zaps. I don’t use the flavor packets at all, but my girlfriend and I are pretty avid fizz water drinkers, probably going through at least a liter or two a day. One great trick we’ve learned is to buy juice concentrates (apple works well, white grape is great too) and drop a tablespoon or three into your water for an italian-soda style deal. Refreshing and a fraction of the calories as a comparable size glass of juice, for those who care about such things.

If you’re at all inclined to drinking fizz water or soda, I really can’t recommend this product enough. It helps saves you money, lets you control what you put in your body, and, perhaps most important of all, gives you the right to tell your friends that you’re in the Soda Club USA. So go buy one, and let the only carbon emissions caused by the your soda habit be the ones you burp out  

Check out some photos of our unboxing (unbottling?):

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4220496.ece

Good job, humans!

Clownfish are going extinct, because Nemo (of ‘Finding Nemo’ fame) was a Clownfish, and now the tropical pet industry is scrambling to supply these fish to the millions of snotty little kids who nagged their parents mercilessly until they finally caved in and agreed to buy one. B.t.w. Clownfish really like sea anemones so make sure that little Nemo has one of those in his six-inch fishbowl, too, Mom.

It’s a good thing that monster don’t exist, otherwise Monsters Inc. would have spelled trouble in for the unsuspecting residents of Monstropolis.

Like some sort of overgrown manchild, who knows not his own strength, and utterly destroys everything he comes in contact with, we have managed, once again, to severely negatively impact the natural world around us. And for what? So we can have a small slice of a coral reef right there in our living rooms … is it not enough to know  that such beauty exists out there, somewhere, in the world? Do we live in such a consumer society that ownership is tantamount to existence?

Surely Disney and Pixar never intended this to happen; in fact the incredible irony of this dire situation is that the movie is (I believe) intended to be a strong statement against ownership of an animal that was never intended to be owned. The fact that this message could be so misconstrued, or completely lost on the public, says something very bad about the state of things. It’s like someone watching the ‘Super-Size Me’ documentary about the impact of McDonald’s food on health and saying “Mmmm … McDonalds …. that sounds good, I think I’ll go get some now.”

In addition to how this reflects negatively on any number of values in our society, it also highlights the impact that media can have on consumer behaviors. If it can have such a negative impact, though, why can’t this be turned around to affect some kind of positive change. Sticking in the domain of marine conservation, I would love to see a film like Sharkwater have the same kind of impact in the positive direction, though if there’s nothing to buy, no possibility of commercial success or branding opportunities, I fear that it just won’t.

According to the Wikipedia article on the “Finding Nemo”, “Tourism in Australia strongly increased during the summer and autumn of 2003″ due to Nemo-based marketing campaigns by the Australia Tourism Commission. Impacts of the increased traffic on the Reef notwithstanding, I would hope that one result of such an trend would be increased visibility and respect for the Coral Reef and the species which inhabit it. 

***

At this point, my glass house is pretty shattered, near caving in on me; I distinctly remember, as a child, owning a turtle for the sole purpose of wanting to name him Michelangelo, my favorite of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That red-eared slider of mine actually ran away (that’s right, turtles are actually quite fast on the ground) when he escaped from a laundry basket on the front lawn while I was cleaning out his (or her) cage on the fourth of july a long time ago. I’m sure she (or he) made a nice, if a bit tough, treat for a neighborhood cat or squirrel  

 **Sigh**  I could blame my parents, but that would be too easy, so I take full responsibility for my actions. But until we all take responsibility, as a species, for the devastating effect that we are having on other species ….. until we think about our actions and the full effect that they could potentially have (or better yet,  don’t take any actions for which the effect can’t be fully calculated) …. then we will keep on inching closer to a world in which the little Nemos, and the Michelangelos (and Donatellos and Rafaels and Leonardos)  exist solely as an animated remnant from a time when such colorful and beautiful creatures actually inhabited the earth.

And that’s a really, really sad thing to think about.

I once thought heaven would be a place filled with ubiquitous super-high-speed internet, eternal puppies and kittens, and where I could eat all I want but still always feel like I’ve just gotten finished with a run; not until going to this exhibit did I have any idea that heaven was also filled with butterflies.

This is exactly what the Butterfly Heaven is like at the Peggy Notebaert Museum. Formally called the Judy Istock Butterfly Haven (They’ve clearly misspelled the word ‘Heaven’ here), this exhibit is an incredible opportunity to experience the beauty of these animals up close. You enter an enormous greenhouse, and are literally surrounded by butterflies; every direction you turn you can see these impossibly colored creatures flying around, eating from bowls of rotted fruit, hanging out on the foliage drying their wings, or doing the nasty with other butterflies (of the same species, of course) right out there in the open. And these are not lame butterflies – they’ve got species from all over the world of different shapes and sizes, exhibiting vibrant colors in varying patterns. We were fortunate enough to see a ‘first flight’, where butterflies freshly hatched from their chrysalides are released into the greenhouse to fly for the first time. Sadly, one of the butterflies’ wings didn’t dry properly and were all crumpled; the museum employee said that they’d be “taking it back to the lab” but I wonder if he he just didn’t want to say in front of the group of kids there that it’d soon be bird food  

All joking aside though, it really was a magical experience.

I think that it is a natural tendency to grow accustomed to one’s surroundings, to assume details as time goes on, no longer actually seeing things, but relying on memory and experience to fill in these gaps. Even living in a city with as much natural beauty as Chicago, I find that this happens to me. Most days of the week I have some exposure to Lake Michigan, but, in the back of my head, I know it’s a lake and I’ve seen it before, so I don’t concentrate on taking in any of the details: the blue-green color, the way the sun reflects and deforms on the surface of the rippling water, the shadow of the buildings.

On the same note, I’m sure I’ve seen many butterflies in the city before, but that memory kicks in, and it becomes a matter of recall and not examination or exploration. This exhibit was a great catalyst to force me out of that haze, to be literally overwhelmed with nature in all these colorful and graceful flying manifestations and to actually see each and every butterfly as a unique entity unto itself. 

 If you’re thinking that putting humans, which it’s becoming painfully clear nowadays have managed to seriously fuck up an entire planet, in such close contact with one of nature’s most delicate creations sounds like a poor idea … then i think you’d be correct. I took this photo of a butterfly which was probably just chillin’ out and basking in the sun when it was mindlessly trampled by some stupid lady who was walking around, listening to her iPod while taking photos with her mobile phone. It seemed futile to tell her what she had done after the fact. I choose instead to honor the life of that butterfly (which, given their ridiculously short lifespan, probably would have died sometime this week anyway), by occasionally turning off my iPod/camera/cell phone/whatever and actually trying to experience the world around me with out any sort of mediation.