1.  Where I’ve been.

“A whirlwind” doesn’t begin to describe the past year and a half.  The short version goes something like this:

Finished grad school (public affairs w/focus on energy and climate change policy, niche of CSR/sustainability).  Finished 1.5-year internship for sustainability consulting group.  Gig as freelance energy analyst.  Gig as freelance communications/social media strategy consultant.  Offer to become fellow at EPA.  Move to DC, find/set up apartment. Move wife/cat/life north.  Start work in wholly regulatory big-government sphere after a lifetime in startup environments.

At the end of the day, this is who I am:  a storyteller, matchmaker and technology fiend, sensing connections between groups, helping them see they’re characters in the same story, and finding the right tools or devising strategies that will help them work together effectively.

2.  Where this blog’s been.

I put Sustaining Ability on hiatus in order to sort through what I wanted to talk about, and ended up adding stacks of additional topics to the list.  Ethonomics, byproduct synergy, community investments in green infrastructure… there’s a lot to talk about.

My focus hasn’t changed since last March— finding fresh ways and channels to talk about sustainable practices and public policies that could reinforce them — just added more moving parts to it, that’s all.

3.  Where this blog’s going.

As I’ve taken a stronger interest in Web/mobile technologies working as levers to increase public participation in local issues or policy development, it’s clear I need to talk about the medium as much as the message.  Web tools, data visualization, mobile apps, and building on the deceptively simple SCVNGR hunt…

Transmedia’s the strange-feeling piece of the puzzle I’m building.  A lot of transmedia work is focused on building storyworlds, engaging viewers or consumers, building a brand or crafting an immersive experience… but not a lot of that work tackles real-world issues* — and authors, please, write in and tell me about your work if I’m wrong — or helps organizations doing the good work to get beyond the unidirectional-message dynamic.

I want to add the personal, sustainable practices or larger environmental picture to the mix and create immersive experiences that don’t just inform, but move people to action, both online and in their own lives.  Take the storyteller and policy wonk sides of my brain and make them one.

Intuitively, it makes sense that strong stories, strong characters, interactivity and play — the building blocks of reader engagement — would be tools that people engaged in this kind of work would be playing with feverishly, like sugar-crazed kids inventing reasons that Transformers would live in the same universe as Legos.

As with everything else I’ve done in my life, if I have what seems like a good idea, I’ve just gotta try it.  So expect notional essays and ideablasts on here while I sort out my first project (venue TK)… and in between, lots of fuel for the fire.

* Some gaming/transmedia examples I’ve already heard of and dig on:  Ayiti: the Cost of Life; Collapsus, the Harry Potter Alliance.

And in some ways, she was right to; it’s a community rife with future-shaping talent who, by and large, haven’t pounced on these issues.

The interactive field is one full of designers, communicators and architects: systems thinkers who consider on a daily basis how to shape narrative, user experience, or communications architecture to engage and sustain an audience. They’re deeply familiar with the notion that it isn’t enough to get their audience’s attention, that the real goal is to motivate them to (preferably continual) action, whether that means playing a game, buying products, engaging in offline or online communities, or donating to/participating in a nonprofit’s work. More importantly, they can look at a system, take it apart and redesign it while incorporating dramatic leaps in efficiency.

Casey pushed SXSW-goers to imagine what that immense pool of talent could achieve if their abilities were directed towards cultural sustainability rather than commerce.

That said, I was pleased to find that, while jumping from panel to panel and having hurried conversations in the halls, more than a few of SXSW’s attendees were trying to embrace both at once, building their business models around addressing one of today’s biggest — and least sexy — environmental and business issues: solid waste management.

Solid waste is a huge contributor to climate change; offgassing emissions from decomposing organic waste in landfills comprises some 23 percent of the nation’s methane emissions inventory (EPA 2007). Currently, the U.S. recycles or composts just over 32 percent of its solid waste streams (EPA 2008). With these entrepreneurs’ help, hopefully we can nudge that number up.

RecycleMatch

Brooke Farrell of Houston firm RecycleMatch saw her company make it to the finals of Microsoft’s BizSpark competition for innovative Web technologies, and with good reason: their offering is, a Web-based marketplace for industrial waste products, or as Farrell put it, the eHarmony for recycling.

Matching “producers” with potential buyers, lots up for bid include everything from organic fruit/vegetable remains (for use in composting) to wood pallets (aka biomass for burning) to industrial byproducts like porcelain, polypropylene and plastic scraps. Interested parties can also post to an ongoing “want list,” an approach I like because, as the site gains users, facility managers may see requests for materials that they wouldn’t have considered upcyclable and sent to the landfill.

On a personal note, Farrell was a networking powerhouse, blogging and tweeting her way through the entire week (@RecycleMatch) and hitting every relevant party I could think of. RecycleMatch is going to need tireless advocates like her to succeed, to draw in enough buyers and sellers to make RecycleMatch a viable marketplace. They’re in the process of upgrading their site’s functionality, and I expect to post more about it (and them) when it goes live.

Re:char

At SXSW’s Zero Waste panel, Jason Aramburu talked about his enterprise, re:char, which manufactures small-scale pyrolysis systems, or more simply, stoves. Re:char’s stoves use a thousands-year-old technique: burn biomass (i.e., wood chips, sawdust, dead plants) in a low-oxygen environment, and you get heat, a form of charcoal called biochar, liquid fuel oil and syngas as byproducts.

South American farmers have been mixing biochar into nutrient-poor soil as a means of rejuvenating farmlands for over 2,000 years. (The photo to the right shows what biochar-infused rainforest topsoil looks like.) What farmers then didn’t realize is that doing so also creates a soil-based carbon sink, trapping not just the CO2 from combustion but helping the soil retain methane and nitrous oxide, two potent greenhouse gases.

Biochar’s been getting mentions in the environmental press for years, but an inexpensive, scalable solution would both benefit poor farmers in tropical climates (who want to render overfarmed soil usable again) and urban communities alike (who want to do something with organic waste like downed trees/branches, beyond sending them to the landfill or turning them into mulch). In New York state, for example, organic matter — mostly food, but also yard waste and other materials — makes up 30 percent of the state’s waste stream. Also, re:char’s pyrolysis process stoves don’t emit the black carbon soot that traditional wood-burning stoves do, which is a major cause of respiratory disorders in developing countries.

Restaurant Recyclers

I didn’t hear about Restaurant Recyclers at SXSW (Austin360 did a great piece on them), but wanted to include them because they’re tackling one of my favorite waste streams: commercial-scale food waste.

Jimmy Mitchell’s company started offering collection and composting services just over a year ago, and currently picks up from about 30 restaurants across Austin, including the Alamo Drafthouse cinema chain and the single best Italian restaurant in town, Vespaio. The collected food scraps, waste paper, glass and plastic are sorted and taken either to local recycling facilities or to Organics by Gosh, a firm that composts the scraps for use in Dillo Dirt, a manure-based soil.

Too often, consumers only pay attention to their individual consumption — making sure to recycle, drinking tap water from reusable bottles, repurposing old jars and bottles for bulk purchases instead of buying packaged goods — but in cities like Austin, there are other options.

Encourage local businesses to make sure their waste streams are recycled (or in the case of composting, “upcycled” into new products). Remind them that biodiesel producers will happily take waste fryer oil off their hands. (An East Austin fixture, DieselGreen Fuels, goes to area grocery stores every Thanksgiving, slapping their stickers onto boxes of peanut oil customers buy for deep-frying turkeys.)

(Note: an extra shout-out goes to Ross Nover of Free Range Studios, who I bonded with over BBQ at the Salt Lick, and who turned me on to Annie Leonard’s Web short, “The Story of Bottled Water.” I’m pretty conversant with the issues around why one shouldn’t buy bottled water, but this 8-minute short covers the entire supply chain and wraps it and advocacy ideas up in a very clever package.)

So I’ll start with this: plenty of folks have started posting about the big lessons from this year’s show, but I’d rather hone in on some larger lessons I saw on display throughout the show and in the people who make it up.

In no particular order:

• Focus on evolution, not revolution. Change doesn’t happen quickly or in huge quantities; it happens through each innovation, each successful (or failed) prototype, and by sharing those experiences.
  

  (Example: Beth Ferguson and her SolarPump Station; Beth mentioned during the Zero Waste panel that the SolarPump installed outside the Trinity St. firehouse was the fourth prototype her group had put together, and they were still working to find the right mix of components to ensure durability in the face of many users and being exposed to the elements.)

• Tell your story. Tell other people’s stories. Conveying information is great, but it’s the details, the quirks, the little moments that stick with us and make the sharing richer.
  

  The Gupta brothers spoke at SXSW about collecting stories from South Asian immigrants by having family members interview them at home, hoping the familiarity of family would bring out details that a journalist or researcher, a stranger, never could.
  Jessamyn West painted a picture about the “digital divide” by spinning yarns about her experience working as a traveling library technologist in rural Vermont; she told us about senior citizens who thought their computer knew they were fat because it flashed ads at them about weight-loss pills, and about people new enough to the Internet that they needed to learn Web basics from scratch.

• Profits aren’t antithetical to innovation or good works. Just don’t victimize anyone to get them. Panels all over SXSWi were buzzing about social entrepreneurship, how to help nonprofits fundraise or communicate better, and how techies can pitch in on the clean energy economy and the zero waste movement. For every panel on personal success, there were three on the importance of understanding/respecting your audience, your clients and the larger world around us.
• (Paraphrasing Rushkoff) Every day, once a day, just… unplug. Go for a walk. Or a bike ride. Or a swim. Or close your laptop and look out over the beautiful vista you live over. Just give yourself leave to untether and go somewhere at least once a day that feeds, quiets or calms you.

TreeHugger offers a rundown of another (impossibly simple) sort of demand management measure: a $5 device that lets you know — in colors a 5-year-old could recognize — when you’re taking too long of a shower.

According to Dezeen, you just put the tiny device at the bottom of your shower. The waterpebble measures and remembers the amount of water you consumed when you used it for the first time, and uses that as a bench mark for future showers. A series of LED lights tells you if you’re being more or less water efficient.

It’s got signals as simple as a traffic light, costs slightly more than a large Starbucks coffee and is so easy to use that kids could teach their parents how it works.

On December 31st, the EPA retired ENERGY STAR’s specification for programmable thermostats, one of the main tools of electricity demand-side management (DSM). One of the chief complaints utilities heard from customers was that the units were too complicated to use, that it was difficult to remember to keep changing the settings when you left the house or went on vacation. They’re working on a new specification with an emphasis on usability, but firms working on new thermostat designs that will comply with the new standard should look to the Waterpebble for inspiration.

Keep it simple, and keep your user in mind.

(Last thought: could you imagine if Scholastic could market these to kids through their school book clubs, alongside subscriptions to science magazines and Ranger Rick?)

(Really last thought: yes, there are drawbacks to the WaterPebble… it’s still a voluntary measure, it doesn’t raise awareness about water use via sprinklers, sinks and dishwashers, and the usefulness of it could be ruined by the user taking one insanely long shower while calibrating it.

I don’t care; it’s a very smart $5 piece of technology and cute besides.)

The new bill takes a more fragmented approach to the climate issue, creating a cap-and-trade market strictly for emissions from electric utilities and a linked-carbon fee system for oil and other transportation fuels, writes ClimateWire’s Darren Samuelsohn. Thus far, no one in Congress has dared to swap the word “fee” with the dreaded “tax,” which would raise hackles on both sides of the aisle; but in effect, those fees would amount to a tax to consumers as producers pass those costs down the supply chain. This proposal has the blessing of the American Petroleum Institute (they came up with the pitch), and the bill’s authors hope this approach will ease the pain to consumers and render the bill more politically palatable.

Unfortunately, this approach leaves several huge portions of the U.S.’s contribution to global carbon emissions unaddressed:

• Emissions from manufacturing operations such as cement manufacturing, which is largely powered by coal on-site;
• Greenhouse gases released by oil drilling and refining processes (only levying a fee based on fuel sale/purchase relieves the oil industry of this obligation);

Other nagging questions about the proposed bill include how high the proposed carbon “fee” would be, where in the supply chain it gets levied, and how this piecemeal approach to addressing U.S. CO2 emissions will affect their negotiators’ credibility in the next round of UNFCCC talks.

I had just finished graduate school three months prior, and my head was still whizzing with the typical titles one transitions into from a public policy program — research analyst, program associate, policy director, etc. — none of which sounded right.

Finally, he shrugged, taking out his notebook.

“Fine, let’s work this out. What’s your ideal job?”

If you aren’t kept awake at night by visions of business cards with senior management titles on them or pursuing an iconic career like being a fireman, astronaut or concert pianist, this question’s not so easy to answer. It gets tougher when you’ve just finished a master’s degree that’s the start of a career change, and want to bring together your abilities and education without leaving pieces of yourself in boxes in the proverbial attic.

All of a sudden, An image flashed in my head, and I took his notebook and sketched out what became the final design:

It occurred to me that maybe the problem was that I was trying to squeeze into boxes I didn’t fit in, when I should instead be creating one that fits me instead.

My “ideal job” combines my policy analysis skills, my knowledge base and fervent interest in sustainable business practices and how those affect the livability of communities, and a writer’s passion for finding the right medium for the right story. In other words, finding fresh ways and channels to talk about sustainable practices and public policies that could reinforce them.

It isn’t a job description; it’s a three-legged stool, an illustration of abilities, the ones that, at this point in my life, I want to sustain me.

Hence, the business card and this blog. I’m here to apply my sustaining abilities — assimilating, communicating, and bridge building — and hopefully start a dialogue about any or all of these things:

• how the media landscape is changing;
• how that affects advocacy and message delivery;
• how behavioral economics offers new ideas about motivating consumers to change their daily lives;
• how framing the debate around sustainability is just as important as having winning arguments or superior products;
• how living our lives and reducing our impacts on the world aren’t mutually exclusive… in fact, bringing those two goals together is easier than any of us might think.

Pull up a stool. Let’s get started.