Sustainability | Green Leader

Archive for the ‘Sustainability’ Category

Powerful approach to accelerating sustainability

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

Reported by Debbie Deland, President of Net Impact Orlando

‘The Designers Accord’ is a creative approach to accelerating sustainability and a role model for other job disciplines or industries. So what is ‘The Designers Accord’? It asks designers worldwide (new product developers, architects, interior designers) to commit to 5 sustainability principles for themselves and their businesses. It is about addressing sustainability on every project with every client. Designing sustainability into a new building, a new product/service, etc. is the best way to achieve sustainable results. (more…)

Tags: , ,
Posted in Sustainability | No Comments »

Why focus on business for sustainability action?

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

Biggest resource consumer and polluter

Based on reliable data from numerous sources, business and organizations use the most world resource and create the most pollution and waste. As undeniable, business enables a lifestyle across America that is not sustainable in that: (more…)

Tags: ,
Posted in Sustainability, United States | No Comments »

Bits about books: An annotated bibliography (part 2)

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

Since my first round of review were nicely received, I decided to keep going and give people the benefit of all the time I have had to read so many new and wonderful books. This bibliography concentrates on books on the literature related to the environment, including but not limited to: climate change, sustainability, history, biological resources, animal behavior, and other personal growth and development resources. As the green business profession is rapidly changing, we as professionals should take a global view of how inter-related the world is. These are not all bestsellers, but most of these books should be readily available in your local library as that is where I found them. (more…)

Tags: ,
Posted in Green Reading, Sustainability | No Comments »

A lot more impact than ‘I’m just one person’!

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

Deb Albers is a hero of mine because she took on sustainability within her company in a way where she and like-minded employees could contribute. Her initiative led to a lot more employee involvement and a lot more sustainability progress for Dell. She didn’t think of herself as ‘just one person’, but someone who had a passion to contribute on sustainability through her day job. (more…)

Tags: ,
Posted in Sustainability | No Comments »

Insufficient, outdated coverage doesn’t help economy

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

The small article on Wal-Mart’s major move to eco-rate deserved front page coverage and a different angle. Positive action toward green or sustainable living commensurate with the size of our problems is news I want to read. The news limelight on N. Korea, Iran, even to some degree all of the Middle East is counter-productive. As they say ‘what you measure is what you get’. Perhaps what you consider news is what you get. These hot spots need addressing, but with the issues we face, they seem almost irrelevant to having a livable future based on the current reality of our$700B/year foreign oil dependence, natural resource depletion, severely declining eco-systems, the onset of climate change, etc. (more…)

Tags:
Posted in Sustainability | No Comments »

American personal freedom challenge

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

We were raised with the ideal that ‘all men are created equal’. It took us a long time to achieve this ideal at least in policy/law, and our consciousness, if not yet in all our actions, except probably for the Gay community today. In fact, we had to make the ideal more real because our founding fathers excluded some (at least women and blacks, gays for sure) from the equality ideal. We’re still working on race and other biases and the mental models or generalizations we have for each other. Our strength is in our diversity, our commitment to equality, along with a willingness to update our mental models to get closer and closer to the ideal that ‘all men are created equal’ in all aspects of our society. (more…)

Tags:
Posted in Sustainability, US | 3 Comments »

A different level of consciousness

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Not sure this is a good match for a post on this site, but here goes. Over the past few months, I’ve experienced a different level of consciousness for my own sustainability. I am not sure why except that I am so much more aware and interested in our progress through reading a lot about sustainability and writing about it. Awhile ago, my family made some of the common lifestyle changes to begin living more sustainably: (more…)

Tags: , ,
Posted in Sustainability | 8 Comments »

Urban myth busted

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

I just saw a report out of Nielsen Business Media. ORC guideline, a part of Opinion Research Corporation, a leading global market research firm, survey finds that many Americans are willing to spend more to support eco-friendly initiatives. Some notes from the national survey (over 1000 adults in private households, May 2009): (more…)

Tags: , ,
Posted in Climate Change, Sustainability | 3 Comments »

Systems thinking blog — our energy system traps (part 2)

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

Our energy system actually exhibits three kinds of system traps or archetypes. The first is Tragedy of the Commons in two ways:

  • No one is managing the atmosphere, so everyone is free to pollute. Everyone keeps polluting until some kind of management of the commons, our atmosphere, is put in place. (more…)

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Sustainability, Systems Thinking, United States | 2 Comments »

Systems thinking introduction and our energy system (part 1)

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

Humans are linear thinkers and event focused. Our focus on events is natural and fed by the media that provides event after event, usually giving no context of time or quantity. The complex systems of our energy structure do not behave linearly. Broad understanding of systems thinking is pivotal to accelerating the deployment of renewable energies, energy efficiencies, and lifestyle change. The public is perfectly capable of understanding the concepts of systems thinking. However, I am not sure any of us understand the lifestyle sacrifices we have to make to fulfill our moral obligations to the planet and humanity. (more…)

Tags: , ,
Posted in Sustainability, Systems Thinking, US | 2 Comments »

People moves, renewable energy - May 2009

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

UK

Pannone the Manchester based law firm has strengthened its construction and projects team with the appointment of partner Simon Foy.

Foy has extensive experience in the energy, waste and PFI sectors and joins Pannone from Australian waste processing company Global Renewables where he was general counsel. He was in private practice at Simmons & Simmons and DLA Piper where he advised on many infrastructure, energy and PFI projects and was also the European legal director at US power company Edison Mission Energy.

US

Former Carter advisor, author and energy guru S. David Freeman will become the ‘Environmental Mayor’ of L.A.

Freeman helped shape the energy policy of the Carter era, and by funding the first wave of research into solar and wind technologies in the early 70’s helped to kick-start the renewable energy industry.

One of his first projects will be to revive a narrowly defeated solar energy plan for the city. Freeman is the man credited with putting solar panels on the White House. (more…)

Tags: , ,
Posted in Climate Change, Global, Green Job Sites, Green Jobs, Renewable Energy, Sustainability, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Climate Change: symptom or cause?

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

As the so-called fourth industrial revolution arrives, and our latest comic book hero, the “Green New Deal” strides forth to save not just our capitalist way of living but also the whole of planet earth, we may feel that we can start to breathe a sigh of relief again. The sun is shining, there are rumours that the housing market has bottomed out and, bar the imminent relegation of Newcastle United, things are on the whole looking a bit more positive. As a species, we are generally good at adjusting to changing circumstances, and as we get more accustomed to the new economy, so our confidence in the future will continue to build and the good times will roll again. (more…)

Tags:
Posted in Climate Change, Sustainability, UK | 1 Comment »

Corporate Responsibility: a dead parrot?

Monday, May 18th, 2009

As the Recession has started to bite, budgets have been slashed and projects mothballed across all sectors and industries. Investments in Sustainability, Corporate Responsibility and Carbon Management have been no exception. For many, who see such spend as purely discretionary, the demise of such, potentially “distracting”, initiatives has been loudly heralded. But is the “parrot” really deceased, or are the obituaries premature?

Is CSR a dead parrot?

Is CSR a dead parrot?

The reality is that in cash-strapped times like the present, the principles of Sustainability, applied in a materially relevant way, should be seen as more - not less - important in ensuring long-term organisational survival. Properly planned and implemented, such initiatives can provide a stimulus for all sorts of good business practices, whether cutting costs through targetted reductions in energy use, enhancing loyalty through increased employee engagement, or speeding up planning processes through effective stakeholder management> in all such instances the effective implementation of the right initiatives in the right way can rapidly and meaningfully add to a companies bottom line. (more…)

Tags: , ,
Posted in Sustainability, UK | No Comments »