Governments should be a lot more assertive about rooting out spam, phishing, viruses, and scams. While private sector solutions address this, the amount of waste that it is creating on the system – and just the environmental cost of added server activity for all this dirty trash – is enormous.
Below is a picture of the amount of good content (24%) VS. Spam and Threats that were blocked by our company recently. It is staggering.
One of the best efforts I have seen at explaining the way we are consuming and living beyond sustainability in this world comes from The Global Footprint Network. At the Skoll World Forum a couple weeks ago, Mathis Wackernagel handed me a business-card sized brochure that very poignantly and clearly explains how consumption in the developed and oil-producing world is depleting our globe in measurably dangerous ways. You should visit the page tracking human development growth and related ecological footprint growth. Their solution, not easy to implement but succintly showing the only way forward, is to aim for sustainable human development.
You can take a quiz to establish and track your own human footprint.
The holy grail for environmentally conscious manufacturers and consumers is truly bio-degradable effective packaging. While the biggest threat is in plastic bottles and packaging materials that overwhelm our landfills, even small wrappers add up.
The challenge to manufacturers is that the very things that make wrappers good – impermeability, sealing out oxygen to prevent oxidation and decomposition – are also what makes the wrappers hard to decompose. And if you try to use corn-based bio-degradable wrappers, exposure to moisture can make the wrapper protection degrade and be ineffective. At KIND we keep looking for solutions that could enable us to use bio-degradable wrappers but have yet to find the answer (if anyone has any technology or ideas, please let me know).
Frito-Lay just announced that the outer layer of its Sun Chips will use compostable packaging. That is nice, but what is really interesting is their commitment that within 1 year, they aim to also use compostable packaging for the bags’ interior. If they really achieve it, that will be a remarkable step.
There are some people in the world that you are just grateful for them being around. Jeff Skoll is one of them. He is the most unassuming, down-to-earth, self-effacing guy, and at the same time among the most accomplished, brilliant, strategic, successful and deeply committed to make this a better world.
I have been following him for a few years and wish we could clone him, or at least learn what in his upbringing made him into a person that is so truly committed to human betterment. Is it Canadian education and society? Jewish family values? Parental role models? Genes? Childhood influences – positive or negative? Socio-cultural exposure?
In his TED talk, he mentions how his Father’s health challenges were a wake up call to him. But there has to be more.
Anyway, Jeff has now created his next venture: the Urgent Threats Fund, designed to tackle the 5 greatest challenges facing humanity: Global Pandemics, Nuclear Proliferation, Mideast Conflict, Water Scarcity, and Climate Change.
The New York Times reports about it here.
Sally Osberg, President of the Skoll Foundation, shared a note with Skoll Social Entrepreneurs explaining:
I also write to let you know that we will announce today the launch of the Skoll Urgent Threats Fund, which will be led by our dear friend and an extraordinary human being, Larry Brilliant. Larry’s new role will be Senior Adviser to Jeff Skoll and President of the new organization, which Jeff will chair and on whose board both Larry and I will sit. This newest venture joins the portfolio of creations—including the Foundation, Capricorn, and Participant Media—that Jeff has founded to advance his vision of a more peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world. Together with the Foundation’s board and staff, I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunities ahead for us all!
You can learn more at the Skoll Foundation site.
Tom Friedman wrote a provocative article about how we have been living our lives and running our economy at the expense of the next generations – and how the environment and the planet will not bail us out.
Peter Thum, the co-founder of Ethos Water (later sold to Starbucks) and I had a conversation a couple weeks along these lines – about how successful new business models will strive to ensure retail, food, entertainment gifts and consumption are sustainable.
The advent of the internet and related electronic worlds and virtual worlds could theoretically provide some clues here – except for the sobering fact that a lot of these seemingly cost-free worlds and avatars actually cost a ton in terms of energy/electricity, storage, etc. Whoever decodes this will make a huge contribution…
Thank goodness Ben Stein is an independent thinker who can elucidate why exuberant enthusiasm over a cap-and-trade system is misguided and dangerous. I am afraid we are condemned to this inefficient dreamed artifice, whereas straight taxation of emissions would be far more effective.
Thomas Friedman contrasts US energy policy and US behavior to the way Danes live and have structured their lives to be energy-efficient, and almost energy-independent.
A study from Cornell University demonstrates a correlation between junk/unhealthful food and energy costs. Artificial stuff, junk food and red meat all require more energy and natural resources to produce than fruits, nuts, veggies, etc. So by eating real foods, you are not just helping your health – you are also helping reduce greenhouse emissions.
Some will criticize this as Shimon Peres’s much-discounted "New Middle East" vision, but I love it, and I am confident that if Israelis and Palestinians get their act together and accept the historical compromises necessary to a comprehensive permanent agreement, this will only be the beginning. Check out this vision for the future of the Arava, intersecting Israel, Jordan and Palestine. It fits nicely within OneVoice’s Imagine 2018 Project.
The article below points to local opposition to water bottling facilities, but does not even highlight one of the biggest reasons why bottled water is causing such backlash: it’s plastic bottles overwhelming negative environmental impact…