Burnin’

As any reader of Natural Capitalism knows, there’s money to be made in sustainability.

Governing.com points out that one direction for budding green workers is to join the staff of a city government.

Fayetteville’s mayor, Dan Coody, is one of 805 mayors nationally who have signed pledges to slash their cities’ greenhouse gas emissions in line with targets set in the Kyoto Protocol. Those mayors have lapped up international praise for leading on climate change where Washington lagged. But the truth is, they are just now getting down to figuring out what exactly they have agreed to. What does it really mean to reduce a city’s carbon footprint?

About three dozen cities now have sustainability directors, and there are more whose job titles reflect either the broader fight against climate change or the somewhat narrower quest for energy efficiency. The idea is to have one person — or in Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle and other big cities, entire staffs — dedicated to squeezing greenhouse gas emissions out of the way government does business, and to serve as both a liaison and a beacon to businesses and citizens who want to limit their own carbon output.

Chris Corrigan of Bowen Island, British Columbia, makes a great point about the world becoming large again (and what our response might be).

When airline travel becomes prohibitive and fuel costs make transporting goods too expensive, the world will begin to unshrink, find its real size again. And in that moment, I had a strong image of the world uncrumpling and in the folds and cracks, new local creativity, food, sustenance, culture and life will unfold.

It makes sense to take a stand for a place now. To have a place where you can contribute to the local resources and the local life.

Sara Lloyd of Pan Macmillan is offering “A book publisher’s manifesto for the 21st century” in six parts on the firm’s blog.

Here’s one paragraph from the initial entry:

Publishers – and, importantly, authors - will need increasingly to accept huge cultural and social and economic and educational changes and to respond to these in a positive and creative way. We will need to think much less about products and much more about content; we will need to think of ‘the book’ as a core or base structure but perhaps one with more porous edges than it has had before. We will need to work out how to position the book at the centre of a network rather than how to distribute it to the end of a chain. We will need to recognise that readers are also writers and opinion formers and that those operate online within and across networks. We will need to understand that parts of books reference parts of other books and that now the network of meaning can be woven together digitally in a very real way, between content published and hosted by entirely separate entities. Perhaps most radically, we will have to consider whether a primary focus on text is enough in a world of multimedia mash-ups. In other words, publishers will need to think entirely differently about the very nature of the book and, in parallel, about how to market and sell those ‘books’ in the context of a wired world. Crucially, we will need to work out how we can add value as publishers within a circular, networked environment.

From a business perspective, I don’t disagree with Lloyd. But from a book lover’s perspective, I still want a physical book to read, one with lots of ideas expressed in words.

Yellow journalism is a pejorative reference to journalism that features scandal-mongering, sensationalism, or other unethical or unprofessional practices by news media organizations or journalists.

The term originated during the Gilded Age with the circulation battles between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. Both papers were accused by critics of sensationalizing the news in order to drive up circulation, although the newspapers did serious reporting as well.

Personally, I don’t identify with the term in today’s media environment. Of course, we’re going to be sensational today. Anything less runs the risk of being utterly ignored. Instead of calling Lindsay’s arrest “yellow journalism,” we might call it participatory journalism.

[via MobLogic.TV]

Now that Barack Obama is the Democrat Party’s “presumtive nominee”, it’s time to address the real roadblocks he’s going to face in the general election.

According to The Washington Post, (and my own observations) racial hatred is still commonplace in America.

For all the hope and excitement Obama’s candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed — and unreported — this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They’ve been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they’ve endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can’t fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.

Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: “It wasn’t pretty.” She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn’t possibly vote for Obama and concluded: “Hang that darky from a tree!”

Documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy, the daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy, said she, too, came across “a lot of racism” when campaigning for Obama in Pennsylvania. One Pittsburgh union organizer told her he would not vote for Obama because he is black, and a white voter, she said, offered this frank reason for not backing Obama: “White people look out for white people, and black people look out for black people.”

Naturally, Obama campaign officials say such incidents are isolated, that the experience of most volunteers and staffers has been overwhelmingly positive. But let’s be brutally honest, we all know people at work, at church or in our families who harbor racist views.

Once the Republican hate machine starts running commercials that paint Obama and his wife as radical, uppity blacks, moderates are going to move toward McCain and in all likelihood those moderates in working class states like Pennsylvania and Ohio will deliver the White House to the Grand Old Party, once again. I’d like to be wrong, but that’s how I see it unfolding.

I think he’ll be to Rome
As is the osprey to the fish, who takes it
By sovereignty of nature. -Shakespeare

Our local power provider, Palmetto Electric Co-op, is offering the community a chance to learn more about majestic raptors in our midst.

For years electric transmission towers have served as nesting homes for the migratory Osprey. As you drive across the Intracoastal Waterway to Hilton Head Island, you can spot the Ospreys congregating on the towers during the spring and summer months. Another tower—in Palmetto Electric’s own backyard—has also served as home to Osprey since 1988.

Each spring our feathered friends return to reside high atop the communications tower that overlooks Palmetto Electric’s Hilton Head Island operations center. This year new residents have taken over the nest and are settling in for the summer. Join Palmetto Electric in our second Osprey season as we get a bird’s-eye view thanks to a Web camera mounted nearby.

Osprey, commonly known as a “seahawk,” live to be 20 or more years old. They mate for life and migrate to South America and back every year. Their diet is 99% fish.

Click here for Palmetto’s Osprey Blog. Or here to hear the Osprey’s call.