Dan Gilbert on Why We Fail to Act

Last year, I watched perhaps one of the more interesting Poptech videos. It was of Dan Gilbert, a Harvard professor in psychology, on why we as humans have failed to respond in any meaningful way in the face of  Global Warming. At the time, I wrote a review for it on Crossroads that elicited some comments from a good friend (and GW skeptic) that made me think about a wider picture of Dan's c…

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Impacts of Growing Populations

Recently, when looking to understand the issues of sustainability, I have been less concerned with mpg or SOX, but about populations. Specifically, the fact that in 1950 we were a mere 1.5 billion people.. and now we are 6.7billion. One of the more interesting, and concise documents, I found recently comes from the Population Media Center. Talking points on Population is a release from their me…

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China’s Environmental Costs: Cancer

While attending the JUCCCE conference last year, I began to understand that when looking at clean technologies, or otherwise making the case for "sustainability", it was important to understand the health costs to remaining brown. That in the end, policy makers and agency officials would eventually connect the dots and begin making investments into sustainability as the costs of their health ca…

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Jonathan Woetzle: China’s Urbanization

Jonathan Woetzle and his team and MGI have been doing a lot of work to research, analyze, and promote the way that China should urbanize. It is a report I read last year, and it is one I believe anyone who considers themselves as having a role in sustainability should read as it does a fair job of laying out the largest challendges and opportunities that China will face going forward. Where I th…

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The Importance of Design, and the Designer, to Sustainability

While the focus of sustainability is closely linked to "energy usage" and waste, the conversation on the role of design & designers has yet to take center stage. The recent article Design is an Avocado: The Layers of Green Design by Brian Dougherty (an excerpt from his recent book Green Graphic Design) though does a great job of introducing the role that designers can play: 1. Designer A…

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