***************APRIL2BLOGENTRY***************** -- Dreaming With The Daffodils

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Date Posted: 23:09:06 04/01/09 Wed
Author: SS
Subject: ***************APRIL2BLOGENTRY*****************

Twelve total hours of volunteering, six new 100% organic T-shirts, umpteen quantities of free shea butter trials and CLIF Bar and Dave's Killer Bread taste samples and one handshake from the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize recipient later...............and I'm still green behind, and well beyond, the ears...........after spending almost my entire weekend at the Portland Expo Center for the Second Annual EnergyTrust Better Living Home, Garden & Lifestyle Show; taking initiative with a greenhouse gusto like some green-eyed monster............with green thumbs.............on the side where the grass is greener..........having a Green Day like no other (okay, I'll stop with the lame green puns now, I'm sure you gather now that I had a ball! ;) )

Needless to say, my three-day weekend was greener than the Pink Cassia and Kadamba-strewn Mango Belt of Chandigarh, India. At 11:30 AM Friday morning last week, I sauntered straight across northeast Portland to the MAX Yellow Line at the Rose Quarter/Memorial Coliseum, where I paid for my round-trip ticket outside Fareless Square through North Portland, and boarded the Yellow Line Train to the end of the line........Portland Expo Center, sandwiched between the Vanport Wetland Area and the Columbia River, which separates Oregon from Washington. It was shortly before I got there just before 1 PM when James Elsen, CEO of SustainLane Media, presented an award to Portland Mayor Sam Adams at 12:30 PM, recognizing my hometown as the most sustainable city in the United States for the fifth consecutive year in a brief ceremony Friday to kick the show off into high gear (SustainLane bases its rankings on sixteen economic, environmental and green and clean technology categories, whose surveys look at healthy air, drinking water, parks and public transit systems, with a sustainable economy, which may include but is not limited to green building, farmers markets, use of renewable energy and alternative fuels, also considered in the rating process).

On my first of three days, unlike the remainder of the weekend, my volunteering duties were stationed around one introductory feature of the larger EnergyTrust Better Living Home, Garden & Lifestyle Show, which was held in Exhibit Hall D (the show itself was primarily held in Exhibit Hall E). As I mentioned in my previous note, The Regional Innovation Forum is basically modeled to showcase current initiatives and innovation, lasso together stakeholders and experts in the field, and have various participants engaging in dialogue and problem solving; identifying pain points, solutions and, perhaps, agreeing on some sort of action plan to advance continuing progress in tackling the pressing issues that face us. At its core, the forum is all about applied knowledge, leadership skill refining and communication, and that is certainly what I gathered all through my services there Friday (I regret to say I did not have the digital camera available on Friday thus, unfortunately, there are no pictures centered around the Regional Innovation Forum, Doctor Stephen Schneider's keynote address and its wider cortege of lectures/symposiums.

In spite of that, I can tell you it was beyond worth attending (of course I already got free admission to the Forum anyway simply by being a volunteer and retrieving a secret discount code to order my free Volunteer/Speaker/Guest ticket via the Brown Paper Tickets service online, which was a $35 value, so saying it was "still worth it" would be leagues below hyperbolic) I rendezvoued with volunteer coordinator Catherine Leedy shortly after signing in at Will Call, receiving my personalized, laminated name tag, entering the exhibit hall, where she threw light upon my general tasks and responsibilities for the day, including 1) functioning as a natural host at the door, directing guests to the day's symposiums and featured speakers and answering any general questions they would have and 2) setting up the tables before each featured speech, which included dragging large sheets of wax paper across the hall to each table, placing multiple sheets upon each table and arranging them in something of a Solomon Seal-esque shape for the purpose of allowing each guest at a particular table personalized spaces on the paper where they could jot down notes, questions and ruminations from each lecture, and finally setting flourescent Post-It Notes and Sharpie markers upon each feng-shui heavy stationary set-up like some obsessive-compulsive culinary arts polymath from Johnson & Wales University; arranging the items in a series of mandalas that would keep eminent psychologist Carl Jung's inexorable mind moiling for hours (hey, they told me to do it! :P ).

Then, by 5:15 PM, after participating in a symposium on Social Innovation, the buffet table was pulled out, where I filled my plate with spinach filo triangles, miniature ciabatta slices, sun-dried tomato hummus and broccoli florets, and poured myself a fresh, tall glass of high alkaline, micro-clustered drinking water. During the intermission dinner, I briefly chatted personally with Levin Nock: a National Sustainable Building Advisor Program-certified project manager, business analyst and greenbuilding research consultant who has devoted years to promoting sustainable neighborhood development and is on the board of the Center for a Sustainable Today, and Martin Tull: Director of Organizational Partnerships at Northwest Earth Institute, a "national leader in the development of innovative programs that empower individuals and organizations to transform culture toward a sustainable and enriching future".................who both complimented me enthusiastically on my contributions to the earlier symposiums. We chatted primarily on our thoughts regarding how social capital, pure personality and a positively-charged psyche is the most potent ingredient in goading constructive, enduring change and sustainable ideals that aren't held hostage by the all-too-familiar "going halfway" outlook or megrim malaria. Then, after we amicably bade each other a pleasant remainder of the evening, I sat at my seat center-right of the podium, awaiting the highly-anticipated keynote speech by Dr. Stephen Schneider: joint recipient for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize along with the other authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was preceded by an inspiring speech by David Yudkin: co-owner of Hot Lips Pizza, who was awarded the "Engaged Citizen's Award" for his lifelong dedication to sustainable business practices (Hot Lips is renowned for making every effort to buy locally organic grown food for the pizza to benefit local farmers, delivering all of their pizzas by either bicycle or their electric-powered Pizza Car, donating all its leftover edible food to local homeless shelters two to three times per week with help from the Portland Office of Sustainable Development's food composting pilot project, and promoting on-the-job training in the community to encourage recycling of the pizzeria's unbleached, recyclable napkins, pizza boxes and cutlery) and a lifting, didactic poem by Marge Piercy.

Schneider's speech was titled "Finding Innovative Solutions To Global Warming: Even If You Can't Negotiate With The Chinese". In a nutshell, his message was that we must keep fueling grassroots and civic involvement to push for greater regulations and to develop sustainable solutions that will reduce the effects of climate change, insisting that while it is too late to avoid some negative effects by approximately thirty years, it isn't too late to avoid catastrophic effects should we ramp up the pressure now.

Firstly, he touched on the issue of denial many CEOs and politicians have on the effect their practices and mindsets contribute to immense carbon emissions that make up a bulk of the problem overall, highlighting that often, when one individual company is single-handedly responsible for 1% of the problem, that the company would harangue that 1% is no big deal, with Schneider saying bluntly: "Each time a hundred people say they're only one percent of the problem, well, you've got one hundred percent of the problem. And it is for this reason that each individual action and decision DOES matter." From there, he touched on a point Douglas Cohen, lead designer of the Regional Innovation Forum and Founder of the Inspired Futures Global Campaign � Inter-Generational Partnerships for Livable Futures, made (who introduced Schneider personally) which was that the new definition of sustainability is rooted in intergenerational conversation. He argued that it's just as much about intrapersonal conversation as it is interpersonal conversation, in that we need people who are mindful of this pressing issue from all, different parts of the world and that, ultimately, good governance has always been about two things: 1) summoning the will from a personal, individual standpoint, and 2) shared values, which is where the importance of interpersonal conversation is instrumental.

Schneider spent a considerable part of his lecture then explaining that science is NEVER "settled" because science has so many interactive components and you NEVER know when you get data. In other words, science, in his view, is a community enterprise, and he used as an analogy in describing an honest scientific process a graduate student stepping onto an active volcano in moon boots, only to find his/her boots melt from the pouring lava, then rectifying that mistake and coming equipped with boots that can withstand the excessive heat, only then to find their testing spoon breaking up to a dozen times on a dozen different attempts, then working out the kinks there but having to deal with broken glasses and beakers, then even when the student finally got what he/she came for, he/she still has to ask questions incessantly regarding the findings. He captioned his point by declaring: "Consensus is not just about conclusions........it's about confidence in conclusions.".

He followed that point up by deconstructing some scientific graphs and charts he found erroneous, such as snowpack trends and heating/cooling trends since 1800, because it promoted itself as settled somehow, such as an abstract from a February 2007 Summary for Policymakers Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report from Portland Community College, which cited that the warming of the climate system is unequivocal, pointing out that assertions and niceties are NOT genuine science and that such reports often make the tragic error of merely telling you the risks and the odds, but not explaining what to do about it as science should help elucidate, urging: "Science is an expert judgment, but it's still a judgment."

He explained, in pointing out several erroneous graph/chart examples, that there is a lot of natural variability in our system, thus it's hard to be honest and say something is going to happen if data is presented that way without offering ideas on how to mitigate such problems. After showing some pictures of the Upsala Glacier in Patagonia and explaining the debate regarding whether the water continues to flow or freeze up again in moulins (he made a wisecrack saying moulins should be of interest to Sarah Palin because they're rivers to nowhere! ;) ) he explained that we do science to begin with for the same reason we buy insurance: NOT because you may get sick or your house may get on fire, but to attempt to keep such scenarios from happening in the first place and to engage with such hypotheticals. Further illustrating this point by showing graphs of an underwater stream in Ukkusissat, Greenland now having become a fjord, he said science is about risk-management and that, when you look at it this way, science is an investment, as opposed to looking at the issue like the gross national product at the cost of money.

Finally, he explained examples to where we have made substantial progress in addressing the issue of climate change in accessible terms, citing California primarily as reason to be optimistic, where Title 24, strong bi-partisan community laws and utility efficiency programs, building standards and appliance standards have made the state a trend-setter in reducing carbon emissions, and that they understand foremost that "there's only one way to get around such a situation..........make a deal." which he claims are instrumental in achieving announced climate sustainability goals, rather than getting hung up on numerology.

In a nutshell, his speech, along with the questions he answered with his fellow panelists in a table Q&A session, were tempered with a coupled mix of no-nonsense professionalism and utmost optimism and faith in this, along with the budding, generation in further educating the global community of this gripping issue. Following the closing Q&A, which ended at about 9:25 PM, I am proud to say I got to shake his hand, and he commended me for my contribution to the group discussion. Again, I lament the fact I had no digital camera on hand at the time, as this is one snapshot that will remain quilted in the fabric of my mind in perpetuum, but it's the experience alone aesthetically that will always paint a more perfect picture that no Canon PowerShot could ever fully preserve; the light in ones eyes gazing into the eyes of such a revered individual, the way you can't help but smile feeling the fingers of that individual intertwine with yours, reading the discerning eyebrows and smile lines on the individual's face, etc. All those distinctions will forever be ingrained in the velveteen vault of my memory! ^__^

*

Following a premiere day focalized around the more cerebral angle of sustainable living, Saturday and Sunday brought out the more entertaining, convivial, happy-go-lucky aspects of a better, eco-friendly lifestyle. After having left my house early Saturday morning (and braving a pouring rain) to purchase fresh, local, organically-grown kale, carrots, leeks, radishes, spinach, Fuji apples, Braeburn apples and D'Anjou pears, along with a jar of the Rose City Pepperheads' Hollerin' Huckleberry Pepper Jelly at the Portland Farmer's Market, and hurry-scurryin' home to pack the crisper with my new buoyant bundles, I scampered back to the Rose Quarter/Memorial Coliseum MAX Yellow Line station, boarded the next Yellow Line train that came, and made my merry way back through the entirety of North Portland to the end of the line; pacing this time toward Exhibit Hall E where most of the hubbub was concentrated this weekend.

Before beginning my shift at 2 PM (it was about 12:30 PM when I got there) I scuttled every aisle, artery, ingress, corridor, crevass, foyer, even lawn, of the hall: adoring each of the featured exhibitioners and collecting business cards, pamphlets, miscellaneous literature, free Natural Awakenings, Oregon Home and Kiwi magazines, pens, refrigerator magnets, dog food samples from V-Dog and Well Pet Nutrition, bars of natural soap from Ballard Organics, one jumbo biodegradable T-Shirt bag from Earth-Centric, LLC, carrot seed packets from Growing Gardens, vegetable and flower seed packets from Territorial Seed Company, samples of Nordic Naturals' Nordic Berries, a replaceable shower head................. even a ten-ounce Double Wall Tea-Zer Tea Tumbler from Liquid Solutions............before my shift was to begin.

As a volunteer, I was even offered unlimited dibs on free food samples, including four different flavors of CLIF Bar (including my new favorite: White Chocolate Macadamia Nut), nine varieties of Dave's Killer Bread (both in a toasted and non-toasted form), small lickings of European Style Drinking Chocolate from Sipping Dreams, Homemade Vegan Truffles

I also got my green on, literally, by doing a little ecophile-apparel shopping. First, I bought a 100% Organic Cotton-certified, USA-made, sweatshop, harsh resin and plastic free T-shirt fromThe Green Loop: a style conscious, eco-retail company specializing in sustainable apparel and accessories for men and women, using only brands that "employ a variety of responsible practices, including: using eco-friendly, sustainable materials; employing energy efficient and low-impact production; investing in renewable energy and carbon offsets; and maximizing recycling and waste reduction." The store was founded in 2004 as an experiment in market based environmental activism in Portland, Oregon, with the "dual goals of using fashion as a vehicle for environmental change and providing a comprehensive shopping resource with a certain aesthetic criteria, for those seeking more sustainable options without sacrificing their sense of style." I am proud to support this local business, and purchased their Live Simply T-shirt, which is supplied via the Green Label brand, which goes above and beyond to see to it all their apparel is also printed phalate and PVC free, which are ubiquitous in screen printing.

Then, I purchased two T-shirts and two pairs of jean shorts at Planet Protect: a local activist sportswear company founded in 2005 by James Beriault after seeing with his own eyes the accelerating problem that is Plastic Pollution during a trip to Maui, who opened its doors after initially taking numerous other responsible steps to draw attention to the issue, whether being joining environmental groups or contacting local legislators. From there, he received this vision for a company amidst his desire to assist at greater length the environmental organizations he valued, and now is presently working hard to have 100% "closed loop" manufacturers by 2010, seek more talented artists via his Freelance Artist Program, and utilizing 10% of each purchase for lobbying efforts, awareness campaigns, activism and outreach, including Oceana: the largest international advocacy organization focused 100% on protecting the world's oceans, Shark Savers: a 501c3 public charity registered in New York and founded in 2007 that focuses on creating awareness and education programs about sharks and seeks ways to empower people to get involved through grassroots campaigns, and Earth Share of Oregon: a federation of America's leading non-profit conservation organizations, working to promote environmental awareness and charitable giving. I am proud to have supported Beriault's cause simply by being a customer: purchasing a medium-sized Mediterranean Green Sea Life: Green Sea Turtle T-Shirt, a medium-sized Milk Chocolate Brown Bird of the Forest T-Shirt (only the Women's Top version of it is included on the site) and two 30-inch pairs (one chestnut brown, one green) of hemp/organic cotton blend Tynhead Shorts provided by sustainable Chinese manufacturer HT Naturals.

Had I had more money on me, I would have also supported two other local apparel businesses: Bamboo Originals (which designs 100% bio-degradable apparel from bamboo that is naturally anti-bacterial because of its bio-agent "bamboo kun", that prevents bacteria from cultivating on it, as well as having a hollow fiber which keeps you comfortable and not clinging to your skin and not retaining odors either due to its moisture ventilation properties) and The Ojoba Collective: a Fair-Trade endorsed company working to better the lives of over 300 West African artisans by means of alleviating poverty through purchasing fairly traded and sustainably produced products, as well as educating consumers to create markets for these products and organizing community projects to promote them. Alas, you almost always can't support every single little guy and gal all in one fell swoop, but I'll certainly have their numbers jotted in the address book of my mind for future reference! =)

Of course, the Better Living Show isn't solely a marketplace; it's also an interactive encyclopedia of sorts, breathing knowledge and quick tips to any customer or guest willing to learn anything about making his/her life more efficient, sustainable, or perhaps just unique. I also became particularly acquainted with the local organization SOLV: a non-profit organization founded in 1969 by former Oregon Governor Tom McCall and other business and community leaders to address litter and vandalism problems throughout the state, which has since expanded into an operation which brings together government agencies, businesses and individual volunteers in programs and projects to enhance Oregon's livability. Indeed, this Earth Day (April 18th) will mark the 20th anniversary of their SOLV IT event, where anyone can pick from over a hundred projects spanning Clackamas, Columbia, Multnomah, Washington and Yamhill counties, which include but are not limited to cleaning illegal dumpsites and neighborhoods, landscaping public spaces, working in community gardens and removing invasive species such as English Ivy and Himalayan Blackberry from sensitive ecological sites. In 2008, nearly 3,200 volunteers volunteered for the 19th annual SOLV IT: taking place on 110 project sites in the greater Portland area, consisting of such major accomplishments as sending 207,306 pounds of mixed waste to be properly disposed of in area landfills, collecting 154,545 pounds of green waste including illegally dumped yard debris and invasive plants, removing 28,000 pounds of scrap metal, and planting 2,950 trees, shrubs, bulbs and native plants in parks and natural areas. I will be at Laurelhurst Park on Earth Day from 9 AM to noon to help pull invasive ivy species on site to help provide clearing so native species can be planted in their place later, and hope to fit another opportunity in there on the same day! After all, it's the LEAST I can do for our Mother Earth: for all she has provided me in terms of biodiverse soils, fresh fruits and vegetables, clean air and water and spacious scenery, among myriads of other blessings! =)

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