7gen Bloc

We’ve mentioned this before here on the Inspired Protagonist, it’s worth saying again: The Story of Stuff is a film you’ve got to see. It’s one of the clearest, most accessible and fun to watch educational videos I’ve seen in a long time. Annie Leonard takes us on a guided tour of how stuff gets made from the story of the extraction of its raw materials to its sale, use and disposal.

It’s hard to feel that there’s a good choice to make when it comes time to filling up your tank. And even those of us with hybrids sooner or later need to make the stop. (I just bought Toyota’s Camry Hybrid, and while I’m still angry at Toyota for fighting against higher mileage standards in California, given where we live and the other options available, it seemed like the best choice – though it did take me almost three months of research to decide.)

Love what Davos is doing on YouTube to engage the world

At this point, I think you really have to bet on technology. By which I mean how we’re going to deal with the climate crisis. It’s not at all clear to me that we (by which I mean humanity) are going to summon the will and the courage and the passion to engage in the kind of behavioral constraints needed to cut carbon emissions 80% by 2050, which is pretty much what the science guys tell us we have to do to in order to avert what I’ll politely refer to as a bit of planetary unpleasantness.

Our scent guru, Eva-Marie passed along this link to Just-a-Minute, an organization encouraging us all to take just a minute here and there to quiet our minds and let peace and stillness rush in as a way to maybe get some of it to rub off on the world.

So remember how I said yesterday I had a mountain of stuff to dig through? I did. Until my e-mail crashed this afternoon precipitating two hours of empty folders where there should have been big piles of blog fodder and triggering a tide of rising panic that threatened my cranium with explosive decompression. It’s all better now thanks to my friend Google and some laborious repairs. But it does make you think…

Returning to the blogosphere after a refreshing holiday hiatus spent largely away from all issues green (‘cept for that tree in the middle of my living room…), I’m finding a lot of news and other items to catch up on. For no real reason other than it was the first thing I encountered this morning, I’ll start with this item, which I think aptly illustrates the dubious art of corporate responsibility misdirection.

“Two years ago, Isobella Jade was down on her luck, living on a friend’s couch and struggling to make it as a fashion model when she had the idea of writing a book about her experience as a short woman trying to break into the modeling business. “Unable to afford a computer, Ms. Jade, 25, began cadging time on a laptop at the Apple store in the SoHo section of Manhattan. Ms. Jade spent hours at a stretch standing in a discreet corner of the store, typing. Within a few months, she had written nearly 300 pages.