Mass PowerShift lobbied in the Statehouse in Boston (see previous article) to encourage lawmakers to pass the Global Warming Solutions Act before the end of the legislative period. And they did!

A few days ago, right before the summer break, Massachusetts committed to reducing its carbon emissions by 20% below 1990 levels by the year 2020 and 80% by 2050. It is a good first step, a statement of intent that allows investors, industry, government, scientists and all citizens to focus their efforts towards a carbon free economy and can make Massachusetts, with its overflow of brainpower and technological capabilities, one of the leaders of new development in the country.

Read more...

Carrotmob is an innovative group creating innovative ways for concerned individuals to come together and create real change in a lighthearted way, and I’m proud to say that I will be working with them and an awesome team of volunteers to create an event in New York City this fall!

What really excites me about Carrotmob is that it is about bringing people together for a shared, do-able goal that has a lot of impact. It’s somewhere between remembering to bring your reusable bags to the store and re-inventing our entire infrastructure and it also looks like a really good time.

This video explains what Carrotmob is about much better than I could so please check it out! I’ve started a Facebook group (search for Carrotmob NYC) which anyone can join to stay current on dates, events, and opportunities to get involved.

Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.

Since I have a healthy hang-up with trash and how to keep reducing it, I thought I’d take another look recently to see what was in there. I found mostly bits of unrecyclable plastic. I decided to find out how I could recycle just 1 item of this motley crew: plastic dry cleaning bags. After searching online, I did not find any dry cleaners or small recyclers that would accept them, but I did find was a great DIY site that offered a tip: tie the hanger end into a knot and use it as a large garbage bag—great, a way to reuse them, even better than recycling… But what about everyone else’s bags? I doubt most people are planning to tie knots in theirs or make fluffy plastic DIY Christmas wreaths.

To my surprise my search also turned up a piece of pending legislation on this very subject: Bill # A.11725/S.8643. This is a NY state plastic bag recycling bill that, should it pass, would override the more stringent NYC plastic bag recycling law that was signed last January.

Read more...

Responsibility. For most of us, that word conjures up images of duty and toil. When are you going to grow up and learn some responsibility? Boring routines and obligations: that’s what being a responsible adult is about. No wonder we shy away from the concept.

But is that accurate? Is caring for something so much that you take responsibility for it necessarily an act of drudgery?

Before we can answer those questions, we need to consider that there are different kinds of responsibilities, and some are more rewarding than others. Taking care of a beloved child is one thing; having to clean the garage is another.

An example: I used to own a car, and frankly, I hated it. I might just have a really small tolerance for “stuff” responsibility, but to me, owning a car felt like nothing more than an endless to-do list filled with unimaginably boring tasks: change the oil, deal with the registration, find out what that funny noise is. Blech.

The responsibility of car ownership didn’t appeal to me at all. But give me a friend in need and I am there 100%. The difference? Love. I love my friends (and yes I know that some people love their cars, too). The key is to look at our lives honestly and ask ourselves, how much of what we have to do every day stems from love, versus simply from having too much junk we don’t care about that still requires attention?

Once we know what’s important to us, then taking responsibility for it is only natural. In fact, it’s the ultimate act of love.

Committing oneself—whether to a child, a project, or a partnership—is a leap of faith. When we say, Yes, I will take responsibility for this, we are aligning ourselves with some of humankind’s best qualities: care, attention, and creativity. We are saying, I love this so much that I will ensure it thrives, no matter what. We take a vow to do whatever needs to be done. When we decide we will see it through, we express our grown-up-ness in its highest form.

Now, our culture doesn’t particularly value grown-up-ness. Maturity rarely makes people famous; wisdom doesn’t sell magazines; commitment may or may not be rewarded. But we have come to a point in our history where we need realer, more humane dreams than the ideal held up by society and the media. Overvaluing big houses, shiny cars, and handbags that cost as much as shiny cars has brought our society to the brink of destruction. It’s time for us to go deeper.

To me, the saddest part is that these shiny things don’t make us happy anyway. Past a certain point of having enough of what we need and at least some of what we want in a material sense, more stuff just means more responsibility of the drudge variety. Biggie Smalls had it right when he said, “Mo’ money, mo’ problems.”

The truth is that we’ve spent our precious lives chasing the wrong goals, and now we are tired and worn down from the weight of achieving them. I say this not to lay blame on anyone—the situation is what it is—but just to acknowledge where we are, so we can find a way out.

So, the question is, how do we turn this around? Is there a way to reframe our thinking so that we chase the right goals—those that truly do contribute to our happiness and the health of the planet? C’mon, you are reading The Sunny Way—of course there is!

It starts by asking, what really makes us happy? One hint: it’s not giant cars and big ole TVs. Studies show that, past that point of having enough (it’s hard to be happy on an empty stomach), the list is pretty simple: Spending time with family and friends; short commutes; freedom to make our own choices; feeling more or less equal with others in our society.

When we shift our goals from money and power to true human happiness, amazing things can happen. In the city of Bogota, Colombia, former mayor Enrique Peñalosa demonstrated this to be true. He made the happiness of his constituents the number one priority of his administration, bringing clean water, pedestrian walkways, and efficient public transportation to hundreds of thousands of people. In doing so, a new sense of self-respect and happiness was sparked in the city. “In everything we did, we tried to increase equality, to maximize integration,” he said. “In this way we are also constructing democracy.”

Peñalosa took responsibility (and a lot of heat!) for making these changes. And he did it out of a sense of love for his city and the people who live there.

What he was able to achieve was impressive, but it is no more than what each of us can do when we fall in love with the future enough to take responsibility for making it happy, vibrant, and magnificent. Doing this doesn’t mean sacrifice, it just means rethinking what we really want. Handbags for health and happiness sounds like a fair trade to me. What do you think?

Most of the materials I’ve read or discussions I’ve seen on the topic of kids and commercialism are along the lines of “when I was growing up things were different.” I was tempted to say the same thing, but I don’t think that is entirely true. I think my generation was the beginning of a society that views children as little more than a target market.

We have always had television and while I remember getting cable and the Internet, I was still pretty young when it happened. Kids my age grew up on licensed characters and Nintendo. Two days a week our school hot lunch was served by Taco Bell or Pizza Hut, who also sponsored a reading program at my elementary school. I’ve been the target of advertisers since preschool and it is only getting worse.

Billions of advertising dollars are spent each year shilling everything from junk food to cheap plastic toys to kids who are not old enough to distinguish a lie from the truth. It’s pervasive. Everywhere a child looks there are advertisements, including in many cases at school.

The Center For a New American Dream has had some success in fighting a company that made radio advertisements for school buses. I can see the logic in it. Kids on a school bus are a captive audience with a limited ability to tell fact from fiction. I can just picture some evil-genius advertising executive salivating over that plan. What I can’t conceive of is the Superintendent of Schools who would agree to something so blatantly bad for children.

Can you tell that this bugs me?

The lines between who we are and what we buy have become blurred. We judge others and ourselves on whether or not we have what advertisers tell us we should have. We believe that “if I just had this one more thing” then I’d be happy or cool or beautiful.

I had parents who fought it, at least when we were young. They restricted how much TV we watched and we weren’t allowed to have a Nintendo. My mom was a preschool teacher and she always had some project for us like making wrapping paper out of butcher paper and potato stamps, or making a periscope from a milk carton and some mirrors. My dad took us to every historical site and museum in the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin. We were one of the last families at my school to get cable. We were allowed to have “cool” toys like My Little Pony or a Cabbage Patch Kid if my mom saw some creative value in it, but “I want it because everyone else has one” was never a useful argument.

Now that I am a parent I can appreciate how hard this is to fight. Right now my kids are little so I have a lot of control over what they see and do, but that won’t always be true. It’s a scary thing when you realize how much influence other people have over your children.

I have talked a lot with other moms about this issue. Many of us are feeling the same way. There’s a sense of desperation. “What do we do? Hide them under a rock for 18 years and hope for the best? Give in and admit defeat?”

I think the solution has to be two-fold. First, we have to teach our kids how to navigate this culture effectively. As tempting as the hide-them-under-a-rock idea sounds, that kind of isolation isn’t going to prepare them for the real world. The real world will hit them eventually. As a mom, protectiveness comes easily to me, but what I really need to do is to give my kids the tools they need to succeed when I am no longer there to protect them.

I need to teach them to evaluate their purchases against their wants, needs and values. I need to teach them to ask lots of questions. Do I want this because it would really improve my quality of life or do I want it because it is bright and shiny and right in front of me? Will it bring me real enjoyment, or just status? Can I picture myself pulling this out of the closet a year from now and I still interested in it or would I send it to a thrift shop? Am I buying this because I need a little novelty in my life? Could I meet that need by checking a book out from the library, creating a piece of art, or seeking out a new experience instead of a new possession? Can I learn to appreciate the beauty of an object without having to own it?

I need to be honest with them about my own struggles. I am a full-grown woman who knows that advertisers and businesses do not necessarily have my best interests at heart. Still, I sometimes walk into Target, feel my eyes start to glaze over, and suddenly feel that “if I just had this” life would be easier.

I need to help them keep their focus on what is important. There’s something about spending time together as a family, getting outside and playing or spending quiet time alone with a book that naturally makes bling look less appealing. The more you appreciate what really matters to you the more contented you are. The more contented you are the less you are likely to believe that you “have to” have something just because someone tells you that you do.

The second thing concerned parents need to do is to find each other and speak up. There are probably other parents in our communities who feel this way. By speaking up we make it easier for others to speak up, and the more of us there are the more effective we can be. These are our communities and our children. We do not have to accept the status quo.

In another Sunny Way article Megan said that we are “the environment.” We are also “society” and any change in society is going to have to come from us.

(Uli’s story of communicating with the elected politicians in her state has totally inspired me to reach out to mine. Maybe a future challenge could be participating in democracy? Image by dbking via flickr. -ed)

Mass Power Shift was a climate change conference in Boston last weekend put on by a number of mainly student organizations. They did an impressive job pulling together a logistically very complex event in only four months.

The weekend was packed—with lots of Speakers (John Kerry and his wife Teresa Heinz-Kerry were the most famous, but the whole line up was very diverse and impressive: Miss Rhode Island, Claire Allen, State Senator Marc Pachico and on and on); about 30 workshops on different aspects of Global Warming and Activism, from networking on the web to green roofs to spiral dynamics, you name it; panel discussions; regional community break-out sessions; entertainment; a march and fair; and, as the culmination and maybe most important part—lobbying in the State House for the State Congress to pass the Global Warming Solutions Act (GWSA) on Monday morning.

This legislation has already passed the Senate in MA, and our goal was to urge as many of the representatives as possible in person, to pass it in this legislative session. We were aiming for a firm commitment to do whatever they could to make this happen, and there is a follow up plan in place. The GWSA demands a reduction of greenhouse emissions of 20% by 2020 and 80% by 2050. Now that seems not even going to be enough according to the latest science, but—one step at a time.

It was all new to me, as well as most of the other 50 or so ‘lobbyists,’ but we practised our meetings with experts in advance. In the first real meeting, I was nervous never the less. We worked in small groups or pairs and I think we all felt strengthened by this. The first reperesentative we met, Antonio Cabral, had agreed to a set appointment, asked us into his meeting room and said “Okay, talk to me!” He has already proposed a rail system around Boston funded by a pollution tax on cars. Another, Anthony Verga, came from a background of fishery and appreciated the sentiment that environmentalism has so far been a white middle class affair and the move out of that bubble.

It is good to get to get to know the people in the legislature. As much as they might be just a small part of the picture, they do hold power, and to speak with them about their own concerns about this issue is both humanizing and enlightening. One very impressive, absolutely non-pretentious and deeply caring man was Senator Pachico—he spent a lot of time with the participants of the conference. First and foremost was the “human connection”! Almost everyone, aides and representatives alike, was incredibly gracious and interested and some said that this kind of event carries a lot of weight in their mind. Meeting real people with real stories makes them feel supported, too, as they are up against a multitude of interests.

It was a powerful opportunity to begin to build relationships with people we have so many ideas about.

And then we will see—let’s hope the act will get passed and MA will emerge as a leader in Climate Action as it could and should be. Mass Power shift and the organisations involved in this event are definitely not going to stop. If you want to take more action right now, you can go for it here:

http://www.350.org/4/

http://www.1sky.org

http://www.itsgettinghotinhere.org