To the faceless millions moving through the dark tonight

Hello readers. It’s been a while. About 10 days in fact since my last post.

I went on holiday in search of a quiet beach and some rest.

We ended up south of Tulum in the Yucatan, just in time for a fierce tropical storm.

The wind howled day and night, filling everything with fine white sand, and the rain came sideways and hard.

Three days in, some fierce waves tossed this home-spun raft (from Cuba I’m guessing) onto the beach.

I’ve stumbled across these ravaged vessels before (in the Bahamas) and be assured they leave you standing cold…

Whose raft was this? What godawful circumstances pushed them to set out on such a risky journey? And, inevitably, how did the voyagers die?

Was it the sun? Did they run out of water? Starve to death? Or did a big, black wave fill their lungs forever with brine?

Does it matter? In face of such long odds, death was almost certain.

It’s hard to imagine a life so miserable, so utterly lacking in hope that it drives people to plunge headlong into the dark sea on little more than a stack of bound twigs for a slim chance at something better, far over the horizon.

But millions of course make this stark choice every year; thousands are on the move at this very moment, across mountains, deserts and seas, risking everything to flee dictators and misery in search of safety, shelter and food.

Let’s never forget the plight of all these courageous people, including the intrepid Cubans who built and set out on this little raft, above.

Let’s endeavor to help them, each as we can, in our own way (a note to South Africans and their pressed Zimbabwean neighbors!).

Finally, let’s honor them with a little quote from Ishmael in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick:

“Earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore… better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!”

My italics.

It’s good to be posting again, readers… more to come from Vermont and Lohas 12.

Prince Hamlet on facing the truth and taking action to affect positive change

I’m telling you a lot of what this Hamlet fellow had to say is right on the money.

On the role of culture in helping us face the truth/reboot the consciousness (even if it means we must wriggle in discomfort while we take it in):

“I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at the play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaimed their malefactions.”

… kind of how I felt after watching Inconvenient Truth and Manufactured Landscapes… we need more media like this and it needs to reach more people.

And here, on sitting on the sidelines vs. taking action to affect positive change (you’ve probably heard this one before):

“To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
and by opposing end them…”

Take arms against a sea of troubles, I say!

Related post on IBC: The transformative role of culture

Crimped lifestyle serves as the tipping point to re-boot America’s consciousness, communties and sense of purpose

Here’s an inspiring snippet from a recent post on WorldChanging (whose tagline is “change your thinking”) about the mainstreaming realization that America is broken, that something is seriously wrong:

“Common folks… are starting to understand that our ever-diminishing free time, the loss of sense of community, rising gas prices, the sub-prime mortgage implosion, and a whole range of other current societal problems are all pieces of a bigger puzzle. We’re starting to understand that all of this points toward a fundamental problem with the way America has designed and developed our communities over the past 60+ years. This shift in thinking among the American mainstream is beginning to bring about the popular and political will to rectify our past errors.”

While this may sound like a gloomy quote, I think it’s a hopeful one in that once enough people feel the negative impact on their lifestyle, they will realize that we have to make some bold changes in the interest of our collective well-being, leading to a flourishing of public/private partnerships designed to restore much-needed community (real community, not Starbucks-baked community) as the foundation for improving our quality of life.

Sigg informs us of our dirty habits…

Sigg, originally uploaded by Oliver Sweatman.

I hooked another one (my activist streak is flowing today)…

I’ll admit it, this image is from an ad in a magazine (Outside). But I did take a photo of it so I guess it’s technically still legit for our bubbling flickr pool (as are screen-shots and video - let’s just get some material up there and see what happens…).

Anyway, the SIGG ad above caught my interest for its sheer educational value (1/2 the battle on moving the needle on mainstream awareness around these issues, I think). The ad informs us:

“100 million plastic water bottles are dumped into America’s landfills - every day! That’s nearly 40 billion plastic bottles per year, each taking over 1,000 years to biodegrade.”

What a disgrace!

One would hope that, faced with this knowledge, folks would stop guzzling through 3, 4, 5 plastic bottles at a seating, or ordering cases of bottled water for the home/office (look into a Brita filter, or a Sigg, I guess).

Growth for growth’s sake? Come on, fire up that creaky imagination…

It’s been a long week so you’re not going to any original thinking out of me tonight… But here’s a nugget from Paul Hawken (who wrote Blessed Unrest) via Outside magazine to tide you over:

“Our best thinking got us here, and part of that is our addiction to growth. We do need to grow, the question is, Grow what? When we’re adults, no one wants to grow physically, but we do want our wisdom, our understanding, our compassion to grow. Those same things are true of the economy. We do need to grow - we need to reimagine mobility, we need to reimagine our agriculture, we need to reimagine our cities, we need to reimagine our buildings as systems. Do we need to grow our Starbucks? No.” [my bolding]

Happy Friday. And don’t forget to take a photo for our nascent flickr pool if you see a “Responsible? Brand” in action this weekend!

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Photo credit: Oliver S. [taken @ recent art fair in NYC... artist's name is?]

NYC warms up to bicycles

News flash: moments ago a friend (with a slacker schedule, it seems) e-mailed me this picture from his iPhone in Soho. Behold, a freshly-painted bike lane on Prince Street!

I rode my Amsterdam cruiser down this same block earlier today, returning from an early breakfast meeting no less, and I don’t remember seeing this painted bike lane.

So NYC is finally getting serious about biking… To add more sauce to this riveting anecdote, just yesterday a friend asked how it was to bike around in the city, and I responded: “we need some paint on the bike lanes to make the lanes more visible to drivers”.

Sometimes in life you get what you ask for…

“Ethically-produced” will become the norm, soon enough

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece today about social responsibility asking, ‘Does being ethical pay?‘ (subscription required). There are a couple of bits worth repeating here. The first is a succinct definition of “ethically produced” goods:

“For our purposes, “ethically produced” goods are those manufactured under three conditions. First, the company is considered to have progressive stakeholder relations, such as a commitment to diversity in hiring and consumer safety. Second, it must follow progressive environmental practices, such as using eco-friendly technology. Finally, it must be seen to demonstrate respect for human rights — no child labor or forced labor in overseas factories, for instance.”

This definition underpins a broader shift towards a more conscious/benevolent capitalism here in America, which comes as a welcome change after a long, myopic focus on profit only…

Beyond the shopping fix towards a healthier value system

Here’s an insightful if depressing snippet via WWD this week about the psychology of shopping:

“The irony is when times are tough, people often become more victims. They may take themselves deeper in a hole and keep spending. They rely on shopping is a quick, easy coping mechanism instead of doing the hard work to dig in and fix what’s really wrong.” Terrence Shulman, founder and director of the Shulman Center for Compulsive and Theft Spending.

Much has been written about our hyper-consumptive culture and its possible long-term, negative effects on both individual well-being and that of society at large…

It’s time to can the email subsidy

There’s a raging debate going on in the blogosphere about how to handle the ever-increasing rush of e-mails stuffing our in-boxes.

Let’s face it, it’s a growing problem causing huge inefficiency (how much time do you spend sifting through/responding to non-essential emails?) and stress.

(Personally, I dread approaching my in-box every day… even worse with my carpal-challenged hands, an unwelcome side-effect of our keyboard-intensive culture).

The various solutions to email overload being discussed: better in-box management, hiring e-mail assistants (nice for some, I suppose), declaring email bankruptcy, reverting to snail mail, and finding new filtering technologies.

Should we subsidize culture?

One of our goals here at IBC is to explore the role of culture in our lives, as a vehicle for elevating consciousness and positive change, but also as a business opportunity for culturally-minded entrepreneurs.

I recently posed a string of questions here about culture to kick off the exploration and have some Q&As in store which will hopefully shed some light on the matter…

In the meantime, in response to my culture pop quiz posted a few days back, one of IBC’s more intrepid readers has volunteered the following:

“Personally, I think government should play a part in supporting “culture” but they also need to allocate sufficient funds to this and appoint the right people in those positions. The last I heard, the U.S. govt continued to decrease funding in the arts & humanities (which was already a pitiful amount compared to Europe), and increased military spending instead. Very sad.”

What does everyone else think??

Zooming into culture

How do we define “culture”?

What role does culture play in our society?

How do we value culture? Is there such a thing as “good culture” and “bad culture”? Who decides?

What is the connection between culture and consciousness?

Should government support the creation and dissemination of culture, or should culture be left to market forces?

What are the business opportunities in culture?

Between the usual bits’n bobs, these are some of the questions I hope to explore here over the coming months…

Would love to hear of any relevant books/resources on the subject.

Restoring a balance of power with brands

Everywhere I go, people are talking about brands.

Brands have become our new social currency, our new belief system.

We find it impossible to divorce brand from the object or service (or person) itself; everything has become branded.

We depend on brands to discover who we are, project our identity, belong and navigate through modern life.

Every day, we admit and discard brands from our carefully-tended brand constellation, something as unique at any given moment as our own DNA.

And as we become more invested in this system, brands become more powerful, they hold more sway in our lives.

Is this good or bad?

Water, water, everywhere

It’s been said that “water is the oil of the 21st century”.

Around the world, and in many parts of the US, water supplies are running dangerously low.

And the problem’s getting worse: supplies of clean water are shrinking, while demand keeps going up as the world population mushrooms (9 billion by 2050, up from 6 billion today) and as emerging economies industrialize (manufacturing-based economies are water hogs).

H2O, in case you forgot (easy to do in the US, where water is free), is a finite resource.

Feel the drought coming?

Remember, we said “oil of the 21st century”, meaning wars WILL be fought over the stuff (this is already happening in Africa).

Think about that for a second… people are/will soon be killing each other for what we drink, bathe and water our lawns with.

What’s the solution?

Americans embrace mass transit; get stuck in

The number of Americans using mass public transport has reached the highest levels in 50 years.

Ah, excellent. What responsible, green citizens you might think.

Think again. For the most part this is happening for selfish (and perfectly rational) reasons - people are trying to offset rampant increases in the price of gas.

Gotta save $ for dinner, movies and jeans. Feel uneasy… might loose my job soon.

Sure, global warming’s on the airwaves, but for most it remains a fuzzy, distant threat. Maybe even a false alarm?

Fact: until global warming becomes a national disaster, most people won’t pay much attention.

Another fact: science tells us that by then it might be too late, irreversible. Death by heat.

So what to do?

IBC recommends: Culture + Travel magazine

Last week, coming off a quiet and cold Easter in Vermont, we hit the art fairs in New York. While the main Armory show left us feeling flat, things picked up Pulse and Volta, two satellite fairs teeming with indie spirit.

Upon leaving Volta, a friend handed us a magazine called Culture + Travel, “in case you need some subway reading material”. Another magazine we’ve never heard of, we thought. (There’s so much content out there.)

But the title and cover photo caught our attention. So we started flipping through C+T (our acronym) on Sunday and were immediately impressed by the quality of writing and photography.