To recognize a tremendous milestone that the Brighter Planet community has just reached, we’ve made a short film. Enjoy!

-The Brighter Planet team

Here at Brighter Planet, we are working to build a truly innovative partnership network across the for-profit/non-profit divide. Our partnerships are based around the shared mission of confronting climate change and reducing human impact on the environment. One of our first partners, Center for New American Dream, recently launched Break the Bottled Water Habit, an exciting campaign focused on getting Americans to pledge to give up the bottle for good old tap water. The individual who gets the most people to sign-up for the pledge will win Brighter Planet’s Live, Learn, Experience Climate Change Prize. The prize includes a commuter bike, a few essential books on climate and sustainability, and a trip for two to Glacier National Park.

So what are you waiting for? Take the pledge and start to spread the word.

If you’re particularly attached to your Aquafina or Fiji bottles, consider these facts:

1. Waste, Energy, and Emissions: The Beverage Marketing Corporation reports that Americans consumed 31.2 billion liters of water in 2006 – nearly 9 liters per month for every man, woman, and child. Manufacturing all those bottles requires 900,000 tons of plastic, the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil, and emit more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide. Trucking around all those heavy bottles emits even more greenhouse gases. Beyond the climate impact there’s the massive waste – 86% of water bottles aren’t recycled - and water bottling is also, ironically, a very water-intensive endeavor. The Pacific Institute tells us that it takes three liters of water to produce one liter of bottled water!

2. Bottled water is full of oil. Making bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 cars for a year. (NY Times) To put it another way, the entire energy costs of the lifecycle of a bottle of water is equivalent, on average, to filling up a quarter of each bottle with oil. (Pacific Institute).

3. Disposable plastic water bottles are not meant for multiple uses. The #1 polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is fine for a single use, but reuse can lead to chemical leaching of toxins such as DEHA, a known carcinogen, and benzyl butyl phthalate (BBP), a potential hormone disrupter.

4. At least 40 percent of bottled water is tap water anyway. That’s right: you are paying a huge premium on water that you could have just gotten from your tap in the first place. (National Resources Defense Council)

So take the pledge, get yourself a few reusable containers, and spread the word.

-Robbie

In 1970, the parents in Aspen decided that the Aspen Elementary School was too conservative. They decided to start their own experimental school following the teachings of Sylvie Ashton Warner, a renowned teacher in New Zealand. The first year, the school opened in the Aspen Institute’s building in town. Sylvie came for the year to establish the curriculum. She documented her experience in “Spearpoint: Teacher in America”.

The parents (who were also the teachers) quickly decided they needed their own building so a local hero, George Stranahan, donated land and the parents began planning the building. The Fall semester of the school’s second year was devoted to building the log school.

The land is in Woody Creek and up the road was a saw mill where we got the logs and separators. I don’t remember where the mortar came from. The parents and students researched the building requirements, got donations and went to work. The main building is all logs with a tower that at the time, was the tallest log tower built. They used as few nails as possible, opting for dowels. The floor was poured concrete and classrooms were partitioned off with recycled garage doors. It was an ungraded school where students were grouped by ability and assignments were derived by student experience (the Aston Warner methodology).

Today, the school has grown but maintained its focus on environmentally friendly structures using yurts and the like. They have solar panels for energy and focus their classes on life skills and academics.

As a kid, my favorite classes were in the garden. The students still grow vegetables and flowers. The plot has grown substantially, but the concept is the same. Teach the children the value of the earth and of locally grown food. It is a lesson I still recall as we put our garden in every spring and as we enjoy our fresh vegetables in the harvest season.

Last week was “Eat Local National Challenge Week”, and I was happy to share the joy of growing food at home with my children.

-Ashley

This month, I have been revisiting the declaration that Sissel Waage and I made in our book: “Yes, we can” (and no, we don’t mind that a certain presidential candidate has also adopted the phrase!) Last year, this was our confident answer to the question: “Can we really win this fight against global warming?,” and our certainty was based on our faith in the power of individuals to bear witness to injustice, build coalitions, take their elected officials to task, and transform societies — the very power that shattered Jim Crow, ended apartheid, and ushered in women’s rights.

I admit, though, that I have recently had my doubts. Earlier this year, James Hansen and colleagues wrote that the world must reduce atmospheric concentrations of CO2 from about 390 parts per million to below 350 as soon as possible. If Hansen is right (and no climate scientist has had a better track record in the last 30 years), this is humanity’s most daunting task, ever.

So, can we really do this? The truth is that no one knows, but we must try. This, it seems to me, is the essence of Al Gore’s magnificent challenge last month to eliminate all carbon-based sources of electricity in ten years. We must try, as impossible as this goal may seem.

There is good news: Earlier this month, I was lucky enough to attend a gathering of like-minded folks in Salzburg, Austria for a four-day session titled “Combating Climate Change at Local and Regional Levels: Sustainable Strategies, Renewable Energy.” The array of locally-based solutions was breathtaking: the rapid growth of biomass in Northern Austria (see Dave Robert’s account in The Grist), the transformation of Freiburg, Germany into a sustainable city, and the building of a clean-energy coalition in the Midwest.

These and other recent examples (see this stunning compendium of Global Warming Solutions that Work from Rob Sargent and his colleagues) illustrate some simple truths about building local and regional solutions: you need strong leadership, a diverse enough coalition, and a emphasis on economic development alongside the call for sustainability and climate justice. Throw in a dash of luck, and determined coalitions really can make a rapid transformation to clean-energy.

And yet … it’s simply not enough. Add up all of the locally and regionally based solutions of the last decade, and we still are only making a modest dent on our collective greenhouse gas impact. Ultimately, we need the strongest possible national and global policies. In the words of Thomas Friedman, we need to change the rules and scale up.

In fact, I believe that this is the true value of all of the extraordinary local and regional initiatives that I learned about in Salzburg: as learning laboratories for global scaling up. By pursuing locally-based solutions to this global challenge, leaders are learning what technologies are most cost-effective, how to finance these technologies with private and public support, and how to build new coalitions. We will need these and other lessons, big time, as we build global institutions for scaling up. (On this essential topic, read the compelling “Climate Choreography” from Lew Milford and his colleagues.)

How to accelerate this process of changing the rules, scaling up, and building new institutions? That’s where the global climate movement comes in. With the strongest possible national legislation from the next American president and a renewed commitment to collaboration from the world’s leaders, we can begin to move towards a carbon-free future. So make a video, join 1Sky, We Can Solve It or other groups and become active in your community. And don’t forget to begin at home: assess your own impact and take steps to conserve what you can, and offset the rest. May the drive to 350 begin. The world can’t wait.

-Jon Isham, co-founder of Brighter Planet

In addition to founding Brighter Planet, Jon is the Luce Professor of Environmental Economics at Middlebury College and co-editor of the book “Ignition: What You Can Do to Fight Global Warming and Spark a Movement“.

Our Facebook page has provided a platform for sharing pictures, videos, events, and thoughts. But sometimes we just need more room to elaborate on issues that pop up there. With his permission, we have decided to pull Adam Thada’s recent ‘Wall’ comment into the blog.

Adam shares:

… An accurate carbon footprint takes into account not just direct carbon purchases (gas, electricity) but also other consumer goods that have a carbon history (i.e. almost everything we spend money on). I recently realized that another one of my “products” is my $12/ton going to [offsets]. Yes, some of that money going toward building a windmill in the near-term, but how much of that $12 is going towards NEW carbon sources - electricity to run … computers, gas to move employees around, etc? Even if [the offset company] offsets their own electricity (which creates a fun little circular definition-type problem), what about the paper they print on, even if it’s 100% recycled? What about the other products and services that they demanded b/c of my purchase?

The point you bring up is a good one—even ‘clean’, or low-impact companies rely on some form of ‘dirty’ resource here and there. Nobody gets off the hook ;). As for the scenario where an offset company buys offsets to balance out their unavoidable emissions, this leads to an immediate, and total, system collapse! Not really, I’d imagine most offset companies do this, and since they can buy offsets at cost, the feedback cycle would lose steam.

Now let’s consider what this means on a larger scale.

As per Adam’s point, the purchase of goods and services generally supports—even if indirectly—the further release of carbon emissions somewhere. Point is, a growing business usually equates to a growing environmental footprint; and in general, business in the US is pretty heavy-footed right now. In 2006 alone, over half of total US carbon emissions were attributed to commercial and industrial activities (EPA). Needless to say, we have some reshaping to do, and business (with our help) will need to undergo a truly world-changing shift to cleaner practices when considering our common environmental goals (Check out Al Gore’s recent challenge for the U.S. to run on 100% renewable energy in 10 years—inspiring and daunting).

Consumers get to play an important role here. From supply chains and shipping, to manufacturing and operations, to consumption and waste, companies are increasingly being held accountable for their actions by customers and key stakeholders, and for this, they keep close watch on consumer trends. The restaurant business does this on a daily basis. If the sandwich on the menu is consistently underselling, people probably don’t like it–how about trying something with sushi? If customers don’t tip well, teach the waiting staff some new tricks! It’s easy market research. We vote each day with the purchases we make. We buy from brands we want to see survive, and leave others (and unappealing sandwiches) on the shelf to lag behind or drop out of the competitive marketplace.

The hope is that, on a large enough scale, this supply and demand equation will drive industry-wide trends in green business practices. Joel Makower’s reports in his report,“The State Of Green Business,” that “the trend seems to be getting to zero – zero waste, zero emissions, zero carbon, and more.” But the question remains, will the shift to ‘greener’ business be enough to get us where we need to be?

There’s a lot to talk about on supporting cleaner business practices, and, one of our other sources of inspiration here, climate innovations (maybe an upcoming post). In the meantime, if you find yourself assiduously pawing through social media apps like we do, come visit us on our Facebook page. This post was Facebook Wall-inspired.

-Jake