Sustainability is a numbers game ... increase what needs to be increased and decrease what needs to be decreased. So how sustainable is your lifestyle? How sustainable are the products you buy? Increasingly customers want to know. Unfortunately, sustainability metrics can be very hard to come by and footprint calculators are often too abstract. As a business owner, manufacturer or retailer, how does your business/product rate on a truly comprehensive sustainability rating scale? It's time we mainstreamed sustainability as a purchase criteria. Join Mark Westwind to look at the challenge of quantifying sustainability and explore how the convergence of consumer demand, Big Data and intelligent technologies can be leveraged to influence markets to sustainable choices. Then participate in an interactive "focus group" conversation about his latest project: the One Planet Sustainability Rating System powered by ImpactTrackr, an AI-driven platform for creating impact profiles and sustainability ratings for every product, every purchase, every place.
KRCB North Bay Public Media brings you the stories that are unique to our region, including environmentalism, alternative energy, water conservation, land preservation and agriculture. Here you'll learn about our food system, and our way of life: stories about our rich legacy of family farming and the new methods that are emerging for growing and distributing food; stories about the people who make the most of what this area has to offer, contributing to our economy, arts, and culture; and stories about the very real concerns that threaten the quality and sustainability of what we hold dear.
The Community Resilience Challenge is our chance to show the world that our daily actions matter and that WE are part of the solution. From mid-March through the end of May each year, our community comes together to accomplish awe-inspiring feats of sustainability, which tell the story of community resilience and paints a picture of our movement. YOU can play a vital role in this story’s success and participation is easy. Just visit our website and register your commitment to take action (we’ve even created a suggested list of actions to choose from, or you can create your own!). By joining the Challenge, not only are you helping to grow the movement, but you get great incentives and coupons just for signing up. There’s never been a better time to Stand Up and Be Counted!
We publish the Sustainable World Sourcebook, an award-winning, magazine-style summary of the big issues, best solutions, and actions to take. We also host online programs and events. Our recent initiative, Planet Earth Arts, uses eco-arts to foster inspiration and engagement (planeteartharts.org).
SOS is an organization devoted to exploring this question and how it pertains to our ability to sustain ourselves on this planet. We are making a feature length documentary film, offering sustainability/filmmaking workshops and curriculum to schools, and creating a sustainability-themed youth-based social network for kids to share their ideas and visions for the future of the planet.
M. Landman Communications & Consulting provides practical and professional guidance on a wide range of sustainability strategies and practices, particularly in the areas of green living, sustainable land use, green operations, green and non-toxic products/materials, green business, and climate resilience. The founder, Miriam Landman, is an experienced writer, editor, advisor, and educator. Miriam has been writing and working in the environmental field for 25 years. She is passionate about building people's awareness of effective solutions to environmental problems, and providing the concrete information and tools that people need to put green principles into practice.
Through consultations, presentations, research, and the development of written materials and online resources, M. Landman helps companies, organizations, individuals, households, and communities to incorporate healthy, efficient, and sustainable practices (and products) into their activities and operations.
She also publishes TheGreenSpotlight.com blog and is a regular contributor to MotherEarthNews.com.
Miriam founded M. Landman Communications & Consulting in 2005. Before that, she was senior associate with Simon & Associates Green Building Consultants, and earlier in her career she worked as a producer and reporter for public radio's Living on Earth program. She has also worked for Global Green USA and Davis Square Architects. She has a master’s degree in Urban and Environmental Policy (and Planning) from Tufts University, and a bachelor’s degree in Community Studies from UC Santa Cruz.
You love innovation, you love change, you love sustainability? Perfect. Do you also sometimes wonder how to create innovations, how to implement them and especially how to make them real? Creating ideas is fun but often when we have great things in mind we aren’t really sure how to develop them. Sometimes we feel like an artist who has the perfect picture in mind and then there are so many pencils, colors and papers and we don’t know where and how to start.
Innovating is the key to a sustainable future. Often associated exclusively with technology, innovations are really much more than that. They can be social, economic or ecological. Advances in each of these areas empowers the others. Just think about how technological advancements have helped us to be socially connected in new ways or how new approaches to farming to improve the soil and create local markets.
Clean energy is one of the most important areas for a sustainable future. California is already on the right track. Gov. Jerry Brown wants to get half of California's electricity from renewable energy. That’s an ambitious aim but our state has some of the best solar, wind and geothermal resources in the world. We already have the most homes which have solar panels installed in any state.
There are lots of different chances to create an energy system that’s in harmony with nature. Each source of renewable energy has unique benefits and costs. In this panel we want to figure out which alternative forms of energy have the greatest potential.
The future is about creating new ways to get from one place to the other in an innovative and sustainable way. Across the country and the region, new developments are helping achieve important steps to a more sustainable transportation system. 10 percent of Americans are now using their bikes to go to work or school and web-based technologies that opened up new, connective ways to organize carpools.
There’s still a lot of potential to continue to improve our ways of transportation to be more sustainable and responsible. For example, I’m actually from Europe where in Amsterdam 90 percent of the residents go by bike. Bike trails are a great solution to improve our wellbeing and travel sustainably.
Young people are our future, that’s for sure. But that’s not all, the next generation is full of potential, joy in innovation and motivation. Maybe some don’t know this yet and maybe some know exactly what to do to create a better future. However we want to show you possibilities, stimulations and best practices to engage for a sustainable living.
Our event Future Makers Sustainable North Bay Youth Summit on Saturday, May 2 will help you to discover what area of sustainability fits best to your interests and how to put your ideas into action. We won’t bore you with hours full of speeches, this is about taking action and participate. We want to introduce you to some really inspiring personalities from our Future Makers event. Maybe you’ve heard about one of them.
Lucas Oshun (of Global Student Embassy) Aaron Ableman (one of the creators of Pacha's Pajamas)
You’ll also hear Dr. Robert Girling from Sonoma State University who is organizer of the SEC and author of the book “The good Company”. The book tells stories of over 20 inspiring companies that do what is right by their employees, their communities and the planet.
During lunchtime you’ll meet the team of Switch vehicles and have a look at their cars. And of course there will be a lot of music, food and interactions. Take the chance to be a pioneer and be one of the first to attend the annual youth summit.
Real Leaders serves a community of over 22,000 CEOs in 125 countries and represents over $6 trillion in spending, with a mission to inspire and connect ‘Better Leaders for a Better World’, through media and global events.
Real Leaders recognize that business as usual is a foolish strategy in a world that is rapidly tripling in population during our lifetime. Several billion more people are placing an unprecedented demand on every resource and system on the planet. Success is coming to those determined leaders who are collaborating to be both the best in the world and the best for the world. Those leaders who are harnessing the power of business to solve these global challenges are the Real Leaders of today.
Real Leaders draws on the achievements and insights of successful leaders to highlight this growing global best-practice of doing well by doing good. Real Leaders sponsors events around the world to bring together leaders to connect and collaborate. In addition, thought leaders blog regularly for the web-site as well as the bi-annual Real Leaders publication read by over 22,000 leaders around the world.
GMO Free Sonoma County is a grassroots movement comprised of volunteers working to prohibit growing GMOs in Sonoma County and to Label GMOs in CA. We strive to educate people regarding ZGMO concerns.
Our Current Mission:
To have the Sonoma County Supervisors vote our ordinance into law, which would make it unlawful for any person, partnership, corporation, firm, or entity of any kind to propagate, cultivate, raise, or grow genetically engineered organisms in the county.
The passage of this ordinance would uphold these purposes:
To protect Sonoma County’s native plants, trees, and animals from transgenic contamination by GE organisms;
To defend and promote the economic integrity of organic, conventional, and other markets that are harmed by transgenic contamination by GE organisms;
To protect Sonoma County from increased pesticide use resulting from GE plant propagation and cultivation; and
To preserve the right of Sonoma County residents to reject GE organisms resulting from health-related, moral, or other concerns.
Help us join Marin, Mendocino, Trinity, and Santa Cruz Counties who already have simislar ordinances in place.
If you are a Sonoma County resident, are 18 years old or older, and have not already signed, please visit our website: www.GMOFreeSonomaCounty.com, and sign our online petition and/ or volunteer. If you represent a business or organization you may also endorse.
SolSolutions is a manufacturer of clean portable solar power generators. We are fully committed to helping customers to integrate their ideas with practical solutions to achieve energy independence and efficiency using quality, well-built products.
SolSolutions strives to educate the community, transform thinking and create new plans for the push towards sustainability. It is our goal to help both residential and business customers to incorporate alternative energy sources into their operations in order to increase sustainability, while lowering long-term monetary and environmental costs.
Reducing the footprint of energy consumers will be a key factor in the sustainability movement. Therefore, SolSolutions is dedicated to advancing the concepts of personal empowerment and responsibility as we shift away from old, inefficient fossil-fuel-based power generation towards new, efficient and localized alternative energy-based solutions.
SolSolutions strives to educate the community, transform thinking and create new plans for the push towards sustainability. It is our goal to help both residential and business customers to incorporate alternative energy sources into their operations in order to increase sustainability, while lowering long-term monetary and environmental costs. Reducing the footprint of energy consumers will be a key factor in the sustainability movement.
Therefore, SolSolutions is dedicated to advancing the concepts of personal empowerment and responsibility as we shift away from old, inefficient fossil-fuel-based power generation towards new, efficient and localized alternative energy-based solutions.
Woolman School is a nonprofit educational community dedicated to the principles of peace, justice and sustainability. Woolman offers educational programs for teens, retreats for adults, and summer camps for children and families. Our campus is located on 230 acres in the Sierra Nevada Foothills within walking distance of the Yuba river, and is an experiment in sustainable community living.
Bay Area Green Tours (BAGT) shines the spotlight on the real life pioneering and innovating models that are creating a positive, productive and sustainable future. We help revitalize local economies by inspiring people to make conscious choices about the things they consume, and to be aware of the economic and environmental impacts of their actions.
At Meridian University the term creative enterprise is used to embrace pioneering actions, or next practices, that enable enterprises of many forms to blend financial viability with transformative innovation.
Creative enterprise takes place in domains of action within which transformative change can be catalyzed to more effectively address critical needs of our time. Needs such as ecological responsibility, community building, right livelihood, personal empowerment, and business ethics.
These emphases inform and infuse every course in the Meridian MBA curriculum, so understanding what we mean by each reveals the education we deliver.
Transformative Innovation delivers solutions fundamentally superior to those currently available to meet the deepest needs of individuals or society. Such innovations are fueled by visionary shifts in thinking, new business models, cooperative alliances, entrepreneurial insight and persistence. We aim to cultivate entrepreneurs and executives capable of imagining transformative innovations then making them happen.
Meridian’s second core area of emphasis is Business and Social Entrepreneurship. This supports our MBAs in launching or running a viable business, non-profit, or hybrid organization that results in positive social outcomes. These outcomes can spring from business innovation in a range of areas including policy and governance, organizational structure, and product or service evolution. Positive outcomes can also be derived via social creativity, such as building unique coalitions that blend efforts of private business, citizens, government, education, NGO’s, and other organizations.
The third area of emphasis within the Creative Enterprise MBA is Applied Wisdom and Sustainability. A meaningful understanding of sustainability and green principles of conducting business are now requirements for any creative enterprise. At Meridian we pay close attention to deepening the process of integrating this foundation into all of our thinking.
The Creative Enterprise MBA integrates perspectives from the major wisdom and spiritual traditions, neuroscience, and deep ecology to explore possibilities for how wisdom can be applied in social entrepreneurship and executive action. The program promotes no particular school of wisdom, but present a banquet of offerings from which you choose what empowers you most, grounding your actions in a context of being connected to a larger universe.
Diverse Learning Formats Meridian MBA students spend half of their class time in sessions at Meridian’s San Francisco Center, located within the Hub SoMa inside the San Francisco Chronicle building. The Hub is an international network of workspaces and communication platforms for engaged social entrepreneurs. Class sessions at our San Francisco Center foster student interaction with social entrepreneurs acting at the “intersection of money and meaning”.
MBA students spend the other half of their class time at Meridian’s scenic campus in the hilltops of Marin County, 25 miles north of San Francisco, providing a more contemplative view.
Our MBA program utilizes Learning Communities and is offered in two learning formats: monthly weekends or hybrid online. The blended online format substitutes internet based learning for weekend sessions. Both formats include immersion learning during two weeklong sessions spent in residence each academic year.
Our sustainability consulting services enhance long-term competitive advantage and success because of our expertise in triple bottom line performance combined with deep experience in organizational change.
Most consultants do not integrate change management expertise with their technical solutions,nor do they help them achieve the kind of market leadership that is possible. While they make some impact, many of these efforts make little long-term change because they have not been integrated into the culture or the mindsets of the individuals within the organization. True and long-lasting success requires attention to the strategy, behavior, practices, and processes that are at the core of an organization.
We have the ability to engage with organizations holistically, maximizing chances for success. By using time-tested organizational change methodologies, practical tools, and facilitation, organizations will find that their sustainability initiative can realize tremendous benefits in operational efficiency, customer and employee satisfaction, and industry leadership.
We have worked with Fortune500 companies small businesses, non-profits, foundations and government agencies around the world, and our tailored approaches yield long-lasting and tangible results.
We work with agents of change at the executive level and throughout the organization to achieve maximum results for their sustainability change effort.
For 32 years, Harmony has been a leading-edge lifestyle festival that celebrates the latest trends in health, music, arts, ecology, and spirituality.
Created and seasoned in the trend-setting North Bay Area, Harmony is the original festival to appeal to the green lifestyle market. Over the past 5 years Harmony expanded into a major music festival and in 2009-10, Harmony added the Eco Rally Action Sports Skate Zone to attract a younger demographic.
In 2008, Harmony Festival celebrated its landmark 30th Anniversary with Damian Marley as the headliner.
In 2009, Harmony Festival again invested capital in the expansion of brand recognition and in pursuit of new demographics. Through the introduction of the 1st Annual Eco Rally Skateboard Competition, Harmony Festival received national and international attention and achieved new record numbers for ticket sales and revenues. In 2010, Harmony Festival, Inc. moved its corporate headquarters to Sonoma Mountain Village, North America’s first and only the fourth in the world to receive the prestigious One Planet Communities honor.
The 2010 Festival reached record-breaking attendance estimated at 35,000 people over the weekend. Press outreach, both print and online, hit the mark with featured stories appearing in LA Times, Boston Globe and thousands of impressions on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Slightly Stoopid and Ms. Lauryn Hill rocked the main field. Eco Rally Skateboard Competition attracted the 7-16 year old demographic. This pro/am contest featured MTV, Village Voice and Rolling Stone youth oriented music. The second year of Harmony Festival’s financially successful Harmony Tea House featured freshly made baked goods, teas, live jazz and sacred music in an intimate setting. A larger VIP area with amenities elevated our VIP experience.
2011 Musical Lineup!
Michael Franti & Spearhead Railroad Earth David Nelson Band with Jesse McReynolds Moon Alice The Flaming Lips Grace Potter & The Nocturnals Rootz Underground Primus Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros SOJA Krishna Das & Friends Natacha Atlas The Soft White Sixties MaMuse Jose Netoband with Steve Kimock Jesse McReynolds El Radio Fantastique Fishtank Ensemble Old Jaw Bone Choksam-pa Three Legged Sister Audiopharmacy Makuru Audiafauna Shovelman Stephen Kent & Friends Salt Water Heelers & Friends Classical Revolution Jazz Brunch
