BB's B[GI]log

My admittedly disorganized thoughts on the class...

This is a recap and portfolio of my cumulative work from the quarter through the lens of Creativity and Right Livelihood class. It's quite long and image-heavy, and I make no guarantees that you will find it interesting unless your name is Taj or Candace. :)

8:19 - Gifford Pinchot opens by thanking all the BGI students who have helped out with the CAIR program.
8:20 - Gif introduces Moura Quayle. "She doesn't just take any old job." Most recently, she's been asked by the Premier of British Columbia to transform the UBC Sauder School of Business. "Hmmm," says Gif, "I wonder how you might transform a business school?"
8:21 - Gif introduces Raymond Lam. "I'm here because you need a minority," he says. Hoots, hollers, laughs, and claps all around. Ray is the environmental manager of Boise Cascade. Saved 3 million gallons of water a day, eliminated chillers that emitted GHGs, etc... lots of experience with large scale impacts in large industries.
8:23 - Gif introduces Michelle McGeoy. She started her entrepreneurial career at age 11. Developed software for law school databases. Worked with inner city kids to share technology. Founded RH Solutions, didn't tell her clients that stood for Robin Hood Solutions. Ha! Didn't work out, retreated for 5 years. Came out of that to found Solar Richmond. 35 BGIers have worked there in some capacity or another.
8:27 - Gif introduces Tom Osdoba, head of sustainability at the University of Oregon. Founded Canada Carbon Trust. Was sustainability manager for the City of Vancouver (woot!).
8:29 - Tonight's theme: how to make the world a better place on a large scale.
8:29 - First question to Michelle, Solar Richmond. You're a crossed-over leader with experience in non-profits and businesses. Tell us about that. What have you learned?
8:30 - [Paraphrased!] In the non profit world, we're all here to do good, right? It should be easier. It's not. In the business world I was moving so fast and got kudos for that. Then I sold my company and didn't have to work again. I started moving even faster, out of panic. I have to make the world a better place. It was a great project, helping youth learn more about computers, but it was incredibly high-drama. I started traveling and speaking, and I kept moving faster and faster. When I finally crashed and burned, I decided I would take a month of to do some power-healing. [Laughs all around.] I've got some childhood trauma, I'll take a month and just [*pow!*] take care of it! I went on a yoga retreat and finally burst open. I retreated to my basement and did a lot of therapy, artwork, yoga, meditation, etc... If I could just make the world a safer place, then I would be safe. I realized that wasn't right. I told myself, if you could just create that safety within yourself, you could go out and create deep social change.
8:34 - Gif says this is a big danger. Folks in non-profits feel they can sacrifice themselves to the cause. Not good. Leadership is about going deep inside, finding out who you really are, and coming to the world in a positive way.
8:35 - Next question to Tom, University of Oregon. What does a sustainability officer do? Perhaps more in relation to Tom's city career than his UofO career. What did you do? What works? What doesn't work? Any lessons to share?
8:36 - [Paraphrased!] 2004, I moved to Canada. Rob [Safrata, Novex Couriers] was one of the first people I met in Vancouver. People were so excited about having one of the first sustainability directors. It took 6 weeks on the job before I met my boss, the city manager. I told her she should be nervous, because my job was to change the organization that she ran. Only then did I begin to understand the politics of a British civil service organization. I realized that I couldn't just check a bunch of stuff off. I had to turn the entire organization, but it was a really rocky road. That's probably why it was such a short tenure position. You can't put your desire for long tenure above your desire to do your job. If you want to succeed as the sustainability director of the City of Vancouver, you will not succeed as the sustainability director of the City of Vancouver. We were very comfortable with engaging citizens, because elected reps are very reactive. It's their job to follow us.
8:40 - Question for Moura. How did she transform the agriculture school?
8:41 - [Paraphrased!] I come from landscape architecture. At UBC, we were in the Faculty of Agriculture. There was lots of angst around our vision. I got asked to be the Dean of the Faculty. It was great because I wasn't an "aggie". I told them, if you choose me, you choose change. I believe in land, food, and community, and the critical intersection of those ideas. We borrowed a city visioning process and set a very strict timeline for the process. We de-departmentalized the faculty, shaped our own program, and scrapped the entire curriculum totally down to nothing and rebuilt it based on student-centered learning. What I learned in a very big way, you don't make change as a volunteer sport. You can't just say to someone, please go on doing your work, and we want to, by the way, add this new creative part to your job. We had to second people from their teaching duties to actually make the change. I also learned that as a leader, I had to be very present. I'll never forget a faculty member saying to me, "Moura, we need you here right now. We're at a fragile part of this process. We need you here talking with us now." I realized you have to be careful as a leader that you don't show up as too personal a leader so as to leave a gap behind you when you move on, which I did. One other thing was that we changed the name of the faculty, through a huge process, to the Faculty of Land and Food Systems.
8:49 - Question for Raymond. You worked for a big company. We have students here and graduates working for very, very big companies. They're making a big difference. We also have students who wouldn't go near a big company with a 10-foot pole, and are destined to be entrepreneurs. There's an argument between those two views here, and which is the better one to do. Jill Bamburg resolved this for us by saying, "It's all good work." Could you discuss the compromises you've had to make to work for big companies and how you've dealt with that personally?
8:50 - One of the reasons I left large business was the waste I saw, and how little work was actually getting done. All the work and money spent seemed to be concentrated effort to do nothing. One of the best things about large business is that you can make errors at their own expense. There's a lot of risk to being an entrepreneur! Doing change within a large business is up to the individual. I was famous within Boise because I was one of the few people who would volunteer to get laid off each time they had to cut anyone. When I left, it took them 6 months to find a replacement. It boils down to not being afraid to get chopped. Two famous wars within Boise. ISO14001. I did it without corporate support. I got the certification and then presented it to the VP. He was totally on board and wanted every facility to get certified. The other environmental managers were upset because it was a lot of work. The other big issue was tire-derived fuel. I refused to permit it. It wasn't a clean win. The social-economic factor never really fits into permitting these days. West Nile mosquitoes breed inside the tires weighting down big tarps. I still refused to burn them. I think you can make big change in a big organization IF you're willing to take a lot of flack. And have a radius of one or two empty seats around you whenever you sit down. If you want to go out on your own, you better have 2-3 years living expenses in the bank. So that's my message: you're screwed either way you go. [Huge laughs.]
8:57 - Question for Tom. How has your view of the role of business in society changed throughout your career?
8:58 - The biggest change is really recent. It's become clear to me in the last 18 months that business as a whole has to be viewed in the context of our bioregion. It might not matter for 5-10 years, but at that point it's going to matter a LOT. Businesses are going to evaporate really quickly. We need to have a conversation not about our government or business, but where we live. We need to focus on the daily transactions we make in our own community. Business opportunities within our region are overwhelming. If Portland increased local food purchases by 5%, the net impact on the local economy would be somewhere on the order of $100 million.
[Sorry that's as far as I'm gonna make it tonight. They're talking QUICKLY!]

Playing catchup in CRL this week, plus trying to stay on top of blog posts. Decided to change my resident expert project for Marketing at the last minute to carbon neutrality as a marketing tactic, to align with Beat Blog and professional work. The idea is that it should be easier... in reality it might actually take me longer because I'll be invested and more interested, but at least what I learn will be useful and relevant to me.

Emailed Taj tonight about using this blog as a medium for my CRL portfolio... we'll see what she says. I think it would be a great experiment in how to use the learning journal blog concept across various classes and types of assignments.


Looking forward to the quarter wrapping up. Started my final to-do list and named the file "pass the quarter.doc". Heh. It's been a (mostly) awesome quarter content-wise, but a break will be welcome and a fresh start in January won't hurt either.

This is me, digging out from my pile of assignments and overwhelm.

I think I've identified why this quarter has presented such a big challenge for me in striking a balance between personal, professional, and academic... Now that's not to say that I've found a solution, but I've at least identified (one of) the root(s) of the problem... I'm actually engaged in my professional work. What a concept!

Last year, I wasn't engaged at all in my work. I had time to check BGI email from work (shh!), I left work on time, and when I got home, I was psyched to get into something more engaging for the whole evening, namely schoolwork. That left just balancing the academic and the personal, which seemed fairly straightforward, all things considered.

This year, I'm often working until 6 or later (because I love it), and I'm fully engaged and focused when I'm there, so by the time I get home, I'm pretty spent. I want/need some time to rest and veg out, and then I'm just as inclined to check my work email as my school/personal email, which of course has over 50 messages from throughout the day, since I have no time to check it at work. So once I've eaten dinner and read through all the emails, it's generally getting fairly late already, and it's hard to dive into assignments then.

Ok, enough whining. Sorry. I love my job and I shouldn't complain. I just need to have the mental fortitude to get through the next 2 weeks, get all of my assignments done, and pass the quarter.


And as Miriam said oh-so-eloquently,

My main goal: never let my teammates down.

Indeed.

The New Scientist's discussion of conservation psychology is quite interesting.

They say to use social pressure and people's instinct to follow the herd:

Tell people about the steps their peers are taking to make things better, and they may follow suit.

Well, then we hear people on the other side of the coin who keep talking about how individual steps aren't enough. Just today, in fact, Alex Steffen of WorldChanging posted what's bound to turn into a well-discussed rant:

Almost all of us believe that someone who buys local food, who drives a hybrid, who lives in a well-insulated house, who wears organic clothing and who religiously recycles and composts and avoids unnecessary purchases is living sustainably.

They are not. [...]

We can no longer afford to mistake the symbolic for the effective, or put our hopes in the mystical idea that if enough of us embrace small steps, our values will ripple mysteriously out through the culture and utterly transform it.

The full piece is definitely worth a read.

But when compared to the New Scientist piece, these two perspectives seem to be at odds. So my question is this: how do we balance not scaring people off with doom and gloom against spurring big, real, meaningful, non-incremental change?

Watching Dan Gillmor's interview, I was reminded of the Fearless City Mobile project going on up here in Vancouver. Gillmor's point is that computers are great, cheap media generation tools. Fearless City takes that idea even further, using mobile devices as critical citizen storytelling tools, and getting them into the hands of marginalized residents of Vancouver's Downtown East Side.

The Fearless Mobile City project is a two-way social media system for marginalized residents and artists of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES). It is an interactive communication system that uses Mobile Muse 3’s technology platform, a free wireless mesh network, distribution and training with mobile handsets, and live screens in public spaces. Participate in Fearless City at live events in and around our inner-city neighbourhood to create community generated media while confronting the digital divide.