Green Options

San Francisco Bike Coalition member Rick Baraff produced this short video documenting how the grassroots advocacy work of thousands of SFBC members led to last Friday’s historic victory at the SFMTA hearing.

Meatout (now in its 25th year) has become the world’s largest and oldest annual grassroots diet education campaign.

Every year on the first day of spring, thousands of supporters in the United States and several other countries participate and encourage others to go meatless for a day (or a lifetime), and discover a more compassionate and healthy diet.

Many mainstream health advocacy organizations such as the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, the American Heart Association, and John Hopkins University promote the consumption of more plant-based foods.

Changents provides the platform for Down2Earth and the City of Boston to promote the semi-finalists in the Pitch the City contest aimed at engaging the community to think up new ways to make Boston greener.

The mega-trends of social media and sustainability share plenty of the same DNA.

The Arnold Palmer is an exceptional beverage. It takes two individual beverages, iced tea and lemonade, each very good in their own right, and creates an even better one. That’s how we feel about social media and green living i.e. sustainability.

There is nothing inherently green about social media. The Web 2.0 revolution is driven by code and the Internet as a platform. According to Wikipedia, it describes this as a trend in “technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users.” This is largely a virtual world.

The move toward sustainability, on the other hand, is taking place entirely offline in the actual world. It is about balancing our impact and more wisely managing our natural resources. The United Nations describes it as commitment to “the provision of a secure environmental, social, and economic future.”

As different as they are, these two trends share one key quality: they’re changing the world for the better. They are changing politics, business, culture, and society. In the following we explore 10 ways that the trends of social media and sustainability intersect as well as align.

Special Note: Sustainablog and Max Gladwell are supporting Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C). By clicking this link and signing up for SocialVibe, once featured in our Ten Ways to Change the World Through Social Media, you’ll effectively donate $1 to the cause. We also encourage you to watch the live telecast on ABC, CBS, and NBC, September 5th, at 8:00pm ET/PT.

For many, this Sunday will bring the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet Dr. Jane Goodall. Participants in the Los Angeles event will join Dr. Goodall and hundreds of others in celebrating peace, while around the world dozens of other groups will host similar events. If you’d like to attend the L.A. event (free admission), visit the event’s website, or simply arrive at the location pinpointed on the maps below.

If you’re not in the Los

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Thursday I attended the birth of what sponsors Yahoo! and AC Nielsen hope will be a grassroots movement to upgrade incandescent light bulbs to a new generation of CFL bulbs on a national scale, saving billions of dollars in the process. A grassroots campaign with corporate sponsors? Weird.

GO Contributor Michael d’Estries (who moonlights with us from Ecorazzi and GroovyGreen) was Johnny on the

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