Al Gore achieved what hundreds of scientists and activists had unsuccessfully attempted for decades: to put the global warming risk inside the collective consciousness. His movie, “An Inconvenient Truth”, not only succeeded in putting the issue in the media but also launched a succession of documentaries which alert about the collision course human actions are following. We are on our way to destabilizing the planet’s physical and biological systems, which could in turn trigger an irreversible climate disaster.
Home is a new and wonderful attempt to warn us that the Earth is reaching the limit of its ecological balance. Although it seduces us with its beautiful images and a hint of optimism, the data it presents are alarming:
•    20% of humankind consumes over 80% of the planet’s resources.
•    5,000 people die every day due to polluted water.
•    One billion people suffer starvation, and another billion have no access to drinking water.
•    Over 50% of the cereal commercialized worldwide is used as food for animals and agro-fuels.
•    Thirteen million hectares of forests disappear annually.
•    The average temperature of the last 15 years has been the highest ever recorded.
•    One in every 4 mammals, one in every 8 fowl, and one in every 3 amphibians are in danger of extinction. Species become extinct at a rhythm 1,000 times faster than is natural.
•    Three quarters of fishing resources are exhausted, in decadence, or about to be exhausted.
•    40% of arable lands are degraded.
•    World military expenses are 12 times higher than development assistance.
With naked realism, the movie confirms the crucial times we are living in, and, like all the previous attempts, again sets out the stark scenario facing us: “the scientific community affirms that we have only 10 years in which to change our lifestyle to prevent the exhaustion of natural resources and prevent a catastrophic evolution of Earth climate”.
Through YouTube (unfortunately the showing ends, but the movie’s available on Amazon), the filmmakers ask each of us to participate in a collective effort to make as many people as possible aware of these issues. There’s probably no better way than the accessibility of YouTube to do it. It’s the most direct channel to a new generation of more open-minded, sensitive youths. Over a million people saw the English version, and another million saw versions in other languages – and it’s possible that a high number among them will understand that climatic change is already an imminent reality, and not the obsession or paranoia of scientists and activists.
“Understanding is 50% of the solution”, affirms Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka,
but what does it take to complete the other 50%? Once we have understood, what do we do? Will we manage in a few years to change the way we live in and relate to this world?
Is it possible to modify, in just one decade, the ideological culture we have built over more than two hundred years, which has led us to pursue constant growth without considering the environmental and social impacts?
Upton Sinclair affirms that “it’s difficult to make a man understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it”. If this is true, the odds are against us, since most of us are aligned under the same economic model.
It’s an interesting dilemma, because if we don’t do anything, then neither shall we be able to refreeze the Antarctic ice layer, reforest the Amazonia, stop the methane leaks of the circumpolar tundra, or put the North Atlantic thermohaline current back into circulation.
No, we won’t be able to do any of this.
Our problem is that we have become the first race of people on Earth to lose the practical need for our fellow beings (McKibben). We have lost the community spirit that enabled us to survive for millennia. Unfortunately, we have managed to replace our collective survival instinct with extreme individualism.
The unbridled consumerism towards which the USA evolved, the sublime manifestation of this model, happened with such speed and efficacy that it dragged the rest of humankind along in adopting it or yearning for it. And now it’s so installed in human aspirations that it seems impossible even to imagine a reversion of this inertia – much less its replacement with a conscious and responsible consumption model.
How do we organize a powerful, quick and agreed-upon action in such an individualistic society?
The answer is not easy, and will not come from either governments or companies – if it is to come as urgently as we need it, it will come from the innate community essence in the soul of the human being, which is nowadays numbed by materialistic fascination.
Once we have recovered it (and provided that we manage to awaken it), this essence will have the huge task of invoking collective responsibility, agreeing upon a common vision, and calling for the design of a new operational system (Paul Hawken) under which humankind must work towards the future. A new consumption and production paradigm, a new, more conscious capitalism, a new and sustainable development model.
And it is from among these few possible solutions that the Internet, and especially the web 3.0, arises as the organizational, communitarian and social platform capable of empowering human beings for this profound collaborative action.
There are one and a half billion internauts today. One quarter of humanity begins to populate active social networks and collective participation communities in what seems to constitute the greatest “sociomorphosis” of our history. Facebook grows at a rate of 600,000 people every day, its number of users exceeding the population of Brazil, the fifth most populated country in the world. Digital society begins to join congregations that boost themselves through collaboration, collective construction and participative creation.
The events we are witnessing are creating dynamics that surpass by millions of times the power of our individual capabilities – the minds of the digital world begin to join and create an organized mechanism with an immeasurable potential for action.
Simultaneously, at the very moment when we discover that we are reaching the exhaustion of our natural resources, we are fortunate enough to witness the ignition of a change of paradigm, the democratization of a model: the democratization of knowledge, Wikipedia; of philanthropy, Kiva; of banking, Zopa; of collective creation, Linux.
We have crossed the threshold of a new era. Unfortunately, we go forward without enough understanding of the complex problems facing us. For the purposes of facing this new era, we have germinal tools, whose development time can still be counted in days and which consequently still present certain rudimentary, adjustable, perfectible traits. But, just like Gutenberg had to print hundreds of proofs before he achieved the printings that changed history, at this very moment, minute by minute, second by second, there are arising thousands of applications which invite collective participation and adoption – and, while most of them are consigned to oblivion, many remain, pass the test and scrutiny of hundreds of users, and are adopted to be used by millions of people who seek to improve them and apply them to knowledge, socialization, the creation of communities, and collective mobilization.
Internet is perhaps the super-organism that will enable the creation of the links and social and economic networks where we can act, produce and think collectively with the necessary speed. Maybe on the basis of this social phenomenon being consolidated in the web 3.0 we will be able to find the collective consciousness that will allow us to live in harmony with nature, with our nature and with ourselves.
Photo Philipp Klinger

Until the sixteenth century, when the sextant was invented, men sailed the seas almost completely blindly. The “technology” employed up to then for determining the vessels’ position in the ocean was a bare dead reckoning, or estimate-based sailing, which depended on a subjective calculation performed by European sailors –then masters of the sea– by combining the distance they believed to have traveled with the direction and power of the winds and underlying currents.
In order to ascertain their position, they took into account the coasts, and traced their routes on the basis of visible geographical features and of their prior travel experience, documented in maps known as “portolan charts”.
On these maps, and with the help of compasses, they drew directional axes to and from the ports (hence the word “portolan”), thus obtaining a precarious orientation which was useful for short distances within sight of the coast, but useless for inter-oceanic navigation.
The sextant allowed mankind to make the great leap in inter-oceanic navigation; thanks to this instrument, sailors were able to calculate their location at sea on the basis of heavenly body-related (instead of coast-related) measurements. These measurements, based on the coordinated projection of heavenly bodies upon Earth, were no longer estimative but particularly accurate, and enabled sailors to locate a vessel sailing the ocean in a map of references.
This new technology enabled sailors to permanently adjust their course throughout their journey.
It is curious that it could take Europeans so long to understand this relationship of the heavenly bodies with Earth, given that on the other side of the planet the Polynesians had understood for centuries that some stars behaved in a special and constant way in the sky, and could thus develop an astrological navigation technique that enabled them to venture thousands of kilometers away and populate the remotest corners of the Pacific, between Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Hawaii and New Zealand.
In his book “Collective Intelligence”, published in 1997, Pierre Levy develops an analogy between this way of sailing and the possibility of mapping (like sailors did in reference maps for inter-oceanic navigation) the space of knowledge, which is the purpose of his book.
Although Levy’s work is prior to the evolution of the Web 2.0 concept, the author suggests that it is possible to determine relationships between individuals according to their preferences and interests and their relationship to the objects of the informatics world. According to Levy, in the Cinemaps –as he calls these possible maps– “it is possible to understand a situation, a dynamic configuration, a qualitative significance space, shared by the members of a collective intellect.”
The new brands map
Eight years after the publication of “Collective Intelligence”, the Web starts to reveal some budding sprouts of the collective intelligence imagined by Levy. Wikipedia and the creation of Linux are just two of them. The anonymous co-creation of a shared knowledge, constantly seeking to perfect and order itself without a single decision or control center, shows the enormous potential the interaction around common interests has in the Web.
Levy’s visionary singularity lies in the possibility of mapping and sailing across that knowledge.

On the basis of these ideas, this parallelism of using the firmament for inter-oceanic navigation begins to make lots of sense.

Folksonomy, tags and the increasing power of search engines, together with the ability to easily share contents and create dynamic information contexts, manage to establish a perfect organization within the anarchy of the Web.

Within this informality, this chaos that establishes a new communications paradigm, the traditional broadcasting technologies, hitherto so successful in creating brands and consumption incentives, cannot find their course or meaning. Unused to interaction and the constant feedback of messages, the traditional communications forms, initially conceived for massive and passive audiences, seem to get lost, or are ignored in the interstellar disorder of this space.

The unidirectional nature of messages, which to a great extent has prevented the establishment of a culture of dialog between audiences and brands, prevents that interaction so typical of the blogosphere, and leads traditional marketing to continue in a sort of “estimate-based navigation” in brand and product positioning.

However, brands are no longer what they used to be, nor do they represent what they formerly were. Consequently, marketing and branding are undergoing a crisis. New measurement instruments are called for.

As envisioned by Levy, within the disorganization of the Web it is possible to establish location references with regard to the companies’ brands, services and products. It is possible to identify conversation and interaction contexts, and brand-relating experiences, which allow for the development of a new navigability map. It is, to sum up, a matter of drawing up a new media map, where brands may co-create themselves in a space that is new and shared with their users, on the basis of dialog, opinion traffic, and experience exchange dynamics.

To continue with the nautical analogy, these contexts may be considered as a series of shining stars that enable us to understand the positioning of brands in the collective ocean of users.

Both the Polynesians and, later, the Europeans understood that of the millions of stars in the sky there are only 57 that can really be used for identifying locations.

Something similar happens in the Web, and it will thus depend on the skills of marketing departments to understand which of these contexts are valid benchmarks and which are not.

Fortunately, the appearance of open platforms such as getsatisfaction.com enable brands and users to establish interactive relationships, in which the latter’s participation, through comments, rankings and the exchange of ideas, gives the references for drawing up a unique and extremely valuable map of the positioning of products and services. It is now in the hands of the companies to accept the challenge of sailing these spaces, making use of the advantages of these references, which represent great opportunities for commercial and product innovation.

It was after a user posted this video on YouTube

I just ordered it from Amazon, but, while I patiently wait for the international pouch to cross the ecuator, I googled it up on the Web to find out that the online discussion on concept and context of the idea has probably outgrown the content printed in the book itself.

Dicussions, comments and ideas exchanged on the implications such as Linkedin and on Friedman´s site itself, where one can participate in the construction of some Chapters, show, not only the timeliness of this book, but the avidness of the online community to participate in generating solutions to prevent a Hot and unsustainable world.

I recommend these videos on Youtube of Friedman presenting his book, from which I extracted a brief and valuable summary.

In a World that is Hot, Flat and Crowded clean power is going to be the great global industry because in time, and it is going to be soon, the World is going to force everyone to pay the true cost of the energy they are using, the climate change they are causing, the biodiversity loss they are triggering, the petro-dictatorship they are supporting and the energy poverty they are sustaining.

These costs will either be imposed by mother nature, individual governments, by consumers, yours or someone else’s, or by your own kids that will not allow you anymore to charge their future on your visa card. Because the costs have all reached a stage of criticality were their impacts on the world can no longer be externalized, ignored or confined. And that is why in a world that is Hot, Flat and Crowded, clean power generation and the tools we need for greater energy and resource efficiency are going to be the next great global industry, they simply have to be, if we want our planet to remain habitable.

And therefore, the ability to build, deploy and export clean energy systems and technologies is going to become a currency of power in the energy climate era, not the only one but, right up there with computers microchips and weapon systems. These green technologies will become critical in determining a countries economic standing, environmental health, energy security and national security in the next 20 to thirty years.

Some see that now, others will see it soon. Eventually it will be obvious to all, I hope every country gets their sooner rather than later, but most of all I want to make sure that my country the United states of America is in the lead.

If America seizes the opportunity to solve these problems it will be a huge engine propelling our economy in the 21st century . TF

I love Mark&Spencer Plan A campaign. They have called it Plan A because, as far as  sustainability issues is concerned, there is no  Plan B. The retail company has set itself 100 objectives to be achieved within a period of five years. To communicate this campaign, they have created a site where consumers can participate and contribute their own pledges. I´ve already completed my first one: to start using  reusable shopping bags.

The company`s compromise rests on five pillars:

• Become carbon neutral
• Send no waste to be dumped in landfills
• Extend sustainable sourcing
• Help improve the lives of people in their supply chain
• Help customers and employees lead a healthier life-style

They have already achieved some results: a   70% reduction  in the use of plastic bags in their stores by charging the customers 5 p. for each bag.

Here you can see a video about Plan A:

Our review:

• Too many flashy images everywhere. I prefer sites that keep it simpler!
• Few participation opportunities and no social media features.

In 1998, aircraft designer Paul MacCready shares his vision of an earth out of balance, and talks about the steps he’s taking in his own work to help solve it — by building amazing solar airplanes, superefficient gliders and an electric car. It’s a stirring vision of how all of us, no matter what our profession, can help make change.

Via: TED | TEDBlog: Nature vs. humans (and what I’m doing about it): Paul MacCready on TED.com

“To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.” - Terry Tempest Williams

I read this morning in Tree Hugger that Wal-Mart awarded HP for the design of a laptop bag Tthat cuts the conventional packaging a 97 %. The laptop comes in a reusable bag from 100 percent recycled fabric.

Besides, they achieved the goal of placing three computers in one shipping box:

I was also surprised to read a critic on Wal-Mart abusive use of plastic bags. Here in Argentina, they have developed the use of a 100% biodegradable plastic bag.