We Add Up: Global Warming, Activism & Organic Cotton T-Shirts

We Add Up is more than just a t-shirt company – they’re pioneers of a new way of getting people to realize that yes, you’re just one person – but together with millions of other people, you make a big difference. We love to see a good mash-up of global warming activism and eco-fashion, and We Add Up does it well.

The concept? Get yourself a ‘We Add Up’ organic cotton t-shirt printed with a unique number that represents your personal commitment to help stop climate change.  On the back of each shirt is printed a word or phrase that describes something everyone can do to help, like ‘Unplug’, ‘Lights Off’, ‘Carpool’, ‘Hybrid’, ‘Bike’ and ‘Buy Local’.  Every person who orders a ‘We Add Up’ t-shirt adds to the tally of folks who have decided that they won’t just stand back and let global warming happen.

We Add Up aims to get millions of people around the world committed, and believes that our combined effort can provide a health, green world for generations to come.  We Add Up t-shirts are made of 100% certified organic cotton, and come in a variety of colors including blue, natural, green and black.

Get involved – buy a t-shirt, start a fundraiser for your school/organization or join the affiliate program.  Get counted in!

Link [We Add Up]

Featured Change Agent: Reverb Greening Up the Music Industry

Each week, EarthFirst.com will be featuring a new ‘Change Agent’ from Changents.com, a social media site that connects people who are doing good in the world with a support system of advocates, donors, publicity generators and fans.

Today’s featured change agent is Reverb, a non-profit organization that aims to clean up the music industry’s notorious wastefulness and pollution. Adam Gardner, Reverb’s founder, is a musician himself, and long complained to his environmentalist wife, Lauren, about the impact of his band’s tours. That’s when they came up with the idea of Reverb, and their first two projects were the Barenaked Ladies and Alanis Morissette’s ‘Au Natural’ tour in 2004. They’ve since worked with bands like the Dave Matthews Band, John Mayer, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Beastie Boys.

Check out this video of Adam Gardner talking about Reverb:

So, what exactly does Reverb do? Essentially, they help bands green up virtually any aspect of their tours, from running their buses on biodiesel to setting up recycling programs and going carbon neutral. They’ve helped bands make their merchandise eco-friendly, reduced waste and offered solar chargers for fans’ electronic devices.

From Reverb’s story on Changents:

Since 2004, we’ve greened 50 tours and 754 events, reduced over 38,000 tons of carbon dioxide, substituted over 265,000 gallons of biodiesel for conventional diesel, and reached over 5 million fans. Did you know that 80 percent of the carbon footprint associated with any tour comes from fans traveling to and from the show?!

While we’re helping bands and fans, we’re also working with more than 1,500 environmental non-profits to promote their messages and campaigns. What’s unique about Reverb is that we have one foot solidly in the environmental community and one foot solidly in the rock world.

For us, it’s about getting the tens of thousands of fans like you that bands are reaching every night to do a little something in their lives, even if it’s simply switching to a reusable water bottle. We’re also encouraging carpooling so fans will reduce their carbon footprints. Concerts are a perfect place to do car sharing – you’re all arriving and leaving at the same time. We’re trying out cool stuff like giving primo parking spaces to DMB concertgoers who motor to the show with at least four in a car.

Reverb’s ‘Eco Villages’ are an attraction themselves at shows, with a festival-like atmosphere and plenty of opportunities for music fans to learn about things like carbon offsetting, register to vote, win cool stuff and check out the latest green technologies. Fans can also get some help from reverb in offsetting their own carbon through the Fan Carbon Offset Program. They’ve partnered with PickupPal to help fans carpool to and from shows.

Want to help Reverb and have a lot of fun at the same time? Join their legion of volunteers and supporters through Changents and help them out with action requests like getting access to biodiesel in various cities, commenting on their blog, checking out their featured videos and helping them out at concerts (you can get free tickets!).

Link [Changents] + [Reverb] + [PickupPal]

Changents: Networking Site Turns Agents of Social Change into Rock Stars

Changents.com is unlike anything you’ve seen or experienced before. This social media startup, which has partnered with The Timberland Company, aims to use the internet and its many social media applications to connect agents of social and environmental change with a community of backers across the globe.

Where once people with great ideas to help humanity and the earth might have been at a loss as to how to begin getting people interested, Changents has made it easy and fun. Change Agents can sign up themselves or be nominated, and can then begin building a network of Changents community members who will respond to, spread, support and consume the Change Agent’s innovations and ideas.

What makes Changents so unique is the fact that they aren’t just highlighting people who effect social change – they’re providing them with a virtual army of assistants, publicity generators, fans, investors and advocates. Just a year old, the site started by entrepreneurs Deron Triff and Alex Hofmann already has dozens of Change Agents, some of whom have as many as 95 backers.

I interviewed co-founder and CEO Deron Triff about how Changents enables Change Agents in remote locations to get the word out about what they’re doing via their Changents networks, and what he’s most excited about as Changents sets to officially debut.

Deron and Alex were driven by the idea that Generation-X and –Y ‘millenials’ wanted to personally make positive changes in the world, but were turned off by traditional non-profit approaches to philanthropy. Technology has allowed today’s younger generations to connect in ways that have never before been possible, and through Changents, Deron and Alex saw a fun and exciting way to use the web to allow agents of change to be discovered and supported.

The Changents team is putting social media to work, using applications like Flickr and Twitter to help Change Agents and supporters get their message out. He says, “The idea of allowing these individuals to create a suite of storytelling tools where they can create real-time dispatches talking about what they’re doing solving social problems creating that direct connection is really inspiring – their stories are so exciting and to be part of what they’re doing is so exciting.”

Deron notes with particular pride the case of Change Agent Elizabeth Redmond, a 23-year-old self-described ‘designtrepreneur’ working on a project called ‘POWERleap’, a flooring system for high foot traffic urban areas that generates electricity through human footfall. Through Changents, Elizabeth has received backing from companies like Reverb and dozens of individuals. She describes how she wants her project to change the world on her Change Agent story page:

The POWERleap concept is meant to engage the community, you, to take responsibility and generate some of the electricity we use everyday. This interaction between our exerted energy and the electrical energy we create/consume is where my designer mind comes into practice- my job is to make it functional, mysterious, fun, interactive, educational, sexy, and satisfying; and also, to make it work! On a larger scale, my vision is to sustain urban public electrical consumption via human energy.

I am determined to create the day when we produce our own electricity by walking to work, running in the park, walking through the airport terminal, and simply playing on the streets together.

Elizabeth is far from the only environmental advocate taking advantage of Changents’ growing network of global citizens eager to help effect change. Take a look through the Change Agents and you’ll be blown away by the good that’s being done, and how many companies and individuals are supporting it.

Another great aspect of Changents is their desire to further push agents of change out into the world so that their ideas and stories reach an even broader audience. Changents aims to help the particularly successful Change Agents with compelling stories gain inroads in traditional media like documentaries, books and magazine articles through their ‘Life Story Option’.

If you know someone who’s doing extraordinary work for the greater good, nominate them to be a Change Agent. You might just help them get the big break they need to bring their innovations to the masses, and you’ll have fun in the process! You can also join Changents as a community member, and be one of the many people who enable Change Agents to do what they do best: save the world.

Link [Changents]

Who’s Who in Green - Michael Braungart

Michael Braungart, the subject of this week’s Who’s Who in Green, is a German chemist who was a founding member of Germany’s Green Party and co-developed the ‘cradle to cradle’ design concept. He’s also an author, and founder of EPEA (Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency) in Hamburg, Germany. For 14 years, Dr. Braungart has also been teaching process engineering at the University of Lüneburg in Suderburg, Germany.

Before he was a renowned scientist and professor, Dr. Braungart spearheaded the formation of the Chemistry Section of Greenpeace International, and became leader of the Chemistry Section in 1985. He spent years ‘climbing on dirty chemical plant chimneys’ and even lived in a tree as protest.

In 1995, Dr. Braungart and William McDonough joined forces to create McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, a consultancy firm that has helped giant corporations like Nike, Ford and Hermann Miller conform to the Cradle to Cradle concept.

Along with McDonough, Dr. Braungart wrote Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, a book that has revolutionized the way products are created and disposed of. In essence, the ‘cradle to cradle’ concept calls for all manufactured items to be designed from the beginning with the intention of eventually recycling it.

In 2007, Dr. Braungart addressed the Cradle to Cradle conference in the Netherlands. In the clip below, Dr. Braungart takes toy giant Mattel to task, calling them “the worst company I can imagine”.

The Cradle to Cradle concept takes its cues from biomimicry, with the slogan WASTE=FOOD. Not food in a human dietary sense, but in a sense of biological nutrients allowed to decompose naturally to be utilized by something else. Dr. Braungart explained it to the Royal Society of Arts in London:

“Traditionally people think linear from cradle to grave which means that at the end the whole earth will be a graveyard because we lose all the material. We have a lot of energy put on this planet but we don’t have material input except maybe some meteorites. But in this context we need to think about how to make material products that they go back into nutrient cycles forever. And we distinguish between two cycles – things which get consumed like food, like detergents, like shoe soles, like brake pads, are designed to be biological nutrients. Right now Australia looses about 5000 times more topsoil that is regained per time unit and so we need to rebuild soil to be able to feed all the people on this planet. That’s a biological cycle.

And the technical cycle are things like washing machines, TV sets etc. You don’t consume them, you only use them, they’re technical nutrients so you cannot design a TV set without heavy metals. I have been analysing a radio and I identified 2800 different chemicals in a radio yet do we really want to own toxic waste or do you just want to listen to good radio programs like this one for example. And then you see you don’t want to own toxic waste, you only want to have a service, but these materials are rare and they are toxic so they need to be able to be designed to go back in a technical nutrient cycle. So this is cradle to cradle.”

He’s been called a ‘radical ecovisionary’, but Dr. Braungart’s concepts are really quite simple. He believes that sustainability is the bare minimum – in order to go beyond simple maintenance, we must think in an entirely different way.  His theory is that we don’t have to work so hard at conservation and cutting back our footprint on the earth if that footprint is providing nutrients back into the earth. In essence, as he has said, “our footprint can be designed to be beneficial for the other species on this planet”.

In 2003, Dr. Braungart was honored with the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award for his work with EcoWorx carpeting tile. Dr. Braungart’s work has been published in numerous journals on science, public affairs, environment and design in the U.S. and Europe. He also teaches at institutions of higher learning all over the world.

Michael Braungart’s Green Score: 72,378

Photo credit: Braungart.com

Net Impact Weekly Professional 2008 Green Challenge

If you’re a member of Net Impact and haven’t gotten in your entry for the Professional 2008 Green Challenge, act fast – the deadline is August 11th! The Green Challenge recognizes and rewards Net Impact members that are working on projects that make a positive environmental impact on their company, campus or community.

Some examples from last year’s Green Challenge include:

*Establishment of environmental task forces or “green teams”
*Creating the business case for green building programs on campus
*Efforts to move campuses and workplaces towards carbon neutrality
*Greening of cafeterias on campus or in the workplace

First prize winners (1 student, 1 professional) will get a cash prize of $500, $500 in Net Impact scholarships, a $100 gift certificate from TheGreenOffice.com, an 8,000 pound CO2 offset from TerraPass and recognition of the project’s success on the Net Impact website, at the 2008 North American conference and in Net Impact’s newsletter publications.

If you’re not already a member of Net Impact and would like to learn more, check out their website. The Net Impact network is made up of MBAs, graduate students and professionals who are committed to using busines for social good. Net Impact offers lots of great resources to help members hone their professional skills. And, if you become a member now, you’ll be able to participate in next year’s Green Challenge!

Link [Net Impact]

Great Green Jobs of the Week – WWF, Pew Environment Group

This week, we’ve got two great green job announcements for you – they were just too good to choose between! The Pew Environment Group is hiring a full time web intern, and the World Wildlife Fund is seeking an online marketing associate.  Now’s your chance to grab a great opportunity in the world of green collar jobs.

Online Marketing Associate – World Wildlife Fund

Job Type: Full Time
Location: Washington, D.C.

Job Description:

We are seeking an online marketing associate to perform a variety of tasks to assist the on-line marketing team with meeting its fundraising goals in the areas of email marketing and online projects. This is an exceptional opportunity to gain online marketing skills and contribute to the growth of the world’s leading conservation organization.

Basic Requirements:

The ideal candidate should possess a bachelor’s degree or equivalent work experience. One to three years of online, web design or experience in a related field is required. Excellent project management skills, the ability to work independently, superior verbal and written communication skills, and proficiency with MS Office suite are necessary. Experience with HTML, Photoshop and Convio are preferred.

The closing date for posting resumes to this position is August 15, 2008.  Visit the WWF website’s jobs page and enter ‘29049’ as the requisition number to apply.

Intern – Pew Charitable Trusts

Department: Pew Environment Group
Location: Washington, D.C.

Responsibilities:

Web Internship, Pew Environment Group

The Pew Environment Group is seeking an online communications intern for the fall semester. This full-time job with the Web and Communications team is a great opportunity for somebody who is just starting out in the field.

Duties and responsibilities include online work on multiple campaign websites and support in developing potential new sites. PEG web interns typically work on dozens of different projects as well as participate in communications strategy discussions, planning meetings, brainstorming sessions and occasional training workshops. We’re looking for somebody who’s quick on his or her feet, adaptable, learns fast and has good attention to detail. Specific skills (html, design, etc.) are useful but not essential; some can be learned on the job. What’s more important is a positive attitude and strong initiative.

We offer a competitive internship hourly rate. Apply at the Pew Charitable Trusts website.

Link [WWF] + [Pew Environment Group]

Who’s Who in Green: Josh Dorfman

This week’s Who’s Who in Green focuses on the accomplishments of Josh Dorfman, a green entrepreneur and media personality with his own radio show, several books, a green furniture company and an upcoming television show. Josh first became interested in environmentalism while living in China in the 1990s, when he was launching Kryptonite Bicycle Locks’ sales and marketing program and noted that a nation of a billion bicyclists was turning into a nation of a billion car drivers. Since then, he’s made it his goal to help people maintain their standard of living while bringing their lives into balance with nature.

Josh is best known as the host of the Sirius radio show The Lazy Environmentalist, which he also created and produced. Listeners tune in to hear Josh discuss issues like eco-friendly personal care products, green charities, alternative energy and organic gardening. The idea for The Lazy Environmentalist all started back in January 2005 when Josh wrote a blog entry stating, “I want it to be totally fun, cool and sexy to act in an environmentally responsible way.” That statement virtually sums up the focus of Josh’s work since – showing people that they, too, can be green without sacrificing fun, style and comfort.

Currently, Josh is working with the Sundance Channel to bring The Lazy Environmentalist to television. He also serves as spokesperson for Brita’s FilterforGood campaign, which aims to help reduce bottled water waste, and for Green Works, the new line of green cleaning products by Clorox. Josh is a member of the Board of Advisors for Healing Lifestyles & Spa Magazine, a member of Newsweek Magazine’s Global Environment and Leadership Advisory committee and the Wolf Trap Foundation’s National Advisory Council for Arts and the Environment. He’s also a frequent guest speaker for companies like Google, MTV and Pepsi.

You may have seen Josh on television already, appearing as a guest on programs like The Martha Stewart Show. He has also appeared on MSNBC, The Sundance Channel, Bravo and many other networks. Check out the Green & Gorgeous video podcast by Treehugger below, where Josh is interviewed by Treehugger’s Jacob Gordon (Part 2 is here).

Josh is also the author of two books: The Lazy Environmentalist, Your Guide to Stylish, Green Living and the upcoming The Lazy Environmentalist on a Budget (due out in 2009). He’s the founder and CEO of Vivavi, a retailer of modern, eco-friendly home furnishings as well as Modern Green Living, Vivavi’s residential real estate search directory for consumers seeking green homes.

Josh’s efforts have certainly been paying off – through all of his work, he’s helped bring the concept of the ‘light green lifestyle’ to thousands of people. On what he wants readers to get out of his book The Lazy Environmentalist, Josh told Treehugger,

“Optimism. I hope that this book is part of the conversation that really needs to happen that says, “Yes, let’s acknowledge that these environmental challenges are real, and let’s get excited that we really have solutions that can solve these problems.” I’m very optimistic, and the book is written in such a way that I hope people come away with the feeling that there really are solutions here, and we can explore this more and talk about it because the solutions really are at hand.”

Josh Dorfman’s Green Score: 22,537

Who’s Who in Green: Simran Sethi

This week’s Who’s Who in Green puts the spotlight on Simran Sethi, an award-winning environmental journalist who has appeared on the Sundance Channel, the Oprah Winfrey Show, the Ellen Degeneres Show, the Today Show and the Martha Stewart Show. Simran is one busy woman, with tons of green cred for all the work she’s done calling attention to environmental issues.

Born in 1970 in Germany and raised in North Carolina with Indian heritage, Simran has a list longer than her arm of astonishing career accomplishments as a freelance environmental journalist and has received many awards and recognition for her work.

Simran is a contributing environmental correspondent at NBC News and is currently writing a book on environmental justice for Harper Collins. She’s also the contributing author of Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy, which won the bronze 2008 Axiom Award for Best Business Ethics book. She’s also NYU’s inaugural Goddard Fellow, Associate Fellow at the Asia Society, and is the Lacy C. Haynes Visiting Professional Chair at the University of Kansas School of Journalism, where she’s currently teaching a course on Media and the Environment.

You may recognize Simran from her many media appearances, her work with Treehugger or our own Top 25 Hottest Girls in Green feature. She’s the co-host/writer for the Sundance Channel’s environmental programming The Green, and is also a featured commentator for Big Ideas for a Small Planet. She anchors the Sundance interstitial business series EcoBiz and creator of the Sundance web series The Good Fight, which highlights global environmental justice efforts. She also hosts the Emmy-award winning PBS production A School in the Wood, which highlights environmental education efforts on Bainbridge Island. As part of the Treehugger team, Simran co-hosted, created and oversaw all video and audio content. She also writes regularly for The Huffington Post.

She was also honored with hosting duties at a forum on global warming with Al Gore, and moderated a panel on climate change at the first Clinton Global Initiative University. Other hosting credits include the podcast for the Alliance for Climate Protection, The EcoZone Project, and the series Keep it Green on Equator HD. She has produced documentaries for MTV News in the U.S., anchored news for MTV Asia and oversaw the MTV India News division. Simran also has her own production company, SHE TV.

Simran was celebrated for her environmental work in the 2007 Vanity Fair green issue, and Variety magazine recognized her as a ‘Woman of Impact’. She was also named one of the top Eco-Heroes of the Planet by the UK’s Independent.

While it’s hard to imagine how Simran finds the time for all of this work, she still feels as if she isn’t doing enough. Of what keeps her up at night, Simran told the Whole Life Times,

“Daily, I worry about being conscious of what I eat and how I live and what I buy. But I also want to have a macro focus, and sometimes I don’t know how to do both — looking beyond just me, and my world and how I consume. How can I, how can we work toward shifting the paradigm so there is greater equity across communities, across countries? That’s the part I don’t feel I’ve fully connected to yet. Because so far we’ve mostly focused on how to consume differently — which I think is a great entry point for people — but I’m also impatient to go further. How do we re-envision our world? That’s what I want to get to. I think the environmental justice movement is a key component of that, and that’s my goal in terms of self-education and the kind of organizations I want to promote, making sure they’re moving towards looking at environmentalism as a human rights issue. So what keeps me up at night is — did I do enough of it today? And where am I going to find time to do more, because I want to talk about all of these stories.”

What Simran’s basic goal comes down to is bringing environmentalism to the people, highlighting the fact that everyone has to start somewhere – so no matter how humble your initial foray into eco-friendliness might be, it’s still big – it’s a gift to the world. Simran wants everyone to consider how small daily actions, like using reusable cups instead of disposable ones, can cause a chain reaction that helps improve the state of the planet. The real-life tips for going green that she offers as the face of green media are just what people need to get off the pollution train and start being responsible.

Simran Sethi’s Green Score: 24,783

Photo credit: Domino Mag

Carrotmob ‘Makes it Rain’ Money at Greenest Local Liquor Store

Carrotmob, a new environmental advocacy group, decided to use one important fact to our advantage: the fact that corporations will do ANYTHING to make money. The premise? Everyone needs to buy stuff. But we don’t do it in an organized way. If everyone who needed to buy the same type of item got together and pooled their money, we’d have a lot of leverage against the companies that sell those items. Watch the video below to see what happened when Carrotmob pulled a big crowd together to spend a lot of money at the local liquor store that made the strongest environmental commitment.

Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.

Edible Landscaping Advocates Wait a Week in Line for iPhone 3G

If you’re wondering what edible landscaping has to do with the iPhone, you’re not alone. Undoubtedly, people who were waiting in line for the iPhone 3G were wondering the same thing about the group of five activists who were first in line when the phones went on sale last Friday. They had been there for seven days and seven nights, seeking the Guinness World Record for “longest time waiting in line” and also a little publicity for their cause.

From Fortune:

Who’s crazy enough to camp out for a week on the streets of New York City for a chance to be first to buy an iPhone 3G?

TheWhoFarm, that’s who, a newly minted publicity-seeking environmental collective with an agrico-political mission: to persuade the 44th President of the U.S. — whoever that turns out to be — to transform the White House’s 17-acre lawn into an organic farm.

“We’re here to restore the edible landscape,” says Daniel Bowman Simon, 28, the group’s organizer and spokesperson and a young man given to making grand pronouncements. “We want to bring seeds of change back to the White House.”

Nice green activism publicity hack. In an open letter to several leaders including Sen. Hillary Clinton and NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, TheWhoFarm listed the tasks it wished to accomplish during their week waiting on line, which included using mobile solar power, drinking NYC’s tap water, eating local food delivered by NYC community gardeners and talking to anyone who would listen about local organic farming. And, they got iPhones out of it as well. Not bad, not bad.

Link [Fortune]