Sep 5, 10
Austin's Energy Conservation Gem: A Worldchanging Interview with Paul Robbins
Paul Robbins has been an environmental activist and consumer advocate since 1977. He has worked on many issues related to the environment, including clean energy, recycling, and air pollution. He is currently based in Austin, Texas, where he publishes, and writes much of the content for, the Austin Environmental Directory,, a source book of environmental issues, products, services, and organizations. (While some of its articles are specific to the Austin bioregion, others are relevant to the...
Worldchanging Interview: Jean Russell on Thrivability
Technology consultant, entrepreneur and thrivability theorist Jean Russell joined Jerry Michalski's August 3 Yi-Tan Conference Call for a conversation about thrivability as a conceptual replacement for sustainabilty. After that talk (which you can hear via the above link), I asked Jean to join me in a brief but enlightening Worldchanging interview. Jon Lebkowsky: Let's start with the definition of thrivability I found at http://thrivable.wagn.org/wagn/Nurture, that it's "our path out of...
The Worldchanging Interview: Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky is an influential writer, consultant, and teacher focused on the Internet as a social platform. He's one of the smartest thinkers I know about how people live, love, and work online. His new book, Here Comes Everybody:The Power of Organizing without Organizations, was just published by The Penguin Press. As an intro to Chapter 11, on "Promise, Tool, and Bargain," he says "There is not recipe for the successful use of social tools. Instead, every working system is a mix of social...
Worldchanging Interview: B.J. Stanbery of HelioVolt
Austin-based HelioVolt Corporation has raised over $100 million in investment capital to finance production of copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar cells. While CIGS might be less efficient than crystalline silicon solar cells, they're also cheaper, and HelioVolt's investors are banking on the cost-effectiveness of its FASSTTM technology, which prints the CIGS coating directly onto a wide variety of substrates. This technology was developed by HelioVolt CEO B.J. Stanbery. I recently...
Empowering Patients With Information Technology
Years ago -- pre-Internet -- I had a doctor who became a friend after a few visits, and who respected my intelligence enough to consider my opinions about diagnosis and treatment. When we differed, he would sometimes prescribe according to both opinions, his and mine. Given his receptivity to my input I took it upon myself to do some research before I paid him a visit -- not always that easy before the Internet was easily accessible and full of free medical information. As almost any of us...
Convergent Media and the DIY Home of the Future
Earlier this month I wrote a column about a DIY (Do It Yourself) home showcase I was helping to create for Maker Faire Austin. Here's more of the story and a report on our success. Derek Woodgate of Futures Lab and I have been meeting regularly over the last couple of years to consider the prospect of doing a showcase, which we've been calling "Futurama," that would give some sense of the impact of digital convergence on lifestyles in the near future. We'd considered doing it at various...
What's Next: Jon Lebkowsky
In 2001, I had this exchange with James White, Director of Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder: Jon Lebkowsky: One point that John Firor makes is that with six billion people on earth, if everyone had the same standard of living that we [Americans] have, there's no way that we could sustain. James White: Yes, that's very clear. I teach a course on energy. That's just one of the resources that you'd need, and if you do the calculations, we use thirty times the...
Tsunami in Southeast Asia: A Summary Report
By Rohit Gupta, Jon Lebkowsky, and Dina Mehta. This summary post is a living document, expect regular updates. (For the latest, check the front page.) At around 7AM last Sunday a rupture occurred along an undersea fault line where the Burma and India plates converge, resulting in a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, the fifth largest since scientists started recording and tracking the magnitude of earthquakes in 1899. It was the second large earthquake in the area within a week, the first being a...
Net.activism and Open Source Politics
When I first wrote "Nodal Politics" in 1997 as part of an unpublished book on Internet activism, I suggested that the Internet could support effective activist work:Computer networks route information laterally through nodes or routing points. This makes for a distribution of information that is from many to many with no single, established point of origination. Information can originate from any point in the network, and virtually explode in all directions. This ultimately changes the way...
Looking Back: "Being Green in 2001"
Seeing Emily's post about Bill McKibben on global warming reminded me that I never got around to publishing my interview with Dr. James White of the University of Colorado at Boulder, which was background for my Whole Earth Review article Being Green in 2001, published in the Summer 2001 issue (the Viridian issue...
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