Start Good Blog

Energy and enthusiasm sum up Green Drinks. I have never felt so good about the people around me. It is a bit odd, but I really have not talked to anyone passionate about the environment face to face other than with a professor I had almost 2 years ago. Joining EcoGeek opened up a new world to me and was a huge boon to my green motivation. This did the same but was on a different level. Being around green conscious Seattle-ites just felt right.

Although I still went through my (unfortunately) regular shyness phase, I had a lot of great conversations with some very interesting people. I met a woman who started an organization called DenCity Research to provide green housing to Iraq veterans. The idea came up from an epiphany she had that many Iraq vets come back with a passion for reducing dependence on foreign oil and also many return homeless. I also met a college student promoting Kale as a food (Eat Your Kale) via T-Shirts, a green architect, a software engineer that was looking to move from corporate to green and a chocolatier.

Ahh chocolate. Autumn, the woman I spoke with, really wanted me to blog on EcoGeek about the company she works for but I have yet to think of a way to make it fit with our audience, but hopefully a small shoutout at my humble startup will suffice for now. The company, Theo Chocolate, is the only organic and fair trade chocolate producer in the United States. Impressive, huh? There has been a lot of controversy about cacao beans, the fruit seeds that are the source of chocolate, since often they are harvested with child (slave) labor. Anyway, they sell all across the US and online also. She mentioned that they give many tours, with free samples, so I think I’m going to schedule an excursion with some friends to check it out.

Well, Start Good Mission: Green Drinks went well. I hope it only gets better!

Photo Credit: Gillo via Flickr

My journey towards starting good starts with this blog, but also in my community. This weekend I am going to join Step It Up, as mentioned below and then today I am going to my first Green Drinks. Green Drinks is a casual, group of people that meet once every month to connect with other people in the green industry. The website describes it much better than I can, especially without having gone!

Green Drinks International

Every month people who work in the environmental field meet up for a beer at informal sessions known as Green Drinks.

We have a lively mixture of people from NGOs, academia, government and business. Come along and you’ll be made welcome. Just say, “are you green?” and we will look after you and introduce you to whoever is there.It’s a great way of catching up with people you know and also for making new contacts. Everyone invites someone else along, so there’s always a different crowd, making Green Drinks an organic, self-organising network.

These events are very simple and unstructured, but many people have found employment, made friends, developed new ideas, done deals and had moments of serendipity. It’s a force for the good and we’d like to help it spread to other cities. Contact your local node to get the latest info about coming along.

You can also email edwin [at] greendrinks [dot] org if you want some tips on how to set up Green Drinks in your City.

The one in Seattle is at 6:00PM at 5th and Madison, a new building that was created with sustainability and efficiency in mind. I’m a bit warry because I’m timid around strangers but it should be a good experience regardless.

With Step It Up, I hope I can gain some insight on the pulse of Seattle and climate change this week. Also, I think it will be interesting as I am using Facebook as a tool to get people to go to Step It Up this weekend, we’ll see how successful I am with it. My results will be posted here after the event, along with a review and critique of Greendrinks and a critique of myself!

Inside the Monkeysphere
An interesting look into how we, as humans, think and view the world and others. The site uses monkeys to make learning about the limitations of human understanding a little more fun. Although it is “fun”, the implications of what is being said is enormous. Unfortunately, we are predisposed to being closed-minded and it takes conscious effort to not succumb to that.

Timebucks
Timebucks is a unique business that hopes to capitalize on people’s skills and services they need by providing a way to trade services. Using “time-bucks” as funds, people earn “time-bucks” by either purchasing them or by providing services to others. “Time-bucks” can also be bought for $1 a unit, with a standardized pricing of 15 “time-bucks” for all services. So why is this good? Because the motivation is to help others, instead of profit from them. Think social capital instead of monetary capital. Also the “time-bucks” can be donated to non-profit organizations and a small amount is used to keep themselves sustained.

Step It Up
April 14th is going to be a big day for climate change as many prepare to rally in various communities. The message this year is “Step it up, Congress! Cut Carbon 80% by 2050!” The site helps individuals to organize and plan their own events and has sign-ups for others to join in. I expect a pretty big showing this year across the country since the build-up over climate change has been rising dramatically, especially with Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth getting so much media coverage.

It’s undeniable. The internet has revolutionized human existence, and with it, somewhere thirteen years ago in a small corner of the universe, I was clicking through my 56.6 k portal to “the world.” My, how things have changed. As the internet transformed and evolved, so did I. Like many things in life, the web is what you make it. For me, it unknowingly gave me a voice that people actually listened to, and an identity amongst the masses. It started with a humble little thing called Xanga. A friend introduced it to me my junior year of high school and I ended up leaving it pretty much dormant for the first two years. Suddenly, I was a freshman in college and I realized it was the only thing that could alleviate the pressures of class, work and social life. It became a hobby, a stress reliever and a companion during some of the hardest times in my life.

Initially, xanga was a rhetorical dump of my daily habits and occurrences, but I didn’t feel satisfied just regurgitating the events of my day. Over the next two or three years, I transitioned my online “agenda” into obvservations, opinions, critiques and general life lessons that I was able to filter through my daily routines. Miraculously, people read, people paid attention, but most importantly, people listened and identified.

And this was when I knew there was something more to blogging than dear-diary’s. If my small speck of the web was able to generate a handful of loyal readership, imagine the possibilities of something more structured, independent, and on a grander scale. My greatest driving force behind xanga was the desire to plant seeds of thought and change in people’s heads. As a student of mass media, I found that the more I learned about my concentration, the more I became pessimistic about society at large–and the more I felt that there needed to be a change–change in thought, cultural perception, values and beliefs. You could say I want to change the world. I’m not going to lie, I do.

So what does Start Good mean to me? It means an online space for people to learn and share from one another, all with the goal of making society a better place. A place that transforms ignorance into knowledge, that brings awareness for the world around us, something that shows there is more to life than all-about-me. I hope that Start Good becomes an environment that facilitates respect and appreciation not only for our individual selves, but for the people we often overlook, or don’t care to look at.

Everyone has a story. And every story has a lesson to be learnt.