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Looking Green vs. Being Green: Lawn Painting and the American Housing Crisis

Sustainable Development:
While the suburban American front lawn has never been an icon of sustainability, it may have reached a new low. As a result of the recession, the housing crisis, and the upswing of foreclosures across the U.S., business is surprisingly good in an often-overlooked sector of the economy: lawn painting. There are, believe it or not, a wide variety of companies routinely hired by banks to clean up, trim, and paint the front yards of foreclosed houses. Business is booming, particularly in places like Nevada and California, where no one's around to water the grass.
Lawn painting, believe it or not, ...

Today | Andrea Brennen

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VCs: Dead or Alive?

Social Media: Is the traditional venture capitalist -- once the sole God of all start-ups -- in danger of becoming extinct? That may be way over-stating it, but judging by some of the talk at a few business innovation conferences this past week, one might be tempted to start counting.

At the very least, the consensus is that thanks to the rising power of social networks, VCs are no longer the "must-have" middlemen they used to be for early-stage start-ups. Sure, they're still loved -- especially by established start-ups and social enterprises looking to scale. But is VC money needed as much n...

Today | Marcia Stepanek 2

Tap'd NY Taps Into Environmental Conservation

Sustainable Development: The negative ecological effects of bottled water are well documented. From draining aquifers, to propping up military juntas (greetings, Fiji water), to burning through large quantities of fossil fuels through international shipping, and of course the endless parade of plastic bottles which end up in our landfills and oceans, bottled water is uniformly ecologically unsavory for anyone who can safely drink their local water.

Yet, much as cell phones have rendered the street payphone all but extinct, the rise of bottled water has usurped the once familiar water fountain. Even if o...

Today | Kendra Pierre-Louis

Sustainable Food Today: Agroecology

Sustainable Food: Agroecology is the logical extension of sustainable food production. The term itself is an amalgam of the word Agriculture and Ecology. It focuses on natural rhythms of the environment to produce ecosystems on the farm, obviously employing the organic options, but even further than "organic" labeling.

Agroecology.org lists a number of principles that all agroecologists should employ, mainly using renewable resources of energy and fertilizer; minimize toxics like pesticides, herbicides or anything that "the use of materials that have the potential to harm the environment or...

Today | Keri Marion

Better health care with better IT, part 3: Keys to success

Health: Previous entries in this series on using IT to improve patient outcomes introduced the conundrum of health care outcomes research, and some of the challenges that of implementation. This entry reviews some of the lessons learned, which could prove useful to other organization in similar situations, and anyone trying to integrate a health IT structure to support processes of care or measurement.

The keys to Kaiser Permanente's joint replacement registry success include:

1. Benchmarking with existing registries, in this case joint replacement registries in Sweden an...

Today | Ano Lobb

The Fuzzy Math of Embodied Energy

Sustainable Development:
When it comes to reducing energy use in buildings, there are basically two camps. The proponents of "operational energy analysis" argue, as John Straube does on buildingscience.com, that "scientific life-cycle energy analyses have repeatedly found that the energy used in the operation and maintenance of buildings dwarf the so called 'embodied' energy of the materials." The opposing argument is that in order to truly understand a building's environmental impact, one must consider the full range of energy consumed across all phases of production, maintenance, and eventual disposal of bui...

Today | Andrea Brennen

Environmental Conservation, Human Health, Chemical Regulation and the EPA

Sustainable Development: There are certain books which are considered environmental conservation classics: Bill McKibben's End of Nature, E.O.Wilson's Biophilia, or Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang. These cautionary books when read decades later read, not like history, but rather, depressingly, still achingly true, although none more so, perhaps, then Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. No one was a more persuasive bellwether of the risks posed by chemical contaminants not only to our ecosystems, but also, to human health.

Nearly fifty years since her book was first published to wide ranging public app...

July 30 | Kendra Pierre-Louis

Celebrating Energy Heroes: Dixie Viesca

Energy & Emissions: The Celebrating Energy Heroes Series is a way for everyday people to be recognized for their efforts in supporting clean, renewable energy for a green energy future. This post's Energy Hero comes from Las Vegas, Nevada. Her name is Dixie Viesca. I interviewed Dixie Viesca on a scorching 100+ degrees F summer day standing on a sidewalk outside the University of Nevada Las Vegas, where President Obama was addressing energy and economy in the region. She had a shirt that read "Make Our Energy Clean, Make it American" and holding a sign with the same text. She was a sweet lady, see the picture.

July 30 | Juan Carlo Pascua

Social Media Under Pressure: Socializing the Middle East

Social Media: Twitter, whose big year was 2009, was certainly an innovate idea. Facebook, which launched in 2004 and was originally just for college students (those were the days), was equally innovative as well, at least if the definition of innovative is how many people something attracts. Of course, the number of people social media has been attracting in Middle Eastern countries has ironically been part of the problem. Social media itself is an innovative phenomenon, and, while its uses (and abuses) are clearly controversial, the Middle East may be benefiting, at least socially, from e...

July 30 | Megan Risley

At the Center for Creative Ecology, Mud Building is Green Building

Sustainable Development:
Mud has just about the lowest embodied energy footprint of any building material. It's cheap (or free), natural, a decent insulator, non-toxic, and in a place like Kibbutz Lotan ( located in the desert of Southern Israel) there's just about an infinite supply. According to Alex Cicelsky a resident of Lotan, the CCE is on its way to becoming a "national leader in the use of natural and renewable materials like earth plasters and strawbales."
Lotan is home to the Center for Creative Ecology, an environmental education center offering opportunities for interdisciplinary learn...

July 30 | Andrea Brennen

Howdy from your Sustainable Development blogger in Santa Monica

Sustainable Development: Sustainable Development. What does it mean? Why do we care? Although I have some answers, I expect to develop a great many new questions and even more new answers in the coming months and years, as I serve within the Sustainable Development news and editorial section on Justmeans.

This isn't my first outing in the world of Sustainable Development. When I was growing up, my father was big into recycling newspapers, composting kitchen garbage, and living lightly on the Earth. It just made sense. Four decades ago, it made sense to m...

July 30 | Robert Moskowitz 2

Public Pools = DNA Damage? Sustainable Living Investigates...

Ethical Consumption:
Alright, who peed in the pool? Whoever it was has now threatened our DNA...

Sustainable living in the summertime takes a bit of dedication. With the warnings about toxins in our sunscreen but risks about skin cancer in the sky, do you really want to know that the public pool is messing with your DNA? Now there's something you don't hear everyday! New research shows that Public Pools that are cleaned with brominating agents should be tossed. Their best recommendation is to replace these agents with a balance of UV treatment and chlorine, but not chlorine alone. Why t...

July 30 | Tiffany F

Why Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Directors Need to Understand Social Media

Corporate Social Responsibility: Most major corporations now treat social media as a function within the communications or marketing department. As such, many corporate social responsibility (CSR) directors now relegate social media into these general communications functions. Given the power of social media as an effective tool for changing behavior, this may be shortsighted on the part of CSR directors. Here's why:

Last year, BSR produced a report entitled ESG in the Mainstream: The Role for Companies and Investors in Environmental, Social and Governance Integration. Two key insights in that report...

July 30 | Martin Smith 3

Top 15 Job Boards for Responsible Careers

Responsible Careers: In my earlier post this week, I discussed how to transition from career success to career significance for professionals interested in responsible careers. Today, we will review data and trends that will enable you to identify responsible career opportunities that best align with your career significance goals. Opportunities that enable responsible professionals to successfully blend financial return with social impact and environmental responsibility are less visible than traditional roles in the business world.

Of course, our justmeans job board is a great way to s...

July 30 | Mrim Boutla

UNCF Social Entrepreneurship Initiative

Social Enterprise: To develop talented new leadership in the social enterprise sector while remaining relevant and responsive to the global economy, the United Negro College Fund, (UNCF), has developed dynamic Social Entrepreneurship programs "to equip African Americans with the skills and resources to make on-going and expanding social impact through entrepreneurship." UNCF intends to accelerate social change by simultaneously strengthening the power of existing organizations and developing qualified leadership for the future. To meet the complex social challenges spurred by growing disparity, an aging populat...

July 30 | Barbara Zaha

Better health care with better IT, part 2: Implementation challenges

Health: The first posting in this series outlined how Kaiser Permanente has developed a registry of joint replacements as one approach to creating meaningful measures of health care outcomes. This post looks at some of the implementation challenges they, and others seeking to follow their lead, face.

Kaiser is a massive system, delivering care to over 8 million patients, with 350 orthopedic surgeons performing 17,000 total joint replacements each year at 43 medical centers. They've been tracking every joint they've replaced since 2001, meaning they have a lot of data to manage.
<...

July 30 | Ano Lobb

The Beginning: Introduction to the new CSR Writer

Corporate Social Responsibility: I have been following Justmeans for awhile now and jumped at the chance to be a staff writer. I didn't even expect to be offered an interview but suddenly I was part of this great team of committed people. I am incredibly honoured to be a part of a community of experts, talented writers and change-creators.

My story starts way back when I was a kid growing up in India and I realized that there was so much that was wrong with the world. I had a special interest in tiger conservation - back then global warming, organic food, ocean acidification etc was unheard of and the urgency w...

July 30 | Akhila Vijayaraghavan 2

New Wind Project in California Might Renew Interest in Renewable Energy

Energy & Emissions: Wind power, the renewable energy source that continues to remain a topic of debate amongst some, has scored another victory. Today, renewable energy company Terra-Gen Power has announced that they will be going ahead with their latest wind energy project after finishing negotiations with partnering companies for financing. The project, consisting of four separate wind turbine facilities, is promising to be one of the biggest in the United States once completed and will generate an impressive amount of renewable energy for customers in California.

The renewable energy projects wi...

July 30 | Richard Cooke

Responsible Careers in Government: 2010 PMF Class Announced

Responsible Careers: Responsible careers that get business done better can be found across sectors. Today we will focus on getting business done better through government work. Government work is a huge area of opportunity for responsible careers. The Social Innovation Fund, as well as Gov 2.0 initiatives such as Code for America and ChallengePost are indications that the US government is leading change by modernizing the way it operates and by increasing transparency. These changes might lead to future responsible career opportunities at the federal, state, and local leve...

July 29 | Mrim Boutla

Delaware Clean Energy Package to Reduce Carbon Emissions and Create Jobs

Energy & Emissions: Today Governor Jack A. Markell of Delaware signed four important clean energy bills into state law. At a time when the US Senate has failed miserably to reduce carbon emissions and invest in clean energy incentives like a renewable energy portfolio standard, leadership in Delaware comes as a breath of fresh air. The four-part "Delaware Clean Energy Jobs Package" is expected to create hundreds of jobs in the state, while ensuring Delaware a leading spot in the clean energy economy and reducing carbon emissions.

The Clean Energy Jobs Package will help channel much-needed funds to ...

July 29 | Nick Engelfried

Six New Rules for Social Enterprise Start-ups

Social Enterprise: Start-up CEOs featured at this week's Stanford Summit in Silicon Valley say it's cheaper than ever to launch a social enterprise. Here are their Top 6 bits of advice for new entrepreneurs in today's fickle start-up climate:

1) Don't let the economy dictate when to start. "The best time to start a company is when you, as a person, feel you don't have a choice but to start a company," says Mike Lee, co-founder of Tapulous, a start-up that creates social apps for the iPhone. "It doesn't matter whether there's a recession happening or if zombies are attacking. " Adds Doug Knopper, C...

July 29 | Marcia Stepanek 2

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Sara Wolcott I'm passionate about a green, just socio-economy f...

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