Gil Friend’s Blog
New Bottom Line: Eye of the Beholder
I've just posted the latest 'New Bottom Line' - my monthly strategic perspectives on business and the environment - at the Natural Logic website. Eye of the Beholder summarizes the recent Cradle to Cradle design workshop in Silicon Valley, led by Michael Braungart and...
Other the other hand
[SF Chronicle]: The good life means more greenhouse gas. Robert Collier recounts the 'China Dream' - 'fancy car, very big house' - that's chasing the 'American Dream.' The same economic boom that is catapulting millions of Chinese into the middle class has made their...
Ready for RoHS? (Why not?)
[GreenSupplyLine]: Gina Roos reports that Newark InOne, a leading N. American distributor of electronic components, is offering a downloadable RoHS legislation and technical manual at its new RoHS Express web site. (Click here for the technical manual.) It's a 22-page...
Micro-credit. Macro-impact.
We're watching the profile of Grameen Bank on PBS's 'New Heros' series. Grameen, guided by founder Muhammed Yunus, has brought 'micro-credit' to millions of the poorest of the poor, required no collateral, experienced an infinitessimal default rate, and has had a...
‘stunning carbon reductions, booming economically’
[Nicholas Kristof, NY Times]: 'Kyoto would have wrecked our economy,' Mr. Bush told a Danish interviewer recently, referring to the accord to curb carbon emissions. Maybe that was a plausible argument a few years ago, but now the city of Portland is proving it flat...
Speaking of density
WorldChanging.com published a piece the next day, coincidentally, on Density as Efficiency, reporting on research comparing the energy efficiency of "high-density urbanism" to Energy Star-rated homes. The result was surprising, even to people already inclined towards...
Have mercy, I cry, City!
In celebration of their 3,000th post, our friends at WorldChanging.com have been posting contributions from guest writers, and asked me to be one. They ran this piece which I wrote with my wife (and director of Natural Logic), Jane Byrd.As the recent World Environment...
Happy Independence Day
A perfect day, somewhere between sports events, picnics and fireworks, to re-read the Declaration of Independence. A most remarkable document, well worth reading once a year, 'whether you need it or not.' (Echo of that old joke about cowboys taking a bath once a week,...
Live8 to G8, right to the point
8 world leaders, gathered in Scotland for the G8 summit, will be presented with a workable plan to double aid, drop the debt and make the trade laws fair. If these 8 men agree, then we will become the generation that made poverty history. That's why we're staging LIVE...