We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Not all corporations are created equal, as our conservative supreme court seems to think. It’s time to use our people power to set that straight. And, while we’re at it, let’s set up a direct democracy party too! The Australians have already made a first step!

Here are just a few of the ways VerticalResponse is going green, we know it’s a journey, NOT a destination.

• We don’t use plastic utensils.
• We don’t drink from plastic cups.
• We use VR water bottles made out of recycled plastic.
• We recycle glass, cans and plastics and mixed paper.
• We buy Fair trade coffee.
• All printed materials and paper are recycled 20% post-consumer,
• We often use eco-friendly supplies, ordering local and from green businesses
• We use reusable bags instead of paper bags.
• We recycle used batteries.
• We offer commuter benefits for people who take public transportation.
• When we print docs we print double-sided.
• We try to keep our lights off during the day, it’s nice and bright in here anyway!
• We turn our computers off at the end of the day. It saves more energy than sleep mode.
• We buy local – saves transportation costs and supports the local economy.
• We buy our supplies from The Green Office
• VerticalResponse offsets carbon emissions with Native Energy who is building a farmer-owned wind project.
• We regularly participate in computer recycling drives.

By acting locally, we at VerticalResponse are putting our best foot forward in the hopes that our green mission will inspire other small businesses.

Check out Vertical response.

Gorilla in the Greenhouse is an action-packed, web-based animated show that inspires kids to take real-world steps towards a healthy planet. The show is set in a magical greenhouse in San Francisco, and features a visionary green gorilla and four kids who use their imagination, their network and their music to tackle the environmental challenges facing their generation.

“Kids can save the world,” says Eli Noyes, kid’s TV veteran and director of the show. “This is the kind of show that will travel effortlessly from the TV to the Internet to the real world. It is by nature interactive, because kids can do in the real world what they see our virtual kids doing. And every imaginary character and action in the show has an analogous real life counterpart.”

The pilot episode, entitled The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, follows the kids as they face a demented plot by Dr. Morlon Hufflebot to create an island of plastic bags in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. In the show, the kids travel to the island to observe the situation, go undercover into the plastic bag factory and then foil the plot though multiple actions. They spread their green message through their social networks, rally cities to ban plastic bags, design a new eco-friendly bag and create awareness through their original song “Bag the Bag (The Gyre Song)”. The next episode planned for later in 2008 will follow the kids through adventures exploring the challenge of energy efficiency.

“When I was a kid, I loved Schoolhouse Rock. The great songs and stories gave us a context for learning how the world worked,” says, Jay Golden, creator of the show. “Gorilla in the Greenhouse is our way of introducing this generation to a world of possibility through story. Instead of ‘put in a new light bulb’, we want to show the most over-the-top environmental scenarios transformed by vision, collaboration and great music. So we decided to start with a huge island of plastic bags.”

The show is a presentation of SustainLane, a green media company based in San Francisco, and created by SustainLane’s VP of New Media, former Free Range Studios and Shockwave.com producer Jay Golden, The show is produced by Ralph Guggenheim, a founding member of Pixar, and producer of Oscar-winning short film “Tin Toy” and the classic animated feature “Toy Story.” Animation, art direction and creative consultation for the show is done by Golden’s former teammates at Free Range Studios, known for its wildly successful, cause-based viral movies such as “The Meatrix”, “Story of Stuff” and “Grocery Store Wars”. Gorilla director Eli Noyes, an academy award nominee, has also directed segments for MTV’s animated showcase “Liquid Television” and Sesame Street’s “Sand Alphabet” and “Mad Painter”.

The show and the curriculum will be broadcast to National Geographic’s platform of over 1 million kids. It is also distributed through the home site www.greengorilla.com.

SmugMug.com offers template based sites and includes a way to sell your photos, printing, and custom watermarks.

Satellite powered by a flickr professional account. You also need a web hosting account that supports the php programming language to install Satellite on. You don’t have to know any php – but knowing some basic HTML helps. Despite all these steps, this is my current favorite because it’s customizable, can be hosted on many website accounts, and gives you a real web hosting account to play with, which gives you additional benefits of having you@yourdomainname.com email, and the ability to install a WordPress blog like the one you are reading now. To see an example of a Satellite powered site I recently created for a friend, check out Colleen Todd‘s. portfolio.

Worried about copying of your images? Consider using steganography (like DigiMarc in Adobe Photoshop) to digitally watermark your photos, although it has been said it reduces quality. An alternative is to put a “bug” in a corner of the image with your name. This can be done in batch mode with a program like iWatermark. Personally, I prefer the bug method, for reasons Ken Rockwell explains.

Want to include a slideshow widget on your site? Check out the Google AJAX Feed Slideshow widget.

Do it yourself portfolios: (free) http://start.uber.com/design can be used for photography or any artwork.

If you have a mac, you may already have the the Apple iLife suite, including iPhoto and iWeb and a dotMac account which can help you make a decent looking portfolio site.

If any of the above methods doesn’t give you a professional web address (URL) of your own, like www.mynamephotos.com – you can use domain masking at a registrar (like SustainableDomains.com) to point to the computer generated URL.

Know of any others, or had experience with the above that you can share? Please let us know in the comments below!

Top 10 Environmental Searches in 2007

1. Recycling
2. Global Warming
3. Freecyle
4. Earth
5. Pollution
6. Al Gore
7. Environmental Protection Agency
8. Live Earth
9. Hybrid Cars
10. Solar Energy

Source: www.yahoo.com

New terms like “freecycle” (a Network to promote waste reduction) popped up this year, while “carbon footprint” and “carbon credits” reached a growing impression as part of the green vernacular. 2007 also saw queries on global warming reach their highest level ever — throughout the summer, buzz on “stop global warming” boomed, as conscientious citizens looked to reduce their carbon footprint.

More eco-friendly searches arose surrounding “pollution”, and peopleused Yahoo! Search to monitor what the “Environmental Protection Agency” was doing about these issues. “Hybrid cars”, “solar energy”, and “recycling” topics also proved popular for those seeking a more environmentally friendly lifestyle.

There are many presentations about sustainability available on the slide-sharing service SlideShare.net. Why share your slides? Well, think about the increase in exposure for your ideas and brand that you can achieve by participating, and helping to create online community for slides specific to sustainability issues. — just by tagging your slideshow with relevant keywords like sustainability, organics, etc.

(from the slideshare.net FAQ) You can upload your PowerPoint, OpenOffice, Keynote or PDF files, tag them, embed them into your blog or website, browse others’ presentations, and comment on individual slides. What’s more, the transcripts of your presentation will be indexed by internet search engines and show up in search results. It’s a great way to share your ideas with others, or to learn from other people.

Ideally, I’d have time to create a website that interfaces with their Slideshare API to allow users to post and tag presentations directly from SustainableMarketing.com – one of these weeks when I have a few days just to play with Ruby

Edit: I created a Slideshare group called SustainableMarketing for collecting examples of good presentations related to the topic of sustainable marketing. Join the group to be notified of updates and add examples of great slide shows!

Technorati Tags:
sustainability, slideshare, communitymarketing

Note this post marks the addition/resuming of geeky (mostly ruby) programming posts to the blog. I’l still have all the regular sustainable marketing and eco-geek content, and will be modifying my feeds so that you can decide which content you want to subscribe to. I tried running two blogs but it was too much work to decide which one to post in! For now, you can also use the menu items at the top of the page to sort by category

Rails apps create session files that are stored in the /tmp/sessions folder. And this folder tends to fill up with old files if you leave it too long. You might get so many files in there that the rm command does not work anymore.

[~/cadvbe/tmp/sessions]# rm *
-jailshell: /bin/rm: Argument list too long
[~/cadvbe/tmp/sessions]# ls -1 | wc -l
144433
[~/cadvbe/tmp/sessions]# find . -name 'ruby_sess*' | xargs rm
[~/cadvbe/tmp/sessions]# ls
./  ../  .svn/

The command ls -1 | wc -l counts how many files were in the directory. Over 144 thousand! Instead, use find . -name 'ruby_sess*' | xargs rm to find all the session files and pipe them to the rm command one at a time. This works.

Thanks to MoundAlexis.com for the idea, and read more on ruby sessions and automatically deleting them with a cron job here

Technorati Tags:
rails, rubyonrails, rm, linux, sessions

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Thanks so much to Ryanne and Jay for taking the time to interview me and edit and produce the video! I recommend that any bay area (and beyond) green companies with interesting stories check out their blog Ryan is Hungry.

Enjoy it, and please contribute by adding your own events to Upcoming.yahoo.com, and tagging them with the tag “sustainability”. Don’t forget, if your event is related to marketing, submit it to the “Sustainable Marketing” group, and after it is approved, will end up on the home page of SustainableMarketing.com, which gets over 15,000 unique visitors a month.

Technorati Tags: sustainability, sustainablemarketing, upcoming.org