The Challenge Your World Blog

The Maldives, a small island nation in the Pacific, composed of over nineteen hundred tiny islands, has announced that it's going climate neutral. It plans to switch away from fossil fuels over the next tens years, moving instead towards energy independence through a combination of wind, solar and biomass energy generation. They plan to offset the cost of such a transition through eliminating the expense of importing oil and diesel fuel. They feel that, as a nation that will clearly suffer early on if climate change results in rapidly rising sea levels, they should lead the world in this transition, for their own well being, as well as that of [...]

The past few days as we work on our June launch event, I've been trying to squeeze in time to work on our company sustainability policy, which I've just done a (final?) draft of and which we will discuss some time in the next few days to get consensus. The next part is operationalizing the policy - putting those principals into practice. A while back we came up with a pretty healthy list of possible actions, and now it's my job to turn those ideas into plans with budgets and responsibilities attached. It's pretty exciting, to get down and dirty into the practices and habits that will actually make a difference, and I'm looking forward to getting [...]

We see and hear the numbers all the time, every day, on news programs, out of people's mouths, we spout them ourselves - the amount of money spent on the war in Iraq; the number of plastic bottles consumed every hour; the number of flights criss-crossing our atmosphere on a given day. They are dizzying in scope, confounding in scale: the compounded rate of our consumption corresponds to the contamination, corrosion and constraints with which we are now coming face to face as we confront the global crisis of our time. Seattle-based American artist Chris Jordan attempts to help us understand these abstract numbers by using the materials, machines and [...]