serendipityoucity

I just saw this fabulous & inspiring video of Majora Carter on the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) blog. She

is the Macarthur-winning founder of Sustainable South Bronx, an organization dedicated to holistic community development, sponsoring projects that create jobs, protect the environment and bring beautiful green space to the inner city.

Here are some of her concepts:

• Green is the New Black - Campaign
• Green Collar Workers
• Green the Ghetto - Campaign
• Triple bottom line - positive returns for all
• Environmental justice
• Develop a city planning strategy & call it the people first agenda
• Embrace your inner capitalists and invest in sustainability
  
• Make sustainability sexy

She also talked about the City of Bogota’s - Progressive Transport and the Poor: Bogotá’s Bold Steps Forward, yep, the city i have only ever envisioned as a hell hole, that has included its citizens in the planning process and how the city mayor Enrique Peñalosa made it happen!

Soooooo inspiring, and reminded me of how smart we can be!

Last night as the sun was setting, my pal Seb scored a fabulous goal with his left foot at pick up soccer! We left the pitch on that high note (although wishing we had done a cool down run & stretch).  Glenn & Gill joined us for dinner at the wonderful Green Door Restaurant, afterwards we ironically drove all the way to Kanata - the land of big box stores & maze like parking lots - to watch an Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore in an empty air conditioned theater. 

The movie was a classic US style didactic presentation interspersed with family values, heart string tugging, boy on the farm type of images and calls to prayer (to reach the more conservative members of the US).  Overall, a good repetition but worth the refresher.

As designer cartographer types, we were totally jealous of his audiovisuals, huge screens and excellent visualization artifacts (maps, globes, earth images, charts, Simpson Cartoons, short films) which clearly and succinctly described the complexity of the science behind global climate change (Carbon Dioxide, Ozone, Temperature increases, desertification in some spots and increase in precipitation in others, Ocean Current Change, Ice Cap melting, permafrost melt data). 

His maps were exquisite, particularly the precipitation and the animated coastal flooding maps.  I also loved the image of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic - where two forest conservation policies were clearly represented. Must be nice to have friends who give you wonderful mosaics of satellite imagery (+1000 images) of cloudless days or the time series images of the planet (home). Hmmm! I am going to ask him to make those visual aids available in the public domain!

Also, he made reference to the good teachers in the world, who help you form ideas that stick.  Nelson Mandela constantly refers to education in his autobiography - A Long Walk to Freedom - so keep the energy flowing - Ron, Stacey, Mick and Anya.

Ah! The priviledge of having the time & resources to follow ideas.