July Events from Sustainable Seattle and Updates

So what is next for Sustainable Seattle? We the month of July is filled with various events and trainings that are still barely available for attendance. We do have limited space so make sure to sign up today!

July 1,2010 Climate Solutions from Buddha



July 15, 16, 2010 Triple Bottom Line Reporting





July 28, 2010 Life Cycle Analysis











Whew, the last few months have been busy here at Sustainable Seattle. We've been working towards a holistic vision of sustainability with all engines firing with different events, trainings and collaborations that have widened the spectrum of sustainability and broadened our minds.

First, we had a fantastic event at Hidmo located in the Central District. It was a cultural exploration of East African people's through dance, song and food. Our partnership with Walking with Africans was to bring the vision of micro lending into the wider audience of the Central District. The event was a tremendous success and the performances were entertaining and educational.

Our Dream a Sound Future project is fired up and bringing in ideas and plans from numerous sources both professional and dreamers from all ages. Some of the ideas that have emerged include an energy source from the motion of falling rain to solar powered street lights.

We have also just completed the first step in our Rain Garden project.
The project was a joint collaboration with Alleycat Acres and Creatives 4 Community and it included an extensive training project that teaches homeowners and individuals about the importance of the Puget Sound Watershed and the steps they can take to lower their impact on this important resource.

The Rain Garden Project was funded in part from a grant from the Puget Sound Partnership via EcoNet.

Measuring all that matters

I am a firm believer that only what gets measured gets fixed. Simply put, measuring and statistically reporting things draws peoples' attention to them, and society has a strong bias towards attending to problems that can be described objectively. It's a sensible enough bias—measurement allows us to know for sure whether our attempts at fixing a problem are achieving anything and good value for money—but it has terrible consequences when combined with another societal bias: our tendency to only measure things in dollars. Our society and media are obsessed with financial statistics at the expense of all others, and this leads policy makers and business leaders into the same tunnel vision, where anything that improves the financial bottom line is seen as inherently good. RFK expressed this better than I ever could, decades ago:

Over the past few years, we've seen some encouraging developments with the measurement and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions. More and more people are using carbon footprint calculators to understand their own emissions, business are starting to analyse and report their own, and with the climate bill about to go through Congress it may soon become compulsory for fossil fuel providers and major greenhouse gas emitters to measure and report their impact. But while this is progress, it's easy to get "carbon goggles" and focus on carbon emissions to the exclusion of all the other impacts that our activities have on each other.

This is why Sustainable Seattle started out as an indicator organisation, and our core is still a set of community-generated indicators that measure sustainability in a very broad, but still objectively quantifiable, sense. Our Sustainability Training And Resources program aims to give people the tools to understand and apply these indicators in their own lives and work. With this mission in mind, we've been working on developing material that introduces useful comprehensive ways of measuring impacts. The first two workshops will be in July:

• In Triple Bottom Line Reporting, on July 15-16, our Executive Director Laura Musikanski will cover the methods and reasons for a company to report its environmental and social performance along with its economic performance.
• In Life Cycle Assessment, on July 28, Rita Schenck of the Institute for Environmental Research & Education will introduce what I believe is the gold standard for measuring the complete environmental impact of a product or process, from cradle to grave.

We are also hoping to announce a Gross National Happiness talk in the near future, but details of that still need to be confirmed, so watch this space for another announcement.