I got to go to the grant celebration at the new Busch Stadium. It was a beautiful day and hundreds of people from St. Louis area non-profits showed up to celebrate receiving grant funds from Cardinals Care.

StLouisGreen will use the grant funds to buy a Mac and software to manage its own website. StLouisGreen plans to build up a webpage where St. Louis area kids can learn about how to start an environmental club and exchange green ideas.

It was a great day. For the full green experience, I even took the Metro downtown.

1. Turn off your web browser. It’s not enough to minimize it. To really stop getting distracted by email and web surfing, you need to close your email program and web browser. If need be, disconnect your modem. My most productive morning in August happened when our cable was cut off. No phone + no email = pure productivity.

2. Refresh your writing with inspiration from other writers. I enjoyed reading 73 Ways to Become a Better Writer. These are the compiled suggestions of lots of different people. I already do a lot of the suggestions on this list, but I’m inspired to try some new things.

3. Don’t only READ your writing – LOOK at it too. Despite years of art classes (thanks mom!),  I have spent my adult life telling myself I’m a writer, not a visual person. When I applied for a technical writing job a couple years ago, I said emphatically in the interview “I don’t do graphics and I don’t think visually.” Lucky for me, the man just laughed, hired me, and taught me to use Adobe Illustrator.  I later learned that he was a graphic designer turned technical writer, so he knew not to worry too much about what I said I couldn’t do.

Today I’m working on a training DVD script. As I select the visual images that will accompany the voice-over, I  finally realized I work visually all the time.  Every time I choose the placement of a paragraph break. Each bulleted list.  Every picture uploaded into a PowerPoint presentation. Most of us will never become graphic designers or professional artists, but we can still look at our work with fresh eyes – the eyes of the reader, the user, or the learner.

1. The majority of businesses (nearly 60%) are increasing budgets for content creation despite the economy, according to a Junta42 study.
2. “In 2008, total communications spending actually increased 2.3 percent, to $882.6 billion, but that was the sector’s slowest growth rate since 2001. Advertising, as is clear by now, is contracting. Spending dropped 2.9 percent in 2008, to $210 billion,” according to The New York Times. They also reported a prediction that the media industry will be the third fastest growing industry and much of that growth will come from public relations and the internet, not from newspapers and traditional media.
3. “Good writing, thoughtful writing, and the effective presentation of ideas will be necessary however it is delivered. Those who can effectively analyze, disseminate and distribute information will succeed. Those who can adapt and prepare for change while staying true to a certain inner strength, a certain confidence in the effectiveness of what they’re doing, will have the best prospects.” – Bill Lascher

When I lived in Nashville, we enjoyed the bulk food bins at the closest Wild Oats. They had a huge aisle full of bulk options, and the store had a delicious crunchy feel. For those of you not deeply immersed in hippie-speak, in this context, crunchy refers to the store’s catering to the health nuts, the hippies, the home-made granola types.  I might share a few characteristics of that target market myself :)

But then Whole Foods bought out and closed the Wild Oats. They re-opened their gourmet food store nearby, in a high-end outdoor mall nestled among upscale gift shops and boutiques I couldn’t afford. Gone was my long dull aisle of boring bulk bins. In their place, I could buy a thousand delicacies – an olive bar, specialty desserts, little fancy jars of jellies from England.

When I competed for grocery cart space with the other shoppers, it was clear which of us was the target market, which of us belonged. It wasn’t people who were trying to eat natural foods for their health. It wasn’t people who cared about organic food. It just didn’t seem to be people who were relieved to find a place that sells coconut oil, flax seeds, decent apples, and sugar-free full-fat yogurt all in one place.  (Okay, seriously, that is an actual grocery list from my past!)

Don’t get me wrong. I love gourmet food. I love imported delicacies. I freakin’ LOVE olive bars. But not at the expense of my precious bulk bins. I need my raw nuts, my oats, my lentils, my banana chips – and I need them in bulk.

When the Whole Foods CEO announced that they would refocus their business on healthy food rather than expensive food, I felt hopeful for the first time since we quit shopping there. Maybe Whole Foods will truly get back to its natural foods roots. (For an excellent article on the history of Whole Foods, check out this Saveur article.)

I like to put leftovers into glass jars, like old jelly jars, because they’re free, reusable, and I don’t have to wonder if the plastic is leaching toxins into my food. I hate to waste plastic baggies for something that I know I’m going to eat within a day. I just don’t want to have to throw the bag away. The problem is that when he goes to organize the refrigerator and fill it with fresh groceries, my precarious stack of jelly jars has a tendency to fall out of the fridge onto his toes. Although other families might use neatly stackable Tupperware or solve the problem with a billion clever, space-saving, and earth-friendly techniques, these are the options in our home -  friendly yet awkward jelly jars or evil yet convenient baggies.

These are the mundane, downright boring, environmental decisions that people make every day. Not too interesting, not a big deal.

And then. This morning we read in the paper that the best gift to the environment is to stop having children.  We’ve heard that one before. Nothing worse than delivering another spoiled, carbon-devouring Western child into the world. But this is the first time I’ve thought about it since having two kids. Nowadays, my environmentalism isn’t about saving the earth, but about saving ourselves from ourselves, or maybe even saving the earth for our own sake. (I’ve said this before in Writing Green.) So much of green writing misses this point.  There are other legitimate moral, logical, religious, health, economic, and miscellaneous reasons for environmental practices, but for me, this is the big one. So I’m not too swayed by any reports that my two kids are the worst thing I could have done for the environment.

So…  someone was really just teasing me about choosing between a third child and the plastic baggies. But he hit on a seeming contradiction in the logic of environmentalism. While we spend our days making piddly little savings – a scrap of tin foil here, a lower wattage light bulb there – we spend our lives raising two environmental disasters… (unless we hit the nature-nurture jackpot and raise a change-the-world type). Except that I see the world – selfishly, I’ll admit – as something I want to benefit me,  my friends and family. I mean, isn’t it obvious that children are the only reason environmentalism even exists?

Who says tech comm issues don’t matter?!

I use PowerPoint a lot in my work, so I spend a lot of time thinking about its pros and cons. Ultimately I have to agree with the concluding comments in the WSJ opinion piece – that it’s not the tool that’s at fault so much as it is the way it is used.

1. PowerPoint is not appropriate for all types of speeches or presentations. It works best when you have visual information to convey. It is not ideally suited to conveying nuance and complex thoughts – for this you need a good presenter or speaker.

2. PowerPoint should address the needs of visual learners. But clicking through some PowerPoint slides doesn’t mean you are automatically helping visual learners learn better, especially when you crowd a hundred words on one slide.

3. It can be hard to find visuals that enhance the learning experience. I sometimes find myself adding pictures that make the slide more visually appealing without making the information more interesting or easier to understand. It’s like, the pictures are a place where I can rest my eyes while I listen to the speaker.

What else?

I really enjoyed reading this, and I can’t help but think about this in terms of environmental legislation, green free-market solutions, and the shifting morality and public mood surrounding green.

As individuals, we usually don’t want people making moral judgments on our lifestyles. We all have our own ways of embracing environmentalism and flouting its mores. As a community, we usually want others to do what is best for the commons. We all have our opinions as to what that is…

Moralizing always comes from somewhere. It can come from government institutions like schools and laws, or it can come from “free” institutions like bossy moms, churches, and the nosy neighbor. Both have their pros and cons. Which do you prefer? And why?

http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php

Speaking of issues of sustainability…

We went to Barnes and Nobel last night and they had a Green table display, probably because Earth Day is coming up. I was excited to see all those books and I’d like to read a lot of them, but about half of the books annoyed me because of their – by now – almost cliche of “green but hip/chic” attitude. All these writers want to reassure us, you can maintain or improve your level of consumption, social status, lifestyle with a green veneer. I guess people are still getting over their loathing of dirty hippies? and the associated painful ugly deprivation-based hemp-patchouli-tabouli environmentalism? The idea of chic green rubs me the wrong way, probably only because the ideas of chic and hip is unappealing to me.

I don’t know. What do you think?

The website’s links page has some interesting sites to explore.

Where would you rather be when the apocalypse happens? Please comment!