The committee in charge of overseeing the preservation of the caribou is coincidentally composed of oil company executives with a vested interest in the development of the tar sands. This is going on in our country. On our watch. Let’s take action.

Working in the social profit space means we interact daily with people who are engaged in a bottom-up effort to improve the world we live in. The ideas are there. So are the startups and the established organisations, showing by example that changing the way we do business is not a hindrance to but simply a broadening of the meaning of profit.

Danish think tank Monday Morning is developing an initiative called Sustainia.

In a nutshell, Sustainia is a collaborative space—both virtual and physical—in which to define an attainable vision of the world for 2020. The vision encompasses existing technologies that are scalable and sustainable and offer measured results to environmental and social issues.

The stated mission of the organisation (from its website):

+ Become a global positive point of reference for discussing a sustainable society – a global BRAND for a desirable sustainable future
+ Make sustainable solutions and products fashionable, desirable and inspiring
+ Help provide a new positive and inspiring momentum around global leadership on sustainability
+ Kick start a global community focused on creating awareness on sustainable solutions and how a sustainable society will improve our quality of life
+ Inspire political decision makers by providing them with a new narrative and concrete vision

In June 2012, the Sustainia site will include a virtual world populated with our future selves and erected with technologies and innovations already waiting in the wings to be embraced and developed. In a world where we spend the majority of our lives fully engaged with a screen and a virtual existence, we can only hope that building a precise, accurate, feasible vision of a possible world will bring it that much closer to reality. (The fancy graphic design, featuring the ubiquitous Gotham, is sure to help too!)

Sustainia is a consortium of partners representing civil society, businesses and experts. Global companies and foundations involved: Microsoft, GE, DNV, Philips Lighting, DONG Energy, Novo Nordisk, Tetra Pak, Cisco, Interface Flor, BIG Architects, Knoll, IKEA, Vestas, VELUX, Realdania, Scandinavian Airlines SAS, Ramboll, UBS Investment Bank. Key organisational partners are the UN Global Compact and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s new climate initiative R20—Regions for Climate Action.

DuckDuckGo is a search engine and an advocate for no tracking, no bubble practices. I previously delved into the “personalization” phenomenon, or the You Spiral as Eli Pariser terms it. I found it refreshing to peruse DuckDuckGo’s DontTrackUs and DontBubbleUs pages because they explain clearly and simply what’s going on when you let Google rule your virtual life.

I personally enjoy being challenged by differing views. I enjoy learning and I don’t like it when well, anyone really, spies on my activity to better sell things to me. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy convenience like the rest of us. I just want to be given the choice. I want to be the judge of what I should or should not be exposed to. Call me crazy.

Underheard in NY is a project that gave voice to four men living on the streets of New York City. Using a mobile phone and a Twitter account, people who have grown accustomed to being ignored, shunned and marginalized had the ability to offer insight into their world. The project is currently on hiatus as the team tries to develop a larger framework allowing the idea to be transplanted to other urban centres.

Whilst the initial concept is interesting and has undoubtedly broadened the reach of these individuals, it seems to open up broader possibilities linked to individuals helping individuals. One of the stumbling blocks for not for profits is their need to connect with donors and express the tangible impact their activities have on individuals, as opposed to the abstract notion of “helping”, “doing good” or “making a difference”.

If the power of Twitter—where conversations and relationships take place between individuals—can be harnessed to connect the haves with the have nots, there is no middleman.

I wish the Underheard crew the best in their efforts to develop the idea into a project that has even greater reach and impact so the homeless in our streets can be heard and seen once again.

Occupy Design is a grassroots project connecting designers with on-the-ground demonstrators in the Occupy Together movement. The project’s goal is to create freely available visual tools around a common graphic language to unite the 99%. The project places an emphasis on producing infographics and icons to improve the communication of the movement’s messages and the data surrounding them across the world.

The site aims to connect designers with occupiers and, whilst this is a laudable goal, one nagging issue becomes painfully obvious when you access the—wait for it—Google doc page.

The world is inadequate in many ways. Poverty is pervasive. Wealth disparities abound. Agreed. There even seems to be consensus that many of the world’s woes stem from the unhealthy mingling of commercial and political interests. So, if the goal of the Occupy movement is to somehow influence how the financial system is run, shouldn’t the focus remain on that issue? Isn’t it enough?

Don’t get me wrong, the efforts of the designers are good, very good in some cases, but will graphic representations of various, disparate issues, help the movement become more unified? If it did, we could design a brand for it. And by brand I mean a recognisable, understandable symbol.

We could design a brand right now for Occupy but not one that could ever serve it as it should. Ideally, a brand should reflect the culture, values and essence of an entity. Without clarity into what those might be, any effort at expressing it visually will fall short of the mark. At best it will be what designers routinely call “an empty vessel”: a graphic symbol waiting to be filled with meaning.

Form is inextricably tied to function and content. If Occupy continues to struggle with its identity and offer dissonant messages, its voice will remain garbled and, in the end, easier to ignore.

Surviving Progress explores, amongst other things, the distinction between good and bad progress. Inspired by Ronald Wright’s bestseller A Short History of Progress, this thoughtful, dense documentary is calling upon us to not only revisit the priorities we set for technological development but also to reset our moral compasses. That humans fail to learn from their past is obvious and should lead us to realise that, if left unchecked, our current behaviours will lead to our own demise.

The film explores Wright’s premise whereas “Things are moving so fast that inaction itself is one of the biggest mistakes. The 10,000-year experiment of the settled life will stand or fall by what we do, and don’t do, now. The reform that is needed is not anti-capitalist, anti-American, or even deep environmentalist; it is simply the transition from short-term to long-term thinking. From recklessness and excess to moderation and the precautionary principle.”

But this rational approach is being blocked by vested interests: financial and energy lobbies, so-called special interests group that are so powerful, wealthy and diverse that they have the ability to paralyze governments, countries and halt—or at least hinder—progress of the good kind.

If the Occupy movement stands for anything, it seems to me to be about exactly this: trying to find a new way to loosen the deadly grip of the greedy on our institutions and leaders.

After its successful festival run, Surviving Progress is being released in Québec on 4 November with Canada-wide dates to be announced soon.

It screens Friday 2 December at 7pm at the Rio in Vancouver.

“We are awakening from the false dream we have been relentlessly sold, and have relentlessly bought. It is, in fact, a nightmare paradigm of a commodified world, a lifeless world of objects, separation and scarcity. We are awakening to a new possibility, where the true abundance of this Earth is no longer hoarded. Where relationships are not transactions. Where your well being is my well being is the planet’s well being. That old dog eat dog eat dog story is a myth. We are celebrating a new story that is as old as life.

Collaboration is where it’s at. Co-operation has created this incredible complex ecosystem called Earth that sustains and delights us. The competitive aspect of evolution is for the juvenile species. It’s time we grew up. It’s time we learned to share. From rainforests to coral reefs to human communities, we are inextricably intertwined in gorgeous webs of interdependence. This is what democracy looks like; planet to person, person to planet.
—Velcrow Ripper

Here’s an explanatory video on the nature of this particular tax.

The website created to outline the details of the tax and its real effects on business, households and the economy as a whole is worth looking at.