I was tagged to participate by Dave D. As far as what’s on my phone (a Sony Ericsson w810i), there’s not much.
Pretty boring for sure.
Blog Action Day is finally here. I’m extremely excited to read the posts that get posted by a variety of bloggers today. The number of blogs participating is upwards of 15,000. This post is my contribution.
It’s fairly common to hear the phrase “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” Just about everyone recognizes this slogan and many practice the Three Rs in their day-to-day lives. While it’s important to recognize the outcomes of reducing, reusing, and recycling – we are still leaving out a core piece of the equation – elimination.
While thinking of the Three Rs, the intent is to place the options in the preferred order. Reduction is preferred over reuse and reuse is preferred over recycling. All of these options are obviously preferred over disposal. We can think of the Three Rs as a typical rank-ordered listing:
This all makes sense right? Minimize consumption (reduce) if you can, otherwise work your way down the list (reuse, recycle, and dispose as a last resort).
I’d propose taking this list a step further. Reduction is a good option, but even better is complete elimination. I guess that in a way, it’s the ultimate reduction.
In theory this all sounds good, but what does it really mean? What does it mean to eliminate or to move towards elimination in the context of dealing with waste?
I tend to think of elimination two different ways.
The first way I think of elimination is simple removal. There are many times that this can be accomplished with minimal effort. As an example, I decided a week or so ago to jump on the bandwagon (for a good reason) and stop drinking bottled water. I’ve completely eliminated my consumption of bottled water. I bought a full-house water filter and broke out my Sigg water bottle to reuse. Simple right?
The second way I think of elimination is complete re-thinking. I’m always amazed at how little we question our beliefs and habits. Re-thinking involves taking new approaches, using creative thinking, and relying on hyper-productive design to remove the need for particular items. One application of re-thinking is using Whole-System Design to remove sub-optimization and unneeded elements. For a good example of re-thinking check out the Tunneling Through the Cost Barrier article from the Rocky Mountain Institute.
A combination of these strategies will help us move towards attitudes and actions that will lead us away from the consumption habits that we’ve grown accustomed to. The sooner that we embrace elimination, reduction, and reuse – the sooner we can move away from mitigation and focus on regeneration (where we ultimately need to end up).
I’m completely mesmerized by the Rockabye Baby Lullaby Renditions. I’ve got a little girl on the way, so I’ve been trying to find some cool music for kids. I don’t think it gets much cooler than this.
Radiohead, Coldplay, Tool, Pink Floyd, Bob Marley, The Cure, Nirvana, The Ramones, Nine Inch Nails, Björk, etc.
I prefer notepad over word.
I prefer writeboard over notepad.
Still, I always feel like nothing has struck the write balance between these three tools. I’ve been looking for something with the formatting capabilities of word (although an easy-to-use subset), the cleanliness of notepad (although with some more options), and the conveniences of writeboard.
It looks like Virtual Ubiquity figure it out. Check out Buzzword.
Looks very promising. Especially now that they’ve been purchased by Adobe.
If you’re a blogger and haven’t heard about Blog Action Day, take a few minutes to check out the Blog Action Day Website and watch the video below.
Three days to go 
The surf in NC has been pretty damn good over the past month. Every weekend is seeing nice size surf (although it hasn’t been very clean lately).
Looks like this weekend will be no exception.
Sunday surf forecast from SwellInfo:
“In Jeet Kune Do, one does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.”
-Bruce Lee
Could your software use a litte Jeet Kune Do?
I blogged before about my initial impressions of Natural Capitalism. I’ve finally completed the book and I can highly recommend purchasing a copy or downloading it.
If you want a preview of the (very dense) book, take a look at A Roadmap for Natural Capitalism article that was published in Harvard Business Review.
Vision statements usually suck. Interface has one that doesn’t:
To be the first company that, by its deeds, shows the entire industrial world what sustainability is in all its dimensions: People, process, product, place and profits — by 2020 — and in doing so we will become restorative through the power of influence.
Nice.
