Tilt

I tried Facebook out last weekend and asked a simple and direct question. Being that I have a lot of eco-minded friends, I was looking for some creative responses. Ask and you shall receive! So, here is the question:

What does everyone think about the concept of carbon offsets instead of just consuming less?

Sara Michener
Consuming less isn’t in the cards so long as we culturally worship capitalism, so Carbon Offsets is probably more politically viable. I get everything from thrift shops and spend most of my money on local, organic foods. But can you imagine if the president told the American people to buy less? He’d be shot the next day.

Alex Lo
I dislike carbon offsets for 2 reasons. The first is conceptual. Carbon offsetting assigns a value to pollution that is paid for by supporting something less polluting. That’s like saying it’s okay to litter as long as you recycle a certain amount at home. A good deed doesn’t really cancel out a bad one.The second reason is a criticism of reforestation. The idea of sequestering carbon in new tree growth is flawed. But that’s a long argument for another day.

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Last week I had the opportunity to celebrate with the Girl Scouts. Girl Scouts of Central Maryland and Port Discovery teamed up to celebrate the next wave of entrepreneurs – girls with the highest pre-order sales in Baltimore City and each county in central Maryland.

I had the opportunity to join in the fun. Check out the photos of me trying to keep up with the next generation.

I don’t know who said this, but my friend sent it to me and I thought it was a great passage regarding architecture and space:

“Americans are too impatient. They expect instant beauty. But they forget that cities are not built in one day. We may spend years agonizing over a renewal project and then we expect the city to be rebuilt instantly. Can you imagine what Paris must have looked like when Baron Haussmann finished with it? The social and cultural shock must have been tremendous. It’s like surgery; it takes a long time for the tissue around a wound to heal. The city has to echo life. If our life is rough and tumble, so is the city. I’ve always felt that ugliness with vitality is tolerable. The great danger our cities face today is that their vitality will be sapped by too much concern for instant beauty. New York is not a beautiful city. It may even be ugly, but it is exciting. It draws beauty from its vitality. If you drove all the residents out and made it a gleaming commercial center, it would only be beautiful in a narrow sense. It would be lifeless, and therefore intolerable.”

–Ieoh Ming Pei commonly known by his initials I. M. Pei, is a Pritzker Prize-winning Chinese-born American architect, known as the last master of high modernist architecture.

Thursday was a remarkable opportunity to talk to Goucher College. In the lastest, Silver LEED building on campus, we were positioned on a panel, front and center to tell our story. After a full day of travel for Rachael and TEDx for Jess, we were wiped out, but ready to force the crowd to help energize us.

We opened with change and asked the room to move around and create some energy. The outcome was fantastic! We had people upside down, slapping elbows and turning around. It was a wonderful sight to see.

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