Our Public Speaking Tour Begins

This past week, we began giving presentations to spread the word about our cross-country eco-video project, making connections in the community, and gaining support for our work. My son Carrick and I are showing selections of our eco-videos, talking about our upcoming cross-country video project, and talking about everyday ways to live more sustainably.

A week ago we spoke at Sudbury Earth Decade, a chapter of the Massachusetts Climate Action Network, and again on Saturday at Broad Meadow Brook Wildlife Sanctuary, a Massachusetts Audubon Sanctuary. At both talks we met some great people and made important connections.
We have five more speaking events coming up before the end of 2008, but I'm scheduling a heavy list for after the holidays are over. It's hard enough to get people to come to speaking events; I don't want to compete with the holidays and shopping! We're networking and setting up talks in a whole variety of places, including churches, schools, libraries, senior centers and civic groups. My goal is 2-3 per week until we leave in May for our journey.

This week I also began a weekly email update for people who want regular updates on our cross-country project. We'll talk about new destinations added, new sponsorships and partnerships, appearances in the media, etc. Once we begin our journey in May we'll start sending out daily email updates as we travel across the U.S. and back.

I'm hoping to have a new and improved design for our website, www.OurRenewableNation.org, within a month. What's there right now is the best I could do on my own, but we could do with a more professional appearance. Our friend Tracy Axelson, a professional web designer, has generously agreed to help us look sharper on the web. Look for the updated website soon!

Be well,
Colin
www.OurRenewableNation.org

Added Destiinations: Chico Bag, Klean Kanteen, Xeko

San Francisco may be the California city to grab all the green headlines, but the city of Chico, about 3 hours northeast, is home to some great green businesses. We've decided to stick around Chico for a few days to get some interviews with our latest additions - Chico Bag and Klean Kanteen.

Chico Bag makes reusable shopping bags that smoosh down to a small pouch, making them easy to carry and store. They're made of washable, durable polyester, and can hold up to 25 lbs. of groceries. Over 1 TRILLION single-use plastic bags are used and thrown away every year, and the average American uses 300-700 bags each year. Chico Bags are a handy way of breaking the plastic bag habit!

Klean Kanteen is a Chico company that makes stainless steel water bottles which are reusable, lightweight, and a healthy alternative to plastic water bottles. Our family has a handful of Klean Kanteens and we use them all the time! 38 billion plastic water bottles go into U.S. landfills each year, with only 23% being recycled. We'll visit Klean Kanteen to learn more about the smarter alternative to buying bottled water!

We've also added another stop in Seattle at Xeko, the collectible cardgame revolving around endangered species. "Xeko is dedicated to a bright green future and preserving some of our planet's greatest riches" Xeko is a game of trading and collecting cards somewhat like Pokemon, but where kids learn about habitats and animals while they play. We'll visit Xeko headquarters to see the people behind the game!

Be well,
Colin

Our Renewable Nation DVD

The ultimate purpose of our cross-country eco-video project is to make a series of video profiles about renewable energy sites and interview people who have made impacts in sustainability, and put together these profiles on DVD to distribute to schools nationally.  The idea is for school teachers to be able to pick and choose which 5-minute profiles they want to use on a particular day.  One day they might be teaching about solar and other renewables, and they'll be able to choose just those videos that best cover that topic.  Other topics might be electric vehicles, sustainable design, zero-waste/recycling, etc.  Our mission is to inspire and empower kids to create a renewable and sustainable future, and it's important and timely that kids see what that future can look like.

Why create a DVD of 5-minute profiles instead of compiling all the footage into a documentary?  I think it's more useful to teachers in this format rather than a 2-hour linear, beginning-to-end documentary.  Watching a 2-hour video is not realistic in many school schedules.  Another reason is that each profile deserves 5 minutes of it's own time, and this way I won't have to cut any of our destinations out of our final video just because it doesn't fit into the flow.  

We're hoping to distribute our video through the National Science Teachers Association, which would give our video national distribution.  I'm working on that connection now.

Another avenue for distribution is to post all of our videos on our YouTube page, www.YouTube.com/OurRenewableNation.  We'll upload each video profile as it is completed.

That's all for now - Be well,

Colin

WeCanSolveIt.org, Verenium support

This post marks 8 months left until our cross-country journey begins, and we celebrate with some great news of support!

Verenium, a company that is developing cellulosic ethanol production, is the most recent addition to our list of sponsors! The Cambridge-based company has a research and pilot facility in Louisiana, which we'll be visiting next June. Verenium uses switchgrass, sugarcane, and "energycane" as sources to produce ethanol, with much higher yields per-acre using crops that are far less energy-intensive to grow than corn. We welcome Verenium as a sponsor and thank them for their support! You can learn more about their work at www.Verenium.com

Our latest endorsement comes from the Alliance for Climate Protection, which runs the action campaign at www.WeCanSolveIt.org:
"The McCullough family is proof of the power of living by your values. They raised their energetic sons to be champions for the climate, and now the whole family is successfully spreading the word that youth benefit when fossil fuels are replaced by renewable energy."
The goal of the Alliance is to build a movement that creates the political will to solve the climate crisis.

Be well,
Colin