From Dugout Dick to Eco Elvis: Your Environmental Road Trip

Pop City, June 24 2006
http://popcitymedia.com/features/yerts0715.aspx

Mark Dixon, founder of Your Environmental Road Trip (YERT) spent 366 days, driving 43,000 miles through all 50 states, and interviewing over 800 people behind some of the most innovative environmental projects in the country. He met Scott Brusaw in northern Idaho, who is working on a plan for building roads out of glass embedded with solar panels, capable of generating all of the nation's electricity. He spent a night in a former mine that had been converted into housing by Dugout Dick, a man who has spent the past 60 years living simply in caves. Dixon even met Eco Elvis, who, dressed in a green jumpsuit and a green cape with green sequins, sings environmentally themed Elvis-style songs.

But if you ask Mark Dixon the most interesting thing he saw during the trip, the first thing he'll mention is the Land Institute in Kansas, which works on transitioning farming from annual monocultures to perennial polycultures, which use less fuel and fertilizer, have deeper roots, and sequester more carbon. “It's not very sexy,” Dixon admits.

Maybe not by itself, but if you watch the Land Institute video, one of nearly 40 short videos produced for the YERT website, it's just as engaging as the video where Eco Elvis battles a monster made out plastic garbage bags. If the environmental message is powerful enough, YERT will make sure it reaches you.

Planting the Seed
Mark Dixon had been thinking about environmental issues for years, but was never motivated to take action, until he attended a Green Conference in San Francisco.

“I saw a diverse array of different people and I thought, 'There is a place in this movement for me,'” Dixon says. Without knowing what that place would be exactly, three months later he had quit his job at an Internet video startup so that he could focus on sustainability full time. In the middle of a ten-day meditation retreat, the idea came to him fully formed- a road trip to make a video documentary about all the interesting environmental projects happening around the country.

The format was particularly suited for Dixon, who has a technical background studying industrial engineering at Stanford, but has also performed frequently on stage. “Basically, I was comfortable making a fool out of myself if it was necessary to convey a message,” he says. He recruited a friend from college and his wife, Ben and Julie Evans, who were both working as actors in New York City, and began planning.

The project started in California, but it really took off when, encouraged by his sister who lives here and drawn by the low cost of living, Dixon decided to move to Pittsburgh. Here he found a wealth of interest and support for the YERT project. The Allegheny chapter of the Sierra Club and the Rachel Carson Institute both provided help planning the trip. Ben Evans was cast in a one-man show at the City Theater, giving him a paying acting job in town in the months leading up to the trip. And they were approached by city councilman Bill Peduto, who sponsored a resolution declaring June 30, 2007 Your Environmental Road Trip Day in Pittsburgh.

In fact, YERT received so much support in Pittsburgh, that they decided to start the trip here, even though for a road trip covering all 50 states it might have made more sense geographically to start on a coast. “It was more satisfying emotionally,” says Dixon. “Pittsburgh has a really compelling story of environmental renaissance. We wanted to retell the story all around the country, that if Pittsburgh can do it, it's possible anywhere.”

Ok, So It's an Oxymoron
On July 4, 2007, Mark, Julie, and Ben began the trip at Rachel Carson Homestead, setting out in a Ford Escape Hybrid nicknamed Rachel “the Car” Carson. They chose a hybrid SUV because it was used, American made, and because it might interest some Americans who wouldn't otherwise take an environmental step.

The threesome also realized that the idea of driving to promote sustainability was problematic. “Environmental Road Trip- the name itself is an oxymoron,” says Dixon. “So we dedicated ourselves to propagating the messages we received, and making sure we would have the greatest impact per mile driven.”

They gave themselves some challenges on the road: they would keep all their garbage for the year, including recyclables, limiting themselves to a shoebox-full per month. One month in, they gave themselves a no incandescents rule- if a room didn't have compact fluorescents, they would use LED head lamps or no lights at all. In the second month, Ben and Mark began to limit their water usage to 25 gallons per day (the average American uses over 100 gallons). Mark dealt with this challenge by taking super short “Navy showers.” Another good way to reduce your water usage is to not take showers when you're not dirty. “Ben makes good use of that rule,” says Mark in one of the YERT videos. “Some might say excessive use of that rule.”

In any event, Ben's hygiene didn't affect his relationship with Julie too terribly. Three months into the road trip she discovered that she was pregnant- and the scheduled due date was July 4, 2008, the last day of the year long road trip. The pregnancy forced them to think more carefully about the impact of their decisions. “In a very real way we saw that what we were doing was about the future,” says Mark. “We're all part of the environment, and our health depends on the quality and diversity of the environment. We ignore it at our peril.”

Ben and Julie left for the last few months, so Mark finished the trip in San Francisco on July 4, 2008 with Erika Bowman, who had been the YERT team's honorary fourth member, helping out with logistics from home. Julie gave birth to a healthy baby boy shortly afterward.

What Now?
The road trip might be over, but YERT is far from finished. The group is still producing short videos for the website from the hundreds of hours of footage they shot during the trip. The videos are funny, energetic, and, according to Mark, highly condensed, using the very best parts of ten hours worth of footage to make each five minute video. They eventually want to make a full-length feature film, and are looking for ways to fund it.

Mark has also been helping plan a Pittsburgh conference in October for the Bioneers, a group he encountered on the trip that promotes practical solutions for restoring the environment. And, with Ben and Julie Evans, he has given multimedia presentations, both in Pittsburgh and across the country to schools, community groups, conferences, and even businesses that want to go green. Dixon calls these presentations “an environmental antidepressant. People come up to me afterwards and say, 'Finally, an environmental presentation that's not totally depressing.' They actually leave smiling.”

And that might be the most important message that Dixon hopes people take from YERT-- that even though the outlook for the planet sometimes seems grim, a sustainable future can be “livable, healthy, and even exciting.”

Johnny Lee Rising Star

Carnegie Mellon Today, Fall 2009

On the flight back from a conference in California, Johnny Lee, a PhD candidate in Human Computer Interaction, and Jason Hong, an HCI professor, are talking about the Nintendo Wii. They both feel that the system has huge potential outside of just video games- Hong is even thinking of designing a class around it, and wants Lee to help. As the plane cruises 30,000 feet over the Midwest, Hong lays down an irresistible challenge: you design an interface, I'll buy a Wii for the office.

Unfortunately for Hong (and the office), Lee has to spend the next few months working on his thesis. But when he finally finishes a few months later, he decides it's time for a fun project. In a few weekends he turns the Wii remote into a simple motion capture device, a digital whiteboard, and a virtual reality headset. Then he posts some videos explaining how to build them on YouTube.

“Any interesting project with the Wii will get some attention,” Lee says, but he had no idea how much. One post became YouTube's number one rated video. The curator of the prestigious TED talks invited him to give a presentation. His devices started popping up everywhere- fourth graders built them for science projects, university professors were using his digital whiteboards in their classrooms, the VR headset was turned into a flight simulator.

Lee, now a researcher at Microsoft, says that by giving away the concepts and making the materials cheap he was able to reach many more people. “Otherwise it would probably be just another failed startup,” he says. Far from a failed startup, Lee was recently named one of the top 35 innovators under the age of 35 by the influential Technology Review, joining past winners like the founders of Google, Paypal, and Netscape.

Pulp 24-7 Samples, 2003-2004

Tuesday, January 27
In high school band circles, there are dozens of jokes about flutists. "How do you get two flutes to play in unison? Shoot one." Or, "What do you get when you gather all the flutists in the band together? Too many flutists." Apparently flutes are just better when they're on their own. And they're best when played by someone like internationally renowned flutist Timothy Hutchins. Hutchins is currently the principal flute of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and before that, he was the principal flute of the Montreal Symphony, where he received international acclaim as a concerto soloist. He's even played Ibert's flute concerto at Carnegie Hall. Tonight he performs accompanied by his wife, pianist Janet Creaser Hutchins, as part of the Y Music Society series, and you can bet that when he's finished nobody will ask him, "How do you know if there's a flute player at your door? You don't, they can't find the right key and don't know when to come in." Ha ha. 8 p.m. $35. Jewish Community Center, Squirrel Hill. 412.392.4900

Monday, February 2
In 1968, shortly after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, elementary school teacher Jane Elliott performed a groundbreaking experiment. She asked her class of fourth-graders in all-white Riceville, Iowa what they thought about black people. They responded saying things like, "They're dirty," "They riot, they steal," and "You can't trust them, my dad says they better not try to move in next door to us." Determined to counter her students' prejudices, she divided the class into two groups and told the children that brown-eyed people were superior to blue-eyed people. She took away blue-eyed students' privileges and told the class that blue-eyed people were lazy and stupid. She didn't tell the students how to treat each other but within minutes she watched blue-eyed students become timid and brown-eyed students taunting the blue-eyed. That day Elliott learned that racism is taught, but it can also be untaught. Now a consultant who works with schools and corporations confronting discrimination in their organizations, Elliott presents a lecture entitled, Anatomy of a Prejudice. Free. 7 p.m. Winchester Thurston School, Shadyside. 412.578.7500

Friday, December 26
This year for Christmas, I asked Santa to please, please let the New York Nationals beat the Harlem Globetrotters. The New York Nationals are the Globetrotters' new opponent since the Washington Generals closed their camp in 1995, after half a decade of miserable defeats. Now I know that rooting against the Globetrotters is like rooting for the Grinch to steal Christmas or for Frosty to melt, but after getting downright embarrassed every day for years, even bad teams are in for a little Christmas magic- and maybe by that logic the Steelers will win their season closer, too. At tonight's game we'll see if the Nationals' holiday wish comes true, or, at the very least, enjoy the gift of watching some awe-inspiring basketball wizardry. 7 pm. Mellon Arena, Uptown. 412.323.1919

Monday, December 29
The cliche goes that one person's trash is another person's treasure. Whoever said that first apparently did not have a relative who worked at a thrift store. After spending some time with someone who brings home what they couldn't give away for free and tries to pass them off as gifts on unsuspecting family members, you get the sense that sometimes one person's junk really is another person's junk. The key is to make sure that it becomes another person's junk. You have the opportunity to do that with this year's unwanted Christmas presents at Zombo's Bad Gift Exchange Extravaganza. Bring them and get a dollar off the door and the opportunity to trade for someone else's thoughtless gift. Live music by the Legion of Incredibly Strange Superheroes, Mr. and Mr$. Funky, the Bowling Allies, and DJ Zombo really turns that bad gift into a treasure. 7:30 pm. $5. Club Cafe, South Side. 412.431.4950

Thursday, January 22
Terry is a struggling actor, living in Staten Island with two other struggling actors, Matt and Alex, who have been lovers for over four years. But lately Matt has been on tour in a musical and Alex has been cheating on him with Buck, a mall manager who got Alex his current gig as a ma mall Santa. Terry desperately wants to preserve the peace and stability he had before Matt left. Such is the basic premise behind the play, The Crumple Zone. Now if you're thinking, "Wait, a zany romantic comedy about roommates with nearly opposite personalities, set in a New York City borough?" or, "Hey, didn't that used to be a sitcom? I don't remember them being gay," you're not too far off. A theater critic for the New York Times says that the play "might have been written by [Neil] Simon if he were gay and 40 years younger." Cloven Hoof Productions kicks off the 2004 season with this Buddy Thomas comedy. Through January 31. The Penn Theater, Bloomfield. 412.761.3947

University Adopts Sweatshop Code of Conduct

Focus, Carnegie Mellon’s monthly newspaper for faculty and staff

On March 27, nearly 200 students attended “Starving for the Swoosh”, an interactive multimedia presentation on working conditions in factories overseas. The two presenters, Leslie Kretzu and Jim Keady, had spent the month of August 2000 living in a factory worker’s slum in Tangerang, Indonesia on $1.25 a day, the typical wage paid to a Nike worker in a shoe factory. In their presentation they talked about the workers they lived with who worked up to 15 hours a day, 6-7 days a week, sometimes working two 24 hour shifts in the same week to make quotas, abusive managers, dangerous working conditions, and pay that may or may not be enough to meet their basic needs. Keady, is a former soccer coach at St. John’s University who was forced to resign for refusing to wear Nike soccer equipment. He says that during a month living on $1.25 in Indonesia he lost over 25 pounds, and was unable to lift even a water bottle without his hands shaking violently. “I was literally starving, and my body was fighting it,” he says.

In the past five years sweatshops have become a major issue on college campuses. Students at the University of North Carolina, University of Michigan, Duke, Georgetown, and dozens of other universities around the country have staged protests and sit-ins in attempts to get university administrations to adopt Codes of Conduct- legal documents that regulate the behavior of the manufacturers of a schools licensed apparel. Recently, students and administrators at Carnegie Mellon have started dealing with the issue, and in April the President’s Council will make a decision about whether or not to approve Carnegie Mellon’s own Code of Conduct.

Work began on the Code of Conduct in Spring 2000 when administrators in the trademark licensing office, who had become aware of the anti-sweatshop movement on other campuses, formed a task force to draft a Code for Carnegie Mellon. The original task force included administration, two faculty representatives, two undergraduate and two graduate students. According to John Soluri, Assistant Professor of History and a member of the task force, they spent the next year reviewing Codes of Conduct from other schools, educating themselves on the issues and potential problems with implementing codes. He says, “It was quite a bit of revising and redrafting to arrive at a code that we were satisfied with.”

One of the biggest decisions the task force had to make was to choose a monitoring group. A Code of Conduct outlines very specifically the labor, environmental, and health practices that the manufacturers of a university’s apparel must follow. Monitoring groups travel to the factories where products are made to ensure that the manufacturers are adhering to the practices outlined in the Code of Conduct. At the time the task force was making their decision there were two major monitoring groups, the Fair Labor Association (FLA) and the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC). The FLA was established by the Clinton administration and was comprised of representatives from various labor and human rights groups as well as representatives from corporations in the apparel industry, like Nike. The FLA has drawn criticism from many people in the student movement who believe because the FLA has representatives from corporations on their board and, because they get part of their funding from corporations, that they are not a truly independent monitor. The WRC was formed by United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), a coalition of student-based groups across the United States, as an alternative to the FLA. The WRC does not include corporate representatives, but some critics believe that it is too small and to be effective. In the end the task force decided to join both the FLA and the WRC. The task force finished a code in the spring of 2001, and it was sent to be reviewed by the administration and the university’s legal staff.

Also in the spring of 2001 two of the students from the task force, Shivdev Rao, a senior BHA student, and Brad McCombs a graduate MFA student, started a student group that was a member of USAS, called People for Worker’s Rights (PWR). “The student group was formed to bring more attention to the subject of the Code of Conduct and to deal with other issues relating to sweatshops,” says McCombs.

Last semester, student and faculty members of the task force who were waiting for the University to approve or reject the Code of Conduct began to feel that progress on the Code had stalled, and PWR began to take action.

According to Matt Toups begin_of_the_skype_highlighting     end_of_the_skype_highlighting begin_of_the_skype_highlighting     end_of_the_skype_highlighting, co-leader of PWR, “One of the challenges this year has been to figure out exactly what was happening with the Code, and how to move progress on the Code from the outside.”

They wrote several letters to all levels of the administration but received little response. The group circulated a petition last semester asking the University to adopt the Code and collected over 250 signatures, and met with President Cohen and other members of the administration.

“Could it have been done faster- that’s not clear,” said Neal Binstock, assistant vice president for business services, who served as an administrative liaison to the task force. “Drafting a code is not a small or easy process.”

According to Binstock, the code had to go through a legal review, and changing each word of the code could potentially change the meaning of the document. He believes that the extra time was necessary. “We had to present the best possible code of conduct to represent Carnegie Mellon University.”

This semester the trademark licensing office sent a revised version of the Code back to the members of the original task force who are still at Carnegie Mellon. On March 18 the task force made some small changes to the Code, which will then be sent to the April 12 meeting of the President’s Council where it is expected to be approved. Once the Code is approved, language will be drafted into Carnegie Mellon licensing contracts insisting that the 95 licensees that make products with the Carnegie Mellon logo on it, as well as any new ones must endorse this code in the manufacturing of their products.

According to Binstock, “Our objective was to have a code of conduct acceptable to all of the people involved, and I believe that’s what we have achieved.”

Members of the task force feel that the move to adopt a code of conduct, although it has been a slow process, has been successful, although there is more work to be done once the code is adopted. Soluri says, “I think it would be misleading to say that students have driven the move to adopt a code, but I have not a doubt that students will have to drive the enforcement of the code by making fellow students, staff, and faculty aware that we need to buy our consumer good from companies that respect workers’ basic rights.”

Sidebar: Living on $1.25 Per Day

On March 27, nearly 200 students and faculty filled McConomy auditorium to attend “Starving for the Swoosh,” an interactive multimedia presentation on working conditions in factories overseas. The two presenters, Leslie Kretzu and Jim Keady, spent the month of August 2000 living in a factory worker’s slum in Tangerang, Indonesia, on $1.25 a day, the typical wage paid to a Nike worker in a shoe factory.

Kretzu and Keady talked about the workers they lived with who worked up to 15 hours a day, six or seven days a week, sometimes putting in two 24-hour shifts in the same week to make quotas. The presentation touched upon abusive managers, dangerous working conditions, and pay that many times is not enough to meet workers’ basic needs.

Keady is a former soccer coach at St. John’s University who was forced to resign for refusing to wear Nike soccer equipment. He says that during the month living on $1.25 a month in Indonesia he lost over 25 pounds, and was unable to lift even a water bottle without his hands shaking violently. “I was literally starving, and my body was fighting it,” he says.

The presentation was sponsored by People for Workers Rights (PWR), a student group that deals with sweatshops and other issues relating to workers’ rights. The group was formed in February of last year, originally as a way to bring more attention to the code of conduct, but the group has since begun to deal with other issues as well. This year the group has organized a “sweat free T-shirt” fundraiser, in which the group sold union made T-shirts which they silk-screened themselves. Also, they’ve been working with other groups at University of Pittsburgh and Duquesne and with local union members in a campaign to get the Pittsburgh Pirates to adopt a code of conduct for its merchandise, similar to the codes of conduct that many universities have begun to adopt.

This year the group has also been organizing its own trip to visit factories in Honduras next spring.

We want to see their culture,” says Matt Toups, a sophomore physics major and co-leader of PWR, “and to see first hand how our consumption affects their lives.”