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Job growth in 2013 stayed sluggish for much of the American economy. But for solar companies, it was a banner year. Employment in the U.S. solar industry jumped 20 percent in 2013 to hit 142,698. The number of solar jobs across the country has grown 53 percent since 2010. Last year, the industry added 56 U.S. jobs per day, on average. "That growth is putting people back to work and helping local economies," said Andrea Luecke, executive director of the Solar Foundation. Her research and advocacy group has issued its National Solar Jobs Census every year since 2010. Nearly half of all U.S. solar workers counted in the most recent survey install systems, rather than make the equipment. Installation employed 69,658 people across the country last year, up from 57,177 in 2012. Solar manufacturing, in contrast, employed 29,851 people in the United States, a slight increase from 29,742 the previous year. In 2012, California had 43,700 solar jobs, 37 percent of the nationwide total. The Golden State is the nation's largest solar market, and many of the country's biggest solar companies - including SolarCity, SunPower and Sunrun - call it home. The survey found that the average installer earned about $20 per hour in 2013.
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For nearly a week, two dozen organic farmers from the United States and Canada shared decades worth of stories, secrets and anxieties [at California's Esalen Institute]. During their meetings, some of the farmers worried that their children would not want to continue their businesses and that they might have to sell their homes and land to retire. [Conference organizer Michael] Ableman, the author of Fields of Plenty, is writing a book about the gathering. Deborah Garcia, the widow of Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead and a filmmaker whose previous films include The Future of Food and The Symphony of the Soil, is making a documentary. The grandfathers and grandmothers of organic farming should be joyous, but they are not. Some of todays organic farmers have thousands of acres of single crops, which are flown to supermarket shelves, where they are sold at lower prices than many small organic farmers can afford to sell their produce. Generally, the farmers at Esalen have less acreage and sell dozens or hundreds of varieties of fruits and vegetables at local farmers markets, to upscale restaurants and through so-called community-supported agriculture. C.S.A.s, as these arrangements are known, consist of consumers who pay before the harvest for weekly deliveries of seasonal fruits and vegetables. The sustainable agriculture these farmers practice goes beyond farming without synthetic fertilizer and pesticides. They adhere to a broader political and ecological ethos that includes attention to wildlife, soil, education and community. For most of them, the bottom line has never been their bottom line.
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Scientists have made the first discovery in 100 years of a new river dolphin species in the waters of the Araguaia river in Brazil's vast Amazon rainforest. The discovery of the Inia araguaiaensis was officially announced earlier this week in a study posted online by the Plos One scientific journal. The study's lead author, biologist Tomas Hrbek, of the Federal University of Amazonas in the city of Manaus, said the new species is the third ever found in the Amazon region. "It was an unexpected discovery that shows just how incipient our knowledge is of the region's biodiversity," Hrbek said by telephone. "River dolphins are among the rarest and most endangered of all vertebrates, so discovering a new species is something that is very rare and exciting." He said: "people always saw them in the river but no one ever took a close up look at them." Hrbek added that scientists concluded the large dolphin was a new species by analysing and comparing DNA samples of several types of dolphins from the Amazon and Araguaia river basins. There [are] about 1,000 Inia araguaiaensis dolphins living in the 2,627km-long (1,630 miles) river.
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Sow Much Good grows fresh fruit and vegetables for low-income communities in and around Charlotte, North Carolina. The seeds for Sow Much Good were planted after founder Robin Emmons helped her brother find residence in a mental health facility. Emmons realized that her brother did not respond well to the canned and sugary foods at the facility – which it served because it didn’t have the funds for fresh foods – and [so she] donated home grown produce [as a substitute]. As a result, her brother’s health improved dramatically. Emmons dedicated herself to providing access to fresh, affordable food to communities in underserved neighborhoods. Part of the mission of the organization is also to educate and engage the community to adopt healthy eating habits. Nationwide, nearly 10% of the population in the U.S. live in economically depressed areas located more than a mile from a supermarket. Those “food deserts” result in populations with greater risks of cardiovascular disease and premature death. Emmons tackled this problem locally by growing fresh fruits and vegetables and donating produce to local nonprofits. Today, she has 200 volunteers helping her tend 9 acres of crops on three sites; that produce is now sold at affordable prices. Since 2008, Sow Much Good has grown more than 26,000 pounds of fresh produce for underserved communities in Charlotte.
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A few years ago Americ Azevedo sat in a college classroom with about 15 students. It was a meditation class and he was the instructor. This past fall, that same class enrolled 603 students and took place in one of the largest lecture halls on the UC Berkeley campus. Richard Whittaker: You told me your early experiences in school were difficult. Americ Azevedo: It wasn’t until I hit first grade that I was exposed to English—and to other children. Kids punched me. I threw up all the time. I felt like I lost the light. RW: It’s interesting that you describe losing something. AA: I lost something. I feel that most people lose it at some point in their lives. But losing at that stage is so dramatic. I think school knocks it out of us. School is so artificial, so industrial. All of the sudden it’s a totally different experience from that matrix of love and all the things that make a human being comfortable. And it takes a long time to recover that feeling. There were bullies. There was one boy who beat me up and somewhere along the way I was able to communicate with him and he became my friend. Then he protected me from the other bullies. Later on I realized that the biggest protection we have as human beings is communication. Now I understand it’s a form of love—even for the bully, but it’s become twisted. But that’s how it is for so many people. Somehow the psyche has become twisted and the good has become bad and the bad has become good.
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An 89-year-old peace activist who refused to fill out the census because of its link to a U.S. military contractor is not guilty of violating the Statistics Act, a Toronto judge decided today. Audrey Tobias, who faced jail time if she had been convicted, argued she didn't file her 2011 census because it is processed using software from Lockheed Martin. Outside the Old City Hall courthouse after the ruling, the Toronto woman thanked the judge. “He put a lot of work and analysis and care into that judgment,” she said. "I respect it and I am grateful. I think it’s a significant issue for Canadians. I think people will know now what their government is all about.” Tobias said she would have been willing to go to jail. “I would have done whatever was necessary,” she said. “Under no circumstances would I have paid a fine, which was a way of saying I was guilty.” Tobias's lawyer, Peter Rosenthal, had argued that forcing her to complete the census would violate her freedoms of conscience and free expression. Judge Ramez Khawly noted that for a conviction both the act and intent of a crime must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, so he had to acquit Tobias. The judge also described the Justice Department's decision to prosecute Tobias, a Second World War veteran, as a "PR disaster." In 2011, StatsCan received 13 million completed census forms, a 98 per cent response rate. Overall, it referred 54 people for prosecution for failing to complete the mandatory census form.
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For more than a decade, Robin Emmons felt helpless as her older brother lived on the streets, eating out of garbage cans. She tried repeatedly to get him help for his mental illness, but authorities told her there was nothing they could do. After he was arrested in 2008 for damaging someone's car during a schizophrenic outburst, she was finally able to become his legal guardian and get him into a halfway house with psychiatric services. But as she watched his mental health improve, she noticed his physical health getting worse. "I learned that he was becoming borderline diabetic," she said. "He wasn't like that even when he was homeless." She investigated and found out that the nonprofit facility was mainly feeding him packaged and canned foods because it couldn't afford fresh fruits and vegetables. "I had a small garden, so I thought, 'Well, I'll just put in some extra rows,' " Emmons said. "I began making weekly deliveries of whatever was coming up." She soon realized, however, that the problem extended well beyond her brother's transitional home. While farmers markets were springing up across the city, she noticed that low-income and working-class neighborhoods had few grocery stores or places to buy fresh produce. "If you don't live in an affluent part of the city ... your easiest options are the dollar menu or the convenience store attached to a gas station," said Emmons, 45. Today, Emmons has 200 volunteers helping her tend 9 acres of crops on three sites. Since 2008, she says, her nonprofit, Sow Much Good, has grown more than 26,000 pounds of fresh produce for underserved communities in Charlotte.
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Designed by students, the small blue house wedged onto a corner of the Santa Clara University campus generates all the electricity it needs. And it needs very little. Solar cells blanket most of the roof. A separate solar array heats water. Pipes in the ceiling circulate cold water to keep the house cool. A mobile phone app controls the lights and windows. Dubbed Radiant House, the building is the university's entry in this year's Solar Decathlon, an international student competition to create energy-efficient houses that run their systems and appliances on sunlight. To win, the houses can't just be a collection of technologies. They have to feel inviting and livable. Judges grade them on comfort and curb appeal in addition to innovation. This year's decathlon culminates next month in Orange County, when 20 university teams present their homes to judges drawn from the fields of architecture, development and renewable energy. First held in 2002, the Solar Decathlon runs in two-year cycles, giving teams enough time to design, finance and build their creations. This year, students from two Bay Area schools - Santa Clara and Stanford University - will compete against teams from as far afield as Austria and the Czech Republic. The contest rules require that the houses can't be larger than 1,000 square feet and must produce at least as much energy as they consume over the course of a week. Solar panels donated by Bosch Solar Energy coat the central room's tilted roof and can generate up to 7.14 kilowatts of electricity, more than a typical home array. The panels rest on a new type of rack, made by startup company Sunplanter, that is integrated into the structure of the roof.
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Ron Finley grew up in South Central Los Angeles, a "food desert" where nutritious eats are chronically unavailable. But when the fashion designer [and] father got tired of driving 45 minutes to buy an organic tomato, he decided to grow his own. In the fall of 2010, he planted a "demonstration garden" on the strip of land between the curb and the sidewalk in front of his house in South Central Los Angeles, a neighborhood where he has lived all his life. He says he was tired of living in the "food prison"—where the lack of access to healthy foods was causing diabetes, obesity, and other health problems. "If you look at the statistics, the drive thrus literally are killing more people than the drive-bys," Finley says. Finley encouraged people to take what they needed from the garden. He shared tomatoes, peppers, melons, eggplant, pumpkins, and more with anyone who passed by his home, often people with few financial resources and little access to vegetables. In May of 2011, however, Finley received a citation from the city, which considered his plants "obstructions." They asked him to pay $400 for a permit or remove the garden. After getting 500 signatures on a petition posted on change.org and gaining the confidence of a city councilman, Finley received a permit for free and eventually provoked the city to relax its laws on curb strip usage. Since then, Finley has created the organization LA Green Grounds, which plants vegetable gardens in South Central yards free of charge and has installed public gardens in curb strips, homeless shelters, abandoned lots, and traffic medians. The all-volunteer organization has installed over 30 gardens.
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A Turkish man has staged an eight-hour silent vigil on Istanbul's Taksim Square, scene of violent clashes between police and anti-government protesters in recent weeks, inspiring hundreds of others to follow his lead. Erdem Gunduz said he wanted to take a stand against police stopping demonstrations near the square, Dogan news agency reported. He stood silently, facing the Ataturk Cultural Centre which was draped in Turkish flags and a portrait of Turkey's founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, from 6 p.m. ... on Monday. By 2 a.m. ... when the police moved in, about 300 people had joined him. Ten people, who refused to be moved on by police, were detained. Gunduz, swiftly dubbed "standing man" on social media in Turkey, inspired similar protests elsewhere in Istanbul as well as in the capital Ankara and the city of Izmir on the Aegean coast. The silent protests were in stark contrast to demonstrations at the weekend, which saw some of the fiercest clashes so far when police fired teargas and water cannon to clear thousands from Taksim Square. What began in May as a protest by environmentalists upset over plans to build on a park adjoining Taksim has grown into a movement against Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, presenting the greatest public challenge to his 10-year leadership.
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Using valuable food crops like corn and sugar cane to produce biofuels has been a highly controversial topic in an age of imminent food crises. But nobody is growing corn on the former strip mines of Eastern Kentucky. Surface mining left its mark on the Appalachian landscape through much of the 20th century, as large swaths of native forest were replaced with sparse, scrubby grassland. But University of Kentucky forestry professor Chris Barton sees in the compacted soil of old strip mines the possibility of using former surface mine land for short-rotation forestry—in order to produce fuel. Here's how it would work: Fast-growing, native trees like black locust could be grown and harvested every five to 10 years; then, the woodchips would be burned in an oxygen-restricted condition to produce combustible gases that in turn could be used to generate energy and heat. After a few generations of short-rotation harvests, the land could be transitioned to a long-term forest. Barton is the founder of Green Forests Work, a nonprofit spin-off of the Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative that seeks to reforest lands scarred by mining with native trees—all the while helping to rebuild struggling local economies. Since GFW was launched in 2008, more than 5,000 volunteers have planted nearly 1 million trees on former surface mine sites. And last year, the program received a $300,000 grant, enabling Barton to add a couple full-time staff members.
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Growing up in a rough housing project on Chicago's South Side during the early 1960s, Alexis Martinez had to hide that she was transgender. "When I came out to my mom that I was transgender, I think I was 13 or 14," Alexis says. "And she called the police. And I always remember that when the police showed up, they just laughed and told her, 'You've got a fag for a son, and there's nothing we can do about it. So, I went as macho as I could be, to mask what I really was underneath," explains Alexis, now 62. One day, [Alexis' daughter] Lesley discovered some of her father's female clothes. "It was a big to-do," Lesley says. "It was sort of, you know, my uncovering the secret." Alexis knew trying to cover up that she was transgender would mean a loss of trust with her daughter — so she told. "I was really torn between being a female role model and a dad," Alexis says. "And so, I said to myself, 'OK, well be the best parent. Whatever it takes, however I do it, you have to look out for your baby.' But one of the most difficult things for me was, I was always afraid that I wouldn't be allowed to be in my granddaughters' lives." She needn't have worried. Lesley and her husband's acceptance, Alexis says, "blew that completely out of the water. To Alexis, the openness with which her family can talk about her gender identity "is a miracle," she says. "Now I walk in love, and I try to live that way every day."
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Most of Donn Tice's customers make $4 to $6 a day. What little money they have, they guard. But they're willing to part with some of it, Tice says, for a product that can improve their lives. Tice's company, d.light, sells solar-powered lamps in the developing world. The lamps charge on their own during the daytime, shine for at least four hours at night and are designed to last more than five years. The standard model costs $30 - a significant investment for d.light's core customers. But the San Francisco startup has sold about 3 million lamps in the last five years, mostly in parts of rural Africa and India with limited access to electricity. "What we've discovered, frankly, is there's a much bigger global problem around reliable power than we imagined," said Tice, d.light's chief executive officer. D.light is one of a growing number of companies trying to make money by selling to the "bottom of the pyramid" - the world's poor. They see a vast, often-ignored pool of potential customers for a wide range of products, so long as those products serve real needs and are affordably priced. For entrepreneurs like Tice, there's the added lure of doing something that can help people pull themselves out of poverty. "I can't tell you how profoundly meaningful it is, how inspiring it is, to go to a village with our customers and go to a school where recently the students weren't using lights to study," Tice said. "It doesn't take a lot of imagination to visualize how really transformative that could be in the trajectory of their lives."
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Tough economic times and growing poverty in much of Europe are reviving a humble tradition that began some one hundred years ago in the Italian city of Naples. It's called caffč sospeso — "suspended coffee": A customer pays in advance for a person who cannot afford a cup of coffee. The barista would keep a log, and when someone popped his head in the doorway of the cafe and asked, "Is there anything suspended?" the barista would nod and serve him a cup of coffee ... for free. It's an elegant way to show generosity: an act of charity in which donors and recipients never meet each other, the donor doesn't show off and the recipient doesn't have to show gratitude. It's fitting that the tradition started in Naples, a city that prides itself on having the best coffee in Italy. The caffč sospeso tradition waned as Italy entered the boom years of postwar reconstruction and La Dolce Vita. For decades, the custom was confined mainly to the Christmas season. Now, it's made a comeback. Two years ago, with the eurozone crisis already raging, unemployment rising and small businesses closing on a daily basis, more and more Italians could no longer afford the national beverage — an espresso or a cappuccino. Then someone remembered the old Neapolitan custom. So several nongovernmental organizations got together and — with the support of Naples Mayor Luigi de Magistris — Dec.10 was formally declared "Suspended Coffee Day." The practice is now spreading to other crisis-ravaged parts of Europe.
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Ideas for co-ops may flourish, but few people understand exactly how to make theirs real. The Co-op Academy is providing answers. Founded four years ago by Omar Freilla (who recently made Ebony magazines list of the Power 100), the academy runs 16-week courses that offer intensive mentoring, legal and financial advice, and help designing logos and websites. Run by the South Bronx-based Green Worker Cooperative, the academy guides up to four teams per session through the startup process and has graduated four organizations now thriving in New York City. These include Caracol Interpreters, which is raising the bar on interpreter wages, and Concrete Green, which focuses on environmentally sound landscaping. Six more co-ops are in the pipeline. Im amazed at how little knowledge and information is out there for the average person about how co-ops function and how to start one, says Janvieve Williams Comrie, whose mother-owned cooperative Ginger Moon also came out of the program. Thats one thing the Co-op Academy really provides, the hands-on know-how. Even money for tuition ($1,500 per team) gets the treatment. Freilla is adamant that teams fundraise to cover that costeven if they can foot the bill themselves. By fundraising for the registration fee, you are promoting the vision for your cooperative, gaining supporters, and creating a buzz before the program even starts, he says. That is just the kind of support that will propel your business forward, and while youre doing it youll be getting an early opportunity to see just how well you and your teammates work together.
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Adam Grant believes that nice guys - and gals - can finish first. The young Wharton management professor, just 31, ... has spent years studying how and why certain people succeed in the workplace. It's more than just hard work, talent, luck or looking out for No. 1. He believes that it also takes a generous spirit. In his new book, Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success, Grant outlines three types of workers: givers, takers and matchers. Givers, he says, are generous about helping others, including lending a hand to junior employees, without expecting something in return. Takers may excel at "managing up" with their bosses, but they can't be bothered with their colleagues and underlings. And matchers fall somewhere in between that spectrum, handing out favors but expecting reciprocity, too. In a recent interview, Grant talked about how to be a giver. Q: What is the first step to becoming a giver? A: The first step is to figure out the people you care about helping and the forms of giving you enjoy. The evidence shows that giving is rarely sustainable when you're doing it out of a sense of guilt, duty and pressure. For some people, (the most meaningful form of giving) is to be a connector and to make an introduction, or for other people, it's sharing knowledge or expertise, solving a problem or becoming a mentor.
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Judge Debbie O'Dell-Seneca, of the Washington County Court of Common Pleas in Pennsylvania, [has issued a] historic ruling that corporations are not "persons." They cannot elevate their "private rights" above the rights of persons. In uncommonly elegant language, Judge O'Dell-Seneca cites the 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution as she declares: "It is axiomatic that corporations, companies, and partnerships have no 'spiritual nature,' 'feelings,' 'intellect,' 'beliefs,' 'thoughts,' 'emotions,' or 'sensations,' because they do not exist in the manner that humankind exists... They cannot be 'let alone' by government, because businesses are but grapes, ripe upon the vine of the law, that the people of this Commonwealth raise, tend, and prune at their pleasure and need." The judgement came after several Western Pennsylvania newspapers had gone to court to reveal the monies one family had received from Range Resources Corp. and other corporations included in a complaint to settle claims of water contamination caused by fracking. The amount: $750,000. This ruling by O'Dell-Seneca, which caused a corporate settlement to a single family to become unsealed, will lend strength to 150 cases now being brought in eight other states around the U.S. Calling it "A New Civil Rights Movement," the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund of Mercerberg, PA documents the victory.
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The Goldman Environmental Prize, the most prestigious award for grassroots environmental work, [was awarded] in San Francisco to six activists who struggled against the odds to protect the world ecosystem. Profiles of winners: Aleta Baun, [of] Indonesia ... was born to a family ... on the western half of the island of Timor. [She] organized villagers against mining companies that started clearing the forests and taking marble out of the mountains. Her efforts led to threats and an assassination attempt by mining interests, forcing Baun, known by villagers as Mama Aleta, to hide in the forest with her baby. The movement grew despite the intimidation. In 2010, the mining companies caved to the pressure and halted mining on all four sites within the Mollo territories. Azzam Alwash, [of] Iraq ... led the effort to restore the Mesopotamian marshland in southern Iraq where he had spent much of his childhood. The marshland, a lush oasis that had been dubbed the Garden of Eden because it was teeming with birds, water buffalo, fox and otter, was drained and poisoned in the mid-1990s by Hussein in retaliation for a Shiite Arab uprising. Alwash ... founded a nonprofit called Nature Iraq and developed a master plan for restoring his beloved marshes. Despite constant threats from armed terrorists, the Alwash-led environmental movement has so far restored half the original marshland, which is scheduled this spring to become the nation's first national park. Alwash is now leading the fight in Iraq to block development of a chain of 23 dams along the border with Turkey and Syria that would reduce the flow of water in Iraq to a trickle.
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The milieu at Shantivan, a garden in Mumbais tony Malabar Hill area, on February 17 was like a hangover from Valentines Day. Placards displaying messages like Love is all we need were tied to tree branches. The occasion was the second monthly lunch hosted by Seva Caf. Omnipresent at the venue was a bespectacled man [named] Siddharth Sthalekar, who was orchestrating this generosity enterprise. About three years ago, he was the co-head of the derivatives trading desk and the head of algorithmic trading at Edelweiss Capital. [One] morning in 2010 [he took the decision] to throw it all away. For some time, the 31-year-old Mumbaikar had been contemplating quitting his cushy job to explore if there is an alternative to the premise of accumulation that seemed to drive individuals in the corporate world. When he finally took the plunge, he set out to travel across India with his wife Lahar. Over the next six months, as they visited several non-profit organisations, they woke up to the concept of gift economy where goods and services are extended without any formal quid pro quo. This motto formed the cornerstone of Moved by Love, an incubator at Gandhi Ashram in Ahmedabad, which carries out various projects. One such project, Seva Caf, was in hibernation. Sthalekar ... and his wife became its core volunteers and helped reopen it in September 2011. Seva Caf practises giving, the antithesis to accumulation. At the caf, volunteers cook and serve meals every week from Thursday to Sunday for free. What is Sthalekars takeaway from the experiment? The idea, he says, is to trust the assumption that every individual, irrespective of his economic standing, can be generous. [He] hopes that people will develop the habit of being generous even outside the cafin all environments and circumstances.
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Many 16-year-olds might covet a smartphone, an Xbox, maybe some expensive new sneakers or even a car. Ronald Hennig just wanted a suit so he could attend a relative's funeral. "I didn't really own even a shirt and tie or dress shoes," he said. "I was seeing some of my old family members, and it was kind of embarrassing to not have a suit when everyone else would have one." The teenager, who had been in and out of foster care for much of his childhood, was living in a group home at the time. His caseworker was unable to justify the nonessential expense. But an anonymous benefactor stepped in to help Hennig through a website called One Simple Wish. "I got custom-fitted for the suit and I was able to go to the funeral," said Hennig, now 18. "I could pay the same respect as everyone else." One Simple Wish was started by Danielle Gletow to help grant the wishes of children in foster care. Since 2008, the nonprofit has granted more than 4,000 wishes for children living in 35 states. Since 2006, Gletow and her husband, Joe, have been foster parents to several children, eventually adopting one of them. Over the years, many friends and family members expressed a desire to help other children in the system, short of becoming foster parents themselves. "(They) would say, 'I really wish there was something I could do, but I don't want to be a foster parent,' " Gletow said. "I just felt like, this is my opportunity to create something that makes it possible for all of these children who need something to get connected to all of these wonderful people that are out there, that want to help them."
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