No Passengers http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth: only crew. --McLuhan Tue, 15 May 2012 10:35:50 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 iCoal http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NoPassengers/~3/w_WskLGdUL4/icoal http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/icoal#comments Tue, 15 May 2012 10:35:50 +0000 Brian Fitzgerald http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/?p=1460 Why is Apple fueling a 21st century data cloud with a 19th century energy source? If the internet were a country, it would be the 5th largest energy consumer on the planet. At the moment, way too much of its infrastructure is run on coal. As data centres get bigger and bigger, they’re either going to put the wind in the sails of more coal use, or choose renewable energy, and make coal expansion fight the headwind.

Cupertino has tried to turn this into a math question to determine whether they’re better or worse than Microsoft, Amazon, and the other big data centre players. Personally, I don’t think they really want to be comparing themselves to that lot. I expect better of Apple. I expect the company that makes insanely great products that I love to do as they say and “Think Different.” I expect a company that pays attention to how a circuit board looks or how a package opens to pay attention to the fuel source that runs their data.

Agree? Sign my petition here.

Apple's iCloud is fuelled by coal?

I don’t want an iCloud with a mercury lining.


]]> http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/icoal/feed 0 http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/icoal The Rant: Bruce Sterling #SXSW http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NoPassengers/~3/GR2lHHPD0bE/the-rant-bruce-sterling-sxsw http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/the-rant-bruce-sterling-sxsw#comments Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:43:55 +0000 Brian Fitzgerald http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/?p=1440 Every year, my favorite part of SXSW is Bruce Sterling’s closing rant. Sterling is a science-fiction writer, futurist, and self-described “Design Critic for things not yet made.” Every year, I hear newbies describe his performance as “disjointed.” Well, yeah: so is the reality he’s describing. Every year, he lifts the veil of exuberant long boom techno-puppy optimism to remind us, not without kindness, of current dystopic reality and warn us about what to keep an eye on as we all skip happily down the road toward tommorrowland.


]]> http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/the-rant-bruce-sterling-sxsw/feed 0 http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/the-rant-bruce-sterling-sxsw We Are Legion premiers at SXSW http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NoPassengers/~3/huQp-92OdkY/we-are-legion-premiers-at-sxsw http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/we-are-legion-premiers-at-sxsw#comments Mon, 12 Mar 2012 14:56:41 +0000 Brian Fitzgerald http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/?p=1426 Premiering to a packed house of more than 9000, (ok, a packed house of 600, but if you get that joke, see this film) “We are Legion: the story of the Hacktivists” rocked the socks off of SXSW last night. Ovations throughout. Masked spokespersons nailing their thoughts to the door. Courage, crazy creativity, and rock hard principle thrown in a blender with anarchic, apolitical Loki worship.

I loved this film. I loved everything about this film. I wanted to tattoo this film on my chest. See it. And help answer the challenge posed by Mercedes Haefer, implicated in committing an online sit-in at the gates of Pay Pal and Master Card: “This is the point in history that you choose if protest is allowed online.”

Fact: the average sentence for computer “crime” in the US is years longer than the average sentence for a pedophile. This is the story of the 99% versus the 1% tracked all the way back to the MIT roots of prankster hijinks to Steve Jobs’ phone phreaking to 4Chan and LULZ to the roots of Occupy.

Do. Not. Miss. This. Film.


]]> http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/we-are-legion-premiers-at-sxsw/feed 0 http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/we-are-legion-premiers-at-sxsw Cyborg Anthropology http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NoPassengers/~3/Qq3Q_FCvFKY/cyborg-anthropology http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/cyborg-anthropology#comments Sun, 11 Mar 2012 23:08:15 +0000 Brian Fitzgerald http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/?p=1413 Amber Case is the original Cyborg Anthropologist. These are my somewhat disjointed notes from a great talk.

Ambient location and the future of the interface.

The future of the interface is that it will disappear — reducing our unnatural actions #AmberCase #sxlb #sxswi
@Swankins
Nicola Swankie


From solid to liquid to air: how we change state — buttons on the phone are liquid, not physical.How do they become air?

An anthropologist would look at our phones and think they were babies. We have devices in our pocket that cry and we need to pick them up and settle them down.
You need to feed them and put them to sleep at night.
cell phone baby
We are 60,000 people in this room if you count the people we bring in with our contact lists.

You can add new contacts to your phone and it doesn’t get heavier. Print out all the documents and images files on your phone? It weighs 2,000 pounds.

Amber printed her Facebook wall on„, a wall. one month worth of data covered an exhibition sized room.

Ethereal storage is ephemeral. Stone carving is the most robust archival system we’ve found.

We are persistent paleontologists, digging into our email archives to find remnants of the past.

Nick Rodrigues, Email Garden: fake grass grew at the rate he receive email.

Technology and its discontents. It makes you look bad. We have superhuman powers. We can click a button and listen to what’s happening on the other side of the world.

Cell phones: the new cigarettes. Bus Stop? Phone comes out the way smokes used to.

RT @ajschwab: Persistent theme at #sxsw today: tech is a drug. #ambercase “In 5 min at the bus stop we used to have a cigarette, now we …
@Gal_butnot_Girl
Gal Oppenheimer

Steve Mann: Wore 80 pounds of equipment in 1981 and live streamed his life. You become inhuman when you assume the position of typing at a laptop, scrunched down, shoulders slumped — he wanted the technology to adapt to HIM, not the other way around. Over course of two decades gear started at 80 pounds then 40, then 20, then 10. Now it’s all in a headset that does a laser projection onto his eye.

Diminished reality: camera over one eye, processing loop around the back of his head, broadcast camera in the other eye. He can get augmented reality messages from wife monitoring the feed. He can erase brands from his image that he doesn’t want to see.

Used one handed twiddler keyboard to write, up to 90wpm.

He edits Wikiepedia articles when waiting for green at crosswalks.

Skeumorphs: old tech simulated in new tech — book reading apps that give you a crumpling animation when you paginate. She really really hates this. Really.

Kelly Dobson: why do we teach machines our language — let’s learn theirs. Build a blender you turn on by whirring at it. (Danger: what if you have a dog??)

“Calm Technoogy” This just works, I get on with my life. Your actions become buttons. Invisible interfaces, trigger based interactions.

Haptic Location: wear a belt that buzzes your skin every few seconds locating North relative to your body.

Location-based context allows you to be embodied in your world rather than tethered to a 2-dimensional screen. — #AmberCase
@boardofus
Melea Seward

Inventor wore it on his bike and discovered he had a sixth sense. He always knew where is house was. He knew how far he was. Why use vision for map and direction — should be compressed into another sense interface.

Tribe that has only words for north, east etc, not left, behind etc can sense direction even in closed rooms. Wow. #sxsw #AmberCase @jugnoo
@rohnjaymiller
Rohn Jay Miller

Your phone will be a remote control for reality. Put a geofence around your home, lights come on when you cross it. Tell your house you’ll be home in 5 minutes. Put a geofence at your bus stop, tell your phone to wake you up when you get there.


]]> http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/cyborg-anthropology/feed 1 http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/cyborg-anthropology Patterns, moustaches, games http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NoPassengers/~3/Qe-u2MwoSD8/patterns-moustaches-games http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/patterns-moustaches-games#comments Sat, 10 Mar 2012 16:56:32 +0000 Brian Fitzgerald http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/?p=1405 SXSW began with a disappointment. My all-time favorite SXSW presenter, Kathy Sierra, was ill and unable to present on “Gamification and the battle for the user’s soul,” which I dearly would have loved to have seen. Kathy was influential in making me think deeply how Greenpeace could move from an engagement offer of “Join us because we rock” to “Join us because we’ll make YOU rock,” and is profoundly wise about things ranging from user interface design to hacking the reptilian brain’s attention centres to Icelandic horses.

The day got better, though, with three rocking good sessions.

“Brands as patterns” tackled the question of how to transition from the “Mad Men” days of advertising and PR in which a brand was established with a rigid handbook of rules about what it stood for and the key to establishing it in the public mind was simple repetition in as many broadcast media as possible. In the era of Social Media, the suggestion went, a brand isn’t owned by a corporation, it’s an interaction, an interface, a series of transactions — in short, a pattern. Implication: corporations no longer own their brands, they create them through that interaction, by what they do, not by what they say. Which, of course, goes a long way to explaining why a contradiction between those things, exposed, becomes a terminal velocity Social Media Meltdown. It also explains the leverage that activist groups now have against corporate ill-behaviour: their reputations have been democratized.

“reptition in context in digital world makes, brands unresponsive and out of step with the audience”, Marc Shillum #patterns
@Shearmans
Sarah Shearman

The guy who wrote the intel jingle is on this panel! #patterns #sxsw.
@Swankins
Nicola Swankie

Some brands DO rather than promising to do. #patterns #sxsw
@wplayford
Bill Playford

Mix with a pinch of MacLuhan and shake well> “Digital isn’t a medium; it’s the age we’re in.” Greg Johnson #patterns #sxswi
@brianfit
Brian Fitzgerald

Why patterns? Unique moments and patterns drive brands forward & define our identity. #patterns #ATSXSW
@bekahlockner
Bekah Lockner

Yes! #patterns #SXSW familiar patterns are easily recognized even with variations (like misspelled words)
@sazzollini
Sandy Azzollini

RT @brianfit: In the social era, a brand is a relationship and interface, an interaction: not repeated, controlled consistency. #patterns
@SuziDafnis
SuziDafnis

Did we just hear the Intel four tone mnemonic in Beethoven’s 5th? #SXSWi #patterns
@brianfit
Brian Fitzgerald

This: explains the meltdowns when contradicting: RT @eknip: “Brands are defined by what they DO, not by what they SAY.” #sxsw #patterns
@brianfit
Brian Fitzgerald

“Can growing a Moustache Change the World” was a “hugely popular in a tiny room” session, in which Movember founder Adam spoke about how an idea for a fun social event — growing a mustaches in November and shaving it off December 1st — transitioned to a cause (raising money and awareness around prostate cancer) with 450 dudes in Australia to the world’s biggest cancer fundraising event bringing in 117 million last year. Significantly, the idea was born in a pub. It was run by marketers and businessmen, not policy wonks. In fact, the biggest cancer charity in Australia turned them down when they pitched the concept — whoops. This was a wide-ranging, intimate (we were crushed) conversation which hit lots of buttons. Some big takeaways below.

#sxswmovember was inspired by women’s health & breast cancer awareness
@kimmediately
Kim Ware

Love it. The idea of Movember came to be over beers in Australia. Beer fuels creativity! #sxswmovember
@nikki_little
Nikki Little

Movemebr was started by four friends. Proof that small things can make a huge impact. #sxswmovember #health #causes
@createthegood
Create The Good

Prostate cancer kills as many as breast cancer, but there is far less conversation about it. Movember started that awareness. #sxswmovember
@caseymars20
Casey Hushon

Majority of donors raising money for Movemebr the first year were women. #sxswmovember
@createthegood
Create The Good

Movember raised $117 million and is the largest prostate cancer supporter. But it’s really about the awareness it’s raised. #sxswmovember
@caseymars20
Casey Hushon

“Even more important than the money we raised were the conversations we started.” #sxswmovember
@MovemberAustin
Movember Austin

Brilliant. In Canada 300 of the NHL pro players grew ‘taches for #Movember — and every male in Canada watches hockey. #sxswmovember
@brianfit
Brian Fitzgerald

“how do you tell the difference between a Mo Bro and a hipster?” “December 1″ heard at #SXSWMovember #SXSWMO
@Movember
Movember

bkgd of the movember staff is not non-profit, but things like business, marketing, tech. gives them an edge/diff perspective #sxswmovember
@adr512
april

“We want to be known as the organization that changed the world & cured prostate cancer”-@adamgarone #sxswmovember
@knowinsky
Kelli Nowinsky

“Superbetter” brought Jane McGonigal back to the stage with a strong reposte to the Colbert line “Am I really going to lie on my death bed regretting that I didn’t play more video games.” See my blog of a previous Jane Keynote for her original premise, which was roughly that gaming is statistically demonstrated to have so many benefits, we should be encouraging and our kids to do more, not less of them. (Up to a point, that is — there is an addiction threshold where benefits collapse). For today’s talk, she took the five most common regrets that researchers have identified as consistently expressed by the terminally ill, and systematically made the case that the right kind of games address every one of them: I wish I hadn’t worked so hard; I wish I’d spent more time with family; I wish I’d kept up with old friends; I wish I’d been who I wanted and not someone’s expectation.We then all played her game, Superbetter, which is designed to create micro tasks which will improve four key performance areas of your life. By Jane’s calculation, I will live 7 minutes longer for having spent that hour in her seminar. I think I just blew my extra time making a video of the queue at sxsw.

“we are moving from the pursuit of happiness to the happiness of the pursuit” #SXSWi #superbetter
@mosejames
Mose James IV

The opposite of the word virtual is not real. It means essence, possibility. Its opposite is “actualized.” #superbetter #sxswi
@brianfit
Brian Fitzgerald

#superbetter part of a new trend in games that @avantgame calls “actualizing games”- games that help us actualize our potential
@RCCNinc
Raccoon

RT @MattaMediaGirl: A visual interpretation of Jane McGonigal’s talk about gaming & app #Superbetter #sxsw http://t.co/eKDO7Dzn
@nattergraeme
natalie graeme

Jane McGonigal’s brave cat mnemonic for what we need to unlock potential. #sxswi #superbetter http://t.co/4Ad6Dl0U
@brianfit
Brian Fitzgerald


]]> http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/patterns-moustaches-games/feed 0 http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/patterns-moustaches-games SXSW: Digital Gummy Bears, Zotz, and Jolly Ranchers http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NoPassengers/~3/J9sZBJdOCG8/sxsw-digital-gummy-bears-zotz-and-jolly-ranchers http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/sxsw-digital-gummy-bears-zotz-and-jolly-ranchers#comments Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:09:00 +0000 Brian Fitzgerald http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/?p=1398 It’s the best candy store you can imagine, if you have a sweet tooth for big ideas, new apps, the subversive nature of technology, and the human and social implications of the Digiscene Era. It’s SXSW in Austin, Texas.

I’ll be doing my best to consume as much of the intellectual energy here as I can, and capture it in random snags. Here’s some of the software that’s helping me.

Apps I can’t do without at #SXSWi: Blackbird Pie plugin for WordPress: make tweets pretty when you blog ‘em. http://t.co/k6hLlgxM
@brianfit
Brian Fitzgerald

Boxcar! Essential. Pings my phone when any number of triggered events I set up happen involving any of my social media. I asked it to give me a nudge if I get a new follower on Twitter, or a message on Facebook, which I can configure to be as attention grabbing or quiet and retiring as I like.

Now, ADD the power of IFTTT (If This then That) to Boxcar and you can create your own information robot which scans the horizon and tugs at your sleeve when something important happens. IFTTT allows you to put together recipes, bit like Yahoo Pipes for Social Media but simpler. IF someone posts a mention of the word “Greenpeace” on Reddit, that turns up in my MetaReddit RSS feed. IFTTT monitors that feed, and whenever a new item appears, sends a notice to me via BoxCar. It can also monitor for mentions of the “Zombie Apocalypse” and I also use it to archive my tweets to Evernote (searchable!!!), ping me when anyone comments here on my blog, and email me Gizmodo’s iPad app of the week.

Hashable lets me keep track of who I meet by simply entering their twitter handle on my phone. Once in, I have a geotagged reference of where we met, we can exchange vCards, and tweet the meet to the rest of our networks. Supergreat.

And I’m trialing a whole heap of new stuff which looks good including three apps that do a possibly creepy, but cool thing of alerting you to the common interests of people in your geographic vicinity, or who have checked in to the same venue with Foursquare. Who’s in Starbucks now? Sonar will tell me, AND will tell me how I’m connected to the people there by analyzing my Foursquare, Facebook, and Twitter networks. Highlight will do the same thing, but only if someone else has the Highlight app. Glancee is a variation on that theme, but is prettier and a bit spooky in how deep it mines your social graph to find common interests. It reports, for instance, that I might want to have a chat with X here in the conference centre because he likes Vonnegut and I like Pynchon, we both use HootSuite, and we’ve both listened to songs by Regina Spektor recently. Well, it’ll certainly break the ice.

I got better results from Sonar than Highlight on the way over simply because it’s tied to FourSquare and doesn’t require building a critical mass of audience that have a new app. Highlight told me it would let me know when anyone interesting came by, but stayed quiet in my pocket while Sonar and Glancee let me know that other people in the airport lounge also followed Mashable, liked the New Yorker magazine, lived in Amsterdam, and had been to my local Bagel & Beans.

Localmind also looks good: allows you to ask questions about local conditions from local experts or people present in a place when you ask. I used it to query the condition of the badge line at the convention centre last night, but it’s more geared toward “Where’s the best sandwich in this neighborhood” kind of persistent information. Nice interface, great mapping of your vicinity and the conversations that are going on about it.

One or more of these is going to go BOOM the same way Twitter did in 2006 — but the SXSW crowd is uniquely suited to this kind of vicinity software. It’s a hive mind of early adopters who share a lot of interests.

So much to see and say. I’m experimenting with Storify’s AUTOMAGIC blogging of SXSW, which will be capturing stuff I put out via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc and doing that Storify thing of making it all Timeliney and pretty. First installment is here, we’ll see how it works.


]]> http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/sxsw-digital-gummy-bears-zotz-and-jolly-ranchers/feed 0 http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/sxsw-digital-gummy-bears-zotz-and-jolly-ranchers Rockin the Mob Squad Skillshare http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NoPassengers/~3/W7NZgVW30Gk/gpdms http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/gpdms#comments Mon, 05 Mar 2012 06:46:40 +0000 Brian Fitzgerald http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/?p=1385 I’m still hungover from the Greenpeace Digital Mobilisation Skillshare: and I’m not just talkin about the after party after-effects (Pirates, Ninjas, iPad band, say no more…); I’m talking about the profound kind of headache you get from imbibing so much heady and thought-provoking information that you come home reeling. As Michael Baillie(@mikebailllie) put it, the whole thing was “SupercalifragilisticexpedaliAWESOME.”

DSC_9102

We’ve had “Webby” skillshares in the past, but Michael Silberman (@silbatron) and his team put together the first ever assembly of digital practitioners (@kgrandia: “Don’t call me a Webby”), volunteer coordinators, volunteers, and fundraisers — breaking across some of the separated silos we tend towards organisationally. I’ve been slaving away over hot html in the online activism pizza factory for a long time, and one of my regrets is that we didn’t start to bridge the online/offline divide much earlier in the game. The power of bits in the ether is exponentially stronger when it’s matched with boots on the ground, yet with a very few exceptions Greenpeace’s network of volunteers and its network of online activists have been hoeing separate rows. Thanks to some inspired efforts by a whole bunch of folks, Michael among them along with Markus Power (@markus_power), Nicole Knapp (@knabbiknapp), and Anna Keenan (@annakeenan) in particular, we’re watching the Good Ship Greenpeace turn toward a new course toward more supporter participation, and a widening of the ways that people can campaign with us. At the skillshare, both Greenpeace Germany and Greenpeace Netherlands showed off shiny digital networking points for self-organising volunteer efforts: Greenwire and GreenAction.

Even better, the skillshare drew in organising power and wider movemement context with the participation of Max Berger (@maxberger) of Occupy Wall Street, Diego San Juan of Los Indignados, and Giorgio Jackson (@GiorgioJackson) of the Chilean Student Movement.

I loved the fact that while we were sharing recipes for the digital mobilisation secret sauce in the Netherlands, Occupy, Greenpeace, and other fellow travelers were training together on the real meat and potatoes of climbing, locking on, and the technical arts of non-violent direct action. (That’d be vegan faux-meat and organic potatoes in this case).

DSC_9274

We talked alternative organising models with Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman (@TarenSK of SumOfUs.org, and Jon Warnow (@Jwarnow) of 350.org. We had super-fun sessions on Games from Heidi Boisvert and insight-warping stories from Jonah Sachs (@jonahsachs) of Meatrix, Store Wars, and Story of Stuff fame (when his book, Winning the Story Wars, comes out, every activist communicator needs to put their paws on it. Trust me: just go pre-order it right now.) I could go on and on and on: I left feeling like I do at SXSW every year, that I’ve only managed to skim the surface of a very deep pool, and had to make hard choices between simultaneous sessions of seismic, tectonic thought.

I think there were three or four of us in the group of 120 who can remember the very first Greenpeace “webby” skillshares, where we hatched subversive plans to infect The Firm with this new and exciting thing called “Cyberactivism” that we were inventing together. We were challenged to define it, confine it, explain how this mysterious geekery worked, defend it from accusations of betraying the core principles of the organisation, suffer internal take-down orders for material that used (good heavens) humour to make a point, and explain, again and again, what possessed us to believe that change would ever be brought about by a tribe of mouse-potatoes clicking on links. We won that battle decisively. Now, some of the same questions and challenges are swirling around the idea of Greenpeace becoming a mobilising force, of Greenpeace supporters being invited to campaign in self-organising groups, of Greenpeace accepting the need to see itself as less of an independent institution and more as an essential part of a diverse and powerful movement.

But winning the war for the future is going to require a radical upgrade of our organisation’s operating system. It’s time to move way past Beta and shoot straight for 2.0

If we’re to achieve that, those of us who have been digital deckhands, and the Good Ship itself, in its slow-turning manner, will need to embrace the fact that while change happens online, revolutions happen IRL. The Mob Squad skillshare was a big organisational leap toward a better future.

DSC_8997
See the session notes, Flickr Set, Tweets and the Storify Chronicle.


]]> http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/gpdms/feed 5 http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/gpdms Xena, Princess Warrior or Rainbow Warrior? http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NoPassengers/~3/ftrC1qV_6B8/xena-princess-warrior-or-rainbow-warrior http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/xena-princess-warrior-or-rainbow-warrior#comments Fri, 24 Feb 2012 08:42:23 +0000 Brian Fitzgerald http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/?p=1378

Xena, aka Lucy Lawless, opposes oil drilling in the Arctic

Lucy Lawless, who played Xena, Warrior Princess, boarded an oil drilling rig in New Zealand that’s headed up to the arctic to drill for oil. Because, you know, that’s such an awesome economic opportunity now that the ice is retreating due to that global warming that’s caused by all that fossil fuel we’re burning. And people say irony is dead.

Take action

Lucy’s Page

My Pinterest board for #Savethearctic


]]> http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/xena-princess-warrior-or-rainbow-warrior/feed 0 http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/xena-princess-warrior-or-rainbow-warrior 30 years with Greenpeace today. http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NoPassengers/~3/Hd37b74kwT4/30-years-with-greenpeace-today http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/30-years-with-greenpeace-today#comments Wed, 15 Feb 2012 09:13:30 +0000 Brian Fitzgerald http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/?p=1372 It’s been called to my attention that it’s the 30th anniversary of the day I stuck my foot in the door of a Greenpeace office, as evidenced by this rather embarrassingly scruffy canvasser badge:

Canvass Badge, 1982

I don’t really have much more to say than I did five years ago, in the blog below about that first day and what canvassing in the US was like back in the 80s. Except perhaps that the story horde has grown a bit, the number of truly amazingly gifted and passionate people I’ve been lucky to work with has expanded greatly in the last five years, the organisation has both become more streamlined and effective, and despite some astounding and glorious wins, we have a healthy dissatisfaction with what we’ve achieved versus what needs to be done, and ambitions to shift into a higher gear. I’m a little greyer, a little greater of girth, but it’s profoundly satisfying to see Greenpeace is getting younger and faster, and eager to move out of its parent’s house.

Here’s what I wrote this day in 2006:

Twenty Five years ago today, I stuck my foot in a door.

It was a trick that Cathy Dees, my field manager and trainer, taught me, for ensuring that no suburban housewife in any devo turf was going to terminate my rap before I’d got to the bit about the slaughter of the harp seal pups, the big eyes, and the ask. That was the day I became a canvasser for Greenpeace.

If you’ve never gone door to door for a cause, the next few paragraphs may not mean much to you, beacuse what I’m about to say here requires first-hand experience to understand, and if you ain’t been there, you ain’t been there. But I’ll do my best to explain.

You travel with four or five companions in a car or a van to a cheap diner somewhere in the American suburbs. You have your dinner, you chit chat and gossip, your field manager tells you what issues may be hot, what Greenpeace is doing that might be on TV, what issues might be resonating in this particular neighborhood, what the organization is pushing at the moment. Then they hand out your turf map. That’s a xeroxed slip of paper you tack to the back of your clipboard with highlighting in colored pencil which shows you the confines of the area you’ll be covering. You also get a set of 3x5 cards listing any current members that are in the area so you can ask them to renew. You all plunk down money for your meal, and somehow, every single time, the pot is short and the field manager has to work it out.

Your field manager drops you off one by one on different corners. High performers get dropped off first. Personal favorites or people on a down day go out last to minimize street-time.
And there you are, somewhere in America, where the most reliable signal that someone is home is the blue flicker of a television screen on the curtains. You’re alone with a clipboard, and a map, and a job to do: convince people to join Greenpeace.
I spent two years walking up the driveways of good turf and bad in all kinds of weather, praying to see a Volvo with a bumper sticker, but often getting a pickup with an American flag decal. Canvassers are improvisational demographics experts, and after a while you could just look at a house and read the secret signs that told you if this was a potential Greenpeace member or not. Among hopeful signals, none in the 80s rivalled a Volvo in the drive with a bumper sticker of any description. If a pet came to the door with the owner, it was a piss-poor canvasser that didn’t walk away with a membership. It that pet was a golden retriever, you generally didn’t have to open your mouth: they already had their checkbook out.
The pickup truck with the flag decal was almost always a lost cause, with the one exception I can remember of a right-wing militarist who surprised me with a back-slapping, crew-cut, have-a-beer-goodbuddy kind of welcome. As it turned out, his incomplete knowledge of Greenpeace led him to believe we were an anti-Russian organization, as I slowly realized amid his paeans to our work at “going after them damn Commie whalers.” At most doors, I used whales or seals as my opening salvo, then moved on to talk avidly about our disarmament campaign and the need for a nuclear weapons test ban — the issue that brought me to Greenpeace. But on this occasion, I’ll admit, I just took his check, and gave him a heartfelt thank-you for his contribution to world peace.

There are a hundred stories. The old woman who stood silently in the door and just pointed at me with narrow eyes. The National Rifle Association member who chased me off his property with gun in hand. The ancient fellow who I believe had me confused for a Jehova’s witness (or given the look I had in 1982, Amish) when he heard the first sentence of my rap and said “Greenpeace? No thank you, I have my own religion.”

I was a decent canvasser. Not an extraordinary one, but most nights a solid deliverer of memberships and petition signatures. I say most, because every canvasser runs hot and cold. Canvassing is an emotionally draining exercise. You need to be pumped up, confident, able to convey passion and inspiration. And there’s no faking it: you have to genuinely feel it if you want to convey it to a stranger at the door. Because every door is never more than 3 seconds away from slamming in your face, and the reasons for slamming that door are infinite, the messages that will swing it open, few. There were nights that I bounded out of the car on my mission, and nights my field manager practically had to pry my hands from the upholstery to get me out into the streets. On the nights you didn’t believe in what you were doing, the evidence was measurable in dollars and cents.

The first night that I broke $500 in a night and got a ‘grand slam’ — what we called a $5, $10, $25, $50, AND the elusive $100 donation — I crawled into the van that rounded us up from our turf and said nothing. Normally, a good night makes a canvasser effusive. Everybody shares their tally. Everybody shares their stories. I remember just settling into the car seat, listening to a Genesis tune on the radio, and savoring what I’d done as the van rolled through Boston and the steetlights flickered past.

I’d convinced someone to take action to save the world. Yeah, you can say it was only a check. You can say it’s an easy way to shift the guilt and responsibility off your own plate. You can quibble about how much of that check gets lost in administrative costs. But I’d talked to people who didn’t know what Acid Rain was. I’d told people about whaling. I explained how we thought the world could get rid of nuclear weapons. I told them about people who had hope, and were acting on that hope, and needed other people to hope along with them as well. And they opened their doors, and they invited me in, and they gave me money. They voted for what I had to say. They joined Greenpeace. Maybe all they had to give was a few bucks. But a few bucks would buy a spark plug. And a spark plug would fire an engine. And an engine would drive an inflatable boat into the path of a harpoon. And those two bucks would be a part of what saved that whale. And saving that whale would be part of what was needed to save the world.

In the car that night, I felt a sense of direction my life hadn’t had until then; that I was on a path, I had something to give, and I believed in what I was doing.

I started out canvassing a couple nights a week. Then it was Monday through Saturday. Then I was volunteering in the office on Sunday too. Then I was helping out from 9am until we hit the streets at 3pm, canvassing my turf, and rolling back to the office around 9pm. When it became obvious I had to quit my day job to maintain my Greenpeace habit, I threw the I-Ching. “Work on what has been spoiled” was the hexagram that decided things. And that was that.

I stuck it out as a canvasser for almost two years, volunteering the rest of my time, before a salaried position opened up as a disarmament campaigner, and I was off the streets.

Tonight I’m up late at home after a day in the office that began at 8:45 and ended at 11pm. I’ve been working on a website that tries to convince people to take action to save the whales. It’s late and I’m tired and somehow in the 25 years since that night in the canvass van and this I’ve become older: a father, a husband, a homeowner — things that kid in that van couldn’t even imagine becoming. I’ve lived in a half a dozen countries. I’ve sailed the Arctic Circle and the Bay of Bengal. I’ve walked to ground zero of a nuclear weapons test. I’ve been to sea, I’ve gone to jail. I’ve helped set up Greenpeace offices in Rome and Moscow. I’ve had laughs and drinks and adventures and horrible mishaps and miserable experiences with some of the most inspiring people to have graced this planet and this time. And I’m still working for Greenpeace.

Andrew Davies, who has been around a while now himself, was telling some young volunteers about what 25 years in Greenpeace meant. He was trying to explain why that’s rare, and why Greenpeace has a high turnover rate in people coming and going. “If you stay too long, it makes you crazy,” he said. When I mentioned that wasn’t a very flattering comment on my mental health, he looked at me and said “Let me put it to you this way. I’m not taking it back.”

OK, point taken. I’ve spent 25 years trying to keep in balance the daily doses of despair and the general sense of hope that by making a choice to do something for the planet, people can actually achieve something for the planet. And there are days I believe that mightily, with all my being, and days I cluck with ancient pity at how naïve a 49-year-old man can be.

But I take comfort in that old Bernard Shaw chestnut: “The reasonable person adapts to the world; the unreasonable person persists in trying to adapt the world to themselves. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable person.”

In short, you gotta be crazy to try. But if nobody tries, game over.

So Cathy Dees, wherever you are, I’ll drink a toast tonight to the heights of unreasonableness you introduced me to, and for making me stick my foot in a door called Greenpeace.

Then I’ll put down my glass, and get back to work.


]]> http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/30-years-with-greenpeace-today/feed 3 http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/30-years-with-greenpeace-today Screw nature: it’s about the fate of the Lolcatz http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NoPassengers/~3/cuT-Gm-lCiI/screw-nature-its-about-the-fate-of-the-lolcatz http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/screw-nature-its-about-the-fate-of-the-lolcatz#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2012 07:06:10 +0000 Brian Fitzgerald http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/?p=1368 Screw nature. It’s about cat videos.

I was a proud participant in the SOPA protest. This website, along with 25 Greenpeace websites and every website I could influence, went dark to demand the internet remain a haven of free speech, and the free and creative playground that it is now: a safe place to put popular culture in a blender and give it a whirl, a place where We the People determined the democratic discourse, not our corporate overlords.

I was also a proud participant in the Copenhagen Climate petition — the worldwide attempt to hold world government’s feet to the fire of public opinion and set them skedaddling to do something about — you remember it — that slow cook problem facing our froggy planet in it’s pot of warming water on the fossil– fueled range.

When I compared these two global mobilizations, it left a bad bad taste in my mouth. In a matter of not even weeks, the internet stood up to save itself from certain death in numbers that made the Copenhagen effort look like a nursing home petition to enlarge the bingo cards.

We — and when I say “we” I mean You, I mean Me — rightly accuse governments of having their priorities back-asswards when they can find trillions of dollars to bail out banks within months, but balk at the 10 million over three years they agreed to put down to save the worlds forests and buy us precious time to wean ourselves from our vodka and milk diet of fossil fuels. But what did We just do?

In 2009, a year-long effort by a huge swath of civil society raised 17 million signatures to demand climate action at Copenhagen.

Last month, in a matter of mere days We amassed more than 100 million signatures to save the internet.

The fate of the Siberian Tiger, the Orang-utan, and that most charismatic mega fauna, adorable baby homo sapiens of the future, continue their slide to oblivion unchecked. But it may be time that We simply stop talking about them, and focus on the threat that climate change poses to the wildlife that really seems to matter to all of us: LolCatz, Sneezing Pandas, and Dramatic Gophers.

1-24-12 #2


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