Alex Steffen: Worldchanging

This session was totally inspiring and provided what is so often missing when it comes to living a greener, more sustainable lifestyle: concrete tips and actions for everyday life that don't require anything to get started. Alex Steffen from Worldchanging provided a continuous stream of suggestions, tips, facts and study findings to help us make changes right away. Speaking 'a mile a minute', he mentioned the following:
- communal sharing services (car-sharing, tool lending libraries, kitchen-rental facilities, and Wifi network access sharing)
- greenbuilding (harvesting rainwater to grow gardens, brightening streets with moonlight, new buildings which integrate actual gardens)
Alex also mentioned some innovative global action campaigns: FUH2, a Web site where people upload photos of themselves 'giving the finger' to Hummers and the 'If the Earth Were a Sandwich' project where two people around the world use a cell phone and GPS to place themselves in exact opposite points on the globe and then drop a slice of bread on the ground to create an “Earth sandwich”. A critical point Alex addressed is the Western cultural attitude (being adopted by developing countries like China and India) which ties status to owning things. A topic that not even Al Gore addressed fully in his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth".