The words of author Jim Kunstler more than a month ago at a NESEA-sponsored forum still ring in my ears: "We're not going to organize our way out of [the climate crisis], and we're not going to tech our way out of it." I don't know if he's right (though I have to say that strong, declarative statements, forcefully stated from a public platform, do have a weight of their own), but he has certainly influenced my outlook. I thought of it several times at the show that followed, such as at BigBelly Solar's booth.

Sorry, Second Rotation, for calling you a leftover, and I do so only in the sense that I didn't follow up soon after the show.

Second Rotation has figured out a way to profit from buying used cell phones, computers, cameras, gaming consoles, GPSs, and other electronic gizmos that are sitting in your drawer, unused. (If you've already sent them to the landfill, too late.)

I used to read Apartment Therapy regularly when I was editor of the Life at Home section, but as a cleansing after that job disappeared, I redid almost all my favorites and I'd not thought of it again until this week, when my sister, Judy, sent me a link from an AT derivative site, re-nest.com.

My friend and former colleague Dave Beard spent his Saturday at the MIT Energy Conference and came up with a trio of posts I would have been proud to write myself: The keynote speaker was Jim Rogers of Duke Energy, the 12th largest CO2 emitter in the world. He told the crowd that he knows they have to produce less, which is startling to hear from such an impressive coal burner as himself.

Like who cares, but I happened to notice as I was opening this window that it's my 300th post. And it's about ... someone else's posts. Worldchanging.com has had a couple of good ones in the past couple of days: Alex Steffen wonders about the freebies that are available to the energy-efficient, and cites as an example the Freeaire system for refrigeration units.

I'm at the Seaport World Trade Center again this morning — "again" because I spent the day here yesterday, and because this was the site of NESEA's Building Energy '08 a couple of weeks ago. The occasion this week is ResDesign, the annual residential design and construction show sponsored by the Boston Society of Architects. Halfway through, I'm finding it somewhat less thrilling the BE'08, almost certainly a reflection of my interests, rather than their programming.

Who could not like this, via Boing Boing? An artist has fashioned animals from discarded plastic bags and affixed them to subway grates. When trains whoosh by underneath, the force of air breathes life into the animals, and then they relax again until the next burst.

Popular Mechanics has a 6-minute video on a three-wheeled electrical vehicle that's either a wave of the future, or a fairly interesting trifle on the road to somewhere else. Link via Ecogeek.org.

I've been visioning/musing/networking on what work I might do, post-baby, and the confluence of sustainability and technology keeps coming up for me. That's a longer post than I have time for today, but it helps explain why I'm drawn to this.