Staying Strong While Everything Falls Apart Event: An Eco-Anxious Perspective

By Alexandra Rose Images are flashing across my computer screen of the California sky blazed with a haunting orange glow. Ice that was once impenetrable in Greenland is now melting beyond a point of no return. Partisan politics and having the most divisive and dangerous president in modern history has made it so that basic …

An Elegant Solution to an Inconvenient Truth

by Eric Grunebaum Two headlines with nearly opposite impact landed in my mailbox last week and it caused me to reflect back on BASG’s En-ROADS Climate Interactive demonstration event in early June. The first was from Environmental Defense Fund’s newsletter, titled “A New Action Plan to Stabilize the Climate and Avert Catastrophe.” Catastrophe. That word …

Don’t Treat Soil Like Dirt

by Tilly Pick The evening of September 4th with the Boston Area Sustainability Group started like no other. Yes, it once again was a diverse group of sustainability-minded people: professionals deeply involved in the topic; “students”; career switchers and networkers; activists and advocates. All of them were passionate and curious. And, it once again was an …

Riding the Wave of Sustainability

by Aaron Hersum I’m going to just go ahead and say it: we might need to do Invite to Ignite more often. Someone actually said that to me as I was leaving our second iteration of the BASG version of speed-dating with sustainability organizations, except at this event making meaningful connections is the norm. Before …

Make the Invisible Costs Visible

by Aaron Hersum Smog: a cloud of dirty air from cars, factories, etc., that is usually found in cities. It’s brown, thick, and easy to see. Smog is a clear villain. I can point to it and say “See, that’s what why we need to reduce emissions.” Unfortunately, carcinogens and radiation from natural gas, ultra-fine particles, …

The Unsuspecting Impact of Minimalism on Sustainability

by Aaron Hersum and Tilly Pick It may be one of the most fundamental questions environmentalists ask- maybe less of a question and more of a concern: Is all the “stuff” we make and consume each day destroying our environment? This month, the Boston Area Sustainability Group (BASG) invited Juliet Schor, Professor of Sociology at …

#IamaVoter

by Aaron Hersum Well, I understand the 2016 election now: data analytics. According to Nathaniel Stinnett, Founder and CEO of the Environmental Voter Project (EVP) and veteran of many political campaigns, Trump and Clinton ran by far the most sophisticated data analytics campaigns in political history. Their managers knew every individual likely to vote in …

The Reality of Carbon Realities

By Aaron Hersum A Boston Area Sustainability Group event headlined “Carbon Realities” was bound to be fascinating- full of depth and charged with the emotion that comes with debating carbon emissions. Once again, most of us did a lot of learning. First-time attendee Marissa LaFave, a senior at Boston University also working in socially responsible …

The True Cost of Coal and the Clean Energy Transition

By Aaron Hersum, with contributions from Jess Halvorsen, Tilly Pick, and Eric Grunebaum photo credit: Paul Corbit Brown The Last Mountain, a 2011 Sundance Festival film, illuminates a stunning trend in the energy sector that I did not anticipate when I decided to attend BASG’s “Clean Energy Transition” event. We are spending billions of dollars not to transition to a clean …