The Portable Light is a self sufficient and sustainable source of power that can be easily folded and transported. Designed by KVA MATx, each portable light unit generates about two watts of electricity and about one hundred lumens of white light, enough to read a book or do domestic tasks by. It can even be used as a power supply to charge a cell phone, or used in conjunction with other units to increase its power supply so it can charge medical equipment or laptops. This breakthrough technology is great news for the 2 billion people in the world who live without electricity.

The Portable Light is on display at MoMA Feb 24 – May 12 as part of their Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition.

For additional images and video of Portable Light adapting to a variety of different uses, click here.

To hear Sheila Kennedy at Pop!Tech discussing the inspirations for Portable Light, click here.

Courtesy of KVA matx

Peggy Shea Andrews

Last year at Pop!Tech, Cary Fowler, Executive Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, spoke of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. February 26 marks the official opening of the “Doomsday Vault,” as it has come to be called. It is intended to protect the Earth’s crop diversity against gradual or catastrophic losses. Sited deep inside a wild Arctic mountain in Norway, seeds from around the world will be mechanically cooled to -20 degrees, which will keep seeds alive for up to 19,000 years. To ensure that developing nations can participate in this important seed bank, The Global Crop Diversity Trust is providing funding so that a diversity of all crops will be secure forever – even in the event of an asteroid or nuclear disaster.

Link to a video about the Seed Vault on the National Geographic website.

To read about specific crop strategies, regional strategies, or to make a donation to this effort, visit http://www.croptrust.org.

Also, last week, the BBC World’s Earth Report aired a documentary about the vault. To read the transcript and watch the video, click here.

Entrance to Global Seed Vault- Credit Image Mari Tefre/Global Crop Diversity Trust

Peggy Shea Andrews

In today’s program, Andrew Zolli, announced the Pop!Tech Carbon Initiative. This initiative is the second iteration of our commitment to being “carbon negative”. This is not your parent’s carbon neutrality. The idea of being carbon negative means that you are offsetting in excess of your carbon emissions.

Representatives of each benefiting project in Pop!Tech’s listings are participating in this year’s Pop!Tech conference as “Pop!Tech Carbon Fellows.” Fellows include:

* Robert Freling, the Executive Director of The Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF), an organization dedicated to helping rural communities in the developing world power a brighter future through innovative uses of solar energy. SELF is bringing solar powered irrigation to Benin’s Kalale District in West Africa where over 80% of the villages do not have a source of surface water. The villages are provided with a source of clean renewable energy, eliminating the need for diesel & gas powered pumps.

* Dr. Sarah Otterstrom, the Executive Director of Paso Pacífico, a non-profit organization seeking to build wildlife corridors along the Pacific slope of Central America by supporting private landowners and small-scale farmers in sustainable land use and conservation activities. She is currently working on the restoration and conservation of endangered forest ecosystems in the Rivas Province of Nicaragua. This project also reduces the vulnerability of local communities to extreme climate events while improving ecosystem services and the viability of endangered species.

* Stefano Merlin, the Director of Ecologica Network and President of Instituto Ecologica, which coordinates several socio-environmental programs including the Bandeira Switching Non-Renewable Biomass Project in the North of Brazil. This project addresses the problem of deforestation and reduces the quantity of biomass decaying which, in turn, cuts down on green house gas emissions.

When you visit the Pop!Tech Carbon Initiative website, you can input some information to get your annual carbon footprint. The average American’s carbon footprint is 9.44 tons of CO2. Mine was 14 tons and to offset that amount towards Paso Pacifico would work out to be only about $77 dollars)

How do you compare to that average?

Also, Mark Anderson of Wired Magazine just wrote a story about the program as a part of Wired coverage of the event.

Katie Fehrenbacher, who has been writing for the popular tech site GigaOm, has launched a new blog called Earth2Tech. The brand new site, which launched this week, is unique in that it can be broken up into three parts:

1. Clean Tech startup news coverage
2. Reviews of eco-initiatives from Big Business
3. Resource page for eco-entrepreneurs

This looks like a promising site and is already filled with some great posts about things like “The World’s Most Important Mushroom”…well, really, you are probably sold by now.

The World Wildlife Federation recently launched an awesome billboard campaign in Canada concerning changing ocean levels.

Using “celestial mechanics” similar to the way a sundial works, a scalloped awning over the billboard casts a shadow, creating a rising water effect over the course of the day.

Here’s an explanation:
“The board respects celestial mechanics (Kepler Rocks!). It’s perpendicular to the equator, with an unobstructed exposure to the west. The “waves” start at about 12:00. The challenge was not azimuth (the daily path of the sun), but altitude, which due to the Earth’s tilt, required the scalloped awning’s shape to be distorted to compensate for 43N latitude, during the life of the posting (about 8 weeks). Thanks to CBS Outdoor, and PLEASE support the WWF.” - YouTube user LowerC02

The video below really captures the elegance and cleverness of the advertisement.

via: TrendHunter

another very clever YouTube-inspired ad to promote blood donation: http://www.blographic.com/divers/thank-you

24 Hours, 7 Continents, 9 Cities, 2 Billion People: the Live Earth Concerts for a Climate in Crisis are coming your way this July 7, 2007.

Part of a global campaign to promote awareness of the current state of climate change, the concerts feature more than 100 music artists from The Police to Snoop Dogg to Metallica to Smashing Pumpkins (for the full and quite impressive list click here). Watch with the world at www.LiveEarth.MSN.com.

And be sure to check out Live Earth’s official guidebook: The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook: 77 Essential Skills to Stop Climate Change, written by long-time Pop!Tech participant David de Rothschild, founder of Adventure Ecology.

The entire book, from conceptions took 7 months, with the project finding its legs at Pop!Tech 2006. David met publisher Charlie Melcher in the “dungeon” of the Camden Opera House (aka Pop!Tech’s Screening Room). He had just been commissioned to do this book, turn-around time was super short, and Charlie offered to help. They went straight at it in February and were finished by April.

Which tip in the survival guide does David take most to heart? “Number 32: Get lost in nature. .when was the last time you took your shoes off and walked about in nature? It’s important to get yourself outside and re-engaged. In the epic scale of Live Earth, it’s worthwhile to ‘get lost in nature’ in order to remember why we need some new guidelines for living in a changing world.”

For a peek at some of survival tips from the book and a look at the great illustrations, you can visit the Live Earth site at http://www.liveearth.org/crisis_solutions.php.

The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City will be opening a new exhibit that explores designs made for individuals and communities of the Global South. “Design For The Other 90%” runs from May 4th to September 23rd 2007.

One of the designs that will be featured is the much-discussed “Life Straw” and other products that were featured at Pop!Tech 2006.
The exhibit will focus on water, shelter, health and sanitation, education, energy and transportation.

While at the museum, you can also check out the Design Triennial where the design for the Ipuli Medical Center is featured. (See previous Pop!Tech blog entry here)

The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum
2 East 91st Street
New York , NY 10128

People have staged concerts, speeches and rallies on Second Life but this was the first time that a group staged a cataclysmic flood. That’s exactly what Adventure Ecology, founded by Pop!Techer David de Rothschild, did to remind of the real world outside of their computers and the real climate crisis that we face.

Creating the flood that covered cities like London, The Netherlands, and Ibiza is much more than a geeky hack. Because locations in Second Life are owned and created by hundreds of individuals, Adventure Ecology had to get property owners to agree to create the flood at a specified date and time.

Read the National Geographic account for the full story. Apparently avatars were calm, some pub going avatars just climbed into boats and continued on with their pints while the conversation shifted to global warming.

“People have a lot to learn about ecology—but first you have to get their attention” said David. This surely grabbed our attention.

Here is a YouTube video showing the flood in Second Life.

Also, if you are in New York City this Saturday (April 14th), don’t miss the Sea of People rally. Thousands of people will dress in blue and make a line around lower Manhattan defining the projected coastline of the City under a 10 foot sea level rise scenario. It will look amazing and sobering.
via:: Treehugger

Ahhhh, another year…another tax season.

But the IRS offers us this temporary relief to the sting of paying taxes by instating the Telephone Excise Tax Refund. I know, sounds exciting right? Well, actually it kind of is. The government owes tax payers approximately 20 billion dollars in illegally collected taxes on telephone bills (this was a law created to help fund the Spanish American War). It may seem like a measly 20 bucks that you get back, but you can do something really exciting with that refund. Refunds for Good is an internet marketing campaign that is focused on educating Americans about this tax refund and enouraging taxpayers to consider supporting one of three nonprofit organizations.

Our friend, The Solar Electric Light Fund, is one of the organizations to which you can donate.

The great thing about refundsforgood.com is how simple they make the process. The website takes you through the entire process so that donating to organizations working towards world peace, population control and sustainable development is a snap.

Here is a YouTube video clip about the project and a feature article from the Boston Globe as well as the official press release from SELF

Pop!Tech encourages you to visit the Refunds for Good website and support one of these causes with your long awaited telephone refund.

I flew up to Camden, ME this week to meet up with my fellow Pop!Techers. As I waited for my flight at New York’s JFK, I decided to ease myself into an outdoorsy frame of mind and bought the latest issue of Outside Magazine.

The banner across cover model, Governor Schwarzenegger’s chest, reads The Green Issue. In the magazine, they list some of the Green leaders and innovators from politics, health care, architecture and Hollywood.

Entrepreneur, explorer, eligible bachelor and Pop!Tech friend David de Rothschild is featured as one of these Enviro All-Stars. David is the founder of Adventure Ecology, a program that gets kids excited about adventure and fosters an appreciation for global responsibility.

“The environment is an area that requires a great deal of energy and optimism,” David says, “and, to my mind, kids have these features in abundance.”

Here is another feature from 2006 on David and how he started Adventure Ecology (also from Outside Magazine).