Direct Action – Page 101 – Things Are Good

Eco Challenge

The finalists are now online for the Eco Challenge, which is something that MTV and GE have conceived together.

“The mtvU GE ecomagination Challenge is asking college students from around the country to develop new, creative ways to green their campus. We’re looking for innovative and groundbreaking ideas that can have a positive impact at the local level or the global level â€” or both. The sky is (literally) the limit.”

To me this seems like an odd partnership for an environmental cause, but whatever their reasons I’m glad they are doing it.

Thanks, mkb!

Find Where to Get Things Green

Five Limes has an online googlemaps mashup that takes your city and overlays information on where you can purchase green goods and services!

They have a ranking of the greenest cities and currently Victoria BC is in the lead! Go ahead and add cities and stores that you know are green.

Here’s an example using Toronto (ranked 7th):

The 59 Smartest Online Organizations

Squidoo has a list of not 60 but 59 of the “smartest orgs online,” and they are all winners! The list is English and North American-centric, which means that there are probably 59 smart organizations in tons of other languages that need to be listed.

This list really is great, I found some new sites that I didn’t know about and thought of others that can be on there.

Cute Environmental Protection Ads

The Environmental Defense Fund has produced a series of awareness-raising ads that show animals doing everyday tasks that humans can do to protect the environment.

The ads ask the simple question: if you don’t preserve nature, who will?

Sorry this took so long

I’ve been sitting on this post for awhile so I figure that it’s best to just toss it out there:

“A University of Calgary professor in the Haskayne School of Business has recently published his magnum opus on the subject of procrastination â€“ and it’s only taken him 10 years.

Joking aside, Dr. Piers Steel is probably the world’s foremost expert on the subject of putting off until tomorrow what should be done today. His comprehensive analysis of procrastination research, published in the recent edition of the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin, presents some surprising conclusions on the subject, such as:

Most people’s New Year’s resolutions are doomed to failure
Most self-help books have it completely wrong when they say perfectionism is at the root of procrastination, and
Procrastination can be explained by a single mathematical equation”

Now if I can only focus on the ThingsAreGood redesign……..