Comments beth112 has made

media and rallies

Maybe this is obvious, but nobody has pointed it out.  The media don't just show up.  An organizer of the rally actually should contact several media outlets via a phone call or sending them a press release before the event.  Local news outlets and newspapers are your best bet.

I attended a peace rally a few months ago organized by a pretty savvy 14 year old and his parents.  We had only about 60 people, but 2 Miami news stations were there.  This is probably because the national organization calling for the rallies asked its local organizers to tell them which media outlets they contacted in their electronic tool kit.  I hope Step it Up had the same foresight. On Get out there on the street! posted 2 years, 7 months ago 12 Responses

Wealth helps improve the environment???

I'm pretty sure that there are many peoples on this earth whose lifestyles involve less cash and material goods than our, but are not abjectly poor who manage to do a pretty good job living in harmony with their environment.  The Native Americans before Europeans arrived come to mind.  You only need to "improve" the environment if you degraded it in the first place.  Degradation requires too much development or resource extraction, overpopulation, and/ or extremes of wealth and poverty among a populus.  I am currently working in restoration and as a co-worker and I were discussing the other day, it is much easier and cheaper to protect the environment in the first place than to repair it later.  One look at New Orleans is a good reminder of that...
I think the environment would benefit much more from fewer cheaped goods produced in China where environmental laws are lacking than donating the "savings" to a nonprofit later.  Real cost accounting might be useful here.  One of the problems is that even if mom-and-pop places are still around, they often still sell these same goods on a smaller scale.  You can do local food to an extent, but buying local is difficult beyond that.  I feel like real alternatives are dwindling fast in all but the most progressive of communities.  I (somewhat shamefully) admit that I shop at a huge chain across the street because 1) I have not yet located any alternatives in the community I have moved to 2) I don't have to drive my car to get there.
Huge chains attract pressure from environmental groups, but as anyone who has done any work pressuring a multinational corporation to change, it's no walk in the park.  They don't just change overnight.  Only the most successful campaigns succeed and each campaign changes one small aspect of what needs to be fixed if we are to become sustainable in terms of environmental and human costs. On Could chain stores actually be good for the environment? posted 4 years ago 19 Responses