It's not in production yet, but Nokia was recently awarded a patent for a cellphone that recharges its own battery, with no electrical connection required.

The thing is built with most of its innards able to move slightly within its case. Between aforementioned innards and the case itself are piezocrystals which, when compressed, put out a small electrical charge. It's not a lot on any single compression, but if you keep the thing in your pocket(book) or in a holster, so that it moves when you do, it's intended to be enough to keep the battery charged.

What this reminds me of is the original self-winding wristwatches. Before the dawn of recorded history, people had to actually remember to wind their watches on a regular basis (imagine!). Then came the self-winding watch which, if you wore it on your wrist and were normally active, used the impetus from your arm motions to incrementally recompress its own mainspring. The Nokia technology is entirely different, but the principal is the same -- capture energy which is being expended anyway in the normal course of events, and apply it to powering an existing application.

That's an important principal in terms of optimizing energy efficiency. Many devices waste a lot of energy (often exhausted as heat, but not always). If we can think outside our traditional parsimonious design models, we can surely find many more ways to utilize energy (often in forms we're not used to thinking about) that's currently going to waste. Cogeneration is a classic example, perhaps even micro-cogeneration powered by exhaust heat from industrial equipment or motor vehicles.

Staying within the consumer electronics sector, Nokia has set an example that lots of firms should be able to follow. Consumer electronics are responsible for a large portion of the increase in electrical use in North America over the past couple of decades. For stationary devices, a good portion of this can be eliminated by use of smart surge suppressors/power strips. But more and more electronic devices are becoming "personal" in the sense of mobile. And for that set of applications, something akin to the Nokia approach seems very attractive.

In order to address a number of Greenback U's sustainability issues, it's necessary that the campus work hand-in-hand with local governments. This was, I'm sure, part of the intent of focusing on higher education through vehicles like the ACUPCC.

For instance, we can't do a whole lot about Greenback's accessibility via public transit unless we get the city, many of the surrounding towns, the county and the local transit district on board.

Similarly, to restrict campus vehicular traffic or facilitate bicycle access, we need to get the highway and traffic control departments from all local municipalities to reach at least a working consensus.

Want to do something about sewer (storm or sanitary)? Gotta talk to the sewer district, and probably the water department.

About waste management? The county refuse and recycling authority and (if it's going on public roads) the highway department.

Want to compost on campus? Refuse and recycling, plus public health.

On and on it goes.

Part of being located in the Northeast is that local government is never something that occurs in the singular. Each municipality is about the size of a bed sheet, and then gets overlapped with some combination of specialized service (water, sewer, fire, transit, etc.) districts. Just figuring out what you've got to figure out is a full-time job. But, at least, it's an aspect of the job which I had anticipated.

What I hadn't anticipated -- although I probably should have -- is that for local municipal governments, "long range planning" refers to anything that happens after lunch. The specialized service districts, while each one jealously guards its own prerogatives and independence, are able to make and implement long-term plans and, indeed, often exist primarily for that purpose. Local municipal governments, on the other hand, can't commit to anything farther in the future than the next election cycle. (Or, if they do commit, it seems the agreement generally isn't worth very much.)

So I'm beginning to understand one of the advantages I have, working at Greenback (or, truth be told, probably any university). Getting all the players on side is a challenge, and establishing actual momentum takes a lot of time and effort, but at least the planning horizons are useful. Talk about setting a goal four or five decades into the future, and people don't find that inconceivable. Work back from that long-term goal to some shorter-term objectives and milestones, and people see (and believe) how it all fits together. Get all the pieces (funding, logistics, governance) in place, and things can actually start to happen. Not quickly, and not easily, but for the long term.

So if you can't beat city hall, maybe you can beat Old Main. And Old Main, with support from the appropriate unelected government agencies, might just be able to outflank city hall in the long run.

A local crew of treestabbers has been around my place fairly regularly for the past week. And that's OK with me.

The stabbers in question are children of a neighbor of mine. They"stab" my sugar maples with steel taps connected to plastic tubes which run into covered buckets, collecting sap to make maple syrup. When sugaring season is over, we put a dab of tree paint on each puncture wound. The trees don't seem to mind at all.

These kids are growing up on the farm across the road from mine, and down a bit.Their family has been farming for generations; none of them has any expectation of ever having to "work off" (as in "off the farm"). They expect their descendants to farm for generations hence. And to sugar -- sugaring is one of the traditional ways farm families augment their incomes in this part of the country.

But the truth is, maple sugaring in the northeastern United States is a dying trade. Seasons are shortening. Yields are down. And it's only going to get worse. As our winters get milder (in temperature if not in wind and snowfall) and our springs get warmer faster, the sap just doesn't flow the way it used to. I've heard foresters predict that, within a generation or two, the sugaring trade will have moved entirely north of the border into Canada.

I've had Canadian maple syrup. I can't tell it from the local product. It's almost like the trees don't care what flag flies above the sugarhouse or even what language the sap-boilers speak. To me, it doesn't really matter so long as I don't have to cover my waffles in that evil corn syrup stuff (not that I'm opinionated on the subject, or anything!).

But it matters to those kids. Or it will, when they learn about it. It won't much affect them this year or next, and they're too young to worry their heads about what comes after that. So I didn't tell them.

Does that make me a tree-stabber-hugger?

Life is pretty busy right now, both personally and professionally. It's not that I don't have time to write a post, it's more like I don't have time/attention to sort out in my own head what I want to write. Then along comes something that needs little or no sorting, at least in its interrogative incarnation.

According to Grist (one of the myriad newsletters to hit my in-box every day), James Cameron addressed a Hollywood fundraiser for the Natural Resources Defense Council. During his remarks, he claimed (with characteristic humility) to be the greatest environmental film director of all time.

Now I'll be the first to acknowledge that Avatar was about the environment, but only on the same level that The Thirty-Nine Steps was about aircraft engine design. More emotional impact, perhaps, but as I was walking out of the movie theater, I don't remember anyone chattering about how they needed to run right out and save the environment.

So the question is: will the environmental McGuffen in Avatar have any effect on people's perceptions in the long term? The short term? Even the instant?

And more seriously -- since popular fiction has a significant impact on popular perception, can any commercially successful movie/television show/novel (graphic or otherwise) really help firm up people's positive perceptions of sustainability, or is the very concept of huge commercial success just to antithetical for that to work? If it could work, what would it have to include? Look like? Feel like?

'Tis a puzzlement.

Intelligence is overrated (see Al Capp's extensive work on the subject of "hoomin stoopidity").

Outrage has been co-opted and merged with ignorance and arrogance.

Irony is dead.

Comedy may be our last hope.

Watch this, then frame your answer.

. . . and it is, in truth, apparently banal.

Oh, it's kind of new-tech, in a 21st century social-networking-becomes-social-engineering sort of way. And I suspect that college students and relatively recent grads are at the center of its target demographic.

The spawn of the Devil, in all its Hellboy-meets-Hello-Kitty cuteness, can be yours at blippy.com.

Funded, in large part, by Sequoia Capital, Charles River Ventures (think "Twitter") and Ron Conway, and headed by Philip Kaplan (known, randomly I'm sure, as "pud"), Blippy intends to take what Twitter did with the question "what are you doing right now?" and apply it to the question "what are you buying right now?" It works by capturing and sharing credit card transaction data, so users don't even have to remember to tweet (blip? bleep?) to participate. They just register their credit cards and, from that point on, everything happens automagically.

The banality of the Blippy business plan is that, in a society where participation equals consumption, the social streaming of purchase transactions is a logical next step. We are no longer known by the company we keep, nor by what we do, but by what we buy (albeit increasingly useless and short-lived stuff from an ever-decreasing number of suppliers). With Blippy, I don't have to worry about achieving my 15 minutes of fame -- my purchase from Overstock.com can achieve 15 milliseconds of that fame for me!

That characterization of why a consumer might participate is probably a tad cynical, but also probably not far off the mark. Why a retailer would participate is rather more obvious. Retailers hope to stimulate copy-cat or "me, too!" purchases. Like unto (but an order of magnitude advanced from) the candies and weight-loss booklets located in the check-out lane, retailers hope Blippy will trigger impulse buying. And the wonder of it is, it doesn't even have to be your impulse!

In a society whose model of economic growth is dependent on over-leveraged consumerism (the fact that consumer debt is once again expanding was trumpeted as a sign of economic recovery), the potential for Blippy to generate "shareholder value" seems considerable. Whether it truly benefits society (much less ecology) to sprinkle this accelerant on the embers of our recently-overheated economic firebox is another question. After all, a recent (albeit unpublished) UN report estimated that one-third of all major corporate profits come as a result of inflicting environmental damage with impunity.

Who knows? If someone can just come up with an effective way to shift purchasing more toward low-value short-lived vicarious impulse items (truly the crack cocaine of the consumer culture), maybe we can get the proportion up to one-half. And Blippy might just be that way!

Before I came to work at Greenback, I used to travel on business quite a lot. Never much cared for it, and was happy to give it up.

Or, at least, to give it up as much as I could. Working for a University, it's pretty much a requirement to go to the occasional conference. Sometimes you present, sometimes you just sit and listen, but pretty much every time you meet people you wouldn't otherwise get to know. And, in a field which evolves as rapidly as "sustainable practices" does, those folks almost always know something you haven't yet had the opportunity (or the need) to figure out for yourself, yet.

My wife. is also in a field where occasional conference attendance is a necessity. Unlike me, she has little opportunity to pick and choose. Sometimes, a conference is the only one of its kind in a particular year. And on occasion, she'll get told flat out by her granting agency that attendance is mandatory.

Mrs. R. was recently required to attend a conference in mid-town Manhattan. It was a 2-day affair, so the best she could do was to stay over only one night in a hotel. She reports that the (major chain) hotel room was too big (although not as big as in some other cities) and over-heated. She also reports spending $30.00 to get a burger and fries for dinner.

Now, I'm not adverse to spending $30.00 on dinner when I travel, but I do try to get something healthier than a burger and fries for my money. And I recognize that mid-town Manhattan isn't Backboro. (Around here, you typically get a very nice three-course meal for that price.) But I was struck by the fact that, given her meeting location, she really didn't seem to have a lot of better options. A consumption level higher than necessary or even desired was (as far as she could determine) the only game in town.

So casting my mind back to my days on the road, I got to wondering -- is there a market niche for travelers who want to be as green as possible? (That's a different question from whether there's a niche serving travelers who want to be told they're behaving sustainably and are willing to spend luxury prices for the privilege.) And since modest rooms at modest prices are fairly available at the metropolitan perimeter, this question pretty much refers to center-city sorts of locations.

In many cities, if I have sufficient time to plan, I can find a small -- usually, older -- hotel in a slightly less fashionable part of town where the room is smaller, the HVAC more modest, and the surrounding restaurants frequented by locals not on expense accounts. But what if my planning time is short? What if I need to be in (or to be able quickly and reliably and efficiently to get to) a high-rent location? What if it's a city with which I'm unfamiliar?

It would just seem to me that a chain of something along the lines of the commercial hotels of a half-century ago -- less posh than today's major chains, but operating on maybe two-thirds the energy per overnight stay, still conveniently located, and providing access to healthy meals realistically priced -- could do a land-office business. Corporate/government bean-counters would certainly approve, small entrepreneurs might go for it in a big way, sustainability offices would try to get it written into travel policies. And "sleep green" might even turn out to be a successful marketing approach.

"It's not just cheap, it's more sustainable." Has a nice sort of ring to it (or am I nuts?).

PS to anyone who has done a lot of business travel recently -- does such an option already exist?

According to the web newsletter Environmental Leader, the British consulting firm Verdantix has just published a report describing four strategies to achieve world-class carbon management. (Carbon management, while not synonymous with sustainability by any means, does address a large portion of the environmental sustainability problem.)

Three of the four are predictable, in terms of "best strategic practices" lists put out by consulting firms -- strong governance, clear strategy, integrated technology. But the fourth strategy, while still somewhat obvious, might have some interesting implications for colleges and universities:

"Design cross-functional process changes across energy, operations and finance."

Personally, I would have preferred the action verb "implement" rather than "design", but the rest of the statement looks pretty good.

Process changes. Change your processes. Don't do the same things the same way because, if you do, you'll continue to get the same results. Don't just be willing to consider change, expect to change. Demand change. Don't take "no" for an answer.

Cross-functional process changes. Meaning, changes that affect multiple operating departments. Academic affairs and student affairs and business affairs, all affected by the same change.

Changes across energy, operations and finance. It's not just an energy question. Changing the lighting, or buying more renewably-generated electricity won't do it. Operations -- what we do, where we do it, when we do it, for whom we do it -- can't stay the same. Neither can how we charge for what we do -- how we charge our students, how we allocate internal charges.

And if there's a single biggest implication of this report as advertised (and I have only the advertisements -- I can't swing the 300 pounds sterling to purchase the actual report (all donations gratefully accepted)) -- it's in the area of internal measurement, internal allocation, internal finance. If universities expect their administrative departments to operate the campus on significantly less energy, they're going to have to incent the academic departments to accept changes in schedule, and in resource utilization. The only proven method for achieving that incentive is to charge the academic departments for space used on an actual (not pro-rated) basis. When they pay the bills (and internal pricing can be adjusted to achieve results desired), the academic departments at Greenback become willing to consider doing expensive things differently. When the savings accrue to their departmental budgets, the unthinkable (like Friday afternoon classes) sometimes becomes a little less so.

Charging for campus facilities on an actual utilization basis requires a level of metering and measurement beyond what most campuses have in place. New meters need to be installed for electricity, steam, natural gas, water, whatever. The meters need to be able to determine not just how much of a resource was consumed, but where it was consumed and -- sometimes -- when it was consumed. "Good enough to pay the bills" is a higher standard when there are more bills to pay, and they have to be calculated with more precision. You can't manage what you can't measure, so we need to be serious about how well we can measure energy utilization.

Many of the meters can be "virtual", and most of them should report their readings regularly and automatically to a central data repository (remember the bit about integrated technology). On our campus, the metering enhancements won't be cheap, but they won't be prohibitively expensive, either. And they're a key enabling technology. Strategically, tactically, and operationally.

Mark Twain, I believe, once wrote that there are two ways of lying artfully -- telling the truth but not the whole truth, and telling the whole truth but telling it in such a manner that your audience believes you're lying. A story on NPR this morning pretty well accomplished the latter.

Using the recent snowstorms in Washington, DC as a hook, the item was titled "Get This: Warming Planet Can Mean More Snow." (Of course, titles aren't broadcast on the radio. To get the title, you have to go to the website.) Taken absolutely straight, the story refuted current silliness about how winter storms contradict scientific evidence of climate change. But it was hard to take the story absolutely straight, because it wasn't presented anywhere near straight. The overall flavor reminded me of nothing so much as the technique my mother refers to as "damning with faint praise."

The opening line was, "With snow blanketing much of the country, the topic of global warming has become the butt of jokes." But the story wasn't really about the jokes, and it never came right out and said that the jokes were based on ignorance. In fact, the strongest statement it contained was that "For scientists who study the climate, it's all a bit much. They're trying to dig out. Most don't see a contradiction between a warming world and lots of snow."

Ummm . . . let me get this right -- the scientists have been snowed under but most of them don't see a contradiction in that? No contradiction? How about simply reporting that climate scientists have, in fact, been for years predicting increased snowfall in coastal areas? Not only does this winter not contradict climate science, it positively corroborates it! And "most"? Can anyone name three scientists who actually study the climate and who do see such a contradiction??

And that opening to the story was no aberation. After soft-pedaling through the substance, the reporter ended with the following:

"In [a warming] climate, you will have more frequent extreme events, heat waves and so on, but again, none of those individual events is proof itself that climate is changing," [a weather blogger] says.

Climate scientists say they can't prove any single weather event is due to climate change. Thus, they say, Hurricane Katrina or the heat wave in Vancouver that's dogging the Winter Olympics isn't proof that climate change is happening. Nor can southern and eastern snowstorms prove that it's not.

So there's the bottom line -- the memory the audience will be left with. Southern and eastern snowstorms can't prove that climate change isn't happening. Implication: it might not be, but we'll need more than a few snowstorms to seal the verdict. The whole thing reminds me of an Eddie Izzard routine where he wryly demonstrates the power of visual imagery trumping verbiage -- he makes a statement which might or might not be true, then alternates between shaking and nodding his head . . . no, I don't mean it . . . yes, I do . . no, I really don't . . .

Wry comedy is hardly one of the qualities I look for in a morning "news" program.

For a far more informative take on the same subject, I was glad to see Bill McKibben's piece in The Washington Post. Quoting the same blogger and citing the same events, McKibben managed to leave his audience less confused, not more. Who knows, maybe someone at NPR reads the Post. And, if so, maybe they'll learn something.

I was talking to an economist this week. (She's not an environmental economist -- I don't know whether that would have made a difference or not.) The topic was the dependency of economic activity on a supply of natural resources. I was able to negotiate an expansion of the definition of "resources" to include sinks as well as sources, but the discussion still didn't get very far.

Whether it was the root cause of our communication problem or merely a symptom, I noticed that she kept coming back to the concept (or at least the term), "equilibrium".

Now I've studied enough economics to place the point of equilibrium at the intersection of the demand curve and the supply curve, but I don't see how the concept is relevant to a discussion of resource utilization when the resource in question is treated as cost-free and infinitely available. For natural resources like iron ore, I can imaging an equilibrium price (at least temporarily). For natural resources like the atmosphere, I simply can't.

More to the point, I don't see the use.

I could be wrong here, but I got the impression that my interlocutor was considering the economy (national, global, or otherwise) as a simple closed system which could be equilibrated by proper management of its internal pieces. If so, maybe that's the root of our disconnect, because I've never considered it such.

To my mind, an economy is a subsystem of a society. And a society is a participant in -- and therefore a subsystem of -- an ecosphere. The higher level systems set the conditions in which the subsystems must operate. Subsystems can affect the status of their supersystems, but not with impunity. Higher level systems tend -- over time -- to be more stable than their components. Indeed, one of the ways higher level systems achieve that stability and survival is by sacrificing components to save the whole. Thus, the question for an economy (and a society) is not whether equilibrium can be attained (or even identified), it's how to live and operate within constraints imposed at a higher level.

That's one of the reasons why I can't begin to understand arguments along the lines of "we can't afford to mitigate (much less reverse) climate change -- it would put too great a burden on our economy." It's also probably one of the reasons why I don't put knowledge of which urban neighborhood to stay out of after dark on the same level as understanding the forces of nature. (Neighborhoods are temporary. Nature, in some form, is forever.)

The economist in question is tenured, so I suspect she's very good at her specialty. But, like so many faculty members, I can't help thinking that she's missing the bigger picture. And I can't help hoping she doesn't pass that myopia on to too many students. ("Too many", like the term "more", sometimes means "any".)