If there’s a new green office space, highway, airplane or sewage treatment plant getting built, chances are that Autodesk software helped design it.
Year: 2011
A paper bottle? Ecologic packages spare the Earth
Some big ideas come in small packages – in the case of Ecologic Brands Inc., a paper laundry detergent bottle.
Cleaire gains speed with diesel engine filter
Gale Plummer’s first job out of college was selling diesel engines for a Caterpillar dealer in Kentucky. Thirty-five years later his company, Cleaire Advanced Emission Controls, leads the California market in diesel engine filtration systems.
Propel hits the road with 24 ‘clean fuel point’ stations
Propel Fuels is putting biodiesel and ethanol on the fuel-pump map – reducing carbon emissions while putting Central Valley farmers to work in the process.
Svan Song: Exploring a Hidden Culture
It was raining hard the morning after Easter when I sat down at a dingy café in Zugdidi, a town on Georgia’s border with Abkhazia, and waited with trepidation to meet my guide. A tour operator in the capital Tbilisi had arranged the rendezvous and I knew nothing about the guide except that he was a Svan – an important detail, I was told, since travelers to the remote Svaneti range of the Caucasus Mountains were warned not to go the road alone. Governed by their own language and customs, ancient honor codes and fierce loyalties to clan, the Svans were seen by many Georgians as a lawless people best known for kidnappings, road robberies and murders. The region had been ravaged in Georgia’s 1992-93 war with breakaway Abkhazia. In 2004 the President of Georgia, Michali Saakashvili, proclaimed “the Al Capone era in Georgia” over after he sent in 10 helicopters and a 200-man swat team to wipe out one of Svaneti’s leading mafia families. Tourism, which had virtually died, was clawing its way back when I visited a few years later.
I.F. Stone’s Radical Idea
In January of 1953, writing in the first edition of I.F. Stone’s Weekly, the Washington investigative journalist Isadore Feinstein – universally known as I.F. Stone – declared: “This weekly represents an attempt to keep alive through a difficult period the kind of independent radical journalism represented in various ways by PM, the New York Star and the Daily Compass,” three esteemed publications that for financial reasons had recently shut down. “This new enterprise,” he wrote, “embodies the hope that by beginning on a rock-bottom basis it will prove possible to survive and expand. The bald economics of daily newspaper publishing is enough to make the stoutest heart quail.”
Bay Area directors explore post-9/11 FBI entrapment in ‘Better This World’
During the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, two young protesters from Midland, Texas, Brad Crowder and David McKay, were arrested on charges of plotting to carry out terrorist attacks using firebombs and got multiple-year jail sentences. But the charismatic grassroots activist who inspired and, arguably, coaxed them to the brink of their alleged crime, Brandon Darby, suffered no legal fallout. On the contrary, his role in the pair’s downfall unveiled a shocking new incarnation of America’s post-9/11 security apparatus, one that is brought vividly to life in “Better This World,” winner for best documentary feature at this month’s San Francisco International Film Festival.
Light at the Middle of the World
Sitting on a bench in the dirt-floor living room of his house in the Amazon, the yucca farmer Danilo Orguera proudly displays the head of a jaguar that he harpooned four years ago in a nearby river: an enduring symbol of the coexistence here between man and nature. Yet while their closeness to wilderness still embodies the Quechua jungle experience, Danilo’s 25-year-old schoolteacher nephew, Jose Daniel, says that what’s needed most now in Amazonian communities like these is photovoltaics (PV). Earlier this summer, engineers came to their remote village, named Curaray, and installed a 1.6 kilowatt array of solar modules; the system now powers three water pumps, filling a 50,000-liter tank which delivers clean drinking water for the first time to all 350 residents in the community.
Mexico at a Crossroads
The most publicized solar story out of Mexico recently may have been the 130 kilowatt array of Uni-Solar photovoltaic laminate that Enel Green Power installed on the rooftop of the Moon Palace, in Cancun, the site of the Nov.29 – Dec.10 COP16 UN conference on climate change. According to Mexico’s Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources, Hernando Guerrero, the array was intended to »set a precedent that all COPs should entirely neutralize their carbon impact,« an ambitious, if not quite yet a realistic, goal.