Simon Fowler

Light Green Change. Oh, really?

The last post (September coz I’m a blogging slacker) showed the video we created at work to introduce the “Green Games”, a two-week competition to encourage our company to develop better environment awareness and practice.

After a successful two weeks it seemed appropriate to see how the stars of that video had faired:

Our man in accounting, Bob, won the competition with the most points gained by his environmental actions and ideas and for submitting his annual carbon footprint. His prize was that we paid for carbon offsets for his carbon footprint. To pay for the carbon offsets we used cash we’d earned by selling excess office furniture on Craig’s List. So we found ways to recycle and re-use in lots of ways. All it all it was actually fun and quite effective, with several people telling us what they’re doing and thinking differently now.

Light Green Change

I lead a small global cross-functional team that is tasked with helping our company learn about, and change our behaviors regarding, the environment. Trouble is I have a cynical tendency and talking about “care for the environment” can seem so turgid sometimes it makes me want to leave lights on everywhere, drive the car when I could walk, and basically do everything I’m not supposed to do. That’s what happens, in our distorted humanity, when faced with moralistic rules but no grace and love. And avid Greeners do seem to take themselves a little too seriously, even if the apocalypse IS coming.

Anyway, the team decided to lighten up a bit by creating this movie ahead of a ‘green competition’ we ran in conjunction with a corporation-wide Green Week initiative. We had a laugh making it at least. And it really seems to have had an effect on people’s behavior, amazingly enough.

[Note: Shot on a Canon HD110 and (not very well) edited with Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9.0]

Where’s home?

I’ve been away for the last five weeks (and silly busy in the weeks before that, hence the blog silence) but within two weeks I wanted to come ‘home’. The weird thing about that feeling is that ‘home’ used to be, and in some ways still is, England. I’ve only lived in the US for 7 of my 43 years, but I wanted to be back here.

Actually, it’s not the US that feels like home, but the street I currently live on. I never before such a sense of belonging somewhere. So even though I was ‘away’ seeing my mom and siblings and wonderful friends I’ve known for decades, I needed a physical location to feel ‘home’. I mean a location, not just a house, that’s associated with people and relationships and a shared history (albeit fairly short).

I don’t know anyone now who lives in the town in which I spent the first 23 years of my life, and I don’t know anyone in the town where my parents retired to in the early ’90s. My sisters are scattered between across England, Scotland, Wales and New Zealand, and my friends are likewise scattered. So the only place I have a day to day continuity of relationship is where I currently live.

If I could gather my friends and family in England together in one place, where I could ‘pop in’ or where I’d bump into them serendipitously in the course of days and weeks, then for sure that would be home. But I can’t, so it isn’t. At least for now, this is.