Looking for ideas, examples, and specific opportunities around ways to leverage prizes and competitions to advance the state of the art in several forestry-related areas, including: Change incentives around inefficient use of fuel wood and biomass. A lot of the approaches out there center on cook stoves. Who is addressing the broader challenge through prize/challenge [...]

During February I floated a survey as part of my efforts to understand our creative economy a little better in Vermont. 51 respondents completed the survey from nearly two dozen locations across the state. I learned at least three things from this effort: Vermont creatives tend to be highly entrepreneurial, working across an average of [...]

Daniel Bornstein, globetrotting documentarian of the “social entrepreneurship” school of development, has an opinion piece in today’s New York Times introducing recent White House efforts to leverage prizes as a mechanisms to “pull” innovation into government. It is hard to escape the fact that the examples of “tangibles” (non-software and data based inventions) cited are [...]

About six years ago I had the opportunity to attend a conference in Botswana focused on governance reform and civil society. At the time there was a lot of excitement about the countries progressive environmental stand, the role of women, and youth engagement. I was especially happy to have met young activists from Pioneers of [...]

Photo: MakerFaireAfrica2012 Make for a great weekend of learning and creativity. This Thursday the Population Institute and Vermont-based Population Media Center will host the 32nd annual Global Media Awards in New York City. “Each year PI honors journalists, filmmakers, radio and television show hosts, and editorial cartoonists from around the world who write about population [...]

The Vermont Agency of Commerce and Community Development recently announced that the former Vermont film commission head would be tapped to lead the recently created Office of the Creative Economy in a shuffling of the deck. The shuttered film commission had been under fire from quarters in Vermont’s film community in 2011. The year ahead [...]

The New York Times will publish on Sunday a great series on education in America. Featured will be a brilliant commissioned piece of taped graphic art by Stephen Doyle, posted here. The photography really draws it together. I found myself really liking the textured wrinkes and scrunches of tape along the floor. Follow the link [...]

The BBC reports today on the incredible surgery by which a man’s toe became his lost thumb – much less disabling, life without a big toe than a thumb, especially for a man in his line of work – a plant operator. Asked, “Does a toe make a good thumb?” Mr Byrne replied, “Yes, I [...]

There’s a great new effort underway to document the everyday fabricators, makers, crafters, and artists at the heart of today’s DIY movement. Its called Makeshift Magazine: A Journal of Hidden Creativity and their first issue is out. If you support their launch by contributing to their Kickstarter campaign, you’ll get a copy! While the magazine [...]

During a brief family holiday along the Erie Canal last week, I had the pleasure of stopping in at the Western New York Book Arts Collaborative. What a thrill! Why? Several reasons:  Its a bright open physical space in the heart of a city ready for a rebound. Artists know what that feeling is like: [...]

In memoriam Perhaps more later…

This past weekend I spent a couple of days in Ithaca, New York at the invitation of someone who runs something called ‘The Level Green Institute’ – which appears to have several offshoots, among them something called “Arts at the Heart of a Sustainable World.” Anyway, the symposium, titled “Greening the Arts” was, though poorly [...]

Today I’m headed to Ithaca, New York to give a talk, run a workshop and in other ways participate in Earth Day celebrations that take place there each year through the Center for Environmental Sustainability (CES) which will sponsor,”GREENING THE ARTS.”  They’ve asked me to be part of an informal panel on Friday morning exploring [...]

April, T.S. Elliot famously wrote, is the cruelest month. Like an inconstant lover perhaps, at least in the northern climes, it teases with hints of warm days to come, then retreats to separate quarters, letting the cold slip back again. Even without the early Crocus and Skunk Cabbage, the sweet smell of burning wood and [...]