plant trees, both literal and figurative

I don’t think I ever wrote about this, but Yvon Choinard (founder of Patagonia) came a gave a talk; he is just inspiring in his approach to running a business and managing people without being in conflict with his employees having lives.

Edit: the mysterious title is the name of Choinard’s autobiography, “Let My People go Surfing”. Great book.

Another interesting movement: Architects of a New Dawn. This is something Carlos Santana created, and he gave a talk (along with some other people in the movement) at my company today. In their words, “It is designed to engage people of all walks of life to work together to create positive change in the global community where love can replace fear and where peace can replace conflict”, but that is kinda wishy-washy. In practical terms they would like to offer up an alternative to the fear, uncertainty, and doubt spread by the news/entertainment media.

http://aoand.com/

I went to a lecture by Cameron Sinclair, cofounder of Architecture for Humanity.
http://www.architectureforhumanity.org/

The group provides architectural design services where they are needed (post-tsunami, post-earthquake, post-hurricane, post-genocide, and the like).

Here is his talk on YouTube that he gave after the group won the TED Prize a few months back:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdcqEjmuxjA

This guy is another inspirational speaker, and I’m going to do what I can to help them out.

(2004 Nobel Prize winner, and founder of the Green Belt Movement – they plant trees, a very modest effort by itself (except they have planted 30 million of them) but the extra trees are helping undo the deforestation of Africa, postponing and possibly reversing desertification, preventing soil loss, returning water to the soil, and raising farmers out of bare bones poverty. Not too shabby.

(As an aside – the conference I am attending is the ESRI User Conference (ESRI makes a suite of powerful software tools that I used heavily for many years, and still use when I get the chance) and after Ms. Maathai’s speech the founder of ESRI (Jack Dangermond) announced that this year they are going to offset the carbon-emmision debt all 20,000 or 30,000 of us attendees incurred by travelling to this conference. Way to go ESRI and Jack!)