7gen Bloc

Visual by www.PDImages.com I’ve been rolling elsewhere lately, but the world’s been rolling on, and it’s high time to play a little catch up and see what’s been happening as it has. Though the “save page as” command and a bulging virtual folder on my hard drive have pretty much replaced my old-fashioned scissors and the mound of newspaper and magazine cuttings they used to create, I still call them “clippings,” and here’s my latest batch:

Here's the first of the week's cross-posts from the Change It blog. It’s here! It’s happening! And suddenly I’m at a loss for words – I’m not sure how to best share the Change It experience with those of you who aren’t with us in DC this week. I so badly want to paint a picture with my words, so that the people who are not with us can almost imagine that they are. So that you can all feel the inspiration, become engaged by the teachings and dialog, lift your spirit with a new found hope, and maybe make some new friends along the way.

So this is the big week for our Change It program. 200 participants are gathered in Washington to hear from some leading voices in the progressive community and learn how to organize, advocate, and agitate. For those of you unfamiliar with Change It, it’s an idea we cooked up with Greenpeace to help send ripples of action out into the world and plant seeds of change in cities and towns all over the country. Here’s how we described the whole thing on the Change It web site:

I am a pretty obsessive do-er. Waiting at the airport, in the car if I’m not driving, when I wake up, and before I go to sleep, I read. The computer on my desk (this one, in fact ) is like a magnetic force that draws me to it whenever it catches my eye. The phone does the same thing. (And it’s worse now that I have a new i-Phone but more on that some another time). So does the radio, which I prefer over the TV.

Here's a new cross-post from the Change It blog.

Scienceman, can you help me better understand just what a kilowatt-hour is?

This week the Financial Times reported that Ark, or "Absolute Return for Kids", set up by leaders in the hedge fund industry raised $53 million at a single event, up from less than $5 million in 2002. Dinners bided over $1 million for a Kenyan safari. The head of one hedge fund group commented "I donate because I'm superstitious; I worry that if I don't, my luck will run out."

Your voice – or rather email – is needed now to stop the USDA from making changes to the organic standards act. Read the Treehugger story below, and follow the link to the send off your email – it takes less than a minute!

Higher wages benefit business by increasing consumer purchasing power, reducing costly employee turnover, raising productivity, and improving product quality, customer satisfaction and company reputation. Today's minimum wage workers have less buying power than minimum wage workers had half a century ago. We cannot build a strong 21st century economy when more and more hardworking Americans struggle to make ends meet.