NBC/Universal - Green is Universal

Once again NBC/Universal (NBCU) is going CRAZY green on Earth Day as part of their Green is Universal initiative. Even better, each of Universal's 'brands' has its own green page as well...take NBC's green page and the Sci Fi Channel for example. NBCU actually has quite a bit of programming throughout the year but each year on Earth Day, they go hard core green. This year is no different with green (literally sometimes) showing up all over the place whether its the logo during the Today show to special editions of "The More You Know", to Oprah's Earth Day show.

Earth Day Everyone!

My big Earth Day project this year was hooking up with the UW Restoration Ecology crowd to do a restoration project on Snoqualmie Indian Tribe land near Snoqualmie. It was just a small corner of their property that had been logged long ago, but it was covered with blackberry bush. The group had previously cleared one of the hillsides so today's group just had one hillside to go. My job was to pitchfork the piles of stems and roots up to the top of the hill. As you can see from the picture, we did quite a number on the hill. The crew will follow up later this week and plant the 2nd hillside with seedlings. It will be fun to check back in now and then to see how it looks.

Student Synergy

I started my Earth Day weekend at Evergreen State College as a panelist in the sustainable business session for their annual Synergy conference. My co-panelists were Karen Nelson and Stanley Stahl of the renound Fertile Ground Guesthouse in Olympia, Karin Kraft who works for the Washington State Department of Ecology in environmentally preferable purchasing and green building in the Hazardous Waste and Toxics Reduction Program and is chair with the Sustainable Communities Roundtable of South Puget Sound, and Marie Poland from Womenrock Productions who also served as moderator (check out the Your Money Matters Coupon Book they put together). It was a great group with a lot of audience participation. And I must say, I was totally diggin the Evergreen campus. It changed a lot since I last visited probably over ten years ago. Lots of big, modern cement buildings and several buildings that were uber modern and totally green. Very nice indeed.

I also got a chance to catch up with an old friend, Health Smith. I'd met Heath ten years ago at a Wildlife Society conference in New Mexico. Back then we were both students trying to figure out where our interests in wildlife would take us. Today, ten years later, we got to see just where that was. Health is now working at the UW Center for Conservation Biology on several projects that use dogs to track scat (yes, that's poop) that aids genetic research utilized for wildlife management and conservation efforts. The Center was started and continues to be run by Dr. Sam Wasser one of the coolest, most amazing people I know. Very cool stuff. Makes me miss my fieldwork days. Hopefully, I'll get back to fieldwork myself someday soon.