At REThink:Green - looking for a greener lifestyle

At REThink:Green - looking for a greener lifestyle

I've been working on a story about rooftop solar power in the last few days - so I was interested in talking to folks in the industry about how well that works in California. One person I interviewed was Sungetivity's Danny Kennedy - who I met Saturday night at the Rethink:Green event at the Blackwelder complex in Culver City. Sungetivity's one of several companies that sell or lease solar panels to homes with a financial mechanism that puts little of the upfront cost on homeowners (I've also talked to Solar City about stuff they're doing, among others).

The event seemed to serve several purposes. It honored 11 people: Heal the Bay's Mark Gold; Surfrider's Jim Moriarity; Anna Cummins, Marcus Eriksen, and Captain Charles Moore of Algalita Marine Research/5 Gyres (who study plastic debris in the ocean); La Loma development's Marco Barrantes; Global Green's Matt Petersen; Dale Bell and Harry Wiland, of the Media & Policy Center; Andy Meyers, president of Shangri-La Construction; and director Davis Guggenheim.

A silent auction featured art that had an environmental angle. Tanya Clarke's were my fave. She works with found objects, glass and light. Her dad is an environmental activist, Tony Clarke - he runs the Polaris Institute in Ottawa (which has as a current campaign water sustainability in California agriculture).

The Makepeace Brothers played. I dunno how many of them were actually present; there's 4 brothers and a friend in the band, but only 2 of the brothers tour regularly; I was talking to the one guy who wasn't a Makepeace (yes, that's their real name) afterward. I do know that one guy sat on a box and played it. They played mellow, upbeat rootsy songs; it sounded like someone's living room. Apparently they've toured with Jason Mraz, who is, to say the least, not my cup of tea. But hey. I guess upbeat and folky can be my cup of tea: I miss live music terribly since I've moved here from New Orleans. MPB are playing tomorrow night at Aviator Nation on Abbot Kinney in Venice. 

The point of the evening was a benefit for Environmental Charter Schools - my brilliant co-blogger Siel Ju profiled the Environmental Charter High School in Lawndale and its Green Ambassadors program a few weeks back. They've been around for a decade or so; now they want to go national. I wasn't around long enough to see how much dough they raked in from a silent auction they ran. I didn't even try the complementary organic-liquor cocktails (though on Monday I'm going to visit a local organic liquor outfit in Monrovia; the ones at this ritzy event were from Oregon).

My friend Heather T. Roy was at the event; she really liked it. She sells houses, and she's developing expertise in green building and sustainability efforts, because, she says, people are interested in them when they believe they can save money. Certainly every rooftop solar installer around who I've talked to in the last month says demand is growing rapidly, no matter in which utility's territory the homeowners are.

Still, I always end up wondering how well this stuff works. I don't just mean from a money raising standpoint, for the charter schools: I mean, how much people are paying attention to what happens in their environment when they're not at a very pleasant evening like this, and how they change how they act as a result. Does it make people more environmentally active generally to drink organic vodka specifically? I know it's not a choice between this and taking the bus. But is eco-friendly art a gateway drug to a greener life?