In case you were wondering, green is still in. It seems that every business is marketing and promoting some initiative to spark renewed interest in their products and services, despite whether they are truly green or not. However, many companies really are betting on green creativity as a way to position themselves for a consumer base more concerned about the sustainability of products and the corporate responsibility of companies than ever.

A piece in the June issue of Fast Company magazine featured the 100 Most Creative People in Business.  Not surprisingly, several people making the list work in some sector of green business — 10 percent according to my count. We’ve parsed those green business leaders into a listing of the 10 Most Creative Green People in Business. The numbers in parentheses represent the individual’s ranking on Fast Company’s list of 100, but the commentary is our own.

92. Annie Leonard – Environmental Activist, The story of Stuff Project

Annie Leonard’s Story of Stuff very quickly became one of the most popular viral videos of the modern environmental movement. After the success of The Story of Stuff, Ms. Leonard, et al. took on the narrower but equally tricky issue of climate policy with follow-up, The Story of Cap and Trade.

59. Majora Carter – Founder, Majora Carter Group

Named by our sister-site, Ecopolitology, as one of the 10 Women Who Changed the Environmental Movement Forever, Majora Carter is a passionate advocate for urban gardens, green jobs and sustainable economic development. After leaving Sustainable South Bronx, Carter launched the Majora Carter Group, a consulting and communications firm focusing on economic revitalization strategies.

50. Natalia Allen – Surfer, Designer

Natalia Allen is a surfer, triathlete and linguist, and–oh, by the way–runs a fast growing design firm in her spare time. The recipient of the highly coveted Parsons “Designer of the Year Award,” Ms. Allen recently founded Design Futurist, which partners with big international firms to develop “innovative and sustainable fashion, accessories and textiles.”

49. Mark Pinto – CTO, Applied Materials

Chief Technology Officer for Applied Materials, Mark Pinto recently became the first chief technologist of a major American tech firm to move to China, where he is heading-up Applied Materials’ research center in Xi’an.

42. Cynthia Warner – President, Sapphire Energy

After 27 years as one of the most powerful women in the oil and gas industry, Cynthia “CJ” Warner made a particularly timely decision to leave her employer for greener pastures in 2009. Warner left her post at BP, where she was head of global refining, to join Sapphire Energy. Sapphire is one of several companies angling to be the first to commercialize a transportation fuel made from algae, sunlight, and carbon dioxide — a product they are calling “Green Crude.”

39. Byron Washom – Director of Strategic Energy Initiatives, Univ. of California San Diego

We always hear that renewables are unreliable because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. But Byron Washom and his team at UCSD are working on a way of getting around that–at least for solar–by predicting the availability of solar resource. A solar entrepreneur and long-time holder of the solar energy conversion record, Washom says: “We are developing the ability to predict one hour in advance the amount of sunlight that will be falling on every solar panel in 25 square miles.” Obtaining this information on a large scale could become a critical component of building out an electric grid that will most efficiently make use of solar power.

20. KR Sridhar – CEO, Bloom Energy

In 2010, Sridhar’s Bloom Energy unveiled its fuel cell known as the Bloom Box, a device capable of powering 100 homes while producing nearly zero greenhouse gas emissions. Sridhar, a long-time professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering, as well as an accomplished member of NASA Mars Program, Sridhar was recognized by Fortune Magazine, as “one of the top five futurists inventing tomorrow, today.”

8. Hannah Jones – VP of Sustainable Business and Innovation, Nike

Joining Nike in 2004, Hannah Jones leads a global team of over 100 employees at Nike whose role is to fuel sustainable innovation and embed sustainability into the core practices of the business. To facilitate this, Nike developed its Considered Design initiative to use less toxic and fewer materials overall in the manufacturing of its products. One example, the Air Jordan XX3 shoe, utilizes a water-based bonding process to attach a carbon fiber plate, rather than using a solvent-based cement. Another shoe, the Nike Pegasus 25 running shoe uses 1.4 ounces less material than previous iterations.

7. Chris Anderson – Curator, TED Conferences

The former journalist, publisher and media entrepreneur, Chris Anderson founded the Sapling Foundation in 1996, with the goal of finding “new ways of tackling tough global issues by leveraging media, technology, entrepreneurship, and most of all, ideas.” In 2001, Sapling acquired the TED Conference, where Anderson now focuses his professional efforts. And if you’ve even had a glimpse into the TED phenomenon, you know he’s doing something right.

4. Shiro Nakamura – Chief Creative Officer, Nissan

With the launch of the zero-emission The Nissan LEAF approaching later this year, Nissan’s design guru, , Shiro Nakamura, has been tasked with designing an electric vehicle (EV) for the masses — a job that he has taken on with care and deliberateness. Said Nakamura of the LEAF design: “We did not want to make something very strange for just the niche buyer.”

Earth and Industry. Timothy Hurst is the founder and editor of ecopolitology and executive editor of theLiveOAK Media Network. He writes mostly about energy and environmental politics, clean tech and green business

WASHINGTON — Pollution before the first Earth Day was not only visible, it was in your face: Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire. An oil spill fouled 30 miles of Southern California beaches. And thick smog choked many cities’ skies.

Not anymore.

On Thursday, 40 years after that first Earth Day in 1970, smog levels nationwide have dropped by about a quarter, and lead levels in the air are down more than 90 percent. Formerly fetid lakes and burning rivers are now open to swimmers.

The challenges to the planet today are largely invisible — and therefore tougher to tackle.

“To suggest that we’ve made progress is not to say the problem is over,” said William Ruckelshaus, who in 1970 became the first head of the Environmental Protection Agency. “What we’ve done is shift from the very visible kinds of issues to those that are a lot more subtle today.”

Issues such as climate change are less obvious to the naked eye. Since the first Earth Day, carbon dioxide levels in the air have increased by 19 percent, pushing the average annual world temperature up about 1 degree Fahrenheit, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“We’ve cleaned up what you can see and left everything else in limbo,” said Kathleen Rogers, president of the Earth Day Network.

Improvements took shape in the form of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and changes in the way businesses treat the environment, said Denis Hayes. Those reforms, he added, grew out of the first Earth Day, an event Hayes helped coordinate.

“It is the most powerful, sweeping, society-wide change America has had since the New Deal,” Hayes said. “The air is cleaner despite the fact that we have twice as many vehicles traveling twice as many miles.”

Nancy Sutley, head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said progress in the past 40 years is about more than just laws. It’s also about innovation that made cleaner cars. And that innovation, Sutley said, “is going to be the answer for tackling climate change.”

No place illustrates progress more than the Cuyahoga River.

Cleveland’s main river used to periodically catch fire. On June 22, 1969, trash and an oil slick ignited. The river burned for half an hour, drawing national attention to water pollution nationwide.

People didn’t swim in the river at the time, and anyone who fell in needed to be checked by a doctor.

“The river bubbled like a cauldron. There were all kinds of chemicals in there, and that was what was bubbling at the bottom,” said Wayne Bratton, a boat captain then and now, and the first president of the Cleveland Harbor Conservation Committee.

On Tuesday, Wayne Bratton was aboard his boat, The Holiday. He looked over the starboard side at Collision Bend and described by telephone what he saw: “I’m looking at a lot of gulls, there’s a loon, a lot of black heron.”

People now fish in the river, which holds 60 species. There’s a spiffy amphitheater on the river bank, which never would have been built when the water had a dreadful stench, Bratton said.

It’s not just the Cuyahoga. In 1957, the Public Health Service declared the Potomac River unsafe for swimming. Now Rogers lets her children swim in it.

“I don’t even wash them off any more,” she said.

In Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s, the joke was that if you moved in during the summer you wouldn’t notice the nearby mountains until the winter. Now peak smog levels are only one-third as high as 40 years ago, he said.

“Unfortunately, it leads some people to think that we don’t have a problem any more,” said Sam Atwood, spokesman for the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

The region still has 6,000 yearly premature deaths linked to unseen tiny particles in the air that cause heart and lung problems, Atwood said.

In 1970, Ruckelshaus said, about 85 percent of pollution was from places like factories or power plants that the government could regulate. Now such sites account for only 15 percent, with most pollution coming from sources like farms that are harder to control.

That makes fixing the remaining problems politically difficult, said Russell Train, chief environmental adviser in 1970 to President Richard Nixon.

“Back in the ’70s, people felt the threat of environmental mistakes and misbehavior,” Train said. “There was a real threat to your health and people knew that. Today, people will accept that as a general principal, but don’t feel any immediate threat from climate change or indirect source pollution from farmers.”

Last month was the hottest March on record worldwide. It was 1.4 degrees warmer than March 1970, according to NOAA.

The average temperatures for the last 40 years are higher than the rest of the 130 years of record-keeping, said Deke Arndt, head of climate monitoring at NOAA’s National Climate Data Center.

And, this week, German scientists published an analysis in the scientific journal Nature that says the greenhouse gas agreement reached by some international leaders last December in Copenhagen would lead to a 10 to 20 percent increase in carbon dioxide levels in 2020.

That puts “in dire peril” chances for limiting the effects of warming, the researchers said.

Still, the White House’s Sutley is optimistic.

“The Cuyahoga River is not on fire anymore, and air quality in Los Angeles is not as bad as it was 40 years ago. I think people get those connections,” Sutley said. “People get that something is changing about our climate.”
By SETH BORENSTEIN The Asscoiated Press

There are farms in the Venice Lagoon producing local food, and like the city, they are sinking as the water from the aquifer below is pumped out. This farm used to irrigate with well and municipal water, but artists Marjetica Potr? and Marguerite Kahrl have developed a solar powered rainwater harvesting system to gather the water from the roofs of the greenhouses.
The farm sells directly to residents of Venice and recently won the Zero Km prize for local food. Fabrizio writes in Abitare:

The Rainwater Harvesting Project is based on the idea that the existence of the farm, like Venice itself, is dependent on water. Because the Lagoon is subsiding, the government of Venice plans to limit the use of water from the underground aquifers in field irrigation, a measure that would threaten local food production and the livelihoods of the farmers. At the same time, sea levels are rising, a fact that threatens the very existence of Venice. Water, which used to be Venice’s closest ally has become her enemy. The on-site Rainwater Harvesting Project seeks to model an alternative to this paradigm.

One doesn’t usually think of rainwater harvesting at a farm; it all goes into the ground. But for greenhouses it probably makes sense.

by Lloyd Alter, Toronto Treehugger.com

Numerous upgrades and construction projects, training centres and community driven initiatives are being implemented in the city of Durban in prerparation for the FIFA 2010 World Cup. Women have played an active roll in these preparations working in the building industry.
The Moses Mabhida Stadium has been completed and the King’s Park Precinct that surrounds it aims to ensure that the venue is in use regularly and not only during big events. The Moses Mabhida Stadium Training Centre has trained local labourers in construction-related issues over the past two years, many of these are women.

Durban’s beachfront is due for an upgrade offering residents and visitors more restaurants, more things to do and more venues for events.With improved lighting, CCTV coverage and other measures, the aim is to create places and spaces where women feel safe visiting alone or with children.

The Buffelsdraai Community Reforestation Project, which is part of the greening programme, aims to help protect the environment and make for a healthier city. Led by Nondumiso Shangse, the project employs a team of nine to run the plant nursery and build the new forest by planting and tending the trees.

The reforestation project also makes use of more than 200 ‘treepreneurs’ from the Buffelsdraai and Osindisweni communities. Many of these treepreneurs are women – grandmothers and moms at home with young children – and they play a vital role in supplying the trees needed to build the forest at Buffelsdraai Landfill that is helping to offset the 2010 World Cup carbon footprint. At the same time, their involvement in the project is helping these women feed their families and educate their children.

The Moses Mabhida Artworks Project aims to highlight the Kwazulu-Natal art industry through commissioning local groups and individuals to provide art for the stadium and surrounding precinct, employing beadwork, woodcarving, ceramics, painting embroidery and wirework. Women are involved heavily in this sector. One of the largest beadwork projects ever made in Africa, for example, is being produced by more than 200 women associated with the Hillcrest AIDS Centre. It’s a 4,5m-long fantasy map of Africa and will be hung in the President’s Atrium at the stadium. Complementing this will be a 4m-long beaded South African flag produced by women from the African Art Centre.

Women also feature prominently in the group of 20 or so people – some of whom are disabled – creating a mosaic mural for the stadium’s Ocean Atrium. Depicting a breaking wave, the mural will use only tiles hand-made for the project.