Design to inspire conservation

Meet Rocco Avallone, a senior industrial design student at nearby Philadelphia University. His senior thesis is all about presenting personal energy consumption to inspire conservation.

Rocco wants to present energy use in a way that'll inspire us all to be less wasteful. We talked about the Lights Out event in Sydney last March that resulted in a 10.2% reduction on the power grid, as well as the one in San Francisco last October and learnt of the upcoming one this March in major cities around the globe.

We began brain-storming on what would spark community buy-in - a web page with graphs? A street sign or a church steeple that changes color as our demand fluctuates? How can we feel that we're all on this low-carbon diet together? And that the actions each of us takes do make a difference?

Black Gold @ InterAct Theatre

Go see the World Premiere of Seth Rozin's play Black Gold at the InterAct Theatre. It made me laugh out loud and weep to think of what our 'leaders' will do to keep the cheap crude flowing, and what they'll consider as renewable energy.

It runs Jan 25 thru Feb 24, 2008.

A teaser about the play....
"Even in the wake of unprecedented tragedies like hurricane Katrina, America’s lower classes and inner cities continue to be largely ignored by the Federal government. In our superpower economy, driven largely by our investment in Middle-Eastern oil, the gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen. But the world’s oil supply will be peaking sometime in the next 20 years, and our government offers little more than lip service toward the development of alternative energy sources…

What happens when Curtis Walker, an African American man living in Detroit’s inner-city, purchases an oil rig on eBay and taps into one of America’s largest oil reserves right under his own back yard? This hilarious vaudevillean take on the not-too-distant future chronicles
Walker’s discovery, as it precipitates a wild chain reaction that throws the world into turmoil, proving just how much America’s petroleum addiction keeps world events on edge. Will the newly-tapped resource lead to violence or prosperity? Will the poor get rich? Will the rich
get richer? Will America’s economy skyrocket? Will the Middle East move toward unprecedented peace or unimaginable chaos? Six actors play over 80 roles in this fast-paced, futuristic satire of class, race and greed in a country that will go to dangerous lengths to keep the cheap crude flowing."