I'll be up at Web of Change and therefore unable to attend, but if I wasn't there, I'd definitely check out this book launch event.

The Wilderness Committee are some of the hardest working and most dedicated environmental activists I know of. Paul George is one of the originals, and he has recently released a book called Big Trees, Not Big Stumps: 25 years of campaigning to save wilderness with the Wilderness Committee. I'm sure it'll be an incredible read – it always makes me shivery to hear stories from seasoned forest activists. (Seriously. I sometimes wonder whether I'll really have lived if I die without ever having chained myself to a logging truck.)

In the words of Guy Dauncey... "This is a fabulous book. More than that: it’s a phenomenon. It’s the War and Peace of BC’s environmental movement. Packed with insights, history, and personal tales, it reveals the dreams, the skills, the conflicts, and the amazing persistence of those whose passion for life led to the preservation of some of BC’s most important wilderness areas."

"Big Trees" will be released at the "Big Party" on September 20th,
2006, 7 to 10 pm, at the Roundhouse Community Centre in Vancouver.

Advance tickets are $15 each or 2 of $25, and include a free drink, $10 off a signed “Big Trees” book, hors d’oeuvres, First Nations dance and welcome, no-host bar, personal tales from Paul, stunning images, out-takes, music, lots of laughter, and the occasional tear.

To get your tickets Call the Wilderness Committee at 604.683.8220 or 1-800-661-9453, or email bigtrees@wildernesscommittee.org

This Sunday, I'm going to be giving a little "Web 101" workshop at Traffic Jam.

Traffic Jam is a day-long event organized by the Livable Region Coalition, with the goal of raising awareness and activism around the issue of highway expansion here in the Lower Mainland. I've learned a bunch about the issue recently... and it's worth caring about.

The Liberal Transportation Minister is bent on twinning the Port Mann Bridge, and pouring money into highway expansion. Research and experience suggest, however, that road expansion rarely actually work to resolve traffic problems in anything more than a very temporary way. Traffic expands to meet the new infrastracture within a few short years, and then you're back where you started. Us humans are so terrible at foresight, aren't we? Why is that?

So the Livable Region Coalition has an alternate plan, and it involves rapid public transit. Hello... no brainer? It just seems so obvious to me that major cities *have* to have decent rapid transit, and with the GVRD's population set to double in the next 30 years or so, now is the time to be making that investment. Now, or even yesterday.

This weekend, Traffic Jam will be an opportunity to learn more about this issue and the possible alternatives to highway expansion. It's also a chance to learn some great activist skills - from blogging to banner making! Plus there's great live music, and it's in a sweet East Van park, so if you're around, come and check it out.

Upcoming this Sunday, in the wonderful Republic of East Vancouver, is the Car Free Commercial Drive Festival!

Come one, come all – if you live in Vancouver, you do NOT want to miss this. It was the highlight of my year last year. I'm serious. I've seen a lot of fantastic displays of community fun in my five years in East Van, but this took the cake.

The whole street, from 1st to Venables, will be closed to traffic until 6pm, and will be packed with people dancing, watching the World Cup, playing ball hockey, making their own music, riding crazy bicycles, selling stuff, hula hooping, and generally enjoying the fabulous feeling that results from seeing thousands of your neighbours and friends, out enjoying the day, with not a car in sight. There will be several stages set up along the length of the Drive with performers. From the site:

FREE OF CHARGE. FREE OF BORING CORPORATE STUFF. FREE OF CARS.
Last year's first-ever Car-Free Commercial Drive Festival gave around 24,000 people a glimpse of urban paradise:
One glorious free-for-all street party thrown BY the people of East Van, FOR the people of East Van.
It's time once again to reclaim our streets – FOR FUN.

See you there!

I landed in San Francisco this morning, and it's been a pretty packed 12 hours so far. My visits to California are always characterized by crazy experiences of synchronicity and random moments of loveliness, and today was no exception.

Eddie met me off the Muni, and we went to Atlas in the Misson for lunch, since I was totally ravenous. Atlas turned out to be a crazy convergence of the internet famous, as we ran into Lane Becker of Adaptive Path and Jason Schultz of EFF on our way in, and then some of the NetSquared team and Zacker of CivicSpace on our way out. I had a weird moment when Jason said he recognized me from GETV – my 15 minutes of internet fame??

Eddie and I then booted it over the Bay Bridge to Berkeley, to the sweet little office from which Circle of Life operates. Circle of Life is the organization started by Julia Butterfly Hill of tree-sitting fame, and Eddie was booked to do an interview with their associate director, Amira, for NetSquared. More worlds collided as it turned out that she is the housemate of a former WOC alumni – and a total candidate for WOC 2006 herself, I might add. So I put in my plug and showed off our site and she got really stoked about it all.

So I totally dug Circle of Life. To the right there you can see half of their Values Board – talk about my kind of people. Also, you should check out their blog and read about Julia's current action – she's up a tree on South Central Farm in Los Angeles, advocating for the rights of the 350 working class families who run this community farm together and grow much of their food on it and are being threatened with eviction. It's a pretty powerful story. Amira was just editing a phone interview with Julia which she'll be posting as a podcast soon. Oh, the internet! That's the kind of stuff that really makes podcasting meaningful, to me.

The coincidences just kept coming after we left, and it turned out that Eddie and my friend Jason knew each other from Burning Man camp. Small world... But you know what, i'll let Flickr tell the rest of the story. Suffice to say that I love California and my trip is off to a great start...

Get it while it's hot... this offer won't last long!

The short story: someone at Chevy came up with the brilliant idea to hold a contest where their loyal customers and adoring public would compete to create the winning "commercial that brings the best Tahoe ever to life". Naturally, when you create a tool that allows you to combine the cheesiest video clips EVER (flowers bowing at the SUV, mountains to tear through, pornographic shots of the fabulous rear entrance opening) with text to supplement the images... people are going to use your tool to create commercials that you might not like.

And it was the most fun I had all day. Though the product would be much better if I had actually put more than 5 minutes into it.

I don't think this will stick around for long, so make sure you make your video now!

I will try and Youtube mine tonight so that it won't disappear when the tool does.

And if you want more, check out the "Tahoe" tag on YouTube. I particularly liked this one.