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Eric Needle
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Eric Needle is a design creative, pr guy and visual artist.
He runs LongbowSG, a boutique marketing communications firm. With a passion for a more sustainable future, he steers his practice to work with people and organizations who are making a difference in their local communities and in the broader world.
Shameless Plug
Like an archery target, one hundred yards down range, he helps you focus your business and attain it's long term goals. With Big Picture understanding off who you are, where you want to go and what you need to succeed, Longbow helps you hit the mark, with each project and campaign. Longbow provides creative services for corporate and non-profit clients. They provide identity, image and branding, integrated marketing in print, web and for trade, and news, investor and public relations.
Go Go > LongbowSG
Affiliations:
Director of Marketing, Community Greenhouse Foundation
Visit CommunityGreenhouse.org
Home Base:
Visit GreenBrevard.com
Favorite Color:
Cyan
Recurring Fear:
Those big orange trucks with the tree chippers that turn lumber into mulch.
Favorite Material Object:
1989 Trek MTB. Still paying for that thing on my credit card... first thing I bought on a credit card.
Latest Greatest Material Object:
Shiny blue roadie, it's a Mongoose I got off a Nashbar.com. (Also on credit card)
Thing I'd really like to have:
Vectrix Electric Superscooter (Can not fit on credit card)
Favorite Non-Thing:
Wife and kids (Has my credit card)
Reason I keep doing what I do:
Mostly the kids
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The Nail that Stands Up
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Last night I saw one of the most depressing movies I've sat through in a few years.
Burn After Reading, was a story without a moral, recording the misdeeds, unpunished crimes, and brutality of a cast of ordinary middle aged people without a conscience. It illustrates to me, everything that's wrong in media. Note that I didn't say, in society. Because instead of portraying real people in a struggle as events cascade around them, out of their control, it provides a caricature of what Hollywood thinks we're all like.
You get to know a transparent cast of personality-flawed villains, only to have a hilariously inane Brad Pitt get shot in the head, in graphic brutality, for no real reason whatsoever. The lesson for Brad's character would be, don't bother getting up every morning. Don't bother to attack each day with joy and energy. Better to have stayed home. The lesson repeats. We bounce from divorce to divorce, adultery to adultery, petty crime to treason and murder to murder. I wish they all would have just stayed home... myself included. What was that Japanese adage? The nail that stands up gets hammered down?
In George Clooney, we are shown a one sided, cardboard cutout of a sex addict, immune to feeling anything. To the actor who imagines himself as a reincarnation of Carey Grant, I bet he lays in bed wondering how he's managed to fake his way this far. Alas, his audience is the dim American public, who should feel honored to get a peek into the blind, gray, unfeeling lives of drudgery on the periphery of the nation's capital.
And what does this have to do with sustainability, you ask? Or even with media? Well for me, this sad, vulgar movie, reflects the world we live in. We are sold of bill of goods, and then take home something we never wanted.
Burn After Reading is billed as a comedy. The trailer includes every, and all of, the humorous moments in the film. And on the DVD box, we read how George is a comedic genius. It's all just kind of sad.
You see I'm like Brad in the movie—except I won't steal government secrets, blackmail a CIA analyst, take state secrets to the Russian Embassy, or break into peoples' houses for more. I have a hope and enthusiasm that defies reality. Just like Brad did. (Maybe that's why I think it sucks that he gets a bullet to the brain.)
But what really sucks is that all these stars, creative film makers and Hollywood dollars bankrolled something so crappy. What stinks is the package we're sold, and expect to sit through.
I live in Florida. The sun shines so much, it is downright annoying. And yet, for thirty five years, the “industry”, the people who make (and own the rights to) all things solar, complain that technology just isn't quite ready for it to be cost effective.
While the folks at CalCars.org tell me they can make a Prius plug-in hybrid get the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon, Toyota or GM isn't quite ready to sell us any.
And though I read in Popular Science that they can make tires that never wear, engines that run on hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, and sea water that burns as fuel, everything is the same as it was thirty five years ago.
And my point in all this, is that it's time to say enough is enough. I think we know how to make things better, but no one is sharing.
Solar power, won't happen, as long as the status quo holds. Energy monopoly, is not going to sit idly by and watch as you replace the need for a power plant, by installing photo voltaic cells on every roof in your neighborhood.
Factors like health effects pollution causes and earth changing, life as we know it threatening global warming, still do not trump the greed of the energy lobby. As Phillip Morris sat by and pretended cigarettes didn't cause cancer, so will the powers that be ignore anything but profit. And they use media to tell us it'll all be okay.
Just like Goodyear Tire and Rubber could convince the people of California to ditch their cable cars. And petro-fuels will not be replaced. What shocks me is that auto efficiency hit it's peak in 1975 with the VW Rabbit Diesel and that San Francisco still runs a couple of those tourist attractions. What took place in that time, that prevented change, despite a cultural revolution to the contrary?
Innovation, is the nail that stands up and media warns us not to get out of bed in the morning — or else.
Questions
• So what's it going to take to change the way we do business?
• Can humanity get past this sticking point? Didn't Rome get just about as far before it fell? Can we learn from the past and create a better future?
• Can collaboration beat out monopoly or are we doomed to repeat the cycle?
• Is innovation enough to force change and improvement?
I think we're all at our personal--and collective--tipping point. I have hope that people like you and places like PlanetShifter.com can communicate ideas, push past media bias, and create a shinier, less polluted, place for my kids to call home.
In the current climate, there are so many things we can do to evoke change. Little things, big things. I look forward to reading about them here and seeing them applied in the real world.
It's time to come together, break the chains, and choose to create a better tomorrow.
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Comments
Movies
They show them at the malls.
'nuff said?
The last two times I went to an "arts theatre" in the last five years, I saw "Fahrenheit 911" (Good job, Michael) and "Prairie Wind" (good job, Old Neil).
Own one DVD (played it twice on my computer and have loaned it out a number of times) "The End of Suburbia", Oh I've also seen "An Inconvenient Truth".
Have been to the mall to see "Ray" and "I Walk the Line".
They show movies at malls and on television.
'nuff said?
Mike Morin
In the tipping point...
Thanks to Eric Needle for kicking-off the launch Event Circle. I agree that many of our corporations are playing for the short-term, grabbing profit and ignoring the emerging sustainable best practices that are ready for our implementation.
"Companies are now recognising that sustainability and reporting are about far more than just mitigating risk and satisfying stakeholders' information needs," said Sustainability co-founder and chief entrepreneur John Elkington. "Extending reporting to help deliver real solutions to sustainability challenges has tremendous market potential and should be at the heart of any decision-making processes about transparency and stakeholders' expectations."
http://www.greenbiz.com/news/2007/03/01/online-tool-reveals-sustainabili...
I define sustainability as a long-term, community-based philosophy that mandates an integrated approach to green auditing and training; that our business contracts and community outcomes must balance environmental, financial and social factors to be sustainable; and that community awareness and participation are necessary to achieve integrated solutions for both all.
Willi
Thanks for landing me Willi. :)
I think that with less energy, Hollywood, and people like you and I could be constructive. We can roll up our sleeves and instead of trying to be the cleverest person bitching about all the woes of life on this planet, we could build things better.
See, it's so easy to criticize; simple to point out the buffoonery of all our brothers and sisters around us. It seems hard to make something shiny or something that lasts, that speaks beyond ourselves. But I think it's easier, like using less muscles to smile, than frown. We could care about what we leave behind.