Festival activities run from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and include play space for walking, bike-riding, road races, and games.

Community impresario and BoulderGreenStreets.org founder Hillary Griffith, who is managing this project, envisions over 50 free public classes, demonstrations and workshops. They will showcase some of the best that Boulder entrepreneurs, artists, and sports and fitness experts have to offer.

BoulderGreenStreets is following the path of larger U.S. cities such as Portland, San Francisco and New York City, in which car-free community play spaces take over downtown city streets each Sunday.

In turn, these “street liberation” events are modeled after the biggest bike oriented event of all: the famous 70-mile-long Ciclovia, which takes place every Sunday in Bogota, Columbia. Each Sunday, Bogota, with a population of 8.5 million people, closes over 70 miles of its major streets to cars, and turns them over to two million bike-riding, road-running, game playing citizens.

“Challenging the assumption that major streets exist only for cars is a powerful stance,” says Hillary. “Turning our city streets green, even for just one day, celebrates Boulder’s active lifestyle, our strong interest in sustainability, and offers us a new way to highlight a community “at play.”

BoulderGreenStreets’ 1-mile-long festival will include five activity zones. Each will feature activities such as running and cycling, yoga, workshops and crafts demonstrations, dancing, music, food, and link to neighborhood block parties.

For more information or to register your activity or event, contact Hillary Griffith, at BoulderGreenStreets.org or email: info@bouldergreenstreets.org

The lead actor, the cause of Madam Butterfly’s suffering, actually got booed when he stepped out on stage at the end. He looked startled, but it shows how well he played his part. Key performers are hired from a worldwide selection of BEST opera singers and spend the season in Central City.

There are two more operas coming up this summer in Central City, and they too will offer free admission to the final dress rehearsals. These operas include Orpheus in the Underworld. The program synopsis notes that there isn’t a serious moment in this opera. It’s pure escapism and unapologetic entertainment.” Three Decembers focuses on the difficulty of communication between parents and children who grow apart because of things unspoken and unexplored in their relationships.

Central City is a good place to go when the weather gets hot in Boulder. The rule of thumb is: you lose 10 degrees of heat for every 1,000 foot gain of elevation. It was about 25 degrees cooler in the mountains. Then too, my iPod friend, Jane, at the Trident Cafe, informs me that if you attend the opera mid-day, you can also pay $12 to attend the Opera A La Cart. This mini-opera is held across the street from the Central City Opera House in a former horse stable. The setting is intimate. The music, thrilling. The next Opera A La Carte is July 7th 1:15 PM.

The company’s venture capitalists wanted to grow it to $15 billion. The CEO ignored their advice and sold it for five. A few months later, the stock market took a nose-dive and the company dropped with it. How did he know it was time to sell? As he put it, “My business school professor once told me that the job of the CEO is to grow a company and then know when to sell it.

That was 10 years ago. President Obama should heed this advice. As Commander-in-Chief of a vast war industry and U.S. military troops, he should confirm that our $1 trillion wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will end by July 2011.

His decision has just been made easier by Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s announcement that Japan — not the U.S. – will gain access to mining his country’s vast mineral deposits. Things will only get uglier in Afghanistan, as greed moves out in the open, to the frontlines.

Back home in the U.S., it’s time to begin the conversion of war industries to peacetime industries. Mississippi Republican governor Haley Barbour is short-sighted, when he laments that the temporary moratorium on offshore oil drilling in the Gulf “is worse” than the British Petroleum oil spill.

What if, instead of offshore oil rigs, the Gulf of Mexico becomes home to a network of off shore WIND energy turbines and ocean-wave technology? Gulf Coast workers who have lost jobs due to the BP oil spill could then don hazardous materials suits and install this green, futuristic technology instead.

Emerging ocean wave technology that generates electricity from the constant rise and fall of waves, along with wind turbines and towers, could provide electricity 24/7 and endless clean tech jobs for workers in the cities and states that ring the Gulf.

One person who sees a future beyond petroleum is Sandy Butterfield, who formerly headed up wind energy technologies at the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Sandy, who has just launched a cutting edge wind technology company called Boulder Wind Power, was also at last week’s dinner party.

As he and his wife Anne said good night, he offered a parting shot to the CEO. “I’m
going to grow my company to $5 billion in only 15 months.”

Hearing this, the CEO shook his fist in the air, as if to punch a hole in the sky. “How dare you break my record,” he shouted, then broke out in a big laugh.

Could laughter and friendly competition provide the seedbed for the next generation of entrepreneurs?

The idea of setting up new businesses in an atmosphere of friendly competition…at desks that face each other, is the inspiration of Thomas Frey, Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute. Frey is also Google’s top rated futurist speaker. In a future column, I’ll describe the daily life of these young “hatchlings” who are each growing small businesses in The Vault, a building that once housed a now defunct BIG bank.

Alexia’s new book, Parkinomics, is an Amazon business and motivational bestseller. Called a “Job Hunter’s Boot Camp in a Book,”‘ it focuses on careers in the New Economy.

This article also appeared on Alexia’s blog on Huffington Post.

Bianca, a 2008 graduate of Boulder High, is enrolled at the University of Colorado but taking time off from classes for her adventure in, well, helping.

“I’m handling all aspects of the project,” she said, “including managing a crew of 25 in the construction of the buildings, the installation of plumbing and electricity, and the water catchment and sewage system.”

Bianca Griffith

“I’m even laying out the walking paths, the herb gardens, selecting the fruit trees, and creating a menu for the cook. Right now, I’ve hired someone to cook for us, and I’m teaching her how to prepare food for those who eat meat, and for vegetarians.”

It was late at night in The Gambia (as the African nation is formally known), and she sounded so cheerful that I had to ask: “Where are you staying while you build the project?”

“You wouldn’t believe the bugs!”

“I’m living on the construction site. I sleep on a foam mattress a concrete floor in one of the huts. Right now, all water is brought to the site in five-gallon containers by bicycle or in a car. When I take a bath, I use a bucket of soapy water and pour it over myself. There is no electricity, so we use candles at night.” And what about bugs? “You wouldn’t believe the bugs!” she laughed.

Earlier in the year, Bianca had spent three months in Senegal. There, she hired a local assistant, made contact with elders from a local village two hours outside of Dakar, and got approval to create a water and sanitation project for the village.

Using $600 from her nonprofit, SanteNatural.org and 40 men from the village, she guided them in the construction of a two-squat toilet, water catchment system, and banana plant septic system. From start to finish, the project took only four days.

At the village construction site, she used her iPod to broadcast their favorite local music to entertain them while they worked. Village children danced to the music while their fathers and brothers worked. She invited an artist from New York City to design a brochure on guidelines for water use and sanitation that would be culturally appropriate to life in an African village.

Left villagers with work to do

When her first project at the village was finished, she left them with construction plans and the hands-on know-how to build additional water and sanitation systems in other parts of the village. The goal was for villagers to learn how to do these projects themselves. Then too, she told them that the banana plants growing on top of the septic system would provide them with a new source of organic produce, and income.

A month later, without a college or engineering degree, she moved on to her second village. This time, the University of Suffolk asked for seven students to join her. You can see the results on the SanteNatural.org website.

Where did she learn these eco-design skills? At an eco-village in Pirenopolis, Brazil. And her familiarity with Africa? At 17, she graduated a semester early from high school, then spent four months with LivingRoutes.org in Senegal learning about sustainable village design.

You can read more about this project, and other ideas for the social entrepreneur, in my new book, Parkinomics.

By contrast, could the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico be a game-changer for President Barack Obama? Could he unleash a whole new set of environmentally sound, green policies that would demand that sustainability be moved to the front of the bus, in every decision affecting business and consumers.

Could this be Obama’s watershed moment? Could America — and the world — turn a deeper shade of green overnight with his leadership? Could climate change and global warming do a u-turn with the wave of a pen from his hand?

As I listened to the oil executives from BP, Halliburton, Deepwater Horizon, and its owner Transocean talking to members of Congress, all blaming each other, I realized that we’re all involved in this blame game. We’re all trying to toss this hot potato to someone else, anyone but us.

Thursday’s unsettling news from Venezuela about the sinking of an offshore natural gas rig, simply underscores the growing risk of an unlimited demand for resources, and our growing human dilemma.

Yes, the corporations that make billions of dollars a year from oil will attempt to clean up the BP catastrophic spill. They will most likely litigate its long-term human and environmental impacts over generations. At the same time, they will continue to look elsewhere in the Gulf of Mexico for drilling sites for oil and natural gas. Mexico, China and India will be willing partners.

For the reality is that the true cost of this mistake, our mistake in demanding unlimited fuel — oil, coal, and natural gas — to support our current lifestyle: for our electricity and heat, our automobiles, our airplanes, our travel, our trains, trucks, and cargo ships that bring us cheap foods and consumer goods from anywhere but here…could take a long time to acknowledge.

How big is the public demand for oil? Today, nearly one-third of every U.S. dollar goes to support our military and the Pentagon. Petroleum fuels wars for dwindling resources, it fuels military actions on behalf of national security. It fuels the delivery of food for life, as well as weapons for mass destruction.

Right now, only two cents out of every U.S. taxpayer dollar goes to support and protect the environment. It funds government oversight to protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, the wild and tame lands that refresh our spirit. Is this enough? Not by a long shot.

Do we look at nature’s bounty as if through the eyes of looters? Do we really need to drill for oil and natural gas in the ocean? Or trawl the seas until the last fish is caught?

Is “Looters” too strong a word to use? The poet e.e. cummings says it differently:

“down with the human soul
and anything else uncanned
for everyone carries canopeners
in Ever-Ever Land”

Where does our appetite end, and nature begin?

What are our human boundaries? How do we fit in to the planetary scheme of things? Can we live in harmony in a world where every action honors life?

The first action, perhaps, might be one of forgiveness. Can we first forgive ourselves for making the choices in our own lives that demand that someone else supply us with an unlimited supply of food, clothing, shelter, resources, and security?

With Obama’s strong leadership, can we then take actions toward a sustainable path to the future that enables us to make changes in our own lives so that over time, communities around the globe, and the environment that surrounds them, become as valued and as well funded as our national security? Can we shift priorities here?

Can we envision a world where all are fed, where peace prevails, and beauty surrounds us?

Yes, our thoughts can change, and our actions and visions of the future can change. Will the world change as we change? The easy answer is yes.

Darryl Carpenter came up with the idea of using hay to soak up the oil spill from the ocean, while driving to a job site last Monday. The next minute he was on the phone with sub-contractor Goodson to ask: “Can you fill a large pan with water and oil, then grab a handful of hay and stir it in? Strain out the hay, then call me back and tell me what’s left in the pan.

Eureka! Carpenter had found a solution. Goodson called back elated to say: “You’re not going to believe how this works!” The hay had soaked up all of the oil in the pan. The water looked clear again. The Walton County Sheriff’s real-time video confirms this.

In a scene reminiscent of a primetime cooking show, the Carpenter and Goodson video shows how Coastal Bermuda and Bahia hay could be scattered over the surface of the ocean with hay blowers to absorb the oil. To start, the two men pour oil into two large pans of water, stir in the hay, add a little “wave action,” then skim off the oil-soaked hay.

The audience watching the Walton County video included representatives from BP, the Coast Guard and the Sheriff’s office. CW Roberts then asks BP and the Coast Guard for the chance to do a 10-acre live demonstration in Gulf waters. They were told that approval has to come from higher up.

Will it come in time?

“We work along the whole Gulf of Mexico coastal area in Florida,” says CW Roberts president, Charles Roberts. “We have everything mobilized. We can have boats and equipment on the water in less than a half-day. We have been getting calls from all over, from people who want to supply the hay. We want to be given the chance to see if it works. If it works on 10-acres, then give us a bigger assignment.”

CW Roberts, a 700-employee contracting firm with headquarters in Tallahassee, Fla., and offices located all along the Gulf of Mexico from Destin to Fort Myers, is now under contract with the Walton County’s Office of Emergency Management to protect their beaches from the oil spill. A major component of their protection strategy is the use of bales of hay to keep the oil spill from reaching the Walton beaches.

As the oil spill moves closer to land, Roberts says: “We want to be given a chance to show that this simple strategy just might solve the problem. It’s so simple that I think it scares people.”

To jump start the process, the company is organizing another demonstration this Saturday morning to show how a hay blower and a conveyor can be put out on a boat to both distribute the hay, then pick it up. Shrimp boats can also be mobilized to pick it up with their nets, says Darryl Carpenter.

In fact, the idea of mobilizing a statewide group of hay farmers, a fleet of shrimp boat owners, and a network of 700 CW Roberts employees to solve a problem of catastrophic proportions — that has challenged BP, the Coast Guard and the U.S. Government — may be just the type of heroism the Gulf Coast and America needs right now.

This column also appeared on Alexia Parks’s blog on Huffington Post.

The world is warming, the economy is changing, and so are we. So, I’m borrowing a phrase from actress Q’orianka Kilcher who attended the World Peoples Summit on Climate Change and Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia to announce: a Global Warming of the Heart.

Ten years ago, I described the emerging New Human in an online report titled Rapid Evolution. I identified Damanhur, a community in northern Italy, as the best model to date, for the emerging human community. I wrote another description of this heart-centered, self-reliant individual and the emerging New Economy in my book, OM Money Money.

Then, last night, I corresponded with David Pursglove, who identifies himself as a “New Being.” The folks at the New Being Project ask: Want to see all the great stuff that’s around the bend-after-next in our culture? Some of it barred from the public dialogue? The easy answer is “Yes!”

For many, however, rapid change could threaten their current job and steady paycheck. Over lunch, for example, a scientist friend of mine, who is also a poet, described the tension he is feeling these days between his passion for science and his love of poetry.

He has come up with an idea for geo-engineering space — to whiten clouds over the sea so that they reflect light and warmth back into space. His idea is gaining traction. Oil companies and other BIG energy companies want to throw money at geo-engineering projects. Other scientists are stepping up to the plate to join him. They want to play in this new money arena too.

However, he is feeling great tension, because he is also a great poet. Over 30 years, he has won many poetry awards in England, and even read his poems and stories on BBC.

Perhaps a story from his childhood illustrates why even this scientist might prefer to “work” full time as a poet, observing the evolving Earth, and humans as they bloom.

As a young boy growing up in northern England, he would wake up in an unheated bedroom and study the patterns that ice had etched on the windows. As he studied the ice, he could imagine frowning, fearsome faces looking back at him. So as an experiment, he took a straw and blew warm air on their icy faces. They softened into smiles. Some even wept.

Could the heart of humans also be slowly warming?

This article also appeared on Alexia Parks’ blog on Huffington Post

With three days left before the close of the Eldora ski area, it’s time to head for the hills one last time. Which runs to ski? They’re all good, however, today the groomer’s choice was Windmill and Corona.

If you need nearly new skis, there is also a year-end demo ski sale going on, however, I didn’t take time to look today. I was too busy skiing. I’m going back for one more day, then calling it a wrap. I’m a midweek skier, so my pass ends Friday. Smart skiers, of course, will ride the lifts all the way to the close at the end of Sunday.

What happens when the ski lifts close for the winter? Last Spring, while hiking the melting Eldora ski trails, I spotted a female moose. It’s the first moose I’ve sighted in Colorado. Friends who live in Eldora called the next day to tell me that she had wandered downhill, close to their mountain village, and was nibbling Spring greens at the edge of a small pond.

What else is wild just west of Boulder? Well, at the top of Flagstaff Road, last weekend, I spotted a small herd of elk on a south-facing hill. Deer were hanging out across the valley following the melting snow toward Gross Reservoir.

Until the gate closes at Eldora, however, the best place to get high is on their well-groomed ski slopes. The view is the best, up top, too. And if you make it downhill to the Katmandu restaurant in Nederland before 3 pm, before their lunch buffet ends, you’ll score a double win.

It was 9:05 a.m. The meters outside the Trident Café had been active for five minutes. I had been standing beside the driver’s side door of my car — three dogs waiting inside — engaged in a last-minute conversation with a friend before driving away.

There were no cars parked near mine. However, a sixth sense told me to look over my shoulder, and as I did, I saw him there — the meter-man — not more than four feet from me, encoding the number of my license plate into his electronic machine.

“You have been standing here talking for five minutes. I saw you when I was across the street, heading this way,” he said without expression. He was right. With the silence of a stealth bomber, he had approached my car. Then, without a call of greeting or warning, the dirty deed was done.

“I don’t try and make decisions on my own, he explained. “I just write tickets for cars without a parking validation. I’ve been told that my job is to write tickets.”

Like the local dog-catcher, he had become adjusted to the idea of dispensing misery to people who were not his neighbors, while holding firm to the thought: “I’m just doing my job.” His eyes were clear and unclouded as he repeated the mantra once again: “It’s just my job.”

Later that day, I watched a classified U.S. military video released by WikiLeaks (see actual video) in which aerial shooters turned their machine guns on a dozen innocent civilians in Baghdad, two of whom were Reuters news staff.

The mantra of the soldiers who gunned them down from the air — then circled around to shoot a Good Samaritan who encountered the bloody scene a few minutes later — sounded familiar. They justified their murderous act as “just doing our job.”

Personal versus impersonal

However, there is no way to compare the two acts. The parking employee has to look each person who confronts him in the eye. His job is face-to-face. By contrast, the military’s aerial shooters, playing deadly video-like war games, never have to face their victims or their families.

They never get to hear the other side of the story or go through a reconciliation process. In the Rwandan Genocide, where hundreds of thousands of innocent people were killed over a 100-day period, the process of healing is taking place through reconciliation. The murderers must sit in a courtroom and listen to the victims’ families describe the horror of the event and the pain and trauma suffered by the surviving families.

In a similar fashion, for those U.S. soldiers exposed in the WikiLeaks-decoded video, who seem immune to the pain and suffering of others, it may be a good time to bring them forward. They could be brought to a courtroom — perhaps in Iraq — where they can listen to the stories of the families of their victims. Perhaps in this way, they can come to terms, at the deepest personal level, with the harm they have done.

Innocent Iraqi civilians are not fair game for burned out, thrill-seeking U.S. soldiers. These war-addicted soldiers, with a videogamer mindset, grasped at phrases like “collateral damage” and “armed terrorists” to explain what had happened when the “game” was over.

In a civilized world, “we were just doing our job” does not apply to murder.

WikiLeaks and Reuters should receive an award for their work in bringing this whistle-blower video into the public spotlight. And the public should demand that all such war-zone videos be placed in the public domain.

Only when we understand the underpinnings of violence done in the name of “national security,” or in the name of “just doing our job,” will we begin to find long-lasting solutions to humankind’s seemingly endless addiction to war and suffering.

Postscript

BUSTED! Through sheer coincidence, a passerby caught a picture of Alexia getting her ticket. (Photo: Andrew Hyde)

Back in 1982, when Scott Harrison moved from San Francisco to the small mountain town of Nederland, Colorado, the first thing he did was build his family a house. For the next 26 years, the first floor would become home to Amnesty International (AI)’s Urgent Action program. The second floor was where Harrison and his family lived.

Scott Harrison and his carousel animals

Over the years, more than 200 University of Colorado student interns and local volunteers came to the house in Nederland to work with Harrison and his wife Ellen Moore. Ellen managed the AI archives, which are now housed in New York at Columbia University.

In 1986, Harrison heard about a carousel in Utah that was going to be junked. It had been built alongside the Great Salt Lake in 1910, then moved in the 1950s to a state-run school for mentally ill and disabled students. Twenty years later, the state sold it to a businesswoman who, in turn, sold off the animals as antiques. Harrison bought the carousel frame, dismantled it and transported it home. In 1992, he bought a Model 125 Wurlitzer Band Organ whose 102 instruments were run by air bellows.

During the years before his retirement from AI in 2007, Harrison spent his “off hours” in a woodshop adjacent to his house. There he would carve fanciful wooden animals, the kind that would travel round and round forever, on a merry-go-round. Drawing upon the creative imagination of local cartoonist George Blevins, he carved a moose, a dragon, a zebra, a peacock, kangaroo, ostrich, gorilla and more. “Carving the animals,” he says, “Was a way to balance things out. On the other side of the wall was the real challenge: torture.”

When his work with AI ended, Harrison converted the first floor of his house into the nonprofit CarouselofHappiness.org. And volunteers, who once offered their skills and talents to heal a world in pain, now turned their attention to a single vision: to build a carousel that would bring laughter and magic to the town and its children.

Local landowner Jim Guercio helped get the ball rolling. Guercio, who managed the famous ’70s rock group Chicago and produced early albums for Blood Sweat & Tears and other bands, offered Harrison a 30 year lease on land in the commercial heart of town for one dollar a month. He also provided start-up construction costs.

Then, with a spirit reminiscent of a barn raising, the residents of Nederland came together to build the Carousel of Happiness. The carousel has a radiant heat floor and insulated roof panels. All labor, except plumbing and electricity, was donated. A crane to lift steel beams into place was offered for free. Boulder’s Lighthouse Solar contributed $40,000 in electric photovoltaic solar panels. And the NED Renewable Energy Project donated 400 LED lights. Working together, town residents created a living piece of American history.

This Memorial Day, the carousel animals in all their painted glory will begin their endless journey prancing round and round the building. With only $75,000 left to raise before the music starts, Harrison’s nonprofit has begun reaching out beyond the boundaries of his small mountain town.

The carousel has fairies throughout the building that can be adopted for only $200 each. Historic, restored paintings can be adopted with the donor’s name engraved on a plaque at the bottom. Plaques throughout the building will celebrate the largest donors. And the work of local artists and fair trade items from other cultures will be offered for sale, with the profits going to help people with special needs.

“Whatever brings happiness will be featured here,” says Harrison, smiling fondly at the circle of brightly painted animals. Seeing my camera, he paused for a photo next to the long necked goose, her wings spread wide for her first flight.

This article also appeared on Alexia’s blog on Huffington Post.