R.I. Sustainable Living Festival

This past Saturday, I had the pleasure of participating in a panel discussion at this year’s R.I. Sustainable Living Festival, hosted by the Apeiron Institute at their Coventry campus. The session was about using the Internet to build real-world communities. Many thanks go out to my fellow panel members:

• Caroline Brown of the Earth Friendly Gardening blog
• Bruce Campbell and Angela Penn of The Ocean Project
• Sue Korte, who runs both The Providential Gardener and the mega-green calendar site, What Grows On in RI
• And to Mary Grady of the Natural News Network for thinking of Sustainable Sakonnet for the panel.

Each of us brought a slightly different perspective on how to leverage the web to engage and enable folks at the local, state, national, and international levels. A key theme was around providing that one-stop-shopping information destination for our respective readers. It was also great to hear how we all keep on keeping on, trying to do more and more with what resources are at our disposal.

The rest of the festival was great too – aside from the blistering heat. Kudos to my wife and kids for sticking it out! You can check out the full vendor list here. Everything from home energy production to recycled products to education and politics.

The Apeiron Institute for Sustainable Living is a great resource, especially for students. I know of a teacher at the high school who brings his class there every year to expose them to this incredibly important (and missing) curriculum. It’s fantastic to see that there are alternatives to what might be considered the “normal” way of living – and that our students gravitate towards that kind of knowledge.