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Greener Assets - Greening Your Business

What Can One Person Do?

by Ali on January 2nd, 2008

This is it! The final week of the b5media Apprentice Challenge, and from over 30 blogs on the b5 Business Channel there are just four left: Accounting Solver, Home Biz Notes, Successful Blog and Greener Assets! You get a say in the final decision, vote for your favorite final Apprentice Challenge post from these four blogs by leaving a comment! Your comment is a vote for that blog!

The final challenge is: Why do you blog? In my mind, the challenge question and answer are one in the same:

What Can One Person Do?

To be honest, I used to think that blogs were for lonely people looking for dates. I’m not kidding. Then I discovered that bloggers were using the internet for positive change. Like TreeHugger, where you can learn something sustainable every day. And Zen Habits, where one man shares his journey of transformation and invites you to join him. Or Sphere, where threatened natural and national treasures find an advocate. I found a thriving discourse in the blogosphere where my ideals were gaining momentum through the global connection of the internet.

“the honour and distinction of the individual consist in this, that he among all the world’s multitudes should become a source of social good” - From the Baha’i Faith

So in order to find a platform where I could be heard I turned to b5media and asked, What does bubble gum have to do with birds? What does your new deck have to do with people in Bolivia? What do spiders have to do with Kevlar? The answers to these questions and more have become my voice in the online environmental movement.

I’ve learned that carelessly discarded bubble gum is fatal to birds, it’s a simple fact that I want people to know. I’ve seen, first hand, how products made from responsibly harvested wood protect tropical forests and want people to know that their consumer choices really do make a difference. I understand that if we use biomimicry principles we could produce a material stronger than Kevlar without generating pollution, just like spiders do every day, and my hope is that by bringing the subject to forum someone will be inspired to find a solution.

When a company finds a new way to harness the wind for electricity I want to tell people. When an individual has made a difference I think that sharing their story can inspire others and lift the cloud of environmental ‘doom and gloom’, even if just for a moment. I believe that if my responses and posts about what I see and learn about the environment have an impact on even just one person than my time here in the blogosphere is well spent. And I’m not alone.

Since I started with b5media, first at Daily Tomorrow and then here at Greener Assets, I witnessed and took part in the first Blog Action Day where the founders asked What Can One Person Do? The answer was a tremendous roar of blogging heard around the world on October 15, 2007, when more than 20,000 individual bloggers across the globe united and said that the environment matters to them.

By uniting the world’s blogging community we can raise awareness of the environment, get people thinking and trigger a global debate. - United Nations Environment Programme

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Blog Action Day reached millions of people worldwide, and that was just one day. As an environmental blogger for Daily Tomorrow, Greener Assets, Inhabitat and Green Redux, every day is Blog Action Day for me. What keeps me writing is the knowledge that the world is one big interconnected system that includes everything from ecology to economics to the internet, and I dig that.

So why do I blog? I blog because it’s what one person can do.

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