Change the Margins

Courant Post-ings II

So stoked! Two fantastic articles came out this week about Margins! So far no bump in traffic from the Courant piece, but I'm hoping that people will curl up with their papers in their jammies over brunch and catch up on reading during the holiday weekend.

The Washington Post 
"The Small-Margin Movement", by Eviana Hartman, can be found here. The piece has an election year slant - very appropriate for a Washington paper. If you want to forward the article to others (please do!), here's the actual link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/
14/AR2008021403284.html?sub=new

You do have to sign in to read the article, but registration is free.

The Hartford Courant
"One Tiny Change Could Save Thousands of Trees" by Joann Klimkiewicz takes a look at the thrifty roots of the Margins campaign, as well as the campaign's goals. You can read it here.

To pass it along:
http://www.courant.com/features/lifestyle/hc-margins0214.
artfeb14,0,7335664.story

Courant Post-ings

The past few weeks have been very encouraging, as the Margins campaign continues to make its way out into the world. I was recently contacted by the Washington Post and the Hartford Courant about doing pieces on Margins.

Both pieces were supposed to come out this week. Not sure what's up yet with the Post, but many thanks to my friend Craig and his stepmom. She lives in Connecticut and found the article in the Courant (it's not online). She's sending me a copy and I'll post it as soon as I receive it.

I'm a little nervous about the pieces. I'm used to being the interviewER, not the interviewEE...hopefully, I said a few things that were either mildly coherent or entertaining and don't make me sound like a jackass.

I'm also curious to see the impact of print press vs. online press on the campaign. Over the past several months, every time there's been a mention of Margins online somewhere, the petition and site traffic have gotten a bump. I'm wondering if the same will hold true for print. If it's not as simple as clicking on a hyperlink to find out more about the campaign, will people actually make the extra effort to do so?

Freaky Thinkin' Genius

Usually when the word "viral" pops up, I go running for a Z-pack from Dr. Goldberg. But when it comes to Margins, viral is what we crave. Thx to the following peeps/orgs for supporting Change the Margins. I've newly discovered Google Alerts, which is helping me to keep track of campaign mentions.

-Freakgirl.com: Change the Margins

-Allan Doyle's THINK blog: He's the Director of Technology at the MIT Museum - that sounds like a verrry cool job that I'd love to have in an alternate version of my life...

January/February issue of World Ark, a newsletter published by Heifer International, an organization dedicated to working with communities to end hunger and poverty and to care for the earth. They've put me up for their "Genius of the Month" award, which definitely makes me feel a LOT better about being the only person in my family who didn't go to grad school. Thanks to my dad who found the article randomly - he receives the publication because of his work with the non-profit org Prevent Child Abuse. While leafing through it he found the article and sent it my way. 

Glamour at Sundance

No Friday EyeCandy last week, as I was up in Park City at the Sundance Film Festival covering it for Documentary Magazine. While I was there, I got covered myself...by Glamour! Margins is going to be featured in their April 2008 issue as part of their Green Guide (not official title).

Hopefully, I didn't sound like a complete  idiot in the interview. The reporter didn't quite catch me at my best... runny nose + 7000 feet of altitude adjustment = a less than coherent Tamara. My body does NOT like the cold!

And speaking of Sundance...several docs up there dealt with environmental issues, and all shared the common themes of acting locally and beginning with small steps. Flow: For Love of Water dealt with  the looming water crisis. I'm familiar with water pollution issues, but learned a lot about the effects of H20 privatization - it scared the crap of out me. In Fields of Fuel, activist Josh Tickell advocates the use of biodiesel fuel, and uses it as the jumping off point to explore our dependence on oil and to showcase current solutions. Trouble the Water, a personal account of surviving Katrina, and I.O.U.S.A., about the national debt, are not directly about the environment, but you can't help but connect the dots once they are put in context.

If you want to see my Sundance coverage: www.documentary.org...all I'm sayin' is, there are pictures of Bono...

Green Architecture

I try to report on concrete positive results for the Margins campaign whenever possible. This in recently from Nick Cassidy, who heard the NPR story and brought the idea to his office at the State Architect’s Office in Ohio. He was recognized as "Employee of the Month" for the improvement. This quote is from the inner office communication that lauded his efforts:

"Another item, which was inspired by our own Nick Cassidy's initiative to narrow the margins of our paper documents, along with a few other efficiency strategies, has allowed us to reduce the number of pages in the consolidated document from 382 pages to 340, even with the addition of 7 pages in the Version Control Document. That's a whopping 12 percent less paper, impressions, energy, landfill space, printing time, etc."

I have no idea what the Version Control Document IS, but I'm all for the 12% cut in waste! According to Cassidy, there are a lot of forms used at State (gee, a government office that generates a lot of paperwork? What a surprise!), so this kind of change has the potential to have a sizeable impact.

  

Petition Signatures Doubled in One Day

Ok, so I don't know exactly how this happened, but the signatures on the Microsoft petition have doubled in the last 24 hours!

I'm assuming that a high profile site linked to it, but I've done a search and can't find a new posting about the campaign in the last week. If anyone can shed light on this, please share!

Environmental Defense Rocks My World

One of my biggest frustrations in working on this campaign has been in trying to find the right stats to pass along when people ask for help in taking the idea to their companies or schools. The internet is an amazing place, but as we all know, you can waste a TON o'time searching and searching and searching and still not finding exactly what you need.

Yesterday, I finally hit paydirt! I followed a link on the "Experts" section of  The 11th Hour website to Forest Ethics. After nosing around there for a bit, I found a report which mentioned a bunch of facts & figures, all credited to a paper calculator created by Environmental Defense.

It's an amazing tool that allows businesses and individuals to easily figure out the impact they could make by reducing various factors in their paper consumption. There are also a ton of reports from the initiatives the company has worked on, so I'll be spending some time with those this weekend mining them for facts and figures relevant to my own li'l project.

All About the Numbers

One of the things I'm learning on my grassroots adventure is the importance of numbers and statistics. They're slippery little fellas! You need numbers - irrefutable numbers - to convince companies it's fiscally worth it to change corporate policy. And a lot of research has been done on the impact of the paper industry on the environment and on how using recycled paper will save trees, cut down on emissions, etc. However, these number are scattered across the cyber-universe in a rather unscientific manner, so trying to put them together in a comprehensive document that can stand up to scrutiny has been challenging. If anyone knows a statistician with some spare time on his/her hands, please send me their contact e-mail address!

What HAS been encouraging are the emails I've been receiving with suggestions and requests for more info to  spread the Margins idea around. I'm almost done with a sample letter that one can use to bring to their company supervisor or IT Department, and hope to have it posted within the next week...just trying to get the numbers to make sense (did I mention I'm having horrible flashbacks to my high school calculus class?).

NPR Story Airs on 9/6/07!

Great news!!! The NPR story aired on Thursday, September 6th. Verrry exciting.

Just as exciting is that as I type this, it's one of the top 4 e-mailed stories on NPR, which means it's listed on the home page, so there's more exposure for it.  If you want to keep it at the top of the list, please forward the story utilizing the "e-mail page" feature in the upper right hand corner of the NPR site.  That allows NPR to track how many people are getting the story forwarded to them. 

Unfortunately, I was on a plane all day Thursday flying to the Toronto Film Festival, where I am covering the event for DOCUMENTARY magazine and shooting segments for THAT INDIE FILM SHOW. I've gotten a bunch of wonderful comments, suggestions, and questions on Margins, which I'm trying to respond to as quickly as possible. I've got limited email access while I'm up here, so thanks for your patience.

One big question people have is HOW to change their margins.  I've posted a very simple explanation on how to do this for Microsoft Word, and my friend and I are working on a nice,pretty  document with screen shots.  Please let me know if this description is clear. 

Other suggestions included sample letters to companies urging them to change margins, and more specific stats. I hope to put this together over the next week and a half.

Thanks thanks thanks for all the feedback & keep 'em comin!

Sludgie.com post

I've been out of town for the past four days and returned to see that the petition has broken 100 signatures - yahooey!

In addition, we've gotten our first blog mention elsewhere on the web. Sludgie.com is an eco-blog with an offbeat sense of humor written by Francis Stokes and Stephanie Weir. Filmmaker/writer Stokes posted "Give Her an Inch and She'll Save a Mile," which explains the Margins idea by referencing the habits of serial killers and  desperate high school students (did I mention the blog has an offbeat sense of humor?). Needless to say, I'm verrry happy that word of the campaign is starting to spread.

Stokes and I met when I appeared in his film Harold Buttleman, Daredevil Stuntman. He's currently in post-production on a thriller and writing for Gristmill, the daily blog for the influential environmental magazine Grist. He had a bunch of great suggestions for my own little blog here, which I will attempt to implement...as y'all know, I'm somewhat new to this, so learning as I go.