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"The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind"
To most of us, old bicycle parts are mostly good for DIY furniture projects if they're good for anything, and windmills are best designed by people with advanced degrees.

When fourteen-year-old William Kamkwamba, of Masitala Village in Wimbe, Malawi, stumbled across the image of a windmill for the first time while pouring over a library book, he wasn't thinking like that. He was thinking of his village's lack of electricity (only 2% of Malawi is electrified) and of how electricity could power an irrigation pump, which would help his family and others cope with meager crops. If you've been reading TreeHugger, or any news really, you probably know what happened next...

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Photo Credit: Juan Diego Pérez

Trudie Styler is many things - a UNICEF ambassador, a human rights activist, a co-founder of Rainforest Foundation and, of course, the wife of the musician Sting. In September, she came to the big screen (or more likely to a smaller independent theater screen) in the film documentary Crude. The film chronicles the case of Aguinda vs Chevron-Texaco - a legal drama that is trying to find justice for a group of indigenous people in Ecuador that has had their homeland devastated in the name of drilling for oil. Infamously called the Amazon Chernobyl, the movie examines the complexity of international conglomerate corporations relationship and responsibilities for environmental peril and human suffering. Treehugger had a change to speak with Styler about her work within Ecuador and find out how she's helping make a bad situation better.

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The dirty, stinking rich! Yeah, I said it! They are always getting called-out for their imbalanced percentage of environmental destruction. For example, the average American's carbon footprint is 2000 times bigger than the average person living in Chad. The average Brit emits more carbon in a day than the average Kenyan emit in a year. It gets worse! Did you know that the top 20% wealthiest people contribute 80% of greenhouse gases? Or that the top 7% are responsible for half of all carbon emissions? Most people see this as a reason to loathe the affluent, but wouldn't it make more sense to see them as an enormous opportunity to create fast and dramatic change for global warming? If the 20% well-to-do offset their CO2 emssions by 50%, that would mean an overall decrease of 40%. That's huge! Jeff Stewart and Nicholas Baily, the founders of Belgrave Trust are aiming to do just that- target the luxury class with a retail carbon offset service which cleans up the environment and lets them live guilt-free! I had a chance to talk to them about their idea.

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Sascha Simon is responsible for strategic planning of product management for Mercedes Benz USA. Bascially, that means that he ensures that future Mercedes products give consumers what they want how they want it while Mercedes continues to produce automobiles that embodies the company's core values. He uses on market research and trend data while working with product designers in Stuttgart, Germany and Palo Alto, California to envision a better vehicle. Treehugger had a chance to talk to him about Mercedes future of green cars, the hurdles to overcome and how their cars will perform with green technologies.

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Photo from wikipedia

On July 31, 2009 , the film The Cove opened in New York and Los Angeles. Fisher Stevens had a major part in whipping the picture into theater-shape. You may remember him from the 1986 hit Short Circuit. With the release of The Cove, he is showing everyone he's got an eye for making edgy eco-documentaries. The film is full of emotion, environmental conundrums and characters that make you want to become a full-fledged eco-activist! I had a chance to talk with Stevens about the pic and how it changed his life.

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In a recent interview with Adrian Grenier and Andrew Vladeck of the Honey Brothers, the two musicians discussed what green means to them and the band as a whole. Grenier talked about the importance of community in the green movement, as well as standing up and getting involved. Check out the interview as well as the band's festival tour debut at the Wanderlust Festival.

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"There are lots of questions"
To meet its ambitious goals -- a 20 percent increase in energy productivity and a ten percent decrease in emissions compared to 2005 levels by the end of 2010 -- China will need to rely on strong national policies, like the so-called "green" stimulus package. But it will also require the determination of the officials overseeing the country's ferocious, unprecedented urbanization -- China's mayors.

To arm them with the know-how they want and the connections they need, the government has turned to Dr. Steve Hammer, the director of the Urban Energy Program at Columbia and an expert1 on New York City and London‘s sustainability plans. Some lessons from those cities apply, he tells TreeHugger -- and like some Chinese cities, some lessons need to be built from scratch.

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Photograph: Jay Westcott/Rappor

Never heard of Stanley Greenberg? Probably means you’ve been living under a rock for the last, say, twenty years. He’s a political mastermind – akin to being described as the world-champion of public opinion polls. His client list reads like a who’s who of domestic and international government – Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Nelson Mandela and Ehud Barak. When the chance to talk enviro-political shop with the Grand Pooh-bah “o” Polling appeared, it was an easy vote of YES WE CAN!