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Discover the origins of some of the largest lakes in the world at this month's Kirtlandia Society lecture with Charles Herdendorf, CMNH Education Volunteer and Professor Emeritus, OSU School of Earth Science. 

Free. To find out more about the Kirtlandia Society, go here.  

Ideas that will transform a “pollution-based” to a sustainable economy are the providence of new leaders such as Sadhu Johnston, Van Jones and the sustainable entrepreneurs found in “Earth: The Sequel”, a New York Times Bestseller penned by Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn. They all shared a vision for the future at last Friday's climate change solutions symposium at Oberlin College.

The national dialogue is now balanced between urgency and excitement because "we're no longer debating climate change; we're talking about solutions,” Bruce Latimer, executive director, Cleveland Museum of Natural History noted in his welcoming remarks.

Indeed, some of the best and brightest solutions are on the rise in Chicago where Johnston, chief environmental officer and Mayor Daley’s deputy chief of staff, is impressively reshaping a 20th century industrial city into “one where you don’t have to leave to find nature.” It’s a bold vision backed by a long list of sustainability programs: At least a dozen LEED-certified green buildings including high-rises and public housing, alleys replaced with permeable pavers, a green roofs grant program, green retrofits for its historic bungalows, a local wind turbine project, a green jobs training center and on.

Unlike some cities that signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement and then stalled, Chicago released a plan based on calculating its carbon footprint and establishing transition scenarios. Chicago’s plan is a roadmap for government operations and investments with goals such as a more livable city and targets to reduce their carbon footprint to 12 metric tonnes per capita annually.

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A two-day I-Open workshop

Welcome to the new world of economic development based on networks. Learn the leadership skills you need to strengthen collaboration in your community and region. Here is an innovative, tested approach to building collaboration for economic and workforce development. Gain the insights, roadmaps and tools you need to develop new ideas and translate them into action. Strategic doing is a new approach to building the civic networks that your community and region need to prosper in the future.

This workshop is ideal for innovative civic leaders who want to expand their perspectives on economic and workforce development. Anyone who must lead a community or region in developing strategies for economic development and workforce development needs new analytic tools to understand how they can have the most impact.

Workshop Details:

When: April 23 - 25, 2008

April 23: Arrive at 6:00 pm on for a kickoff dinner and networking

April 24: All day workshop and dinner

April 25: One-half day workshop and lunch. Adjourn at 2:00 pm

Register online at 123 Signup

Send your check to: The Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open), Cleveland Midtown Innovation Center, 4415 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44115.

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Meeting to continue the dialogue concerning how to become the first region nationally to embrace the application of biomimicry in the design of our products, buildings, organizations and communities.

More information about biomimicry and the collaborative.

If preserving historically significant architecture is the very definition of sustainability, it can also be a long and winding road. Such is the case for adaptively reusing the Marcel Breuer-designed Ameritrust Tower.

A small group of thoughtful people continue to make the case that the county will save millions of dollars while reducing its budget deficit, diverting tons of materials from the landfill and preserving an important piece of our national building heritage.

They may have turned the tide as recent reports indicate the county is in conversation with two developers interested in taking the tower and making something of it.

Read a brief history of this preservation effort, including letters from influential art and architecture professionals, and GreenCityBlueLake’s appeal to the National Trust for Historic Preservation which lead to the Trust sending a letter this week calling for the county to “investigate this possibility to save the building from the landfill through sale to a preservation-sensitive developer committed to saving both the Rotunda and the Ameritrust Tower.”

For advocates of preserving modern architecture, the fate of the Ameritrust Tower, designed by Bauhaus-trained Marcel Breuer in 1971, embodies their frustration with the general malaise toward a style that promised architecture for the masses. But, it also holds a glimmer of hope for an ad hoc coalition of government waste foes, architects, environmentalists, and fans of Design Within Reach and Dwell magazine's mid-century design, who are working tirelessly to change the minds of two of the three Cuyahoga County Commissioners who want it razed.

Churches and neoclassical halls have been the low hanging fruit for preservation organizations for years while visionary glass-and-steel and pre-cast concrete structures of the modernists have been mostly shunned. (Update: the county commissioners have sold the Ameritrust Complex to The K&D Group of Willoughby who intend to preserve the Breuer Tower and to transform the complex into a complete, mixed-use lifestyle center encompassing almost 10 square city blocks)

What if your organization could make better decisions, faster, without getting bogged down by endless debates or office politics -- AND give everyone a voice in the process?

That’s the promise of Holacracy™, a new idea for delivering organizational agility in today’s fast-paced world of constant change.

On Tuesday, Oct. 30, business, nonprofit and academic leaders will gather to explore and experiment with Holacracy™, a cutting-edge system designed to help organizations successfully navigate complexity and uncertainty.  The event is sponsored by Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management and the Cleveland-based consulting firm Conte & Company.

Conte & Company is a Cleveland-based consulting firm that supports leaders, teams and organizations to solve complex problems, reach their full potential and realize their goals. The firm offers leadership development, executive coaching, team development, meeting facilitation and organizational change consulting.

Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, is internationally acclaimed for redefining management education and is known as one of the most innovative business schools in the world. Its Organizational Behavior Department has been ranked best overall in the world by the Financial Times for the five year period (2003-2007). http://weatherhead.case.edu/

This specialized 3-day course is designed for professionals in various design fields including architecture, engineering, landscape architecture, interior design, and industrial design interested in applying biomimicry to sustainable architecture and design.

For additional details and pricing please click here.

On September 25th more than 400 attendees packed The Cleveland Institute of Art to hear Janine Benyus, co-founder of the Biomimicry Guild, introduce a new source of design inspiration.

This was the kick-off event for a year long focus by E4S and its latest regional sustainability effort—Cleveland+ Biomimicry Design Collaborative—to seed Biomimicry into the regional design DNA and create what might be the first regional effort to put these revolutionary ideas to work to rebuild our economy.

Janine actually packed-in five events in 24 hours, interacted with many businesses on the sustainability path and toured the Cuyahoga River Valley. She left us with many idea seeds for new businesses, designs and fresh nature inspired viewpoints on our current assets, E4S writes in its latest email.

Jim Hartzfeld, InterfaceRAISE introduced Janine to the E4S Network. While in Cleveland he shared the knowledge and tools to transform technology and culture with several local companies who want to implement sustainability. His work on sustainability at Interface for over 12 years makes him a global leader. We hope both Jim and Janine will return to visit the E4S Network over the next year.

If you’re interested, check out this upcoming E4S networking event and this October 9th event to lay out the vision of the Biomimicry Design Collaborative. And mark down this Cleveland Biomimicry Workshop in January, 2008.

Nature is a great teacher—her millions of years of evolution is practically a free text book for sustainably designed products and businesses. Janine Benyus calls it “Biomimicry”, which, she explained to a full house at last night’s Entrepreneurs for Sustainability event at Cleveland Institute of Art's Aitken Auditorium, involves engineers, scientists and business leaders learning from plants, animals and sometimes entire ecosystems that display great skill in adapting to harsh conditions or create "products" without burning fossil fuels.

Many, like the conch shell, are masters of self-assembly—gathering calcium carbonate from the sea which reacts with its surface to form (without heat) mother-of-pearl a thousand times tougher than ceramics formed in kilns, Benyus says.

“Cleveland is particularly suited to do biomimicry,” she says, "with twenty-seven universities, NASA-Glenn, the Cleveland Clinic and all of the biological know-how. It’s about seeing a technological world that’s already been created, but maybe just overlooked.”