Speak Up!
Environmental organizations like SpaceShare may do the work,
but they don't have power. In today's economy, consumers
often have amazing power. A few comments from you, buying a ticket
or registering for a conference, can have a great impact.
Quick intro
Ask them if they carpool! When you hear of the conference,
when you buy a ticket or register, ask to talk to the person in charge
of carpooling & recycling.
Mail the organizers
this
introduction to SpaceShare, or simply encourage them to look
over www.spaceshare.com/green
Give them a grade!
Here is a guide you can send to an event before it happens or
take with you, fill it out, and hand it in with the event survey.
Print
this checklist.
Two keys are particularly helpful:
- Let them know that carpooling or room-sharing or flight-networking
would help you get there. In any organization, the environmentalists
will "get it" when asked to set up carpooling; letting the
organization know the very simple
message that "I am a customer and I want it" gets through to the
business side.
- Ask to talk to whomever is in charge of making the event green.
Usually, no one is in charge, and that is half the struggle. As a customer
asking who makes the decisions about carpooling and recycling, they owe
you an answer, and that may bring them over that threshold, assigning
someone the job. Most events are not "brown" because they've made the
decision not to care; rather they are brown because they haven't
thought about what they can do to be green. If someone is simply
in charge of thinking about greening the conference, the rest is downhill.
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