7gen Bloc

Last week's Seventh Generation Index proved so popular that we've decided to go back to the books and do it again. So it is that we present this new snapshot of our world, a look at some deceptively pithy facts and figures that speak volumes about the state of our planet today and where we need to take it tomorrow.

One of the biggest challenges in marketing Seventh Generation products is telling the story of their many benefits. Because where a lot of that story is concerned, you can't really see the reasons why they're the best idea around. In fact, unlike many products, including the competition's, some of the biggest things our products do are the things they don't do.

Rob Hopkins, author of The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience, sums up the Transition Initiative movement that he helped launch in Britain.

SEVEN FUND stands for Social Equity Venture Fund. The name is inspired by Michael Fairbank's Framework of the "Seven Forms of Capital" and by the number seven, which has positive associations in various cultures around the world.

It came late the other night, borne by hammering rain and tearing winds, announced by the white glare of skyfire and its riotous clamor. As it did, Vermont's sweet precious summer began its slow and inexorable fade.

Call it a case of two steps forward, one step back. I recently wrote about terrific new federal legislation that will ban and/or restrict a host of toxic phthalates in children's toys.

Begun in fits and starts, my vacation has not been a very effective escape from work. It pains me to count the days I have left. As July slipped into August, I increasingly distanced myself from most calls and emails. But my mind seems to still be working, even if I am not physically at work.

You can count the real heroes of what I call the "global detox movement" on maybe a hand and half. Because there just aren't a lot of scientific minds that have chosen to become activist as well. So we have the research community on the one side, which does the fact finding, and the advocacy community on the other, which takes this evidence and does the proselytizing.

"This is the way the world ends," wrote T.S. Eliot in his poem, the Hollow Men. "Not with a bang but a whimper." So it is with our own unsustainable world as well. There's no magic switch to hit. No watershed event on the way. We're not going to wake up one morning to newspaper headlines trumpeting a future suddenly arrived. Instead, the change we seek will come through a series of small and often unnoticed steps.

A Look At Leading Environmental Indicators