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Sunday, November 23, 2008

CNN This Afternoon

Thankfully I don't sound as nervous as I really was, and also, apparently, you can't hear sweating over basic cable, which is a good thing.
Enjoy.

16 comments:

esther said...

nope! you don't look nerveous at all! great video!!

translated your post http://jemerecycle.over-blog.com/article-25088202.html (yes I know, you can't read french, just so you knew it...)

Dave said...

Awesome! Thanks.

dave

Anonymous said...

Great show. I'm glad you are out there, showing it can be done. You are part of my inspiration to reduce my own waste at home.

I think all of your tips are helpful and easy to implement even for some of the most wasteful people.

Donavan S. Moye said...

You done good!! So cool the word is spreading! Maybe we'll reach a tipping-point soon!

Anonymous said...

Hey Dave,

Nicely done! Very professional and interesting. You look like this is old-hat for you ;)
It's great that you are helping a movement and that it's growing forward.

Anonymous said...

It's strange that I get more used to hear your voice all the time now. It's good that people know more about this. Do you know how to make a compost system? like building one, cause I live in Chile and I've never seen people selling that stuff around here.
Thanks a lot dave, keep it up

Anonymous said...

How cool to see you on CNN.com's home page! I've been following your blog for a few months and tell people about what you're doing every chance I get...sometimes they get it, sometimes they don't (BTW, I think the CNN interviewer falls in the "didn't get it" category.)
Anyway, I blogged about your timely Thanksgiving tips today for my magazine's readers (linking to your site, of course).
Thanks for what you're doing, it truly is incredible and takes an amount of committment I wish more people had.

Anonymous said...

Dismayed to see you wearing the Bummer shirt. I compost, I use a push mower for my 1500sqft of grass that my kids and dogs play on in a yard that is otherwise desert landscape, and I have been making bio diesel for many years for my Hummer H1. It is not any less fuel efficient than any other like sized vehicle and I use it for everything from work to recreation. There are only about 7 thousand H1s in the entire US. The best part is that I can service virtually anything on that beast myself due to it's design. Most guys I know with Hummers are comparable "green aware" and live that way. There are not enough H2s to outweigh the gas consumption of any other single brand of SUV. A shirt with a suburban would be a more deserving target.

I have seen similar PR messages just like yours over the past few decades, so nothing really new. While you suggest to kill the business of florists and non-local farmers to stimulate your local economy, I can just bet your bio-diesel vehicle is a foreign made (probably German) vehicle which makes you a bit of a hypocrite. My truck is about 96% American made and at retail likely fed at least 5 times the number of American families that your purchase likely did. That is the American way to "spread the wealth". Am I right? Did you help create the trade deficit with your car?

So while I agree with much of your lifestyle, you would do well to not promulgate hate toward those that make choices outside your own. Wearing that shirt on CNN was a conscious effort to do just that. While I agree American auto makers need to make cars more fuel, energy and materials efficient... the backlash of the "green" effort has put us all in a position of spending our ever increasing tax dollars to bail them and their employees out instead of buying a car with the same money. And, just like shortly after the last gas crisis of the '70's, gas prices are once again back down to lower levels than what caused all the "gas guzzler" hate in the first place. People are such puppets of the media hype.

So while you clean out your basement of all that accumulated trash from the past year, think about getting rid of some of the trash locked up in your head from the same period.

Dave said...

Wow, hey Anonymous,
Thanks for the lengthy post and I apologize if I don't hit all the comments specifically. I appreciate the fact that you are taking me to task on something like this and further appreciate the fact that it challenges me to think a bit.

For starters, a push mower for 1500 SQ ft? I'm in awe (and much worse shape than you obviously). I would say that you would be correct that a Suburban pic on the shirt would be more apt, but i don't know f one and the bummer shirt makes me laugh. Having said that, and forgive me if I get this wrong, you have one of the real Hummers, the original Army vehicles, am I correct? IF that's the case, than the car on the shirt and yours are vastly different (IMHO). You seem like a guy who is really doing the right thing and living by example. It sounds like you have an H1 due to where you live (but I'm guessing). The shirt is really geared towards who I see everyday here in LA, the suburban housewife who drives an H3 (the truck on the shirt). I don't know the numbers, but i would venture a good guess that an extremely small number of these car owners make their own biodiesel, and that an even smaller number of those owners actually ever need the kind of vehicle that they drive. I wasn't aware that a Hummer is 96% American made. Is that true for the H3 as well?

The shirt is not meant to be a message of hate or anything f that sort, but a comic look at a consumer trend that I don't agree with. Again, if you live in the mountains, an H1 makes sense. IF you live on Rodeo Dr in Beverly Hills, an H3 doesn't make much sense (to me at least).

I truly am sorry if you felt that i was judging you and can assure you that I meant no harm. I have a pretty good sense of humour about myself and hope others can feel the same about themselves.

I do drive a German made car, but that's due to the fact that I couldn't find anything else that was diesel. When I work, I travel with about 8 cases of gear, so I could have easily sold myself on a Hummer. Instead, I drive a 4 door VW Golf (used by the way). I would have gladly bought American if an American car company made the car that I needed.

Back to the shirt, and I don't expect you to believe this, it was not a conscious effort on my behalf. Ask anyone I work with, I have a bunch of enviro oriented t-shirts and that came up in the rotation. As proof, if I wanted to make sure that the shirt was seen, I wouldn't have been wearing the flannel one. I actually asked them if they wanted me to button the top shirt and they said no, so opened it a bit more as I didn't want it t look like I was wearing a Hummer shirt (again proof that had I thought about it, I would have worn something else entirely). Anyway, nuff said on that one.
I think what's great about what you have brought up though is that none of us, myself included, is perfect or above reproach and we all need to keep a watch on eachother in this wacky game that we call life.
I truly appreciate your comment and hope that if you take time to look over the blog, I take great care in not judging (well openly anyway) or trying to fearmonger. Instead, I just like to nudge people, and myself, t think a little differently.

I hope you'll comment back and continue to add to the discussion and am still a bit sore just thinking about that lawn you mow!

Best

Dave

Dave said...

Felipe,
Check out here for making your own composter
http://ryanishungry.com/2007/03/24/apartment-composting-101-vermicompost-with-barb-finnin/

It's pretty easy to do.

dave

Anonymous said...

Hi Dave,

You stood up well in the media. Too bad they cut your bag demo short. The commodity carrying bags in particular were worth a show. Containers are the best method of attack on waste here.

John.

Anonymous said...

I'm glad that they aired you on cnn, but maybe next time you can shave before you go on national television so less people thinking you're crazy and pay attention more to what you have to say =)

Dave said...

Alot of people seem to have had that same thought, which is odd because looking back at the video, I realized i had shaven, just was growing a Van Dyke/Goatee. I do that every once in a while and while I think it looks ok, I guess others think it looks like I haven't shaven. Ironically, a fair amount of the press I have gotten shows me in various states of unshaveness but this was the time everyone seemed to have a problem with. The guys I was talking to on the Hummer board the other day seemed to be all over that, and they were even against what i had done (wearing a Bummer shirt that is) so I guess the crowd has spoken.

Thanks for the input. I hate shaving, but we'll see.

Dave

Anonymous said...

I am not understanding how people can instantaneously equate an unshaven face with craziness.

Dave said...

Hey Jayne,
Thanks for the support. Vive La Grunge!

dave

Anonymous said...

I completely agree with Jayne. Your facial hair doesn't at all distract me from what you're saying, and cheers to the steel water bottle.