JenniferOladipo.com

From where I sit, it’s all bits and pieces. Finding evidence of green ventures throughout the African continent isn’t difficult with a little bit of internet time.

A bio-gas facility in Rwanda reuses waste, conserves resources, and provides the energy to cook three meals a day for school students. Sub-Saharan Companies are showing willingness to adopt green building techniques (which, one assumes, means either the construction industry is going green, or new green builders are popping up). Countless individuals are creating their own useful innovations for fun or to fulfill need, and they’re coming together to share ideas and accomplishments with each other and the world.

However, getting a good, broad picture is more difficult when you’re in Kentucky. Of course, looking for a cohesive and telling picture of 54 countries spread across 30,221,532 sq. km. (11,668,545 sq. mi.) is just silly. Instead I’m e-mailing people who might help me cobble something together, by country or by region. I’ve encountered a few leads, and plenty of dead ends. Much of my correspondence seems to still be making its way across the Atlantic. C’est la vie. I have to admit, searching is part of the fun.

Two online identities finally merge. Wordpress blog, meet facebook page. Facebook, wordpress. I’m feeling so 21C.

How does a year sneak by like this?

Well, no reason to dwell on it. Better to post a few recent writings and move on. May I recommend a look at a local movement to make green political color and an irreverent examination of Earth Day. More to come, of course.

At the Society of Professional Jounalists awards ceremony last night in Louisville, biggest ‘oooh’ and ‘aaah’ moments came after a couple of brief power outages caused by thunderstorms. We couldn’t really hear the ruckus outside, insulated as we were in a room at the Louisville Zoo, chatting loudly in a room just above an orangutan, tapir and other endangered or threatened species in the Islands exhibit.

Then came the rapid-fire award announcements. I won 2nd place in the Continuing Coverage in the Newspaper/Wire category for my environmental reporting at LEO. I’ve been trying to forge something of an environment beat there, and I guess I have in the eyes of judges in some midwestern state somewhere.

It was fun being a freelancer at the event, having ties to more than one publication. The schmingling (schmoozing + mingling) was good. So were the brownies. Another freelancer buddy of mine, about eight months pregnant, wondered aloud who would get the story out first if she went into labor during one of the power outages. We decided it would probably be the bloggers.

So I got curious about the feasibility of green-collar jobs in Louisville, my fair city. It turns out there’s potential, but not necessarily momentum. Read the results of my asking around in this week’s Louisville Eccentric Observer.

Spring is in full effect in much of the country, and it’s prime time for hunting. Hunting wild plants, that is. Check out my brief primmer on the subject for Get Out! Magazine, which is aimed at outdoorsy types in the Ohio River bioregion. The article’s also got plenty of pretty photos (not mine), and I must say weeds never looked so tasty.

The Green for All’s conference on green-collar jobs was a great place to learn about efforts all over the country to make them a reality. I wrote a round-up of the experience posted at Grist. I’ll continue to report on the subject, including an upcoming piece about what’s happening in my own city.