The Unconference

If I could adopt a conference, it would be the USGBC Cascadia chapter's Living Future 'Unconference'. As someone who generally prefers to stay behind the scenes talking shop, it was a delight to find myself surrounded primarily by the obsessed of the green building world. Even better, as presenters we were encouraged to bring our own big challenges to the table and get attendees to help us address them — which is exactly what we and many other presenters did. (More about that later, I hope.)

First, this is the only conference I've been to where I left with less stuff than I started with! Yes, you could buy a conference T-shirt (lovely, organic, low-impact dyes, made in the USA), and I did get some green building playing cards, but there was no bag full of conference papers and booth swag. Instead, at registration we were each given a paper nametag and a single tri-fold with the conference schedule. For details, you had to wrest control of one of two computers hooked up to a screen set to scroll through sessions. I, of course, lost my tri-fold, and there didn't appear to be any spares.

Paul Hawken's keynote speech set the tone for the conference with kudos, encouragement, and warning for the audience; kudos for the work going on to transform the world for the better, encouragement that we are not alone (visually demonstrated with an endless scrolling list of nonprofits that can, by the way, all be found on WiserEarth) and a warning of radical changes to come that'll put green practitioners on the front-lines. "I just want to caution you. I think your star may rise faster than you'd want it to... I'm not saying this to flatter you. I'm saying this to warn you."

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