Thanks to our intrepid pal Serena Bartlett, founder of Grassroutes Travel and author of Oakland: The Soul of the City Next Door, Nomad Cafe was featured as one of Serena’s favorite East Bay Eco-Friendly Businesses on the Feb. 9 edition of the popular television show Bay Area Backroads.

View the segment now (click on the heading “Eco-Friendly Businesses”).

Thanks, Serena!  We think you’re great too!

Thousands of organizations & campuses help focus nation on solutions to global warming

Oakland, CA. — On Jan. 30, 2008, Green Café Network and Nomad Cafe will participate in Focus The Nation, an unprecedented teach-in model on global warming solutions. “We are in a time where critical decisions need to be made on global warming, which means today’s leaders and the youth who will inherit the crisis need serious education on the issue,” said James “Gus” Speth, dean, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. “Focus The Nation is our country’s foremost model to create that level of education and interaction with law makers.”

Focus The Nation has created a teach-in model centered on the three most essential pillars for today’s youth to embrace solutions to global warming: education, civic engagement and leadership.

Green Café Network, a Bay Area non-profit organization dedicated to greening the coffeehouse industry and harnessing café culture for environmental education, is co-hosting a public event in support of Focus the Nation with Nomad Café, a community-centered café in Oakland known for its green business practices.

The Focus the Nation teach-in will kick off the night of Jan. 30, with the 2% Solution web cast produced by the National Wildlife Federation and aired by the Earth Day Network. Panelists will include actor Edward Norton, Stanford climate scientist Steve Schneider, Hunter Lovins, CEO, Natural Capitalism and environmental justice leader, Van Jones, executive director, Ella Baker Center in Oakland, Calif.

At Nomad Café from 7-9pm, Green Café Network and Nomad will host a free screening of the 2% Solution, followed by Q&A and discussion. They will also screen a 20-minute film, “The Story of Stuff,” produced by Free Range Studios with host Annie Leonard. Both Nomad Café and Green Café Network are big believers in the power that informal gathering places - especially cafes - have in building community and catalyzing a movement. When they heard about Focus the Nation, they immediately decided to join the teach-in and host an event for the public.

After screening the 2% Solution, participants will be encouraged to vote on what they think are the top five solutions from a list of ten that are available at www.focusthenation.org. Vote results will be presented nationally in mid February. All students who vote on the Choose Your Future ballot will be eligible to win a $10,000 leadership scholarship for a project to be completed by end of August 2008.

Green Café Network and Nomad Café will have information for people to continue their participation in Focus the Nation the next day, Jan. 31, at campuses across the Bay Area. Many Bay Area colleges and universities will be inviting local, regional and national civic leaders to engage in the culminating event, a Green Democracy round-table. In the event that members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives can’t make it back to their states for these discussions, Focus The Nation has partnered with a company called SightSpeed to provide live, video conferencing technology between campuses and Congress.

For more information on Green Café Network and Nomad Cafe and their participation in Focus The Nation, please visit www.focusthenation.org or call 415-788-3666 ext. 208. Please also visit www.greencafenetwork.org or www.nomadcafe.net for more information.

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Focus The Nation is an unprecedented educational initiative on global warming solutions for America occurring at more than 1,000 universities, colleges and civic organizations in all 50 states on Jan. 30th and 31st, 2008. As the largest teach-in in U.S. history, Focus The Nation is preparing millions of students to become leaders in the largest civilizational challenge any generation has faced. For more information, please visit www.focusthenation.org.

Obama supporters,

Come show you’re fired up and ready to go for the California primary!

Rally for change on Saturday, Feb. 2 at 11 a.m. featuring music and special guests, including Rep. Barbara Lee.

Then, we’ll go door to door and tell our neighbors why Barack Obama is the only candidate who can bring change we can believe in!

Come be part of the movement in this last big push for support before Tuesday’s election.

Yes We Can!

Obama Campaign Oakland Rally and Canvass
Saturday, February 2
11:00 AM - 3:00 PM
Frank Ogawa Plaza - Oakland City Hall (Oakland, CA)
1 Frank Ogawa Plaza
Oakland, CA 94612
Rally in front of Oakland City Hall just west of Broadway between 14th and 15th Street.
(Directions)

Nomad Cafe has established its own fundaising goal of $1,000. Please help us meet our goal! Click the Obamarometer to contribute:

We hope you will join Nomad Cafe and Green Cafe Network on Wednesday, January 30th at 7pm in Oakland as a part of the nationwide event, “Focus the Nation - Global Warming Solutions for America.”

Don’t miss this special webcast premiere of “The 2% Solution” and learn what you can do to stem the tide of global warming before we reach the point of no return. Please note that we will be broadcasting this at 7pm local time. We will also be screening “The Story of Stuff,” an entertaining and effective film about conservation and consumption. The screenings will be followed by discussion and Q&A. Invite a friend and spread the word!

Event Details:

When: Wednesday, January 30th, 7-9pm

Where: Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. (at 65th St.) Oakland, CA 94609

What: 7pm screening of “The 2% Solution” (60 min) followed by discussion and viewing of “The Story of Stuff” (20 min). Informal sharing and Q&A to follow.

Bring Friends: This event is FREE and sponsored by Green Cafe Network and Nomad Cafe. Bring friends, colleagues, neighbors…and please spread the word!

EVENT LINK

Focus The Nation is an unprecedented educational initiative on global warming solutions for America occurring at more than 1,100 universities and colleges and in all 50 states on Jan. 31, 2008. As the largest teach-in in U.S. history, Focus The Nation is preparing millions of students to become leaders in the largest civilizational challenge any generation has faced. For more Info on Focus the Nation, visit: www.focusthenation.org, and also check out this recent Grist article.

“Never underestimate the power of a small group of people to change the world … indeed it is the only thing that ever has” - Margaret Mead

We hope to see you there!

Nomad Cafe was active in supporting the passage of the plastic bag ban ordinance in Oakland, which was scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2008. It has been put on hold pending a court hearing over a lawsuit against the ordinance by the plastic bag industry. The court hearing is on Tuesday, January 29. Please come out and join Council members Nadel, Quan, the Director of the Lake Merritt Institute, and recycling and zero waste specialists on Monday, January 28 at 10am for a press conference on the steps of Oakland City Hall, affirming the City of Oakland’s commitment to the reduction of pollution, oil dependence, blight and global warming through the implementation of this ban, among many other efforts.

Oakland Plastic Bag Ban - Media Alert

Those who would make this a debate over “paper vs. plastic” are tacitly validating both, along with all the resource consumption and waste that accompanies them. If you want to make a difference, don’t use either one! Go with reusable bags. In the meantime, the plastic bag ban is a crucial beginning.

The litigants’ demand for an Environmental Impact Report on this ordinance is just a costly delay tactic and an attempt to create another opportunity to establish plausible deniability. Don’t let them get away with it! Come out Monday to City Hall to support this ban.

Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) split the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

Read the full text of Gore’s moving acceptance speech and call to action here.

I encourage you all to check out this really great, entertaining, funny 20 minute film about the environment, social justice and what we can do to support global sustainability. It’s sponsored by Tides Foundation, which has provided a great deal of grant funding to my son’s Oakland public school over the years for our garden projects. This film is a great way to reach out and engage people who need a basic big-picture introduction to our fundamentally flawed production/exploitation/overconsumption/waste system.

The Story of Stuff

For a list of 10 things you can do to help, go to the Another Way page.

Many of y’all may have already seen this (it’s been buzzing around the Bay Area Blogosphere for 36 hours or so), but it’s worth re-posting here.

The following is an interoffice memo distributed to Bay Area Air Quality Manage Board employees. Read for yourself:

Lesson: Striving to affect the air quality, one car trip at a time.

As infuriating as it may seem–and yes, it’s infuriating–my housemate made a good point that it’s often easier for us to point out hypocrisy in an organization that is attempting to do good than it is to criticize a corporation that doesn’t have a single good-intentioned cog in their proverbial wheel. Let us not abandon the BAAQMD and their mission just because of a little blip in the radar.

But still…

(I originally discovered this on Richard Masoner’s Flickr page, but there’s also a good discussion on the Bikescape blog.)

House vote on illegal images sweeps in Wi-Fi, Web sites

Is this law creepier than those it is ostensibly designed to thwart?  How is the law going to impact the Nomad, if at all?  How does this play into the issues raised by Justin’s very thoughtful previous post?

The Nomad Cafe had the good fortune of appearing on the front page of the Datebook section in today’s San Francisco Chronicle. (The story can be found here.)

I think the article is actually serves as a great snap shot of the Nomad at this point in time. John King, the article’s author, provides a surprisingly astute assessment of the current state of the cafe, particularly in observing tension between “community gathering place” and “wireless internet hot spot.” From a manager’s perspective, this tension has been one of the most difficult lines to walk as we attempt to locate this cafe at the center of our community.

At first glance, it seems that the laptop army is incommensurable with face-to-face interactions. One desires library-like silence, while the other wants a space to argue or commiserate or laugh. On any given day, I’m likely to walk into the cafe to find every table full, a sea of laptops staring back at me. Other days (such as today), I find strangers sharing tables and striking up a conversations or engaging in a heated debates with their table-mates. It seems that many days, the laptops win out over the communitarians, further perpetuating the belief that, when it comes to cafe ambiance, we can’t have it both ways.

And yet it’s not always an either/or propsition. Folks with laptops have been known to converse with strangers (gasp!), and a boisterous table can often happily coexist with surrounding laptop laden ones.

This one issue, however, seems to capture the duality of our modern technology-oriented society (can you tell I’m a sociologist at heart?). It’s a debate that has been regurgitated time and time again: are we losing something as we begin to rely more heavily on technology? Is there something of value in person-to-person meetings that can’t be recreated on a computer screen?

It’s all too easy to fall on one side or the other of this debate. There are fanatics on both sides of the so-called battle. The anti-technology folks want to say that community consists of the type of interpersonal relationships that can’t be built through a computer. The technophiles can be equally vehement by pointing to a wide array of social networking technologies (MySpace, instant messaging, Twitter, etc.) to argue that the locus of community has simply shifted.

And here I sit in the middle, listening and trying my best to appease everyone. I’d be out of touch if I didn’t acknowledge the validity of both sides. At the same time, I do believe that this cafe can meet the needs of the diverse cross-section of people who are part of the Nomad community. Case in point: As today’s Chronicle story points out, we’ve decided to turn the wireless off at opportune moments when we want to get rowdy and have a little fun. The wireless is an important part of our business, but at the same time we do value other modes of community building. Upon reexamination, the tension that at first seem inevitable may simply be an opportunity change perspectives.

That’s a battle this cafe has never shied away from. The Nomad Cafe has always seen itself as a moral arbiter. We’ve pushed issues long before they’ve been popular and hip. So, maybe it’s time for us to take the lead in promoting a technologically savvy community who still recognizes the value of face-to-face interactions. Maybe we should feel empowered to establish a new standard for respectable laptop use. Maybe it’s not that out of line for us to be a little more assertive in promoting wireless usage that is compatible with building interpersonal relationships rather than counter to it.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter in the comment section…