Sierra Club

Pissing from the mountaintop at Oracle OpenWorld

September 29, 2008 by Ted Cuzzillo

Wouldn’t you know it. Follow BI around long enough and you come across family—if only the kind of family you see at funerals and weddings. Oracle finally brought us together again with its sustainability theme at last week’s OpenWorld.

The Sierra Club and I used to be close. My mother led San Francisco Bay Chapter hikes, and much later I found myself deep in greenhood as an editor and organizer. So imagine my surprise, having left “home” so long ago, to witness one-time Sierra Club president Adam Werbach on a panel of environmentalists on a stage. They debated “the economy or the environment?”

Sierra Club’s global cooling

March 27, 2008 by Ted Cuzzillo

I listened to the yammering in Sierra Club committee meetings 20 years ago, before I got into technology, and thought that the “real” world knew better.

One little incident convinced me. At one meeting of the group overseeing the Sierra Club’s old ski lodge, Clair Tappaan Lodge, someone wanted to change the name of a room, the Puce Room. A woman who’d just redecorated in there wanted to rename it after the just-passed folk singer Kate Wolf.

I really liked the old name, especially apt for the room’s cold concrete walls and rusty dripping pipes. The committee, though, was about to approve the change. Then at the last minute, the mischievous manager piped up. “Ted has been in touch with a group that’s all upset with changing the name.” I had joked to him earlier that morning that I wish there were such a group.