Last Saturday I attended the Nonprofit Bootcamp 2008 in San Mateo, California, organized by the Craigslist Foundation.

It was a wonderful experience, very energizing, where I learnt lots of things and tapped into a great deal of fantastic local resources.

Most of the presentations, slides, materials, etc, are available for download from the website so that anyone interested in the nonprofit world can access all the resources for free, which is excellent!

The Boot Camp, supposedly, was ‘green’ this year, and I was curious to see what it meant. I am sorry to have to criticize a fabulous event that helps lots of people help others. However, the way in which the Boot Camp “went green” was very disappointing, and it epitomizes what is wrong with American environmentalism, where the words “green”and “greening” have become brands that people and institutions wear over their bloated bodies, instead of signifying deep changes of consciousness and attitude.

Most of the waste was recyclable, which is great, and there were some volunteers teaching people where to dispose what, which is also very good. However, everything was plagued with single-use disposables and individual containers.

There were thousands of small free bottles of ‘eco drinks’, juices, and bottled water (!!), thousands of disposable forks (compostable) , thousands of disposable paper cups (recyclable), etc…

The result was that this event produced hundreds of pounds of waste (even if was recyclable or compostable) that would have been very easy to avoid. How about emailing people and telling them to bring their own bottles, cups, and cutlery? Or how about having reusable metal cutlery, real cups, etc?

The food was free, very good, and mostly organic, but it was the kind that requires utensils and bowls (hello, people, there is something called sandwiches!). The absolutely worst was to find hundreds of individual sushi boxes that were made of bullet-proof plastic.. (my pet peeve). The sushi was very tasty, but the sight of heaping plastic waste was hard to digest.

Recycling is good thing when there is no other choice. However it cannot be an excuse to keep wasting cerelessly.

Look what happens to most of our recycling:

(The findings of this video also apply to the US, which is in fact the largest exporter of waste to China).

I would have designed this event around LESS WASTE, eliminated single-use disposables and bottled water and used more IMAGINATION. What they did was to convenientely paint wasteful ways and habits in a pretty color green.

There was no public transportation provided to the event, only a link to the already existing (insufficient and obsolete) public transit and a call to connect to carpoolers through a website. I posted an ad offering a ride from Santa Cruz -none were being offered- and nobody contacted me. I drove alone, and then learned that there were lots of enviros and hippies from Santa Cruz there, who had probably driven alone in their priuses, like hermit crabs in their little private shells.

Parking at the event was 8 dollars for the day. Why not charge say 30 dollars for non-carpool parking and provide good alternatives, such as buses from and to a few cities in the Bay Area? Bold actions like these would have had a significant impact.

Also, it would have been good to advise exhibitors against giving away plastic swag, such as the plastic pens (individually wrapped in plastic, WTF?) seen in this photo. The sight of people stashing them away in their eco-friendly carrier bags would have been funny if it weren’t so revealing of how much education is still needed. And we are not talking about a NASCAR race, or about an RV show in a redneck area; this was a gathering of the nonprofit elite in the midst of eco-righteous Bay Area.

While I appreciate the ‘greening’ attempt, and the focus on recycling, there are two things that bothered me: a) that such an opportunity to lead and set an example was not used fully and b) that the Craigslist Foundation displayed such self-satisfaction about their own “greening”.

I can’t wait to I just did share these thoughts with the organizers. I really think that the Craigslist Foundation could do and should do much better. I hope they’ll listen and that we all will learn from the experience and make some progress together.

Having said all this, I want to take the opportunity to congratulate the Craigslist Foundation on what otherwise was a fantastic event.