The blog at ranchrevival

Sometimes it’s very cool to watch history being made. On August 15th, an international initiative was launched with the aim of getting the international blogging community to unite for one day — October 15th, 2007 — and devote their respective blogs to the subject of the environment. The initiative is called Blog Action Day.

Collis Ta’eed, an Australian blogger from FreelanceSwitch.com, and cofounder of Blog Action Day, said, “We want to display the potential and the power of the blogging community, which is a disparate community but one with an amazing size, breadth and diversity. By bringing everyone together for one day, we can see just how much can be achieved, and how much we can be heard.”

When queried by e-mail about just what he hoped the Blog Action Day would accomplish, Ta’eed had this to say:

“One of the things that I love about blogging and new media are how decentralized and populist they are. What we hope Blog Action Day will accomplish is to leverage that people power to put an issue on the table. And to do it in such a way that you see thousands of snapshots and viewpoints from thousands of different people across the web. No issue is black and white, and certainly the environment is a very broad concern for the whole global population. So to tackle it in this manner is to give it the treatment it deserves.

I believe that change in the world does not happen in events, but rather in processes. It’s easy to think ‘what can one person do’, or ‘what change will some bloggers really have’, but the truth is by participating in Blog Action Day we are helping steer the global conversation, adding impetus to an already important issue and driving social change in the only way that really matters, by changing people’s minds.” — As posted on ClearBlogging

A quick peek at the search engines and you can see the conversation has already begun. Plug “Blog Action Day” into your favorite search engine and see for yourself. Browsing the hits is like taking a walk down a long, bright hallway, catching bits of conversation from hundreds of virtual doorways. Geography bloggers, computer bloggers, housebloggers … there’s already a lot of e-chatter going on out there, and from what I can tell, there’s a lot of optimism even if no one is sure what the ultimate impact such a global effort will be.

As for the potential impact, a fellow houseblogger mused,

“It will be interesting to see what comes of this. I often see these things as a double edge sword of sorts. There is a lot of misinformation regarding the environment floating around, some of it by ignorance and some by design…. Chances are, there will be quite a bit of duplicated ideas and generalizations. That being said, there are also quite a few people out there that know things and could contribute.” — Paul at Homeowner’s Blog

There are, I notice, a lot of housebloggers out there, like Paul at Homeowner’s Blog, and others, who are already a part of this conversation, every day, through blog entries that deal with the issue of global sustainability in very real and very personal ways, through questions they’re asking and decisions they’re making at the household level. This is what I’m interested in seeing come out of Blog Action Day: more of this kind of sustained conversation, across state and national lines, that contains information people can actually use, right now, in their own everyday households. Anyway, I’ll be here, doing whatever I can, and whether you’re a blogger or not, I encourage you to go to the Blog Action Day website and find out more. Here’s the link: http://blogactionday.org/

‘Till next time,
Jen Wolf