Digital channel reports green news
Team tells inspiring stories about solutions, not problems
Green isn’t just a colour. It’s also a choice.
It’s an Alberta company harvesting green power from the downswing of oil-pump jacks. A small city in British Columbia with a big appetite for wind power. An Ontario dairy farmer who transforms stinky manure into valuable biogas.
Put a series of choices together, and in addition to a greener country you have Green Energy Futures, an online multimedia project based in Edmonton that’s dedicated to sharing good news about green energy. “We want to inspire other people to become engaged with the solutions; really, that’s our goal,” says David Dodge, producer and host. “We’re trying to get people motivated. We’re not picking winners and losers, we’re just telling stories about people who are being relatively successful.”
Each weekly “episode” of Green Energy Futures includes a blog posting, a video story and a podcast featuring people, places and businesses that are embracing the transition to cleaner, greener forms of energy. There are 42 episodes to date, with another 80 planned. Archived episodes can be seen on its YouTube channel.
It’s not hard to find the stories, Dodge says. If anything, there are too many to choose from. He calls it “a quiet revolution.” He and his collaborator Duncan Kinney, writer and production manager, are trying to make the revolution less quiet with their weekly reports from across the country, be it net-zero homes, Canada’s greenest building, profiles of clean-energy entrepreneurs or innovative car-sharing companies.
Dodge worked for years as the communications director for the sustainable energy thinktank Pembina Institute before starting up the project in late 2011. His hope was to counter traditional media’s tendency to focus on environmental problems: climate change, fossil fuels and the impact of the oilsands.
“The element that was missing was stories about the solutions.”
He wrote a dream project pitch that would see him “travel around and tell stories about people with green energy solutions, people you don’t run across every day,” and got funding from individuals to make a pilot episode. From there, he fundraised his way into the job.
“It’s one of those projects that makes me feel special. I have to pinch myself every day,” he says. (Since Dodge is mounting a campaign to run for Edmonton city council in the October election, he will be ceding several of the project’s higher profile duties to Kinney, while continuing to work in the background.)
Green Energy Futures is a Pembina Institute project with editorial independence, that’s sponsored by Suncor, TD and Shell Canada.
The project provides its content free to media outlets, including the Huffington Post, Troy Media and CKUA Radio Network, which airs the podcast three times a week. The podcast, available free on iTunes, has been downloaded more than 12,000 times.
“These are soft stories for the most part, but they’re new and fresh and people are very curious about this stuff,” Dodge notes.
Providing a digital goodnews hub about clean energy is the reason Green Energy Futures is a finalist for an Emerald Award in the public education and outreach category. Since 1991, the Alberta Emerald Foundation has doled out the awards to “green heroes” across Alberta as a way of lavishing attention on innovative environmental stewardship.
The best part of his work, says Dodge, is meeting “the most inspiring people who are trying to do things against all odds. They’re really, really committed to doing something different, to making a difference. These guys are motivated to do something special, and that’s what makes their stories special: their level of commitment.”
The 22nd-annual Emerald Awards will be given out at a gala June 6 in Edmonton.