The economy definitely had an impact on this year’s West Coast Green with less venders but with less money that mean that people just had to get more creative with less moola such as the floating island, show gardens and even the sustainability built Jewish Sukkoth. The usual green rock stars like Eric Corey Freed and Michelle Kaufman made their presences felt with their energetic personalities.

Kaufman, in fact, talked about the use of Green pre-fab homes and the affordability factor. She mentioned that she gets most energized by the fact that her parents and grandparents who live in Iowa would have to go through a long drown out and costly experience if they wanted to build a Green home, only because the resources don’t exist there – yet. She wants to make Green pre-fab homes affordable to all people. Fab Michelle, fab. She went off on the top three production homebuilders who she says do “crap” as their homes are not well made, not well designed, not healthy and efficient. “The big home builders won’t be proactive to make changes said Kauffman. American homebuilders being reactive? We can’t believe it.

We also could believe how interesting the planetarium project at the closing party at the Academy of Sciences was. The special WCG program featured An Ecological View of the Cosmos. This interactive program (accompanied by live narration presented by media artist David McConville, the Director of Noospheric Research of The Elumenati and a Director of the Buckminster Fuller Institute and classical/new agey music from Christen Lien and Rachel Bagby gave us a stirring, complex and though provoking view of the universe. In fact, we learned from this program how when someone asks us if we think that we are the center of the universe we just might be able to answer affirmatively.

David de Rothschild seeks to change the perception of plastic. He has created a plastic love boat named the Plastiki which he discussed in depth in a presentation/lecture a couple nights ago at San Francisco’s Academy of Sciences. De Rothschild plans to sail his boat, made almost entirely from reused plastic bottles, from Pier 31 in San Francisco, through the Great Eastern Garbage Patch to Sydney, Australia.

De Rothschild’s presentation came off as anything but dull and preachy. What else can we say when he begins the lecture with a video of many bovine tailpipes creating various amounts of various colored excrement. Rothschild’s point being not to gross the audience out (which he did to some degree) but to educate people that all the cow “tailpipes” create more CO2 than the tailpipes for all cars and trucks.

The casually attired, highly educated and hyper frenzied De Rothschild never wasted a moment or a word as he pointed out various that fact that there are 300 terms for “sustainability” and that his project and much of his thinking attributes to Buckminster Fuller. De Rothschild takes Fullers words, “Do more with less” to heart and thus the creation of the boat made from the plastic bottles.

De Rothschild, admittedly could have spoken for hours, mostly seeks to educate the world that people should find value in the omnipresent plastic – even if it means pulling a Kon-Tiki or Waterworld to get his point across.