The Associated Press reported yesterday that hotel-goers are less likely to practice resource conservation in their rooms than at home. I guess the temptation of tiny bottles of shampoo and sheets changed daily is too much for many.
Which gets me back to a personal conviction: the only really green General Assembly or other church fellowship meeting is the one where people can participate without being physically present. Other good options would be distributing the meeting into regional centers connected virtually, holding it less than annually and shortening its length.
I wrote about this before General Assembly but was heartened to see Unitarian Universalist minister and blogger Christine Robinson (iMinister) address it recently.
I saw a great throw away line in the paper recently where they said buying carbon credits is the modern equivalent of buying indulgences.
I spent most of the last six years of my life working on meeting virtualization with real time videoconferencing. Technically it is not so difficult, but culturally it is a major adjustment. It is very hard for people at remote sites to feel included.
The biggest distributed conference I know of is Megaconference http://www.mega-net.net/megaconference/ . I’ve participated in Megaconference Junior before and some other distributed national conferences for education http://www.keystoneconference.org/ . It is really hard to generate any sense of coherence.