Green Kicks for Runners: Brooks Hits Its Stride with the Green Silence

“Our challenge is to make radical, challenging green stuff that sets new standards normal (it is not enough to make normal stuff seem greener).”—John Grant, The Green Marketing Manifesto

GOING GREEN HITS ITS STRIDE with the bright and buoyant, fast and fabulous Brooks Green Silence racing flats—”racing flats” are performance/competition running shoes for all you non-Runner’s-World-subscribing-I-live-to-trim-seconds-from-my-miles normal folks out there. These foot rockets go a long way (potentially literally) in proving that cradle-to-cradle eco-conscious design doesn’t have to compromise one iota to deliver a championship-calibre performance. Waterproof/breathable/ultra-lightweight hats off to Brooks for bringing these kicks to the finicky (read, I readily admit, elitist) marketplace of outdoor/sports-geek gear.

So what did Brooks do and how did the Green Silence perform when it came to race time? Let me share.

It all started several years ago when Brooks announced it was going to create a truly eco-friendly shoe, utilizing more eco-conscious design, manufacturing processes and sustainable materials; this may not be the full-blown, cross-the-board commitment of, say, a Patagonia (see Patagonia’s “Footprint Chronicles,” for example), but it’s a sizable DfE (Design for Environment) stride in the right direction. In 2008 Brooks launched the BioMoGo midsole, “the world’s first biodegradable running shoe midsole that breaks down 50 times faster than traditional midsoles in an enclosed, active landfill.” That same year Brooks also debuted a new shoe box made of fully biodegradable, 100-percent recycled paperboard. The Green Silence soon followed.

You can take a quick interactive tour of the Green Silence on the Brooks website, but here are the salient facts:

  • Constructed with just 48 percent as many parts as comparable shoes
  • More than 75 percent of the shoe’s materials are post-consumer recycled
  • All dyes, colorants and adhesives are nontoxic, with VOCs lowered by 65 percent
  • Midsoles, collar foams and sock liners are completely biodegradable

What you end up with is a lightweight racing flat—it weighs just 6.9 oz.—that features a minimal 8 mm offset, or drop, from heel to toe: you’re not running barefoot, by any stretch, but you’re low to the ground, and thanks to the compression-molded BioMoGo midsole, I found, well-cushioned. Just add human accelerant and you feel propelled forward by warm jets of eco-conscious good will!

Which gets me to my trial-by-fire race: the annual mid-May Pole Pedal Paddle relay race in Bend, Oregon. This crazy, fun, challenging event features six legs, starting with a downhill skier on Mt. Bachelor who slaps happy with a cross-country skier who fist bumps a bicyclist who quick taps a runner who passes speedy karma to a kayaker/canoer who finally lends spiritual propulsion to a sprinter who then crosses the finish line at the Les Schwab Ampitheater in Bend’s Old Mill District. Sound fun? It is. This year, the PPP’s 34th, had the most participants in its history, 3,005. The best time was posted by Marshall Greene of Bend at 1:44:27.

I was part of one of three teams from Journeys, a highly recommended wine bar and pub in Portland’s Multnomah Village neighborhood, and took part in both running legs. My Green Silence were anything but (and if that vibrant, asymmetrical gold and red color scheme doesn’t work for you, Brooks has more colors in the works), and easily got me under 6-minute miles on a course that included road, sidewalk, some trail, a few small climbs—and all at an average elevation of around 3,625 feet. The Green Silence fit comfortably, provided quite adequate support, created no race issues and had a springiness to them that made running a total pleasure—they totally kicked it. I also tried a little trail run with them, but unless you’re on smooth dirt only, I definitely wouldn’t recommend them in this capacity—nor would Brooks, I’m sure.

Way to go, Brooks, in setting a new standard in radical, challenging green stuff and truly embracing the DfE ethic. It may be “Silent steps to a Greener future,” but I want to make a lot of noise about it now. Looking forward to my next race in the Green Silence.

—Allen

May 24, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Closed

An Elegy for Ice, an Elegy for Gaia: Gretel Ehrlich’s In the Empire of Ice

“THE ARCTIC IS CARRYING THE DEEP WOUNDS OF THE WORLD,” asserts Gretel Ehrlich in her elegiac In the Empire of Ice: Encounters in a Changing Landscape [Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2010]. She continues: “Wounds that aren’t healing. Bands of ice and tundra that protected Inuit people for thousands of years, ensuring a continuity of language and lifeways and a meta-stable climate, have been assaulted from above and below, inside and out. Pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, the crushing demands of sovereignty and capitalism, war and religion have severed the strong embrace of ice.”

Her timely, highly recommended book clashes great beauty (“The poet Joseph Brodsky said that the purpose of evolution was beauty,” she notes amid myriad descriptions of awe-inspiring Arctic allure) with dispassionate science (“The paradise called the Holocene is ending, and a new epoch, tentatively named the Anthropocene, is beginning—an era when climate will be forced against its cyclical ‘instinct’ to become cold again”). It’s this clash, really a jarring shift, like ice shelves themselves colliding, then violently crumbling as they part, that infuses Ehrlich’s text with its vigorous and heartrending power.

In her telling observations, she is as unrelenting as the melting ice: “Perhaps the term climate change should be changed to climate care, since it is carelessness that is bringing so many changes to life as we know it and most likely will bring much of the life of humans and megafauna on this planet to what may be the end”; or try: “When we lose an ecosystem we are losing our thumbprint uniqueness, our way of knowing the world and our strategies of survival.”

As tocsinlike and grim as this may sound, and is, Ehrlich also celebrates native ingenuity, creativity—primarily as witnessed through storytelling, myth and art—and toughened spirit—the will to survive, to balance a hierarchy of needs and to bask rather contentedly in the determinate beauty of a (still) ice-locked natural world—a little of the noble savage perhaps, but I’d never for a moment confuse Ehrlich with Rousseau. Read More »

May 12, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Closed

Getting Beyond Petroleum: The Gulf, the Blob and Our Future

BP: OBLOQUY AT PRESENT FOR CERTAIN, BUT ALSO “BEYOND PETROLEUM”—WHERE WE NEED TO BE, a point violently underscored by the epic tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico that continues to unfold. And it’s wryly interesting, timingwise, how this follows hot on the heels of a ho-hum Earth Day anniversary and Obama’s call to resume domestic offshore oil exploration to bolster U.S. energy independence—reconsidered and cancelled post-Deepwater Horizon explosion, which, lest we forget, cost the lives of eleven crew members.

There’s also been a sizable wave made in the climate energy bill debate (see the New York Times story “Gulf Oil Spill Threatens to Rearrange Washington’s Climate Agenda”). Ah, our constant craving for energy to (em)power our lives, particularly in its crudest form, a liquid scream slithering from our distant past, hidden away far beneath the Earth’s surface, ornery oleaginous ghosts and amorphous liquified-fossil hobgoblins from yesteryear.

BP: Beyond petroleum is the brand tag and theme developed by Ogilvy & Mather for British Petroleum. “We want to build one of the world’s great brands by building an organization devoted to revolutionizing the world’s relationship with energy,” Lord John Browne, then-CEO of BP, was quoted as saying in Alina Wheeler’s Designing Brand Identity (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003). How hollow those words now sound as the Gulf rupture threatens to surpass the Exxon Valdez Prince William Sound spill of two decades ago. Adding fuel, a senior BP executive informed members of Congress at a closed-door briefing yesterday that the well could conceivably spill as much as 60,000 barrels a day of oil—ten times the current estimate. Can this beast be stopped?

Getting beyond petroleum, honestly and realistically, is where we need to be. And safely harnessing new forms of energy in the amounts required to power our growing, demanding, let’s face it, insatiable world is no easy matter. That we already know. There is no silver bullet. It’s a challenge—perhaps the challenge of our age—that the greatest minds must apply themselves to and solve. Soon.

Humans have achieved so much, as have we squandered. As the great blob inexorably approaches the Gulf coastline, and authorities attempt to burn off yet another patch, and a giant steel trap is readied for containment like in some 1950s monster movie, we know we’re running out of time. Incentive enough?

—Allen

May 5, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | Comments Closed