name: Ashley Hodson

email: commoncourtesy@gmail.com

url: sustainableroute.com

amount: $2000.00

usage: This is going to be a pretty money intensive project due to gas prices and length of project. The three major items for purchase are food, gas and equipment. I would allocate this specific money towards gas and food.

My budget right now looks like this:

Gas 7500miles@20mpg x $3/gallon= $1200

Food 12weeks@$20perday= $1680

Tech gear=$300

timeline: Approximately a 3-5-minute video for every location visited between September to December across the entire United States and parts of Canada. One episode will be posted every week.

This project is highly dependent on the Internet access available from place to place, the amount of footage shot in each location, and the travel time between locations.

This is how it will probably go:

Most locations are major cities where I will be setting up a base with friends or other contacts. Length of stay will vary depending on the number of locations to be visited but will usually be a few days. We will spend a day or afternoon with each location accruing about an hour of footage (hopefully no more than this, unless they are incredibly interesting). Every week we will post one video. This will give us the flexibility we need to ensure internet access, editing time, travel time, etc. I’m positive we’ll exceed one video per week but that is our baseline expectation.

FromSept 1-15ish I\'ll be doing test runs in New England to work out any kinks and to have my home base in Boston. After that we\'ll head North and then accross the country.

Here is a rough calendar along with the people we can stay with:

September:

1-15 New England

16-19 Burlington (Althea + Forrest)

20-21 Montreal

22-26 Toronto (Sarah Frizelle)

27-29 Michigan (Chris Weagel)

October

30-3 Chicago (James Payne or Sylvia Spicer\'s Families?)

4-11 Vancouver

12-17 Seattle (Chris Barker)

18-19 Portland (Amy Ross\'s Family)

20-22 San Rafael, CA (Bioneers)

23-31 San Francisco (Ryan, my sister)

November

1-3 L.A. (Kyra\'s Family)

4-7 Tuscon

8-15 Prescott (Ecosa kids)

16-19 Moab, Utah (Zora, another ecosa kid)

description: Wikipedia has a great basic definition of sutainability:

"The central problem of sustainability is whether the human life support system on earth can continue indefinitely, or whether it is changing the world in radical ways that will fail.\" (wikipedia:sustainability)

Many videobloggers have begun to gear videos towards the issues of sustainability along with the bigger media like newspapers and public television. This is my attempt to explore my own definition of sustainability as well as bring it to the videoblogging community in order to further conversations about this movement. I’m interested in what people like me are doing with their ideas of sustainability. I’m especially interested in the individual scale, what can we as non-experts do to learn about sustainability. This is inherently a videoblogging mentality and I think this community is the most ideal audience for this project.

Also in light of “An Inconvenient Truth” by Al Gore, I want to know what people are doing with such overwhelming environmental news. I don’t think it’s enough to be an alarmist. What are our options, and what does it look like on an individual scale?

This idea started a few months ago when I graduated form college and I felt like I had no idea where to go from there and I wondered what was going on in the world in terms of environemental responsibility. I began conversations about going on a possible roadtrip to visit different projects geared towards \'sustainability\' and as I spoke aout it I realized everyone was using this term in different ways and it seemed like the perfect theme to explore in depth. I continued shaping this idea with my friend Megan who is planning on coming on the trip to assist in this crazy endeavor.

One of the reasons videoblogging is so important to this project is that I want to depend on people watching the site to give suggestions of people and places they know of that we should visit. I must meet someone everyday who knows of a friend going off the grid, or of a farm doing interesting agricultural practices, etc. We\'ve heard of the big corporations with the resources to fund these incredible projects, but we\'ve also heard of plain jane who\'s doing radical energy renovations in her house, or george who\'s printing his own local currency. I\'m hoping that as this project catches on we will be connected accross the country with these individuals through word of mouth (and our fantastic website).

Thanks for your time!