Jon Stewart’s last day at The Daily Show is August 6… That’s today. Try and hold back your tears and remember that it’s best to remember the good times. To help you do just that, we’ve rounded up a few of the Jon Stewart segments we love.

1. The Fault in Our Schools

In this video, Stewart shows us just how terribly many schools handle sexual assault. When this video aired in June 2014, most everyone with an Internet connection knew about all the sexual assaults that were happening on campuses (and just how little was happening to the students who assaulted the women — even when there was footage). The best part of this clip comes when Jessica Williams takes over and schools everyone in the audience about just how much women are “required” to think about when they navigate the world everyday of their lives.

2. Eric Garner Grand Jury Decision

Through the past year, we’ve all learned that white privilege is real and that #BlackLivesMatter, and Jon Stewart was with us throughout that entire education. And while Stewart was there to give us some comedy to make some of these situations a bit better, he also knows when to get real. The above video is the realist reaction Stewart had about the Eric Garner grand jury decision.

3. Burn Noticed

Jon Stewart is great at dealing with emotional issues, but he also is incredibly adept at dealing with science news, too. One of the issues he dealt with on (sadly) a regular basis was climate change. We are really going to miss his humor when we have to hear about nasty things like drought and water shortages in the future.

4. Democalypse 2012 – Election Night 2012: This Ends Now – Campaign Headquarters 

And we’d be remiss if we didn’t include at least one clip of Stewart doing what he does best: covering a presidential campaign. What we wouldn’t give to see him in action in 2016.

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Great educators don’t often get a lot of recognition for great teaching moves. So, ‘Key & Peele’ went ahead and imagined a world where teachers get the recognition and pay that sports stars do.

In this Comedy Central clip, you’ll see the comedy duo imagine a teaching draft, feature a killer teaching “highlight of the day,” and a hilarious mock commercial.

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The post ‘Key & Peele’ Give Educators the Attention They Deserve [Video] appeared first on EcoSalon.

We learned that we need better green messaging, cities are where we’re going, and children should spend time in nature early and often.

The first annual SXSW Eco conference was a success by many measures. The number of attendees exceeded the organizers’ expectations, the sessions were lead by well-known industry pioneers and up-and-comers, and the discussion was informative and productive. Here were some of the highlights we found most applicable.

Senior Editor, Andrea Newell:

The green movement is losing the messaging war.

As Anna wrote earlier, the green movement is facing the sad truth that people aren’t moved to combat climate change when confronted with grim statistics, alarming graphs scolding and guilt. It isn’t working. We need a new way to connect with people and get them to care.

Knowing your audience is Business 101, yet green has promoted a generally one-size-fits-all rationale. Comedy Central’s Kelleigh Dulany, VP of Corporate Responsibility talked about how she narrowed the focus of the message to Comedy Central’s demographic, made it relevant to them, and, of course, delivered it with humor. Dulany said, “Make the change small, make the result big and make the impact local.”

Due to what many feel is alarmist green marketing, people get the idea that if they are not significantly changing their lifestyle to be green, they are not doing enough. So they do nothing. The truth is that if many people made small changes in their conservation habits, that would make a bigger impact than a few people making big changes. So, taking baby steps toward a greener lifestyle still helps.

Most of us will live in or near cities by mid-century.

As our population grows, it will naturally consume more space. By 2050, 70 percent of the world’s population will live in or near cities. Cities will expand because that is where the jobs, education and resources are. The turning point will be how those cities react to their increasing size and population. Infrastructure is crucial. Sustainable cities in the future will include better public transportation, bike trails, child-friendly spaces and quality education, good jobs, and access to healthy food.

In addition to planning for better cities, many metropolitan areas need to plan for environmental changes. Melanie Nutter, Director of the San Francisco Department of the Environment, projects that sea level will rise nearly 55 inches by the end of this century. For San Francisco, surrounded by water on three sides, this is a serious issue. The airport will be underwater, as will 99 miles of roadways. These are eventualities that she knows she must start planning for now. Amongst many aggressive environmental initiatives employed by the city, currently it leads the country in waste disposal (more than 77 percent is composted, recycled or reused) and has set a goal of zero waste by 2020.

Robin Rather, CEO of Collective Strength, Inc. makes the argument that we’re all in this together – cities, suburbs and rural areas. Our current us-versus-them mentality works against progress and change. She contends that we all have to face this problem united, whether we live in super-hip cities like San Francisco, cities in dire straits like Detroit, a Rhode Island suburb or rural Nebraska.

The children are our (environmental) future.

Several speakers and organizations have identified a new, desirable demographic to target – children. (Relatively) free of cynicism and unswayed by complicated charts, children easily believe that the environment is precious and important simply by spending time outside.

Keynote speaker Mark Tercek (The Nature Conservancy) fell in love with nature when he wanted his children to develop an appreciation for the outdoors and they planned many exploratory family trips. TNC supports programs that help urban youth who would not otherwise get to spend time outdoors participate in nature activities. Keynote speaker Philippe Cousteau certainly was brought up to love the water, but his foundation, EarthEcho International focuses on encouraging children to appreciate oceans and their ecosystems. Disney reaches out to children through Iron Way Films using creativity and imagination, and Comedy Central speaks to teens and young adults through humor.

It’s fitting. Children will inherit our planet, so the idea that they should learn to care about it early on is the right one. If children hold so much sway over parental buying decisions, perhaps they can exert influence over some greener behavior, too.

Marketing Manager, Anna Brones:

It’s all about food.

What is the one thing that connects us? The one thing that can get anybody talking? Food. “We cherish our connections to food. We do not cherish our connections to turning off our lightbulbs,” said journalist Simran Sethi. If there is one thing that binds us, no matter what side of the political spectrum we are on, it’s what we eat, and when it comes to talking about the environment and our health, food is also one of the main common denominators.

We need to have uncomfortable conversations.

Population control, religion, race – these are all things that many of us steer clear of, but if we don’t bring these important issues to the table we are going to have serious missed opportunities. Roger-Mark De Souza of Population Action International made the connection between access to reproductive services and family planning and climate change; if we slow population growth we can limit carbon emissions. Here is an area with potential for significant impact, and yet it is one of the many important questions that won’t be on the table at the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development held in 2012. If we continue to veer from the difficult questions, we can forget progress.

Listen before talking.

Action is needed, but to inspire action we have to know who we are talking to and how they will respond. This requires listening. Identify not only what communities need, but what they want. We live in an era that requires serious action, and we need it now, but if we continue to preach, we won’t effect real change. As Andrew Hutson of Environmental Defense Fund, pointed out, we cannot lead discussion “with ideas that threaten people’s core beliefs and values.”

Editor-in-Chief, Sara Ost:

Life, sustainability, and the pursuit of happiness.

“We need a Rosetta Stone” for green messaging was Gary Lawrence’s quote retweeted round the conference room in “Let’s Stop Talking about Sustainability: How Our Green Vocabulary Is Failing Us.”

We need a ring decoder, someone else said. We need to know how to market and message for our target audiences, another panelist noted. Well, yes.

What are these words that will work? We know what they aren’t. Green, eco, sustainability, environmentalism, climate change, global warming, conservation, cutting back, recycling, reusing, reducing and worst of all: sacrifice. Green doesn’t just have a sex appeal problem (on the level of Christian rap; besides, who wants to be a color?), it has a happiness problem.

We environmentalists can argue about consumption, mitigation versus paradigm shift, and technology until the grass fed cows come home. The fundamental problem is that green, The Movement, asks for sacrifice and gets snippy when it doesn’t happen. If sacrifice were going to work, it would have already. We live in a nation where the grand directive from our President in the weeks after 9/11 was for us to shop. I don’t think we’re at a point as a culture anymore where we can be asked to sacrifice in the face of very real problems – at least not without government involvement (think enforced rations circa WWII).

I’d like to remind people that Obama was able to win an election on simple appeals to our common humanity, to the good in us: “Change” and “Yes we can.”

In this particular panel, Lawrence asked us to consider appealing to the core emotions we all share. These are fear, aspiration and nostalgia. He then said what I consider to be the most profound thing I heard at the entire conference: “We are forgetting about happiness.”

It strikes me that we live in a culture where happiness is not a value – despite the fact that it’s written right into our Declaration of Independence. What American doesn’t recall having to memorize “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in grade school? Yet we don’t take  vacations. Paternity leave? What’s that? Hell, we barely get outside. Take a look at infant mortality rates, the number of adults on antidepressants, the media we consume – it’s awful. On the flight in, I happened to sit next to a woman who counsels Fortune 50 executives on communication and negotiation. She had that glow that really present, grateful, active people have. I was riveted by the earful she gave me about high stakes negotiating, and equally moved when she said, after a pause: “People who live here don’t see just how self-loathing we are. Other cultures are blown away by it.”

Of course, I also couldn’t help but think about Steve Jobs and his impact on the world during all of this green discussion and debate. People love Apple because there’s an element of happiness to the products. Design is soul.

It’s simple, but green needs some soul.

Image: Kewl

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What’s cool and green and seen all over? Eco-themed television! Green programming is a growing niche in entertainment, and each week, we’ll look at shows that make us shout out “I want my green TV!”

“˜Future Forward’ Inspires Cooks to Recycle Kitchen Scraps

Planet Green’s “Future Food” executive chef, Omar Cantu of the world-renowned Moto restaurant in Chicago, shocks viewers and diners alike with his unusual culinary creations. This week, he was even more eco-friendly than usual, when he challenged his crew to recycle discarded food.

After rendering innocent bratwursts inedible via an incident with a flamethrower, he repurposed the still usable bits instead of tossing them in the trash.

Inspired, he ordered his staff to recycle the potato skins. Success?

First, they made chili cheese fries out of frozen pureed potato skins, crinkle cut, coated in potato starch to stiffen and fried in beef fat. For the chili, they pulverized deep fried peels into a ground beef texture. The “cheese” sauce was even more creative – juiced carrot scraps, eggs, salt, and truffle oil. The final result looked just like regular chili cheese fries, and yes, according to diners, they were delicious.

We viewers may not have the culinary creative skills, or proper kitchen gear, to go this far outside the box. But hopefully the show will inspire a few people to think twice before throwing away their scraps.

Stephen Colbert’s Global Warming Smackdown

The global warming “debate” escalates further between meteorologists and climate scientists this week. A New York Times article reported that 90 percent of climatologists believe global warming is man-made while only 31 percent of meteorologists agree. Sadly, the same article says most Americans trust weathermen for their climate information more than politicians like Al Gore. Aren’t we talking about the same job where it’s OK to be wrong over 50 percent of the time?

On this week’s “Colbert Report,” fake conservative news anchor Stephen Colbert brought the “Science Catfight” to his desk. In one corner was Joe Bastardi, the chief Accuweather forecaster, and in the other corner, Brenda Ekwurzel, a Union of Concerned Scientists climatologist.
Neither got much of a chance to defend their argument in the presence of Colbert. One of our favorites? “The sea levels rising… could that just be because… Americans are getting fatter and going swimming?”

Join us next week – same time, same channel – for more of the latest highlights in green TV.

Jesie Lee

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