THE STORY

It has been very difficult to choose the topic for my story and I still haven’t completely decided. Maybe this happens when you have too many options and no boss to point to one specific thing and choose in your place.

Stories dealing with energy issues are common these days in the worldwide media. So there is another requirement for my story as a consequence to this trend: originality; not only in terms of design or format, but also in the choice of subtopic, data relations and comparisons.

The following subtopics that I have been tackling one by one in the last couple of months have developed literally one from another. Since there is no particular issue I am keen on investigating, the ideas below were born from my extended readings and from the news.

1. Green jobs
Since it is an ongoing subject and I will not have the resources to work on my thesis after April 2010, I felt my graphics would be outdated fairly quickly.

2. The relationship between working hours and energy consumption (I recommend the book Sharing the Work, Sparing the Planet: Work Time Reduction, Consumption and the Environment, which includes study cases of laws and policies in Canada and Europe).

I abandoned this topic, because I felt I had to devote too much time on my understanding of labor policies and the labor market itself, both in the United States and Europe, in order not to oversimplify the matter and neglect important threads of the story. 

This particular story is very interesting to me, for at least one reason: in this case, you have no clue where the data will lead you. There are two main approaches to the issue: a productivist one (if people work less, they will spend more time consuming and adding to the environmental damage) and the green one (the productivity gain, obtained through technological increasing efficiency, is used to obtain more leisure time, get out of the work-spend cycle we live in, involve more in the family life or the community, inform decisions etc.) I think this story has great potential and could become a personal project in the future.

3. Since I am reading so many books about energy-related issues (Michael Pollan’s Food Rules was the most recent one), I had this idea of investigating the relationship between a media diet consisting of non-fiction books, documentaries and online articles, and the behaviors of people towards energy consumption: have the media affected the behavior and led to people taking action? Laura has helped me to clarify some of the goals I would target with this story.

This kind of story requires a very carefully crafted methodology of data analysis. There are so many factors to be taken into account in drawing any kind of conclusion, that, if not scientific enough, the method could lead to comparing apples with pears. In case I decide to pursue this story, I will explain the method in detail and document it with experts.

Source: The City of Stockholm

And the winning story is…

4. Stockholm is the European Green Capital for 2010. Now this is a subject I can relate to. I have lived in Sweden for six months in 2003 and while I did not have any interest in the environment back then, the Swedes were developing programs and strategies, even before the huge awareness that Al Gore’s The Inconvenient Truth brought to the whole world in 2006. What makes Stockholm so special? How does it compare to Seattle (WA), the greenest city in the US according to the Natural Resources Defense Council? If you take a look at the picture I posted above, which I found in an official document released by the City of Stockholm, you would see what level of development they have reached in the last decade.