PEIR,

PEIR

Travelling to San Francisco to investigate a new environmental initiative, Frances discovers that the project is less about new research and technology, and more about how that technology is affecting people’s behaviour. Confronted with the inescapable evidence of her own carbon footprint, Frances feels compelled to amend the errors of her own ways, though her efforts don’t meet with quite the results or acclaim she was hoping...

As a girl, I confess, I’m not that into gadgets. So when Lonely Planet approached me about this assignment – investigating mobile phone use and new Nokia applications – I wasn’t that enrapt.

But as I learnt more about the PEIR project - that it was student-sprung, for example - inspired, founded and propelled by teen twins at a US high school, I found myself more and more intrigued. And San Francisco did sound like the perfect setting for such a project.

America’s prettiest city, ‘San Fran’ is also practically synonymous with civil rights movements, social activism and free thinking. As I filled the flying hours from London, I read in my LP guide that the city is also known as an axis of ideas, inventions and technology and ‘… boasts more non-profit organisations,’ (including, I guess, this one) ‘than any city in America’.

With one of the best restaurant scenes in the US and some of its best wines, I reckoned it was as good a place as any to spend a couple of weeks, even if I never did figure out all this mobile jargon. Eight hours later and still on the plane, I’m now on the Nokia literature: What for Heaven’s sake, I think to myself, is ‘SynchML’, ‘FOTA’ and ‘UI rotation’?

One of my first ports of calls in San Francisco is to meet the said twins, the founders of the youth environmental organisation, Go Green, and piloters of the new Nokia PEIR application. Recalling my own troubled teens, I expected spotty, surly and sullen students who could barely string a sentence together.

Not Catalina and Trevor. Well-dressed, eloquent and passionate they have me converted to the cause and Go-Greening before you can say, well, Go-Green.

More remarkable, they’d managed to convince their fellow-students that caring about the environment was cool, smart and even fun, and had launched an inter-high school competition for the lowest, collective carbon footprint.

In place of long-winded lessons, self-righteous adults, and incomprehensible stats gathered in remote locations, the Environment according to Go Green was all about checking out each other’s carbon footprint on Facebook, belonging to a cool youth organisation, and gently prodding parents about the carbon impact of their cars.

Champing to get to give it a try, and armed with my Nokia N95 loaded with the environmental ‘app’, off I went for my next appointment, the CENS laboratory at UCLA in Los Angeles.

Mindful of my new responsibility as a member of the Gutierrez Go-Green gang, terrified that I’d expose myself on Facebook, and fearful of disappointing Catalina and Trevor, I opted for the train over air or road travel.

Unfortunately, my halo (and smugness) soon slipped upon learning (from the hilariously sympathetic Jeff Burke - look out for him) that my carbon impact that day was still three times what it should have been. Oops.

My next port of call was to meet Nithya and her gorgeous daughter, researchers and piloters of PEIR. Bad news: it seems that the last laugh’s on us. In a nutshell, the more we pollute the environment, the more it pollutes us. I reckon if anything can get America and the rest of the world out of our cars, it’s this, even if the results aren’t always as brilliant and virtuous as we might hope...

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