Community Pulse is all about providing regular feedback and making connections between four of our biggest environmental challenges:  waste, water use, energy use and CO2 emissions. Our mission is to assemble and organize utility and agency information that is collected but rarely used to help people understand where we are at now, how far we are from where we want to be, and how we can get there.

Individuals (and communities) in our society lack the adequate sense in real time of how well we are doing - how much energy we are consuming, how many negative environmental and social impacts we are creating, how many opportunities we are missing to create cleaner richer lives and communities. Not only is it out of sight, we have no sense of how much we are using, and no feedback loops that might show us how and when we can reduce our consumption[1].

Community Pulse is our effort to provide this information that is missing from our day-to-day lives. At the moment this website is just a proof of concept. We started Community Pulse in Sonoma and Napa counties because this is where we are from, this is where our network is based. Unfortunately, the resources are not currently available to ramp this concept up to the scale we have envisioned. We have always thought that the real potential of Community Pulse lies in providing this information for major cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, as well as all of the states, allowing it to reach a wider audience and inspire a little friendly competition between communities and states. We would still like to see this happen, and if you would like to be a part of making it happen, please let us know!

[1] Newman, Peter, T. Beatley, and H. Boyer (2009). Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change. Covelo Island Press, Washington, DC.