The Green Apple Meetup is for New York City

• residents, 
• businesses, 
• organizations, 
• building managers, 
• and others concerned with making sustainability sustainable.

The Discussion Board is currently active. Please contribute to the discussion online (even if you can't attend an event in person).

We do not advocate meetings, or meetups, for the sake of talking green. There is already too much talk and too little action. We are interested in ways of making green happen. In practice there is a certain element of lifestyle choice in the green culture, but eventually, green will only work if it also generates the other kind of green - dollars.

So we are particularly interested in initiatives that combine green with green, truly a natural combination! And it turns out there are plenty of opportunities, while a lot of other things are over-hyped.

Being in the city means many people rent or lease space, so there is a conflict of interest between tenants and owners which tends to hold up the show, yet here and there people are finding innovative solutions. Yet there are some amazing things tenants can do, which benefit them directly, and yet they are not being done (enough).

What matters is creating a collaborative environment where the discussions focus on practical solutions and how to do them, while keeping an eye on avoiding merely painting everything that's more resource efficient than last year's version as 'green.'

So when is green green? In our view it happens once you're on a trajectory that leads to total sustainability over time. Some solutions lend themselves to achieving a sustainable business proposition right now, others are steps in a process. The dead ends are when you merely become more resource efficient, but are not progressing towards a structural solution, although efficiency may also bring structural solutions closer to reality, because they make the problem smaller, but efficiency should not be given priority over structural solutions lest we major in a minor.