Brian Lam
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Graham Hill |
Barcelona resident Graham Hill is a next-generation environmentalist. With an advanced degree in architecture and industrial design, extensive travel experience and an avid interest in extreme sports, he is just the man to create an environmental design blog that is everything hip and urban. TreeHugger attracts about half a million visitors a month, mostly students and designers in their 20s and 30s, and posts an average of 16 entries per weekday. Using the latest in blogging technology, including an interactive broadband channel TreeHuggerTV, Hill is making every effort to get his message of "green" living out to the world. In addition to TreeHugger, Hill maintains a user-generated environmental blog, Hugg.com, and sells a ceramic mug at WeAreHappyToServeYou.com which pays homage to the popular paper cup found in New York City delis.
When did you start TreeHugger?
We started posting two years ago at the end of July... and the concept has been percolating for many years. The first time it manifested physically was in 2000, when I took a Photoshop class with an assignment to create fake ads — I did three. I essentially took three different pictures that I ripped out of magazines of cool urban types, two guys and one girl, and then superimposed text over the middle of the photograph. The words were treehugger, damn hippie and bleeding heart. The point I was getting at is that we have stereotypes about what treehuggers, damn hippies and bleeding hearts should look like. You should be allowed to be a modern city dweller and still care about the environment.
Your design approach is "it's for the cool folks." What advantage does that have?
My premise is if you have a choice, try to work with human nature and not against it. Sadly, humanity has a lot of negative aspects, and the two I focused on were laziness and shallowness. It is my belief that we are aesthetically shallow. We are very aspirational; it really matters how we dress, what kind of car we drive and what our place looks like. That's why gossip mags, TV and movies are so aspirational — it's always about something that is slightly out of our reach ...I want to capitalize on the way that our society seems to work, and make green, help green, profile green as this cool thing to help make it trendy and aspirational.
What do you want people to walk away with?
I hope that they can say, "Hey, I care about the environment and I can still do a lot and keep my lifestyle." The other thing I am trying to do — back to the laziness aspect — convenience is the real killer. If you want anything to happen, you have to make it easy. I'm hoping the takeaway on the site is this positive "Wow, I've seen this green that is here now and I can change my life in a green direction, whether it's transportation, fashion, housing, etc." A lot of environmentalism has been doom and gloom, negative, inspired by fear. We are trying to be positive: 80% of of the stuff we feature are solutions and good news. I try to make it really inspiring so a lot of people come away hopeful.
It's difficult to have an environmental blog without having a political stance; how do you manage that?
I want all parties, all persuasions to be comfortable on the site. It's very tempting for this to be a left-leaning site. Our gig is green — period. We want Republicans, Democrats, etc., all to be comfortable on the site. We did a survey a while back and we had 10% to 20% Republicans. I would like there to be more Republicans on the site. I feel that it has been a largely Democratic issue, but it shouldn't be.
What about your broadband channel, TreeHuggerTV. When did it start and how did it change your blog?
TreeHuggerTV is fairly new, within the past four months. We have gotten a lot of nice comments on it, people enjoy it. Clearly cable, network and the Internet are slamming together, which makes sense... That's clearly where things are headed, and I think the Internet allows a lot of that to happen. I think that much of advertising is difficult to measure on TV and is much easier to measure on the Internet. Those factors together suggest to me that there will be a role for online video in combination with advertising. My feeling was to develop this green media brand called TreeHugger and how it could expand in many directions.