Top stories from our Canadian blog:
Tokyo's Transforming Tower | Madeline Ashby
"I wish there were a way to combine these shutters and some form of external cladding, but in a year both the tower's designers and its inhabitants will understand how best to exploit this building's transformation potential."
Event Summary - 2009 Behavior, Energy and Climate Change Conference | Stefanie Bowles
We feature notes from Stephanie Bowles on a couple of talks from the 2009 Behavior, Energy and Climate Change (BECC) conference in Washington DC. Bowles, quoting Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez: "... the BECC conference organizers made the veggie lunch option the default for the conference, and you had to opt in for the meat option. Meat eating went from 95% to 20% with this simple change, and we...
One of the unifying features of this time of year – of Thanksgiving and the winter holidays – is food, and lots of it. Although the traditional seasonal consumer excess will be curbed by economic pain this year, many people will still maintain the tradition of gathering with others around the table. This in itself isn't a bad thing: food brings us together, and to many people the experience of sharing a meal is a sacred act.
But Worldchanging readers know that all of this food raises questions from a sustainability perspective. And I can think of no aspect of our diets more controversial than meat .
Readers of this site, by and large, attempt to be good environmental citizens; it’s our unifying feature. While not all of us are vegetarian, most of us are aware of the...
-- Embracing the leapback and an open approach to innovation. -- If you have access to the tools for creating physical change in your community chances are you live in a privileged and highly networked community. For most of the world there is an innovation divide that continues to grow, not because of the lack of creativity or passion but the barriers surrounding the ability to share ideas, collaborate and to adapt existing solutions continue to spiral out of the reaches of those who need them most. In living in a connected society and the ability to travel the world I get to have a unique opportunity to discover the incredible ingenuity happening in areas the media have cast off as ‘hopelessly in need of saving’. The reality is that when improving your surroundings becomes a...
For those of us who have spent years warning that climate change is a problem of the highest magnitude, these are gratifying days. Politicians, business leaders, labor unionists, celebrities and religious figures all seem, finally, to be listening to the science and beginning to hear its meaning: we must change, dramatically, at once.
This is a Very Good Thing. At the same time, I am beginning to have misgivings about some of the debate emerging around climate change -- and perhaps not in the direction you might think.
We still have much convincing to do, and a lot of denial to brush aside, to get action commensurate with the magnitude of the problem. But that is not what is beginning to worry me. What has begun to set off my inner alarm bells is a new meme emerging from the ranks of...
These are hard days, but thrilling. They're difficult, and scary, because for the first time we're coming to understand that things are worse than we thought, and the time we have to act on climate change should perhaps be measured in years, not decades. They're exciting because we're beginning to see paths forward that could lead us out of this catastrophe and into a better future: they're still faint, and we're far from home and night is not far off, but they do exist.
George Monbiot's new book, Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning,is, at its core, a personal quest to find such a path. Indeed, Monbiot fairly declares that he was prompted to write the book in part because of a member of the audience at one of his talks in which he had declared the need for an 80% reduction in carbon...
In a nice piece of unplanned synergy, this is our 5,000th post, and tomorrow is our three-year anniversary.
It's quite odd, actually, to think that it's only been three years since we put up our first post (about Jim Moore's essay, The Second Superpower). That seems an age ago.
Looking back, though, it's amazing how well the stories we wrote that first month have anticipated the work we've done in the three years since, with pieces on Corruption and Transparency International, the Thai Bio-Solar House, the Earth Simulator, Organic Photovoltaics, Open Source and the Developing World. the Public Library of Science, Open Source Biology, Car-Free Cities, Creative Commons and Copyleft, Biomimicry, "Soft Paths" for Water, Solar Power in the Developing World, Knowing Nature Through...
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press, 2006) is an extended philosophical manifesto on the potential of open source decentralized "peer production" - not just as a way of creating software, but in the broader sense of a fundamentally new means of producing goods, services, and freedom itself.
Since the online version of the book is available at author Yochai Benkler's site under a Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial - ShareAlike license, I've remixed several of my favorite parts of the book into an essay, which hopefully conveys some of the essence of Benkler's subtle and insightful work.
For all of us, there comes a time on any given day, week, and month, every year and in different degrees over our lifetimes,...
Once in a while, somebody notes that the Internet should be materially contributing to solving the world's problems. I think the notion has been around since about 1965. I'd like to raise some ideas for you, WorldChanging's Open Thinktank, to think about, speculate on, contribute to and improve.Natural Capitalism and Waste Aggregation
One of the key concepts of Natural Capitalism is "Sell Services, Not Products." Part of the rationale for this is what I'm going to loosely term "Waste Aggregation." To take a canonical NatCap example, imagine an elevator. If the elevator is owned by the business which uses it (say a hotel) then the energy efficiency and reliability of the elevator has relatively minor impact on the bottom line of the hotel. As long as it basically works, nobody cares...
Just how much more can we do with less?
I recently read an article which discussed a company which went to a 32 hour work week with no drop in productivity. (the story is taken from The Time Bind by Arlie Hochschild)While this example would not scale over an entire economy - a steel mill, for example, is unlikely to be able to replicate it - it fascinates me that a company could cut 20% of one of it's most critical and expensive inputs (human time) and not change its outputs. While not in the same category as Factor Four it is in an unexpected domain. How much more slack is there in the system?
Is it possible that the inefficiencies in our economy are so large that, in fact, we could tighten 80% of our resource use right out of the loop over a period of fifty years, without...
Population, in some ways, is the critical wild card in our efforts to win the Great Wager, stave off ecological collapse and build a bright green future.
On the one hand, its clear as day that building individual livelihoods that provide prosperity and a high quality of life yet whose ecological footprints are small enough to be globally sustainable is possible. Only a very few yet live those lives, and much work remains to be done before they can be available to all, but there is no doubt that one planet living is within our abilities.
On the other hand, population growth makes one-planet living a moving target: the more people there are, the more our share of the planet shrinks, after all, and the harder it becomes to distribute those sustainable technologies and practices to...
How much of a difference do we really make when we take small, personal steps to ptrotect the environment? That's been a subject of much debate around here recently. Just to throw a little biodiesel on the fire, WorldChanging reader Brad Stone writes in recommending his most recent column in Newsweek, Do Good By Doing Bad in which he lambastes Greener Miles, the new partnership between Ford and TerraPass, which will let SUV-owners offset the carbon they spew while driving the kids to the little league game in a 7,000-pound Ford Excursion:
Greener Miles allows customers to "offset" the environmental impact of their Ford automobiles by making online donations to projects that reduce greenhouse gasses. You no longer have to feel bad about driving that 13-miles-per-gallon Lincoln Navigator...
Green is the new black. No buzz-phrase better sums up both the excitement many of us feel about the blooming environmental and social consciousness around us and the essential hollowness of the answers being promoted by many newly-minted eco-pundits.
The flood of environmental magazine cover stories, documentaries and advertisements has pushed us over a public-opinion threshold, which is great. But the solutions being touted by many of our new-found allies are themselves creating a new kind of problem -- people who should know better are selling a muddle-headed, style-over-substance, "lite green" environmentalism at a time when what we need to be rebuilding our civilization to avoid disaster. To be blunt, we're being sold out.
People are being told to buy organic cotton T-shirts, keep...
Scenario methodology is a powerful tool for thinking through the implications of strategic choices. Rather than tying the organization to a set "official future," scenarios offer a range of possible outcomes used less as predictions and more as "wind tunnels" for plans. (How would our strategy work in this future? How about if things turn out this way?) We talk about scenarios with some frequency here, and several of us have worked (and continue to work) professionally in the discipline.
With its genealogy reaching back to Cold War think tanks and global oil multinationals, however, scenario planning tends to be primarily a tool for corporate and government planning; few non-profit groups or NGOs, let alone smaller communities, have the resources to assemble useful scenario projects or...
"Sail on!" it says: "sail on, ye stately ships! And with your floating bridge the ocean span; Be mine to guard this light from all eclipse. Be yours to bring man neared unto man.
- The Lighthouse, H.W. Longfellow
1: Camera Obscura
In her last column of 2005, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote that the Vice President has turned America into a camera obscura. She was speaking of Giambattista Della Porta's dark optical chamber where the outside world is seen through a pinhole or lens, and the images are always inverted. Cheney's attempt at censoring his residence's details from the Google Earth software (a tool which has raised the eyebrows of potentates in many countries, including India ) was the target of Dowd's vitriolic erudition. Here was a man trying to erase himself...
There's a theory in cognitive science that suggests that one of the hallmarks of human consciousness is the ability to model another person's thoughts in one's own brain, and do so with reasonable accuracy. It's not simply being able to read expressions, although that's part of it; humans can imagine how another person's thought processes, which may differ significantly from their own, would play out in reaction to a given situation. If you think about it, this is an amazing capability, especially because we don't always do it consciously. We run sophisticated simulations of other people's minds within our own. This capacity allows us both to imagine how others would feel after we witness their circumstances -- that is, it allows us to experience empathy -- and to imagine how others...
The Earth's environment, particularly its climate, is not a linear, obvious-cause-and-immediate-effect system. This has a number of implications, but the one that troubles many of us who pay close attention is the resulting potential for "phase change" shifts in the climate system, where seemingly-small perturbations lead to a major change in how the climate behaves (the classic example of this kind of change is a pile of sand with grains dropping down on the peak; some will slide down, some will stack up, but eventually the entire peak will collapse, radically changing the shape of the pile). As we develop the tools and techniques to better understand the overall global climate and ecological system, these "tipping points" should be at the top of our list of processes to identify and,...
Two philosophies dominate the broad debates about the development of potentially-worldchanging technologies. The Precautionary Principle tells us that we should err on the side of caution when it comes to developments with uncertain or potentially negative repercussions, even when those developments have demonstrable benefits, too. The Proactionary Principle, conversely, tells us that we should err on the side of action in those same circumstances, unless the potential for harm can be clearly demonstrated and is clearly worse than the benefits of the action. In recent months, however, I've been thinking about a third approach. Not a middle-of-the-road compromise, but a useful alternative: the Reversibility Principle.
It's very much a work-in-progress, but read on to see what this could...
When Cameron Sinclair took the stage to receive his TED Prize last Thursday, he devoted a good portion of his talk to the exploration of his idea of an "open source" form of architecture. Cameron's emphasis was on the openness of the designs and architectural innovations most useful to builders in the developing world, but the idea of open source architecture has the potential to go even further than that. It dovetails with the slow emergence of open source hardware, pointing us towards a world of individual power over design that has the potential to be extraordinarily worldchanging. At first blush, the open source model doesn't necessarily seem like a good fit for physical objects. The reason comes down to replication: with open source software, I can give you a copy of (for example)...
You may have heard that the gulf coast is still broken from hurricane Katrina five months ago. It's definitely true--I know because I was just there, doing reconstruction work with Hands On USA, an organization of amazing people who are exceptional at getting things done. As we see more and more in this globalized world, the organization started overseas and then came to the US. Hands On Thailand was created a year ago by a handful of people responding to the destruction of the 2004 tsunami, and when hurricane Katrina hit, two of the American founders came home to found Hands On USA. They are now handing operations over to Hands On Network, a different but coincidentally-named organization with a long history of relief work.
I'd never done this sort of thing before, but I...
The future is not written in stone, but neither is it unbounded. Our actions, our choices shape the options we'll have in the days and years to come. We can, with all too little difficulty, make decisions that call into being an inescapable chain of events. But if we try, we can also make decisions that expand our opportunities, and push out the boundaries of tomorrow.
If there is a common theme across our work at WorldChanging, it is that we are far better served as a global civilization by actions and ideas that increase our ability to respond effectively, knowledgably, and sustainably to challenges that arise. In particular, I've focused on the value of openness as a means of worldchanging transformation: open as in free, transparent and diverse; open as in participatory and...
The idea of the emerging participatory panopticon scares a lot of people. That's not surprising; after all, there are numerous ways in which a world in which millions of us carry always-on, mobile networked recorders could lead to invasions of privacy, harassment of the powerless, and an increased coarsening of public discourse. But if we accept the notion that the participatory panopticon is a likely consequence of otherwise desirable improvements to communication and information technologies, it becomes incumbent upon us to think of ways to use it as a tool for good.
I've long admired the Witness project, which provides video cameras to human rights activists around the world in order to document violations and abuses. I was particularly happy to see the recent news that Witness...