World Changing

Thanks to everyone who attended our 5th Anniversary bash on Wednesday night at the Sole Repair Shop! We were thrilled to celebrate with so many old and new friends.

We'd also like to share our enthusiasm for the standing-room-only crowd at Cafe Presse both last night and last Friday evening, where we gathered to watch the first of the debates leading up to the November election (photo above). We were truly impressed by the turnout, but even more impressed by the way everyone stood in (mostly) silent attention listening to our presidential and VP candidates discuss and disagree. It's exciting to see the public so engaged, informed and involved.

This week on the local blog, we've been excited to discuss two very specific plans for new sustainable developments – a rural methane digester for Skagit County, and plans for the country's largest urban swale in South Lake Union. We've also posted some notes on designing cities for car-free living, and followed up with a few more profiles from our Seattle to the World series of best local innovations. Check out the details:

Lecture Notes: What to Do About the Automobile?
The classic ideal of personal car ownership is tumbling from its pedestal. Last Friday, Worldchanging editor Julia Levitt heard Seattle policymakers, designers and developers discuss solutions for building communities that are less auto-centric.

Manure-to-Energy in Skagit County
Renewable energy startup Farm Power Northwest was recently awarded a $500,000 grant from the USDA to help fund a methane digester that will turn dairy farm refuse into power for the local grid.

Seattle to the World: Green Factor
Raising the standard for landscaping in Seattle's neighborhood business districts has motivated developers to incorporate green roofs, pervious pavement and other smart details in their new designs.

Seattle to the World: A Better Plan for the Viaduct
Sometimes when we live with a problem for too long, we forget that it is a problem. Such seems to be the case with the Alaskan Way Viaduct…

Vulcan Announces the "Swale on Yale"
Seattle will see a new advance in low impact development (LID) with a two-block biofiltration swale in the heart of the South Lake Union neighborhood.

Are you here in Seattle? We'd like to hear from you! Check out the local blog and leave comments, or contact editor[at]Worldchanging[dot]com if you have ideas or would like to write.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 3:11 PM)

The urbanist journal Next American City is on my short list of critical urban resources. In comparison to many policy- and planning-oriented magazines, it's routinely intelligent, passionate and forward-looking -- I sometimes disagree with the perspectives they offer on the future of cities, but I nearly always learn something from the experience.

It's also a good looking pub, so I was glad to read that it's just won an Ozzie.

Congrats, NAC! Keep up the good work.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Urban Design and Planning at 8:54 PM)

The Daily Telegraph published a handful of cartograms yesterday from The Atlas of the Real World, the latest book from big-picture focused professors and worldmapper.org creators Daniel Dorling, Mark Newman and Anna Barford.

The Atlas of the Real World includes 366 digitally modified maps ‘depicting the areas and countries of the world not just by their physical size, but by their demographic importance on a vast range of subjects.’

The book focuses on a 'variety of subjects ranging from population, health, wealth and occupation to how many toys we import and who’s eating their vegetables.' The Daily Telegraph picked up Land Area, Aircraft Travel, Rail Travel, Mopeds and Motorcycles, Nuclear Weapons, and both the Increase and Decrease in Emissions of Carbon Dioxide. Here are a few I found most interesting:

Aircraft Travel: the size of each territory indicates the total distance flown by aircraft registered there.

Nuclear Weapons: As of 2002, eight countries are known or suspected to have strategic nuclear weapons: the United States, Russia, France, China, the United Kingdom, Israel, India and Pakistan.

Increase in Emissions of Carbon Dioxide: Between 1980 and 2000, nearly three-quarters of all territories saw an increase in carbon dioxide emissions, with China, the United States and India leading the way.

Decrease in Emissions of Carbon Dioxide: Between 1980 and 2000, 28 per cent of countries reduced their emissions. Almost half of reduction were made in territories of the former Soviet Union, while Germany (15 per cent), Poland (eight per cent) and France (six per cent) also made substantial cuts.

With almost 400 pages displaying new ways of looking at the world, The Atlas of the Real World provides us many spots at which to stand to gain a new perspective. Seeing the areas and countries of the world manipulated in this way gives a simplistic elegance to the complicated topics they address; they make clear in one image what some books take hundreds of pages to explain.

This collection of delicious mind candy will no doubt be proudly displayed on the coffee tables of cartography geeks and info-fiends alike for years to come, and will hopefully infiltrate the libraries and classrooms of schools throughout the world. If you're hungry for more information like this, and need instant satisfaction, I would highly recommend geeking out for a few hours on the Worldmapper site.

Images from The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the Way We Live by Daniel Dorling, Mark Newman and Anna Barford, published by Thames & Hudson

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Planet at 3:10 PM)

by John de Graaf

There’s a problem with today’s health care debate in America. It’s way too focused on health care.

It’s true that the American health care system is on life-support. Priced at nearly $8,000 a year per American, and soon to be 20 percent of our GDP, it’s more expensive by 40-60 percent than health care systems in any other industrial country and totals nearly half the health care budget of the entire world. Yet it leaves 48 million Americans uncovered by health insurance and produces remarkably poor results.

Americans rank 45th in life expectancy, right there with Albania. After age 50, they are nearly twice as likely as western Europeans to suffer from chronic illnesses. Even in the hospital, US patients face unusual dangers. As many as 275,000 of them die each year from “healthcare” itself--errors or infections during treatment. So the system is broken. But fixing it will require a far more holistic approach than has been discussed in the health care debate.

HEALTH CARE: THE ROOF OF THE HOUSE

Let’s consider American health as a house. Health care is the roof, the final protection against illness. In our case, it’s an expensive roof, gold plated yet with 48 million holes.

In some ways—vaccinations, for example—it’s a preventive system, but mostly it’s sickness care.

In most other countries, the roof is a simpler affair, asphalt shingles on a fiberglass mat but with hardly any leaks. These health care systems rely more on prevention; less on high tech treatment. Yet the people in the house live longer, healthier lives. That’s because in those other countries, the foundation and the walls of the house are stronger, with fewer cracks to let in the cold.

THE FOUNDATION

Let’s start with the foundation. That’s the head start toward health that children in most other rich countries receive. There’s a stronger focus on pre-natal care, for example. In part because of this, infant mortality in all other industrial countries is lower than in the United States, which ranks 42nd in the world, according to the CIA. Every other rich country does better.

In every country in the world except, believe it or not, the United States, Liberia, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea, mothers, and often, fathers, are guaranteed paid time off from work to take care of newborns. In many cases, such “family leave” extends for up to a year or more. In the US, by contrast, parents often return to work when children are only a few weeks old.

Paid family leave, and the parental bonding it ensures, pays off in terms of children’s health—fewer childhood illnesses, fewer problems with attention-deficit disorder, less obesity. Most countries find that such a taxpayer investment in early childhood results in lower health costs and other problems as children grow up.

A recent UNICEF study ranked the United States 20th out of 21 rich nations regarding children’s welfare. While our rich enjoy a marble floor, and our middle class, a wooden one, poor Americans have a dirt floor, with rain leaking through the holes in the roof and puddling up in the corners.

WALL NUMBER ONE—LIFESTYLE

If Democrats talk almost exclusively about universal health care as the solution to our health problems, Republicans tend to focus on wall number one—lifestyle choices. It’s a matter of personal responsibility, they say. Americans should simply stop smoking, eat properly, avoid over-eating, and excessive alcohol consumption, exercise regularly and sleep enough. Of course, this is sensible advice.

But it isn’t all a matter of personal responsibility. Policy changes would help here as well. Our tax system subsidizes producers of sugars and fats and our marketing system relentlessly advertises unhealthy foods. At the same time, Americans tend to work longer hours than people in other rich countries. Europeans, for example, work 300-350 fewer hours each year on average. Laws guarantee them sufficient time off, including a minimum of four weeks of paid vacation a year, and shorter weekly working hours. This leaves them more time to select foods carefully, eat more slowly—and, as a result, eat less—while exercising and sleeping more.

WALL NUMBER TWO—STRESS-RELIEF

It’s no secret in the field of public health that stress is a killer. Several factors make American life particularly stressful. We are among the most competitive of wealthy capitalist countries and have the widest gap between rich and poor. Fewer people on top; more on the bottom. Studies clearly show that whether it’s humans or baboons, the lower your status, the higher your stress levels. More economically egalitarian societies, like Sweden or Japan, for example, are clearly less stressful and more healthy.

Stress is also the result of insecurity. As the American social safety net has been gutted in recent years (with more of us losing health and pension benefits, for example) and job protections have been reduced, life in America is far more insecure than in other rich countries, where strong social safety nets remain in place. Danes, for example, can be fired as easily as Americans, but they receive generous unemployment benefits, job training and government jobs if they are unable to find a position in the private sector. Insecurity also leads to anxiety, a mental illness. American rates of anxiety are double or triple those in western European countries. Europeans say their social safety net gives them a feeling of peace of mind. It’s certainly good for their health.

Finally, stress is the result of time pressures and overwork. More breaks from a stressful workplace are seen by Europeans as yet another way to improve health. It’s unlikely that we will be able to quickly change the levels of hierarchy and inequality in the US, or that our safety net will be suddenly strengthened. But policies offering shorter work time and longer vacations, clear stress reducers, could be enacted more easily and quickly, and they should be.

WALL NUMBER THREE—SOCIAL CONNECTION

It’s a given in the field of public health that social connection strengthens immune systems and improves physical well-being. In fact, it may be the most important single factor in health outcomes. One of the worst things you can do for your health is to be lonesome. Yet America is an increasingly lonely country. More and more people, and especially older Americans, live alone, far more than in other rich countries. A recent study found that the average American has only two close friends he or she can turn to. A quarter of us have none at all. Loneliness quickly turns into depression. As with anxiety, Americans are two to three times as likely to suffer from depression as western Europeans.

A National Institutes of Health study comparing frequency of chronic illness in the United States and the United Kingdom found that Americans are nearly twice as likely to suffer from chronic illnesses such as heart disease in old age. Such diseases account of a huge part of our health care costs. The study found, surprisingly, that poor Britons are as healthy as rich Americans. It didn’t find that eating fish and chips makes you healthier. The major reasons for the difference were related to the fact that the British had more security and more free time, which they used to exercise more, but especially to socialize more.

WALL NUMBER FOUR—A SAFE ENVIRONMENT

Americans, according to the UNICEF study, rank at the bottom in child safety, with the highest rates of accidents among children. Partly, time pressure on American parents leave them less able to supervise their children. Other studies show extremely high rates of accidents in the workplace compared to other nations. Preventable death rates in the US, including deaths from automobile accidents, are the highest among industrial countries. Moreover, the European Union has stricter controls on the release of toxic chemicals into the environment. On average, Americans breathe in air pollution at double the levels of western Europe.

Finally, and this is no small matter, every other industrial country guarantees its workers paid time off from work when they are sick; only the US does not. In many cases, as much as a month of leave is allowed. These countries know that without paid time off, workers will come to work sick, as many American workers do. They will get others sick and stay sick longer, often requiring more expensive treatment for their illnesses. This is not rocket science. Most Americans get this immediately. That is why more than 80 percent of them favor a law that would guarantee paid sick days for workers.

WHAT CAN WE DO TO IMPROVE OUR HEALTH?

To achieve better health outcomes, Americans must begin to see health as a holistic matter, like the house I describe. Right now that house has a foundation that is part marble, part rotting wood and part dirt. It has four walls that are a mixture of teak, balsa wood and bamboo, all of them in sorry shape. And finally, it has a gilded roof with millions of holes.

It is not enough to talk of making the roof all gold and eliminating the holes, though we do need to eliminate the holes. We need to eliminate the gold as well, taking the profit and costly complexity from the system and expanding a program like Medicare to cover everyone, potentially at less cost. Such a system must rely more on preventive methods than high tech cures.

If we also pay attention to the foundation and the walls, we can assure better outcomes also at lower cost, as is the case in other rich nations. We can:

Strengthen the foundation by improving pre-natal care and providing at least three months or more of paid leave to all parents of babies or very young children. Make the Family and Medical Leave Act a paid provision and extend it to all workers.

Strengthen the wall of lifestyle by encouraging consumption of whole grains and vegetables, teaching children the value of eating healthy foods, eliminating subsidies to the purveyors of sugars and fats, and especially, reducing working hours to give Americans more time for exercise, sleep and healthy eating.

Strengthen the wall of stress relief by re-instituting tax policies that narrow the gap between rich and poor, re-building our social safety net and adopting policies like paid vacation time (the US is the only industrial nation without a law guaranteeing paid vacations) that can assure Americans periodic relief from the stress of our hyper-competitive and long-hour workplaces.

Strengthen the wall of connection by reducing working time and by stimulating, through programs like national service, greater volunteer involvement with our neighbors and communities.

Strengthen the wall of safety by improving OSHA and other protections for workers, building more pedestrian and bicycle friendly cities, and regaining the environmental zeal of the early 1970s, which led to much cleaner water and air for all Americans. Pass the Healthy Families Act, guaranteeing seven paid sick days to American workers.

All of these changes, taken for granted in other nations, will make the United States healthier, and almost certainly at less cost than our current system. Improving our health outcomes is less a matter of better science and more money than of political will and an ability to see the connections between things.

Many business leaders (though certainly not all!) will object to these ideas on the grounds that they will cost too much and make us less competitive in the world economy. But the cost of poor health will be far greater than the price tag for such reforms. If there is one thing more than any other which makes it harder for American businesses to compete, it’s the escalating cost of health care.

We can do better. We owe it to ourselves and our children to make these changes without delay.

John de Graaf is a documentary filmmaker, Executive Director of Take Back Your Time and co-author of Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic.

Photo credit: Flickr/kden604, Creative Commons license

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Columns at 1:01 PM)

The Bioneers conference, an old staple of the conference circuit for many greens, will once again be held two weeks from now, a little ways north of San Francisco. But this year there's an additional new event, put together by the Biomimicry Institute (with whom I've worked): it's a day-long seminar the day after Bioneers finishes, called Biomimicry’s Climate-Change Solutions: How Would Nature Do It?

We've long touted biomimicry as an excellent tool for green design, and Worldchanging ally Janine Benyus was one of TIME's Heroes of the Environment in 2007. How can biomimicry help climate change? Here are a few examples from their press release:

Filters modeled on human lungs sequester over 90% of the CO2 in flue stacks. Wind turbines designed after humpback whale flippers show a staggering 32% reduction in drag over conventional blades. Biofuels grown as diverse, native plants akin to prairies produce 238% more bioenergy than conventional monocultures.

A score of brilliant thinkers from the worlds of engineering, biology, chemistry and venture capital will speak on the state of the art in bio-inspired design that increases efficiency, reduces toxicity and increases the abundance of renewable energy and materials. Some that we've mentioned here before are the small startup formed by University of Delaware researchers who make circuit boards out of chicken feathers and soy plastic; solar cells that mimic photosynthesis; and Pax Scientific. If you're new to biomimicry or already a fan, this would be a great event to be fire-hosed with knowledge and get connected to those doing great things in the field.

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(Posted by Jeremy Faludi in Events at 8:22 PM)

The Worldchanging Team-at-Large is enormous. Scores of writers from around the world share their work and research here on a regular basis; respected institutions on the leading edge of sustainability and social innovation are our allies; and our active network of hundreds of thousands of readers contribute smart comments, suggest new ideas and spread the word through their work.

But here at Worldchanging headquarters in Seattle, a small core staff keeps the doors open, the lights on, the blog updated and the ideas cranking. We've welcomed several new faces to the Worldchanging headquarters since spring, and we're happy to say that after plowing through an exciting summer full of new opportunities, our new staff members have settled into their roles, made them their own and have already brought about big changes, with more on the way. We're proud to introduce the newest additions to the Worldchanging staff, and we'd like you to get to know them:

Office Manager Mayling Chung has brought a much-needed sense of calm to our world with her organized approach. She keeps things flowing by managing Alex's tour schedule, handling logistics, official records and communications, and constantly inventing new ways to keep our systems tidy. This Colorado College grad, who earned her BA in Sociology with a minor in Art Studio, held jobs at a video art lab in Colorado, TOPS Veterinary Rehabilitation in Illinois and at Great Harvest Bread Co. in Seattle before joining the team. She continues to feed her passion for food, farming and human and animal welfare with volunteer work, and has given her time to Lettuce Link, Seattle Tilth, Sustained Dialogue, Mother's Choice and C.L.A.W.

Mayling is both inspired by, and impatient for, smart innovations. As she tells it, while on vacation with her family in Australia in 2000, "I discovered the half-moon vs full-moon flush buttons on the toilet, and I wanted to know why such things didn't exist everywhere! Wait, why don't they still?" But she's happy to be in a place to help people learn what's possible. "There are so many interesting and thoughtful ideas out there that nourish independence, connections, and true balance. I love that powerful moment when somebody meets a solution that fits them."

Worldchanging Design Intern Morgan Greenseth landed in Seattle after earning her Bachelor's at the Art Institute of California-San Diego, and completing her Masters of Interior and Living Design at the Domus Academy in Milan, Italy and the University of Wales. Her creative and colorful mind makes her a whiz at communicating Worldchanging ideas and stories through graphics.

"As words are to the editorial staff, colors, shapes and forms are to me," she says. In addition to creating original graphics and compilations, Morgan helps organize local events, researches articles for the editorial staff, and has even spruced up our office layout to make our days more pleasant and productive. When she's not brightening up the Worldchanging office, she's designing interiors with downtown firm Dynamik. In her free time she rarely passes up an opportunity to soak up city culture, whether she's visiting a new exhibit or art gallery, attending a concert or trying out a new vegan restaurant.

Managing Director Brittany Jacobs, who holds an MBA from the cutting-edge Bainbridge Graduate Institute, first encountered Worldchanging in 2006 when she helped organize our book tour. She now returns, after most recently flexing her marketing, managing and networking muscles as Communications Director for Interra, a non-profit organization focused on strengthening local economies. Sitting at the helm of Worldchanging's business development, this Oklahoma native has her capable hands full managing various projects, crunching numbers, fielding proposals and planning fabulous parties and events.

While the rest of us are often happy to end the workday with veggie stew and a glass of wine, Brittany (who bikes up a big hill to the office, mind you) spends most of her free time climbing, skiing, backpacking, kite-boarding, running and otherwise maxing out her enjoyment of the gorgeous Pacific Northwest. Her endless energy motivates the team even better than our daily dose of locally roasted coffee. But what fuels Brittany better than anything is the very real quest for a better world. As this internationally savvy traveler puts it, "We look beyond our backyard and bring a global perspective to the solutions on which we report. I see this type of responsible reporting as a tool that can help shape the future in which we want to live."

Associate Editor Sarah Michelle Kuck is, in her own words, "inordinately obsessed with making the world a better place." This Midwest ex-pat moved from Wisconsin to the Pacific Northwest in the fall of 2003 to attend Western Washington University's prestigious environmental journalism program. After graduation she moved to Bainbridge Island to work as an editorial assistant for Yes! Magazine, then took this knowledge to the mainland where she co-founded the online magazine seattleDIRT and community organization Sustainable Wallingford before joining Worldchanging. Our resident yoga instructor can now often be found upside-down, as she does her best thinking while handstanding against the office wall.

You can catch some of Sarah's infectious enthusiasm in her regular posts about new solutions and inspirational people, and you can thank her for keeping you in the loop by updating our social networks and managing our weekly newsletter. An avid traveler who has conducted interviews as far from home as Kenya, she says she loves her job "because it allows me to write from a perspective of both intelligence and optimism. Being able to participate in a discussion with some of the world's most brilliant thinkers and most passionate visionaries helps me realize on a daily basis that we can in fact build the world we need and want to live in."

Managing Editor Julia Levitt sees journalism as her all-access pass to the most exciting people and ideas on the planet. She got her first real sense of how big the sustainability conversation was as a student, when she covered a social controversy over land preservation in a farming community in northeastern Brazil. Since graduating from Northwestern University, she has let her curiosity and attraction to change-makers lead her to jobs at the Medill Innocence Project, Steppenwolf Theater Co., and green start-up A Fresh Squeeze, in addition to traditional editing and writing gigs. She's thrilled to be overseeing relationships with Worldchanging's international team of writers, managing original content and editing our newest site, Worldchanging Seattle.

This Ohio native is inspired by the possibilities of merging classic values like local business and safe, walkable streets with cutting-edge goals like living buildings, zero-waste and sustainable transit to create cities that are prosperous and environmentally sound. Julia holds to the hope "that the United States is at a turning point, where an increasingly loud majority from all corners are ready to demand a future that's smarter and more efficiently powered, more fair, more resourceful and more connected." When off the clock, she loves traveling, hiking and skiing with her husband, singing loud, teaching yoga, working with kids and starting new projects on her sewing machine.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Columns at 5:30 PM)

A few months ago, we started to wonder about what you, our readers, were up to.

When we sent out our Worldchanging Readers’ Survey in July, more than 1,000 of our readers responded to tell us about themselves, how they use Worldchanging, and how they feel about the site. Since it’s our five-year anniversary, and we are announcing a lot of exciting news, we thought we would share some of the responses that greatly helped us make some incredibly important decisions. Here are some highlights:

We found out that the average reader is between the ages of 25 and 34. Our audience is split almost evenly between men and women.

From your responses we learn that you are highly educated and actively engaged people. Almost 50 percent of you hold graduate degrees, while many of the rest report that you are still in school studying subjects related to sustainability, foresight and innovation.

Almost 80 percent of you told us that sustainability, foresight and social innovation is a part of your job or will be quite soon, and nearly 60 percent of you might be reading this while at your desk.

Many of you reported that you hope to connect with other readers, and that you would like to meet each other through a Worldchanging-hosted event. The idea of a Worldchanging conference, in particular, was wildly popular. We hope bring that about in the very near future.

You told us some things you would like to see change: a new look, a more global view, new ways of accessing content. We heard the message loud and clear, and we are currently hard at work to make those things happen.

In addition to lots and lots of great critical feedback and intelligent suggestions, you also told us somethings you like about us: our character and our smart, fresh, optimistic, diverse, visionary and creative style. You like our variety, our thoughtfulness, and our big picture look at what is on the forefront of the environmental debate.

In your own words:

“I like Worldchanging's forward-looking attention towards sustainability and ethical social engineering. I like that Worldchanging gives hope that even as the quality of living trends downward, there are still ways to live well and help others.”

“Forward thinking, innovative, informative, accurate, insightful, and inspiring: and all this made possible by a fantastic cohort of people who really are the best of their kind around.”

“It's a refreshing change from the usual "green movement" stuff - it challenges my own views and has a very bold way of getting the message across.”

“It is the ONLY website that is comprehensive, solutions-based, far thinking, thorough, etc.”

“I find that it is more reliable than other environmental blogs on the internet. That is, the focus is on changing the way we live rather than changing how we buy. It also takes a holistic view on how to change the world, and recognizes how only a multifaceted approach can hope to truly accomplish this goal.”

“It gives the public access to crucial discussions that would never appear in traditional media”

“It gets to the heart of things. It stays abreast of what is happening around the globe and in America. I feel like I'm getting leading edge insights.”

Thank you to those who took the time to give us some feedback! Here’s to the years ahead!

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 5:02 PM)

Here at Worldchanging, solutions are our business. We've spent the last five years exploring the world's most innovative ideas for addressing the planet's most pressing problems. Today's our birthday, so we thought we'd take this chance to let you know about our new plans.

Until now, we've largely focused on discrete innovations. Even our book is a compendium of individual insights, solutions and approaches. We've assembled a larger and larger pile of pieces to the puzzle of how to build a better future, but we've never really attempted to put those pieces together, instead allowing the existence of those puzzle pieces to imply that an assembled puzzle is possible. We've written much about the tools for building a better future, and not enough about that future itself.

But people need a new future. In fact, one could reasonably argue that people need a new future now more than any time in the history of the species. Our present way of living is an ocean liner colliding catastrophically with the iceberg of ecological and economic reality -- a collision that threatens to essentially destroy civilization -- and yet we cling to it with white knuckles, in large part because we can't really imagine another way of living. Given the choice between a sinking ship and dark uncertainty, most of us tend to hold tight to the rails and hope for the best.

If we are going to convince large numbers of people to embrace the kinds of creative, large-scale change sustainability demands, we need to offer them something more than scattered, loosely connected possibilities. We need to show them a new, brighter future, a plausible, inspiring, achievable -- and sustainable -- future towards which people can aim their aspirations. We need to invite people to abandon that sinking ship and swim for a future that works.

Imagining that future still strains our foresight, but more and more clearly it lies within the boundaries of possibility. We have much of the toolbox of solutions we need to build a bright green future: designs, technologies, policies, practices and insights that we can use to ratchet down the ecological impacts of nearly any aspect of our civilization. Some large gaps remain -- no one has yet invented a realistic sustainable model of the aviation industry, for instance -- but between solutions that already exist and new innovations leaping off the drawing boards now, we can at very least trace a plausible path from here to a bright green future.

That future is simply unattainable without America's wholehearted commitment. To begin with the obvious, we Americans are intimately connected with the causes of much misery, from our climate emissions and runaway resource use to our rogue-state diplomacy, and the simple cessation of that stupidity would go a long way towards making possible the good. But that's not the limit of the leadership the United States can offer. Simply, America remains the epicenter of possibility in the human imagination. No other nation has as thorough a sense of idealism and open-hearted mission, no matter how badly worn it may seem today. We are, even now, despite it all, still the place where many people who want to change the world struggle to arrive. What Emerson said in 1844 remains true today: “America is the country of the future. It is a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations.”

If the world is going to figure out one-planet prosperity, a bright green way of life that can lift everyone out of poverty while averting catastrophe, to some very serious extent, we Americans will need to invent our own version of it first.

Of course, America is far from sustainable today. Upper-middle class Americans, whose idea of prosperity is increasingly emulated around the world, often have ten-planet ecological footprints. Even middle class Americans weigh in at four to five planets (almost twice the ecological impact of the average European).

We need to show the possibility of a way of life every bit as prosperous as -- indeed, more attractive than -- the lives of today's American upper-middle class, but lived within reasonable ecological limits: prosperity with a small enough environmental impact that it could be shared by every person on the planet. We need to show that way of life, demonstrate its realism, and distribute tools for building it.

That is exactly what Worldchanging intends to do in the next twelve months, with four new projects.

We're launching a major book, tentatively titled Bright Green. With clarity, forceful arguments and concrete proposals this heavily illustrated book will show the American people that the tools exist, the thinking exists, the solutions are possible to build a country that's more prosperous, more just, more creative and so green that its practices could be emulated by every person on Earth without destroying the planet. Even more, it will show that transformation can be accomplished not in centuries or a number of decades, but in years, quickly enough that the model we create can spread around the world. It will illustrate that if we do it right, we will have better lives and be safer, happier, healthier and more connected to our friends, families and communities.

We're also concluding negotiations to put out a second edition of our first book, Worldchanging: A User's Guide to the 21st Century. This updated edition won't just highlight the world's best new innovations, it'll include an increased emphasis on global implementation -- on politics, business and social entrepreneurship -- showing how we can all come together to actually make global sustainability happen.

You'll also be seeing major changes on the Worldchanging site itself, improvements we'll be unveiling in stages over the next six months, but which add up to more original writing, better resources, more community and a stronger focus on the amazing people in our network and the work they do. Look for new columnists and features in the coming days.

Finally, we're planning a major conference and North American tour for late 2009.

Together, these four new projects will add up to a major acceleration of our work to bring the best thinking from the frontiers of change into a deeper conversation with a much larger audience. We hope you'll join us in growing that conversation and exploring those innovations.

Photo credit: flickr/Jared Zimmerman, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Features at 3:12 PM)

by Christopher Flavin

The following is adapted from a speech given by Worldwatch Institute President Christopher Flavin at a high-level United Nations event on September 25, 2008.

I want to commend the UN Secretary-General for his decision to focus on environmental sustainability as one of the three cross-cutting pillars of the Millennium Development Goals. Environmental sustainability may have seemed peripheral to meeting human needs when these goals were adopted in 2000. But the world has changed.

The health of the world's ecological systems will be decisive in determining our ability to meet all of the Millennium Development Goals. Environmental sustainability is not just another policy goal. The human economy is wholly contained within the global biosphere-and if the biosphere's productivity is undermined, the human economy will suffer.

Just as some parts of our economy have accumulated unsustainable fiscal debts, the global economy has accrued a massive ecological debt - a debt that must be settled if we are to sustain economic development and meet the needs of the 1.4 billion human beings who are still mired in severe poverty.

Today, our planet supports 6.5 billion human beings. Those numbers are growing by 70 million people each year, and global consumption levels are soaring, as China and other countries enter the consumer age. The economic model that has supported unprecedented economic progress for several hundred million people in industrial countries over the past half century cannot possibly meet the growing needs of the more than 8 billion people who will live on this planet by the middle of this century.

The events of the past year have provided graphic reminders that collapsing economic systems have real human impacts-and that the world's poor, who are most directly dependent on natural resources, will suffer first and suffer most:

*
In Haiti, the impact of three large hurricanes this summer was magnified by the vast deforestation that has left millions of people vulnerable to floods and landslides.
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In West Africa, the decline of local fisheries has left thousands of poor families without a livelihood and in some cases with no source of affordable protein.
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Across large areas of the Indian subcontinent, diminishing supplies of fresh water are undermining food production and leaving people with inadequate drinking water.

And from the Arctic to the Equator, the world's climate is changing rapidly - and undermining ecological systems on every continent, from forests to oceans and fresh water. Many scientists believe that a dangerous climate tipping point may be near-unleashing a runaway greenhouse effect that would feed on itself for centuries to come.

The bottom line is clear: the inefficient, carbon-intensive, throwaway economy that was so successful in an earlier era is not suited to today's world. Our planet in now in mortal danger of an ecological collapse whose human impact would dwarf the financial collapse the world is now seeking to avoid.

Stabilizing the world's climate and dramatically reducing our dependence on fossil fuels is the central challenge of our generation. Building a new energy system is essential to achieving the Millennium Development Goals, a fact that is reinforced by the devastating impact that rising prices for oil and other fossil fuels have had on the world's poor in recent years. These fuels are no longer sufficiently abundant to provide the reliable, affordable energy supplies needed to fuel economic development.

It is therefore urgent that we build a sustainable low-carbon economy that meets all human needs and is in balance with the world's natural resources. This effort could jumpstart a powerful new engine of economic development, creating thousands of industries and millions of jobs in rich and poor countries alike.

In the eight years since the Millennium Development Goals were launched, the world has come a long way in its understanding of the fundamental importance of environmental sustainability to human well-being. It is time for world leaders to embrace this understanding and begin building a green economy for the 21st century.

Christopher Flavin is president of the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research organization based in Washington, D.C. His forthcoming report, Low-Carbon Energy: The Way Forward, will be released in November.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Sustainable Development at 2:02 PM)

$700 billion still goes a long way.

by Eric de Place

I just can't help wondering what else we could do with $700 billion.

According to the United Nations, the entire debt for the entire continent of Africa was about $320 billion in 2003. Adjusting for inflation and further accumulated debt, let's call it an even $350 billion.

You could install solar panels on 20 million American homes for $300 billion. (I'm ballparking a rather conservative $15k for full installation of enough solar infrastructure to fully power an average American house; the price would surely come down drastically at that scale.) By the way, 20 million houses is more than one-quarter of the entire stock of occupied detached houses in the U.S.

Of course, the solar panels would actually pay for themselves pretty quickly. Under this plan, lucky homeowners (or renters) would then pay nothing for their new solar electricity -- we just footed the entire bill. It might be nice to target low-income folks, who generally inhabit the least efficient buildings. Even better, because the sunniest parts of the US are also, generally speaking, some of the most coal-dependent we'd shut down coal plants across the Sun Belt. So it's a huge win for global warming to boot.

That still leaves $50 billion lying around under the couch cushions.

We could install ground source heat pumps for 5 million American homes for $50 billion. (I'm ballparking a mildly conservative $10k for enough GSP installation to fully heat an average house.) Again, this would also pay for itself pretty fast. Plus, lucky low-income folks in the colder climates would be looking at a lifetime of carbon-free (and money-free) heat for their homes. One good place to start would be in places like the northeast where expensive and inefficient oil heating is common.

Pretty sweet. I just retired every cent of Africa's crushing debt. Then using conservative estimates, I provided an eternal supply of free electricity or heat to 25 million households -- thereby drastically reducing US carbon emissions.

Alternatively, some credible analysts have suggested that paying the full cost of implementing the Kyoto Protocol for the entire world would run $716 billion. (I should mention that other credible estimates are much, much lower.) And this figure doesn't count the tremendous savings from avoiding the potential costs of climate change impacts -- estimated at trillions of dollars just for the U.S.

This piece originally appeared on The Sightline Institute's blog, The Daily Score.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Bright Green Economy at 1:52 PM)

How to actually deliver green-collar jobs to those who need them.

by Alan Durning

Converting the Pacific Northwest over the next few decades to a place of compact, walkable communities that run on superefficient, renewable energy system—a climate-safe economy—will be a lot of work: paid work. But for all the exciting announcements of solar jobs and green-tech investment that pepper the newspapers, the skill sets of today’s workers are not yet aligned with the needs of this future.

In previous posts in this series, I have described three good uses for revenue from the auctioning of carbon permits: dividends for all, buffering the incomes of low-income families, and upgrading the energy efficiency of working families’ homes. A fourth good use for cap-and-trade auction revenue is to spend a portion of it training a green-collar workforce for the clean-energy trades. In many sectors of the economy right now, a limiting factor on seizing the opportunities of the new energy economy is a shortage of mid-skill labor. For example, low-income weatherization programs across the Pacific Northwest are currently crippled by a scarcity of crew chiefs qualified to supervise retrofits on job sites.

A mid-skill worker is neither a laborer nor someone with a four-year degree. Rather, he or she is a tradesperson or technician, usually with an apprenticeship credential, an associate’s degree, or a vocational certificate. For unskilled, low-income workers, a pathway to mid-skill work is the best route out of poverty, but many obstacles loom. Finding the time and money to study is the day-to-day challenge. The larger challenge, not only for workers individually but for society’s poverty-reduction goals overall, is to integrate work with studies into a “career ladder” of steadily rising competence, experience, education, opportunity, and earnings.

According to a study by the Community College Research Center, to grow green-collar jobs for disadvantaged, low-skill workers, auction revenue might best be spent on expanded public funding for narrowly focused training programs in community and technical colleges that lead to vocational certificates or degrees in the trades: carpenters trained in green building, plumbers capable of installing commercial-scale solar water heaters, electricians educated in photovoltaics and advanced energy-system controls, machinists who can produce windmill turbines and carbon-fiber aircraft parts, metalworkers skilled in forging bicycle frames and the ultralight components for the automobiles of the future, and forest managers knowledgeable about carbon sequestration.

Such programs are already sprouting in two-year institutions around the Pacific Northwest. Columbia Gorge Community College now offers an electronics engineering technician program. Many graduates of the first cohort are already working in the wind industry, earning from $35,000 to $60,000 a year, according to the New York Times. Lane Community College, in Eugene, Oregon, trains renewable-energy technicians in a two-year program that teaches students how to improve the energy efficiency of homes and businesses and install solar-power and wind-power systems. In Washington, Bellevue Community College and Cascadia Community College offer similar programs.

Still, for the clean-energy transition to become a chance for workers to achieve economic security, much more needs doing. The national organization Green For All has published the most detailed road map. Called Greener Pathways, it identifies the specific programs that northwesterners can use to build a ladder from poverty to climate-safe prosperity for low-skill workers.

Many of these approaches are integrated well into Washington State’s 2008 Climate Action and Green Jobs Act. The law puts green-collar jobs at the center of the state’s response to climate change. It directs the state Employment Security Department to conduct a detailed assessment of green-collar job potential in the state and to identify jobs that pay family wages and could grow rapidly. The law also establishes a process for coordinating the assessment of, and planning for, workforce development needs in several industries through the creation of panels that include representatives of businesses, trade associations, labor unions, educational institutions, and others involved in the labor market. Finally, it authorizes a grant-funded set of investments in workforce training programs (typically, at community colleges) that target jobs prioritized by the industry-specific panels. This approach is a national model, because it so carefully targets public spending to training programs that actually help low-income workers get qualified for high-demand, family-wage jobs. Although the 2008 law authorizes the creation of training grants, the state has yet to fund them—an obvious use for carbon auction revenue.

This piece originally appeared on The Sightline Institute's blog, The Daily Score.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Bright Green Economy at 1:35 PM)

In South Korea, wind power would be a likely resource to help the world's tenth largest energy consumer meet government goals to lower fossil fuel dependency through greater investment in renewable energy.

Yet efforts to build wind turbines in South Korea have met fierce opposition, even among environmentalists, due to the lack of open land in the densely populated country. Only about 100 megawatts (MW) of wind power are installed nationwide despite plentiful wind resources and government price controls that keep renewable power competitive with traditional energy sources.

The solution might be found off the Korean peninsula's shores, and South Korea is not alone. As more countries seek to increase their renewable energy ratios, many consider off-shore wind a potential solution to provide clean energy without affecting local landscapes and communities.

Off-shore wind has so far taken a back seat to on-shore wind farms during the current boom in wind energy development. Off-shore turbines are more difficult to maintain, and they cost $.08-$0.12 per kilowatt-hour, compared to $.05-$.08 for on-shore wind.

But off-shore wind farms offer several benefits over their land-based counterparts. Strong ocean winds allow one off-shore turbine to generate substantially more power than one on-shore turbine. Also, if an off-shore wind farm is located near a coastal city, clean energy would be available without dedicating land to new transmission lines.

Denmark installed the first off-shore wind farm in 1991. Since then, slightly more than 1 gigawatt (GW) has been installed worldwide, mostly in the North Sea, according to the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA). An additional 3.8 GW is expected in the next four years, forecasts British energy firm Douglas-Westwood, Ltd. Based on their estimates, annual installations are set to increase from 419 MW in 2008 to 1,238 MW in 2012, with the United Kingdom, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, and China leading the way.

In Europe, about 80 percent of the off-shore wind market will be concentrated in Denmark and the United Kingdom by the end of this year, with 1 GW planned by the two countries combined, EWEA said in a policy recommendation report. The association predicts that 50 GW of off-shore wind will be operating in Europe by 2020.

In Asia, China installed its first off-shore wind farm in November. The country plans to add more than 1.5 GW of off-shore projects. Feasibility studies are under way in South Korea and Japan.

Along North America's coasts, a handful of projects are moving forward, and several more are tied down in local site disputes. According to a U.S. Department of Energy report, more than 900 GW of off-shore wind power could potentially be tapped from U.S. shores, mostly along the northeastern and southeastern seaboards. The United States is expected to finalize its leasing rules for off-shore wind farms this year.

Similar to concerns that on-shore wind farms threaten bat and bird populations, off-shore wind farms could disrupt marine ecosystems. The initial construction may kill organisms on the seafloor, and transmission cables create magnetic and electric fields that may disrupt fish orientation.

But researchers are still unsure what damage might occur, and several studies suggest that turbine construction and operation would pose minimal threats. Some experts suggest the turbines would benefit marine life by creating artificial reefs.

Weather may also be a limiting factor. Harsh winds often prevent construction during winter months, slowing development. Turbines are designed to sustain winds as strong as 200 miles per hour, but so far few have experienced intense hurricanes.

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be contacted at bblock@worldwatch.org.

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(Posted by Ben Block in Energy at 1:16 PM)

Today's our fifth birthday. It's an exciting time, with tons of change.

For the last five years, Worldchanging has been the leader in solutions-based journalism about sustainability and social innovation. Our approach has incorporated elements of a blog, a magazine and an online community, but one thread has woven all these elements together: helping people understand the tools we have for solving the planet's most pressing problems.

In that time, we've both explored big picture ideas and covered thousands of discrete innovations. Sometimes, we've been the first publication to cover them; other times, we've simply blogged and contextualized others' coverage of good ideas. Not infrequently, we've presented our own ideas for how we might better tackle big problems.

Here's some of what we've done: We've built a very large community of smart and innovative readers (according to Nielsen Online, we're the second largest sustainability site on the web) while publishing almost 9,000 articles -- journalism and essays that have won us the Utne Independent Press Award, the Green Prize for Sustainable Literature and numerous nominations including Webbies for Best Magazine and Best Blog, and Bloggies for Best Writing and Best Group Blog. Our best-selling book, Worldchanging: A User's Guide to the 21st Century (published November 2006) received hundreds of reviews, the vast majority of them glowing; has become iconic (thanks in no small measure to Stefan Sagmeister's awesome design); and has already been published in French and German (translations into a number of other languages are planned as well). We've also actively participated in the public debate around sustainability. Many of the leading thinkers in sustainability have shared original ideas on our site. We've given hundreds of media interviews and presented talks at many of the most influential sustainability and design events in the world. Finally, we've done our best to help our allies, from raising money for good causes to providing "attention philanthropy" to a ton of emerging projects and rising leaders. We're told we've often made a real difference.

Not too bad for a scrappy little non-profit with no institutional backers.

Although the budgets have been lean and the hours have been long, it's been a wonderful way to work. We've had the privilege of learning in public about unmapped and exciting ideas and emerging possibilities. We've sat at the middle of one hub of a global network of all you worldchanging explorers, heard your reports from the field and visited your labs and camps and conferences. We've gotten the chance to read draft manuscripts, hold prototypes, attend premieres and argue late into the night about how best to save the planet. We've made great friends and thrown great parties. Speaking for myself, if there's a better job in the world, I can't imagine what it looks like.

Now we're setting out in some new directions. We think the next year will be the most exciting, dramatic and high-impact yet in our history. We hope you'll be a part of it.

Thank you for helping to make something extraordinary happen.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Columns at 8:30 PM)

Five years ago, on October 1, we launched Worldchanging as a venue to find, discuss and imagine the world's most innovative solutions to the planet's most pressing problems. Since then, we've found a great and diverse global community of readers, won prizes and awards, put out a best-selling book, and published 8,500 stories about how to change the world. In the process we've not only grown substantially (becoming the second largest sustainability site on the web, according to Nielsen online) but gathered an amazing network of allies who are among the world's leading sustainability thinkers.

On October 1 of this year, we'll be announcing our next major project. We're incredibly excited to be taking the editorial work we've developed over these last five years to the next level, and we hope that all of you will join us in trying to make that work as useful and innovative as possible. On that, more to come.

In the meantime, we thought we'd use September as an opportunity to review what we've done so far -- a sort of Worldchanging greatest hits. All this month, we'll be highlighting the tools, models and ideas for building a bright green future that have inspired us so far.

Here are a few of our favorites from the beginning:

Zero Impact Within Our Lifetimes

Climate Change is a Problem We Can Choose to Tackle

Seeing Chinook as Indicators

Green Building, Compact Communities

Cool Hybrids, Smart Grids and Renewable Energy

Solastalgia and the Mental Affects of Climate Change

Moving From Rhetoric to Reality: Clean, Green Jobs

Optimism is a Political Act

Worldchanging Interview: Influential Thinker Clay Shirky

Combining Smart Grids and Product Service Systems

This piece is a part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Features at 10:18 AM)

This article was written by Joy Green in March 2008. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

What happens when disruptive ideas combine?

We’ve heard a lot about distributed energy generation and smart grids recently – cities could act as distributed power plants, channeling energy from hundreds of thousands, even millions of individual rooftops (think micro-wind and solar PV) into common use and minimizing transmission losses. In essence - your home or building generates clean power and sells the surplus to the grid at peak prices for you during the day– it buys any excess energy you need during the evening when prices are low. You could plug your hybrid car into this fabulous integrated system and depending on the time of day it would either sell surplus energy from its battery to the grid or charge itself up ready for use the next morning.

We’ve also heard a lot about product-service systems. At the moment, as I’m working on an urban mobility futures project at Forum For The Future , I’m particularly interested in the Velib scheme in Paris – the self-service, easy access bike hire scheme with banks of bikes outside metro stations and other key points that has got thousands of Parisians cycling again (Similar to Barcelona's Bicing system - ed.). You pick up a bike anywhere you need it and drop it off, no-fuss, at your destination. Like the smart grid, this is also a form of distributed infrastructure – you could call it a lightweight public transport infrastructure that smooths the peaks of demand for the more traditional system of the metro and the bus.

And if you combine them?

MIT recently outlined a service model for personal urban mobility that does just that.

Imagine the Velib bike scheme in Paris supplemented with self-service electric, stackable two-seater mini-cars at transport interchanges and hundreds of other points all over the city. These mini-cars are designed for multiple short urban trips so they don’t need huge bulky batteries or high top speeds. They’re tiny (six stack in the same space you’d park a regular car), lightweight, ultra-maneuverable and super-convenient – you’d never have to worry about finding a parking space again. You just swipe your card, pick up a mini-car whenever you need one from a nearby stack, and drop it off at another stack when you are done.

This already sounds like a good service model, but what makes it much more interesting are the potential second and third order effects. When the cars stack together, they effectively become large, intelligent batteries plugged into the grid – and the perfect partners for smart grids and distributed power generation. Car stacks could mop up and store excess energy or provide an extra boost of local power as required, so would be a particularly good fit with buildings that generate power from intermittent renewables such as solar or wind (or even, by the coast, wave power). In essence, each mini-car doubles as a mobility service and an intelligent energy storage device. With a hundred or so mini-cars in a stack, and hundreds or thousands of these car stacks in a city, you’d have enormous battery capacity being added to the electrical grid – perfect for large-scale distributed energy generation from renewables on buildings. The batteries would provide the flexibility to cope well with fluctuations in demand and generation.

If you then add in ubiquitous mobile networking and ‘embedded intelligence,’ things get even more interesting. William J Mitchell at MIT speculates on these mini-cars

* knowing patterns of energy prices and mobility demand, and intelligently playing the energy futures market
* operating in an environment of fine-grained, highly dynamic road congestion pricing, and intelligently playing in the road space market
* knowing parking space availability and dynamically adjusted prices, and intelligently playing in the parking space market

In effect, these cars becoming “Google for the city, efficiently getting you to its resources, while taking account of time and cost constraints”

Even without this heady third stage though, the proposal is a potential distributed system that integrates energy, transport and the built environment. It’s an idea for personal urban mobility that takes on many of the perceived strengths of the car – convenience, independence, weather protection and safety. (One caveat here though - it would be difficult to predict how many car journeys this system would actually displace without running a pilot project. Velib has so far mostly displaced public transport journeys – which is also helpful for easing pressure on creaking infrastructure – but had little effect on car use.)

It’s also a little closer to how an ecosystem works – flexible, interlinked and resilient. And this is a lot closer to how we’re going to have to think and act if we’re going to solve problems like personal mobility in a world where there are 9 billion of us and 6 billion of us live in cities.

Smart Grid, Meet the Product-Service Model is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 10:10 AM)

This article was written by Jon Lebkowsky in March 2008. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Clay Shirky is an influential writer, consultant, and teacher focused on the Internet as a social platform. He's one of the smartest thinkers I know about how people live, love, and work online. His new book, Here Comes Everybody:The Power of Organizing without Organizations, was just published by The Penguin Press. As an intro to Chapter 11, on "Promise, Tool, and Bargain," he says "There is not recipe for the successful use of social tools. Instead, every working system is a mix of social and technological factors." Clay and I had the following conversation early in March. We'll follow up with an asynchronous conversation on the WELL for two weeks starting May 28.

Jon Lebkowsky: My first very general question for you is about how the web started changing around 2000. What are your thoughts about what was driving the changes, and how the changes have affected our experience of the web?

Clay Shirky: This is the sort of ancient history that got me doing the book. Here Comes Everybody is, in a way, a do-over. I wrote an earlier book – a very different kind of book, about online community – and I had the grave misfortune to have it come out in April of 1995. The book was all about Usenet, the WELL, Echo, and it was about all of the social components of the pre-web Internet. And in April of '95, no one wanted to hear about that stuff anymore.

In fact, I got pulled into the web, too. I taught myself HTML, like a lot of people. I ended up being Production Manager of one web shop, and Chief Technology Officer of another. In that period, '95 to 2000, the template for the social use of the web was really under-optimized. Everybody was excited about using it to distribute information, and everybody was excited about ecommerce. We were basically recapitulating these older patterns: point to point transactions, replicating newspapers, magazines and so forth on the web.

I think that the change that started in 2000 came about for a couple of reasons. One – HotMail brought us all to the realization that the web could be a new interface for existing social platforms. It wasn't like email was one thing, and the web was the other. The web, in fact, was a general purpose interface.

The second thing is so many people were online by 2000, that you could actually start to get real social density, you didn't have to do everything just point to point.

And third, critically: the money ran out. Instead of entrepreneurs saying "I'm going to start this new little web service, and I'm going to go raise $5 million in venture capital, and I'm going to have this big business plan," people had to to ask themselves, "What's a cheap way to do this? What's a cheap way to accomplish my goal?" And, very often, the cheap way was to get the users involved. And once we started down that path, the possibilities just opened up.

Jon Lebkowsky: It was interesting to me that people didn't just throw up their hands and walk away, when there really was no money flowing. People who wanted to innovate, and who wanted to publish content online, all hung in, and were finding ways to do it. They were passionate about it.

Clay Shirky: Absolutely. And certainly a lot of people who rushed in in the late 90s, when it looked like there was free money, rushed back out again. But the people who were left cared enough about some other goal than being dotcom millionaires that they stuck with it. And very often the goals that were left, when the people who were seeking a quick buck were gone, were goals that had real social ramifications. These were people who wanted to make the world better in some way or other, rather than just figuring out a cheaper way to deliver plane tickets.

Jon Lebkowsky: You mention how much higher adoption was by 2000, and of course we've seen it increase persistently since then, so that pretty much everybody's online now. How does that change things, having this pervasive adoption of the web?

Clay Shirky: This is actually one of the things that first led me to try to describe the social patterns that ultimately ended up in this book.

There's a big difference between having some people online and having most people onine. That's a difference that appeals mainly to businesses, now the audience is larger. But there's another difference between having most people online and having everybody online. The advantage of having everybody online is that in your social group, if everybody is online, then you can take it for granted that you can use online tools to coordinate the life of that group.

Small social groups have very high density. In a group of five or six people, pretty much everybody has an interface to everybody else. That's a lot of interface. If even a couple of those interfaces can't be bridged by email or instant messaging, then people will default to the most inclusive possible technology, which prior to the Internet was the phone.

If you were under 35 in the year 2000, and you made more than $35,000 a year, you were almost certainly online and so were your friends, and you could start to take it for granted that you could use the Internet to coordinate your business life and your social life. You could use it to coordinate visits to church, group buying pools, anything that involved a group. Suddenly it became possible, and not because the technology was in place; the technology had been in place for years. It was because the social density had finally caught up with the technology.

Jon Lebkowsky: With Metcalfe's Law and Reed's Law, you're really talking about an increase in potential value that can be realized as real value every day.

Clay Shirky: And the funny thing about the relationship between social applications and Metcalfe and Reed's Laws is that social applications actually trailed them early on, because people don't want to adopt technologies that cut out some members of the group. Why would you use something that excludes some members of the group? But once social density kicks in, social applications actually overperform Metcalfe's Law, as predicted by Reed's Law, because the Internet isn't just about point to point connections, the way Metcalfe's Law is. It's also about group connections.

There was a famous example of this in the attempt to put MetroCards – to put digital card readers – in the New York City subway system. There was a very grim interim report from the Department of Transit, because they were using the token system and the MetroCard system at the same time, saying we've wired 80% of the stations, but we're not seeing 80% of the users use MetroCards. "Oh woe is me, woe is me, this whole thing is potentially a disaster."

And then you read on a little farther, and you realize they hadn't put the MetroCard Readers in Times Square or Union Square yet, which are two of the busiest subway stations. So as long as anybody had to use a token in any station, they weren't going to switch to the MetroCard. Social applications work exactly like that. Merely getting 80% of the people in your business on email meant that there were still significant conversations that you couldn't have online. And so people wouldn't make the switch.

Jon Lebkowsky: Well, sure. If you have a key member of your team or your group who just can't or won't adopt, just can't get it, it just can't work. You see this a lot with wiki. People want to use wiki for collaboration, but out of a dozen people in their group, three people are just totally wiki-resistant, just don't get it.

Clay Shirky: That's exactly right. And you bring up another important point. It's not just the availability of the technology, it's the mental availability of the user. If you've got the web, you can get access to a wiki, but if you've decided you are, as you say, wiki-resistant, it doesn't matter. This is one of the many reasons that groups of young people overperform groups of older people, even given the same technology. In addition to access to the tools, just the set of the functions that go into doing the job – it's more present among people who are more familiar with the tools.

Jon Lebkowsky: You talk quite a bit about public vs private, and the way we're using the web for everything – we all have the same tools to publish in a fairly sophisticated way and we're publishing in public, but not everybody is publishing with the same intention.

Clay Shirky: This is really a reply to all of those media outlets who are writing disparagingly about user-generated content, saying that the content of a weblog is dreck that no one would bother to publish in the print world. All of which is true, but irrelevant, because, of course, the people who are publishing the little observations about their trip to the mall in LiveJournal – they're not talking to you.

The really big change here is that we've got a medium which scales from small groups – me talking to a group of my friends – all the way to "now I am making a public declaration." And because previously, we had a world where, if somebody said "I love you" on the phone, you knew it was meant for you. And if somebody said "I love you" on the TV, you knew it was specifically not meant for you, because the mode of carriage lets us figure out how that message should be interpreted.

And that's now broken. There are people having relatively personal conversations with their friends, yet they're doing it in a public medium. But that's no different from sitting around talking with friends in the food court at the mall. If you want to go down and find a group of teenagers chatting to each other at the mall, you can sit at the next table over and listen in, but then it's pretty clear in that situation that you're the weird one.

What we don't yet have is a set of social norms for figuring out – in a medium like the web, which scales from intimate personal address all the way to full publication – which messages we should be paying attention to and which messages we should be ignoring.

Jon Lebkowsky: When you mention friends, it makes me think about how we've started to use "friend" as a verb...

Clay Shirky: Yeah, I'm going to friend you – yes, exactly.

Jon Lebkowsky: So are we changing the meaning of that word, of what it means to be a friend.

Clay Shirky: I don't think we're changing it so much as we're adding to it, which is to say that I think people still have a sense of the old meaning of friend, as someone you would do a favor to if they were in some real trouble. We still keep that meaning around. I don't think that sense has been denatured, but I do think that the word friend now includes someone who sent you a message on Facebook, and you friended them because why not?

There was an interesting period during the dominance of Friendster where people would talk about their friends, and then their friendsters, and their friendsters were people who they were friends with only on that site. So we may see some growing subtlety in people being able to signal, "Yeah, this person is actually a friend of mine, whereas that person is only a contact I have on Facebook."

Jon Lebkowsky: Another major change I noted around 2000, when I first started using Ryze, and for all those years before that – I had been online by then for a decade or more – and I couldn't see my online friends. And then Ryze created a social network platform where anyone could easily upload digital photos, and at the same time digital photos were more available, because digital cameras were coming out. Suddenly you had visual reference, and today nobody really thinks about whether they know what their "friends" that they never met face to face actually look like, because everybody has a pile of pictures online at Ryze or Flickr or Facebook.

Clay Shirky: Yeah, what we know about those people has been transformed.

Jon Lebkowsky: The experience seems to have more depth now than in the nineties, even though we had really powerful experiences that were text-based. Now we have so much more that we can do.

You said at one point in one of your chapters that our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they're a challenge to it? What were you thinking about there?

Clay Shirky: For the last hundred years, the key organizational conversation was, are big challenges better taken on by the state, by the government, raising taxes and spending the money, or are they better taken on by businesses operating in the marketplace. But the dot dot dot at the end of that sentence was because obviously people can't get together and do these things for themselves.

There was a basic assumption, both in capitalist and communist theories of large scale action, that the complexities of ordinary life would defeat the ability of groups to come together and do things on their own.

It seems to me that what's happened is that this thesis has now been rendered false in a surprising number of cases, and, maybe more importantly, a growing number of cases. There are places now where people are coming together and creating value for one another without doing it in either the framework of government or the framework of business.

I gave a talk at Supernova, a brief talk on the Perl programming language. I was pointing out that the Perl programming language, which has been an absolute mainstay of the web from the earliest days, is held together by love. It's not held together either by government intervention or by corporate investment. It's held together because a bunch of people love Perl, and more importantly, they love one another in the context of Perl. They like being part of a community that makes this language work, and work better.

The idea that this could create a programming language as good and as powerful and as ubiquitiously-used as Perl is new. One of the big shifts, and one of the reasons I wrote this book – this is a non-techie book, instead of writing for my usual audience of folks, programmers and engineers, I've actually tried to write it for my Mom – to explain why this is a big deal. One of the things I think is happening, is that the pattern of groups being able to come together and do things for themselves is now spreading outside of the technical and geek communities, and is becoming a general social capability.

Jon Lebkowsky: You mentioned love as a motivator and social glue. Do you have a technical, operational definition for love?

Clay Shirky: You know, I don't. (Laughter.) I have the same definition that the supreme court used to have for pornography, which is I know it when I see it.

That's actually an interesting question, I should take that seriously. Right now it's defined largely by negation, which is to say, when people come together and do things together without obviously being motivated by either requirements or payments... if I'm doing something, and it's not because my boss told me to do it, or I'm doing something and it's not because I think I'll get more money at the end of the day, if I do it – then almost by definition I'm doing it for love.

That strikes me as kind of an unsatisfactory definition, and there is so much work yet to be done on motivation. In part it hasn't been done because neoclassical economics assumes that most human motivations can be backed into money, so that you can use money as this kind of universal calculator, even if there's no money involved in the actual transaction. And we now know that to be false, from a lot of research and behavioral economics. There are some jobs where people will do the job better if they're not paid, which is to say if they sense they're being asked for a favor and are participating in community building, they'll actually do a better job than if they're simply given money to do the work.

Jon Lebkowsky: Isn't this like the work of Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John Smith with communities of practice?

Clay Shirky: That's exactly right. Communities of practice is one of these great patterns of demonstrating, to the consternation of many neoclassical economists, the degree to which people will go out of their way to help each other with no obvious return.

The community of practice that I love is the high dynamic range (HDR) photography people on Flickr. Back in the old days, if some new photographic technique came along, it would take 5-7 years to spread from someone's photo studio to photo magazines, and finally to widespread visibility in Popular Photography, and the average darkroom.

You could see the high dynamic range technique, where you take multiple exposures of the same scene and combine them to get the brightest brights and the darkest darks, rip through Flickr, where people were posting these photos, and someone would come along, and say "Oh, my god, that's the greatest photo I've ever seen, I love it. How did you do that?" And then you had these threads that were thousands and tens of thousands of words long with pointers to external software, and other people posting images in the thread that would help illustrate things.

This community sprung up around high dynamic range photography, and they essentially explained it to themselves in the course of about three months. HDR photography went from being something that a handful of people knew how to do to a general technique that any photographer who's willing to spend an afternoon on Flickr could pick up and understand. And the speed of that spread wouldn't work if money were involved.

The awareness and the growth in expertise actually happened faster because people weren't asking for payment in return for value. They were asking to participate in a community that loved this stuff. I think we're going to see a huge amount of experimentation with those kinds of advantages, which will appear in all kinds of new places.

Jon Lebkowsky: In my own work, I've been looking at and thinking about how these sorts of things happen, especially in business environments. And we know that they do happen, and now there's a body of work... like Verna Allee and the value network people, who are saying, "We don't really have a way to capture that value, or quantify it, so how do we do that?" Are you familiar with the value networks body of work?

Clay Shirky: Yes, and one of the really interesting patterns that jumped out at me, doing a book about large scale collaboration, is that very often really large-scale collaboration, whether it's a Wikipedia or Linux or what have you, involves a small number of people who care an enormous amount, and then a large number of people who only care a little bit, but who are participating, who are adding their value to the overall work product.

What the value networks work seems to be to point to is ways in which you can create some of this kind of benefit without having everybody participating in a formal community of practice, and also getting more heterogenous kinds of skills and values involved. Everybody who's in the HDR community of practice on Flickr is (a) a photographer and (b) experimenting with HDR. But once you get to something like Wikipedia, there are people who are fact checkers, and there are people who are sentence editors, and there are people who are content creators. You get a kind of division of labor that's really quite different, and makes the whole more valuable, in part because of those differences.

Jon Lebkowsky: There's a whole interesting question about kibitzing, about lurkers in a community and the extent to which they actually add value. And, of course, many lurkers are never 100% lurkers. Even if they don't uncloak in public, they'll email people who are having conversations, and drive things along. There was something in your writing, an idea that suggests the shape of a fried egg, where you have a cluster of real activity in the middle, and you have a sort of supportive community around it that's less involved, but still contributing.

Clay Shirky: I haven't used the fried egg analogy, but I love that. And the observing community is the pool from which the participants are drawn, even if a majority of the people in the observing community never become participants.

Jon Lebkowsky: We've been thinking about that in Austin, where there's an active community of bootstrap entrepreneurs. One thing we've been talking about recently, that I had been thinking about for a while, is the idea that you could potentially do the larger things that people normally grow monolithic corporations to do... that you could cluster and aggregate networks of smaller companies to collaborate to do these larger things. Instead of having a big company with departments, you just have a network of companies that have figured out how to organize so that they can really depend on each other. And that gets to the issue of trust, which you talk about...

Clay Shirky: What you just said is, in my mind, the key piece of economic analysis, which is when the transaction costs are down, then the ability of smaller groups to find one another and bind themselves to one another as needed goes up. And once you get those two things happening at the same time, you can actually start figuring out when you'd be better off decreasing the size of the group and increasing the discoverability of the interface.

Jon Lebkowsky: How would this relate to the question of trust, and how you get the group to come together and to work? How would that relate to your trinity of plausible promise, effective tool, acceptable bargain...?

Clay Shirky: A lot of it starts with the plausible promise, with telling people, if they come together, they can actually do something successfully. And very often modest success matters more than audacious goals.

If you look at the original document proposing either Wikipedia or Linux, the most striking thing is how incredibly modest the original requests were. But that was enough. It was enough to get people involved. And then, if you can do that, and in many ways that's the hardest thing to do... then you get to the problem of figuring out which tool to use, and what bargain to use.

The tool is relatively simple, which is to say there's a few classic misakes to avoid – if you want people to converge on some sort of shared work product, don't launch a mailing list. If you want people to diverge and generate lots and lots of competing ideas, don't launch a wiki. But fitting the tool to the job is in many ways a matter of looking out and seeing who else has got a problem similar to yours and what tools are they using.

The bargain is the hardest one of all, particularly around this idea of subdividing into smaller groups that then interact with one another. Because the bargain really says, "what are the users' expectations of one another over the long haul? &ndash as opposed to anything that the site's founder or host can promise.

Getting the culture right is really an art, and not a science... which is to say that your early culture is going to be set by the people who happen to come around, and you've got to work with that while, at the same time, keeping your eye on wanting to have a culture that can scale up over the long haul.

Kathy Sierra has a fantastic example from Java Ranch, which was a site meant to host friendly conversations among Java programmers. They wanted to get away from the kind of supercilious snarkiness that characterizes a lot of technical communities. So they have a terms of service you have to accept to be part of the community, and the actual terms of service, in its entirety, is "Be nice."

And that was their way of saying, "We can't enforce every little jot and tittle of user interaction. We know people are going to say things that may upset one another. All we're going to say is, our standard of behavior is that you should be nice to each other, and if we see that not happening, we're going to intervene."

It's such a beautiful rebuke to all the lawyerese of you can't do this or that, where people try to enumerate everything that could go wrong. Because what they did, I think, in that model, is that they managed to streamline the kind of thing that has to go into a long-term user bargain, into a very simple to understand concept, and I'd like to see more of that and less of the "we had the lawyers wrote the terms of service, and suddenly it's fifteen printed pages."

Jon Lebkowsky: We have everybody online now publishing with the same forms of media, everybody's got access to everything, and you've got mass communication on one end of the spectrum, and on the other end you have very intimate but still public conversations, which is kind of interestingly weird. Is that a gradual continuum? How much are people really confused about the kinds of conversations they're having?

Clay Shirky: This is an experiment I want to see run, but I think this is a very interesting question. Here is my hypothesis: that one of the things that people create some kind of really deep mental model for is modes of communication. People my age and older have a very good sense of when to call someone on the phone, and when to send them a personal letter, and when to go see them. But we don't have such a good sense of when to email them, or IM them, or Twitter or what have you, because all of that stuff was invented after we had already solidified our sense of the media landscape. All of those things are still new.

One way to test this would be to see whether fifteen year olds today have a literally more intuitive sense of when to call, when to SMS, when to email, and when to IM. And I think they do. I think that the confusion around media is largely with people who have grown up in the environment we grew up in, where television is one thing, whereas the phone is another thing. The medium that reaches groups isn't a communications medium. The medium that is a communications medium doesn't reach groups. When all that has gotten overturned, it looks strange to us that people having group communications in a public medium – you know, these half a dozen friends, are all Live Journaling one another about their trip to the mall, or the party last Friday. But to those kids I don't think it seems weird at all. And if that's true, then that's the kind of generation gap that came up around the use of the telephone or the use of the telegram, and I think it's something society will have to weather for thirty years. If I'm wrong about that, which is to say, if increased numbers and kinds of media actually lead to increased social confusion, then I think that society is going to have to develop some formal methods of etiquette in order to figure out how to manage all of this proliferation of new communications options we've gotten.

Jon Lebkowsky: Twitter has turned out to be a very interesting communication space. I really didn't get it, didn't have the right experience of it for the longest time, because I was just using the web interface. Occasionally I would activate it for my phone if I was stuck in traffic and bored, and wanted company.

But I recently started using Twitter via IM using GTalk. and that's an entirely different experience, in that you really get the flow of conversation, seeing comments as they're posted.

One of the interesting things about Twitter is that you have this continuum that we were talking about... you have some people who come to Twitter only because they want to broadcast, to announce something to the world, or at least to their network. So they'll show up and post a url, "this is my latest blog post" or whatever. But they don't really hang out and have conversations. More often, though, Twitter users have public conversations where they're talking either to everybody, or to a specific person through a public reply. And you have people who want fairly intimate conversations and will go to direct messages, which are private. So there's this whole spectrum of experience you can have on Twitter.

Clay Shirky: I think like everybody, when it came out, I started playing with it, but it seemed to me that most of the action and gone private, but I had not tried to use the GTalk interface. I'll have to give that a try.

Jon Lebkowsky: What is the problem of filtering, and how has it changed? You talk about a priori filtering in the publishing world, and how filtering is now more after-the-fact.

Clay Shirky: The problem with filtering is, now that there's not bottleneck for production, there is no way to filter in advance. You can't filter the good from the mediocre in advance, simply because it's too expensive. No one has the cash needed to simply keep on top of everything that's coming down the pipe, because now everybody has a pipe.

So filtering has now gone to this post-hoc thing. As good as it has gotten, with things like PageRank and del.icio.us and Technorati, and so forth, we're still in a world where the average experience of wandering around the web is of being exposed to all kinds of things that are really kind of irrelevant. The searching and sorting problem hasn't yet settled itself down.

One of the things I try to explain to people when they say how much junk there is on the web is to use the analogy of a book store. You go into a book store and your experience of the book store is, "oh, I went right to the section on philosophy, and I went right to the books on Plato, and there they were." So I know that there's all this great literature in the bookstore.

But if you picked up that book store, and you shook the contents out into the street, and you waded in and started picking books at random, you'd find Chicken Soup for the Hoosier Soul and Love's Tender Fury, and all of this stuff. In fact, our experience of the book store as being a site of a lot of really good content is in large part because we're really good at ignoring 99% of what's in there. If you're not going to the book store for self-help books, you don't have to look at them.

And because the filtering problem on the web is so enormous, and because we're still in relatively early days of figuring out how to solve it, we can't yet get to that happy state where the stuff I'm not interested in doesn't show up. It takes a much more active stance in terms of searching and grooming and so forth to zero in on the good stuff.

So it seems to me that the problem of filtering is going to remain one of the key problems of the age, for the next few decades, in part because the volume of material people are producing is still going up. And once we get a relatively good solution for filtering the web, for example, along comes Twitter – here's this new medium that we don't have these filtering tools for. How do you figure out what to read and what to ignore and what to save and what to throw away, and so forth? That problem is coming up now, and is going to keep coming up over and over again for as long as we're on this ride. We keep going to a place where there's so much more content this year than last year, so a lot of our old strategies are broken.

Jon Lebkowsky: It seems to me that one of the real problems of filtering is that, to the extent we feel that we have to filter and set up filters, that we're liable to exclude things that we didn't know we would find interesting.

Clay Shirky: That's right. And designing filters with a certain amount of serendipity involved is a key part of this. But even then, even with some serendipity, it is so easy to have the amount of content radically overflow any strategy that we've got for sorting the stuff that we care about from the stuff we don't care about. Even with a serendipity meter built in, we still have to work hard to get this right.

Jon Lebkowsky: Where do you see things going? You've written a good analysis of where we are, but what comes next?

Clay Shirky: The ladder that I develop in the book is how much does the individual have to coordinate themselves with the group to get an effect. So the simplest thing is sharing, right? Flickr, del.icio.us, YouTube, Napster... my ability to share with millions of others and then for all of us to profit from that requires very little coordination from me. That pattern is very easy to bootstrap.

The next pattern up is collaboration, where there actually is some more coordination required between me and other people. This is Open Source software, this is Wikipedia, and so on.

The pattern that strikes me as being most radically different from what we've had before is collective action, the pattern where the group comes together, and stands or falls depending on the actions of the entire group. Every member of the group is affected by the action of the group as a whole. I spent a lot of time looking, in particular, at the political prostests in Belarus that are using the flash mob model for protesting. It seems to me that the collective action model, where the group isn't just a loose collection of individuals, it's actually a unit, has not yet seen a lot of traction. There have been some interesting experiments, but most of the interesting work there is still in the future. And that's what I'm watching out for – what's coming with the future of collective action, because I think there's a huge amount of work still to be done there.

Jon Lebkowsky: When we were doing the Extreme Democracy book, and as a precursor to that we were having the emergent democracy conversation, the Joi Ito thing. The big question for us was emergent leadership.

Clay Shirky: Yes.

Jon Lebkowsky: How does that work. How do we actually have leaders emerge, and how does the group know – how does a flock of birds, for instance, know which bird is in the lead at any given time.

Clay Shirky: One of the big surprises about the Open Source movement is how many of the projects had a benevolent dictator for life at their head. There are a few that don't, like the Apache Foundation. But Perl and Python and Ruby and Linux and on and on had the charismatic, technically adept founder at the head. How people find and identify those leaders, and what lessons we can take from the technical community to the nontechnical community, I think is a really big open question.

Jon Lebkowsky: We had a sort of laboratory for thinking about this with Howard Rheingold's Electric Minds, the business he created around an online community. When Howard realized that he needed to do something with Electric Minds, that it really wasn't working as a business, the question was, where does it go? He got a buyer who agreed to honor the community. Then the question was, if Howard was going to become just another community member, who was going to lead? It's a long story, but in the end, the community found that the benevolent dictator model seemed to work very well.

Clay Shirky: Yes, absolutley. And it locks the "benevolent dictator" out of participation. Stacy Horn, who founded Echo, had this problem. She could not go out and socialize with her own users, because she was the owner, and everybody kind of behaved weirdly around her. So she ended up having to mainly consign herself to conversations that were only populated by people who remembembered when Echo was just a few hundred people, so that they wouldn't treat her so weirdly. But she couldn't, in fact, be just an ordinary member of the community.

Jon Lebkowsky: That's interesting. Howard's next thing, of course, was his semi-private Brainstorms community, where he's the door. Everybody comes through him, so he knows everybody who comes in. That weirdness that Stacy Horn experienced may have been there to some extent with Electric Minds, but it's absolutely not there at Brainstorms.

Clay Shirky: No, because you're already going through Howard on the way in, so you're sort of aware of that.

Jon Lebkowsky: Yeah, and even though he's still kind of the benevolent dictator, he's a member of the community. The problem you run into is when you have some people in the community that feel you need to throw a person out, because they're misbehaving – this has been a big deal on the WELL, for instance. In one case, there was a guy who was trashing the commons on the WELL in a big way, but because of the strong tradition of free speech on the WELL, the managers didn't want to just throw him out, and there was a quandary – what do you do about this guy? Because you didn't really have a strong benevolent dictator who would just throw him out. You had to have a process, and the process extended the pain.

Clay Shirky: It's a dilemma, deciding when the needs of the group trump the needs of the individual. And it's a tough moment, nobody likes that moment. It's anti-democratic in one way, and yet all groups require that, because all groups acquire the kinds of trolls that you're talking about here.

Jon Lebkowsky: The tragedy of the commons.

Clay Shirky: Yeah, exactly.

Jon Lebkowsky: And you made a strong case, I think, in your writing, for the need for governance. Obviously there is always some governing principles in any group, whether they're formal or informal. It's a problem when we try to put those principles aside.

So