A few notes on an idea:

Ethical behavior on a finite planet involves leaving as many of that planet’s systems functioning for future generations as possible.

Indeed, people in the future (many argue, +I agree) have a human right to inherit a livable world.

Debate in 20th C boiled down to dichotomy: no growth + respected limits, or growth + disregard of limits.

It’s a 20th C way of thinking to equate “growth” with material growth, increased possibilities with more stuff.

It’s quite clear to me that experientially infinite growth in possibilities is completely compatible with the idea of planetary boundaries. Once basic material needs are met + culture provided for (which even for a population of 9B can be done w/in planetary boundaries), the potential for low-footprint work that advances the frontiers of art, science, human insight and so on is so large it looks from here to be infinite.

In other words, you don’t need boundless material growth to have boundless growth in possibilities, experiences + well-being.

Humanity’s future, like the Tardis, is bigger on the inside than the outside.

Foreign Policy published a little piece of mine they commissioned on carbon zero cities as economic stimulus:

Want to grow the economy? Shrink your city’s emissions.

In tough times, some of us see protecting the climate as a luxury, but that’s an outdated 20th-century worldview from a time when we thought industrialization was the end goal, waste was growth, and wealth meant a thick haze of air pollution.

Cities and urbanization are the story of the 21st century. Already, most of us live in cities. Over the next 40 years, though, we’ll ride a building boom unlike anything humanity has ever seen, or may ever see again, as the world’s cities swell by billions. Cities at the center of this demographic revolution will be utterly changed.

Of course, there’s lots more to come on this subject as Carbon Zero comes closer to completion!

This is an essay I wrote in Spring 2010. It seems appropriate to repost it, given that the need to bring future concerns into present politics has never seemed more urgent.

The future that my parents’ generation warned us about forty years ago looks an awful lot like our present. The ice caps are melting, deserts are spreading, the planet is thick with people, most of the world’s primeval forests are gone, the seas are in crisis, and pollution, famine and natural disasters kill millions of people a year. Compared to the world we might have had, had the progress of the early 1970s continued steadily through the following four decades, we live on a half-ruined planet.

That half-ruined planet, though, is our home. People old enough to remember the first Earth Day can well grieve for that other, healthier Earth we might have had if only older generations had made different choices. Kids born today won’t have that luxury. This world is the only one they’ll ever know: they’ll have to make the best of it; life goes on.

1970 is the same distance in time away from us now as 2050: that’s how close the future is. The 2050s, we know, will be a watershed era: the decade when, if we’re smart, human population will have peaked, a bright green model of sustainable prosperity will be widespread and human damage to the climate and biosphere will have begun to be repaired. In an amount of time about equal to that from the first Earth Day, we have to remake the world. We’ll know whether we’ve done well enough by 2050. If we fail, the resulting descent towards greater and greater catastrophe, will likely cause immeasurable human suffering and the end of civilization; it could include perhaps a general extinction of most life on Earth. The final outcome will almost certainly be ripped from our control at some stage. (It would be far better to tackle the planetary crisis while we have a chance at controlling the outcome).

Even if we do reach a safe plateau towards the middle of the century, with a stable human population, a new model of prosperity and a planet-wide effort to halt and reverse ecological destruction, much will still have been lost. Unfortunately, even a “win” may look like a ruined planet to the eyes of those used to the one we have now. Climate commitment means that no matter what we do, more climate change is a given (even if we avoid triggering any massive climate tipping points). Living on a planet of children (the median age in the least developed countries is only 19, for instance) and in a world where billions are struggling to rise out of poverty, means that even if reinvention happens fast and models spread quickly, entire forests, fisheries, rivers, mountains of topsoil, and myriad creatures will be devoured by human needs in the meantime. In the best case realistic scenario, we’re going to do a huge amount of damage to the planet even as we transform ourselves into a global society that provides prosperity with essentially no impacts.

Some older environmentalists (most prominently, James Lovelock) have suggested that the fact that no future now awaits us in which our planet is not greatly depleted means the game’s over. Lovelock in particular seems to enjoy saying it’s too late to do anything to save humanity, but he’s not alone among his generation. These “it’s too late” doomers look ahead and see a world full of deserts and empty oceans, dying forests and dead coral reefs, and they say, “we tried to warn you…” and walk away.

The problem is, the children of 2050 will look at that future world, with all its problems, and see home: and they’ll look at the choices they have in front of them, and see the future. And since the choices we make in the next forty years will decide what choices our descendants are left with — a thriving society engaged in centuries of restoration and planetary repair, or a gradual desperate retreat towards the poles — giving up now because we don’t like the choice set we face is pathetic cowardice.

In fact, it’s worse: the writing off of the future (especially on the part of those who bear the responsibility of cultural authority) actually directly supports the work of those who are destroying the future; those that are stripping every last shred of profit from the planet’s biosphere while they still can. The idea that there is no future is a club used to beat people into submission and acquiescent participation in the unthinkable.

The planetary crisis we face may be made up of machinery and market failures and sheer masses of humanity struggling to live, but I’m more and more convinced that it is not at its core really a material crisis at all. Rather, the planetary crisis is a crisis of vision; we see a growing and darkening void where our future ought to be. The average person, presented with accurate information about the state of the world, can see no way forward at all. The path we’re on appears to end in darkness and a swift, cataclysmic drop. Most folks, entirely understandably, choose not to look.

That void in our future vision, I believe, is not accidental. In the 40 years since the first Earth Day, a whole set of industries has grown large attacking scientists and conservationists; falsely complexifying issues; spinning the news of environmental crimes; launching astroturf front groups; endowing think tanks; bribing politicians; obfuscating the need for systemic change by pushing funding towards NGOs that advocate the most limited of personal actions; and by promoting (in the most direct financial sense) cultural work that promotes cynicism and a disdain (if not a hatred) for idealists, from talk radio to teabagging. In a twist on the old axiom that tyrants don’t care if they are hated so long as their subjects don’t love each other, these industries don’t care if the future they’re offering us looks dark, so long as no other futures we can imagine look brighter. Despairing consumers still buy, and they cause less trouble for the investing class. “We have an economy,” as Paul Hawken says, “where we steal the future, sell it in the present, and call it G.D.P.” Keeping the future dark hides the crime.

There is a vicious political fight for the future happening right now. Having realized that they’re steadily losing the war to convince people there are no problems, those profiting from the status quo have now turned to fear, uncertainty and doubt. They’re trying to convince the public that it is both too expensive to make changes that probably won’t work and too soon for drastic measures (I personally think that the political use to which geoengineering is being put is very much a part of this effort, but that’s a story to take up again another time). The dark, unknowable future has been turned into a weapon against action in the present.

The irony is, we already have the ability to solve or at least address the planet’s most pressing problems. We don’t have every solution we’ll need, not yet. We do, though, have the technological capabilities, the design genius, the scientific ingenuity, the entrepreneurial zeal, the policy acumen, the community-building skill, and the educational and cultural wisdom. It is not that we are not capable of sustainable prosperity. We have never had more or better ability to build a better world. What we seem to lack is a belief that we can actually use those powers to change anything, and we lack that belief precisely because the future has been ripped out of our cultural debate.

That’s why if we care about the planet, the most important thing we can do is start showing how good a future we still can have. That’s why, right now, optimism is a political act, and a radical one at that.

I think, what we need today, is mass movement planetary futurism. I don’t mean futurism in the cheesy sense — the what-color-is-your-rocket-car sense — I mean futurism in the best sense: of people who understand that the future is not an alien world or a land-of-make-believe, it’s where we are right now, with a brief passage of time. Utah Phillips used to like to say that the past didn’t go anywhere. Well, the future’s already here. We’re making it, as we speak, and we make it better when we consider what the effects of our actions might be over a longer range of time.

Human beings make the future every day. Making the future — setting in motion future events — might almost be considered part of the definition of humanity. The problem is that today, when powerful men sit down and make decisions, they generally make those decisions as if the future didn’t exist, as if the consequences of their actions were beyond anticipation, as if they bore no responsibility for foresight. The future’s not welcome in the room.

We need millions of people ready to put the future back in the room. We need millions of people ready to demand that their governments, their companies, their communities and their cultural institutions confront the reality of the futures they make every day.

In 2010, any institution which is not looking forty years ahead and at least considering the long-term impacts of its work is probably engaged in actions that wouldn’t bear the full light of day. We need to sunlight them. We need to hold them up against absolute standards, hard numbers and firm time lines (I prefer carbon-neutrality by 2030, myself, but again, that’s an argument for another time). We need to demand forty-year goals and bold immediate commitments. We need to be the voices for the children of 2050 who otherwise currently have no rights in our halls of power. 2050 is right around the corner: we need to fight for it in every discussion of practical action, in every institution on the planet.

And we need to be ready to envision the alternatives, and explore them with people struggling to make better decisions here in the present. Because the reality is that change is not only in the interests of future generations, it’s in our own interest. Almost all the things we need to do to safeguard the best possible set of choices for the children of 2050 are things we’d want to do for other reasons, anyway:

*build better cities, so people can live in vibrant walkable communities and green homes, served by ecological infrastructure and a mix of transportation choices;

*foster a culture of bright green innovation, helping to generate meaningful work for the billions who will need it, by spreading new approaches like adaptive reuse, product-service systems and so on;

*develop new technologies and material and new clean energy industries;

*redesign our products and manufacturing to remove the toxic chemicals that are poisoning us and recover materials to eliminate waste;

*preserve farmland and forests, securing working sustainable foodsheds and needed ecosystem services;

*protect and restore wild places and biological hotspots on land and in the sea, helping prepare them for climate adaptation as best we can, saving as much biodiversity as possible, and reconnecting us with the beauty of the planet.

Even if climate change magically ceased to be a problem tomorrow, these are all things we’d want to do for other reasons anyway; places that do them will become far more economically robust and systemically rugged than those that don’t.

There will be opposition. We will meet people filled with anger and fueled by misinformation. Many of the men (and they are still mostly men) making these decisions are good people. A few are evil sociopaths, actively obscuring the future to hide their own knowing crimes, but most are people you’d find decent dinner company, people you’d welcome into your family. Some are among the most principled and conscientious people you’ll find anywhere. But many look only backwards.

Many, I believe, are secretly terrified of what they’d see if they looked ahead. The people most deeply traumatized of all in our society may be the older men who’ve devoted their entire lives, in grinding hard work and out of love for the people around them, to building companies and communities and systems they thought represented a pinnacle of human endeavor and free enterprise, but which instead — they would now find, if they could bring themselves to admit the possibility — have become components of what is quite possibly the most destructive way of life ever made by human beings. To have done right and well your whole life and yet find yourself ethically indicted in the end, to have your accomplishments turn to ash, to arrive late expecting security and respect, and find neither: I don’t think those of us who are younger can fully understand what a soul-wrenching experience that must be.

As the air goes out of the most destructive parts of our economy — as the oil runs out, as the sprawl financing dries up, as the world runs out of big trees to cut and big fish to catch — economic fear gets added to the mix as well. How will they survive? Even when they see a glimmer of a bright green economy, it looks full of jobs demanding different skills than the ones they’ve spent a lifetime honing. I think a lot of them refuse to see a bright green future — attack even the possibility of its existence, yell at those who even suggest its necessity — because they see no place for themselves in it, and hear a ringing condemnation of the legacies they’re preparing to leave woven into every fiber of the innovations we need.

I honestly have no idea how to reach out to these good people. We know, though, that they are the ones often at the table when the future is made, and though we will eventually prevail since time and numbers are on our side, spending another couple decades butting heads with these guys will at best slow our progress. Merely defeating them politically also wastes a huge creative resource: their talent and experience. Many of the people most angrily denying the future are those who understand how the systems we now need to retrofit, redesign, replace and adapt actually work — because they built them — and, if convinced that this new work needs to be done, they have oceans of insight and institutional knowledge to bring to bear on the problem. No one knows how to hack a system better than the person who’s been in charge of protecting it from change…if only we can win them over to the side of change.

Whether or not we can bring around the oldest generation, the fundamental need is clear: we need, now, to put the future back in the room.

Every few weeks, someone sends me an article, a study, a design competition for redesigning or retrofitting suburbia. The idea that we’ll need to do something about the suburbs has grown hot.

Unfortunately, most American ideas for suburban redesign seem almost universally to fail to understand systemic shifts involved. I suspect this failure is related to insanity of US debate on oil, climate, climate impacts and social shifts. People have a hard time imagining that what we think of as normal now no longer describes current reality.

As I wrote in a Worldchanging piece last year (Outer Ring Suburbs and the Permanent Foreclosure):

Many still debate that anything about the American model of sprawl development needs fixing, but most understand that something has gone seriously wrong with the outer-ring suburbs that more than a quarter of American call home. It doesn’t take a futurist to look at the conditions on the ground — long commutes, auto dependence, the expected steep rise in oil prices, environmental problems, the bursting of a massive financial bubble (resulting in millions of abandoned homes and ruined families and a wave of bankrupted suburban local governments) — to realize that they suburbs are in deep trouble, and that trouble is just going to get worse.

Indeed, the more we understand about the scope, scale and speed of the changes we face, the worse things look for the more sprawling, auto-dependent suburbs we’ve built in the last 30-40 years.

And when a suburb was built is critical. A sharp distinction needs to be made between older, inner-ring suburbs (often comparatively dense, with “good bones” that can allow infill development and redevelopment of auto-focused commercial arterials into people-focused streets, close enough to central cities to participate in joint transit and infrastructure planning) and the outer-ring suburbs and exurbs built since the 1980s (which tend to be extremely low-density, poorly suited for redevelopment and distant from central cities). Any project approaching suburbia without knowing what kind of suburb it hopes to redesign is hopelessly lost from the start.

In many places, the inner-ring has already begun a process of semi-urbanization. Since we don’t know of any reality-based sustainability/resilience program for developed world lifestyles that doesn’t involve density, walkability, transit and efficient infrastructure, the ability of inner-ring suburbs to urbanize themselves in practical steps actually offers real hope to those places, despite the extreme strains many currently find themselves under. But the answer remains clear: urbanize, rapidly, in as innovative and practical a way as can be found.

The outer ring suburbs are a different story. They have no useful systems on which to build, and small tweaks will make no difference to their performance. If you treated them as vacant land, with a few structures and bits of infrastructure that might be re-usable, I suppose you could build a completely new urban community on top of them, but why would you want to, since they’re far away and disconnected from central cities? And, of course, outer ring suburbs/ exurbs are not vacant land, and the people who own those houses (even the foreclosed empty ones) are unlikely to embrace a plan of total reconstruction.

The common design response to the apparent impossibility of urbanizing the outer-ring is to rusticate it. Turn it back into farmland. This idea, too, proceeds from false understandings of the systems involved, as I wrote before:

Often, the thinking behind new suburban design provocations seems to go something like this: the problem with the outer ring is that it’s too spread out; therefore, let’s make that weakness a strength and use all that land between the buildings, say, for farms and wildlife habitat. On the surface, it might appear to make sense, but reality is far less forgiving.

The reality is that because of the way we build suburbs, the land left underneath has limited value either as farmland or as habitat; it has neither the benefits of proximity of truly urban gardening, nor the richness of undisturbed land farther out; while pulling out buldings and roads, mitigating toxics, re-shaping the flow of water over the land and restoring ecosystems essentially from scratch is such an expensive process that it will never make sense as long as really critical prime habitat remains endangered elsewhere (which will likely be the case for the foreseeable future). The “asset” of open land that outer ring suburbs have is not a very valuable one, in ecological terms.

The answer is, as far as I can see, that no solution is going to save most of the Outer Ring, especially the most exurban parts of it. It was a bad idea to build it, it’s unsustainable, and neither the economics nor the ecology of any of the solutions I’ve seen will pencil out for most of the hintersprawl slowly decaying around our core cities and inner-ring suburbs. The longer it takes us to admit how dire the situation is, the more billions we’ll pour into trying to prop up places that seem pretty destined to collapse. That’s good money after bad.

Of course, some outer-ring suburbs are doing just fine, and probably will for some time, because their residents are extremely wealthy. Many outer-ring suburbs are too wealthy to fail; and while they’re too expensive for ordinary people to maintain, the rich have the money and clout to hold on indefinitely. I expect there will be people living in McMansions and driving big cars and practicing conspicuous consumption for many years to come, no matter how bad things get. Extreme wealth trumps even very strong price feedbacks on energy and carbon (though if these areas become essentially uninsurable, as is possible, then all bets are off). As long as they’re willing to pay the true cost of their actions, I don’t have anything against them living however they choose.

But most of the Outer Ring is not that wealthy. Most outer-ring suburbs cannot absorb the rising costs of their choices or address the increasingly expensive vulnerability of their systems, and the rest of us can’t afford to subsidize them. In truth, the best public policy approach may just be harm reduction.

So, enough with the foreclosure farm schemes and the McMasion retirement homes and the “re-imaginings of suburban life” based on hydrogen cars, robot caretakers or aesthetic retrofits! I’m in favor of bold visions, but these deny hard realities: they are pipe dreams. Pipe dreams are not helpful in a crisis.

If you’re a designer, engineer, planner, public policy wonk and you want to put your insight and acumen to work, then think about this: How do we take the third of metro America that is the Inner Ring, and urbanize it — practically, in an innovative and affordable way — before the clock runs out?

I’d like to go into this in more depth and nuance, but I don’t have time to write more today. This is a topic, though, that bears returning to again and again.

Yesterday, David Roberts tweeted “Large environmental NGOs developed their habits & tactics at a time when all enviro policy was bipartisan. Not suited to present world.” I fired off a few tweets in response:

“Realism” re:planet w/in US political debate is an insane departure from the factual problems we face+ reality of solution spaces.

Every outcome that’s “realistic” by Beltway standards= catastrophic in real-world terms. Every possible “win” in that frame is a loss.

To fight a battle you cannot win, on the enemy’s terms, is pretty much the definition of bad strategy. Time to read some Sun Tzu.

What I was trying to get at is what seems to me an inherent tension in our current politics.

On the one hand, we have a reality of planetary problems that are all-encompassing and non-negotiable. There is no part of our lives that will remain un-impacted by the planetary crisis we face (or that can remain unchanged in the face such challenges), and the timelines we face for dealing with the parts of that crisis are determined not by political choice, but by physics, biology and large, slow forces like demographics. If we do not act quickly and boldly enough, we lose, period. No points for trying…

On the other hand, we here in the U.S. have a political system drenched in a carbon-lobby-funded far-right ideology and a conventional wisdom about our national priorities that has remained essentially unchanged for 30 years. Inside the Beltway, “realism” is defined by the limits of ideology and conventional wisdom about the politically possible. Corruption is all but open. Facts are not really part of the debate, much less paradigm-tearing realities.

It seems to me that to continue trying to win progress on sustainability and planetary responsibility within that Beltway debate is a doomed project. Yet, like the generals of World War One, progressive NGO leaders, funders and media keep committing essentially all their resources to frontal assaults that end, time and time again, the same way. Billions of dollars have been spent, tens of thousands of activists burned out, movement morale depleted, years wasted, and we are, if anything, in a worse and less tenable position than we used to be.

If we want to win, we need to rethink strategy. In this case, that means starting with understanding that the DC debate is not the battlefield we ought to be fighting on and our traditional strategic package (the campaign plans, strategic communications, lobbying efforts, etc.) is no longer a functional battle plan. Myriad better, more innovative approaches are possible.

Of course, as an industry, the progressive NGO-funder-media complex suffers from exactly the same kinds of limitations as any other industry, particularly the problem of sunk-cost expertise: when leadership has skill and expertise in one approach, and doesn’t understand (much less have mastery over) newer approaches, they will quite often work harder to avoid change than to prepare for it. Those who are used to thinking of themselves as players in the national debate, people of influence in DC circles, canny insiders, etc. have been fighting fiercely for years against any change in strategy. There’s no reason to expect them to change now. To the old guard, victory is always just one more frontal assault away.

“If your enemy is secure at all points, anticipate him. If he is superior in strength, evade him. If your opponent is temperamental, irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. If he is taking his ease, give him no rest. If his forces are united, separate them. If sovereign and subject are in accord, sow division between them. Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected. … The intelligent general imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy’s will to be imposed on him.” – Sun Tzu

If ever there were a time for a revolt of the young guard, a reinvention of strategy, a refusal to fight in already lost battles, a need to out-think the opposition, it is now.

When I was younger, I thought craft was merely a stepping stone, something I had to learn so I could start doing “real” writing. Now, craft feels indivisible from story, and story from thought. To think creatively, I find, I need to focus on the craft of telling stories. The making of the story is the blooming of the thought.

I happy to announce that the talk I gave last month at TED Global can now be seen on the TED.com page. It offers a pretty good short summary of the work we’re doing with Carbon Zero, the short ebook on carbon neutral urban innovation that should come out next month. Here’s the talk, hope you enjoy it:

If you want to keep in touch, please consider following me on Twitter ( @AlexSteffen ) or liking my page on Facebook.

Big thanks to Tristan Seniuk, Lindsay Martin, Norma Straw, Angie Harrison and everyone who worked on our awesome robot helicopter video for this talk. We weren’t able to finish that in time, but we hope to share it with you soon — stay tuned. Thanks as well to Sarah Bergmann for her last-minute design help.

Nice talk by Hannah Nicklin, about how we can use technology and art to “haunt” our cities, reclaiming them from the kind of digital commercial vampirism so many “smart city” initiatives foresee and hope to enable:

Smart as hell (this woman’s going places). Two especially good little chunks:

The Arts, she says, too often look at technology as a tool, not a material. “Art and technology should be like taking water and heat and producing something fundamentally different.” “The Arts need to embed themselves in the real world like a benevolent virus, haunting the city with visions of what it might be, and how we — not private interests — might use the city and its technologies.”

Warren Ellis: “[We're] giving the gift of the digital city to our ruling classes”

From John Thackara

This week, Seattle residents were given a chance to “opt-out” of delivery of phone books. There wasn’t much publicity, and it certainly wasn’t the top of the news, but in just 5 days, people canceled delivery of 85,000 phone books.

Seattle’s phone book experience is one of many rebuttals to the idea that Americans want to hyper-consume and waste. The argument is made all the time that particularly unsustainable practices are right and good, because a company is doing them, and if there’s a market for it, it must mean that consumers want it.

Of course, the reality is different. Very often, consumers have no choice: profit-driven systems lock us in, and the company making the money simply finds it profitable to continue off-loading the cost and inconvenience on to us, while pocketing the proceeds.

Take phone books. When a company drops a stack of them on my stoop, they are not doing me any good at all — I haven’t used the phone book in a decade. Quite the opposite, actually: I have to divert a few minutes attention to dealing with the phone books, put then with the recycling, then remember to haul them out for pick-up day. The same is true for hundreds of thousands of my neighbors. In the meantime, huge amounts of energy and materials are used to print and distribute the books; air and water are fouled, forests clearcut, greenhouse gasses emitted — the companies pay for none of these externalities — then more damage is done recycling objects that never needed to be created in the first place. All of these costs, from my time to melting ice caps, are paid for by others so that phone book companies can report higher numbers when they sell ads. This is, simply, involuntary consumption.

The idea that this is consumer-driven is clearly absurd. The compromise here — that Seattlites must opt-out, instead of companies being required only deliver if people opt-in — is illuminating.

My guess is that if companies needed people’s permission to drop stacks of phone books on their porches, they’d go out of business.

How many other systems in our lives are similar? How many things are done in the name of consumer convenience that are actually extractive business models, mining externalities for profit while offering little benefit to the people involved? I suspect a large portion of our consumption is in fact driven by these business models.

Smart places will start looking for ways to identify and make transparent these models; then make the companies involved pay the true cost of their actions and/or put the burden on the companies to prove people want their products. In the meantime, 85,000 phone books is a great small first step.

UPDATE: The City announced today that 105,000 phone books have now been canceled… in six days. That’s about 80 one-ton dumpsters full of unused phone books cut out of the waste stream.

Thanks to everyone who’s given and/or helped spread the word about Carbon Zero: A Short Tour of Your City’s Future! We’re about 2/3 of the way to both our basic goals, of at least 200 backers and $10,000 in pledges.

If we can raise at least $10,000, the project will go forward. Of course, that’s a shoe-string budget for publishing a whole book, and every pledge is welcome, even after we hit our target.

Thank you so much for your support and encouragement! This has been really thrilling and fun.

Please join me in an experiment in collaborative publishing!

I’m working with the design firm Open to put together a new book project Carbon Zero: A Short Tour of Your City’s Future for release this Earth Day.

We’re funding it through Kickstarter, an innovative community funding platform. We need $10,000 to do the project. We have 28 days to raise it, and it’s an all-or-nothing proposal — if we don’t raise all the money, no one pays anything. If we do raise the money, we’ll put out a short, accessible, sharply-designed ebook explaining what carbon neutral cities are and how to think about what carbon neutrality might look like where you live.

Will you come join us and back this project today? Pledges can be as little as a dollar, but for $10 or more we have cool rewards to share. It only takes a minute to pledge. Will you go to our Kickstarter page now and do it?

Thank you!

The new Worldchanging book comes out today.

The new Worldchanging features a foreword by green jobs pioneer Van Jones, an introduction by 350 founder Bill McKibben and entries by scores of Worldchanging’s insightful thinkers, journalists and designers. It is optimistic, clear-headed, solutions-oriented; both visionary and practical. Worldchanging 2.0 is the definitive result of seven years of global solutions-based journalism. It’s a wild, ambitious, imperfect and energetic book, and the best summation of the Worldchanging project we knew how to create.

We need your help to get the word out, though! Please consider helping spread the word about Worldchanging 2.0:

1. Get and enjoy the book itself! Discover new solutions, explore new ideas, let the brilliance of the worldchanging people it covers inspire you.

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10. Most obviously, please buy a copy! It’s available now in the US, Canada and the UK

Thanks to everyone for your support and encouragement!

A terrific E.P.A. study highlights what I’ve long said, that urban form (compactness, housing size, walkability, transit-orientation) is the elephant in the room, when it comes to climate change.

For instance, it finds that single-family rowhouses in walkable neighborhoods use 42% less total energy than detached single-family houses in auto-dependent places.

Of course clean energy is critical; of course we want more efficient technologies; of course we need to eat less (and better) meat — climate change is a complex issue, with many solutions. But climate change is a land use problem first. Our land use underlies nearly all our other climate problems.

Changing how our cities are planned, built and run is the key to humanity’s survival. Unborn generations will care far more about that than any other thing we’re doing (with the possible exception of how we handle nuclear weapons and waste).

Cities are machines for making the future. Right now, they make a sweltering future of climate chaos and suffering. They could make a bright green future. We choose.

Up until the recent housing bust, you often heard the advice “drive until you qualify.” If you couldn’t afford as large a house as you’d like to buy in the city, you should look at surrounding suburbs, widening your search outwards until you found one far enough out on the suburban fringe to cost what a bank would loan you. The bust — which has hit outlying suburbs most devastatingly — has made this advice pretty clearly a thing of the past, and even traditional real estate agents are starting to recommend that families look at the combined cost of transportation and housing when choosing a place to live.

The opposite advice would seem to be the old adage that if you’re on a budget, you should buy the smallest house in the best neighborhood you can afford. Certainly, market analysts tell us we’re seeing a shift (especially among Millennials) away from concern with owning one’s “dream home” and towards living in one’s “dream neighborhood.” In North America, observers say, we’re definitely seeing a fast-growing locational preference for walkable urbanism, a more modest set of expectations in terms of home size and an overall shift away from home-ownership as a heavily-leveraged financial investment. People want smaller, more affordable homes in walkable neighborhoods.

Buying in a good neighborhood is probably sound advice. But there’s something bigger moving under the surface of these waters. A leading-edge set of urbanites now wants neighborhoods with “good bones” to support urban lifestyles that barely yet exist.

All good compact neighborhoods offer more ability to live a low-consumption, high-access, experience-rich and car-free life. I’m seeing evidence, though, that a non-trivial number of the best informed home buyers are looking for neighborhoods able to evolve in the face of rapid change. Places willing to adopt innovations – from increased density to district energy to elimination of parking to new transit modes — that might be opposed by NIMBYs in more established areas. They’re shopping for places where both the urban form and the community culture favor experimentation and adoption of new solutions; they’re looking for someplace they can build their own solutions and life experiments.

They’re looking, you might say, for neighborhoods that work as platforms for innovative living.

I’ve been thinking about the profound sense of disconnect many of us working on sustainability-related issues seem to be finding these days.

It’s not the disconnect we experienced 10 or 20 years ago, thankfully: it’s not the strangeness of discussing matters with people to whom it’s never even occurred that we live on a finite planet. Today, when even oil executives can talk a good game on sustainability, that sort of disconnect is (mostly) a thing of the past.

What I’m talking about is something different. It’s the surreal experience of talking to smart, informed people who are sure that a big transformation is underway across the entire globe, and yet (when asked about their own work) anticipate little change in their own industries, cities or lives.

Considered from a distance, the scope, scale and speed of change are obvious to them. But move the focus to their immediate surroundings and concerns, and the changes they expect to see are generally marginal and incremental. Few seem to have considered the possibility that things will change dramatically, quickly, across the entire economy. It’s almost like when the idea of change gets that close, the forces involved make it so big that it becomes invisible.

This is totally understandable, of course. Change that big is scary; discussing it at all risks backlash from Right Wing political elements and reactionary stakeholders; exploring it fully runs the danger of being seen as outside the “realistic” spectrum of the public debate (especially in the U.S.); addressing big change without having some strategies for anticipating and adapting to new opportunities and threats could lead to looking unprepared and adrift. There are a lot of good reasons not to see the magnitude of change bearing down on us.

I sometimes think that the task of the sustainability movement at this particular moment is to find new ways to help leaders bring the scope, scale and speed of planetary change into our discussions of daily life. Based on what I’m hearing from friends and colleagues, we have our work cut out for us.

On the other hand, the mere fact that so many brilliant people have yet to engage with the scope, scale and speed of change in their own lives, work and communities means that a huge wave of innovative solutions is still swelling in front of us. If our sense of the magnitude of the problems is out-of-scale, so is our anticipation of future innovations with which we can meet those problems.

Recently, I’ve been getting asked what I think about the idea of “the death of distance.” The death of distance is a buzzphrase for the idea that as oil production peaks and energy (especially the fuels needed for motorized boats, planes, cars and trucks) gets more expensive, we’ll all be retreating into smaller and smaller geographies. Peak oil, the thinking might be summed up, will make our worlds smaller.

This seems to me to misunderstand some key facts about the physical world.

The first is simple physics: the amount of energy used to transport something is based on the mass of the thing and the speed of the movement, as well as how long you move it. Simply put, moving something heavy slowly takes far less energy than moving it at higher speeds. The faster you go, the more energy-intensive the acceleration (which is why lower speed limits for cars save so much gas).

The second misunderstanding here, it seems to me, is about energy substitution. It’s not that substituting other forms of energy for oil is impossible — for instance, people sailed the world thousands of years before the invention of the steam engine — it’s that the energy available in these other forms is often less “dense,” which means it’s harder to gather the energy to move heavy things quickly. You can sail a ship slowly using wind; to drive it forward at a good clip, you need coal or (better yet) oil.

So, in the future, it’ll likely get much more expensive to move big, heavy things at high speeds over long distances. But not everything we ship is heavy, and not everything we move needs to go fast.

Moving more slowly doesn’t mean you never ship anything. Many commodity goods, for instance, can travel quite slowly and still be valuable. Ancient Rome, for instance, maintained a thriving trade in grain with Egypt. Overnight shipping may soon be a thing of the past, but global trade isn’t going anywhere.

Other items don’t weigh much, and so don’t take much more energy to ship more quickly; and of course, much trade is now essentially dematerialized. Software, news, entertainment, design — all are traded in digital form. And the increased cost of energy for these transactions is pretty marginal compared to their value. Even if energy cost 10x as much, the price of downloading a song wouldn’t need to rise much. Even the computer we listen to that song on isn’t nearly as “energy price sensitive” as say, your average lawnmower or home gym. Information will still flow in a world with expensive energy.

What this all means is that what we’re really about to experience is what I call “the death of speed.”

The death of speed will have profound impacts on our cities and suburbs, on whole industries, on a variety of retail models, even on our diets. It will change the landscapes of our lives. But it won’t leave us living in the small towns of the past.

UPDATE: Got an interesting question, asking why the death of speed wouldn’t lead to a more agrarian future of small towns, self-sufficiency? It’s a good question, and one I’ll explore in more detail soon, but the short reply is this: moving food makes up a minuscule portion of most developed nations’ energy footprints.

Particularly in places like North America, Australia and New Zealand, the biggest direct impact will almost certainly be that car-travel (and thus, also, auto-oriented businesses and sprawling suburban lifestyles) will become much more expensive. The best solution to this problem is simply building communities where more things are close by and walkable. Density-done-right saves energy in all sorts of ways I’ve written about in the past and will explore again soon. The death of speed will spur the rise of compact communities.

The future of green is orange: within the 600 pages of the new Worldchanging book, you’ll find the global sustainability movement redefined.

This is a time for thinking in terms of scope, scale and speed. Consequently, we’ve taken out almost all the guides to small steps, better shopping and behavior change. We’ve added hundreds of new and updated entries on building a bright green future, from the very basic systems of life all the way up to planetary thinking. Though it is a revised edition of our first book, Worldchanging 2.0 is so substantially reworked that it might as well be thought of as an entirely different book.

Worldchanging 2.0 is an urban book, focusing on cities and the systems we need to change to make them carbon-neutral, zero-waste, walkable and equitable engines of prosperity. It’s an ambitious book, full of the kinds of bold thinking we need to engage with to build a truly bright green future: climate foresight and planetary thinking; sustainable design innovations and passivhaus buildings; walksheds, ubiquitous technology and sharing systems; biomimicry and green chemistry; adaptive re-use and rugged green infrastructure; telling the backstories of the things we buy, making transparent the functioning of our governments and rebuilding the ruins of the unsustainable. On a planet hurtling towards not only a population of 9 billion people, almost all living in or around cities, facing a massive ecological crisis and an unfaltering technological revolution, ideas like the ones in Worldchanging are no longer just provocative, they’re essential. Worldchanging is a guide to building (and living in) bright green cities. Now, not in some distant, perfect future.

The new Worldchanging features a foreword by green jobs pioneer Van Jones, an introduction by 350 founder Bill McKibben and entries by scores of Worldchanging’s insightful thinkers, journalists and designers. It is optimistic, clear-headed, solutions-oriented; both visionary and practical.

Worldchanging 2.0 is the definitive result of seven years of global solutions-based journalism. It’s a wild, ambitious, imperfect and energetic book, and the best summation of the Worldchanging project we knew how to create. And though Stefan Sagmeister’s new design is gorgeous, we hope the ideas inside are what make this a book you read and return to and use to drive your own creativity and solutions.

Worldchanging may not change your life, but it may change how you design your future.

Worldchanging hits the shelves in the U.S., U.K. and Canada March 1st. It is already available for discount pre-order at Powell’s, Barnes and Noble, Borders and Amazon.

As with our last book, we’re depending on word of mouth and reader recommendations to spread the word — if anything, the fact that Worldchanging is now closed and the promotions effort is all-volunteer makes your support even more critical. So we hope that you’ll share this news with others (blog it, tweet it ( @AlexSteffen for regular updates), join the Worldchanging Facebook group, or just tell your friends you’re excited to read it). Once you’ve had a chance to read the book, we’d appreciate your positive reviews on all these sites, as well, of course.

Let’s change the world.

((crossposted from Worldchanging.com))

Landscape Urbanism is, as Wikipedia puts it, “a theory of urbanism arguing that landscape architecture, rather than architecture, is more capable of organizing the city and enhancing the urban experience.” It was formed very directed as a critique of New Urbanism, in an attempt to wrest back a place of central relevance for thinking about landscape and land form in urban debates. Or, as others have put it, New Urbanism says it’s where you put the houses that matters, Landscape Urbanism says it’s what you put around them.

I think that any attempt to see the systems around us more clearly adds value. That said, one of our biggest problems is that in the developed world (but most especially in North America) we have a tendency to mistake the wrapping for the mechanism. We tend to think too much about how a place looks and feels, and far too little about what actually drives the systems within it.

American cities, especially, are the apices of vast networks of material and energy flows that reach literally around the entire planet. The impacts of our every day lives radiate out in all directions, from the atmosphere to the ocean depths, from distant forests to melting ice caps. Those impacts are planetary, gigantic in aggregate and unsustainable in nearly every particular. Most of those impacts we will never see. And the biggest impacts of all are generated by our auto-dependence, our over-consumption, our sprawling land-use and our bloated and poorly designed homes.

Walkability, transit-orientation and green building all reduce those invisible impacts. In discussing these, New Urbanism is excellent. The problem I have with New Urbanism is a lack of ambition — something that feels like an unwillingness to face the actual scope, scale and speed of the changes we need, and to really push the boundaries of urban form. Too much New Urbanist rhetoric feels to me to be locked in a debate from the 80s that assumes suburbanization is the norm, is here to stay and needs only modification.

If we take planetary boundaries seriously, we need to be reducing the unseen impacts of our lives by something like 95% in the next couple decades. That’s a big task, and it’s made more important by the economic and social vulnerability built into our current systems and their reliance on long, complicated supply chains, limited nonrenewable resources and a stable climate.

Bright green cities — able to offer prosperity with 5% of the impact using far more rugged systems — will not be had by tinkering. We need serious changes in land use, big investments in infrastructure, new innovations in design and technology, and new approaches to how urban life is lived. We simply can’t get there with home retrofits, electric cars and backyard gardening. The physics don’t pencil.

Some of changes needed will take, I believe, weaving biomimetic systems into the city: making our infrastructure and places work in such a way that they demand less from nature. But we’re never going to make car-dependent suburban sprawl sustainable through changes in landscape: the amount of good we can do within the boundaries of those places will never eliminate, much less make up for, the damage done elsewhere to support them. No amount of permaculture in the backyard will fix the melting of the ice caps caused by a lifetime of driving and dwelling in extremely inefficient low-density systems.

The future of cities, I think, involves high-density, high-innovation cities meshed through with extranatural systems, systems that reduce the need for inputs and decrease the toxicity and wastefulness of outputs, helping to stabilize natural systems around cities. Those systems and the landscapes they define may look nothing like natural rivers, forests, farms — but that’s okay.

Because one of the biggest problems with urban debates these days — and it’s a problem I fear Landscape Urbanism contributes to, rather than addresses — is that we continue to mistake that which looks green for that which is sustainable. We dress up disastrous land-use and voraciously wasteful urban systems in gardens and greenery, and end up with a Potemkin sustainability.

New Urbanism, more hardcore urbanists have long charged, can end up being just “sprawl in drag.” Landscape Urbanism, unless it addresses the physics of underlying systems (transportation, housing, manufacturing), threatens to be just “sprawl in a pretty green dress”.

I’d like to see a whole different approach, one which starts from the scope, scale and speed of the changes we know we need to make, and backcasts from that transformation as the basis of any sound urban thinking. Planetary urbanism.

That’s a task that will take all the smarts we have, in every discipline.

If you’re already following this site, thanks! I’m still just dusting this off, so please be patient while it’s under construction.