SXSW: Worldchanging 2.0

[Notes from this panel with Alex Steffen]

This talk is about the tools available to make the world a better place.

We inherited a broken future and need to fix it. The future looks grim. One large symptom of this grimness is climate change. It is here. It is real. It is dire. We are causing it.

It will impact every aspect of our daily lives.

If left unchallenged it will, according to the British government, be the greatest economic catastrophe in history.

Meanwhile we live on a planet full of children. Many of our fellow human beings are eager for prosperity. Billions have seen the affluence of the developing world and want something like it. This is entirely reasonable. Billions more are struggling merely to survive.

The UN terms many of these people as environmental refugees to be as their suffering becomes compounded by ecological collapse.

The ramifications are not merely predictable, they are predicted.

We are racing to what one report called a global Somalia. We must demand a currently unimaginable future.

We must design a one planet prosperity. Everyone in this room has a ten planet footprint. We need prosperity that fits in the earth's limits.

We need to include everyone. We need to rebuild our entire material civilization.

So what is World Changing? An NGO that hunts down and shares tools to help build this better future.

People are hungry for a better future. There is a profound sea change in public opinion about sustainability. The debate is over and we are left with two side: people who understand the practical limits and people who are fundamentally wrong.

Why can't we build buildings that use no outside energy? Why can't we have kites that provide wind-power? Why can't we build cities that work with natural systems? Why can't we grow rooftop gardens with rain instead of treating rain as waste to be drained away?

We also need to move quickly. To move as quickly as we need to, to change deeply enough at the proper pace.

Look at Netflix. Think about how we used to rent movies. You used to get in your car, drive to a big box store, and walk into a building with hot lights, HVAC, etc, hunt down the movie you like, go home, watch it, and then repeat the whole process. With Netflix the mail carrier, who is already going to your house, is eliminating not only the trips but the store itself. Netflix delivery is a fraction of the environmental footprint of the old model.

The point is that there are ways to get what we want without the baggage of our current systems if we think intelligently.

We can dematerialize all the extraneous stuff that gets in the way of the life we want.

One big step is compact living in well designed cities. People have access by proximity in these structures. Cities are tools for making your life greener if they are done well.

Compare old development to new and measure how far you can get in a 1 mile walk. Suburban patterns that don't use a grid are profoundly wasteful. City grids have lower rates of automobile trips.

We are getting better and better at knowing where things are. Think about Ze Frank's If the Earth Were a Sandwich project. This is a great example about how well we know where things are in our world. This knowledge can help us.

Many things are only garbage when they are in the wrong place.

See: Garbage Scout
See: Freecycle

Car sharing is a great example of this. It stagnated for a long time but technology has allowed the experience to change so completely that the structure now works. Car sharing has real benefits. About half of the energy and most of the materials that go into using your car will be used in the car's production. The more people who use the car, the less of this energy is spent. The ratio of cars taken off the road to shared cars ranges from 6:1 to 20:1 in more dense cities.

This can save you money and reduce your ecological footprint.

Moreover, you are a more efficient driver and trip-planner in a shared car so you use less gas to get the same or more done.

When you share, it is easier to use things more effectively.

Think about a power drill. The average power drill gets used between 3 and 20 minutes in its lifetime. Most of us keep the drill around for years on end looking for opportunities to make holes in the wall. This is the epitome of unsustainable waste. While there is emotional satisfaction to owning the drill there is no reason to own it. We are simply looking for the ability to make a hole in the wall when we need to.

There are ways to do this better.

When you start to think of things differently you can do things differently.

In the UK they found that by moving the energy meter into the home from outside reduces energy consumption by 10% without doing anything else. Observed flows can be made beautiful. Design can reveal the true impact of our actions to us and help with realtime decision making.

Using wastewater to grow plants where the water is wasted reminds us of what we are doing.

Why do you need to own your carpet? Interface will lease you carpet. When you are done they will come pick it up. They will swap out worn out pieces and remanufacture old pieces into new pieces.

We feel no attachment to the airplane pillow. When we are done with things why can't companies take everything back?

Most electronic devices are hard to recycle. If you are a cellphone producer and you have to take it back at the end of its life, you will make that cellphone differently.

When we start to think this way we gain the ability to think through the cost of our lives.

What if products came with environmental nutrition labels? We should demand a back-story to our products. We want things around us that tell better stories.

It is easier to make things that tell better stories. Why cant everything we do be done better?

We realize that redesigning everything around us is not impossible. It is something we can do if we think differently. We can make our lives better and the world better at the same time.

This does mean a massive change. We need to retool all of our systems.

Do we have to leave behind those of us who are not in a position to get rich off of this?

No. A bright green future can be enjoyed by everyone. The models we are creating are being replicated elsewhere. If we design better systems, the tools available to others will be better.

We are learning how to share tools more effectively. We are learning how to understand that we can work with people seen as "victims" as partners.

From solar powered street lights that are also wireless base stations to the mine detecting flower the world is full of amazing game-changing innovation. Pot-in-pot non-electric refrigeration. Rainwater harvesting systems. The Lifestraw filters water as you suck water through it from a stream.

See: Plumpynut
See: Roundabout Play Pump

It is within our capacity to see that people in truly dire situations are given more alternatives and to empower them to create solutions we alone would never have thought of. Instead of giving the developing world the oldest technology, we give the newest. There are 100 million cell phones in Africa because cell phone towers are cheaper than land-based wiring. This "leap-frogging" allows true innovation to happen. Farmers can now call into town to find out prices so they are not cheated by middle-men. Distance medicine allows rural woman to get health information for their families. Cell phone minutes are being used as a form of currency.

See: Acumen Fund

There are ways of helping people who are already trying to do something good that helps them do it more effectively.

We can either resign ourselves to the ruinous future we face or we can imagine a truly better future.

Smart people with creative minds need to start thinking about how we can do things differently. We must actively grapple with the realities that undermine our world.

The more you use World Changing resources, the more a pattern will appear that wasn't there before.

You are brilliant and the earth is hiring Paul Hawken

Be a role model in your life for other people. Bike when you can. Green the things in your life that you are passionate about. Green your car or your garden or your kitchen or your business. Do carbon offsetting even though it isn't perfect. The point isn't to be a martyr, it is to do everything you can and to be very creative.

It is impossible to separate issues of social justice, equity, and civil rights from the issue of sustainability. The book deals with these issues of democracy promotion, non-violence, and fairness. the problems we see in terms of poverty and oppression are all symptoms of one larger problem which that we have screwed up and allowed people who profit from bad decisions to continue long after we have realized our mistakes.

We cannot build a world that is more sustainable and unfair. We need to make altruistic gestures to everyone else in the world and we need them to be altruistic back. Everyone needs to participate in making a better world.

Most of the efforts to green computers and electronics are half-measures. This is still part of the ecological nightmare. Hopefully we will see big strides in coming years. One basic thing is to extend the usable life of your computer as long as possible. Even if you upgrade, pass your old one along to an NGO so it will keep being used.

By hitting people over the head with catastrophic information we have made a grave mistake by not leaving them with something meaningful to do. An Inconvenient Truth is a great example of this. It is 90 minutes of information about the ecopocolypse without much help.

Everyone knows that recycling your cans will not save the planet but we still only tell people to do this as if it were a gateway drug. We need to encourage people to green whatever they are passionate about in their lives.

It is a big problem that so many of our visions of the future are post-apocalyptic. Our literature tells us that society will fall and then be reborn. This is dangerous. We can get people to change by showing them a better alternative to which they will wish to defect. We have a profound lack of visions of a truly better future that is deeply enticing. We need serious compelling dynamic beautiful visions of where we might be headed.

Companies must realize that everyone is going in this direction. Regulation is moving in this direction already. There are cars manufactured in the US that cannot be sold in some countries. This trend will accelerate. We will see a global cap and trade system. If you make things that are carbon inefficient you will hurt your competitive ability in the near-term.