Archive for July, 2008

I finished The Limits to Growth, and found their conclusions very interesting.  Specifically, it was good to see simulations that made assumptions such as, “what if we had twice as many natural resources?” or “What if there were “perfect” birth control? ” The ability of their model to demonstrate a need for unified change, across all major variables, was very convincing.  I am going to start on Jeff Sachs’ book, Common Wealth later this week.

DC sent me a link to a speech by a man named Adam Werbach, which was fantastic.  It’s a video, or a podcast, or a pdf transcript:

Adam Werbach is former president of the Sierra Club (at age 23), and founder of the first sustainability consulting firm (originally Act Now, recently merged/renamed Saatchi & Saatchi S). In this speech, he talks about how we need to move beyond a green movement to a “blue” movement which can engage 1 billion people in changing their behaviors. The focus shifts from saving the planet (which appeals to a narrow audience) to saving people and making people happy (a mainstream goal). He started something like this at Wal-Mart by engaging employees and their families in a program called PSP (Personality Sustainability Practice).  You can read more about Werbach’s controversial decision to work with Wal-Mart here:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/118/working-with-the-enemy.html

Basically, each person chooses one “nano-practice” that is SMART

Sustains the planet
Makes you happy
Affects the community
Repeatable
Takes visible action to focus on for a period of time.

Ok.  Here’s my commentary, in case you were interested:  Werbach has vision.  He is, however, the Danton who is too pragmatic for the enviro-Jacobins.  I think that Werbach’s ideas show a lot of foresight, and he realizes that radical environmentalism isn’t the best way to change the world‘s environmental practices.  I am getting excited now:  Jeff Sachs has well-argued opinions on economic growth and eradication of poverty through the widespread, small-scale, e.g. microloans.  Werbach’s message is essentially the same, but applied to a different problem that is endemic to current worldwide culture (broadly speaking.)

If you take Werbach’s small-scale ideas, and combine them with massive structural/policy changes, as suggested in Lester Brown’s Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, the result could be serious change on a large scale, capable of redefining what is thought to be possible by humans.  Brown recognizes the need for change in policy very clearly, while Werbach sees the power of changing a culture… And all of this was written about 35 years ago in The Limits to Growth, whose conclusion is that reducing pollution, stabilizing population, and investing heavily in technology won’t change the world’s outcome—it will only change the timing of events, give or take 50 years.  The real solution is a change in cultural practices in simultanaeity with changes in world policy.  Otherwise the world’s dynamical system has predictable and not very bright futures.