10/21/08: I was drinking a ten dollar coffee in the Copenhagen airport when I heard that Barack Obama had been assassinated. I was just off the overnight from Seattle, heavily sleep-deprived and disoriented, with a couple hours to wait for my flight to Norway. A young Scandinavian guy in a black jean jacket sat next to me with four empty beer glasses in front of him. He looked at me several times, said something to me in Danish (or Norwegian or Swedish... I have to admit its hard for me to hear the difference), and then, when I told him in English that I couldn't understand, and that, yes, I was an American, he asked me, "What did you think about Barack Obama being killed?"
I had one of those moments when the world squeezed tight and time moved slowly. The well-dressed passengers moving across the wooden floors past the design stores and banks of glass in washes of pale Northern sunshine looked for a minute to me like people in aging photographs. I remember thinking, "This will always be where I was when I heard," and then, as my anger began to mount, "those motherf*****s, they actually went and did it."
Of course, it was a simple matter of errant translation. As of this writing, Obama is alive and well and looking like my next president. All my drunken neighbor wanted to know was whether I worried that Obama would be murdered by right-wingers before he could change America. The answer, I guess, is obvious.
Later I fly to Norway, to Stavanger, a charming old city built from the profits of dragging enormous hauls of fish from the sea and canning them, and, more recently, pumping enormous flows of oil from off-shore North Sea rigs. It's a town that's gone through two long resource booms, and it feels tidy, prosperous and efficient.
It does not feel warm. I live in Seattle, and thus thought I knew what cold and wet and dark were all about, but after spending the morning walking the streets of the old town and harbor here, I realized that Seattle is downright tropical in comparison. I left the hotel with high hopes, an overcoat, a scarf and an umbrella, and staggered back, two hours later, dripping pools of water, trailing behind me the tattered remains of my brolly and looking like a survivor of Napoleon's March on Moscow.
I'm here to speak at InnoTown, the Norwegian ideas conference. The title of my talk is to be "Innovation got us into this mess. Innovation will get us out of it."
Which, generally speaking, I whole-heartedly believe. That said, I also worry that because of its over-use in business circles, we have begun to attach to to the term innovation a notion of meaningless, incremental cleverness. Innovation perhaps has come to mean anything new, anything unexpected.
We need new thinking and new solutions, absolutely. But we don't need just any old innovation; we need the right ones. In a similar way, we don't just need to aspire towards some vague increase in sustainability; we need to aspire towards the absolute elimination of human harm of the natural systems on which we depend, so that we do not destroy those systems.
Our goal then, as I've discussed before, needs to be zero ecological impact -- on a timeline open to debate but almost certainly much sooner than the vast majority of people understand -- and the innovations we need to pursue are the ones that help us shrink away our impact while increasing the quality of our lives. Unfortunately, only a tiny fraction of the smartest, most creative people (the sort who tend to innovate the most) are actually engaging the challenge at that level.
Anyways, I've got to write up a talk about that now. More tomorrow.
(Photo credits: Stavanger at Mid Day; Welcome to Tropical Stavanger; Books and Booze. All by Alex Steffen. Creative Commons, some rights reserved.)
