WorldChanging

Interview with Mark Anielski

Hassan Masum — 2008-05-09T10:56:12-08:00

We recently had a chance to talk with Mark Anielski, Albertan and author of The Economics of Happiness: Building Genuine Wealth. Mark has been working for many years on better ways of measuring progress, and this conversation delves into the potential of moving beyond GNP. Whether in measuring a sense of community or valuing ecosystem goods and services, better measures of progress can align us on the targets that really matter.

Hassan Masum: In your book, you have this great quote from Robert Kennedy about GNP, which I was amazed to read because it was back from 1968 or so - 40 years ago. It seems like we've had some progress, but not a whole lot of progress since then. Could you give us some framing thoughts as to why better measures of progress are so important, and why if they are so important they have taken so long to get popular?

Mark Anielski: Robert Kennedy's challenge was to economists and politicians to begin to measure the things which make life worthwhile, and not things like oil spills and car crashes and treating cancer as somehow genuine progress. So his challenge in '68 wasn't really responded to seriously until the mid-1970's by some economists, and then in 1995 by Redefining Progress out of San Francisco where they created the Genuine Progress Indicator.

This whole GDP accounting system was developed during World War II by John Maynard Keynes in Britain, as a way of figuring out how much cash was flowing through the British economy so they could tax the British people to help pay for the war. The war is long over, but we still have this accounting system that adds up all cash flow in the economy, and doesn't distinguish between expenditures that contribute to well-being and those that may in fact represent erosion of well-being.

HM: That sounds great, and you have a good analogy in your book about how during wartime it actually does make sense, perhaps, that all production is geared toward the single goal of defeating the enemy, whereas in peacetime it's a much more differentiated kind of beast.

But just to play devil's advocate for a minute: a lot of our readers are familiar with the idea that GDP is flawed, but GDP at least has the feature of being relatively objective, in the sense that you're measuring a single quantity which says if a transaction did happen or didn't happen. How do you extend this to more subjective dimensions like the ones you talk about - for example, community well-being, a sense of neighborliness, that kind of thing?

MA: Well first of all, we're not saying throw the GDP out the window. We're saying that when we track expenditures as a society, we have to distinguish between those we think are contributing to the genuine well-being of society, and those for which we would say, "gee, we'd probably not want to clean up after a hurricane or an oil spill" or "that effort wasn't really progress, it was an unfortunate expenditure that we'd rather not have made". That's the first thing we have to do as a society, and right now we don't do that at all - economists don't do that and politicians don't do that with the GDP.

On the subjective side of quality of life, there are lots of things that don't have a monetary expression, including happiness. People would say we can begin to monetize happiness by what job loss does to your lack of productivity in the economy, and how much counseling you have to get to get over your depression and all that. There are some areas of subjective well-being that may never have a monetary expression, but we can ask people things like "what's your sense of belonging to a community?" "how's your spiritual well-being?" - we can ask those types of questions, that would expand the way we account for progress, beyond the monetary expressions of transactions.

HM: Would it be fair to split the kinds of measures you're talking about into two categories? Category one would be transactional - something like a net version of GDP or GNP, where as you say the transactions or activities which are harmful are netted out from the beneficial ones. Category two is maybe more of an indicator-based set where you're asking people or otherwise surveying or understanding properties of the physical or social world, but which are not directly linked to particular transactions.

So category two is more like a dashboard of where we are; category one is talking about the flows of transactions and activities. Is that a fair distinction?

MA: That's exactly what my Genuine Wealth model proposes. The first thing any auditor does is take inventory, and that gives you a physical counting - you can count the number of automobiles in an auto dealership, and then you can figure out what the market value is of those automobiles.

The first thing you do is you measure what you've got, in physical terms, so the Genuine Wealth model says the first thing you do is measure how many trees you have, how much agricultural land you have, how many people you have, what their skill set is, how many degrees people have...and then beyond that we can begin to measure what the market says it's worth.

So out of this new accounting system, you can derive indicators of well-being or sustainability, and those are not necessarily monetary. It's like in a financial statement you can generate price to earnings ratios for investors - same thing with this accounting. You can generate quality of life indicators from the inventory you've taken, and then begin to hopefully make better decisions than those purely based on, say, looking at only revenues or costs of a company.

HM: That's a very interesting parallel. It sounds like you have parallels with both capital statements and income statements on a financial statement, and also as you were saying those financial ratios which dig a little bit deeper into those statements and tell you whether the company is healthy or in danger. All those seem to have parallels in the Genuine Wealth model, which cover a broader range of issues.

MA: Yes - my message is that what we lack right now is a balance sheet for the nation. We basically have an income statement, and are only looking at the revenue line in the income statement, or the expenditure line. So we have no capital accounts for natural capital - for trees, and all the other things that nature provides for free.

We don't have a human capital account - we may know population but we don't know
what the skill set is of the population. What are the capacities for a population or community to be flourishing? What's your diversity of skills? We don't have a social capital account, which is a sense of belonging or a sense of trust with each other, and relationships with each other.

So it's like flying a 747 - I've told the chief economist of one of the big banks in Toronto this years ago - with three instruments on, when you know it's way more complicated. We don't have a complete dashboard, we don't have a balance sheet, and when economists say "oh that's OK"...would you say that to any large company's CEO or board of directors, that we don't have a balance sheet?

HM: One challenge would be, I suppose, that these kinds of assessments would work or be applicable over multiple scales, all the way from global to regional, to company based, to even personal. How would you interlink those different levels of assessment - is there a way to for example automatically take all the ones at a lower level and compile them into a higher-level aggregate?

MA: In theory. Right now, the GDP, for example, is generated by a survey of households and businesses. That survey is only done once a year, and quarterly data is projected. So even with GDP, you're only measuring a subset of society, and then of course scaling that up and saying well, if we think our sample size is right, then we can just scale it up to the number of citizens and assume that represents the actual economic flows.

We could do the same with this accounting system. We can, for example, expand our household surveys to include some of these other attributes of trust and belonging. And in some cases in Canada, with Statistics Canada, we already do what's called a General Social Survey - in the US they have similar surveys. We can begin to track how people use their time - we've been doing that in Canada since the mid-70's with time-use surveys.

What I'm saying is that a lot of the data already exists. Some of it's incomplete, but what we're talking about is creating a consolidated accounting system, if you like. I've done it with corporations. Are they ready for it yet? Not necessarily, but we're bringing everybody to the table and saying, you're collecting data already, what we're going to show you is how to consolidate this, so that we can tell a story that's more than just financial performance.

So again, this can be scaled from the household, to the enterprise level, and then of course to the municipal or macro-economic level of governance.

HM: So the data partially exists, but it's more a matter of building a system which will link it together. But who do you see being the people or groups who would make that happen?

MA: Well, it primarily would be the statistical agencies: Statistics Canada, the Bureau of Economic Analysis in the US. Those existing institutions would be either redesigning the surveys they currently use, or seeing how they're closely inter-related - basically working on what already exists, and creating a different "state of the nation" type reporting that would balance the economic performance with social and environmental indicators of well-being.

HM: It sounds good, but what do you see as being the path to implementation? You're talking about the end state, but what would some intermediate goals be from here to there?

MA: Intermediate goals would be to just develop the first preliminary set of accounts, if you like. Right now, the treasurer or the finance minister is simply reporting on economic performance. Now the treasurer could also be talking about what's happening in air quality and water quality, whether water aquifers in the nation are healthy, income inequality which is the biggest indicator of society's human health, and suddenly the conversation - the news in the morning is different than simply listening to the stock market report.

Media could get involved, so the morning news doesn't end with just the hockey or the football scores - it ends also with financial market updates, and with some type of suite of indicators on quality of life. And then the conversations change at the dinner table, and in the coffee shops - it's creating awareness. What happens, though, is most people couldn't care less about the stock market report. I don't care - I'm an investor, but I don't really listen. I care about my portfolio, but even then...most people are bewildered by what all this data means.

And I think what it creates is a new awareness. I think if we measure what matters, which is what Kennedy was saying, then people may be more engaged. They're more conscious, and they're bringing that consciousness into their workplaces, to the dinner table, with their family, and with their neighbors.

HM: That's interesting. So you're really talking about a sort of co-evolutionary process, where once the indicators are there, even if in a rough form, they'll probably then be picked up by media or other outlets. That probably will raise consciousness, which will feed back to the indicators and make them more likely to be accelerated - a virtuous cycle.

MA: That's right. Behind all this data is someone's real experience, right? There's a story. Data is boring unless it comes alive, and the only way it can come alive is connecting it to someone's experience.

If you're talking about domestic violence, for example, why is domestic violence going up? Is it because more people are aware that services exist to call? There's a story there. Why is domestic violence rising at the same rate as GDP right now? Does it mean there's a correlation? Not necessarily, but it's interesting - something people like asking, "so what's going on here?" So the conversation begins, right?

HM: Speaking of stories, I had a look at your "Ontario Community Sustainability Report" from last year. This was an attempt to look at a couple of dozen municipalities across the province in a multidimensional way.

So you have this report of 100-odd pages, and it covers the physical, social, and economic aspects of all these communities, and then tries to amalgamate these aspects to come up with some sort of score for each community as a whole. What do you see as being the main outcome of this - what do you hope for?

MA: It's interesting...that report, what you actually come down to is that trying to measure sustainability, or trying to point to a community which is genuinely sustainable, is very difficult. Each community will believe that its quality of life is as good as anybody else's; there's a really subjective part of this. In spite of our attempts to measure sustainability objectively, I think the truth is that each community has its own strengths, and opportunities to improve.

The report does perhaps tease out some of the new things communities have tried with transit, bike paths, or whatever, that other communities can learn from. That's the benefit of this kind of work - you create greater awareness across communities, about what's working and what's not.

HM: I suppose ideally you'd want to have these done every 5 years like a census, so you could track over time changes that happen.

MA: Exactly. Some people say oh, all you've done is establish a baseline. But we take that baseline and track the trend over time, so one city says gee, we ranked lowest on this list on air quality, how can we move ourselves up the ranks? And more importantly, how can we become more closely clustered, so the gap isn't as big?

Then another city might say, you're in 25th, but statistically the gap between top and bottom isn't really that significant - which is good news in my mind, that everyone's doing a pretty good job overall. Though maybe someone in Sweden or Iceland is doing way better than all the Canadian cities...

HM: Another Canadian initiative is the Canadian Index of Well-being, which I understand has been happening for a while now. Could you give us a sense of where you see that going, and its value?

MA: The Canadian Index of Well-being (CIW) started several years ago after we released our Alberta Genuine Progress Indicator in 2001. Charles Pascal of the Atkinson Foundation in Toronto, which is funding this initiative, saw that our work had hit a nerve - he said, my vision is to help change the conversations of the water coolers of the nation, and the coffee shops of the nation...

So what we're trying to do with the CIW is to provide Canadians with a way of measuring what matters, or what we think matters. That's not always easy, because as experts we have to pick what indicators we're going to report on. And how do you balance that with what Canadians might say about their values and quality of life?

This is an attempt to measure the quality of the natural environment, economic well-being, health, and community well-being and vitality. It's probably the most ambitious project we know on the planet right now to measure well-being at a broad societal level, and ultimately get Canadians to expand the conversation.

HM: And in terms of the sustainability of this effort, would it be something which would be taken up by government, or funded by Atkinson, or...?

MA: Well, the initial investment is by Atkinson. Joseph Atkinson was the founder of the Toronto Star newspaper, which is the largest independent newspaper in Canada. But we're working closely with government - with Statistics Canada, with Environment Canada, with other government ministries, because we want them to support ongoing inventory, data collection, and analysis.

So the CIW is being developed by independent researchers, including myself on the ecosystem health report. The beauty of being independent is that we have the flexibility of saying things that wouldn't be as easy to say when you're sitting in government, accountable to a minister. Again, we're working closely with the government agencies - they're reviewing our reports and hopefully going to provide the data down the road. Ideally we'd like this to be a non-partisan kind of initiative.

HM: That's a very important point, which brings us to some ideas about the theory behind this. If I imagine the CIW as an index or set of indices, and then some other group were to come up with a set of indices, and you had multiple sets of these, then that might get a little confusing for people to look at.

MA: Absolutely. I think the challenge is that we've got many different measurements and issues going on. People get overwhelmed, and some people might say, let's just retreat back to GDP, it's way easier and we've been doing it for 50 years.

It also demonstrates that we've got an amazing capacity to measure things now, such as from satellites - but can we ever decide on the ideal accounting framework? I'm not sure we can. The beauty of this work, I think, is that it reflects individual community values, and it's OK to have diversity.

Can we agree on a common set of indicators? I don't know - maybe never. But what will drive us to common indicators now is a set of global indicators that are already being tracked, by the UN and World Bank and groups like that. The issue then becomes, what are the local indicators that are more meaningful at the local level, that need to be collected and tracked at the local level?

HM: Do you see in the longer term, then, a world where we converge on a small set of indicators which we all agree on - CO2 concentrations and so forth - but then have diverse indicators at the local level, which might reflect local values or cultures, or ecological conditions?

MA: Exactly. There will be some common indicators like how much arable land do you have, what's your ecological footprint, inequality measures. We can use science, we can use epidemiology, we have all kinds of ways of saying, what do we think are baseline common measures that everyone would agree are important to quality of life? You start with basic needs - food, shelter, clothing - and then you can create layers on that.

So yeah, I think there are some obvious common indicators, and then some unique ones that are going to be culturally sensitive.

HM: Speaking of multiple indicators, one key issue is how do you handle having 2, 5, 10, 30, 100 indicators? One interesting method you had was a "flower graph" with a sort of radial layout where each indicator's length from the centre reflected how high it was on the scale. That's a way of comparing a large number of indicators at once, and maybe understanding at at a graphical level how they differ.

Do you have any ideas as to other kinds of methods that could be used, either to display a whole bunch of indicators, or to combine them in a nuanced kind of way?

MA: I found that with the "flower graphs", you can cluster related indicators into one petal, to show a theme. I've used these graphs with Santa Monica, here in Alberta, and in China, and found that it's the most effective way of showing a complex set of indicators that aren't necessarily comparable - you can't relate GDP and suicide rates in terms of the actual units of measure, but you can say that more GDP is better than less, and less suicide is better than more.

So you can create ways of translating the raw data - the suicide rate, say - into an index, out of 100 points let's say, and then create these radial graphs which show relative to historical rates how good a given community is at a given point in time. And politicians and decision-makers say oh, that petal there's pretty wilted, we've got to do something about it - it might be suicide, it might be teen pregnancy - whatever it is.

So it becomes an easy way of saying, that's where we can focus our budgeting, our community efforts. It doesn't matter if you're city council or the United Way or another non-profit organization. As compared to aggregate measures that roll everything up into one number, I've argued that we need a way of being transparent in the accounting system, and I think this technique helps.

You can always drill down on that one data point, and learn way more about what's going on with car crashes, for example - there's a story behind that one data point, and you can show trends over time with car crashes. And trends are as important as that one snapshot: in what direction something is moving is just as important as its current condition.

One thing I've found very effective is comparing GDP rates of change with any other indicator of well-being. You get some really cool pictures, like I said earlier - in Edmonton, domestic violence and commuting times going up in lockstep with GDP.

So if the city says, we want to really reduce commuting times, well, how are you going to do that? You're presumably not going to do that by slowing the economy, but if you keep going down your current path, commuting times are going to go up every year. Suddenly you can use this data to do budgeting and forecasting, which we're doing with the city of Edmonton.

HM: Hmmm, "key anti-correlations" - interesting. Just one technical question around indicators. Understanding that you don't typically want to combine them, there may nevertheless be cases where you do want to have some kind of ordinal ranking of cities or regions, by how sustainable or innovative they are and so forth. In that case, you need some way of taking a weighted average or whatever to get a single number at the end.

Now when you do that, that process is probably inevitably going to involve some degree of subjectivity, in terms of what weights you assign. So the question is, if you think about asking three different experts to take a set of indicators, and come up with a weighting to combine them all, then you're probably going to wind up with three different ways of combining them. Wouldn't it then make sense to do some kind of sensitivity analysis, to show that even though your three experts gave three different weightings and hence three different rankings, they weren't "that different"? That might give a little more robustness.

MA: Oh yeah. In fact, I did a bit of sensitivity analysis on the Alberta GPI work. And what I did is I said okay, we just finished this conversation with Canadians about what they value most. So we could reweight the indicators for Alberta by what Albertans say is most valuable to them. That takes it out of the political realm.

Currently we're saying we don't know what's most important. Experts can help us, saying we definitely need clean water, so that's number one. So we can create weights and play around with how those weights affect the composite index. But the flower diagram still avoids the problem of weighting - it just says everything is as important as everything else, and to me it says everything is interconnected. At the same time, for budgeting we say there are priorities - clean water is a priority. So yeah, we can play around with ordinal ranking as much as we want.

HM: Thank you so much, Mark. Just to ask you one last question: at a very personal level, can you tell us what you've learned from doing this as one of your life's main works?

MA: First of all, you've got to follow your dreams. Sometimes we're paralyzed by the fear of tomorrow and scarcity, but in fact it's quite the opposite - there's abundance when you let go of that anxiety. Getting your own life and household in order, getting your debt down to zero, changes the whole way you think about business.

For our family, we've actually set a revenue sufficiency goal - how much money do we need to have a good life without debt? You don't need that much money - we don't want more stuff, we don't need more stuff to fix and dust and clean. So what kind of quality of life do you want? And then you write your own business plan accordingly, and the business plan of the business is to generate enough revenue for the household. My wife and I, we have a family-owned corporation, so effectively we work for a corporation, but it's a family-owned corporation, and it makes just enough money for us (the shareholders or "care-holders") or enough billable hours, to live a fairly good life.

It's been remarkable to me that I make less now than I made when I was working in government in 1997, but we have a better quality of life, because we don't pay any interest on debt any more. That's a huge difference. 50% of most expenditures in our economy are interest embedded in the cost of all goods and services. Strip that out of your own life's expenses, you're left with way more discretionary income, to spend on things that matter more.

HM: Have you found also at a personal level that the people involved in this kind of work are a rare breed, but also relatively driven and interesting to hang around with? Do you find there's some value in that too - just to be involved with those kinds of people?

MA: Oh, it's hard to sleep at night, because there are so many exciting things to be done!

It's like you're out in the Matrix - you're Neo, but you're looking at the Matrix now, you're looking at the world and asking, where are people going so fast, where's everyone driving to? And meanwhile you're focused on slow food, and where your food comes from, and renewing your relationship with your kids and neighbors, and staying put and not moving every five years. The whole life of slowing down and just being more conscious about where things come from, and your relationship with the land and each other - suddenly there's an explosion of entrepreneurship and opportunity that you didn't have time for before, because you were so busy just trying to make ends meet and pay for the mortgage.

It's hard to stand up and make a case that moderation's really good for you. Living simply is pretty darn good, I can tell you, and most of my friends are pretty darn happy. Even going on vacation - where are you retreating to? Are we spending enough time in our lives getting in touch with what we're really about?

Slow down enough to listen, and then all you see is opportunity to do something different. And life becomes more of a party, more of a celebration of abundance.

HM: Mark Anielski, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.

MA: Thank you - it was a pleasure!

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Hassan Masum in Bright Green Economy at 10:56 AM)

Gold Farmers

Regine Debatty — 2008-05-09T09:33:01-08:00

The documentary i was dying to see at the Homo Ludens Ludens exhibition at LABoral in Gijon was Gold Farmers, by Ge Jin.

Image courtesy of Ge Jin

Gold Farmers are young people who earn their living by playing MMORPG games. They acquire ("farm") items of value within a game, usually by carrying out in-game actions repeatedly to maximize gains, sometimes by using a program such as a bot or automatic clicker.

They sell the artificial gold coins and other virtual goods they've harvested to players and/or farming organizations and get "real" money in return. Players from around the world will then use the golden coins to buy better armor, magic spells and other equipments to climb to higher levels or create more powerful characters.

World of Warcraft, image gameslander

Many companies have attempted to block the use of gold-farming services by specifically stating in their End User License Agreements and Terms of Service that any and all game assets (from the player's characters themselves, to any items that they may be carrying) remain the sole property of the company itself, and taking aggressive action to close the accounts of any that are found to be using gold-farming (or similar) services.

Although there are gold farmers or gold farms in countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, and Mexico, Chinese are by far the most dynamic. There, young players typically work twelve hour shifts, with just a lunch break somewhere in the middle.

There are gold farmers or gold farms in other countries as well, such as the Philippines, Indonesia, and Mexico. However, they do not approach the scope and scale of the Chinese farm industry.

Image courtesy of Ge Jin

Ge Jin, a 30-year-old Shanghai native and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, San Diego, has shot a Gold Farmers, a documentary that delve into the background and lives of Chinese gold farmers.

Gold farming puts down the mechanisms that govern a universe in which everyone starts at the same level, no matter how rich their parents are, no matter how many degrees they've collected at the university. Players trying to work their way up according to the rules and in all fairness are the ones who get hit hardest by the practice of gold farming.

Watching the documentary, you can't help but feel some compassion for the gold farmers: they have very little free time, they are paid quite poorly to feed the whims of the Western consumer, they have to deal with the ire of a family who doesn't approve of what they do for a living, they must face the hostility of other players as soon as these realize that gold farmers are on their turf, their english is not good enough to enable them to communicate with other players, and they work hard. Don't be fooled, they don't sit there for hours just for the fun, most of their activity is extremely repetitive. In fact they would sometimes end their day at the "factory" by playing a real game in WoW. Just for the fun.

Chinese Gold Farmers Preview video (Ge Jin has uploaded more video previews):

I asked Ge Jin to discuss his documentary for the blog:

First of all, is the video on show at laboral only part of the documentary you are making or is it the full version of it?

I have another 40 min. long version, but this one is complete in itself as a short version.

Gold farmers have the challenging task of constantly navigating between clandestinity and the need to advertise their service. i suspect that finding and getting the "gold farmers" to talk must have been difficult. how did you locate the players and how did you gain their trust?

It is indeed difficult to get into the exclusive "gold farming" circle. But I was lucky to have an old friend in Shanghai who was running gold farms from 2003 to 2005. This friend introduced me to some gold farm owners. But the reason that the gaming workers/gold farmers trusted me was mainly because I treated them with respect. They face discriminations from non-gamers who see them as game addicts who are losers in real life as well as discriminations from gamers who think they care about more about money than gaming itself. I tried to be a good listener for them and they can see I didn't approach them with many assumptions.

Image courtesy of Ge Jin

How much has the phenomenon evolved since you started working on this documentary in 2005 (it think)?

Yes I started following this phenomenon since 2005. I think the market become much more competitive and the profit margin for gold farmers are much smaller now. Meanwhile, more sophisticated services like power-leveling have become the mainstream of real money trade. Also, the domestic demand for in-game goods in China has risen so much that Chinese gold farmers no longer just work in foreign games.

In your documentary, you are neither pointing the fingers to gold farmers and saying "look this is evil!", neither are you saying that this is kind of labor embodied in play is the best thing that happened to the gaming scene. I had the feeling that you are not taking a stand. Am i right?

You are right that I'm not taking a stand. And I try to let the people involved in real money trade to tell their own stories in my documentary. But I think some of my "biases" do make their way into the documentary. For example, I don't really care if real money trade changes the regular gaming experience, I'm more concerned with how people's virtual life and real life affect each other, so you don't hardly hear the game industry's point of view in my documentary.

Image courtesy of Ge Jin

Is gold farming regarded differently in China than it is in the USA, Europe or Japan for example? Is the practice seen as more acceptable by the public and the government? How much does China try to tax and regulate the business?

Culturally, real money trade is indeed more accepted in China than in other countries. For example, the successful game Legend from Giant. Ltc thrives on incorporating real money trade in game design. Western game companies dare not do so blatantly because many gamers may think the game is not a level playing ground that way. But the Chinese gamers seem to accept this inherent unfairness, as if they see so much injustice in real life that they don't expect the virtual world to be better. The government doesn't seem to have any problem with the gold farming business. It has not figure out a good way to tax virtual trade yet, in some rare cases, some gold farms pay a fixed amount of tax based on very rough estimation of trade volume. There is currently no policy directly regulating this industry. Though there are regulations generally aiming to purify content of games and limit how long people can play online games.

Did your research on gold farming sparkle the interest of Western commercial gaming companies? Asking your help to crack down on farmers? Or asking for your opinion on how to make the most of this new form of economy?

To my surprise, I was contacted by gold selling websites who want to use my website to advertise themselves, by gold buyers who are looking for a steady supplier, and by market researchers who want to measure the supply and demand of gold trade. I wish I could seize such opportunities to make some money for myself. But unfortunately I was occupied by exploring the social implications of this economy.

Thanks Ge Jin!

Another documentary part of Homo Ludens Ludens is the fantastic 8 bit movie.

More WoW stories: The Avatar Machine, Joichi Ito on WoW, Life at the gamers' farm.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Regine Debatty in Emerging Technologies at 9:33 AM)

Give Your Grad a Carbon Clean Slate!

WorldChanging Team — 2008-05-08T12:23:14-08:00

What do you get the globally conscious grad who has everything?

If you're looking for something unique, you're probably stalling out somewhere between the hemp sandals and the solar-powered backpacks. We have the answer.

These kind of gifts offer dubious ecological benefits and a fleeting trendiness. That solar backpack, for instance, used only occasionally, might need to be worn for decades simply to balance out the energy and materials used to make it -- and do you really think solar backpacks will be cool next year, much less next decade?

And most green gifts are pretty meaningless, because little steps alone don't lead to sustainability. This is especially true for the lifestyle choices young people can make themselves. We often tell kids to start by screwing in a compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL), since they are dramatically more efficient than regular bulbs. But our lives are so ecologically damaging that Tom Arnold at TerraPass has figured out that to balance out the climate emissions from just one average American kid's Little League season, that kid would have to swap out ten bulbs. That doesn't even begin to count the food that kid eats, the house he or she sleeps in, the school he or she attends, the toys and clothes he or she buys... it's pretty obvious that most kids are going to run out of light bulbs to replace long before they reach sustainability.

The real answers to our problems, as we've said before, all lie in changing the underlying systems in our economy. Until political change is sold at the checkout counter, though, the best socially conscious gifts you can give are the ones that actually change the world directly in meaningful amounts.

That's why this graduation season, Worldchanging is proud to offer its major donors appreciation gifts that really make a difference: our Carbon Clean Slate certificates.

Growing up, few kids have the power to transform their surroundings into a bright green life. That power generally only comes as one grows older. That doesn't mean that kids don't recognize (and feel guilty about) the ways in which their lives have helped make climate change and other planetary problems worse.

Our Carbon Clean Slate gifts lift that guilt by offsetting their childhoods. They can go forward in life knowing that their emissions have been balanced by your gift, and they are free to make their own way in the world, unhampered by the past.

How it works: for every major donation above certain levels, Worldchanging will buy a major carbon offset in the name of your favorite graduate.

For $6,000, we'll offset all the climate emissions that grad racked up until he or she graduated from high school;

For $7,500, we'll offset their childhoods and their university years;

For $25,000, we'll offset their youth, college and working careers.

The offsets themselves will come from TerraPass, the gold standard company in carbon offsets. TerraPass uses independent verification (including a complete voluntary independent audit), direct sourcing of their offsets (so they know they're for real) and immediate investment (to create offsets now not later)... as well as offering full transparency about their projects. You can't find a better offsetting program than theirs.

Your grad will get a handsome certificate announcing that their slate's been wiped clean, climate-wise, along with a personalized note and a copy of the Worldchanging book. You get the satisfaction of knowing that you've made a real, demonstrable difference and honored the graduate's commitment to changing the world.

Everyone wins: Your grad gets to head out into the world with the moral weight of their personal choices lifted from their shoulders, you get to show your love and respect, the climate gets a bit of a break and Worldchanging gets the funds we need to continue our prize-winning work exploring the solutions that will create real, lasting change. Half your gift is even tax-deductible!

To buy, or to simply make a donation to support our work, please click here.

Worldchanging's Carbon Clean Slate: Because there's no better present than a better future.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Features at 12:23 PM)

A Thousand Little Pieces: A graphic illustration of what we spend our money on

WorldChanging Team — 2008-05-07T12:27:12-08:00

Posted by Clark Williams-Derry for Sightline WORDS

No point, just cool: The New York Times shows what Americans spend their money on -- and how fast prices are rising.

Check out gasoline: it's up 26 percent, year over year. But that's nothing compared to fuel oil: up almost 50 percent. Energy's up across the board, as are plane tickets and plenty of food items. (What's up with eggs? Why are they going up twice as fast as dairy products?)

Great graphic, fun tool, fascinating data -- but beware, if you don't have a lot of time to waste this afternoon, do not click.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Purchasing Green at 12:27 PM)

Collaboration Calls for New U.N. Agency to Oversee Transport Emissions

Ben Block — 2008-05-07T12:09:24-08:00

A newly formed watchdog of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is proposing that the U.N. establish a new authority to regulate emissions from high-carbon international activities such as aviation and shipping.

The International Scientific and Business Congress on Protecting the Climate, a group of climate change policy negotiators, scientists, and business stakeholders, suggested that the UNFCCC establish a World Carbon Authority to oversee a global emissions cap-and-trade scheme that would apply initially to the transport sector. They made the proposal in an open letter sent to Rajenda Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and Björn Stigson, president of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development .

The authority would be in charge of regulating aviation and shipping emissions that occur beyond a member nation's borders. U.N. organizations are currently crafting policies to regulate international transport emissions, which were exempt from the Kyoto Protocol. But Terry Barker, chair of the Congress, said he doubts those organizations can effectively hold their respective industries accountable.

"A substantial portion of emissions from aviation and shipping are outside international jurisdictions: international water, international air space," said Barker, an author of the IPCC's 2007 assessment on climate change and the director of Cambridge University's Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research. "It's difficult to see how they will be controlled.... I'm not convinced (current U.N. efforts) will be sufficient. It seems voluntary."

The IPCC estimates that aviation contributes about 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions , and emissions from the sector are predicted to grow between two- and six-fold from now until 2050. Also, because aviation emissions are released higher in the atmosphere, their contribution to global warming is two to four times the rate of emissions closer to Earth, according to a European Union report.

Maritime shipping releases twice as many greenhouse gases as aviation, or about 4.5 percent of the world's total, a U.N. report said . More-frequent shipping is likely to increase emissions 30 percent by 2020. However, shipping, which carries 80 percent of world trade, is currently more fuel-efficient than aviation.

The Congress, organized by the European Academy of Management, proposed a World Carbon Authority to consolidate climate change efforts now under way at two U.N. agencies: the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the International Maritime Organization (IMO). Both organizations are drafting independent plans to address greenhouse gas emissions. But Barker accused them of being "captured by industry."

Jeffrey Shane, former undersecretary for policy at the U.S. Department of Transportation, said that although neither organization has passed a binding policy to reduce emissions, their members have indicated a new willingness to address climate change. "The industry is beginning to get it in a way we haven't seen in the past," he said. "The notion industry will do everything in its power to prevent a meaningful approach to carbon reduction is simply at odds with the facts."

The ICAO passed a resolution in September that said it would develop market-based measures to reduce emissions by the next major UNFCCC meeting, in Copenhagen in 2009. Giovanni Bisignani, director general of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), says his industry is focused on improving fuel efficiency, finding more direct flight paths, and developing bio-based fuel alternatives. The aviation industry "is not opposed to emissions trading providing that it is fair, global and effective," he said in a speech delivered on April 22. "And the only place to achieve that is at ICAO."

IMO committees have also been debating strategies to reduce emissions, but no official policy has been proposed. The marine transport agency will hold a meeting in Oslo, Norway, in June to discuss market-based greenhouse gas emissions reductions.

Like the Congress, several environmental groups are skeptical that the ICAO or IMO will reach a binding agreement on their own. "With ICAO, it's not clear they're moving expeditiously on this," said Deron Lovaas, a transportation analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The proof is in the policy, and we just haven't seen any proposed policy that ICAO and the industry will take care of it. It's not reassuring."

So far, the only proposed mechanism to address the climate impacts of international transport has been offered by the European Union, but it has not been adopted by other nations. The policy requires E.U. airlines to join the region's Emission Trading Scheme by 2012. If other nations agreed to the policy, those nations' airlines would likewise have to buy carbon credits for flights to or from the European Union or they would face E.U. sanctions.

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute who covers everything environmental for Eye on Earth. He can be reached at bblock@worldwath.org

Photo credit: atom2bit via Flickr

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Ben Block in Climate Change at 12:09 PM)

More Choice for Women Means More Sustainability

WorldChanging Team — 2008-05-07T11:55:13-08:00

from the Worldwatch Institute

Washington, D.C.- Unwanted childbearing is a greater demographic force than the desire for large families, and may have been for centuries, suggests Robert Engelman, Vice President at the Worldwatch Institute, in his new book More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want. Expanding the capacity of all women to choose when to bear children is thus the surest route to achieving an environmentally sustainable population.

In countries that make effective personal control of reproduction possible for all, women invariably have two children or fewer on average, according to More. Such low fertility levels eventually lead to gradually declining populations in the absence of net immigration.

"It makes sense that those who bear children and do most of the work in raising them should have the final say in when, and when not, to do so," Engelman said. "By making their own decisions based on what's best for themselves and their children, women ultimately bring about a global good that governments could never deliver through regulation or control: a population in balance with nature's resources."

More, published Thursday by Island Press, explores the link between population and the environment through the lens of sexual relations and women's efforts to influence the timing of their reproduction.

Engelman, a former newspaper reporter who worked in the population and family-planning field before joining Worldwatch in 2007, interviewed women in Africa, Asia, and Latin America over a period of more than 25 years. Interspersing stories from these conversations with wide-ranging research across history and the social sciences, More delves into the roots of sexuality and procreation to discover how women's lives and status have influenced cultural evolution, history, and modern society.

The answer to "what women want," Engelman writes, is not "more children, but more for their children, and we can be thankful for that." Women have been so intent on reproducing at a time that is best for their child's survival that they have hidden their contraceptive use from their husbands and religious leaders, or have risked their lives to manage their fertility with dangerous or ineffective herbs or unsafe abortions.

Similarly, societies have at times been so intent on rooting out the use of contraception that it was banned in parts of the United States from 1873 to 1965. In Europe, the role of midwives in helping women plan births may have made birth attendants prime targets of the witchcraft hysteria of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Based on this record and contemporary findings, societies that make it easy for women and their partners to safely plan the timing of births will experience stable or gradually declining populations, Engelman contends. And that, in turn, will ease the staggering challenge of building environmentally sustainable and socially just societies.

Since its founding in 1974, the Worldwatch Institute has demonstrated how important the stabilization or gradual decline in population is for long-term environmental sustainability. That record drew Engelman to the Institute, where he directs the research strategy and continues his work on population.

"With its accessible analysis and innovative solutions to environmental problems, Worldwatch offers a perfect perch for me and a strong partnership with Island Press in helping to launch this book," he said. Engelman is posting regular blogs that appear weekly both at the Insitute's website and at a dedicated website maintained by Island Press.

"Population growth is a driving force behind some of today's most serious problems, including climate change and rising food prices," said Worldwatch President Christopher Flavin. "In More, Robert Engelman identifies an approach to population -- meeting the need for safe and effective contraception -- that can speed the transition to sustainable societies that offer lasting opportunity for everyone."

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Empowering Women at 11:55 AM)

Biopiracy in Art and Literature

Regine Debatty — 2008-05-07T10:43:27-08:00

by Regine Debatty

Back in July, while I was visiting Documenta 12 in Kassel, I saw a 16-metre-long flower-bed raised above the ground, with 70 packets of seeds sprouting from the grass, each of them carrying worrying labels that documented the latest form of Colonialism: biopiracy.

Photo documenta 12

Biopiracy describes a new form of "colonial pillaging" in which Western corporations reap profits by taking out patents on indigenous plants, food, local knowledge, human tissues and drugs from developing countries and turning them into lucrative products. Only in few cases are the benefits shared with the country of origin.

Biopiracy targets particularly countries known for their exceptionally high level of cultural and biological variety: Mexico, India, Brazil, Indonesia and Australia. This process is also referred to as "internal conquest" in analogy to the "external conquest" of colonialism.

In her Siegesgärten (Victory gardens, 2007) installation, Vienna artist Ines Doujak criticized the bio-politics of EU and the USA which turn a blind eye on the ruthless economization of nature and of life. The seed packets sprouting from the flower-bed informed visitors about global exploitation, genetic engineering and monoculture. On the front of the packets are photo-collages showing drag queens and kings and fetish secual practices set in exotic natural settings. On the back, the conditions and consequences of biopiracy are described and illustrated using real examples of the practice.

"We fear an increasing dependency on large corporations that seek to control global food production and agriculture by means of patents, from milk to bread and from baking grains to energy plants", explained patent expert Christoph Then (via no patents on seeds.)

I had kept the artwork somewhere in the back of my mind, feeling that i needed to investigate the matter deeper. Now, Doujak has collected the images and texts relating to her work in a book which is partly in German and partly in English.

This is an eye-opening book (at least for me). I don't think I'll ever shop the same way again. Except that it's not going to be easy. I can boycott a few cosmetics but how could I live without the giant which has been accused of being the "biggest threat to genetic privacy" for its alleged plan to create a searchable database of genetic information: Google? In her book, Doujak retraces many cases of biopiracy, while giving a context for the practice.

In 1980, Ananda Chakrabarty became the first person to receive a patent for a transgenic organism, a bacterium he had engineered to digest oil. Previously, life forms had been excluded from patent laws. The landmark patent has since paved the way for many others on genetically modified micro-organisms and other life forms.

Five years later, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office allowed GM plants, seeds and plant tissues to be patented. And by 1987 animal patenting followed. Today even human gene sequences, cell lines and stem cells are permitted. Corporate interests can thus corner life forms for the lifetime of a patent and have a monopoly on their exploitation. With the advent of nanotechnology comes the rise of what the Captain Hook Awards call the nanopirates, those who claim ownership of the molecules and even the elements that everything is made from.

Image documenta 12

As Ines Doujak writes in the book:

There is a clear distinction between research of public resources in the interest of all and corporate theft and privatization of the same resources.

The stories collected by the artists are fearsome, here's just a couple of them:

- Genetic material from members of some indigenous communities in Brazil and Venezuela can be purchased for 85 dollars through the Internet. It is unclear whether the samples were obtained with the full and informed consent of the individuals and of the Brazilian government. Another issue is whether there are guarantees in place to ensure equitable distribution of the knowledge and profits generated from the samples.

- A coalition of indigenous farmers in Peru protests against the multinational corporation Syngenta's patent for 'terminator technology' potatoes. The patent involves a genetic-modification process that 'switch off' seed fertility, and can therefore prevent farmers from using, storing and sharing seeds and storage organs such as potato tubers. The Indigenous Coalition Against Biopiracy in the Andes says that by commercialising such potatoes, the corporation would threaten more than 3,000 local potato varieties that form the basis of livelihoods and culture for millions of poor people. They also fear that pollen from the modified potatoes could contaminate local varieties and prevent their tubers from sprouting.

Some of the cases described in the book are comforting, they show how organized action can reverse unfair processes. That's what happened with quinoa, a plant cultivated in the Andes for 6000 years. In 1994, scientists from Colorado University were granted a patent to a Bolivian species. This means they could also control the rights to any hybrids created using the Apelawa variety, including many traditional varieties grown by peasant farmers in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Chile as well as varieties important in Bolivia's quinoa export market.

As the president of the Bolivian National Association of Quinoa Producers said at the time: "Our intellectual integrity has been violated by this patent," he said, "Quinoa has been developed by the Andean agriculturists for millennia, it wasn't 'invented' by researchers in North America." Protests proved successful: the patent was dropped in 1998.

A second case with annulment of a questionable patent concerns the Hagahai people (Papua New Guinea). Their first contact with the outside world was in 1984. Viruses and illnesses resulted in this contact decimated the Hagahai to such extent that they were under threat of extinction. Foreign researchers administered the vaccination needed but also took some DNA samples (without their knowledge). They discovered that the people is immune to leukaemia and degenerative neurological illnesses. The genetic qualities of the Hagahai were patented in the United States. Worldwide protests led to the annulment of the patent.

More images from her work at documenta, Kassel.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 10:43 AM)

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

WorldChanging Team — 2008-05-07T10:18:46-08:00

by Clay Shirky

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan's Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.

This hit me in a conversation I had about two months ago. As Jen said in the introduction, I've finished a book called Here Comes Everybody, which has recently come out, and this recognition came out of a conversation I had about the book. I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, "What are you seeing out there that's interesting?"

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system."

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first--hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we're still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there's an interesting community over here, there's an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can't predict the outputs yet because there's so much complexity.

The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff near where you're going. That's the phase we're in now.

Just to pick one example, one I'm in love with, but it's tiny. A couple of weeks one of my students at ITP forwarded me a a project started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It's a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there's an assault, if there's a burglary, if there's a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring.

Now, this already exists as tacit information. Anybody who knows a town has some sense of, "Don't go there. That street corner is dangerous. Don't go in this neighborhood. Be careful there after dark." But it's something society knows without society really knowing it, which is to say there's no public source where you can take advantage of it. And the cops, if they have that information, they're certainly not sharing. In fact, one of the things Furtado says in starting the Wiki crime map was, "This information may or may not exist some place in society, but it's actually easier for me to try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the authorities who might have it now."

Maybe this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn't, it's illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn't have imagined existing even five years ago.

So that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer. But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."

At least they're doing something.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change.

This is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on that offer. It doesn't mean that we'll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we'll do it less.

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?

Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was essentially, "Isn't this all just a fad?" You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It's fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, "This isn't as good as doing what I was doing before," and settle down. And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn't the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.

I was arguing that this isn't the sort of thing society grows out of. It's the sort of thing that society grows into. But I'm not sure she believed me, in part because she didn't want to believe me, but also in part because I didn't have the right story yet. And now I do.

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

It's also become my motto, when people ask me what we're doing--and when I say "we" I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that's what I'm going to tell them: We're looking for the mouse. We're going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?" And I'm betting the answer is yes.

Thank you very much.

Clay Shirky is the author of the book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Here Comes Everybody is about what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures. You can order the book here. Along with the book, Clay has launched a Here Comes Everybody blog, designed to both chronicle and extend the themes of the book (which you can buy here).

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

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

BIMstorm: Honing Bureaucracy, Giving Urbanism an Edge

WorldChanging Team — 2008-05-06T13:21:48-08:00

by Justus Stewart

As the recent discussions in the blogosphere attest – Andrew Rivken and Joseph Fromm in two prominent examples – we are at an interesting hurdle for climate action. Post-tipping point, we are in the exciting phase where we look around the confetti-strewn floor (post-tipping point party) and ask, "now what?"

Although we find ourselves in what has been described as a 'technology gap', I would argue that it is better understood as an implementation gap. Companies, governments, and citizens are rallying and attempting to 'solve' global warming. But the dizzying array of potential solutions is intimidating, as they are mostly untried, often politically difficult, and are sometimes proposed and debunked before decision makers had learned what the hell we were talking about, a la the recent biofuels debate. It is an incredibly challenging climate (sorry) in which to formulate policy, fund untried technologies, change behavior, or restructure our bureaucracy.

In a recent WC post, it was stated that the United States' "most important environmental policy" may well be land use reform. This may not resonate with you, but it resonated loudly enough to be picked up and presented to a group of the most progressive local elected officials in California (PDF), at their annual conference.

It is local elected officials, in the U.S., who control land use. The system is old and deeply flawed, but it is the current system, and changing it – while worthy – will be an arduous task. This obvious fact lies behind a great deal of our implementation gap. Climate change challenges all of our systems simultaneously, and our systems are poorly constructed to do anything quickly, or in coordination.

This is especially true with the other major player in land use and green building (and therefore transportation and energy): the development industry. This sector is risk-averse, non-innovative, and profit-driven. But there is one sign of hope: To the development industry, time is truly money. Waiting – for environmental reviews, permits, meetings, and weathering political battles – is so integral that these processes are often included in project budgets.

Into this fray steps Kimon Onuma, and his company, Onuma, Inc. The impact they might make is subtle, but powerful; they aim to massively reduce the time it takes to move projects from concept to construction, without sacrificing design quality or basic economics. The implication is that urban projects that are riskier and more drawn-out – and therefore less desirable and more expensive – can begin to compete with sprawl development. This is good news for transit, for urban infill, for affordable housing. It's good news for land use, and therefore for sustainability.

The Onuma Planning System and BIMstorm (BIM = Building Information Modeling) relies on a platform of web-enabled software that integrates with other software through open standards, communicating with each other to design everything from a site plan to an operations & management budget. People can potentially participate from anywhere in the world (On January 31, Onuma did a BIMstorm in Los Angeles for a multi-acre site north of downtown. 133 players from 11 countries participated in the final design. Some of the results are available here), communicating through programs as common as excel, google earth, and GIS, and as expert as Computer Aided Design softwares such as Revit and Vectorworks.

What does this process yield? "For starters," as Kimon pointed out, "we did not have 700 people flying to Los Angeles for a convention." But more meaningful is another quote. The purpose of this exercise is not to determine the final design, but "creating train wrecks ahead of time." The range of software in play is comprehensive enough to go from site plan (large-scale) to pro forma (building-by-building economic performance), and through a range of designs in a 24-hour period, resulting in the equivalent of an astonishing 2.8 million pages of documents. It allows planners, designers, builders, elected officials, and the public to review the implications of design and policy decisions as they would appear on the site. A process that was once extremely time consuming, and potentially controversial, can now be advanced in a fraction of the time.

If the cost balance in this country is to ever shift away from hinterland sprawl, and toward urban development, these tools may be part of the reason why.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Columns at 1:21 PM)

Unclogging the Water and Sanitation Crisis

Robert Katz — 2008-05-05T13:01:25-08:00

Safe tap water is a luxury that many people in the world do not enjoy. In many developing countries, it is not safe to drink or use the tap water. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posts health information about every country in the world, and it’s interesting to see how many countries fall under the following advice: "Drink only bottled or boiled water, or carbonated (bubbly) drinks in cans or bottles."

Bottled water is expensive, of course, and people living at the base of the pyramid (BoP) often cannot afford it. World Resources Institute’s research in The Next 4 Billion: Market Size and Business Strategy at the Base of the Pyramid shows that low-income customers pay anywhere from eight to sixteen times more for bottled or trucked water than they would for a local, public utility (page 58). If this isn’t a BoP penalty, then I don’t know what is.

Access to clean drinking water is a concern world-wide – but it is not the sole responsibility of government to provide it. The Next 4 Billion report concluded that there is a clear willingness to pay for clean water in the BoP. However, even if there is a willingness to pay, access to such services is not widespread, especially in rural areas. What the world needs are effective and innovative ideas on how to get these services to the people in base of the pyramid communities, and to deliver them.

In that light, Ashoka’s Changemakers has partnered with The Global Water Challenge to launch a collaborative competition to discuss and discover new solutions. WorldChangers will be familiar with the Changemakers initiative, which has run collaborative competitions for everything from ethical ideas to affordable housing and is also the source of cool concepts like the Social Entrepreneurial Solutions Mosaic and the Changemaker Innovation Awards.

The latest competition, Unclogging the Water and Sanitation Crisis, opened back in January. It will close on Sunday; 9 finalists have been selected by the community, and voting is open. If you haven't already, drop by the Changemakers site and vote - it only takes a few minutes, and your voice actually counts (three winners get $5,000 cash and are eligible for up to $1 million worth of Global Water Challenge grants).

In an era when most decisions - political, business - are made in back rooms away from our inquiring eyes, Changemakers represents real change (pun intended). By opening up the decision making process to anyone with a web connection, they are democratizing (and crowdsourcing) at the base of the pyramid. Happy voting...

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Robert Katz in Columns at 1:01 PM)

Pangea Day

Craig Neilson — 2008-05-05T04:10:19-08:00

Pangea Day is May 10: A global film event showcasing short films made to inspire and compel social change. We first reported on Pangea Day when creator Jehane Noujaim was awarded the TED Prize as a project spring-board in 2006.

When we checked in with Noujaim a year later, the plan was to choose a line-up of short films: 10 winners from 30 finalists. The films were announced a few days ago: There are fifty - and they look fantastic.

On Saturday, these films will be shown at more than one thousand events. They'll be broadcast on more than 20 television networks, as well as over the web and to mobile phones. The program is a four hour "global campfire" including short films, guest speakers and live music. It will be subtitled in seven languages.

What's fascinating is that Pangea Day is so largely a community event. Despite Nokia's sponsorship and a fair amount of celebrity involvement, the majority of Pangea Day events ('Friends of Pangea Day Events") are making use of willing grassroots networks to succeed.

The films have been provided, for the most part, by people and organisations very close to the subject of their work. The Friends of Pangea Day events are numerous, non-profit and advertised predominantly by email lists. The broadcasting partners will download the content by satellite, free.

There's a lot of power in grassroots networks, and Pangea Day will succeed if only a reason to meet up and check in with what's going on in the world. It could soon be a relevant and meaningful shared experience for a lot of people - something to inspire and compel the group action and social change Noujaim and partners set out to achieve. Pangea Day doesn't tackle all the issues head on, but by presenting them in an emotive and personable way, maybe the people that watch it will get a sense that they are responsible for doing so.

With so many events, the first Pangea Day looks to have an honest shot at causing a change in perspective for a lot of people. The films offer a wide range of perspectives to choose: (my highlights from this menu follow)

2 Men, 1 War, 33 Years On...
Having fought on opposing sides during the brutal Lebanese civil war, two men reconcile openly with their violent history to find forgiveness.
Lebanon

Elevator Music
Problems arise when a conservative old man walks into the same lift as a 15-year-old girl who likes to play loud music from her mobile phone.
United Kingdom

Endless Journey
Two boys from opposite sides of town have breakfast.
Sri Lanka

Ji-Hee's Candlelight
Ji-Hee, a 16-year old high school student in South Korea, let very little come between herself and her studies. But in June 2002 her world changed when two 13 year old girls were run over by a U.S. Military armored vehicle.
South Korea

Encounter Point
The most important story in the Middle East is not being told on the nightly news. The true heroes of this conflict use something more powerful than bullets and bombs. This is the story of people who lost everything except the courage to face their enemies.
Occupied Palestinian territories

Laughter Club
Laughter Club explores the world of Indian laughter clubs and the life of a man who has a dream of staging the world's first laughter competition.
USA

Moving On
In a traffic jam in Mumbai, levels of irritation and frustration are rapidly rising. An announcement on the radio explains that the traffic situation is a lost cause as a building has collapsed up ahead, leaving everyone, in more ways than one, stuck. And, as is natural, people react in different ways.
India

Mutual Recognition
This short documentary offers a unique and intimate perspective into the thoughts of a Moroccan imam and his wife as they discuss their romance. They describe their thoughts about how to build a deep, trusting, and enduring relationship in this film that shows the specific ways the Islamic faith relates to the universal concepts of love and respect.
Egypt

New Orleans For Sale
A gripping short film examining life in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
USA

Wild Snowman
The population of wild snowmen is shrinking due to hunting and the warming of our planet.
USA

Pale Blue Dot
In 1990, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft took a photograph of the planet Earth from a distance of 4 billion miles.
USA

Walleyball
Walleyball documents the world's most illegal game of volleyball – played at the U.S.-Mexico barrier. On one side, helicopters and machine guns; on the other, mariachi bands and families sharing popsicles. Between them, a fierce battle – not of mere volleyball players, but of human citizens who would be free to play together against those forces determined to keep them apart.
USA

The Ball
Children in Mozambique have found an interesting way to make a football.
Mozambique

I implore Worldchanging readers to be a part of this. Auckland readers: might see you there!

Image credit: Flickr/Looking Glass

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Craig Neilson in Columns at 4:10 AM)

Book Review: Seven Wonders

Sarah Kuck — 2008-05-02T17:26:53-08:00

In Sightline’s new book Seven Wonders for a Cool Planet: Everyday Things to Help Solve Global Warming, Eric Sorensen and the staff of Sightline Institute created a pithy, action-oriented book dripping with insightful Worldchanging ideas.

Seven Wonders uses everyday items, from the bicycle to the ceiling fan, the clothesline to the library book, to show that we need to look no farther than our own backyards to find much of what we need to change the world.

About the book from the book:

SevenWonders for a Cool Planet is not another book of tips. Like its antecedents in the “seven wonders of the world” lineage, it's a guide to miraculous human-made things. The twist about these wonders is that they already surround you. This book is an ode to seven everyday devices you probably already own or use, which are so powerful, elegant, and in most cases simple, that they are and always have been friends of the climate (and
also of your pocketbook, neighbors, health, and children). It's a reminder of everything that's right about our lives, not everything that's wrong. More subversively, SevenWonders is a way to think—illustrated seven ways—about solving the climate crisis once and for all: by designing sustainability into the very heart of our lives, communities, institutions, and economy. It's a way to reimagine the problem, starting with a few mostly low-tech tools and notions. Each of the seven wonders carries the weight of a larger idea, a more encompassing way to see the global-warming challenge and its solutions.

This 120-pager offers tasty ideas and bits of information that are sure to grab the attention of just about anyone. People who are already into the climate change movement can find fascination within the lines that the Sightline team draws between how common items and the climate crisis, like with the tomato:

As recently as the 1950s, the fruits and vegetables eaten in most major cities were grown on nearby farms, a likely reason New Jersey, lying between the cities of New
York and Philadelphia, came to be called "the Garden State." But refrigerated transport, interstates, and advances in storage quickly took the show on the road. By 1996, more than 90 percent of fresh produce was moving by truck, according to research by David and Marcia Pimentel, authors of Food, Energy, and Society. And the distance food travels is only growing longer as global trade and cheap oil make it easier to send produce around the planet…So even in the peak of summer, when tomatoes are ripening in gardens around the country, American supermarkets will sell mass-produced hothouse tomatoes from Canada and Roma tomatoes from Mexico. The result: tens of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide emissions, often when nearby food choices can be grown, processed, and shipped with much less energy.

People who need an entry point into the climate change movement will hopefully find Sightline’s examples of human ingenuity and simple, affordable solutions entertaining in and of themselves, like their discussion of the how the condom can save the world:

The condom is a remarkable little device. It weighs in at a fraction of an ounce, and can be as thin as 1⁄500 of an inch, yet it simultaneously fights three of the most serious problems facing humans at the beginning of the twenty-first century: sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), unwanted pregnancies, and population growth. Those last two can have an outsize effect on climate change. With just a modest decrease in unintended
pregnancies, we can go a long way toward slowing the world's population growth and the carbon dioxide emissions that inevitably follow in each person's wake—especially the wake of North Americans. All thanks to the wonders of a flimsy elastic tube. Though it often provokes humor or embarrassment, the party hat is widely appreciated for all the good it does.

Sightline’s ability to show how simple things, like fruit and string, can help us change the world is incredibly creative and refreshing. Seven Wonders shows us we have the ability to imagine the world we want to live in just by looking differently at the stuff already laying around the house.

You can buy copies of Seven Wonders for a Cool Planet directly from Sierra Club Books , your local bookstore, or online from bookstores such as Amazon Seven Wonders for a Cool Planet: Everyday Things to Help Solve Global Warming.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Stuff at 5:26 PM)

Book Review: Verb Crisis

Regine Debatty — 2008-05-02T15:32:42-08:00

Verb Crisis, edited by Mario Ballesteros, Albert Ferré, Irene Hwang, Michael Kubo, Tomoko Sakamoto, Anna Tetas and Ramon Prat. Design by Twopoints.net (Amazon UK and ) USA

Publisher Actar says: Verb Crisis examines architectural solutions to the extraordinary conditions of an increasingly dense and interdependent world.It presents innovative projects and research through original photos, essays, and exclusive interviews with key figures from architecture and urban planning to environmental, economic, and global affairs. Confronted by shifting densities and uncharted urban transformations, Crisis tackles the conflict between the physical limits of architectural design and the demands on the practice for an updated social relevance.

With a description like that and coming from one of the most fashionable publishers in Europe, Crisis could only raise very high expectations and, of course, fail to fulfill them. Granted that I'm not an expert in crisis, I'd say that the book doesn't disappoint, it is a fantastic source for reflection and inspiration. The editors invited first-class urbanists, thinkers, researchers and architects to explore some particular projects in order to illustrate the "crisis issue:" FOA, Teddy Cruz, Shigeru Ban, Elemental, Boris B.Jensen, Hilary Sample, John May, Jacobo García Germán, Markus Miessen, Interboro Partners, MVRDV, and Takuya Onishi. There are some brave statements, some very critical views on what is being regarded as "urban crisis management" today, some inspiring examples of practices coming from Chile and other locations over the globe, etc.

But what's Crisis about exactly?

Tijuana ( image Teddy Cruz for the New York Times)

Crisis is one of Actar's boogazines, hybrid volumes that combine the flexibility of a magazine with the depth and format of a book. While previous boogazines were focusing on the most promising aspects of innovation and technological progress, this one takes a step back and questions current models of urban developments. Crisis states that to remain relevant, architecture must not connive at the economic, social, cultural and environmental challenges our world is currently facing.

The volume opens with an etat des lieux of Dubai and the many ambitious promises the city of superlatives is likely to make or break. At the risk of sounding like the usual sneering Europeans, the authors demonstrate that there are as many hopes as cracks in the glossiness of one of the most talked about real estate adventures: no matter how much money is poured into the mammoth project, the sand is an everyday reality likely to tarnish the pristine surface of the buildings, badly paid workers live in ramshackle housing, the thematically designed sets of dwellings might not always dialog well one with another, etc.

However, the chapters that fascinated me most were dedicated to:

MVRDV's Mirador building in Madrid

Foreign Office Architects' bamboo social housing in Madrid

Ecoboulevard of Vallecas near Madrid, designed by [ecosistema urbano]

- Madrid's urban sprawl and the transformation of the periphery into a space for endless rows of off-the-shelf brick and mortar apartment buildings interwoven with soulless shopping malls and a playground where edgy architects throw in some examples of their most experimental works. Jacobo Garcia-German as well as architects from MVRDV and FOA share their personal experiences, strategies and views regarding a periphery which grows at a rate of thousands of square meters per month.

Tijuana (image Teddy Cruz for the New York Times)

- California suburban housing properties being exported as symbols of wealth and progress in China or, even better, massively reproduced on a miniature scale or dismantled and loaded onto trucks to find a new life on the other side of the US-Mexico border and forming "non-conforming patterns of development."

California-based architect Teddy Cruz comments on the characteristics but also on the opportunities offered by border urbanism. Estudio Teddy Cruz's Manufactured Site takes its cue on "the resourcefulness of poverty." Families would receive a kit with an assembly manual, a snap-in water tank, and 36 frames that can be placed in a variety of configurations, serve as frames for concrete poured on site, or to incorporate materials found nearby. Cruz would pair San Diego non-profits with local Mexican government officials to funnel money to the "maquiladora industry" - corporations that have built plants in Mexico to take advantage of a labor force characterized by low wages, no health care, and no unions - which would fabricate and distribute the kits, "to give back to the communities it exploits." (via Lynn Becker).

Iquique barrio before transformation

- Chilean architecture studio ELEMENTAL was asked by the government to knock down Iquique'sinner-city slum and turn it into a viable neighborhood for the 100 families who had occupied the space illegally for 30 years. Interestingly, the architect decided to regard the housing as an "investment," he provided the families with a minimum life unit but left enough room for them to improve, build upon and customize their housing according to their own needs and tastes.

Iquique (images by Cristobal Palma for Elemental )

- the pages dedicated to Detroit invite readers to redefine their definition of crisis and of what could constitute a solution to it by forcing them to see Detroit as a place for healthy suburbs in the making rather than a city in decline. Urban design, planning and architecture firm Interboro Partners have been investigating the Detroit suburbs and discovered what they call "blots" - lots that that get bigger and better when homeowners take, borrow, or buy adjacent lots. The phenomenon give rise to a new form of "suburbanism".

Image Forgotten Detroit, via Land+Living

Blot opportunities

- the "BioMed City" scheme regards cities as prone to public health crisis and argues that cities worldwide need infrastructures dedicated to studying and fighting infectious diseases.

- there's a gripping story about Fresh Kills Landfill (Staten Island) set to become the 2,200 acres Fresh Kills Park . Far from being all cheerful and optimistic (that would be hard to achieve with a name like that), the pages remind us that if the life of a consumer goods inside our houses is quite short (there's always a model which has the virtue of being shinier and full of even more promises), its synthetic corpse disappears after a very slow and hideous process. Set in 1948, the dump could be regarded as being the largest man-made structure on Earth, with the site's volume eventually exceeding the Great Wall of China.Closed in March 2001, the landfill had to be temporarily reopened in order to receive and process much of the debris generated by the 9/11 attack (via). The debris was later removed into various locations, including museums and steel mills. The happy green plan to create a public park three times bigger than Central Park has to meet with system able to control leakage of methane gas and toxic leachate .

Image cryptome

Along with the spotlights on several crisis location there are interviews with urbanists and architects:

- Shigeru Ban explains why architects do not get much respect in Japan, discusses how he creates strong and resistant architecture using weak materials, like paper tube to build emergency shelters for Rwandan refugees, bridges, churches, houses and offices, how he manages to finance his social contribution architectural projects and why he hates the hype built around the "sustainability" label.

Paper bridge over the Gardon River in Southern France

- i also discovered the work of Takuya Onishi. The architect designs mobile, ultra-light, inflatable, air-delivery or foldable structures that respond to challenging and emergency situations. Because in his view, private companies take decisions much faster than governments, Onishi developed some fascinating way to hijack commercial powers in order to finance and develop his project (most notably with the . FedEx Pak Project)

Air Drop Bubble Shelter

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Regine Debatty in Cities at 3:32 PM)

Nau: An Elegy

Alex Steffen — 2008-05-02T12:22:17-08:00

I just got off the phone with Ian Yolles at Nau, and have some sad news to convey: Nau is going out of business.

The immediate spur for this decision, Ian says, was the Nau team's inability to close the deal on their next round of funding. Needless to say, volatile recessions are a hard time to raise money for innovative concepts.

And innovative Nau has been. From writing a new form of corporate charter that literally incorporated sustainability and social responsibility into the the business' core to pioneering new materials and a great new retail concept, the webfront, Nau has been not just a leader, but way out there ahead of everyone else. They have been allies, and we'll miss their boldness.

Nau has failed as a business. At the end of things, though, it's important to remember that there are different kinds of failures, and not all of them are tragic. To me, Nau has been the best kind of failure: a smart, creative, energized bunch of people who saw something wrong with the world, thought they saw how to do something better instead, and went for it with everything they had.

In the process, Nau has prepared the ground for a whole crop of innovations and new thinking. That they will not be the ones to harvest the benefits of that crop is disappointing, but shouldn't dim our view of what they've accomplished.

I'm sure today's a tough day down in Portland, but I hope when the microbrews get poured tonight, the Nau team keeps what it has accomplished in mind. Nau is a "failure" that's changed the world for the better.

(And if you want to show that you agree, leave a comment here saying so, then go over to their site and buy something -- it's all 50% off -- and help them close down gracefully.)

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Alex Steffen in Columns at 12:22 PM)