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The Problem with Big Green
Alex Steffen and Julia Steinberger, WorldChanging
Do small steps actually lead anywhere? We all know the theory that small steps lead to bigger steps, which lead in turn to real change. And there are certainly a lot of small steps on offer these days, from the latest home energy tracker to the solar bikini. But it’s not at all clear that the ready abundance of small steps is actually making any difference. Indeed, between greenwashing and green fatigue, emphasizing little behavioral changes may actually be hurting.
Until recently, suggesting that “going green” in this fashion wasn’t a correct path was a quick route to condemnation. But now, some of the world’s most prestigious environmental advocates are beginning to call for a whole new approach.
WWF recently published a major report, Weathercocks and Signposts: the environment movement at a crossroads, which launches a major assault on green consumerism and social marketing as avenues to sustainability, and encourages instead a new and more committed values-based approach.
… We talked with Dr. Tom Crompton, the study’s author, who shed some interesting light on their conclusion that to create lasting change, groups working for environmental change should be targeting the intrinsic set of values that motivates the public, rather than tantalizing their extrinsic desires.
… To get beyond the small steps and change the fabric of the debate, Crompton says, we need to engage the values that underpin public discussion. For example, appeal to people’s sense of connection to the natural world. And he insists that this isn’t the same as heartstrings-tugging approaches we’ve seen before. Asking the public to save the panda out of moral obligation, because we feel guilty, is not the answer. What previous campaigns have missed is that the world we hope to build as we progress towards sustainability is not just a world that offers a better quality of life, it’s a world that’s more in alignment with the sort of fundamental values (from concern for our children to connection to nature to a sense of duty) that most define us as human beings. When we are at our best, we are capable of extraordinary things.
(25 June 2008)
Scenius, or Communal Genius
Kevin Kelly, The Technium
Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes” can occasionally generate. His actual definition is: “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”
Individuals immersed in a productive scenius will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by scenius, you act like genius. Your like-minded peers, and the entire environment inspire you.
The geography of scenius is nurtured by several factors:
- Mutual appreciation — Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.
- Rapid exchange of tools and techniques — As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.
- Network effects of success — When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.
- Local tolerance for the novelties — The local “outside” does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.
Scenius can erupt almost anywhere, and at different scales: in a corner of a company, in a neighborhood, or in an entire region.
… What Camp 4 illustrated is that the best you can do is NOT KILL IT. When it pops up, don’t crush it. When it starts rolling, don’t formalize it. When it sparks, fan it. But don’t move the scenius to better quarters. Try to keep accountants and architects and police and do-gooders away from it. Let it remain inefficient, wasteful, edgy, marginal, in the basement, downtown, in the ‘burbs, in the hotel ballroom, on the fringes, out back, in Camp 4.
(10 June 2008)
Intriguing concept. Some of this seems to be going on with peak oil and sustainability. I’ve run into it in the past working in high tech in the 80s and 90s, and in the counter-culture of the 60s.
Alex Steffen of WorldChanging was also impressed by this essay and comments on it at Scenius, Innovation and Epicenters. He writes:
…The art of courting genius is one that people hoping to solve the world’s big problems would do well to learn, because truly worldchanging solutions don’t arrive steadily or predictably on schedules as deliverables for rational investment. No, truly worldchanging solutions tend to arrive in unruly clumps, in great non-linear spills of changed thinking.
… what we need is an exploding number of epicenters, independent and creative people and groups, and well-designed networks to support them — things that set the conditions for a planetary explosion of new thinking. We need to prepare lots of welcoming spaces where genius can take roost. That’s going to take some risk-oblivious, keenly perceptive, imaginative money.
But even more, I suspect it’s going to take worldchangers understanding how valuable networked scenius is, and joining efforts to welcome it into their own lives and communities.
Methane Burps & Tele Everything (audio)
KMO, C-Realm Podcast Episode 108
KMO welcomes Dennis M. Bushnell, chief scientist of the NASA Langley Research Center, to discuss climate change and ways of combating it that don’t produce Big Brother on steroids. Mr. Bushnell also discusses the existential risks that could arise from the “simultaneous IT, bio, nano, quantum, energetics, double exponential tech revolution.”
Show notes: http://kmo.livejournal.com/358068.html
In our conversation, Dennis Bushnell makes several references to and speaks very highly of a book by Peter D. Ward called Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future
(25 June 2008)
