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Gradually Greening: Empowerment through Laziness
Karl Schroeder, WorldChanging
There is a secret to changing your behaviour. The trick is not to trust your own willpower. Instead, arrange conditions outside yourself such that the desired new behaviour is always your laziest option.
…Which brings me back to the notion of empowerment through laziness. It’s my personal opinion that environmentalism has never really gotten traction with most people because it styled itself as a creed: a philosophy and associated lifestyle that you had to adopt. It’s like converting to a religion; recent studies in how religions work (socially) indicate that the successful ones demand some sort of adherence price be paid by converts, whether that be shaving your head, renouncing certain foods or whatever. A steep price presupposes some level of commitment on the part of your converts. The downside is that while you keep the riffraff out, you guarantee that not everybody will want to convert. I can’t tell you whether hard-core environmentalism actually adopted this strategy, or whether public perception was that as a distinct creed, environmentalism must naturally have such commitment cost. The net result is the same: the riffraff were kept out.
At this point, we want the riffraff. Hell, we want everybody we can get. We don’t care whether people believe in some environmental ethos–all we care about is changing their behaviours.
Social and cultural revolutions are hard. In fact, this one is almost impossible within the critical timeframe of the current climate-change crisis. We just don’t have time to foment a social revolution. Luckily, we don’t need such a sea change. And when you realize that you can ignore the hard stuff–changing people’s minds–in favour of just tweaking their behaviours, then suddenly the future doesn’t look so bleak.
Imagine if all residential power meters came with an in-house monitor that told you the dollars and cents you’re using. Imagine a mileage-cost meter for your car that works the same way. And one for your water. You don’t have to convert people to make them environmentalists; all you have to do is make the previously unclear visible, and make the right behaviour into the laziest behaviour.
Great social revolutions may be started by the hard work of the few; but they’re completed by leveraging the self-interest of the many.
(10 March 2007)
US moves up Daylight Saving Time
Yasmin Schulten, Monsters and Critics
Washington – In an effort to save energy, the United States will make its annual move to Daylight Saving Time on Sunday – three weeks earlier than usual – to make use of longer hours of natural light. The change was authorized by the US Congress in 2005 to cut down on energy use.
With longer hours of daylight, Congress hopes less artificial light will be used. Clocks will be turned back again on the first Sunday of November instead of late October.
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) opposed the move from the beginning, arguing that ‘managing the exercise will add up to hundreds of millions of dollars in costs’ to the airline industry. The final tally will only be known after March 11, said IATA Public Affairs Officer Steve Lott. But he’s still optimistic about preparations, noting that the law has been known for two years. ..
(11 Mar 2007)
See here for more on the history of daylight saving in the US. This is a long foreshadowed and modest change but deserves attention for being not technology or price driven.-LJ
Fashioning a future
Maggie Alderson, Sydney Morning Herald
The days of chic foreign designer labels and cheap imports are numbered.
I’ve come over all futurologist. this came on after I bumped into a friend who is a major fashion academic and he told me he had just been at a conference in Miami about “the future of fashion in America”. I didn’t have the chance to ask Ted what conclusions they’d reached over there, but I’ve been mulling it over ever since and I have reached this one: fashion as we know it doesn’t have a future.
It doesn’t have a future any more than the internal combustion engine does. I don’t know how long it will take for the current fashion system to become unworkable, but I’m certain it will happen. Just call me Pradadamus.
Even if you haven’t seen An Inconvenient Truth, or the even more terrifying documentary about peak oil, The End of Suburbia, it can’t have passed you by that even reluctant groups such as the Bush Administration and the Howard Government are now accepting that destructive climate change, caused by man-made carbon emissions, is a big and real and scary thing. Coming now, to a planet near you.
The problem with fashion as we currently know it, within that scenario, is that it involves a lot of moving of product long distances. And unless someone comes up with an engine that works on air (and emits only the same) some time pretty soon, this is going to be less and less easy to do. And even apart from the ethical implications, it will be financially entirely unviable. ..
The scale of this unnecessary stuff-shifting really struck me last year when I was investigating the ultra-budget UK chain store Primark on your behalf. British fashionistas are obsessed with this joint because you can buy quite great jeans there for $10 a pair and amazingly on-trend pieces for $15, so I had to take a look. I went to the Brighton branch and instantly loathed it. I could see there were some amusing pieces among the hectares of utter tat, but it already looked to me like the landfill in which these one-wear wonders would soon be residing. And it got worse when I ran to the lift to escape.
Something went wrong and instead of opening on the ground floor, the back doors slid apart and I was looking into hell – the loading dock, which was stacked from floor to ceiling with great obscene bales of more crapola. I fled, but that image won’t leave me. I was looking at the bales, but I was seeing the endless convoys of container ships toting it around the world, and the massive amounts of pesticides and water necessary to produce such vast quantities of cheap cotton fabric. ..
(10 Mar 2007)
Landless Take Over Rio Bank
Staff, Prensa Latina News Agency
Rio de Janeiro, Mar 7 (Prensa Latina) Members of the Brazilian MST (Landless Rural Workers Movement) are occupying the main branch of the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES) in Rio de Janeiro Wednesday.
The action is part of the Day for Struggle in Defense of Life, against illegal agro business, promoted by MST women in all Brazil, an MST note revealed. Some 150 rural workers, union leaders and feminist militants entered the bank at the end of the morning and stated they would not leave until they are received by the bank president, Damian Fiocca, to hear their demands, including loans for production under the Agrarian Reform.
The women identified themselves as defenders of food sovereignty and biodiversity, and criticized the bank for having increased its energy investments, especially in biofuels. MST leader Nivia Regis commented that BNDES finances food for cattle and raw material for paper, but does not invest in food production for people. She said MST defends a model based on agriculture and agricultural ecology, with diversified production. ..
( 7 Mar 2007)
