I think urban farming is one of the most hopeful developments to come down the street in a long time. First of all, it encourages the practical economic advantages and benefits of raising and consuming food locally. But its importance goes beyond that for me. I am sometimes asked why I spend my time writing about farming and gardening when, it is suggested, there are more important topics to which to apply my talents. That, in one sentence, indicates one of the most troublesome cultural problems that modern society faces today: the notion that food-getting is not an important enough subject to merit the close attention of all of us.

First of all, if you let big food business rule the roost in agriculture, you are going to get just what you pay taxes for: more big food business. For example, most people don’t even know that they are eating potatoes that have been genetically modified to kill potato bugs. If sometimes you get a notion that potatoes don’t taste as good as they used to, you just might be right. The potato bugs would surely agree with you.

But there’s something else that I think is important in this regard. The fact that our country has become divided into so-called red and blue states is an outcome directly traceable to the urban-rural division of our society. This is something of a simplification, but food producers and their social allies tend to vote red and food consumers and their social allies tend to vote blue. The division is thought to be between conservative and liberal philosophies, but it much more reflects the difference between rural and urban values. (There are plenty of urban conservatives and rural liberals.) This division is hopefully coming to an end but has a long way to go yet. We are doing a fairly good job of bringing the city to the countryside but a very poor job of bringing the country to the city-side. Both sides need each others’ viewpoints for good government and social interaction. A good way that we can heal the friction is to bring farming to the city. There is nothing that will cure an overly zealous wildlife lover quicker than to make a farmer or gardener out of her. On the other hand, there is nothing that will change the overly-isolationist view of life cherished by rural people quicker than bringing them into close contact with city life. The rural dweller may think that all those rules that cities make are silly, — until he is surrounded by suburbs.

It has become common to say that food is everybody’s business. The only way I know to become convinced of that fact is to grow some food yourself or at least live right next to someone who does. Otherwise it is so easy, especially if you have plenty of money, to demand totally “organic” food: no pesticides, no hormones, no antibiotics, no chemical fertilizers, no manure, no nothing except pure undiluted water and air and leaf compost touched only by the wings of angelic organic growers. Try to grow some of that angelicly pure food yourself and you will quickly realize that whatever you get paid for it, it ain’t enough.

Try to raise livestock and chickens as lovingly as you would raise a child as so many non-husbandmen think we should. Then have a ram plant its horns or head into your rear end, dislocating a disc or two in your back. Rams and bulls and roosters are very effective educators of new farmers who think our time-honored rules of husbandry are too cruel. Go ahead. Don’t dock your lambs. You might get lucky. You might even be on the trail to a better practice. But after you have scraped the maggots out of the lamb’s hide and then watch it die anyway, come talk to me.

I like to tell the story of an editor friend of mine who worked on my books at Rodale Press back in the days when we were first trying to champion environmental ways of farming. I told her once that I had just that morning shot a groundhog that was ruining my garden. She was horrified. She could not believe that someone who appeared very civilized (in those days I could appear very civilized when I needed to) would do such a beastly thing. A couple years later, she succumbed to her own desire to farm environmentally. She and her husband bought a place in the country and began garden farming in earnest. About a year later, I met her again at a conference. She came up to me and said she wanted to apologize for the callous way she had treated me when I said I had killed a groundhog. She explained, after swearing me to secrecy:

“Last week I finally cornered the groundhog that was tearing up my plantings. It was in the tool shed. I killed it with a shovel, the only weapon handy.”

Illustration: Tonyç

via OrganicToBe

To live in the modern person is to be a purchaser of things. We all shop.

Many of us are paying more attention to the quality and impact of the things we buy. More and more of us are questioning how much we shop and whether we need so much stuff in the first place. But in the last few years, there’s a been a quiet revolution emerging in where and how we shop as well.

Right now, many of us in the developed world shop by driving to large chain stores — this is especially true in North America, but has become common elsewhere too. The problem is, this way of shopping adds an enormous ecological burden to all the good we buy: not only do we burn gas getting to the store and back, but the building and operation of that store and its parking lot have a huge impact; the supply chain that keeps huge stores stocked with masses of various kinds of goods adds more impacts; while the packaging and sales presentation of the goods we buy tops it all off with more energy and materials waste. From the lighting to the loading docks, the freezer cases to the shopping carts, conventional retail is unsustainable.

Retail today has other costs as well. Big chain stores are not generally known for their excellent labor practices, meaning that part of the savings we get by shopping in them comes from the mistreatment of the people who serve us while we’re there. The kinds of volumes that it takes to stock big box chain stores means that these stores will only buy things in huge orders, often from the lowest-cost big provider, which often means supporting sweat shop work conditions, factory farmed food or toxic knock-off products. Furthermore, because the backstories of the objects they sell is often so atrocious, big chain stores are often at the forefront of fighting transparency and labeling laws (Walmart’s latest effort may or may not be an exception to the trend).

Not all chains are as bad as this, of course, and certain leaders, like Marks and Spenser, have shown that even giant retail corporations can take seriously their ethical obligations and offer better products, with clearly labeled impacts, in more energy-efficient stores. But there are real limits to how much the model of big box, auto-dependent chain stores can be improved.

A better model is emerging. Innovative companies that are changing not only their stores themselves, but how the whole experience of shopping works and what it means. Think of it as bright green retail.

What are the main components of this better way of shopping?

*Webfronts: having stores which work as the physical showroom for a virtual store, which let you try clothes on, try tools out, and so on, and then order the thing online for later delivery, saving money and facilitating smaller storefronts, minimal stock costs and car-free shopping.

*Flexible spaces: sharing under-utilized spaces between multiple businesses, for instance, having two restaurants share one space by offering meals at different times of the day, which cuts down on their costs and maximizes the use of the facility, lowering its ecological impact.

*Microcommerce: direct purchases from a producer (whether at a farmer’s market or an online service like the craft site Etsy) means more of your money goes to supporting that producer, rather than middlemen and brokers. Increasingly, there are even stores and markets designed to mix the webfront model with microcommerce, offering sample products from small-scale producers, like São Paulo’s Endossa.

*Backstories and display transparency: backstory management has become a big trend, provoking leading companies to explore new ways to not only try to track everything that went into their products but where and how they were made. Increasingly, these backstories are being built into the brand identity of the product itself, and detailed information about their origins and performance is being made available online (sometimes without a company’s permission). When companies actively engage in transparency, though, they also gain another benefit: they can offer their customers participatory retail experiences, allowing them to pick the precise origins and characteristics of the products they will by, down to the farmer that grew their coffee, or the worker who assembled their laptop.

*Delivery: the shipment of good from producer to store, and store to customer has been undergoing a rapid shift, with a move toward low-impact shipping and home delivery from centralized locations, both of which save enormous amounts of energy. Even bigger savings are to be had through dematerialized delivery (Netflix streaming a movie to your TV instead of you picking up a DVD at the video store) and decentralized manufacturing (having a neighborhood fabber where you can go to pick up a printed-out version of the product you’ve ordered online).

*Dropshops and reverse supply chains: as producer responsibility and zero waste laws become more common, “reverse” supply chains — systems for taking back products, breaking them down, recycling and/or salvaging their parts and then getting them to the appropriate manufacturer for reuse — become needed parts of the commercial system. Some leading thinkers have begun to imagine that returning used products may become a major part of the shopping experience, that special stores may even emerge to facilitate consumer returns (I like to think of them as “drop shops”) by offering a cafe setting, public information on the future fate of the returns dropped off in that store, and affirmation of the consumer’s effort. This would make a chore more pleasurable while building further brand loyalty in shoppers who can look forward to enjoying returning a product almost as much as they enjoyed buying it. Perhaps they’ll even shop for the replacement while they’re there.

No single one of these innovations will suddenly reverse the massive damage mega-scale retail is doing to the planet (and our communities), but taken together, they offer the outline of something pretty exciting: a smarter way of connecting to better stuff, with a smaller impact on the planet.

Illustration: Darwinbell

via World Changing

Diplomatic Standards is an attempt at organizing the chaos of the current organic industry on a global scale and openly. We are an active community that believes that you should understand the importance of having an unclouded source of sustenance. You and I, together with anyone that believes in the quality of the food they eat, now have the opportunity to ensure that outcome.

We would like to issue a call out to anyone and any organization to come and actively participate and collaboratively work to implement a new global standard and enforcement apparatus that can ensure safety and compliance. Diplomatic Standard is a direct response to a current global organic industry that is full of ambiguity, fraud, turmoil and that maintains a closed system.

Where Diplomatic Standards fits

It is of no secret that current national standards were created as deliberate pure marketing efforts to expose the organic concept to consumers. Pressured by the major firms in the agricultural industry, many governments had since setup numerous apparatus towards the effort of promoting organic goods to farmers and consumers alike. It was also within the judgment of the consumer that these governmental frameworks would protect, enforce and uphold the true idea behind the term organic as it was understood and believed to be.

Regrettably, during the course of this remarkable growth of the industry globally, the organic image has unnecessarily immensely deteriorate and has prompted a need for a new approach. The idea of Diplomatic Standards is to use current technology to form a global, bottom-up, open standard where all parties can truly collaborate in reaching consensus and whose primary mission is for transparency and decentralization. Diplomatic Standards is positioned to place itself as the third choice within a two system framework that is currently composed of either conventional or organic foods.

Where within any system, the fundamental conflict exists where vendors by nature compete to capture the largest market share possible whereby raising costs vs. the market at large which seeks lower costs and freedom, Diplomatic Standards’ goal is to remove this conflict by empowering the individual with universal access to the standard’s process – made possible through modern technology.

Illustration: Darwinbell

When purchasing fruits and vegetables, I believe, for most, freshness is of priority. However, buyers may not have a keen eye for discerning a particular fruit’s freshness nor even its edibility – considering that vendors do wax-coat their apples, brush and fluff their pears so that they appear to be fresh. Peas and other greens are dipped in dye for a ‘greener’ look – not to mention the practice of having ground meat warped in plastic bags made for that specific purpose of diminishing the grayish look of dated meat. The truth is, trust of vendors is neither necessarily an affordable nor a worthy practice.

This is where the concept of the Fresh Code comes in. Conceived from the folks at Yanko Design, this bar code diminishes gradually based on the freshness of a particular item. It intelligently displays through a graph the freshness level of the item as time passes until it reaches ‘0′ indicating that item should be thrown away.

Beneficial to any supermarkets, another purpose might include lessening all together the vendors effort at managing products saleability through this improved visualization of freshness. I for one would find its implementation very useful, which would include alleviating doubts of my veggie freshness through a similar achievable standardized concept.

If a ‘natural and organic’ supermarket such as Whole Foods sells the same junk as everyone else, then what’s the point?

Not long ago I made one of my periodic forays to Whole Foods, the all-natural-groceries conglomerate. My assignment was to buy a Christmas ham from a pig that had not suffered unduly, and that was relatively free of chemicals and antibiotics.

I was somewhere between the Amy’s organic soups and the own-label cans of vegetables when I came upon an unexpected sight: bottles of Heinz regular ketchup that, like much of the industrial food that comprises the American diet, is sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

As you may know, HFCS is among the laboratory-created synthetic foods targeted for elimination by activists, most notably the journalist Michael Pollan in his influential book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Though scientific opinion differs on whether HFCS is any worse for you than regular sugar, there’s little doubt that its cheap ubiquity – a consequence of misguided government farming subsidies – has contributed significantly to our epidemics of obesity and type-two diabetes.

Thus I considered it a breach of faith that Whole Foods would carry such a product. Shopping there means you’re going to pay more and drive farther than if you simply stocked up at the nearest supermarket. In return, it doesn’t seem too much to ask that you be spared from having to worry about ingredients such as HFCS. So it was with a perverse sense of anticipation that I started reading Nick Paumgarten’s 9,100-word profile of Whole Foods founder and chief executive John Mackey in the current issue of the New Yorker.

As Paumgarten observes, Mackey has stepped in it several times in recent years, engaging in embarrassing (and legally dubious) internet sock puppetry with regard to his acquisition of Wild Oats, a rival chain, and writing a commentary for the Wall Street Journal in opposition to government healthcare reform. The latter enraged his largely liberal customer base, engendering brief calls for a boycott.

What makes the New Yorker article valuable, though, is the way Paumgarten captures Mackey’s “crazy uncle” and “right-wing hippie” personae and places them in the context of his radical libertarianism. In the course of talking (and talking, and talking), Mackey reveals an important contradiction that illustrates why Whole Foods simply isn’t as good as it should be. On the one hand, Mackey, now a vegan, is absolutely committed to healthy food. On the other, his naive belief in individual responsibility informs not just his contempt for government but, in a sense, for his own company as well.

Consider, for instance, Mackey’s much-criticized statement that “We sell a bunch of junk.” In fact, Whole Foods sells meat, which Mackey eschews, as well as nutritionally empty snacks. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Meat, candy and potato chips have been with us for a long time, and, in their unadulterated, pre-industrial incarnations, were considerably less toxic than they are today.

But Mackey’s libertarianism means that the consumer must always beware, even at Whole Foods. As Paumgarten writes of Mackey:

His belief in the power of the individual is such that blame falls on individuals, too. In his view, it tends to be the fault of the unhealthy or fat person that he or she is unhealthy or fat. People just need to eat better….

It matters less to him that our food system, for a dozen reasons, … has been rigged to deliver unhealthy food at artificially low cost to a misguided public. People have the power and the means to choose rice and beans over Big Macs, and when they fail to do so they bring ruin on themselves, and on everyone else.

The trouble with this type of thinking is that, at its end point, it’s our own fault if we buy ketchup loaded with high-fructose corn syrup – even if we got it at Whole Foods. After all, there was a shelf full of Heinz organic ketchup next to the regular variety. If you choose the cheap stuff, what concern is it of Mackey’s? Whole Foods is a store that sells “a bunch of junk”, not a shrine.

Except that Mackey misconceives an important part of his business. At a time when even Walmart is carrying organic foods, the niche Whole Foods ought to fill is that of the trusted guide. If I have to walk the aisles of Whole Foods with the same label-reading skepticism that I bring to supermarket shopping, well, I might as well go to the local supermarket. It carries more natural and organic foods than it used to, it’s closer to our house and it’s a lot cheaper.

Besides, as Paumgarten writes, Mackey’s libertarianism ignores larger social and cultural forces. My wife and I would love to do better than Whole Foods – to buy most of our food from local farmers, and to leave the industrial-food system altogether. We’ve tried. But unless we are willing and able to devote a lot more time and money to the enterprise, the best we can manage is to buy produce from farmers markets during the growing season and milk from a nearby dairy.

For us, a place like Whole Foods should be an important way station between industrial food and something better. Mackey seems to understand that, but his blind exaltation of the individual misses some pretty important caveats.

Individuals live in a social setting, turning over some tasks so that they can specialise in others. I don’t want to perform my own surgery or maintain my own roads. And I don’t want to come home from the grocery store with unhealthy food only to be told it’s my own damn fault.

Especially if I bought it at Whole Foods.

via The Guardian by Dan Kennedy on 12/29/09

Illustration: Lyza

In an unusual yet stimulating proposition, The L.A Times recently covered an interesting tale of Hantz Farms buying abandoned properties in the city of Detroit with the plans of turning these plots into large scale commercial agriculture use.

Officials at Hantz Farms imagine the current trend of local food consumption must continue to grow in order to make this venture a successful investment. The idea has also gathered some support due to the hope that it might help in revitalizing the city which was hit terribly hard by the economic crisis with an almost 50% of the population either unemployed or underemployed.

In addition, aesthetically this would also allow for the redevelopment of the over one-third of the city’s 376,000 either vacant or abandoned parcels while supplying an alternative to the idea of Vertical Farms, which has yet to date neither supportive nor contradictory data for the theory.

However, no endeavour is lack of hurdles – the city must rethink its zoning laws, make plans in case of soil contamination, propertax mundanes and answer the question of who would bare the cost of parcel preperation.

Illustration: cuellar

Oxymoronic as it may sound, I can imagine plans are seriously being drawn by a major cigarette company to introduce a new line of ‘organic’ cigarettes brand in order to partake in the rapidly growing ‘green’ market and capture some ‘green’ conscious smokers.

The Organic Foods Production Act which was passed in 1992, permitted the creation of the current program in the U.S. had been classified by the USDA as a marketing initiative, not a food-safety, nutrition or an agriculture program. As with any marketing effort, the program boosted the organic industry to be $23 billion in 2007 ( €16.2 billion). Currently, the big players in the industry are starting to take notice. With that in mind, they are bringing along with them all their gimmicks and schemes in order to capture one old deity as they maintain their sacrosanct missions: market share.

The effects are already being noticed. In 2008 alone, 98 percent of green-labeled goods were found guilty of greenwashing – a term coined by Jay Westerveld in an 1986 essay attacking the hotel industry’s double standard of towel re-use in promoting green while the practice also saves them heaps of money. As more and more loopholes are discovered in the laughable American organic label and more powerful actors follow the cash; lobbying to attain their desired lax standards and watching the USDA’s list of allowable non-organic ingredients grow to cover new products, consumers find themselves buying and eating the same products found in the conventional aisles.

Under the original organics law, 5 percent of a USDA-certified organic product can consist of non-organic substances, provided they are approved by the National Organic Standards Board. That list has grown from 77 to 245 substances since it was created in 2002. Companies must appeal to the board every five years to keep a substance on the list, explaining why an organic alternative has not been found.

The goal was to shrink the list over time, but only one item has been removed so far. The original law’s mandate for annual pesticide testing was also never implemented — the agency left that optional.

It is even true that pesticides were once allowed to be used by farmers on food that are to be sold as organic when the pesticides in questioned, after a ‘reasonable review’, did not contain any chemicals found in the ban list of the National Organic Program. Now it is just common knowledge for anyone in the industry that pesticide testing is hardly ever carried out.

Deputies of the NOP know and have clearly communicated that their mission is to ‘grow the industry’ as quickly as possible. Easiest, quickest and best possible way one can imagine is to incrementally relax the standard and ‘wash’ the meaning out of what organic is meant to be. Organic cigarettes may just be the beginning.

Update: Apparently there is such a thing as organic cigarettes.

Illustration: Bukutgirl

This question must definitely be rephrased. It is not a matter of whether or not sustainable farms can feed the world, it is rather more of a question of how soon and how can we implement this goal. The notion of choice is a long gone experiment.

Arguments against this issue point to a list of factors that indicates industrial farming as the only way the world can be fed with a substantial growing population – including the listing of massive-scale farming methods as key elements in curbing climate change.

I am very much a proponent of biodiversity and any idea that undermines the Earth’s variation of life forms under a given regional ecosystem is to me unequivocally irrational and just plain uttermost self detrimental. Massive-scale farming as it is done today has proven time and time again to be of dire consequences for the surrounding wild life in any locale.

Thousands of reports and experiments can attest to one how crucial the biodiversity of our planet is to us and to everyone of it’s inhabitants. Today, how industrial farming treats the planet must undergone a complete repair as it is very much so broken. The 2008 World Bank and UN International Assessment on Knowledge, Science and Technology concluded that a fundamental overhaul of the current food and farming system is needed to get us out of both the food and fuel crises. Findings of the report acknowledges that ecological methods should be the aptly choice for the future.

Let us take an anecdotal evidence of industry scale transformation: Mosanto, the leading producer of genetically modified seeds, which sells 90% of the world’s GE seeds, recorded a loss of $ 213 million last quarter. Foreseen results like these in essence has led Mosanto to years ago strategically posed itself desperately as the key to hinder starvation in developing nations with its claim of godlike high yield seeds.

I think we’re cathing on.

Illustration: Chaval Brasil

The idea is simple. Create a platform where one can track where all the materials and parts in a good come from. A product of a research project at MIT labs, it is in essence trying to achieve a paradigm shift in product design, manufacturing and traceability. Sourcemap introduces a new dimension in product procurement and in the supply chain of the materials that a product may compose of.

No more it is nearly simply asking what the overall costs may be in acquiring the materials of a good, it has now become a joint effort in assessing a good’s life-cycle’s sustainability, exposing the external costs and our apparent prolongation of the tragedy of the commons. Transparency and social conscious are here the ultimate aim of Sourcemap, linked with an apparent immeasurable breadth of underlying calculations and open databases; It hopes to “impart environmental literacy, foster collective simulation and build solution paths where no path currently exists.”

Supply chains (as with many other social issues) have numerous metrics for success, especially determined by when and where they are established. Some of the metrics useful to determine whether a supply chain is appropriate are local interest, environmental factors, human rights – none of which can be quantified in absolute terms. When there is no single solution, it is fundamental for designers to provide the tools to initiate discussions about the variables that matter.

We also would like to note that its marketing aspect for all types of endeavours and consumer products are also none but few.

We’re nearing an inflection point in our discussions about sustainability and building a bright green future.

Mainly, this is because we’re realizing that our task is larger and more pressing than we thought even a few years ago. It’s not enough to be less destructive, to be more sustainable. We need to actually start being non-destructive, being as close to sustainable as we understand how to get. And we need to do it quickly. As Dana Meadows said, in an era where we seem to be running hard up against the limits of so many natural systems, the ultimate limit turns out to be time. If we don’t make truly massive shifts in the next decade or so, we’re committing ourselves to huge troubles; if we here in the developed world don’t transform ourselves in the next two decades, we’re committing ourselves and our descendants to catastrophe.

Given how far we need to go, how quickly (I think we need — for reasons I’ll explain in another piece — about a 95% reduction in our impacts in the next two decades), we can’t waste time on what doesn’t work. We’re being forced, I think, to look at our solutions with a colder eye and clearer judgment. What works? What scales? What has the best political chances of happening? What can make money or creative infectious behavioral change or in some other way self-replicate? What solutions, in short, could work?

Everything else — all the solutions that don’t make that cut — are at best distractions, and in our current situation, where we’re fighting in the public debate for mindshare for real change (and change-stalling propaganda surrounds us), even distractions are not incidental. The idea that every small step is a good thing is simply wrong.

We have inherited a whole set of solutions by conventional wisdom, many of them surrounding lifestyle choices. Almost all of us believe that someone who buys local food, who drives a hybrid, who lives in a well-insulated house, who wears organic clothing and who religiously recycles and composts and avoids unnecessary purchases is living sustainably.

They are not. As we’ve explored a bunch of times in different ways here on Worldchanging, the parts of our lives that actually fall within our direct control are the tips of systemic icebergs, and often changing them does nothing to alter those systems: not individually, not in small groups, not even in larger lifestyle movements. If we’re going to avoid catastrophe, we need to change those larger systems, and change them for everyone, and change them quickly.

It’s quite clear that some of the “solutions” we embrace don’t actually motivate people to change at all. There’s hard evidence suggesting that most of the time, small steps do not actually motivate people to later take larger steps (most people adopt a small change or two and then feel they’ve done their part and stop).

Other times, we ask people to pay attention to the wrong things. Though the efforts some contrarians’ make to discredit local food verge on the absurd, the fact remains that food miles are not the most important measurement of food system sustainability. Perhaps more importantly, some observers’ suggest that local food often serves as a substitute for systemic engagement in movements to change agricultural systems at the largest levels, and I think there;s truth there. Certainly, many of us have a tendency to engage in iconic consumption, without really examining the entirety of our impact and whether our time and money might best be spent trying to effect change in some other way.

That’s not to say that its wrong to garden or recycle or buy CFLs. It’s not. It’s never wrong to try to live a life that’s internally consonant with the change we want to see in the world. Most of those life choices also make us healthier, happier and better off in the long run. So no harm in doing them (disclosure: I garden, recycle and use CFLs). Some personal choices, like forgoing beef and living without a car, not only create some measurable impact, they’re also public enough to signal your beliefs. But we still shouldn’t mistake these things for creating sustainable systems. Until we have systems that reduce the numbers of cows and cars we all use, we’re not making any real progress at all.

We can no longer afford to mistake the symbolic for the effective, or put our hopes in the mystical idea that if enough of us embrace small steps, our values will ripple mysteriously out through the culture and utterly transform it. We’ve been saying that for more than 40 years, it hasn’t happened and we need to stop lying to ourselves that it will. Live the life that fits your values, but don’t mistake that for changing the world.

Far too much of the debate about sustainability still orbits around ideas of smallness, slowness, simplicity, relocalization that often obscure the reality of our lives from us. Their main virtue is that they make incredibly complex systems that we cannot change alone seem susceptible to easy understanding and quick transformation through personal choice. In other words, they let us deceive ourselves in ways that are extremely comforting.

We need to be better than that. We need to be bigger than that. We need to understand that a bright green future will look like nothing that has ever come before, and will involve us changing the fabric of our lives, not just the ornament. It will involve needing to be more connected to global networks of people working towards change, more committed to seeking understanding and transparency in complexity, more engaged with systems that make us feel small — because we are small, and the world is complex, and we can’t do this alone.

We’re redesigning our civilization. We need to be people who are tackling the most important systems around us, employing tools that can change them quickly at scale. We need to get comfortable talking policy, working in parallel collaborations, thinking in systems, understanding infrastructures and markets and flows, and using money to power comprehensive transformations.

The opposite of democracy is depoliticization. The idea that “regular” people can’t do this is insultingly elitist, psychologically isolating and inherently depoliticizing. Of course we can. Even those of us who lack formal education in these fields are entirely capable of contributing in important ways to big efforts — if we learn to think of ourselves as connected and collaborating, and start to pay more attention.

Ah, attention. Some will stop there and say, “people are lazy! they won’t pay attention to anything!” There’s some truth to that. We are primates are lazy, inclined to sit around, much sweets and groom each other. But we’re also curious, and passionate.

Many of us want to know how things work around us. Many of us feel passionate about the need for change. The simple hard reality is that the powers that be are incredibly effective at working to disillusion us, to make us too cynical to act in our own best interests, so overwhelmed by jargon and bureaucratic process that we get bored and go home. We are apathetic and disengaged in some very large part because that’s the way some people want us to be. That’s a hard truth, but still truth.

The answer to that apathy and disengagement is not to demand less from people. That hasn’t worked. Instead, I think, we need to regard not being boring as one of our cardinal design principles. We need to make change interesting, and fun, and provocative, and full of good times and relationships with others and meaningful work. We need to approach complex, vast systems in terms of art, and game design, and public festivals every bit as much as in terms of reports and committees and NGOs. We need a cultural movement, for sure — it just has to be a cultural movement aimed at making systems geekery a passionate part of the lives of regular people.

That, ultimately, is the biggest problem with the hand-made approach to sustainability: even when it works, it makes us passionate about small things in our lives, not engagement with the world. Visiting a neighbor’s great backyard garden may well encourage me to want to grow my own; it doesn’t encourage me to understand global agrobusiness, connect with food policy activists and do something to change the $2,000 in destructive agricultural subsidies the U.S. government pays with part of my taxes every year. The hand-made can be beautiful. It can be deeply personally meaningful. I’d like a world where the hand-made abounds. But the hand-made is not The Revolution.

via World Changing by Alex Steffen on 11/1/09

Illustration: zachstern