Features

Worldchanging Executive Editor Alex Steffen has become a respected voice of dissent in the global conversation about geo-engineering strategies. This fall, he re-enters the debate as part of the cast of front-line innovators featured in a new docu-style series from Discovery and Impossible Pictures. The program, called Discovery Project Earth, launches this Friday, August 22.

Time's insights flow in both directions: anticipating the future can help us remove contemporary blinders to understand the past in new ways, and delving into the past can give us fresh perspectives on what might be possible in the future. Or, as I wrote earlier, when trying to explain the importance of environmental history, "The past is still doing its work in the present, and understanding that past gives us leverage on the problems we face today."

A few weeks ago, we asked if you would help us imagine what comes after green, to imagine the sustainable society that we both need and want to live in. Many of you responded with clever, inventive and thought-provoking ideas for building that world. Some of you called for a world where no one went homeless or hungry, where no one had to fight in senseless wars and where no one suffered abuse. Others called for an end to institutions and infrastructure as we know them, suggesting more functional and sustainable alternatives to our transportation, education, economic and waste systems.

And although each idea presented an imaginative and inspiring vision, we (as promised) have selected our favorites. Our choices were made because they are possible, positive, innovative and concrete. So without further ado, here are the winners:

For the last three decades, it's been more or less assumed that globalization was a force that moved in only one direction -- towards ever-greater integration.

And due to the logic of global trade, the assumption of ever greater integration led to the prediction that manufacturing would continue to move from countries with low labor costs to those with even lower labor costs and even looser laws, while supply chains would tend to grow ever-longer and more complex. The world would grow flatter.

So far, these predictions have held true, but will they always? For the first time in recent decades, it seems there are now real reasons to question the logic underlying the official future of ever-increasing global trade.

Normally, I try to think in planetary terms and avoid parochial nationalism, so it's somewhat ironic that today a global perspective actually leads me to believe that what happens in America over the next 18 months is the most important global uncertainty we face. As we choose how to confront a host of planetary problems -- especially climate change -- will we have an America that leads or drags?

Al Gore stood up and showed what an America determined to lead would look like last week when he delivered a sharp speech calling for a bold policy -- the complete conversion of our electrical supply to renewable sources within ten years:

The greatest opportunity of our generation: that's what could be waiting for us, after we leave "green" behind. Saving the biosphere and spreading sustainable prosperity is going to take a lot more than doing things in a more environmentally-conscious manner; it's going to demand we remake much of our material civilization.

And that's good news. It frees us up to think in really new ways, to innovate, to create, to re-invent. Our day is almost defined by the exploding number of people who have access to tools and models and ways of thinking that were previously rare or expert or unimagined. If we live in an age of stark ecological limits, we also live in an age of widespread potential innovation.

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?

As cool as ultra high-performance green buildings are individually, the real action is all with districts. Individual buildings may blaze paths, and as we engage in acupunctural infill (changing sprawling or underused areas into walkable, compact mixed-use communities by adding new buildings and redeveloping older properties -- something we'll be writing more about soon) we're going to need a lot of small-scale, even individual architectural solutions.

But if we want to really push the environmental performance of urban areas down to zero-impact levels, we need to think in terms of districts; we need to look at settings where a number of buildings can be built afresh or creatively re-used, and where the infrastructure and public space they share can be recreated in ways no piecemeal agglomeration of individual projects can usually match.

With new ideas about sustainability and responsibility rapidly moving to the forefront of the discussion, things that once seemed implausible are quickly becoming a reality.

We caught up with some Worldchangers at the Seattle Green Festival to ask them about what's possible now that they once thought impossible.

So, what's possible now that you once thought impossible?

Annie Leonard, The Story of Stuff

Clay Shirky is an influential writer, consultant, and teacher focused on the Internet as a social platform. He's one of the smartest thinkers I know about how people live, love, and work online. His new book, Here Comes Everybody:The Power of Organizing without Organizations, was just published by The Penguin Press. As an intro to Chapter 11, on "Promise, Tool, and Bargain," he says "There is not recipe for the successful use of social tools. Instead, every working system is a mix of social and technological factors." Clay and I had the following conversation early in March. We'll follow up with an asynchronous conversation on the WELL for two weeks starting May 28.

Jon Lebkowsky: My first very general question for you is about how the web started changing around 2000. What are your thoughts about what was driving the changes, and how the changes have affected our experience of the web?

Big Toy is on the march. According to Seattle media reports, the CEOs of Hasbro and Mattel flew into Washington State's capital Olympia, the national Toy Industry Association blew $50,000 on a last minute lobbying campaign and right wing bloviators have filled the air with shrill warnings about the latest assault on the American way of life. What horrible transgression is it that's gotten their panties in a twist?

By Sanjay Khanna

A small yet growing body of evidence suggests that how people think and feel is being influenced strongly by ecosystem transformation related to climate change and industry-related displacement from the land. These powerful stressors are occurring more frequently around the world.

A case in point: When researchers from the Centre for Rural and Remote Mental Health at the University of Newcastle in Australia conducted interviews in drought-affected communities in New South Wales in 2005, the responses suggested some of their subjects may have been suffering from a recently described psychological condition called solastalgia (pronounced so-la-stal-juh).

Saul Griffith is a remarkable guy: inventor, entrepreneuer, Squid Labs, ThinkCycle and Instructables founder, columnist, genius grant winner and now president of the clean energy start-up Makani Power. A couple weeks ago, I did a talk at eTech, and while I was there, I had the fortune to hear Saul give his presentation on energy literacy and climate change.

The time has come to reconcile ourselves with a fundamental truth. Most of us were already alive when humanity went into overshoot and (sometime in the late 80's) began using up the planet faster than the planet could replenish itself. And many of us will still be alive, when, by mid-century at the latest, we have returned again to being a sustainable, one-planet civilization.

Of course, we may prove ourselves to be an evil and criminally shortsighted generation. We may melt the 'caps, log the Congo, burn the Amazon, slushie the tundra, acidify the ocean, drive half of all life into extinction and needlessly cause the deaths of billions of our fellow human beings. But I don't think we will. I think enough of us are better than that, braver than that and bolder than that.