As a social constructionist, my belief is that we both create and make sense of “reality” in relation and in conversation. The key contribution of Web2.0 is its ability to support these kinds of relationships and conversations among disparate and geographically dispersed people. So very cool that we have these blogs and social networking tools – thanks to all of you who are speaking out (and listening in)!

Is the happy talk limited and one-sided? Yes, probably. But it attracts an audience that is optimistic and energetic and wants to “do something.” There’s nothing wrong with that – it meets those folks where they are and begins their education.

Does doom-and-gloom, end-of-the-world, apocalyptic naysaying have its place? Yes, it creates that “burning platform” that motivates people and organizations to change. However, over-reliance on it leads to long-term “compassion fatigue” and a sense of nihilism – nothing matters, nothing I do is going to change anything, so why bother?

Maybe it is the dynamic of this “positive” and “negative” conversation, this creative tension, that will help us generate a collective, shared vision of the future that will pull (as opposed to push) us forward.

We stand on the edge of chaos. It’s a scary place, AND the potential for generating new ways of thinking, being, and doing is maximal for those who have the courage to recognize it and the capacity to stay in it.

Again – great conversation. Thank you!

Treehugger and similar lifestyle sites can encourage critical (rather than passive) consumption. Hopefully that may also create more educated people who will become politically active.

But after that a whole tougher approach is needed to continue to create an unaligned mass movement (not a mass panic!) that can intimidate politicians throughout the world into acting as rapidly as possible. Right now politicians don’t fear voters, they despise them, but they fear corporations simply because corporate control of the media can be used to destroy their careers if they ever step out of line. We have to make both politicians and corporations fear our media even more, and that is not easy given that our media is itself subject to corporate control. Lots of fun ahead!

You are also right about us being quoted as authorities. I statement I made about bamboo not being the perfect was picked up flooring material was picked up by the New York Times, no less. We are working a lot harder at making sure that we know what we are talking about. I keep George Monbiot on my desk at all times to remind me of the seriousness of the crisis we face, but it will do no good if we scare everybody away.

But back to the topic, I’d add another big name and that is Joel Makower. His uncritical belief in market solutions could come straight from a neo-con textbook. As an Australian looking at the US from the outside (I have spent time there) it is always shocking to see supposed progressives like Makower who are nonetheless permeated with right wing individualist ideology. Right now we should be cherry picking ideas from every political ideology. The Europeans are better at that, much more free thinking. So I was interested to see this post yesterday on Gristmill http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/12/31/104751/62 about learning to love the nanny state. That’s a step in the right direction – governments are the only large scale organisations that we have even the remotest chance of controlling – even if it doesn’t look too good right now.

Secondly, on positivism, having been involved in these issues for decades now we’re over doom and gloom long ago. Without wanting to sound like the inane positivism I criticised earlier, things are now so inconceivably bad that they’re good. I suppose it’s a bit like being diagnosed with a fatal disease, suddenly life’s trivialities disappear. I feel that humanity’s catastrophic position means we’ve been given this enormous privilege, the freedom to propose and discuss almost anything . I genuinely feel that every new mega-problem is an amazing opportunity to do something interesting. It may be over for humanity but that’s not certain and we want to go down fighting for imagination and creativity, the only things that may save us (and not just humans, I feel a deep seated shame for our failure to show care for other species). But we are not prepared to waste one iota of imagination on keeping things going the way they are, we are only interested in how the world as it is now can be warped into something else. That means being brutally tough minded and critical, not the Pollyana approach that global capitalism will push till the very end.

Re genetic engineering, I agree that the simplistic responses are not good enough. We’ve been collecting links to write more about it. There’s no doubt that when used to extend corporate power, as in the case of food crops, it’s a disaster, but in the meantime our race is inadvertently engineering massive change by the destruction of diversity and entire habitats (eg all of the Arctic…who would ever have imagined that?) so any idea that there is a moral imperative to maintain some pristine world untouched by human genetic tinkering is now an absurdity. As usual I hope and work towards the best while planning for the worst.

Hope this isn’t too long and windy a reply.

The feeling I get from much sustainability commentary is a desire to maintain the current world by tinkering with the settings a bit and it just ain’t going to be like that.

Yes, absolutely. The implicit message is that we can hang on to what we have with just a nip and a tuck and a whole bunch of products from some green version of Target. Which is absurd, the more you think about it. The magnitude of changes that have been set in motion are just too large… climate change, population growth, habitat alteration… the world in 50 or 100 years is going to be very different. Once I realized that I actually felt kind of liberated. I was like, “Okay, I’ve got to let go of my dream of the frontier past.” Which then gave me room to start dreaming about how cool the future could be once freed from that dream. For me it turned environmental thinking away from a “conservative” “prudish” mode (that primarily said NO DON’T DO THAT) to a creative mode (that primarily said, OKAY, HOW CAN WE DO THAT?)

In defence of worldchanging and treehugger, maybe they are the first footholds on that ladder for most people, especially those who can only view life through the ideology of consumerism and therefore can only see change as a change to consumerism.

Yes, we must give them credit for shifting the focus away from the old doom and gloom and guilt-trip style of “traditional” environmentalism (at least in America). All their product listings really do counter a tragic misconception from the past … that doing good by the environment meant suffering in your personal life… like when President Carter turned down the thermostat in the White House and wore a sweater. There’s no reason living some more environmentally sensitive way can’t be just as pleasant.

My problem is that the discussion pretty much stops there. That was fine when Treehugger and Worldchanging were just regular blogs, but now they’ve become “authorities” by virtue of their popularity. They owe their audience a little more, IMHO of course.

Say, speaking of adaptive reuse, have you though much about genetic engineering? I think it’s going to be a huge part of the way our world transforms.

The feeling I get from much sustainability commentary is a desire to maintain the current world by tinkering with the settings a bit and it just ain’t going to be like that. For starters almost every form of political and social organisation will change, radically and inevitably. The only thing you can be sure of is that most of it will begin with the adaptive reuse of the technology and social forms that exist already (which is why we started our blog http://adaptivereuse.net to do a running commentary on that evolution), it will all happen through a form of rapid evolution with ad hoc-ery piled on ad hoc-ery in most cases. In defence of worldchanging and treehugger, maybe they are the first footholds on that ladder for most people, especially those who can only view life through the ideology of consumerism and therefore can only see change as a change to consumerism.

“I don’t get it. People who live in a big house but do things to use less energy are ridiculed here. Yet Laurie David, who owns not one but two mansions (in the Pacific Palisades and Martha’s Vineyard) and flies by private plane, is called a hero and treated like a saint. Make up your mind, Treehugger.”

this gives me a good idea for a bottleworld feature. when you run out of environmental blogs to skewer, you can create a list of celebrity environmentalists, and write screeds about their flagrant energy consumption. basically, compare their lifestyle to their message, see how they measure up, and skewer as needed. it would be interesting to see if anyone actually measures up to their rhetoric. another interesting slant would be looking at other famous people who do live with a small footprint, but do not preach the green gospel. (notice how this is all me saying “someone else should do this” …)

re: cfl lightbulbs; you can save about 160+ lbs of carbon a year replacing a single 100 watt bulb with a 20 watt cfl bulb, and save money in the process. in contrast, i looked into a solar water heater, a heat pump, a new furnace, etc. those things take decades to pay off, plus by being an early adopter, you’re risking missing out on cheaper better technology that is not available yet. our windows were not cheap, but we needed new windows anyway.

I’d say that all the stuff that places like treehugger advocate are good and fine — but that there’s not much sense wringing your hands over whether you meet all of them, since there’s no way they can be “enough” anyway. Nothing is really going to be “enough” to return the earth to conditions of 10 or 100 or 1000 years ago, which is kind of the implicit goal of most environmentalism, even a new-generation forum like treehugger.

Rather, we’re gonna be making an entirely new world as we try to ride out this ecological shift. The worldchanging site attaches itself to that idea a little (their tag line is “another world is here” ) but i’m not really sure they get how different it may be. The vision there is, what? One might call it “Europe for all.”  I think it will be far far weirder than that.
Anyway I’m blathering. Thanks for stopping by.

I did the eco footprint once and was frightened by the results- however, your comments make sense too. You really can’t drop it down to a number of earths that at first glance is acceptable. It just doesn’t work. Realizing that makes me feel a little less guilty about taking up so many earths!