Worldchanging 101: An Anniversary Collection

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/010573.html

Worldchanging is six years old today!

To celebrate our sixth anniversary, we've created a collection of what you might think of as the Worldchanging canon: pieces that have had enduring popularity and that we think say something important. And it turns out the two overlap pretty well. After compiling a list of our most popular articles we noticed that a high proportion of our most read, forwarded and linked pieces not only represent groundbreaking work, they also highlight many of the core ideas we often discuss on Worldchanging.

Below you'll find the links to our anniversary series, Worldchanging 101. We hope this toolkit makes Worldchanging's big ideas exciting and accessible to all who want to rediscover some excellent writing, whether new to the site, or old friends. We encourage you to share what you like with others.

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one sample:



Bright Green, Light Green, Dark Green, Gray: The New Environmental Spectrum
Alex Steffen, 27 Feb 09



People ask me with increasing frequency to explain what I mean by "bright green," and what the differences are between bright green, light green, dark green and so on.

I can understand the confusion. The term is being used more and more widely, but the available explanations aren't very helpful: the Wikipedia entry on the topic is far from clear, and with a handful of exceptions (like Ross Robertson's excellent article), most of the media coverage so far has tended to muddy the water in one way or another.

What is bright green? In its simplest form, bright green environmentalism is a belief that sustainable innovation is the best path to lasting prosperity, and that any vision of sustainability which does not offer prosperity and well-being will not succeed. In short, it's the belief that for the future to be green, it must also be bright. Bright green environmentalism is a call to use innovation, design, urban revitalization and entrepreneurial zeal to transform the systems that support our lives.

It's been pretty amazing to watch "bright green" take off. Since I first coined the term, thousands of organizations -- businesses, NGOs, blogs, student groups, even churches -- have adopted the label. For this year's COP-15 climate summit in Copenhagen, both the parallel expo and the lead-in youth summit are calling themselves Bright Green. I've even started to see the term bubbling up in pop culture, used by people who clearly get it.

Of course, not everyone talking about sustainability is bright green. I contrast bright green thinking with three other prominent schools of thought: light greens, dark greens and grays. All have some overlap, and in reality, even dedicated sustainability advocates tend to adopt different approaches on different questions. But here's a brief run-down:

Light green environmentalists tend to emphasize lifestyle/behavioral/consumer change as key to sustainability, or at least as the best mechanism for triggering broader changes. Light greens strongly advocate change at the individual level. The thinking is that if you can get people to take small, pleasant steps (by shopping differently, or making changes around the home), they will not only make changes that can begin to make a difference in aggregate, but also begin to clamor for larger transformations. Light green environmentalism, as a call for individuals to change, has helped spread the idea that concern for sustainability is cool. On the other hand, it is the target of much of the "green fatigue" we're now seeing. (My own thinking about this approach can be found in these three articles: Privatizing Responsibility, Don't Just Be the Change, Mass-Produce It, and The Problem with Big Green.)

Dark greens, in contrast, tend to emphasize the need to pull back from consumerism (sometimes even from industrialization itself) and emphasize local solutions, short supply chains and direct connection to the land. They strongly advocate change at the community level. In its best incarnations, dark green thinking offers a lot of insight about bioregionalism, reinhabitation, and taking direct control over one's life and surroundings (for example through transition towns): it is a vision of collective action. In a less useful way, dark greens can tend to be doomers, warning of (sometimes even seeming to advocate) impending collapse. Some thinkers, of course, (for instance, Bill McKibben and Paul Glover) blend a belief in the rural relocalization efforts of dark greens with the more design- and technology-focused urban solutions of bright greens. (Some of my own thinking can be found in these pieces Deep Economy: Localism, Innovation and Knowing What's What, Resilient Community and The Outquisition.)

Grays, of course, are those who deny there's a need to do anything at all, whether as individuals or as a society. They range from the most blatantly dishonest and self-interested people (climate scientists who take oil company money to dispute the clear scientific consensus on climate change, or "contrarians" like Bjorn Lomborg who make up specious "skeptical" arguments in order to make money) to principled, smart people who lack the facts (an increasingly small minority) or whose worldviews are just too set in an earlier way of thinking to understand the present-day realities of living on planet in overshoot. The epicenter of gray thinking is the nest of lobbyists and industry-funded think tanks on K Street in Washington, D.C.

Obviously, you can't divide people's thoughts neatly and simply into categories. Certainly one can believe simultaneously in the need for changes in systems, individuals and communities. I suspect that almost anyone who thinks seriously about the big planetary problems we face tends to pick and choose various ideas from all three schools of green thought and blend them together.

The point in defining these classifications isn't to be divisive, because infighting among those in the fold will only harm the chance for progress. But understanding the spectrum among us can help us think more clearly about our choices. That might be exactly why the bright/light/dark green discussion has gained so much momentum.

How would you classify your own thinking? What shades are you, and why?