undergrowth newsfilter

In 2002 Gary McKinnon was arrested in the UK for illegally accessing US military and NASA computers. McKinnon, who describes himself as a "bumbling computer nerd," claims to have exploited lax security systems by using a simple script that searches machines to find blank passwords.

read more

Everyone who drives feels the increasing price of gas in their pocketbook. But what are the additional social costs of transportation? How would one even start thinking about this question clearly?

Transport Canada recently released a report quantifying the full costs of transportation, that made national headline news in Canada. The full costs of transportation were estimated to be between $198 billion and $233 billion (all figures $CDN) - that's about $7000 per capita.

So where did all this money go? Over 80% went to financial costs (vs social costs). 80% of the financial costs are due to road transport. Air, rail, and marine, in that order, make up the rest.

Slicing the financial costs another way, the cost of vehicles (capital and operating) was more than 80%. Infrastructure made up the rest—including roads, bridges, patrolling, and even snow removal.

Interestingly, user charges (such as transportation-specific fuel taxes) paid by vehicle operators for infrastructure were broken out separately in the report. The ratio of user charges to infrastructure costs was over 1/2 in the case of air, around 1/3 in the case of road, and a small fraction for rail and marine—food for thought when thinking about who pays for transportation, and who benefits.

Perhaps surprisingly, the social costs amounted to less than 20% of the total costs of transportation. This does not mean that these social costs are negligible, but rather that we spend even more on moving people and things around than the short-term effects of all the pollution and accidents might indicate. Accidents were estimated to be over half the social costs, with delays, pollution, and greenhouse gases also being significant.

How much can these figures be trusted? While the methodology is robust, many costs were explicitly not included due to insufficient data or resources, like oil and chemical spills, parking, and environmental costs of fuel and vehicle production. There are also assumptions about discount rates and many social cost factors (like the "cost" of a ton of greenhouse gas emissions), which are made explicit but might be questioned.

The authors acknowledge up front that "the benefits of transportation are real and important to society," but were unable to estimate these benefits in this first report. That's a critical missing factor in most cost analyses of pollution, social costs, or ecosystem services, yet one that is truly a "Grand Challenge" to solve. How much is your car worth to you? What is the quantified "social benefit" of a municipal public transit system? What are the long-term development, business, and international relations benefits of air travel—and how much will the concomitant carbon emissions cost us in the long run?

It's good to know that work like this is being done. (This report follows on one from last year on the Social Cost of Motor Vehicle Collisions in Ontario, which if anything was even more detailed.) Estimating full costs and benefits—be it for transportation, ecosystem services, or health—gives us a handle on those things we intuitively know are important but can't readily attach a price tag to. It also promotes clear thinking and good data about the components of costs and benefits, which in turn helps focus on where costs can be reduced and benefits increased. Perhaps the next step is to link the full panoply of such work being done worldwide into a loose federation, so we could add up costs and benefits across jurisdictions, sectors, and time—and model where ingenuity and behavior change could be best applied.

Photos: Mark Tovey
Article originally published on WorldChanging Canada.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Hassan Masum in Columns at 10:51 PM)

By Worldchanging Canada writer Jason Diceman.

Politicians should take note; there is a new answer to some of the toughest questions of our times. When presented with an issue with no obvious popular and sensible solution, or a situation where a legislature is unable to make progress on an important topic, 100 random citizens can be called on to solve the political puzzle, as they did in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Ontario (my home province).

Following the 2001 election, the newly elected premier of BC followed through on a promise to create a citizens' assembly to consider changes to the provincial electoral system. In 2006 the Ontario government followed suit as part of their democratic renewal efforts. Both citizen assembly projects followed an innovative model designed by former BC politician, Gordon Gibson, and were given a clear and independent mandate by an all party committee.

Each assembly process began with tens of thousands of written invitations sent out to random citizens all across the province. Through several stages of positive responses and further lottery selection, the members of the assembly were narrowed down to 158 in BC and 103 in Ontario. Members came from every electoral riding. Their ranks included equal numbers of women and men, and spanned the demographic spectrum in rough similarity with census data. While not absolutely perfect, this was a more representative sample of folks than I have ever seen at any town meeting or campaign rally.

Central to the citizen assembly model is the learning phase. In Ontario and BC, members spent six weekends learning about the topic from panels of experts, custom educational materials, and a staff of adult educators selected and trained to present a range of perspectives in a way that avoids biasing the process. By the end of this learning phase these assorted bus drivers, home makers, blue-collar managers and school teachers were able to debate election reform at a Masters level.

Following this learning phase, the assembly members took part in a series of public meetings and opportunities for comment from the public, giving members a greater understanding of the varied views and opinions within the population.

Finally each assembly went through an exhaustive six weeks of facilitated consensus driven deliberations and structured decision-making. Members talked in small groups and large groups, debated, researched, weighed options, heard concerns and voted step-by-step through each of the key decisions required to find a common answer. In the end both BC and Ontario citizen assemblies ended with over 90% of their members voting in favour of a common final recommendation. As the third party evaluations and academic reviews have come to prove, these staggering majorities were not the result of charismatic manipulation, authoritative coercion, or exhausted frustration. These results represent over 100 random people approaching full agreement on an open ended question—on an issue as complex as election reform. This was achieved by a thorough understanding of the options and respectful discussion with the stated goal of seeking the best solution that would be in accord with the commonly recognized values of the people. This was an example of the wise and practical democracy most of us assume is impossible. As Gordon Gibson expressed it "For someone with a faith in democracy, this was like seeing God."

To put this demonstrated model of the citizen assembly into context let's quickly look at some more traditional methods of hearing the 'voice of the people' on public policy:

• Elections: Candidates often win less then 50% of the votes cast, (but still more than their multiple competitors). Voters are generally poorly informed by combative media campaigns and are unable to recall much detail about the policy positions of their favourite candidates. Once elected, politicians are driven by short term public perceptions and party rivalry in order to secure a re-election.
• Expert Panels: In formal committees, politicians and government bureaucrats are informed by select experts. The members of these committees are often well informed about their subject matter, but without any necessary grasp of public values. The selection of experts may bias the advice.
• Opinion Polls: These telephone surveys are a result of top of mind reactions to yesterdayís sound bites and newspaper headlines. They superficially reflect public values, but without the educated, deliberated, and reasoned conclusions one would want to steer a society by.
• Focus Groups: Focus groups typically have a small number of people at the table who are usually not informed about the issue at hand. Depending on the facilitation, focus groups may yield results that are uninformative, and not highly representative of the values of the population as a whole.
• Town Halls & Hearings: Comments from the floor in a public hall have always been abused by the loudest and most charismatic speakers who are first to speak their complaints and accusations to the room. While iconic of our early democracy, the self-selected public speakers who tend to participate are often driven by personal or interest group agendas and are quickly situated in Us-VS-Them debates. These are not well informed, representative, or consensus-driven events.

In comparison, the citizen assembly model is what deliberative democracy theorist Archon Fung calls a "minipublic," that is "...an educative forum that aims to create nearly ideal conditions for citizens to form, articulate, and refine opinions about particular public issues through conversations with one another." It is one of few processes where the shared values of the public are directly applied to policy recommendations, rather than guessed or assumed by privileged individuals—sometimes with their own agenda. That said, the citizens' assembly model it is not a perfect system. It is susceptible to manipulation or corruption by incompetent staff, or can be directed by a biased chair, possibly appointed for political reasons. According to the third party evaluations, this was not the case in Ontario or BC.

Both the BC and Ontario Citizen's Assemblies on Electoral Reform ended with referendums (similar to U.S. ballot initiatives) that were carried out as an addendum to the provincial elections. That is, the thoroughly debated, close-to-consensus recommendation of over 100 random citizens (who had been highly educated on the topic at hand), was subject to 60% approval by a general public that was overwhelmingly uninterested and uninformed about the subject matter. In BC the proposal won 57.7% of the votes, but did not pass the 60% threshold required. In Ontario the proposal only received 37% support. One theory for the difference between the two is the much higher level of media coverage of the citizens' assembly process that occurred in BC, i.e. the more people learn about the citizen assembly process, the more likely they are to support its recommendation. In any case, referendums are dependent on expensive media campaigns and commercial news coverage with often trivial, controversy seeking, and superficial rhetoric. Without a complete overhaul of the media system, like public opinion polls, referendums are not appropriate mechanisms for wise policy decisions. In short, the citizen assembly model works to produce useful recommendations to government and like any legislative commission or committee, should not be required to pass a referendum.

Beyond these two Citizens' Assemblies on Electoral Reform, Canadians have and continue to use similar random selection, educated and deliberative citizen panels to inform various government decisions, such as the newly starting Ontario Public Drug Programs Citizens' Council, the ongoing independent Canada's World project, or some of the many citizen dialogues conducted by the Canadian Policy Research Networks. Based in Toronto, a young firm called Mass LBP is aiming to make a business out of citizens'-assembly-inspired public consultation.

Internationally, many governments and non-government organizations have conducted similar processes under many different names: Consensus Conferences, Study Circles, Planning Cells, National Issues Forums, 21st Century Town Halls, Citizen Juries, and Citizen Panels (among others). Each model varies in the number of members, the amount of time given to education and deliberation, and the facilitation process, but as Matt Leighninger of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium suggested at the BC When Citizens Decide conference, "We should avoid 'modelitis' that focuses on the difference between models rather than the similarities. The larger context is more important then the specifics of the model." That larger context most importantly includes the political will of the government to listen to recommendations from its citizens.

Looking to 2009, we will see elections in Canada, the Unites States of America, Germany, Mexico, India, Japan and over 50 other counties. These politicians will all be facing such challenging issues as climate change, public education reform, strains on health care, improving child care, supporting minority rights, addressing aboriginal land claims, fresh water protection, demographic shifts, sustainability and development. When looking for direction on such complex issues, there will be many that seek advice from business leaders and experts, some that carry out traditional consultations with the usual suspects, but only a courageous few that will take the political risk to champion citizens' assembly like process that will have actual influence based on the deliberation of informed random citizens. These few pioneers will be the examples for future democratic leaders and we should give them our support.

You can learn more about deliberative democracy processes at the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation's Learning Exchange.

Jason Diceman is a stakeholder engagement consultant with LURA Consulting and author of the popular Dotmocracy Handbook for large group decision-making.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Columns at 9:44 PM)

This article was was written by Jeremy Faludi in May 2006. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

We've been saying that LED's are the future of energy-efficient lighting. What if we're wrong? Organic light-emitting diodes (OLED's) have been emerging for years, but they are gradually getting more and more exciting, starting to give traditional LED's a run for their money. In a few years you might be able to wallpaper your home in light-emitting sheets, or maybe turn all your windows into heads-up displays. Why you'd want to do this might be a different question, but there are obviously useful applications, too, such as flexible displays (the roll-up computer or the e-ink newspaper; there's also talk about sewing them into clothing, too, but no one's done it yet like they have with LED's.) Cambridge Display Technology and Epson have also used OLED's to make color printers faster, higher-resolution, and smaller. OLED's also promise to ubiquitize displays: already a keyboard has been prototyped whose keys change according to what alphabet you want to use, or what program / game you have running. When any surface can become an interactive display, what will we want to display where?

OLED's: The Future of Light? is a part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on Oct. 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 4:12 PM)

This article was was written by Ethan Zuckerman in June 2006. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Recently, I visited with my friends Walter Bender and Jim Gettys at the new headquarters of the One Laptop per Child Project. I’'m writing an article for the IEEE Spectrum on the project and had asked Walter if I could come by and grill him on the technical and conceptual details of the project. But that’s really just an excuse - I’'m fascinated by the project, and am trying to offer what help I can to Nicholas Negroponte and his team in helping people understand what the project is and isn'’t, offering my perspective on how the device might best be rolled out, supported and used in developing nations.

One of the most interesting phenomena surrounding the One Laptop Per Child project has been the amount of attention it’s garnered, not just from the development community, but from average users around the world. Interest in the project seems to focus on a basic and very compelling idea: a laptop that costs a hundred dollars or less. After writing my earlier piece on OLPC, I now average 20 emails a week asking to purchase the laptop, or receive one as a gift. I now have a keyboard macro that gives a stock response: I’'m not officially affiliated with the project, the laptop isn'’t available yet, and when it is, it will be sold in lots of a million or more to governments and school systems.

Most of the people who write me are interested in owning a laptop they can afford. And that, it turns out, is not the goal of the One Laptop Per Child project. Their goal is to produce a laptop designed for use by children - students in grades K-12. And that requires radically different design decisions than what one would make in simply creating a low-cost laptop.

Getting across the distinction that this is a children’s laptop, not just a cheap laptop, is a surprisingly difficult task. When I last wrote about the laptop on Worldchanging, a number of commenters mentioned that they’d like one of the computers as a backup or travel computer - I suspect they might feel differently after playing with one of the current prototypes. They’re really small. This is a good thing - I wouldn'’t want a kindergarten student carrying around my 12" PowerBook - it’s too heavy and too fragile. The current prototype is little, orange, and very, very cute. It has a molded plastic handle and looks remarkably like a Speak and Spell.

It’'s got bunny ears - antenni for the 802.11s wireless radios, which are designed to self-assemble meshes with other laptops. The ears fold down to cover the USB, power and mic ports, an excellent design for the sorts of dusty environments I can imagine the device used in. The screen in the current prototype is a conventional LCD screen - the screen in the production devices will be roughly the same size, probably slightly larger than the 7.5" screen in the prototype, but will be based around a technique that doesn’t require white fluorescent backlight. (Many of the questions I need to answer for the IEEE article concern the screen, as it’s one of the most expensive and power-hungry components of the machine.) The keyboard is about 60% of the size of a conventional keyboard and has calculator-style keys.

My favorite feature of the current prototype is the hinge that holds the machine together. Ever since Nicholas outlined the engineering challenges of building a good hinge, I’'ve been fascinated by the different ways people attach screens to laptops. As promised, the laptop can be folded into an ebook, with the screen on top, used as a handheld game player, or have the screen turned around so the machine can be used as a video player. Walter tells me that Quanta, the company responsible for manufacturing the machine, insisted on the hinge used in the prototype because it’s the only one they trusted to stand up to the wear kids will put on the machine.

In other words, while I love it, I’'m not trading my laptop in for one any time soon. I suspect that low-cost computers designed by AMD and others are likely more appropriate for most users than the laptop. Again, that’s okay - the goal isn'’t to capture the bottom end of the laptop market - it'’s to give kids learning tools. If the laptop did become popular on the low end of the market, it becomes a target for theft, which is one of the reasons the machine is a brilliant shade of orange.

The one feature missing from the prototype I saw - the crank. It’'s been clear - even before Kofi Annan broke the crank off an early laptop prototype - that a power-generating crank attached to the machine, like cranks are incorporated into FreePlay radios, might not work. Jim, who has designed the motherboard of the machine and has been focused on power consumption, helped me understand why.

Contrary to what you learned in The Matrix, human beings are lousy at generating electric power. Small children are capable of generating between five and ten watts, for short periods of time. Since conventional laptops draw about 6 to 8 watts with their screens turned on, that’s a real problem for a child-powered laptop. The laptop needs to get much less power-hungry, and power generation needs to maximize the output a child is capable of. This means being ergonomically smart - use large muscle groups, and use human-generated motion efficiently. A crank attached to a laptop fails on both fronts - to crank a box, you fight the tendency of the laptop to move in the opposite direction of the crank. This means you either hold the laptop in one hand and crank with the other - and do work with both arms - or put the laptop on a table and run the good chance of it falling off a table. And cranks use small muscle groups - the triceps, hand and wrist muscles.

The solution is to make power generation an external add-on. The team is working on microgenerators that produce power using really big cranks - ones you might anchor with a hole in a table, and crank using your whole upper body. (Think Oompa Loompas in Wonka’s chocolate factory opening valves.) Other microgenerators use a pullcord, the sort I use to start my lawnmower, or pedal power. And other power sources, including solar panels, could plug into the input jack of the machine. The current prototype accepts voltage from -23 to +23v, which lets power hackers be very creative - and more than a little sloppy - in providing power to the device. Got a power block for a laptop? If you can make the connector fit, it will power the laptop.

The prototype I saw didn’'t have a battery installed, but the team has decided to use nickel metal hybrid batteries rather than lithium ion. The rationale? Lithium is not very tolerant of voltage spikes - you need to regulate the power that enters the battery to prevent damage to it. Human-generated power is necessarily spiky, so regulating that voltage means losing generated power. NiMH is less efficient than Li-Ion in terms of power transfer, but the ability to capture spiky power is worth the trade-off… and MnH batteries are somewhat easier to dispose of in an environmentally conscious manner than Li-Ion.

The machine still needs to be miserly with power to be usable as a human-charged device. And this is where the team have worked some serious magic. When the machine is not in active use, it can act as a mesh node, helping maintain a connectivity cloud over a village or school while drawing only 0.5 watts - the wireless subsystem (a Marvell chip with 100kb of RAM) operates independently of the main processor and can forward packets with the CPU shut down. The machine draws a similar amount of power in ebook mode, using a black and white display. The display IC has a substantial frame buffer - this means it can store a black and white image and display it without any assistance from the CPU, again allowing the CPU to shut down and save power. With the processor and color screen in action, the laptop draws 2 to 2.5 watts. To get the power consumption so low, Jim and the team chose an older AMD chip - the Geode GX2 - rather than the newer chips, which burn more power. Using the GX2 chip and the version of Fedora Red Hat has been developing for the machine, many Linux packages run on the laptop with almost no porting effort.

The board itself is designed to encourage hardware hacking - the 500 prototype boards currently built come with a VGA jack soldered on. But production models will leave the jack leads etched on the board, though unpopulated. Want to turn a laptop into a device that can drive an external monitor? Solder one on. Also on the board but unpopulated will be connectors for additional RAM and flash memory, as well as a mini-PCI slot. A goal for the next iteration is a board with a wider pitch, which makes it easier to repair the board or to hand-solder additional connections. The case is designed to be easy to open and access the innards - this makes it easier to make Frankenmachines from dead machines, and also makes it easier to mass produce lots of these devices quickly.

The storage capacity is decidedly modest - 128MB of RAM, 512MB of flash memory instead of a hard drive. That 512MB has to hold the operating system and applications, as well as any documents. No one’s going to be loading a complete copy of Wikipedia onto this any time soon. That said, Walter showed me an early prototype of another orange box - a wire/wireless interface. Basically, it’s a wireless base station, designed to connect some of the laptop mesh nodes to an ethernet cable (presumably attached to a VSAT or some other device.) The box acts as a peer on the network, not a server, but has a larger storage capacity, so could serve as a document server as well as a web cacheing server. And you just might load Wikipedia -- or an edited, educational version of Wikipedia -- onto these boxes before distributing them.

The prototype running at the OLPC offices was running GNOME on top of Fedora, and looked very much like one expects a Linux desktop to look. This is not what most children will see when they turn on the machine, but it’s important to the designers that the machine be designed in layers, like an onion. (Or a parfait. Software designers like parfait.) For expert users who want to develop on the system, the laptop will ship with gcc, gtk, and the other stuff you need to build and distribute software. In addition, the software will include three development environments: Python, Javascript and Logowiki.

Logowiki, from what I’'ve seen of it, is amazingly cool. It starts from a collection of wiki pages, like Wikipedia, and treats pages as computational objects. This means that the Wikipedia page on Logo would run Logo, letting you try out functions and move the turtle around. This opens up some amazing possibilities - wiki pages about physics that include programmable models that help you understand acceleration or momentum, for instance. And, indeed, you can come onto logowiki and play with little programs that build spirals or calculate Pi.

Wikis are important to the architecture of the software for another reason - they’re part of the subversive strategy behind the machine. The OLPC team won’t have control over what content is loaded onto the laptop in different countries - that’s the decision of individual education ministries. But by using wikis as a content management system - rather than, say, a PDF viewer - the team manages to sneak in the idea of user-generated content into schools. Perhaps most textbook pages will be protected in a wiki structure - wiki features like discussion pages will still exist, opening new possibilities for how kids interact with schoolbooks.

Walter explains that the fundamental design goals for the software of the project are to give students and teachers tools that leverage their ability to learn, their ability to be expressive and their ability to be social. A simple interface - more for discussion than a rough draft of any actual interface - shows some of these ideas. It’'s a tabbed interface, like a web browser, which holds applications like a word processor in some of the windows. Another window holds a graphical chat program, designed to let a student type or draw messages to another student - the chat is aware of what other students are logged on and proximate to the machine. The goal is not to isolate students from one another, having them stare into their machines, but to encourage them to communicate through the machines.

It’s cute. It’s orange. It’s got bunny ears -- An update on the One Laptop Per Child project is a part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on Oct. 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 3:47 PM)

In celebration of the official debut of Worldchanging Seattle, we bring you our Seattle to the World series: a collection of the 100 best local innovations, institutions, policies and people that we think could benefit readers in cities around the world. We've collected your recommendations – and sought out our own – to locate what we felt was a sample of Seattle's most inspiring solutions for a better future.

We're kicking off the series with a week dedicated exclusively to the best in Seattle's food scene. This week at Worldchanging Seattle, we've been serving up profiles of Seattle's most important food-related success stories – giving you an inside look into each solution, and showing you our take on why each one is worth broadcasting to the world. As with a good meal, we hope you enjoy … and that you find plenty of opportunity to share with others.

Recent posts ranged from coverage of Seattle's best policies and organizations helping improve the local food economy to a photo essay of Pike Place Market and a map of the area's best vegetarian restaurants. Check out what's new:

Solid Ground's Food Resources Programs
Since its founding in 1974, Solid Ground (originally known as the Fremont Public Association) now operates 30 creative community programs that help nearly 33,000 families combat poverty each year.

FareStart: Delicious Meals With a Social Purpose
FareStart's students, staff and volunteers work together to provide nutritious, from-scratch meals for childcare programs and homeless shelters all over Seattle, every day of the year...

Vegetarian Map of Seattle: Best Meat-Free Neighborhoods
Seattle's vegetarian-friendly culinary scene makes it both easy and extremely palatable to eat a diet that's more plant-based (or even cut out animal products entirely). Check out our Vegetarian Map for a veggie lover's-eye-view of Seattle...

Pike Place: A Photo Essay
For more than 100 years, the Pike Place Market has earned its moniker as "The Soul of Seattle," housing more than 200 commercial businesses, 120 farmers and attracting more than 10 million visitors a year...

If you're in town, we'd like to hear from you! Check out the local blog and leave comments, or contact editor[at]Worldchanging[dot]com if you have ideas or would like to write.

Photo credit: Full Circle Farm

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 3:44 PM)

This article was was written by Alex Steffen in May 2006. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Ally Josh Ellis wanted to do some writing about the Trinity nuclear test site and its meaning today. So, this being the 21st Century, and Josh being a freelancer attuned to his times, he passed the PayPal hat, raised a little money and went off to research and write an excellent essay, Dark Miracle: Trinity, the Manhattan Project and the Birth of the Atomic Age:

It's a fine piece of work, and we highly recommend it. It's also a sign of things to come, as writers, photographers, and documentarians of all shapes will increasingly deliver their work to audiences which are willing to support the creation of that work, whether or not magazines, publishers, art galleries or studios get the worth and importance of doing that work.

This ability of creative people to connect with "long tail" audiences may prove vital in helping to make the transitions which face us over the next couple decades. We need a lot more innovation, after all. Almost all innovation, whether technological or cultural, springs from the concerns of what are initially a very small group of people (at least relatively speaking). Reporting key bits of information, delivering fresh and useful perspectives and connecting people with shared concerns is a vital part of the process -- and a job for which independent journalists and artists are particularly well suited. Indeed, increasingly, these circuit riders and explorers are serving an absolutely critical role, delivering news to people who need it, long before the rest of us have caught on that it's important. Micropatronage, therefore, is a good thing, and Josh is ahead of his time.

So, please, go read Dark Miracle, and if you like the piece, show your support for worldchanging journalism and drop a buck in his tip jar.

Micropatronage and Josh Ellis' Trinity Project is a part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on Oct. 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 3:19 PM)

by Eric de Place

What Canada's tax shift means for the U.S.

British Columbia's recent carbon tax made waves in the US. (more here, here, and here.) But it's not terribly popular in BC, as economist Marc Lee of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives explains:

Quick aside for American readers who may not follow Canadian politics: the Liberals are the right-of-center party that is currently in power in BC; they're the ones responsible for the provincial carbon tax. The NDP -- the New Democratic Party -- is the left-of-center opposition party, which has criticized the carbon tax. And yes, you heard that correctly: the right is proposing a carbon tax and the left is attacking it.

Confusingly, although the BC Liberals and the federal Canadian Liberals are different parties with different orientations and platforms, their fates may be wedded in the next election -- because the national party has also proposed a carbon tax. At the federal level, however, the Canadian Liberals are the opposition party; the national government is controlled by the Conservative Party.

Got that? Okay, so here's what Canada's carbon taxes may mean for the rest of North America...

According to Marc, in addition to the political difficulty of levying a carbon tax, there's a public perception problem with revenue-neutral tax-shifting, at least in BC. This is concerning to folks like me who think that revenue-neutral tax-shifting is an excellent idea on substantive policy grounds. For instance, Sightline tends to favor cap and rebate and cap and dividend approaches to climate policy -- policies that put a price a carbon but return a significant portion of the revenue to taxpayers.

But whatever the policy merits, the political will appears fragile. As Marc notes:

I think Marc's right that it will be extremely informative to watch how Canadian (and British Columbian) politics play out over the next few months. Still, I'm not quite as bearish. In fact, I think revenue-neutral carbon taxes are actually gathering steam in the US. To my mind, carbon taxes are second-best to auctioned cap and trade, but they're still a very valuable tool.

In the meantime, policy wonks should keep an eye on the Progressive Economics Forum blog. We don't always see eye to eye on some climate policy issues, but it's home to reliably good thinking.

This piece originally appeared on the Sightline Institute's blog, The Daily Score.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Columns at 3:17 PM)

This article was was written by Jamais Cascio in March 2006. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

There's a theory in cognitive science that suggests that one of the hallmarks of human consciousness is the ability to model another person's thoughts in one's own brain, and do so with reasonable accuracy. It's not simply being able to read expressions, although that's part of it; humans can imagine how another person's thought processes, which may differ significantly from their own, would play out in reaction to a given situation. If you think about it, this is an amazing capability, especially because we don't always do it consciously. We run sophisticated simulations of other people's minds within our own. This capacity allows us both to imagine how others would feel after we witness their circumstances -- that is, it allows us to experience empathy -- and to imagine how others would respond to our own statements and actions -- that is, it allows us to rehearse our behavior.

We are now in the process of building that same capability into the world in which we live.

We are building this capability through the intersection of three important lines of research, all of which should be familiar to WorldChanging readers:

This interview was was conducted by Jon Lebkowsky in April 2006. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Jon L. talked to Adam Greenfield about his new book, Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing,when he was in Austin to speak at SXSW Interactive as part of a digital convergence track Jon helped put together. Jon will also be leading a discussion with Adam in the Inkwell.vue forum on the WELL beginning Friday, April 14. — Ed.

WorldChanging: Could you say just a little bit about what led you into ubiquitous computing? I know you as a designer, so what was it that piqued your interest in ubicomp and made you so interested that you wanted to write an authoritative book on the subject?

Adam Greenfield: It was a sense that there wasn't really anything out there for people. It felt like a gathering storm, to me. This was a technology that had ambitions to interpose itself in social relations in every sphere of life, a technology that had ambitions to literally embed itself or to be embedded in the objects and surfaces of everyday life. It doesn't take a genius to see that, by definition, this is going to effect hundreds of millions of people, by an order of magnitude more than the PC.

And yet, despite this extraordinary expansion in the number of people who would be affected by this particular information technology, nobody was talking about it in anything but an academic and technical voice. Sure, there was 7-10 years worth of literature out there. There had been Pervasive conferences and ubiquitous conferences. But there was nothing yet that targeted the smart generalist or the general readership. And that struck me as profoundly wrong.

So I bootstrapped myself. Despite not having a background in it, despite not having any sort of engineering background whatever, I went to a couple of Ubicomp conferences and did a whole bunch of research.

WorldChanging: What sort of people did you find going to ubicomp conferences? What kind of people are driving development?

Adam Greenfield: Some very, very smart people, but they're systems people. They're people that are looking at the event heap, how you negotiate system resources to a whole bunch of distributed systems with heterogeneous interfaces in a given space. Brilliant work, foundational work, important stuff... but nothing from the user experience end. That whole mind-set had not yet percolated into the practice of ubicomp. So you'd see a lot of papers on prototype systems, and in some cases extremely aggressive prototype systems, in the sense that they had this sort of land grab mentality about them. Systems that were embedded in flooring, systems that were comprised of camera nets that would track you in real time as you moved through the city. Locational systems. And yet they were designed by engineers, seemingly for engineers.

I'm not blaming anybody for this. Engineers are not user experience folks. They're not trained to be. Possibly by inclination, they're not concerned so much with the user. They tend to model the needs of the people using the systems on their own reactions to technology, and that's understandable, and I don't blame anybody for that.

The trouble is, when you get systems that are designed that way, they're intolerable. If you want a technology to be present in everyday life at the widest possible scale, I can't imagine having to negotiate systems through the equivalent of a command line interface for people. The prospect was intolerable.

And I thought (hopefully I don't sound too pompous here) that it was ethically incumbent upon someone who could see this to get out there and write about it, whether or not they had a background. If they could educate themselves to a point where they more or less knew what they were talking about, and were able to fairly represent the history of this discourse, and the history of this practice, somebody had to write about it. And nobody was doing it. So I said, what the hell, I'll do it myself. (Laughs)

WorldChanging: So you're actually coming from a user experience perspective in your analysis of ubicomp?

Adam Greenfield: That's the genesis of it, yeah. That was the real emotional hook for me, just thinking about people having to configure their toilets and people having to configure their teapots to boil a kettle of tea. And just taking a direct analogy with the technical systems that are around us now - you know, dropped cellphone calls and the blue screen of death, and everything that we're familiar with from the PC and mobile infrastructure…

WorldChanging: The blue toilet of death! (Laughter.)

Adam Greenfield: Can you imagine? And I think what heightened the sense of urgency was that this stuff was moving beyond prototypes in short order. It was moving toward consumer products, toward the digital home and digital convergence. The products were starting to be packaged and shipped. And still nobody was talking about the nonlinear interactions of network systems in one space all operating at once - it's as if none of the people who were designing them had, not so much thought, but felt what it would be like to sit in the middle of a room where you've got fifteen different technical interfaces around you, and you're responding to all of them at once, and they're all responding to you at once.

It really was from the more empathic end of the user experience field, not so much about usability per se, but about pleasure in use. And about sustainability and use, sort of a sustained quality of life issue. Wanting to design systems that really do enhance people's quality of life, and not just destroy it.

WorldChanging: What's the down side with ubiquitous computing? Are there things that we should be concerned about - or things that we should be advocating for, as they develop?

Adam Greenfield: Well, I certainly think so. I'll point out from the beginning that I tend to impose my own vaguely libertarian prejudices on a lot of this stuff. I think there are privacy issues, but what I say in the book is that everyware doesn't just redefine computing, it redefines surveillance, as well.

I'll give you a quick example of what I mean by that. One of my favorite examples is the BodyMedia Sensewear monitor, a sort of sexy band-aid that you slap on your arm and, triggered by body heat, it wakes up and starts taking what its producers call a physiological documentary of your body. It's a sort of constant, realtime beacon of your life signs. We're talking about, not just the obvious channels, but more channels of information flowing out from your body, from your activities. It's not just a camera and your image, it's not just a microphone and your voice. It's potentially your gait pattern, the pattern of your footfalls as you walk across the floor. I don't think most people have even wrestled yet with the implications of the idea that you could be identified with reasonable confidence by the pattern of the way that you walk. It's not quite as unique a signature as a fingerprint or, certainly, as DNA. I think there' something like an 80% confidence interval in a group of twenty that you could single somebody out just from the pattern of their walk, and that's at a prototype stage.

So it's easy for me to imagine - I've got this kind of not particularly fair, but real scenario in the book. It is not by any stretch of the imagination improbable. The scenario is that there's a bar, and the bar has load cells and sensors and processors in its flooring, and the moment you walk into the bar, it will track you and associate your identity with records that are databased externally. And then it will do a relational search, and identify you by political affinity. And then you see if you get served a beer or get punched in the nose and sent out the door, based on whether they want to serve you or not.

What is your political background, who are you? They could just associate the records about your political contributions on relational databases that are already out there in the world with the unique signature of your footfall. That sounds like a strange scenario, but it's not unrealistic. I don't know why anybody would want to design that system, but they certainly could, and they could do it with stuff that exists right now.

WorldChanging: We normally think of surveillance as a bunch of guys that are watching monitors that are linked to cameras that are placed around, but what we're really talking about here, is a bunch of sensors that are gathering data where the patterns can be analyzed, and you don't have to depend on having a human looking at a million different monitors, right?

Adam Greenfield: You sure don't. It's inferential. And to me, one of the scariest things about it is that it's sort of imperceptible, right? These are systems that are embedded, they communicate wirelessly, they're not perceptible to immediate, ordinary analysis. When you walk into a room, you might have no idea that they're operating. But they're collecting information, and inference is being made, machine inference is being applied to the fact patterns that they're gathering. And then this becomes actionable. Once that exists, then people can make determinations about their behavior based on it. And to me that's scary.

I'm real simple about it. I just don't necessarily want to live in a world like that. I want to be able, to the greatest extent possible, to enjoy relationships with other human beings where they're not preconditioned by the sum total of information that's available about me because it's flowing off my body in realtime.

WorldChanging: On the solutions side, what are the most positive results we can expect from ubicomp, based on what you've seen so far?

Adam Greenfield: I get asked some version of that question a lot, and there are certainly valid uses for it. Memory augmentation, and independent living for elderly people is one of the best scenarios I've seen, where having the armature of pervasive informatic systems does actually help people live independently, longer, with dignity, if the systems are designed correctly.

When Mark Weiser devised the idea of ubicomp way back in the late 80s or early 90s, he saw the power of applying very powerful informatics to everyday hassles like "where did I leave my keys," or "is that shirt that I wanted still on the rack at Macy's," or "what is the best commute to work," or "is there a parking space available where I'm headed." I think that's still a valid vision. I think that everyware will have some very positive consequences in people's lives in terms of reducing or even eliminating some of the hassles for thousands of years, and we just accept it as the price of existence. So I'm optimistic in that sense.

What raises red flags for me, though, is that each one of those systems and each one of those interactions will have to be designed by somebody, and knowing what I do about the technological process, and how things get sped to market, and how things get rushed, and how user experience work is so often the very first thing that's cut out of a development budget, I'm not terribly sanguine that all of those transactions are going to be designed with any kind of feel for people in them. So you can theoretically see the good things that can come out of it, and for every good that I can imagine, there are flags that come up, though one of the fundamental things that I hope people take away from the book and from my talks is that I'm not anti-ubiquitous computing, I just want it to be done right. And to be done sensitively.

There are great potentials for improved quality of life and certainly amazing business opportunities in the region where sensitive user experience development is applied to the challenge of ubiquitous systems. And that's what I'd like to see happen, and that's certainly a discussion that has yet to be started. So that's what I'm all about.

WorldChanging Interview: Adam Greenfield is a part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on Oct. 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 2:43 PM)

This article was was written by Jamais Cascio in March 2006. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

The Earth's environment, particularly its climate, is not a linear, obvious-cause and immediate-effect system. This has a number of implications, but the one that troubles many of us who pay close attention is the resulting potential for "phase change" shifts in the climate system, where seemingly-small perturbations lead to a major change in how the climate behaves (the classic example of this kind of change is a pile of sand with grains dropping down on the peak; some will slide down, some will stack up, but eventually the entire peak will collapse, radically changing the shape of the pile). As we develop the tools and techniques to better understand the overall global climate and ecological system, these "tipping points" should be at the top of our list of processes to identify and, if at all possible, defend.

This concept of particular points of environmental vulnerability bears a striking resemblance to a seemingly very different concern: the vulnerability of economies and societies to attack by those who would intentionally do harm. Analyst John Robb, in his Global Guerillas weblog (which should be required reading for all of us), calls these points of vulnerability systempunkt (we first mentioned this over a year ago); we could, in turn, think of these points of environmental vulnerability as ecopunkt. Robb defines "systempunkt" in this way:

Working with that description, we could define "ecopunkt" as: the point in an ecological system where a swarm of small insults will cause a cascade of collapse, leading to a chaotic destabilization of the environmental system.

Although we don't have dedicated groups of antagonists targeting environmental points of vulnerability in order to destabilize the climate (it just seems that way sometimes...), the risks arising from multiple ecopunkt are nonetheless profound. The "swarm of small insults" need not be intentional, or even obviously damaging; the cumulative effect of myriad seemingly-rational decisions can have be profoundly dangerous to the environment. Moreover, these ecopunkt could become intentional targets, if a political entity decides that the likely environmental disruptions would be less damaging to themselves than to their opponents.

But like the vulnerable points in markets and infrastructure described by John Robb, the ecopunkt could, in principle, be given preferential protection, so as to reduce the ease with which they are disrupted and the intensity of the result should they be damaged. While this would be most readily accomplished by slowing and stopping the damage already underway (by reducing global carbon emissions, for example), we might also be able to respond with mechanisms and technologies after the fact to shore up collapsing systems. This starts to sound like "Terraforming Earth" or "geoengineering," but with the advantage of focusing on a narrowly-defined system. It would still require a better understanding of geophysical and climatological processes than we now have, but that understanding is more likely to emerge if environmental scientists embraced the ecopunkt model.

(Here's an example of what this narrow geoengineering might look like: John Latham, a senior research associate at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, suggested that seeding atmosphere above the oceans with salt water vapor, accelerating the formation of clouds, could reflect enough sunlight to slow the planet's warming, but would require many thousands upon thousands of ships operating across the global oceans to do so; an ecopunkt version of this idea, however, would note that the melting of the Arctic ice cap is a very significant warming accelerator, as it greatly increases the absorption of warmth; potentially, a far smaller fleet of ships adding water vapor only in the Arctic ocean could have a greater positive result with much less effort.)

It's tempting to think that the ecopunkt model also tells us that small, distributed groups could have a disproportionate ability to protect the planet's environment. This may be so, and ideas like the Earth Witness/EarthPhone proposal fits in this approach. Unless we can identity the vast majority of ecopunkt, and can be sure of our ability to deal with each effectively, we're better off combining the ecopunkt concept with the more traditional efforts to push global institutions -- governments, NGOs, corporations -- to reduce significantly their carbon and environmental footprints.

In the end, the ecopunkt model doesn't require us to change how we confront climate disaster in radical ways; it's more of an ordering principle, a way to think about how best to prevent the worst types of environmental damage. The volume and variety of changes that we need to make in order to stop climate disaster can be overwhelming, even for those of us who know that solutions are possible. The ecopunkt approach of seeking out and paying the greatest attention to those processes and local systems that face rapid, non-linear collapse from accumulated small insults forces us to pay attention to the complex nature of the planetary environment, but could offer us a real chance to head off global catastrophe.

As always, the Open Future essays are explorations of ideas-in-progress. We encourage readers to comment and discuss, helping us to evaluate and strengthen the concepts.

The Open Future: Ecopunkt is a part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on Oct. 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 2:18 PM)

This article was was written by Regine Debatty in March 2006. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

The Soil Sampling Shoes are part of a larger project, Gardening Superfund Sites. They attempt to covertly take soil samples of Superfund waste sites in Silicon Valley as the wearer simply walks around on the soil.

In researching the sites, Amy Franceschini found that there are 29 sites in Santa Clara County. This is the most concentrated area of toxic sites in America. Many of the companies responsible for contaminating this area were making products that the artist uses. But it proved very hard to get information about the history and current status of the toxic clean up.

The shoes gather information in the form of soil information that can be pure evidence. This soil presented in the form of a sculpture becomes suspended evidence. The shoes become charged objects in the sense that the glass vials filled with soil become a representation of the memory of each site. A record of the waste produced in the making of computer memory in the early 1980’s.

Related: Johnny Appplesandal.
Other works by Future Farmers: Phototropism and robot, Homeland Security Blanket, Fruit.

Via Jonah Brucker-Cohen's interview of Amy Francescini for Gizmodo.

Soil Sampling Shoes is a part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on Oct. 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 2:01 PM)

This interview was was conducted by Hassan Masum in February 2006. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Joshua Farley is a professor at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics - home of the original $33 trillion estimate for ecosystem service value. Joshua co-authored the recent textbook Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications,which reconceptualizes economics with a few key new axioms: ecosystem and resource limits, distribution issues, and broader definitions of human well-being. He's in the vanguard of a growing movement to get economics right - with sustainability and human well-being as core principles.

Hassan Masum: Josh, thanks for agreeing to do this interview. 'Ecological Economics' sounds like an odd combination the first time one hears it. What exactly is Ecological Economics, and why is it important?

Joshua Farley: Ecological economics has been defined as the science and management of sustainability. There are lots of things that distinguish ecological economics from more conventional approaches to economics. First, ecological economists assume the human economic system is a subset of the sustaining and containing global ecosystem. The laws of thermodynamics tell us that matter-energy cannot be created or destroyed. This means that everything the economic system produces must come from the raw materials provided by nature.

The same laws tell us that entropy increases in an isolated system, and an energy differential is required to perform work. From the perspective of economics, entropy can be thought of as disorder, or uselessness. This means that all economic production uses high quality energy, which is used up and returned to the ecosystem as waste. In fact, everything the economic system produces ultimately returns to the ecosystem as waste. Humans, like all biological organisms, depend for their survival on the goods and services provided by healthy ecosystems. When we extract raw materials from nature to make things and we spew waste back, we degrade the life support functions of the planet’s ecosystems.

All economic production bears an opportunity cost measured in the loss or degradation of ecological life support functions and other ecosystem services. Unique among the planet’s species, humans have the capacity to irreversibly degrade these life support functions. Ecological economists assume a moral obligation to future generations and other species. The first task of an ecological economist is therefore to make sure that the physical size of the economic system — the rate at which it takes resources from the ecosystem and spews them back as waste — never exceeds the capacity of the ecosystem to sustain it.

The economy can’t grow for ever. If the economy can’t keep growing indefinitely, then the solution to poverty is not simply more growth. It makes no sense to care about the well-being of future generations not yet born and not care about those around today. The second task of an ecological economist is therefore to pursue a more just distribution of resources. Ecological economists also care about economic efficiency, but sustainable scale and just distribution take precedence.

Second, ecological economists assume we live in a world of extreme complexity and uncertainty that is constantly changing, and the economic system must also change in response. As our society evolved from hunter-gatherers to farmers to industrialists, our economic systems changed as well, and they continue to change. Ecosystems respond to change through unpredictable evolutionary processes. Economic systems develop unpredictable new technologies, then change in fundamental ways in response to those technologies. Human behavior evolves as cultures evolve. Both evolutionary and technological changes are unpredictable.

Ecosystem goods and services used to be extremely abundant relative to human made objects. If we want more fish on our dinner plates, the scarce factor of production is fish, not fishing boats. If we want more timber, the scarce factor is trees, not sawmills. Some of the most important issues we face today are climate change, biodiversity loss, ozone depletion and other environmental problems that are completely ignored by market forces. Our economic system has to evolve to respond to these new scarcities. Nobody could have predicted these problems two hundred years ago when market economies were first evolving, yet addressing them has become the key to our survival.

Third, ecological economics is explicitly transdisciplinary. Economics is the allocation of scarce resources among alternative desirable ends. Defining the desirable ends requires insights from ethics, philosophy, religion and psychology at the very least. Understanding the nature of the scarce resources requires insights from physics, chemistry, biology and ecology. Figuring out how to allocate requires insights from economics, sociology, political science and psychology. Disciplines impose narrow blinders that keep us from seeing the problem as a whole. This doesn’t mean that ecological economists must master a variety of disciplines, but rather that they learn to communicate and synthesize across disciplines.

The dominant economic paradigm strives for ever-increasing economic growth. Not only is this impossible on a finite planet, but growing evidence suggests that beyond a certain point, more material consumption does nothing to make us better off. Ecological economists seek to adapt our economic system to the increasing scarcity of ecosystem goods and services in order to create a more sustainable and desirable future.

HM: That's an impressive list of goals, which will be a challenge to live up to. You outline the necessity for our economic system to evolve in response to new scarcities - how do you see this evolution happening? What's an example where ideas from ecological economics have been successfully adopted?

JF: Living up to these goals may be a challenge, but if we fail to live up to them, we face insurmountable challenges - if the global economic system continues to grow and encroach upon the global ecosystem that sustains it, both will collapse. Fortunately, in many important areas, the economics system is already evolving to meet these challenges, though as of yet not as quickly as it needs to. Take the cap and trade policy on sulfur dioxide in the US as an example. Sulfur dioxide is emitted by coal fired power plants and other industries. In the US, we capped the amount of sulfur dioxide that industries are allowed to produce. Though the cap may be higher than many of us would like, at least in principle it follows the ecological economic rule of limiting the amount of waste emissions to a quantity that can be safely absorbed by our ecosystem.

The right to pollute was then distributed to the existing polluters, who were allowed to trade the permits. Markets in permits help minimize the financial costs of meeting pollution targets. The policy follows the ecological economic approach of scale first, distribution second and efficiency third. The policy was actually designed by conventional economists, which is why it perversely rewarded those industries that polluted the most. Ecological economists would favor a more just distribution - for example, auctioning off the right to pollute to industries, then using the revenue to replace regressive taxes. For cap and trade policies to be truly just, they must also prevent the concentration of pollutants in Žhot spotsŽ. The basic approach is a good one, however, and can be applied to resource extraction as well as to pollution.

Perhaps the biggest challenge we face is how to deal with complex systems. We don't really know what impacts our activities have on ecosystems, and when decisions are urgent and stakes are high, we rarely have the time or resources to make sure of our facts before we act. Because uncertainty affects future generations, we always confront the ethical issues of our obligations to future generations, so facts aren't enough anyway. We have to make the best choices we can under these circumstances, and avoid irreversible outcomes that will limit our future options.

As an example, we did a workshop/field-course a couple years ago looking at the conversion of mangrove ecosystems to shrimp aquaculture. We did a case study of a site on Palawan Island in the Philippines where mangroves were being illegally cleared as we worked, so decisions were urgent. Few studies had been done in the region, so facts were highly uncertain. The local villagers depended on the mangrove ecosystem to sustain their fisheries, protect their communities against storms, absorb silt and wastes washing the land that would otherwise damage the offshore coral reefs and so on, so stakes were high.

Ecological economists and scientists from various disciplines worked closely with several NGOs, the local government and local community members to learn as much as we could about the local system in the time available. We supplemented this information with scientific studies done in other locations. Guided by our NGO partners (Earth Economics in particular) we presented our findings on the potential ecological, economic and social impacts to the local government and the press.

The local Mayor, Edward Hagedorn, decided that the mangrove deforestation must be stopped before it caused irreversible damage. He not only got permission from the federal government to halt the deforestation, but helped organize the local community to actually tear down the existing dikes. Once people are presented with a bigger picture, integrating both ecological and economic issues, solutions are often obvious.

Unfortunately, universities too often teach people to focus on only one side of a problem, leading to distorted analyses. One way we're trying to advance ecological economics is by changing the way students learn and think. Many ecological economists therefore design transdisciplinary, transinstitutional courses that focus on real life problems, with real life constraints. We have a long ways to go before we accomplish our goals, but when the world finally recognizes that our economic system depends on a healthy ecosystem, we'll be ready with the necessary policies.

HM: Let's explore the question of education. As a university professor and author of the textbook 'Ecological Economics', you have experience on the ground in 'changing the way students learn and think'. How do students react to the broader ecological approach to economics? And what methods have you found to be effective outside academia, e.g. in talking to policy-makers and the public?

JF: In my experience, students react very favourably to ecological economics, especially those students who have some background in the natural sciences or in environmental studies. Occasionally I do find some resistance to the ideas from students who have background in neoclassical economics, but in compensation, when these students do come around, they really seem to get it.

I find more resistance to the methods I use to teach ecological economics. When I learned neoclassical economics, it was taught as revealed wisdom, with no historical context, and with no discussion of the obvious shortcomings of the discipline. I hated that approach - it doesn't teach students to think for themselves. I always tell students that I don't know all the answers, and no economist does. Other professors teach neoclassical economics, and both approaches can't be entirely correct.

I like to teach the theory and have students work with a community partner on some real life problem to which they can apply that theory. If the theory helps them understand the problem they are working on and provide solid solutions, they learn the material better, and have some empirical support for the theory. If instead what they learn from a real life problem contradicts the theory, then they learn the theories are inadequate and must be improved - and it's their job to improve them. That's the scientific method.

The problem is that it's a lot more challenging to apply theories then it is just to memorize and regurgitate. Lots of students are used to being spoon fed, and hate problems with a more applied approach that exposes them to messy, complex real life situations. By the mid-point in a typical semester, most students are intensely frustrated as they try to get their minds around the problem and think about how they can make a meaningful contribution to solving it. They complain if I can't tell them the answers, but I point out that none of them will ever have a job where the boss knows all the answers. Fortunately, by the end of the semester most of the students have made some real progress, and appreciate the approach I use.

I still don't have as much experience as I would like talking to policy makers and the general public, but in the experience I do have, I find the best approach is just to speak in clear, straightforward language anyone can understand. If I canŽt explain something clearly, it's probably because I don't understand it well enough myself. I certainly won't be able to convince policy makers to pay attention to what I have to say if they can't understand it.

I think a lot of economists use jargon and language that no one but other economists can really understand. The reason I got a PhD in neoclassical economics was so that I could understand that language, and when I did, I learned that much of what was being said made no sense at all. It's actually a lot easier to explain ecological economics to the general public than it is to explain neoclassical economics precisely because it's solidly grounded in the laws of physics and ecology, is explicit about its ethical assumptions, and shares those ethical assumptions with the majority of society.

HM: Thanks for the insight! Bringing our economic theories into harmony with broadly-accepted ethical assumptions is a challenge for all of us.

Maybe GDP isn't even the right mental model to use. If not, then what alternate or complementary system(s) would you like to see implemented, that would measure sustainable progress yet be simple enough to be commonly referred to in the media and everyday discussions?

JF: GDP is actually even more absurd than most people think, as it uses economic values in ways they were not meant to be used. The price of something is its value at the margin, the value of one more unit. This is why diamonds are extremely valuable while water is cheap. It doesn’t really make sense to multiply the price (marginal value) of something by total quantity to get total value.

For any resource that is essential and has few substitutes, such as food and energy, when the amount available falls by 10%, the price rises by more than 10% - the less we have, the more GDP grows, and vice versa! This is why Exxon made more profits this year than any corporation in history, not because they produced more oil, but because they produced less. When economists forget this, they draw absurd conclusions. Take for example the recent Nobel prize winner in economics, Thomas Schelling, who says that global warming won’t harm the US much since it will mainly affect agriculture, and agriculture only accounts for 3% of our GDP! When you measure everything in dollars, one dollar is as good as another — better computers are a substitute for food.

Fortunately the various Green GDP measures don’t make such a stupid mistake. Rather than trying to add in the total value of ecosystem goods and services, they subtract the value of what we degrade or use up. This is appropriate, since what we use in one year is more or less a marginal value. The Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare and the Genuine Progress Indicator include other factors on top of this, such as income distribution, non-marketed labor, and leisure time, but the base of all of these is still GNP, so more is always better.

What we really want is a measure of Quality of Life, not consumption. Almost by definition, quantifying quality of life represents a real challenge. We have proposed a measure of quality of life that includes subjective estimates of well-being (basically just surveys asking people how satisfied they are with their lives) as well as objective measures of opportunities available for satisfying the entire range of human needs. Drawing on the work of Manfred Max-Neef, we have proposed a list of human needs that are stable across time and cultures, including subsistence, reproduction, security, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, spirituality, creativity/emotional expression, identity and freedom.

To satisfy these needs, we need much more than just economic output — we also need the goods and services provided by healthy ecosystems, healthy social relationships and healthy minds and bodies, which we refer to as natural, social and human capitals. We also believe our real human needs are satiable. The reason people believe our demand for consumer goods is insatiable is because we use consumer goods to try and satisfy needs they are not capable of satisfying.

While it is a serious challenge to come up with some quantifiable index of human need satisfaction and subjective well-being, an imprecise measure of the right goals is much better than a highly precise measure of the wrong ones. Just thinking about how to measure the right things will get us thinking carefully about how to provide them. For simplicity, we could refer to the measure as gross national happiness, which they use in Bhutan, or something similar.

As long as we continue to accept ever increasing material consumption as the central goal of society and pursue it blindly, oblivious to ecological, social and human costs, we are unlikely to improve our quality of life. Even in countries like India, where increasing levels of material consumption remains extremely important, states like Kerala show that society can do a much better job of meeting human needs with the resources already available.

The problem is that people obsessed with consumption look at all talk of sustainability as a sacrifice. In reality, those of us in the richest countries are sacrificing our quality of life on the altar of ever-increasing consumption, and through the ecological costs this consumption imposes, we are sacrificing the well-being of the rest of the world as well. What we need to do is develop a positive, shared vision of what life would look like in a more sustainable and just world. Sustainability and just distribution does not require sacrifice — in reality it is the only path available to a better quality of life for us all.

Joshua Farley, Ecological Economist is a part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on Oct. 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 1:38 PM)

By Kathryn Cooper

William Pinar once wrote that “we are what we know” and also “what we do not know”. For me, this idea that our identity is shaped by what we are and what we are not—what we pay attention to, and what we do not, is at the heart of our unsustainable habits in Western culture. In effect, we are the two sides of a coin. Both sides belong to us. Change one side and it affects the other. That is why it concerns me that in a recent survey of 1200 global executives commissioned by The Economist, 71 per cent of business leaders either agreed or strongly agreed that too many companies are using “greening” and sustainability as merely a public-relations tool. Companies are not changing who they are/who they are not—just who they pretend to be.

When we see a program that is designed to effect authentic behaviour change, we should embrace it. In July, Air Canada (the world’s 14th largest scheduled and charter airline), and the Zerofootprint Group of Companies, launched their Corporate Carbon Offset Program. Seemingly based on principles of social marketing, this program encourages companies, as part of their corporate carbon management strategy, to offset the CO2 e from travel that they cannot cut from their operations.

I see offsets as one tool of authentic behaviour change. For some critics offsets are seen as enablers of the status quo. They believe that individuals and businesses use them to appease their “greenhouse guilt” by paying to conduct business as usual. But this theory disregards the opportunity presented by quality offset projects. Anyone familiar with the concept of internalizing externalities might see offsets as a first step toward this important economic practice. There is some wariness about offsets because of a lack of transparency and choice among many offset offerings. You might wonder, with the very little information provided to most offsetters about the projects they are funding, whether it is all just smoke and mirrors. Yet somehow, many people overcome this concern, and take the leap of faith. In 2006, about $91 million of carbon offsets were purchased in the voluntary market, representing about 24 million metric tons of CO2e reductions (State of Voluntary Carbon Market. This might seem small compared to the 4.1 billion metric tons of unsequestered CO2e (4.5 billion tonnes) humans add to the atmosphere annually, but it is a step in the right direction.

Adhering to good social marketing practices such as: overcoming barriers, making activities convenient and providing incentives; the Zerofootprint/Air Canada Corporate Carbon Offset Program is unique. Zerofootprint and Air Canada have dialed up the commitment to accountability, quality, and choice in the offset industry. For this program, Zerofootprint sought out regionally diverse certified carbon offset projects. Corporations can choose offsets from four registered projects that have been verified and certified by an independent body using ISO 14064-2 or an equivalent standard. In addition to certification and registration, projects must also be “additional”, meaning that they would have not otherwise have taken place, that they account for “carbon leakage” (to avoid unanticipated CO2 emissions), that they be managed under good risk management practices, and that they have a significant sustainability impact. Corporations can choose from a tire recycling program in Quebec, a run of river hydro project in Ontario, a forest restoration project in British Columbia, and a landfill gas recovery project in Ontario. Offsetters can see a detailed description of these projects on the Zerofootprint website and the site is regularly updated with photo and CO2e sequestration or CO2e avoidance data.

A unique feature of the Corporate Carbon Offset Program is the “Green Leader” initiative, which rewards early adopters. The first “Green Leader” under the program was the Royal Bank of Canada. And since in a voluntary market, someone needs to measure and recognize how behaviour has changed, Zerofootprint offers Levels of Distinction to every company who participates. In this case, companies that offset 100 percent of their remaining travel can use a branded platinum seal in their promotional activities. Good social marketing theory says “make the behaviour visible”, and this is exactly what this seal does. The seal is a sign of the company’s commitment to sustainability. Levels of bronze, silver and gold provide a step-wise goal of advancing a company’s sustainability stature.

The design elements of this Corporate Carbon Offset Program, with its focus on accountability, quality, convenience, choice and incentives, are enablers for authentic corporate behaviour change. The program sets the bar high enough that companies can transform what they know and what they do in significant ways. It may not be as easy as “greenwashing”, but it is real and meaningful, and it is an approach we need in a low carbon world.

Kathryn Cooper is a sustainability practitioner and a researcher in sustainability and education at York University, Toronto, Canada.

Article originally published on WorldChanging Canada. Previous WorldChanging Canada articles on offsets:

Bundled Carbon Offsets
Gradually Greening: Neutralizing my Car
Going Beyond Carbon Neutrality

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Columns at 1:06 PM)

This article originally appeared in Conscious Choice.

read more

This article was was written by Alex Steffen in February 2006. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Here's a problem I didn't know existed. are underground fires that burn in coal mines and seams. In China alone, they may spew as much CO2 into the atmosphere as all the cars in the US.

These fires are exceedingly difficult to put out. Indeed, some well-known ones have been burning for decades.

Finding a way to put out coal fires and prevent new ones would seem to me to be an area where some worldchanging innovation could yield profound benefits for everyone. A brief online search turned up some interesting projects -- Remote sensing GIS tools to support fire fighters, an ambitious-looking Sino-German project, some new coal fire-fighting techniques -- but I'm not at all confident that these are the best (or even good) ideas.

But I know some of you guys must have ideas and information. Are there better tools out there? What might be done to address this problem? Why isn't this a better-known issue? If we were going to make fighting coal fires a priority, what would we do, and how would we best go about it?

Coal Fires and Climate Change is a part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on Oct. 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 11:58 AM)

Right before Worldchanging began, Alex went on a six month road trip across the United States to search for signs of sustainability. During his journey he kept a travelogue, which later became pieces for Worldchanging. Below is an excerpt and a link for each of the two that we've received the most feedback on over the years.

From Night, Hoover Dam: