If you follow green blogs and tweets, as I do, it's hard to miss the ongoing slanging match between Climate Progress and the Breakthrough Institute. And I'm not, at least in this post, picking a dog in that fight. But I have been reading Breakthrough - the book that birthed the institute - and it seems to me that Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, the book's co-authors, have at least one insight that all of us should pay attention to.

It answers a question I've always had about my own history as an environmentalist: if I do believe in this cause - and I do - why have I seldom contributed to, and never volunteered for, any environmental group? I did once work - for pay - for a couple of environmental groups, but that's another story. (Though perhaps not entirely unconnected to the question at hand.)

It also goes a long way to explain the exponential growth of the Transition Town movement.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger make two related points. First, that for most of its history, the environmental movement has been almost entirely dedicated to stopping things. And second, that about all it has asked from its supporters is their money and their votes. The result, they argue, is that while an enormous number of people say they support environmental causes, when push comes to shove - when they have to put their money or their convenience on the line - their environmental concerns fall by the wayside. (They're not alone in noticing this: a sure way to make green business guru Joel Makower testy is to send him a survey reporting that some huge percentage of Americans buy green, when all the evidence indicates that they don't.)

All this made sense to me, but where they really caught my attention was when they compared the success, or lack thereof, of the environmental movement with the growth of evangelical churches. Unlike environmentalists, they argue, members of evangelical churches will turn themselves inside out to support their church. Why? Because their church is more fun.

Well, I spent quite a lot of time at an evangelical megachurch while I was researching The Word, my book about how people read the Bible, and the Breakthrough guys are right: it's much more engaging, exhilarating, and satisfying to be a member of an evangelical church than it is to be a member of, say, the Sierra Club. It's not just that evangelical church schedules are packed full of meetings, clubs, groups and activities, though they are. It's also that their members are convinced that, through all these activities, they are helping to build a better world. Yes, there are things they want to stop. But there is much more that they want to create.

And suddenly a light went on: that's why the Transition movement is growing so fast. (If you're not familiar with the Transition movement, go here, or here, to find out more. Better still, get ahold of a copy of Rob Hopkins' The Transition Handbook.)

Transition isn't a church, or in any way religious, but but the Transition movement is more like an evangelical church than any other group I've ever come across. Rob Hopkins has grasped what most environmental activists seem to have missed: if people are going to be engaged over the long term, they have got to be building something, not stopping something. And they have got to enjoy themselves.

There are a lot of Transition Towns in the US - and around the world, for that matter - but the one I'm most familiar with, because I've spent some time there, is Totnes, the first in the UK. This summer, according to their July bulletin, you could attend a solstice picnic, go on an edible garden crawl, or go to a meeting about direct action on climate change. There were activities for bikers and photographers, a kids' event at a local estate, a bunch of lectures and movie screenings. And no matter what aspect of our climate crisis grabs you - housing, the economy, jobs, energy, food, health, the arts, politics - they've got a group for you.

The other genius of Transition is that the task of a Transition Town group is not to stop climate change. It is to imagine how their town could not just survive, but thrive, in an oil-constrained and warmer world, and then to do everything they can to make that imagining a reality. But the very process of working towards that goal, of course, also deepens their commitment to doing whatever they can, personally and politically, to address climate change. The two feed, and feed on, each other.

So, though it's hard to think of two people more different in almost every way than Rob Hopkins and Rick Warren...

Labels: Breakthrough Institute, climate change, Climate Progress, environmentalists, evangelical churches, Joel Makower, peak oil, Rick Warren, Rob Hopkins, Transition Towns

I am a huge fan of Zipcar, the company that's enabled us to live without a car for the last decade. Especially since they put a bunch of cars four blocks from our house, we use them a lot: mostly for necessary errands, but, once in a while just for the hell of it, because we simply don't feel like getting on the subway.

The magic of Zipcar is that - apart from the minor inconvenience of having to book the car for a pre-specified block of time - it's exactly like owning your own. You stroll over to the garage, unlock the car, and drive off. You don't have to pay for insurance, garaging, or even gas - just an hourly rental charge and - if you go far enough - a small mileage charge. Of course, there is a certain Cinderella-and-the-coach aspect to it. If you don't get it back by the time you've promised, the car may not turn into a pumpkin, but you are stuck with a hefty surcharge.

But though Zipcar cars are shared, it doesn't really feel like sharing. The company does its best to make Zipcar users feel like members of a community - addressing us (regrettably) as Zipsters, offering an online forum and even hosting the occasional party - but it doesn't really work. I do grin when I see another Zipcar, but I rarely actually talk to the driver. And other Zipcar drivers show no particular desire to talk to me. I did get into a Zipcar conversation four months ago, with the guy at the tree stand who carried our Christmas tree to our Zipcar pickup. Turns out they use Zipcar pickups for their deliveries too, and we agreed, in a most un-Christmaslike spirit, that Hertz (which had just started a carbon copy of Zipcar in midtown Manhattan) deserved to fall flat on its copycat face.

But that was the exception. Basically, Zipcar users are customers. Pure and simple.

So - partly prompted by a post by Rob Hopkins a while back about living without a car and partly by working on a story for MSN on sharing stuff in general - I've been thinking about what would make for real, community-oriented car-sharing. And the conclusion I've reluctantly come to is that you can have ease of use, or you can have community, but I'm not at all sure you can have both.

Take my recent experience with Jolly Wheels, a company that began its business by going Rent-A-Wreck one better (the car I rented from them a year ago or so had really scarily erratic brakes). Since then, they've adopted a new business model, in which people who own cars but don't use them regularly can rent them out to others. Jolly Wheels takes care of the bookings and (I assume) the insurance. All the car owner has to do is drop it off when the rental starts and pick it up when it's over. It sounded like at least a step towards real, genuine car-sharing.

But judging by my experience, it's not working very well. Even the $50 or so a day that Jolly Wheels renters pay owners for the use of their cars doesn't seem to be attracting ordinary car-owners; the guy whose car I was supposed to get owned a whole fleet which he rented out himself, using Jolly Wheels to fill the gaps in his schedule. And he seemed perfectly willing to leave Jolly Wheels in the lurch when a more attractive rental came along; I discovered when I called to check on my rental that my puny three days had been cast aside in favor of a more lucrative five-day deal - and that this wasn't the first time this particular owner had done that. (Of course, why, after the first experience, Jolly Wheels was still using him.....really desperate for cars, I'd guess.)

In his post, Rob writes about still another model that's more like carpooling than a car-share. People post trips they're planning (with or without a car) and the site tries to match car-owners with ride-seekers.

To make any of these concepts work - indeed, to make any sharing model work - you need volume. Because if sharing stuff involves even the smallest amount of friction, most people won't bother. (I believe in sharing, and I'm unlikely to try Jolly Wheels again. However much I like their business model in theory, in practice it was nothing but a pain.)

Yes, the truly dedicated simple-lifestyle crew will sign up quickly. But if it doesn't work right - from the get-go - even they will be driven away. If car-sharing is going to change the driving and car-owning habits of even a significant minority of drivers, let alone a majority, it's got to be so easy that it's a clear and immediate improvement on owning. And how to do in a community-oriented model, without having to spend the enormous amount of money that only a corporation can come up with, is a problem I don't think anyone has yet solved. (Except Craig Newmark, and it took him a year or so just to move from emails to a website. And let's face it - when it comes to other people and your stuff, selling's a one-night stand, but sharing is a marriage.)

The idea of sharing large, expensive, and often infrequently used items like cars, bikes, and tools is so enormously appealing - on economic, social and environmental grounds - that it seems like a no-brainer. As Jeff Boudier, a co-founder of the rent-anything site Zilok, said to me when I talked to him for the sharing article, "Instead of having 10 people rush to Wal-Mart and buy a $30 drill made in China that will break in 5 minutes, wouldn't it be better for one person to buy a very good quality tool and have a way to share it with others?" Of course it would - better for the planet and better for our credit cards, too.

Unfortunately, a no-brainer is just what it isn't. Somehow, we seem to be wired in such a way that anything short of owning - even owning something like an electric drill that we hardly ever use, don't keep in repair, and can't even find when we do want to use it - feels like a diminishment. Wherever did we get that idea - and how on earth can we be persuaded to let go of it?

Labels: environment, Rob Hopkins, sharing, Zilok, Zipcar

I've been reading Bill McKibben's Hope, Human and Wild - in particular the chapter about Curitiba, a city in Brazil that seems to have about as low a carbon footprint and as vibrant a community life as a city could hope to have. It sounds wondrous.

But, I thought to myself regretfully as I closed the book, it is in no way a model. Why? Because all the wonderful things the city has done seem to be the brainchild of its mayor, Jaime Lerner, and the band of young and enthusiastic architects and planners he's assembled. Turning a street into a pedestrian mall over a weekend (and against the fierce opposition of the street's merchants), getting people in the slums to collect garbage by paying them with bags of food - it all looks - from afar, anyhow - like redesign from the top down.

I think there's a limit to just how far top-down can get us. And to how long its changes can last.

Start with the practicality. In a city like, say, New York, there's no way those kinds of programs could be instituted just on the mayor's say-so. Frankly, Mike Bloomberg doesn't have much of a say-so. Any major initiative requires state approval; it also requires him to successfully navigate an intricate web of political pressure groups inside the city, all of them empowered by a regulatory process that's designed to give just about anybody a chance to have their say and - in many cases - to gum up the works. Just look at the fate of congestion pricing, or the ability - currently on depressing display - of a couple of state legislators to block a plan to bail out the transit system.

But I think the problem with the top-down approach goes deeper than the bureaucratic gridlock that afflicts long-established cities. Maybe I've been hanging out too much with Transition Town folks (I just spent two weeks in Totnes and had a chance to talk with Rob Hopkins, founder of the movement, a conversation I'll report on as soon as I've transcribed the tape). But I am skeptical that changes directed from the top can, by their very nature, be sustainable.

As McKibben describes it, governing Curitiba seems to involve a constant struggle to keep on top of the next manifestation of human nature or economic pressure that could destroy the town's carefully created culture. While the public transportation system is astoundingly efficient - and very heavily used - lots of people are still wedded to their cars (and delighted by the relative lack of traffic). McKibben quotes one resident as saying, "In some ways we remain spectators of the town." It sounds as though the town's culture is - so far at least - the creation of its mayor, more than of its citizens.

Top-down is a tempting model. A lot of us long for someone - President Obama, Mike Bloomberg, anyone - to impose sanity on us and our maladjusted, carbon-dependent, super-individualistic lifestyle. Take away our cars, take away our fast food, stop us - because we don't seem to be able to stop ourselves.

But if changes are really to take hold, there's no escape from the slow work of bringing people onboard. It is frustrating and maddening; I often feel like taking the whole population of the United States and just shaking them awake somehow.

Unfortunately, when you shake people awake, most of the time the only thing they really want is to be allowed to go back to sleep again.

Labels: Curitiba, Rob Hopkins, sustainability, Transition Towns, transportation, urban planning