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

The question of the juncture - or is it disjunction? - between sustainability and economic growth is being raised all over the place right now. Over on Rob Hopkins' Transition blog, there's a lively debate on the UK's low-carbon transition plan and its emphasis on economic growth. Nate Silver, at FiveThirtyEight, responds -- with a mordant logic worthy of Jonathan Swift -- to arguments that global warming won't be so bad because it will only cut GDP by 5% over the next 100 years. Hey, look, he says, we could wipe out almost half the world and drop GDP by only 4.4%, so why worry? And Dennis Pacheco, on Chelsea Green, asks whether California's IOUs are really a cleverly disguised alternative local currency.

It's a huge topic, and while, after decades as a financial reporter, I know something about the subject, there's a lot more that I don't know than that I do. But it does seem clear to me that there's something perverse about the way that economic growth has become the fundamental measure of the health of our society. Or any society.

If you watch financial news, you've noticed that the very first question out of any interviewer's mouth is "When is the economy going to start growing?" The very definition of a recession is negative financial growth. We are taught, over and over again, that the test of our well-being is how fast our economy is growing, and the first argument raised against any attempt to curb greenhouse gases is that it will hurt economic growth.

So when peak oil folk talk - and they do - about a steady-state economy, it's kind of scary, even to me. Can we thrive - all of us - in an economy that does not grow? Where everything stays pretty much the same?

Of course, it's not that there's not enough to go around. Just as there's enough food in the world to feed us all - if it could be gotten to the people who need it - so there's enough money in the world for a decent, if not extravagant, lifestyle for all, if some of it could be taken from those who have a ludicrous excess and given to those who have almost nothing.

The trouble is, I can't think, off the top of my head, of a single even slightly developed society that has succeeded in doing that. The human desire to hang onto what you've got is very, very strong.

On the other hand, to argue that economic growth is the only way to bring even a modicum of wealth to the world's poorest people is - essentially - to claim that it's necessary to make some obscenely wealthy in order that others may have the barest necessities of life. Does that make sense?

I certainly don't know the answer. But if climate change and peak oil are the overwhelming and intertwined emergencies of this century - and I believe they are - then it's a question we're going to have to tackle, and soon. Journalists and economists and politicians -- and all the rest of us -- are going to have to find a new way of defining social well-being. Growth won't cut it.

Labels: Chelsea Green, climate change, economic growth, FiveThirtyEight, peak oil, Transition Towns

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