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A few weeks ago, Seth Godin blogged about enormity:

If you’ve got a small, fixable problem, people will rush to help, because people like to be on the winning side, take credit and do something that worked. If you’ve got a generational problem, something that is going to take herculean effort and even then probably won’t pan out, we’re going to move on in search of something smaller.

Now, Seth is a smart guy, and I don’t doubt that he is right about this. But at the same time, we actually are facing a generational problem that is going to take herculean effort. The jury is out on whether or not it will pan out. So if Seth is right, and people simply don’t have the capacity to respond to enormity at this level, even if that enormity is Reality, then what’s our next move?

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One Monday morning in early August, I was walking down 23rd street in Manhattan when a voice in my head yelled, “I want to get out of here.” Impressed by its sureness (I am a champion of ambivalence), I jumped online as soon as I got to work. I googled Cape Cod Community College and looked up their Language and Literature Dept. After a couple minutes of sleuthing, I found the name and email of the department chair. Ten minutes later, I had sent a carefully-tailored introduction of myself and job query to Ms. Polito. I told the voice in my head, “There.”

Over the past month, I’d been visiting my boyfriend on the Cape on the weekends and though he’d urged me to move, I’d always said, “What about work?” as though I would never be able to get a job there that wasn’t miserable. The truth was that I could do what I did in Manhattan on the Cape – if CCCC was hiring.

The work day rolled on in its familiar pattern. I chatted with my coworker Christine about our ESL Immersion kids and how we thought each would do on his or her upcoming ACT test. The dim lighting lulled me into a sense of being outside of time, outside of anything ever changing. But when I went to check my email around noon, I had received a reply from Sally Polito. She said that indeed, there were classes in need of instructors for the Fall semester. After a couple more emails, an interview was scheduled. 

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Alex Steffen is one of my heroes. His work on Worldchanging (the book and the website) is some of the most important work being done today, so I was stoked to find this hour-long video of a talk he gave at Yale this past spring. In it, he shares many of the ideas—already in play—that can create the bright green future we want to live in.

Right now, he says, there are 2 choices for the billions of mostly young people in the developing world: they can either stay poor and frugal, which no one wants to do, or they can become rich and wasteful like us, which would be an environmental catastrophe. What we need is a third choice—a new kind of prosperity that raises standards of living without trashing the planet. And those of us in the developed world have the resources to create this third choice, which makes it our responsibility.

In this talk, we learn how we are getting there, piece by piece. Dense and vital cities, smart power grid technology, economic and political power for women, thoughtful consumerism, and transparency in industry and government are all on the rise. And they interact in subtle, powerful ways to create new waves of innovation and freedom.

The G20 is meeting today in Pittsburgh, and I can’t help but wish they’d watch and discuss this talk. But part of building a bright green future is each of us taking on responsibility, here and now, to educate ourselves and bring these fresh ideas into our own circles of influence and care. I hope you will take the time this weekend to learn about what’s possible and, indeed, what is already happening, so that you can be part of it.

image courtesy of helgasms!

I grew up right at the beginning of “self-esteem culture.” We got ribbons for participating in Field Day, even if we didn’t win anything, and though our teachers didn’t hold back with criticism, they did take care with our feelings. This seemed to work pretty well; as I recall, I had a fairly good understanding of my strengths and weaknesses, and conceited kids were brought back down to size by the pack rather quickly.

It’s been almost 20 years since I was in school, though, and things have changed. Parents and teachers are more mindful of the self-esteem of children, and often praise them for, as Chris Rock famously put it, “shit they are supposed to do.” The result? Ever-more-entitled people who see themselves as special and above average for no particular reason.

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This is a guest post from Marianne Luhrs, an Urban Planner and Disaster Preparedness Specialist currently working as a research assistant at John Jay College. She can be found online at LinkedIn and at her Google page.

Recently, there has been a “new” movement sweeping the nation and Europe. Well, maybe sweeping is too strong a word. “Popping up” might be more appropriate. The Transition Towns movement emerged four years ago with Rob Hopkins, a British ecologist. An April 19, 2009 New York Times article held that the movement, while it shares certain principles with environmentalism, actually regards itself as “deeper” and “more radical.”

The thrust of the Transition sales pitch is that escalating oil prices and worsening climate change impacts will eventually result in industrial society’s catastrophic collapse. To sidestep this “eventuality”, the group says we must foster community resiliency by embracing sustainability. Transition claims to be a new way to react to the problems of our time, but if you read a history of urban planning, you would find that there have been many such movements over the years.

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I was catching up on my newsreader this morning and came across this article from Tim Ferriss’s blog, an excerpt from the book The Leap (which I haven’t read, but after reading this bit of it, I will). This excerpt examines Bill Gates’s “origination story” and in the process, explodes the myth of entrepreneurs as audacious risk takers. According to author Rick Smith, “The Leap” actually unfolds as a series of small steps of testing hypotheses and tweaking ideas until the big risk becomes the next logical step.

“You don’t have to be fearless to make dramatic changes in your life. Transformative change isn’t propelled by raw courage. It’s “sparked” by a series of events that build exposure and experience, both of which help to create asymmetric risk. Through sparking, the upside opportunity is confirmed while downside risk is mitigated. Ultimately, the leap—when it comes—is not one of faith but of experience, even of comfort, just as it was for Gates.”

This is really an exciting idea to contemplate in terms of building a new way for humans to live based on bright green principles. We don’t have to screw up our courage and take a massive leap into the unknown. We just have to try new things, accept the feedback, and try again. This involves a certain amount of self-discipline for sure to avoid falling back into inertia, and a certain amount of discomfort. But maybe looking at it this way makes our enormous task of reinvention a little less terrifying and a bit more fun.

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Last night I took part in a great conference call with my homies from EnlightenNext. We talked about our experiences over the last month or so, and most of us reported that this summer was a time of rapid change. Some of us started demanding educational programs, others got new jobs, I moved house—and we all also described the same feelings of terror and elation as we took on new challenges and watched our old lives fade away in the distance.

I know for me that when things get scary, I have a tendency to retreat into old habits. I eat too much, I sit on my arse too much, I hibernate and spend too much time alone. The funny thing is that, before I do these things, they sound like a lot of fun. “Don’t I deserve a break?” I ask myself, and the answer is resoundingly yes. But after a day or so of indulgence, I invariably feel shitty. The “treat” I so “deserved” isn’t even fun.

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Saturday I attended a workshop led by Pamela Slim (author of Escape from Cubicle Nation) and Jonathan Fields (author of Career Renegade) designed to help budding entrepreneurs step through the process of turning our passions into viable business models.

As Pam and Jonathan shared their hard-won expertise and helped us evaluate our ideas, I started think how new this was. Ten years ago, or even five, how many big selling authors would take an entire day to educate fledgling entrepreneurs and possible competitors? It’s not like they did this for free, of course—each of us paid a fee to be there—but still, the monetary rewards seemed modest for a whole day out of both of their lives.

Moreover, these two writers have a wide overlap in the audiences they serve. They are each others’ competition. And yet they chose to work together.

From a traditional business standpoint, this looks kind of crazy. But from the strange brew of internet accessibility, the critical-condition economy, and the gnawing questions many of us have about the value of a life dedicated to corporate service, a new way of doing business is emerging.

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The last few weeks have been a whirlwind. I packed everything I owned, sold a big portion of it, moved, and unpacked. To top it all off, summer just ended. What this translated for to me was a perfect storm of stress, partying, and mountains of fried food. Oy.

A few years ago, I would have looked over the past month and gotten discouraged with myself. I’d call myself a colossal screw up, and this period of my life—which has generally been quite healthy and productive—would come to end in a glorious blaze of French fries, ice cream, and primetime television. I’d simply give up, at least until the next time I got annoyed with my unhealthy self and started again.

Only thing is, each time the pendulum swings from strict compliance to wild defiance, damage is done. In Rapt, Winifred Gallagher talks about this phenomenon, quoting research psychiatrist George Ainslie:

[Willpower] is a bargaining situation with your expected future selves, in which the present choice is a test case for a whole category of probable choices in the future. Why not eat the cake? After all, one piece won’t show! What you lose isn’t that little bit of slimness, however, but your expectation that you’ll be able to stick to your diet.

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Today’s video is from author and speaker John Marshall Roberts, who covers terrain familiar to The Sunny Way—how to use the ideas of personal and cultural development to create change in the world. He uses the work of Clare Graves (which we’ve discussed before) to show the many ways human beings think about life, and to break down what works when communicating with people with these different worldviews.

I have to admit it was a little rough for me to get past the New Age-y graphics—I have a pet peeve about them!—but I’m glad I did. Roberts has a deep understanding of how change works and is able to share it really effectively. I’m definitely going to grab his book.

image courtesy of fazen

Since Monday’s post, I’ve been thinking a lot about freedom. What is it? What is it for? As I unpacked and organized and pondered these questions, I remembered Naomi Wolf’s wonderful book Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries, and specifically this passage on the Declaration of Independence:

The Declaration is not saying: “Hurrah, you are born free, enjoy your bingo or your yoga as you see fit.” ... Rather, it is saying something darker and more personally demanding: you have a sacred obligation to take the most serious possible steps and undergo the most serious kinds of personal risks in defense of this freedom that is your natural right ... Jefferson left us not a guarantee of a life basking in a lawn chair, but rather a guarantee of a life of personal upheaval and sacrifice when necessary.

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