image courtesy of .candy

“We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game by taking sides .... No one who has read a page by a good critic or a speculative scientist can ever again think that this barren choice of yes or no is all that the mind offers.”

—Jacob Bronowski, host and author of The Ascent of Man, physicist/philosopher, and all around smart guy

I came across this quote in the book “Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food,” written by an organic farmer and a genetic engineer who are married to each other and who wonder how their disciplines might be married for the good of both humankind and nature.

Both the question they are asking in their book and the content of this quote are fascinating. How often do we settle for the barren choice of yes or no, even when reality itself teems with untold possibilities? And how often do we make that barren choice unconsciously?

The answer: Pretty much all the time. From politics to the economy to the environment, we generally turn the content of our discussions into a horse race in which the most important thing is whether or not “our” horse wins.

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As soon as I moved back to Pittsburgh in February, we got an enormous amount of snow that ground the city to a halt, and I was stuck at home for a few weeks. This was OK, cause I had a lot of painting and unpacking and rearranging to do. That was all done within a month, around the time the snow started to melt. Then I went to Colorado for a week to attend the (very awesome) Integral Incubator at Boulder Integral. I came back with my sails full of wind, ready to start my new blog and activist project, Bright Green Burgh, dedicated to creating a future for Pittsburgh that is both bright and green.

My first BGB act was to speak at a really fun event last weekend, put on by dear friend/professional bellydancer/community-builder extraordinaire Amethyst Azhar, where local artists created bellydance costumes out of recycled stuff. I was excited to talk to a bunch of environmentalist-leaning folks in such a merry atmosphere, hoping to connect with some and start to build a team. And I worked hard on what I would say—practiced it and clocked it and edited it and practiced some more.

By the time I got to the event, I felt ready. But I was in the middle of a conversation with a fellow speaker when heard my name being called, and I hurried to the mike. And then, as my demure friend Matt likes to say, I shit the bed.

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In this short video (which I saw on No Impact Man’s blog), researchers converted a staircase into a piano, making it a feature in an otherwise boring transit routine. As a result, they found that 66% more people chose it over the escalator than usual. There are other examples at TheFunTheory.com, a project of Volkswagen, and they are also running a contest with a prize of 2500€ going to the best new fun theory ideas.

Thinking about how this might work on a large scale is in and of itself a lot of fun. So much of environmentalism right now is about self-denial and shrinking—but does it have to be? What if it wasn’t? As we build new ways to live, how can we make them playful and more fun than what we are doing now?

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image courtesy of Nesster

Last week I watched the first episode of Ken Burns’s new documentary series on America’s National Parks. It focused largely on John Muir, the Scots-born American writer and philosopher who many think of as the first environmentalist.

Muir’s outlook was based largely on his deep spiritual connection with nature, gained through epic walks in the mountains of Yosemite and other wild places in the world, and conveyed through his writings. His words touched me as they touched so many of his contemporaries. He saw nature as God’s greatest expression and worked tirelessly to protect it from the encroachments of industrial society and its half-baked notions of “progress.”

Much of the environmental movement still has this anti-progress bias today. But I wonder, is this historically inherited bias still serving us? Backing up even more, can we look objectively at the concept of progress? I’m not sure that we can, but it’s worth a shot.

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As you can see, today we have launched a complete redesign of The Sunny Way. What do you think?

Our goal is to simplify the design to make the articles easier to read and digest. We also want to extend the cherry tree metaphor referenced in the book Cradle to Cradle. The task of 21st century environmentalists is not to do fewer bad things to the planet; it’s to redesign human society so that prosperity, health, and beauty—not waste and inequality—are its byproducts.

You may have noticed that over the last few months we’ve focused our message to dive into the relationship between personal development and changing the world. How can pursuing our own growth as individuals and groups be part of creating a new way to live? How does our mindset impact what we are capable of building? How do we be the kind of people who can create the future we want to live in?

Everything evolves through time. What’s most interesting to me is how we can participate in that process and leap beyond the problems we have now into a clean, just, prosperous future—as Alex Steffen puts it, “A future that is both bright and green.”

To create this bright green future, we must first believe that it’s possible. Then we must hold ourselves personally responsible to see that possibility through. This requires a huge amount of strength, clarity, and community. Our hope is that The Sunny Way can support us all in finding and using those resources.

Please click around and let us know what you think of the new design and our new direction. Thanks!

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YERT is “an environmental anti-depressant in film form.” Mark Dixon, Ben Evans, and Julie Dingman Evans drove around to every state in the US for a year, covering ideas to move us toward sustainability and the people who are working on them—from the Solar Roadways guy to the guy who lives in a cave.

Right now they are hard at work putting the film together and trying to get it exposure (Sundance!). Check out the trailer below—this is going to be a blast, and I wish them all the best. So much so that I just gave them some cash to help them finish it up. You can, too, at this link.

image courtesy of jurek d.

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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image courtesy of Aldon

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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image courtesy of omniNate

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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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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courtesy Pink Sherbet Photography

Well, I’m all moved out of my old apartment and into the new. I’m getting unpacked, having fun setting up my new space, and it’s nice here. Still, I felt kind of sad last night as I locked the door to the old place for the last time. I have lots of great memories of that flat; my years there were very, very happy.

Even deeper than that, though, is the fact that the apartment represented security for me—the most and best security I’ve had in my life. This was huge, and very nourishing in a way that I sorely needed after my chaotic childhood.

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image courtesy of David Paul Ohmer

This week I’m getting ready to move, and so I’ve been focused on small, mundane details and plans. Rushing around getting everything ready, I realized that I tend to see the day-to-day minutae of my life as somehow separate from the larger mission of creating a lovely, fair, functional future, like I have to choose between attending to what needs attention right now and what needs attention in the larger sense.

Silly, right? I think most of us do this, though. We focus on the everyday demands placed on our time, and we lose the thread of our larger desires and goals. How do we stitch the two back together? How do we live each day, and make each choice, in the context of creation and responsibility?

It depends on where we put our focus, and how we spend our time. Here are some things to keep in mind as you decide where to apply these precious resources each day.

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image courtesy of jonnykeelty

Grumpiness happens. For me, it’s when people are willfully clueless and/or bad drivers and/or walking too slow on the sidewalk in front of me. I can feel myself get tense and then I start muttering to myself like a crazy person. It’s not pretty!

Beyond ‘not pretty,’ though, it also has a larger impact. On days when I give in to being grumpy, I get less done. I spend valuable moments replaying the annoying things that happened and parsing my reactions to them. “I shouldn’t have been snippy with so-and-so,” etc.

Of course this is a total waste of time.

Why your mood matters

There’s also the fact that, as I learned in Winifred Gallagher’s excellent book Rapt, negative emotions cause us to see fewer possibilities, and to constrict our focus. Think about millions of grumpy faces dotted across the world on any given day. How many great opportunities and connections are we missing because we’re focusing on the wrong things?

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