The urbanist journal Next American City is on my short list of critical urban resources. In comparison to many policy- and planning-oriented magazines, it's routinely intelligent, passionate and forward-looking -- I sometimes disagree with the perspectives they offer on the future of cities, but I nearly always learn something from the experience.

It's also a good looking pub, so I was glad to read that it's just won an Ozzie.

Congrats, NAC! Keep up the good work.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Urban Design and Planning at 8:54 PM)

The Daily Telegraph published a handful of cartograms yesterday from The Atlas of the Real World, the latest book from big-picture focused professors and worldmapper.org creators Daniel Dorling, Mark Newman and Anna Barford.

The Atlas of the Real World includes 366 digitally modified maps ‘depicting the areas and countries of the world not just by their physical size, but by their demographic importance on a vast range of subjects.’

The book focuses on a 'variety of subjects ranging from population, health, wealth and occupation to how many toys we import and who’s eating their vegetables.' The Daily Telegraph picked up Land Area, Aircraft Travel, Rail Travel, Mopeds and Motorcycles, Nuclear Weapons, and both the Increase and Decrease in Emissions of Carbon Dioxide. Here are a few I found most interesting:

Aircraft Travel: the size of each territory indicates the total distance flown by aircraft registered there.

Nuclear Weapons: As of 2002, eight countries are known or suspected to have strategic nuclear weapons: the United States, Russia, France, China, the United Kingdom, Israel, India and Pakistan.

Increase in Emissions of Carbon Dioxide: Between 1980 and 2000, nearly three-quarters of all territories saw an increase in carbon dioxide emissions, with China, the United States and India leading the way.

Decrease in Emissions of Carbon Dioxide: Between 1980 and 2000, 28 per cent of countries reduced their emissions. Almost half of reduction were made in territories of the former Soviet Union, while Germany (15 per cent), Poland (eight per cent) and France (six per cent) also made substantial cuts.

With almost 400 pages displaying new ways of looking at the world, The Atlas of the Real World provides us many spots at which to stand to gain a new perspective. Seeing the areas and countries of the world manipulated in this way gives a simplistic elegance to the complicated topics they address; they make clear in one image what some books take hundreds of pages to explain.

This collection of delicious mind candy will no doubt be proudly displayed on the coffee tables of cartography geeks and info-fiends alike for years to come, and will hopefully infiltrate the libraries and classrooms of schools throughout the world. If you're hungry for more information like this, and need instant satisfaction, I would highly recommend geeking out for a few hours on the Worldmapper site.

Images from The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the Way We Live by Daniel Dorling, Mark Newman and Anna Barford, published by Thames & Hudson

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Planet at 3:10 PM)

by John de Graaf

There’s a problem with today’s health care debate in America. It’s way too focused on health care.

It’s true that the American health care system is on life-support. Priced at nearly $8,000 a year per American, and soon to be 20 percent of our GDP, it’s more expensive by 40-60 percent than health care systems in any other industrial country and totals nearly half the health care budget of the entire world. Yet it leaves 48 million Americans uncovered by health insurance and produces remarkably poor results.

Americans rank 45th in life expectancy, right there with Albania. After age 50, they are nearly twice as likely as western Europeans to suffer from chronic illnesses. Even in the hospital, US patients face unusual dangers. As many as 275,000 of them die each year from “healthcare” itself--errors or infections during treatment. So the system is broken. But fixing it will require a far more holistic approach than has been discussed in the health care debate.

HEALTH CARE: THE ROOF OF THE HOUSE

Let’s consider American health as a house. Health care is the roof, the final protection against illness. In our case, it’s an expensive roof, gold plated yet with 48 million holes.

In some ways—vaccinations, for example—it’s a preventive system, but mostly it’s sickness care.

In most other countries, the roof is a simpler affair, asphalt shingles on a fiberglass mat but with hardly any leaks. These health care systems rely more on prevention; less on high tech treatment. Yet the people in the house live longer, healthier lives. That’s because in those other countries, the foundation and the walls of the house are stronger, with fewer cracks to let in the cold.

THE FOUNDATION

Let’s start with the foundation. That’s the head start toward health that children in most other rich countries receive. There’s a stronger focus on pre-natal care, for example. In part because of this, infant mortality in all other industrial countries is lower than in the United States, which ranks 42nd in the world, according to the CIA. Every other rich country does better.

In every country in the world except, believe it or not, the United States, Liberia, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea, mothers, and often, fathers, are guaranteed paid time off from work to take care of newborns. In many cases, such “family leave” extends for up to a year or more. In the US, by contrast, parents often return to work when children are only a few weeks old.

Paid family leave, and the parental bonding it ensures, pays off in terms of children’s health—fewer childhood illnesses, fewer problems with attention-deficit disorder, less obesity. Most countries find that such a taxpayer investment in early childhood results in lower health costs and other problems as children grow up.

A recent UNICEF study ranked the United States 20th out of 21 rich nations regarding children’s welfare. While our rich enjoy a marble floor, and our middle class, a wooden one, poor Americans have a dirt floor, with rain leaking through the holes in the roof and puddling up in the corners.

WALL NUMBER ONE—LIFESTYLE

If Democrats talk almost exclusively about universal health care as the solution to our health problems, Republicans tend to focus on wall number one—lifestyle choices. It’s a matter of personal responsibility, they say. Americans should simply stop smoking, eat properly, avoid over-eating, and excessive alcohol consumption, exercise regularly and sleep enough. Of course, this is sensible advice.

But it isn’t all a matter of personal responsibility. Policy changes would help here as well. Our tax system subsidizes producers of sugars and fats and our marketing system relentlessly advertises unhealthy foods. At the same time, Americans tend to work longer hours than people in other rich countries. Europeans, for example, work 300-350 fewer hours each year on average. Laws guarantee them sufficient time off, including a minimum of four weeks of paid vacation a year, and shorter weekly working hours. This leaves them more time to select foods carefully, eat more slowly—and, as a result, eat less—while exercising and sleeping more.

WALL NUMBER TWO—STRESS-RELIEF

It’s no secret in the field of public health that stress is a killer. Several factors make American life particularly stressful. We are among the most competitive of wealthy capitalist countries and have the widest gap between rich and poor. Fewer people on top; more on the bottom. Studies clearly show that whether it’s humans or baboons, the lower your status, the higher your stress levels. More economically egalitarian societies, like Sweden or Japan, for example, are clearly less stressful and more healthy.

Stress is also the result of insecurity. As the American social safety net has been gutted in recent years (with more of us losing health and pension benefits, for example) and job protections have been reduced, life in America is far more insecure than in other rich countries, where strong social safety nets remain in place. Danes, for example, can be fired as easily as Americans, but they receive generous unemployment benefits, job training and government jobs if they are unable to find a position in the private sector. Insecurity also leads to anxiety, a mental illness. American rates of anxiety are double or triple those in western European countries. Europeans say their social safety net gives them a feeling of peace of mind. It’s certainly good for their health.

Finally, stress is the result of time pressures and overwork. More breaks from a stressful workplace are seen by Europeans as yet another way to improve health. It’s unlikely that we will be able to quickly change the levels of hierarchy and inequality in the US, or that our safety net will be suddenly strengthened. But policies offering shorter work time and longer vacations, clear stress reducers, could be enacted more easily and quickly, and they should be.

WALL NUMBER THREE—SOCIAL CONNECTION

It’s a given in the field of public health that social connection strengthens immune systems and improves physical well-being. In fact, it may be the most important single factor in health outcomes. One of the worst things you can do for your health is to be lonesome. Yet America is an increasingly lonely country. More and more people, and especially older Americans, live alone, far more than in other rich countries. A recent study found that the average American has only two close friends he or she can turn to. A quarter of us have none at all. Loneliness quickly turns into depression. As with anxiety, Americans are two to three times as likely to suffer from depression as western Europeans.

A National Institutes of Health study comparing frequency of chronic illness in the United States and the United Kingdom found that Americans are nearly twice as likely to suffer from chronic illnesses such as heart disease in old age. Such diseases account of a huge part of our health care costs. The study found, surprisingly, that poor Britons are as healthy as rich Americans. It didn’t find that eating fish and chips makes you healthier. The major reasons for the difference were related to the fact that the British had more security and more free time, which they used to exercise more, but especially to socialize more.

WALL NUMBER FOUR—A SAFE ENVIRONMENT

Americans, according to the UNICEF study, rank at the bottom in child safety, with the highest rates of accidents among children. Partly, time pressure on American parents leave them less able to supervise their children. Other studies show extremely high rates of accidents in the workplace compared to other nations. Preventable death rates in the US, including deaths from automobile accidents, are the highest among industrial countries. Moreover, the European Union has stricter controls on the release of toxic chemicals into the environment. On average, Americans breathe in air pollution at double the levels of western Europe.

Finally, and this is no small matter, every other industrial country guarantees its workers paid time off from work when they are sick; only the US does not. In many cases, as much as a month of leave is allowed. These countries know that without paid time off, workers will come to work sick, as many American workers do. They will get others sick and stay sick longer, often requiring more expensive treatment for their illnesses. This is not rocket science. Most Americans get this immediately. That is why more than 80 percent of them favor a law that would guarantee paid sick days for workers.

WHAT CAN WE DO TO IMPROVE OUR HEALTH?

To achieve better health outcomes, Americans must begin to see health as a holistic matter, like the house I describe. Right now that house has a foundation that is part marble, part rotting wood and part dirt. It has four walls that are a mixture of teak, balsa wood and bamboo, all of them in sorry shape. And finally, it has a gilded roof with millions of holes.

It is not enough to talk of making the roof all gold and eliminating the holes, though we do need to eliminate the holes. We need to eliminate the gold as well, taking the profit and costly complexity from the system and expanding a program like Medicare to cover everyone, potentially at less cost. Such a system must rely more on preventive methods than high tech cures.

If we also pay attention to the foundation and the walls, we can assure better outcomes also at lower cost, as is the case in other rich nations. We can:

Strengthen the foundation by improving pre-natal care and providing at least three months or more of paid leave to all parents of babies or very young children. Make the Family and Medical Leave Act a paid provision and extend it to all workers.

Strengthen the wall of lifestyle by encouraging consumption of whole grains and vegetables, teaching children the value of eating healthy foods, eliminating subsidies to the purveyors of sugars and fats, and especially, reducing working hours to give Americans more time for exercise, sleep and healthy eating.

Strengthen the wall of stress relief by re-instituting tax policies that narrow the gap between rich and poor, re-building our social safety net and adopting policies like paid vacation time (the US is the only industrial nation without a law guaranteeing paid vacations) that can assure Americans periodic relief from the stress of our hyper-competitive and long-hour workplaces.

Strengthen the wall of connection by reducing working time and by stimulating, through programs like national service, greater volunteer involvement with our neighbors and communities.

Strengthen the wall of safety by improving OSHA and other protections for workers, building more pedestrian and bicycle friendly cities, and regaining the environmental zeal of the early 1970s, which led to much cleaner water and air for all Americans. Pass the Healthy Families Act, guaranteeing seven paid sick days to American workers.

All of these changes, taken for granted in other nations, will make the United States healthier, and almost certainly at less cost than our current system. Improving our health outcomes is less a matter of better science and more money than of political will and an ability to see the connections between things.

Many business leaders (though certainly not all!) will object to these ideas on the grounds that they will cost too much and make us less competitive in the world economy. But the cost of poor health will be far greater than the price tag for such reforms. If there is one thing more than any other which makes it harder for American businesses to compete, it’s the escalating cost of health care.

We can do better. We owe it to ourselves and our children to make these changes without delay.

John de Graaf is a documentary filmmaker, Executive Director of Take Back Your Time and co-author of Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic.

Photo credit: Flickr/kden604, Creative Commons license

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Columns at 1:01 PM)

Today's our fifth birthday. It's an exciting time, with tons of change.

For the last five years, Worldchanging has been the leader in solutions-based journalism about sustainability and social innovation. Our approach has incorporated elements of a blog, a magazine and an online community, but one thread has woven all these elements together: helping people understand the tools we have for solving the planet's most pressing problems.

In that time, we've both explored big picture ideas and covered thousands of discrete innovations. Sometimes, we've been the first publication to cover them; other times, we've simply blogged and contextualized others' coverage of good ideas. Not infrequently, we've presented our own ideas for how we might better tackle big problems.

Here's some of what we've done: We've built a very large community of smart and innovative readers (according to Nielsen Online, we're the second largest sustainability site on the web) while publishing almost 9,000 articles -- journalism and essays that have won us the Utne Independent Press Award, the Green Prize for Sustainable Literature and numerous nominations including Webbies for Best Magazine and Best Blog, and Bloggies for Best Writing and Best Group Blog. Our best-selling book, Worldchanging: A User's Guide to the 21st Century (published November 2006) received hundreds of reviews, the vast majority of them glowing; has become iconic (thanks in no small measure to Stefan Sagmeister's awesome design); and has already been published in French and German (translations into a number of other languages are planned as well). We've also actively participated in the public debate around sustainability. Many of the leading thinkers in sustainability have shared original ideas on our site. We've given hundreds of media interviews and presented talks at many of the most influential sustainability and design events in the world. Finally, we've done our best to help our allies, from raising money for good causes to providing "attention philanthropy" to a ton of emerging projects and rising leaders. We're told we've often made a real difference.

Not too bad for a scrappy little non-profit with no institutional backers.

Although the budgets have been lean and the hours have been long, it's been a wonderful way to work. We've had the privilege of learning in public about unmapped and exciting ideas and emerging possibilities. We've sat at the middle of one hub of a global network of all you worldchanging explorers, heard your reports from the field and visited your labs and camps and conferences. We've gotten the chance to read draft manuscripts, hold prototypes, attend premieres and argue late into the night about how best to save the planet. We've made great friends and thrown great parties. Speaking for myself, if there's a better job in the world, I can't imagine what it looks like.

Now we're setting out in some new directions. We think the next year will be the most exciting, dramatic and high-impact yet in our history. We hope you'll be a part of it.

Thank you for helping to make something extraordinary happen.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Columns at 8:30 PM)

The Bioneers conference, an old staple of the conference circuit for many greens, will once again be held two weeks from now, a little ways north of San Francisco. But this year there's an additional new event, put together by the Biomimicry Institute (with whom I've worked): it's a day-long seminar the day after Bioneers finishes, called Biomimicry’s Climate-Change Solutions: How Would Nature Do It?

We've long touted biomimicry as an excellent tool for green design, and Worldchanging ally Janine Benyus was one of TIME's Heroes of the Environment in 2007. How can biomimicry help climate change? Here are a few examples from their press release:

Filters modeled on human lungs sequester over 90% of the CO2 in flue stacks. Wind turbines designed after humpback whale flippers show a staggering 32% reduction in drag over conventional blades. Biofuels grown as diverse, native plants akin to prairies produce 238% more bioenergy than conventional monocultures.

A score of brilliant thinkers from the worlds of engineering, biology, chemistry and venture capital will speak on the state of the art in bio-inspired design that increases efficiency, reduces toxicity and increases the abundance of renewable energy and materials. Some that we've mentioned here before are the small startup formed by University of Delaware researchers who make circuit boards out of chicken feathers and soy plastic; solar cells that mimic photosynthesis; and Pax Scientific. If you're new to biomimicry or already a fan, this would be a great event to be fire-hosed with knowledge and get connected to those doing great things in the field.

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(Posted by Jeremy Faludi in Events at 8:22 PM)

The Worldchanging Team-at-Large is enormous. Scores of writers from around the world share their work and research here on a regular basis; respected institutions on the leading edge of sustainability and social innovation are our allies; and our active network of hundreds of thousands of readers contribute smart comments, suggest new ideas and spread the word through their work.

But here at Worldchanging headquarters in Seattle, a small core staff keeps the doors open, the lights on, the blog updated and the ideas cranking. We've welcomed several new faces to the Worldchanging headquarters since spring, and we're happy to say that after plowing through an exciting summer full of new opportunities, our new staff members have settled into their roles, made them their own and have already brought about big changes, with more on the way. We're proud to introduce the newest additions to the Worldchanging staff, and we'd like you to get to know them:

Office Manager Mayling Chung has brought a much-needed sense of calm to our world with her organized approach. She keeps things flowing by managing Alex's tour schedule, handling logistics, official records and communications, and constantly inventing new ways to keep our systems tidy. This Colorado College grad, who earned her BA in Sociology with a minor in Art Studio, held jobs at a video art lab in Colorado, TOPS Veterinary Rehabilitation in Illinois and at Great Harvest Bread Co. in Seattle before joining the team. She continues to feed her passion for food, farming and human and animal welfare with volunteer work, and has given her time to Lettuce Link, Seattle Tilth, Sustained Dialogue, Mother's Choice and C.L.A.W.

Mayling is both inspired by, and impatient for, smart innovations. As she tells it, while on vacation with her family in Australia in 2000, "I discovered the half-moon vs full-moon flush buttons on the toilet, and I wanted to know why such things didn't exist everywhere! Wait, why don't they still?" But she's happy to be in a place to help people learn what's possible. "There are so many interesting and thoughtful ideas out there that nourish independence, connections, and true balance. I love that powerful moment when somebody meets a solution that fits them."

Worldchanging Design Intern Morgan Greenseth landed in Seattle after earning her Bachelor's at the Art Institute of California-San Diego, and completing her Masters of Interior and Living Design at the Domus Academy in Milan, Italy and the University of Wales. Her creative and colorful mind makes her a whiz at communicating Worldchanging ideas and stories through graphics.

"As words are to the editorial staff, colors, shapes and forms are to me," she says. In addition to creating original graphics and compilations, Morgan helps organize local events, researches articles for the editorial staff, and has even spruced up our office layout to make our days more pleasant and productive. When she's not brightening up the Worldchanging office, she's designing interiors with downtown firm Dynamik. In her free time she rarely passes up an opportunity to soak up city culture, whether she's visiting a new exhibit or art gallery, attending a concert or trying out a new vegan restaurant.

Managing Director Brittany Jacobs, who holds an MBA from the cutting-edge Bainbridge Graduate Institute, first encountered Worldchanging in 2006 when she helped organize our book tour. She now returns, after most recently flexing her marketing, managing and networking muscles as Communications Director for Interra, a non-profit organization focused on strengthening local economies. Sitting at the helm of Worldchanging's business development, this Oklahoma native has her capable hands full managing various projects, crunching numbers, fielding proposals and planning fabulous parties and events.

While the rest of us are often happy to end the workday with veggie stew and a glass of wine, Brittany (who bikes up a big hill to the office, mind you) spends most of her free time climbing, skiing, backpacking, kite-boarding, running and otherwise maxing out her enjoyment of the gorgeous Pacific Northwest. Her endless energy motivates the team even better than our daily dose of locally roasted coffee. But what fuels Brittany better than anything is the very real quest for a better world. As this internationally savvy traveler puts it, "We look beyond our backyard and bring a global perspective to the solutions on which we report. I see this type of responsible reporting as a tool that can help shape the future in which we want to live."

Associate Editor Sarah Michelle Kuck is, in her own words, "inordinately obsessed with making the world a better place." This Midwest ex-pat moved from Wisconsin to the Pacific Northwest in the fall of 2003 to attend Western Washington University's prestigious environmental journalism program. After graduation she moved to Bainbridge Island to work as an editorial assistant for Yes! Magazine, then took this knowledge to the mainland where she co-founded the online magazine seattleDIRT and community organization Sustainable Wallingford before joining Worldchanging. Our resident yoga instructor can now often be found upside-down, as she does her best thinking while handstanding against the office wall.

You can catch some of Sarah's infectious enthusiasm in her regular posts about new solutions and inspirational people, and you can thank her for keeping you in the loop by updating our social networks and managing our weekly newsletter. An avid traveler who has conducted interviews as far from home as Kenya, she says she loves her job "because it allows me to write from a perspective of both intelligence and optimism. Being able to participate in a discussion with some of the world's most brilliant thinkers and most passionate visionaries helps me realize on a daily basis that we can in fact build the world we need and want to live in."

Managing Editor Julia Levitt sees journalism as her all-access pass to the most exciting people and ideas on the planet. She got her first real sense of how big the sustainability conversation was as a student, when she covered a social controversy over land preservation in a farming community in northeastern Brazil. Since graduating from Northwestern University, she has let her curiosity and attraction to change-makers lead her to jobs at the Medill Innocence Project, Steppenwolf Theater Co., and green start-up A Fresh Squeeze, in addition to traditional editing and writing gigs. She's thrilled to be overseeing relationships with Worldchanging's international team of writers, managing original content and editing our newest site, Worldchanging Seattle.

This Ohio native is inspired by the possibilities of merging classic values like local business and safe, walkable streets with cutting-edge goals like living buildings, zero-waste and sustainable transit to create cities that are prosperous and environmentally sound. Julia holds to the hope "that the United States is at a turning point, where an increasingly loud majority from all corners are ready to demand a future that's smarter and more efficiently powered, more fair, more resourceful and more connected." When off the clock, she loves traveling, hiking and skiing with her husband, singing loud, teaching yoga, working with kids and starting new projects on her sewing machine.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Columns at 5:30 PM)

A few months ago, we started to wonder about what you, our readers, were up to.

When we sent out our Worldchanging Readers’ Survey in July, more than 1,000 of our readers responded to tell us about themselves, how they use Worldchanging, and how they feel about the site. Since it’s our five-year anniversary, and we are announcing a lot of exciting news, we thought we would share some of the responses that greatly helped us make some incredibly important decisions. Here are some highlights:

We found out that the average reader is between the ages of 25 and 34. Our audience is split almost evenly between men and women.

From your responses we learn that you are highly educated and actively engaged people. Almost 50 percent of you hold graduate degrees, while many of the rest report that you are still in school studying subjects related to sustainability, foresight and innovation.

Almost 80 percent of you told us that sustainability, foresight and social innovation is a part of your job or will be quite soon, and nearly 60 percent of you might be reading this while at your desk.

Many of you reported that you hope to connect with other readers, and that you would like to meet each other through a Worldchanging-hosted event. The idea of a Worldchanging conference, in particular, was wildly popular. We hope bring that about in the very near future.

You told us some things you would like to see change: a new look, a more global view, new ways of accessing content. We heard the message loud and clear, and we are currently hard at work to make those things happen.

In addition to lots and lots of great critical feedback and intelligent suggestions, you also told us somethings you like about us: our character and our smart, fresh, optimistic, diverse, visionary and creative style. You like our variety, our thoughtfulness, and our big picture look at what is on the forefront of the environmental debate.

In your own words:

“I like Worldchanging's forward-looking attention towards sustainability and ethical social engineering. I like that Worldchanging gives hope that even as the quality of living trends downward, there are still ways to live well and help others.”

“Forward thinking, innovative, informative, accurate, insightful, and inspiring: and all this made possible by a fantastic cohort of people who really are the best of their kind around.”

“It's a refreshing change from the usual "green movement" stuff - it challenges my own views and has a very bold way of getting the message across.”

“It is the ONLY website that is comprehensive, solutions-based, far thinking, thorough, etc.”

“I find that it is more reliable than other environmental blogs on the internet. That is, the focus is on changing the way we live rather than changing how we buy. It also takes a holistic view on how to change the world, and recognizes how only a multifaceted approach can hope to truly accomplish this goal.”

“It gives the public access to crucial discussions that would never appear in traditional media”

“It gets to the heart of things. It stays abreast of what is happening around the globe and in America. I feel like I'm getting leading edge insights.”

Thank you to those who took the time to give us some feedback! Here’s to the years ahead!

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 5:02 PM)

Here at Worldchanging, solutions are our business. We've spent the last five years exploring the world's most innovative ideas for addressing the planet's most pressing problems. Today's our birthday, so we thought we'd take this chance to let you know about our new plans.

Until now, we've largely focused on discrete innovations. Even our book is a compendium of individual insights, solutions and approaches. We've assembled a larger and larger pile of pieces to the puzzle of how to build a better future, but we've never really attempted to put those pieces together, instead allowing the existence of those puzzle pieces to imply that an assembled puzzle is possible. We've written much about the tools for building a better future, and not enough about that future itself.

But people need a new future. In fact, one could reasonably argue that people need a new future now more than any time in the history of the species. Our present way of living is an ocean liner colliding catastrophically with the iceberg of ecological and economic reality -- a collision that threatens to essentially destroy civilization -- and yet we cling to it with white knuckles, in large part because we can't really imagine another way of living. Given the choice between a sinking ship and dark uncertainty, most of us tend to hold tight to the rails and hope for the best.

If we are going to convince large numbers of people to embrace the kinds of creative, large-scale change sustainability demands, we need to offer them something more than scattered, loosely connected possibilities. We need to show them a new, brighter future, a plausible, inspiring, achievable -- and sustainable -- future towards which people can aim their aspirations. We need to invite people to abandon that sinking ship and swim for a future that works.

Imagining that future still strains our foresight, but more and more clearly it lies within the boundaries of possibility. We have much of the toolbox of solutions we need to build a bright green future: designs, technologies, policies, practices and insights that we can use to ratchet down the ecological impacts of nearly any aspect of our civilization. Some large gaps remain -- no one has yet invented a realistic sustainable model of the aviation industry, for instance -- but between solutions that already exist and new innovations leaping off the drawing boards now, we can at very least trace a plausible path from here to a bright green future.

That future is simply unattainable without America's wholehearted commitment. To begin with the obvious, we Americans are intimately connected with the causes of much misery, from our climate emissions and runaway resource use to our rogue-state diplomacy, and the simple cessation of that stupidity would go a long way towards making possible the good. But that's not the limit of the leadership the United States can offer. Simply, America remains the epicenter of possibility in the human imagination. No other nation has as thorough a sense of idealism and open-hearted mission, no matter how badly worn it may seem today. We are, even now, despite it all, still the place where many people who want to change the world struggle to arrive. What Emerson said in 1844 remains true today: “America is the country of the future. It is a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations.”

If the world is going to figure out one-planet prosperity, a bright green way of life that can lift everyone out of poverty while averting catastrophe, to some very serious extent, we Americans will need to invent our own version of it first.

Of course, America is far from sustainable today. Upper-middle class Americans, whose idea of prosperity is increasingly emulated around the world, often have ten-planet ecological footprints. Even middle class Americans weigh in at four to five planets (almost twice the ecological impact of the average European).

We need to show the possibility of a way of life every bit as prosperous as -- indeed, more attractive than -- the lives of today's American upper-middle class, but lived within reasonable ecological limits: prosperity with a small enough environmental impact that it could be shared by every person on the planet. We need to show that way of life, demonstrate its realism, and distribute tools for building it.

That is exactly what Worldchanging intends to do in the next twelve months, with four new projects.

We're launching a major book, tentatively titled Bright Green. With clarity, forceful arguments and concrete proposals this heavily illustrated book will show the American people that the tools exist, the thinking exists, the solutions are possible to build a country that's more prosperous, more just, more creative and so green that its practices could be emulated by every person on Earth without destroying the planet. Even more, it will show that transformation can be accomplished not in centuries or a number of decades, but in years, quickly enough that the model we create can spread around the world. It will illustrate that if we do it right, we will have better lives and be safer, happier, healthier and more connected to our friends, families and communities.

We're also concluding negotiations to put out a second edition of our first book, Worldchanging: A User's Guide to the 21st Century. This updated edition won't just highlight the world's best new innovations, it'll include an increased emphasis on global implementation -- on politics, business and social entrepreneurship -- showing how we can all come together to actually make global sustainability happen.

You'll also be seeing major changes on the Worldchanging site itself, improvements we'll be unveiling in stages over the next six months, but which add up to more original writing, better resources, more community and a stronger focus on the amazing people in our network and the work they do. Look for new columnists and features in the coming days.

Finally, we're planning a major conference and North American tour for late 2009.

Together, these four new projects will add up to a major acceleration of our work to bring the best thinking from the frontiers of change into a deeper conversation with a much larger audience. We hope you'll join us in growing that conversation and exploring those innovations.

Photo credit: flickr/Jared Zimmerman, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Features at 3:12 PM)

by Christopher Flavin

The following is adapted from a speech given by Worldwatch Institute President Christopher Flavin at a high-level United Nations event on September 25, 2008.

I want to commend the UN Secretary-General for his decision to focus on environmental sustainability as one of the three cross-cutting pillars of the Millennium Development Goals. Environmental sustainability may have seemed peripheral to meeting human needs when these goals were adopted in 2000. But the world has changed.

The health of the world's ecological systems will be decisive in determining our ability to meet all of the Millennium Development Goals. Environmental sustainability is not just another policy goal. The human economy is wholly contained within the global biosphere-and if the biosphere's productivity is undermined, the human economy will suffer.

Just as some parts of our economy have accumulated unsustainable fiscal debts, the global economy has accrued a massive ecological debt - a debt that must be settled if we are to sustain economic development and meet the needs of the 1.4 billion human beings who are still mired in severe poverty.

Today, our planet supports 6.5 billion human beings. Those numbers are growing by 70 million people each year, and global consumption levels are soaring, as China and other countries enter the consumer age. The economic model that has supported unprecedented economic progress for several hundred million people in industrial countries over the past half century cannot possibly meet the growing needs of the more than 8 billion people who will live on this planet by the middle of this century.

The events of the past year have provided graphic reminders that collapsing economic systems have real human impacts-and that the world's poor, who are most directly dependent on natural resources, will suffer first and suffer most:

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In Haiti, the impact of three large hurricanes this summer was magnified by the vast deforestation that has left millions of people vulnerable to floods and landslides.
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In West Africa, the decline of local fisheries has left thousands of poor families without a livelihood and in some cases with no source of affordable protein.
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Across large areas of the Indian subcontinent, diminishing supplies of fresh water are undermining food production and leaving people with inadequate drinking water.

And from the Arctic to the Equator, the world's climate is changing rapidly - and undermining ecological systems on every continent, from forests to oceans and fresh water. Many scientists believe that a dangerous climate tipping point may be near-unleashing a runaway greenhouse effect that would feed on itself for centuries to come.

The bottom line is clear: the inefficient, carbon-intensive, throwaway economy that was so successful in an earlier era is not suited to today's world. Our planet in now in mortal danger of an ecological collapse whose human impact would dwarf the financial collapse the world is now seeking to avoid.

Stabilizing the world's climate and dramatically reducing our dependence on fossil fuels is the central challenge of our generation. Building a new energy system is essential to achieving the Millennium Development Goals, a fact that is reinforced by the devastating impact that rising prices for oil and other fossil fuels have had on the world's poor in recent years. These fuels are no longer sufficiently abundant to provide the reliable, affordable energy supplies needed to fuel economic development.

It is therefore urgent that we build a sustainable low-carbon economy that meets all human needs and is in balance with the world's natural resources. This effort could jumpstart a powerful new engine of economic development, creating thousands of industries and millions of jobs in rich and poor countries alike.

In the eight years since the Millennium Development Goals were launched, the world has come a long way in its understanding of the fundamental importance of environmental sustainability to human well-being. It is time for world leaders to embrace this understanding and begin building a green economy for the 21st century.

Christopher Flavin is president of the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research organization based in Washington, D.C. His forthcoming report, Low-Carbon Energy: The Way Forward, will be released in November.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Sustainable Development at 2:02 PM)

$700 billion still goes a long way.

by Eric de Place

I just can't help wondering what else we could do with $700 billion.

According to the United Nations, the entire debt for the entire continent of Africa was about $320 billion in 2003. Adjusting for inflation and further accumulated debt, let's call it an even $350 billion.

You could install solar panels on 20 million American homes for $300 billion. (I'm ballparking a rather conservative $15k for full installation of enough solar infrastructure to fully power an average American house; the price would surely come down drastically at that scale.) By the way, 20 million houses is more than one-quarter of the entire stock of occupied detached houses in the U.S.

Of course, the solar panels would actually pay for themselves pretty quickly. Under this plan, lucky homeowners (or renters) would then pay nothing for their new solar electricity -- we just footed the entire bill. It might be nice to target low-income folks, who generally inhabit the least efficient buildings. Even better, because the sunniest parts of the US are also, generally speaking, some of the most coal-dependent we'd shut down coal plants across the Sun Belt. So it's a huge win for global warming to boot.

That still leaves $50 billion lying around under the couch cushions.

We could install ground source heat pumps for 5 million American homes for $50 billion. (I'm ballparking a mildly conservative $10k for enough GSP installation to fully heat an average house.) Again, this would also pay for itself pretty fast. Plus, lucky low-income folks in the colder climates would be looking at a lifetime of carbon-free (and money-free) heat for their homes. One good place to start would be in places like the northeast where expensive and inefficient oil heating is common.

Pretty sweet. I just retired every cent of Africa's crushing debt. Then using conservative estimates, I provided an eternal supply of free electricity or heat to 25 million households -- thereby drastically reducing US carbon emissions.

Alternatively, some credible analysts have suggested that paying the full cost of implementing the Kyoto Protocol for the entire world would run $716 billion. (I should mention that other credible estimates are much, much lower.) And this figure doesn't count the tremendous savings from avoiding the potential costs of climate change impacts -- estimated at trillions of dollars just for the U.S.

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

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Bright Green Economy at 1:52 PM)

How to actually deliver green-collar jobs to those who need them.

by Alan Durning

Converting the Pacific Northwest over the next few decades to a place of compact, walkable communities that run on superefficient, renewable energy system—a climate-safe economy—will be a lot of work: paid work. But for all the exciting announcements of solar jobs and green-tech investment that pepper the newspapers, the skill sets of today’s workers are not yet aligned with the needs of this future.

In previous posts in this series, I have described three good uses for revenue from the auctioning of carbon permits: dividends for all, buffering the incomes of low-income families, and upgrading the energy efficiency of working families’ homes. A fourth good use for cap-and-trade auction revenue is to spend a portion of it training a green-collar workforce for the clean-energy trades. In many sectors of the economy right now, a limiting factor on seizing the opportunities of the new energy economy is a shortage of mid-skill labor. For example, low-income weatherization programs across the Pacific Northwest are currently crippled by a scarcity of crew chiefs qualified to supervise retrofits on job sites.

A mid-skill worker is neither a laborer nor someone with a four-year degree. Rather, he or she is a tradesperson or technician, usually with an apprenticeship credential, an associate’s degree, or a vocational certificate. For unskilled, low-income workers, a pathway to mid-skill work is the best route out of poverty, but many obstacles loom. Finding the time and money to study is the day-to-day challenge. The larger challenge, not only for workers individually but for society’s poverty-reduction goals overall, is to integrate work with studies into a “career ladder” of steadily rising competence, experience, education, opportunity, and earnings.

According to a study by the Community College Research Center, to grow green-collar jobs for disadvantaged, low-skill workers, auction revenue might best be spent on expanded public funding for narrowly focused training programs in community and technical colleges that lead to vocational certificates or degrees in the trades: carpenters trained in green building, plumbers capable of installing commercial-scale solar water heaters, electricians educated in photovoltaics and advanced energy-system controls, machinists who can produce windmill turbines and carbon-fiber aircraft parts, metalworkers skilled in forging bicycle frames and the ultralight components for the automobiles of the future, and forest managers knowledgeable about carbon sequestration.

Such programs are already sprouting in two-year institutions around the Pacific Northwest. Columbia Gorge Community College now offers an electronics engineering technician program. Many graduates of the first cohort are already working in the wind industry, earning from $35,000 to $60,000 a year, according to the New York Times. Lane Community College, in Eugene, Oregon, trains renewable-energy technicians in a two-year program that teaches students how to improve the energy efficiency of homes and businesses and install solar-power and wind-power systems. In Washington, Bellevue Community College and Cascadia Community College offer similar programs.

Still, for the clean-energy transition to become a chance for workers to achieve economic security, much more needs doing. The national organization Green For All has published the most detailed road map. Called Greener Pathways, it identifies the specific programs that northwesterners can use to build a ladder from poverty to climate-safe prosperity for low-skill workers.

Many of these approaches are integrated well into Washington State’s 2008 Climate Action and Green Jobs Act. The law puts green-collar jobs at the center of the state’s response to climate change. It directs the state Employment Security Department to conduct a detailed assessment of green-collar job potential in the state and to identify jobs that pay family wages and could grow rapidly. The law also establishes a process for coordinating the assessment of, and planning for, workforce development needs in several industries through the creation of panels that include representatives of businesses, trade associations, labor unions, educational institutions, and others involved in the labor market. Finally, it authorizes a grant-funded set of investments in workforce training programs (typically, at community colleges) that target jobs prioritized by the industry-specific panels. This approach is a national model, because it so carefully targets public spending to training programs that actually help low-income workers get qualified for high-demand, family-wage jobs. Although the 2008 law authorizes the creation of training grants, the state has yet to fund them—an obvious use for carbon auction revenue.

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

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Bright Green Economy at 1:35 PM)

In South Korea, wind power would be a likely resource to help the world's tenth largest energy consumer meet government goals to lower fossil fuel dependency through greater investment in renewable energy.

Yet efforts to build wind turbines in South Korea have met fierce opposition, even among environmentalists, due to the lack of open land in the densely populated country. Only about 100 megawatts (MW) of wind power are installed nationwide despite plentiful wind resources and government price controls that keep renewable power competitive with traditional energy sources.

The solution might be found off the Korean peninsula's shores, and South Korea is not alone. As more countries seek to increase their renewable energy ratios, many consider off-shore wind a potential solution to provide clean energy without affecting local landscapes and communities.

Off-shore wind has so far taken a back seat to on-shore wind farms during the current boom in wind energy development. Off-shore turbines are more difficult to maintain, and they cost $.08-$0.12 per kilowatt-hour, compared to $.05-$.08 for on-shore wind.

But off-shore wind farms offer several benefits over their land-based counterparts. Strong ocean winds allow one off-shore turbine to generate substantially more power than one on-shore turbine. Also, if an off-shore wind farm is located near a coastal city, clean energy would be available without dedicating land to new transmission lines.

Denmark installed the first off-shore wind farm in 1991. Since then, slightly more than 1 gigawatt (GW) has been installed worldwide, mostly in the North Sea, according to the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA). An additional 3.8 GW is expected in the next four years, forecasts British energy firm Douglas-Westwood, Ltd. Based on their estimates, annual installations are set to increase from 419 MW in 2008 to 1,238 MW in 2012, with the United Kingdom, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, and China leading the way.

In Europe, about 80 percent of the off-shore wind market will be concentrated in Denmark and the United Kingdom by the end of this year, with 1 GW planned by the two countries combined, EWEA said in a policy recommendation report. The association predicts that 50 GW of off-shore wind will be operating in Europe by 2020.

In Asia, China installed its first off-shore wind farm in November. The country plans to add more than 1.5 GW of off-shore projects. Feasibility studies are under way in South Korea and Japan.

Along North America's coasts, a handful of projects are moving forward, and several more are tied down in local site disputes. According to a U.S. Department of Energy report, more than 900 GW of off-shore wind power could potentially be tapped from U.S. shores, mostly along the northeastern and southeastern seaboards. The United States is expected to finalize its leasing rules for off-shore wind farms this year.

Similar to concerns that on-shore wind farms threaten bat and bird populations, off-shore wind farms could disrupt marine ecosystems. The initial construction may kill organisms on the seafloor, and transmission cables create magnetic and electric fields that may disrupt fish orientation.

But researchers are still unsure what damage might occur, and several studies suggest that turbine construction and operation would pose minimal threats. Some experts suggest the turbines would benefit marine life by creating artificial reefs.

Weather may also be a limiting factor. Harsh winds often prevent construction during winter months, slowing development. Turbines are designed to sustain winds as strong as 200 miles per hour, but so far few have experienced intense hurricanes.

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be contacted at bblock@worldwatch.org.

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(Posted by Ben Block in Energy at 1:16 PM)

Five years ago, on October 1, we launched Worldchanging as a venue to find, discuss and imagine the world's most innovative solutions to the planet's most pressing problems. Since then, we've found a great and diverse global community of readers, won prizes and awards, put out a best-selling book, and published 8,500 stories about how to change the world. In the process we've not only grown substantially (becoming the second largest sustainability site on the web, according to Nielsen online) but gathered an amazing network of allies who are among the world's leading sustainability thinkers.

On October 1 of this year, we'll be announcing our next major project. We're incredibly excited to be taking the editorial work we've developed over these last five years to the next level, and we hope that all of you will join us in trying to make that work as useful and innovative as possible. On that, more to come.

In the meantime, we thought we'd use September as an opportunity to review what we've done so far -- a sort of Worldchanging greatest hits. All this month, we'll be highlighting the tools, models and ideas for building a bright green future that have inspired us so far.

Here are a few of our favorites from the beginning:

Zero Impact Within Our Lifetimes

Climate Change is a Problem We Can Choose to Tackle

Seeing Chinook as Indicators

Green Building, Compact Communities

Cool Hybrids, Smart Grids and Renewable Energy

Solastalgia and the Mental Affects of Climate Change

Moving From Rhetoric to Reality: Clean, Green Jobs

Optimism is a Political Act

Worldchanging Interview: Influential Thinker Clay Shirky

Combining Smart Grids and Product Service Systems

This piece is a part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 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.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Features at 10:18 AM)

This article was written by Joy Green in March 2008. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

What happens when disruptive ideas combine?

We’ve heard a lot about distributed energy generation and smart grids recently – cities could act as distributed power plants, channeling energy from hundreds of thousands, even millions of individual rooftops (think micro-wind and solar PV) into common use and minimizing transmission losses. In essence - your home or building generates clean power and sells the surplus to the grid at peak prices for you during the day– it buys any excess energy you need during the evening when prices are low. You could plug your hybrid car into this fabulous integrated system and depending on the time of day it would either sell surplus energy from its battery to the grid or charge itself up ready for use the next morning.

We’ve also heard a lot about product-service systems. At the moment, as I’m working on an urban mobility futures project at Forum For The Future , I’m particularly interested in the Velib scheme in Paris – the self-service, easy access bike hire scheme with banks of bikes outside metro stations and other key points that has got thousands of Parisians cycling again (Similar to Barcelona's Bicing system - ed.). You pick up a bike anywhere you need it and drop it off, no-fuss, at your destination. Like the smart grid, this is also a form of distributed infrastructure – you could call it a lightweight public transport infrastructure that smooths the peaks of demand for the more traditional system of the metro and the bus.

And if you combine them?

MIT recently outlined a service model for personal urban mobility that does just that.

Imagine the Velib bike scheme in Paris supplemented with self-service electric, stackable two-seater mini-cars at transport interchanges and hundreds of other points all over the city. These mini-cars are designed for multiple short urban trips so they don’t need huge bulky batteries or high top speeds. They’re tiny (six stack in the same space you’d park a regular car), lightweight, ultra-maneuverable and super-convenient – you’d never have to worry about finding a parking space again. You just swipe your card, pick up a mini-car whenever you need one from a nearby stack, and drop it off at another stack when you are done.

This already sounds like a good service model, but what makes it much more interesting are the potential second and third order effects. When the cars stack together, they effectively become large, intelligent batteries plugged into the grid – and the perfect partners for smart grids and distributed power generation. Car stacks could mop up and store excess energy or provide an extra boost of local power as required, so would be a particularly good fit with buildings that generate power from intermittent renewables such as solar or wind (or even, by the coast, wave power). In essence, each mini-car doubles as a mobility service and an intelligent energy storage device. With a hundred or so mini-cars in a stack, and hundreds or thousands of these car stacks in a city, you’d have enormous battery capacity being added to the electrical grid – perfect for large-scale distributed energy generation from renewables on buildings. The batteries would provide the flexibility to cope well with fluctuations in demand and generation.

If you then add in ubiquitous mobile networking and ‘embedded intelligence,’ things get even more interesting. William J Mitchell at MIT speculates on these mini-cars

* knowing patterns of energy prices and mobility demand, and intelligently playing the energy futures market
* operating in an environment of fine-grained, highly dynamic road congestion pricing, and intelligently playing in the road space market
* knowing parking space availability and dynamically adjusted prices, and intelligently playing in the parking space market

In effect, these cars becoming “Google for the city, efficiently getting you to its resources, while taking account of time and cost constraints”

Even without this heady third stage though, the proposal is a potential distributed system that integrates energy, transport and the built environment. It’s an idea for personal urban mobility that takes on many of the perceived strengths of the car – convenience, independence, weather protection and safety. (One caveat here though - it would be difficult to predict how many car journeys this system would actually displace without running a pilot project. Velib has so far mostly displaced public transport journeys – which is also helpful for easing pressure on creaking infrastructure – but had little effect on car use.)

It’s also a little closer to how an ecosystem works – flexible, interlinked and resilient. And this is a lot closer to how we’re going to have to think and act if we’re going to solve problems like personal mobility in a world where there are 9 billion of us and 6 billion of us live in cities.

Smart Grid, Meet the Product-Service Model is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 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.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 10:10 AM)