A number of big-picture things are not going to well recently. The Gulf Oil spill shows no signs of ceasing, and now the Atlantic hurricane season threatens to halt control efforts and spread petroleum around the American South (perhaps even through rain!?). Despite massive youth electoral efforts in 2008 to place climate champions in political leadership, policy efforts towards climate and energy solutions have been lethargic at best. And despite over a trillion dollars in economic stimulus spending, recent data shows that the national economy is still slipping steadily deeper into decline.

These three cases display a common pattern – failure (of energy companies, the political process, and our national economy) is being treated like an accident from which we need to recover to normal working order.

The accident-recovery story is holding us back in three very important ways:
1. It helps erase our memory of the ways that business as usual hasn’t been working for a great many people for a very long time.
2. It disguises the fundamental and systemic nature of the challenges we face and legitimizes management of the problem using the ways of thinking that created them, even when this way of thinking proves ineffective repeatedly.
3. Because it normalizes business as usual, it mystifies reimaginative approaches that shift power and agency, making them seem unrealistic or irrelevant.

In this blog post, I’ll demonstrate how this happens in the context of my current work in the Twin Cities Summer of Solutions in Minnesota, and how we’re trying to overcome accident-recovery stupor.
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Cross posted from It’sGettingHotinHere.org

During PowerShift 2009, I was lucky enough to be able to speak these words to Representative Markey’s Select Committee on Global Warming:

“The $100,000 Clean Energy Revolving Fund I helped build at Macalester College invests in efficiency projects on campus and puts the savings back into the fund. In its first year, we got a 40% annual return on investment. That’s a bunch of college sophomores with no financial training doing four times better than the stock market – when it’s not collapsing! What would it be like if we harnessed these opportunities, which a green economy provides all across the country?”

In this third post in the series (you can also check out Part 1 and Part 2), I’m going to cut to the chase:

If we want to get real, fundamental, and adequate action taken on climate change, it’s not enough to make it clear that we (even tens of millions of youth in that we), think it’s a good idea.

We have to make it clear that it’s 1. possible, and 2. a good thing all around.

This sounds like a no-brainer, but making that case convincingly can be hard.

A lot of the solutions that are most readily apparent – solar panels on roof-tops, hybrid cars, less consumption – are either way out of the reach of most people (and thus sound elitist), or are framed as a sacrifice. The mentality that a green economy is costly frequently creeps into our own thinking. It’s easy to advocate for spending more money on wind energy electricity or on a super-cool green building because it’s the right thing to do. Scaling up, I’m quite sure a lot of the debates you’ll hear at Copenhagen will revolve around how much wealth various countries should give up for the greater good of a sustainable planet and the well-being of future generations (us and those to come).

Sure it’s right, but is it smart?

I’m not arguing that smart is more important than right, or that we should ever advocate for things that are smart and not right. I’m simply suggesting that if we can’t demonstrate in actual real life that our vision is right AND smart, we’re going to lose.

I hope the insight of how to do so may be helpful as hundreds of youth climate leaders converge on Copenhagen and the struggle for a green economy continues on a thousand campuses and communities.

Read on for what the examples of the Clean Energy Revolving Fund and the Macalester EcoHouse – tales from my own experience that reflect the great work thousands of people across the globe are doing –  have to say about being right and smart. Continue reading →

Cross posted from: It’s Getting Hot in Here.

How do we take our calls for clean energy, climate justice, and a sustainable economy from being seen as neat ideas to being seen as the game plan?

Getting the institutions we are working with to see a green economy as their game plan is key to the big picture changes we are working for. When we demonstrate a solution as a route to success on existing goals, rather than just a cool side-project, we open up whole new reserves of commitment, ingenuity, and resources to make it possible. It also becomes much more important: conceding to obstacles is no longer acceptable.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Macalester College’s sustainability plan and the how that it provides to make big ambitious goals both meaningful and realistic. In this post, I’ll explore the importance of moving from neat ideas to game plans in creating the commitment to that process in the context of Macalester’s journey. I recognize that this is just one tiny microcosm of the bigger picture, but I hope that it will serve as an example about how we move much larger institutions towards viewing the green economy as a game plan for success, and thus working with us as collaborators. They might even go outside the traditional sustainability boxes to think about broad institutional strategy.

So let’s get started:

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Cross-posted from Its Getting Hot in Here

Macalester College, a small liberal arts college I attend in Saint Paul Minnesota, released its Sustainability Plan on September 15th. In the midst of a flurry of action on the national policy level, internationally around Copenhagen, and in the local fights against mountain-top removal and other dirty energy, one more college sustainability plan seems almost insignificant. What’s important about this plan, however, is not what its goals are (though they include carbon neutrality by 2025, zero waste by 2020, and more) but how it plans to achieve them. I hope this focus on the method as well as the goals can inform and inspire the climate movement – with some pretty strong resonances with what it means to be solutionary. Here’s a brief synopsis of the key features of the how, which I’ll explore in more detail below the fold.

1. Going carbon neutral will be revenue positive, meaning a carbon-free future is as much commonsense smart decision-making as it is a moral imperative.
2. Designing the vision was participatory – 400 students, faculty, and staff contributed at a college with a student body of 1900 – and implementation will continue to be. The plan clearly states that it is a baseline platform, not a ceiling.
3. The changes really matter – with a few exceptions, the plan identifies strategies to that make actual change, rather than check the boxes of conventional practice.
4. The college plans to create ripples of change that extend far beyond campus – emphasizing pathways to broader change through the supply-chains, education process, and community relationships it engages.
5. Sustainability is defined holistically as the ongoing process of nurturing a healthy environment, social justice, and a strong economy. It is a guiding quality of all the institution’s core values, not an addition to them.

I’m using this post to encourage movement leaders to dig deeper into figuring out the how, and to introduce future posts exploring what it really means to deliver the visions of a sustainable society that we advocate for constantly. To guide the story, I’ll use the case study of Macalester and the efforts I’ve been involved in that now extend far beyond it, not because the method is limited to this example (the network of amazing solutionaries nationwide clearly highlights that, and any method would be flawed if so limited), but because I know them well. These posts will explore how campus leaders made success not only broad but also deep, meaningful, and transformative, the expansive horizons to which similar methods have grown our work far beyond campus, and the implications that each step has for the broader climate movement over the coming decades. Stay tuned for more stories from the process.

In the meantime, check out more details on what’s important about how Macalester seeks to achieve sustainability below.

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My friend Zach McDade recently posted to a Macalester blog explaining the housing bubble and how it has helped shred the broader financial system. I wanted to note two trigger factors obscured by his general statement: “the market decided that we had built too many houses.” Here they are:

1. Suburban housing values fell, causing people to default on mortgages, precisely because demand for new subdivisions slackened. This happened at exactly the same time as energy prices spiked (both home energy use and transportation are higher in the suburbs), and America saw its first net flow of people from the suburbs to the cities since the 1950s. Decoded: the energy crisis => the change in suburban-urban land use value => the housing crisis

2. Low-income urbanites started defaulting on mortgages or rent payments as the cost of fuel, energy, and food rose. Food prices rose due to A. rising energy prices increasing input costs and B. crop failure due to adverse weather in several food-producing areas (US Midwest, East Africa, India, Australia)  globally reducing supply. Decoded: the food crisis (itself caused by the energy and climate crises) + the energy crisis itself => rising cost of living for poor => the housing crisis.

So what does this have anything to do with me, the career I’ll be trying to start when I graduate in 10 months, or the stimulus package?

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