Bloggers for a brighter future put ideas down on paper.
By Nathan Rosquist, Bainbridge Graduate Institute
Tuesday October 31, 2006
Three weeks ago on Friday the 13th, Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and his organization, the Grameen Bank, won the Nobel Peace Prize for devising microcredit, a system for giving tiny loans to people in poverty—usually women—to help them start small businesses and build assets. The idea is to help eradicate extreme poverty, educate the poor, and empower women.
Imagine hundreds of Muhammad Yunuses, collected together in one place… a Nobel Prize-themed party? Hundreds of people with ideas to change the world—including Muhammad Yunus—have now come together in a big, colorful brick of a book: Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century. (You can buy it on Amazon in a coordinated effort to make it a best-seller at 11:11 a.m. Pacific time on Nov. 1. Get it: 11/1 at 11:11.)
Worldchanging comes from a group of about 60 journalists and policy experts at Worldchanging.com, an innovative blogging community. Since the end of 2003, Worldchanging’s contributors have written more than 5,000 news and opinion articles for the site.
“The bravest and most important thing any of us can do is to actively imagine a much better future,” writes Alex Steffen, editor of the site and book. “Not to imagine it in the casual sense of daydreaming about it, but to imagine it in the way an architect imagines a house she is planning to build—to imagine it as reality, to try to see it whole, to lovingly dwell on its details, and to see ourselves walking through it one day.”
And they’re not dwelling on those details alone. The online public has received Worldchanging warmly, with an estimated 300,000 unique visitors to the website every month , according to Worldchanging’s Tessa Levine-Sauerhoff.
Most of the ideas in Worldchanging the book echo what has been cycling through Worldchanging the website for the last few years. Does this mean that anyone who has been following the website will be reading "The Best of Worldchanging.com"? Not really. Threading through the book are thoughtful introductions to each topic, summaries and well-reasoned commentary about the complex issues at hand. Steffen and the Worldchanging team have succeeded in creating something that’s more than a bunch of articles from a website. The pace of the Worldchanging site can be overwhelming. It’s nice to finally catch up on all of their content away from a computer screen, leafing through a book instead of tunneling down through unending links.
What’s inside the book is a collection of hundreds of mini-articles, and describes what scientists, politicians, college-students, economists, designers, environmentalists, business types, merchants, artists, farmers, and other folks are doing to imagine a much better future and bring it about. It is a yearbook of Nobel winners-to-be and "most likely to succeed" ideas for the future. More importantly, there are hundreds of invitations for the reader to act, as well. What can we do? The message is simple, if multifaceted: "Imagine a better future. Find your allies. Share tools. Build it. Start now."
The ideas in Worldchanging come in all shapes and sizes: big, systematic shifts as well as meticulous, street-level changes. If progressives want to imagine a better future, productively, they need what Steffen calls "solutions-based journalism." They need pragmatic new models for bringing ecological, economic, and social sustainability to the way we build, use, and dispose of stuff—the way we design shelters, build cities, organize communities, conduct business, engage in politics, and tend to the planet.
"We’re used to politicians without a single new idea, journalists who dress up tired clichés and call them revolutionary, and pundits who take for granted the idea that actual change is unrealistic," Steffen writes. Unless you think “changing the world” is itself a cliché (as many certainly do), Worldchanging provides much-needed proof that change is possible.
Almost all the ideas in Worldchanging are unexpected. Out-of-left-field ideas abound. Examples include:
Any reader should be able to appreciate the relevance, even someone who hasn’t been closely following every world affair for the last few years. Worldchanging doesn’t assume you know what’s going on—even if you should. They explain the whole mess the world is in: global warming and oil-dependency, growing economic inequality, as well as solutions like renewable energy and cradle-to-cradle design, nonviolence and freedom of speech, accountability and transparency in everything. There is "a clear bias towards democracy, human rights, and civic freedoms," the authors admit on Worldchanging.com. The book rarely points fingers, but when it does, it blames systems and behaviors rather than individuals.
The book and website come in the context of a larger movement. These people ask how we can “out-create” the current systems. Steffen and futurist Bruce Sterling discussed the topic in 2005 at the South by Southwest festival and conference in Austin, TX. “We really need our society to have its creative people get out of bed every morning with a sense of commitment and burning need to budge the status quo,” Sterling said. We need to start thinking about what Steffan called “cooler futures.” With the right tools, the status quo need not be so static, solid, or immovable as we are often convinced.
As Steffen points out in his introduction, “In the next 25 years, we need to consciously redesign the entire material basis of our civilization." If we don’t, all we’ll have left is "deserts, hunger, and freaky weather."
Some progressives might take it easy on Halloween this year, so that they can wake up early, wipe the corn-syrup blood from their eyes, go to (or logon to) their nearest bookstore, and demand Worldchanging. What the hell do you need to get drunk for on a Tuesday night, anyway?
Nathan Rosquist is based in Seattle, where he is a graduate student in business and sustainability at Bainbridge Graduate Institute and works for the Interra Project.
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Comments
Fascinating ideas put forth by an obviously brilliant young grad student with unlimited talent. Namaste.
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