KAPITAAL from STUDIO SMACK on Vimeo.
'Advertising is the vandalism of the Fortune 500.
The Green Map website provides adaptable tools and a graphic language, while local leaders and residents throughout the world create and populate the cartography with personal, intimate knowledge of places. These inventories turn into practical sustainable living guides for residents, and greener tourism options for travelers. Participants in the mapping process can access the interface online through user profiles and mapping groups, or can participate in workshops provided by the organization. The collaboration between individuals to inform themselves and others about their neighborhood enhances the general public’s knowledge about the area and fosters community building.
The communities then publish their graphic guides with the help of Green Maps, in various formats and graphic styles representative of each project. Green Maps in New York City include the Powerful Green Map, created in the aftermath of the 2003 blackout with the intent of teaching New Yorkers about their energy choices, and possibly preventing future blackouts. Green Maps can act as devices for education and change towards more sustainable communities.
Sites are organized within three main categories: Sustainable Living, Nature, and Culture and Society; icons on the map indicate the subcategory each location represents. Additional information about each place is presented real-time through an interface similar to that of Google Maps. Locations in New York City include East Village community gardens, organic and local food restaurants, and social service organizations. Open Green Map connects the local economy, green development and ecotourism movements, engaging citizens with local environment, climate and equity issues in New York and worldwide.'
'A movie that is now being launched in the UK called Collapse shows Michael Ruppert chainsmoking his way through visions of social and economic disaster. It is symptomic of the utterly self defeating way that peak oil and climate change are typically communicated...
What is interesting is the way that footage of Ruppert is interwoven with a rolling news format of economic and social collapse. Recent documentaries and disaster movies now frequently use a collage of rapidly edited random footage taken out of context. This slick style aestheticises images of destruction and objectifies the suffering of the people who appear, all too briefly, as bodies being blown up or swept away.
Four years ago an excellent report by the Institute of Public Policy Research identified alarmism in words and images as one of the dominant narratives about climate change. Gill Ereaut wrote:
The sensationalism of alarmism and its connection with the ultimate unreality of the movies also serve to create a sense of distance from the issue. What is more, in this ‘unreal’ and awesome form, alarmism might even become secretly thrilling – effectively a form of ‘climate porn’ rather than a constructive message. Alarmism potentially positions climate change as yet another apocalyptic construction that is perhaps a figment of our cultural imaginations. All of this serves to undermine the ability of this discourse
By this analysis ‘Collapse’ is an 82 minute long apocalypse pornfest that further reinforces the association between the visual aesthetics of disaster and concerns about resource shortages, peak oil, and, by association, climate change.
In terms of public motivation this is very bad news. Repeated research has shown that apocalyptic language and images create a sense of powerlessness and actively undermine peoples’ capacity to act. They can also directly feed a range of associated denial strategies including a short term hedonism and nihilistic cynicism that can be very appealing to young people.
Increasingly - as we are seeing with the political polarisation in the US and Australia- people are not weighing up climate change or other resource issues on the strength of the solid evidence but are choosing between competing worldviews that deliver a package of lifestyle, political and ethical decisions.
On the one side people are presented with a cornucopialist future of endless expansion, built on technical ingenuity and personal freedom. This has now become absorbed into a wider right wing narrative of globalisation, corporatism, minimal government and free markets.
On the other side the apocalyptists promote a future of decline, conflict, corruption, personal guilt, and collapse. This worldview has become deeply associated in the public mind with climate change and peak oil and this movie reinforces it in every way.
So if Ruppert is right he is following the worst possible strategy for raising concern about Peak Oil. By emphasising and reinforcing the existing worldview divides he is following a script that could have been written for him by those opposing action.
That is if he is right. But I think he is wrong. I think that capitalism is, for all the reasons that its defenders use, far more resilient than most apocalyptists believe and has repeatedly shown its capacity to postpone the impacts of resource shortages. What is more, there is overwhelming evidence that even when people do face problems they are far more likely to work together and seek collective solutions than to panic and riot. The images in this film of looting and rioting are rooted in a very American fear of the underclass.
This does not mean that I do not think that we are running into severe problems. There is no doubt that our resource use is insanely short sighted and we are already seeing the first shortages...
Of all resources, the most precious is the willingness of people to listen and change. This too is finite and only changes between generations. We only get one shot at this and we’re really blowing it...'
'It's 8:30 a.m. in Silicon Valley, and Neal Gorenflo is already busy sharing. Inside his Mountain View town house, just a few short blocks from the Caltrain station where commuters pour out each morning on their way to Google, Gorenflo hands over his 15-month-old son, Jake, to a nanny he shares with his neighbor. At a local coffee shop, he logs on to a peer-to-peer banking site called Lending Club to make a series of small loans to someone planning a wedding, another starting a pet business, and a guy named Pat who wants to move. After biking down to the station, he drags his ancient Peugeot onto the train to San Francisco, where he hops into a Prius he's reserved for a few hours from City CarShare, a not-for-profit version of Zipcar.
After driving out to Berkeley for a tour of a cohousing community, he finally lands at a shared office space in SoMa, from which he works once a week. "What typically happens is when people try one sharing behavior, then they start to think, What can I do next?" says the 47-year-old ex-equities analyst. "And those small changes ultimately lead to big changes."
Gorenflo does, of course, still own stuff. He owns his house and his laptop and his clothes and even that old Peugeot bike (Mountain View won't get a bike-sharing program till later this year). But the self-described "sharing hacker" has come a long way in a short time from his past existence as a corporate exec. In 2004, he was a strategist for a division of shipping giant DHL, splitting time between San Francisco and company headquarters in Brussels. The Up in the Air life was not for him - he started noticing that most thirtysomething expats in his office were divorced, and he worried that his relationship with Andrea, his girlfriend, might be headed for trouble. "Our mission statement at DHL was something like, 'To be the best box mover in the world,' " recalls Gorenflo, who resembles a compact Kris Kristofferson. "I thought, What am I doing?" One afternoon, after a jog through the parking lot of his Brussels hotel, he quit his job. Since then, Gorenflo has deconstructed every aspect of his personal and working life, "removing all the things that don't add value and concentrating on the things that deliver value." Andrea made the cut - she's now his wife. But the corporate life did not. In late 2009, he started Shareable, a not-for-profit web hub that provides individuals and groups with a playbook for how to build systems for sharing everything from baby food and housing to skills and solar panels.
"Business has spent centuries making buying really easy," says Gorenflo. "We're just at the beginning of making sharing easy."
Gorenflo is a leading proselytizer of a global trend to make sharing something far more economically significant than a primitive behavior taught in preschool. Spawned by a confluence of the economic crisis, environmental concerns, and the maturation of the social web, an entirely new generation of businesses is popping up. They enable the sharing of cars, clothes, couches, apartments, tools, meals, and even skills. The basic characteristic of these you-name-it sharing marketplaces is that they extract value out of the stuff we already have. Many of these sites depend on millennials disenchanted by the housing bubble and the banking crisis, or uninterested in traditional icons of success such as house or auto ownership. But the number of people who have quietly begun tapping in is impressive: Already, more than 3 million people from 235 countries have couch-surfed, while 2.2 million bike-sharing trips are taken each month. Contends Rachel Botsman, coauthor of the recently published What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption: "This could be as big as the Industrial Revolution in the way we think about ownership."
The evolution of the social web, explains Botsman, first enabled programmers to share code (Linux), then allowed people to share their lives (Facebook), and most recently encouraged creators to share their content (YouTube). "Now we're going into the fourth phase," says Botsman, "where people are saying, 'I can apply the same technology to share all kinds of assets offline, from the real world.' " The 33-year-old Brit, schooled at Oxford and Harvard, ditched her career as an innovation consultant for companies like GE and IBM. "In marketing, we spend so much money on research and understanding the consumer psyche -- and all that investment goes into selling more stuff," she explains. "I just can't help companies sell more stuff."
The central conceit of collaborative consumption is simple: Access to goods and skills is more important than ownership of them. Botsman divides this world into three neat buckets: first, product-service systems that facilitate the sharing or renting of a product (i.e., car sharing); second, redistribution markets, which enable the re-ownership of a product (i.e., Craigslist); and third, collaborative lifestyles in which assets and skills can be shared (i.e., coworking spaces). The benefits are hard to argue -- lower costs, less waste, and the creation of global communities with neighborly values.
The earliest of these marketplaces, like Freecycle and CouchSurfing, encouraged the exchange of goods among peers for free. But the latest sharing platforms are anchored in commerce. They have the potential to amass a new ecosystem of entrepreneurs, just as eBay once aggregated fragmented buyers and sellers into a global online marketplace. Gartner Group researchers estimate that the peer-to-peer financial-lending market will reach $5 billion by 2013. Frost & Sullivan projects that car-sharing revenues in North America alone will hit $3.3 billion by 2016. And Botsman says the consumer peer-to-peer rental market will become a $26 billion sector, and believes the sharing economy, in toto, is a $110 billion-plus market. "Is this purely a warm-and-fuzzy kind of thing?" says Ann Miura-Ko, a venture capitalist at Floodgate Fund who, along with partner Mike Maples (an early backer of Twitter and Digg), has invested in three sharing businesses. "It's not. As a venture capitalist, I'd never invest in something that's purely warm and fuzzy." In fact, in the past year, Google Ventures; Sequoia Capital; and Greylock Partners' Reid Hoffman, the cofounder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, have all backed "sharing" ventures. (Actually, Silicon Valley's preferred phrase is "underused asset utilization." As Howard Hartenbaum, general partner at August Capital, explains, "It's more obvious how you make money.")
Now that the sharing economy is gaining the backing of the financial community, corporations from car manufacturers to big-box retailers better start paying attention. "This has the potential to be lethally disruptive," says Umair Haque, an economist who recently published The New Capitalist Manifesto with Harvard Business Press. Sharing platforms won't bankrupt a company like Home Depot, says Haque, but they could eat away at its business. "If the people formerly known as consumers begin consuming 10% less and peering 10% more, the effect on margins of traditional corporations is going to be disproportionately greater," says Haque. "Which means certain industries have to rewire themselves, or prepare to sink into the quicksand of the past."
On a damp February evening in San Francisco, the founders of AirBnB -- one of the hottest startups in the sharing scene -- are reminiscing about the first strangers who slept on their apartment floor. "We had a 38-year-old female who worked at Razorfish. And then an industrial designer from Salt Lake City who was even older. They slept on an air mattress on our kitchen floor," says Joe Gebbia, AirBnB's hoodie-wearing head of user experience. Back in 2007, Gebbia and Brian Chesky were recent RISD graduates in need of extra cash to pay their rent. On a whim, they built a website offering attendees of a design conference a unique place to stay -- in their apartment, on those air mattresses, with a home-cooked breakfast. Says Gebbia of their houseguests, "They broke every assumption we ever made about who would stay on an air bed at a stranger's house." Encouraged, he and Chesky decided to try and build a business: a web platform where booking a room in a person's home anywhere in the world was as easy as booking a hotel room.
The challenge with building a marketplace is to ensure that there is both supply and demand. "It's a chicken-and-egg problem," says James Reinhart, cofounder of ThredUp, a venture-backed startup that helps people unload or swap children's clothing and toys -- the ultimate forced obsolescence -- by the box. An alum of Harvard Business School, Reinhart closely studied eBay, which in its early days helped create demand by making it free for anyone to list. "You have to pick which side to subsidize," says Reinhart. Like eBay, ThredUp started out by funding the supply -- the company bought hundreds of boxes of clothing before launch, so it could open up with inventory. ThredUp now gives users a credit every time they post a box of stuff their kids can no longer use. They can use the credit to acquire a box of goodies more in line with the current age of their children. Boxes that are unsold after two weeks are either given a fire-sale price or donated to charity. "The worst experience," he says, "is having a box of children's clothes to sell and nobody who wants it."
AirBnB, on the other hand, had to create demand. Gebbia and Chesky had no problem ginning up a marketplace when a major event occurred in a city with limited hotel space, like the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. But when there was no urgency, business slowed to a trickle. As a result, Chesky and Gebbia put in a lot of time meeting AirBnB's early suppliers, spending the night at their homes, and organizing user meetups. They learned that people weren't willing to pay for a room they couldn't see, so Chesky and Gebbia insisted on beautiful wide-angle high-resolution photos. Early on, they placed an artificial cap on price, but they experimented with lifting it -- suddenly, hosts began renting out entire apartments, and the experiment became the norm. "Today, if you add up all of our listings in New York City, it's probably safe to say we're 10 times larger than any hotel," says CEO Chesky. "We're on almost every single block in the city."
AirBnB is now in more than 8,000 cities, and rents houses, castles, cars, yachts -- even igloos. "I knew within three minutes I would be very interested," says Greylock's Hoffman, who invested $7.1 million in AirBnB last April, several months after Sequoia Capital led a seed round. AirBnB -- growing at a staggering 45% average rate, month over month -- sees travel as but a first step. "If you look at it as the eBay for space," says Hoffman, "people have a massive amount of liquidity and economic value tied up in their space. The ability to parse that in different ways ... the sky's the limit." Unlike VRBO, which is limited to renting second homes, the future of AirBnB is not only in monetizing the houses, say the founders, but in monetizing all the stuff in houses, front yards, backyards, and driveways. "I only invest," says Hoffman, "when I think a company will be a multibillion-dollar company."
This is why sharing startups have piqued the attention of Sand Hill Road. "It has the potential to be really disruptive. Amazon came first, then eBay, and peer-to-peer is next. It's almost as far as you can get on the spectrum of goods exchanged," says Josh Felser, an investor at Freestyle Capital. In January, Craig Shapiro, former president of Good Worldwide, left the media company to start Collaborative Fund, a venture fund that will invest mostly in collaborative-consumption businesses. "I'm looking at virtually every resource and finding ways to extract additional value or productivity from it, from food to gardens to skill sharing," says Shapiro, whose investors include YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley, MIT Media Lab cocreator Nicholas Negroponte, and even Botsman.
Not every category is a natural for sharing. "Expensive electronics wouldn't work," says Punsri Abeywickrema, a former LinkedIn software engineer who founded an online rental company called Rentalic in 2008. Abeywickrema built the platform as a marketplace for rentals of everything from handbags to lawn mowers. But after nine months of user testing, he concluded that shareable objects had to fit specific criteria: They must cost more than $100 but less than $500, be easily transportable, and be infrequently used. As a result of his research, Abeywickrema has narrowed the site's scope to sporting goods and outdoor gear.
The challenge that worries everyone in the sharing world, of course, is trust. It's one thing to believe that a knitter on Etsy will mail you that crocheted beret. It's another to let a stranger sleep in your home or borrow your second-most-expensive asset, your car. "Sharing of the kind we're talking about really only works when there's reputation involved," says Freestyle's Felser. "We haven't seen any mass-market approach to combining distributed trust and sharing." Most sharing platforms try to combat this issue by building a self-policing community. Almost all (including AirBnB) require profiles for both parties and feature a community ratings system.
But these ratings would carry far more weight if they traveled with you across the web, so that your eBay reputation helped inform your standing on AirBnB. Startups like TrustCloud would like to become the portable reputation system for the web. The company is building an algorithm to collect (if you choose to opt in) your online "data exhaust" -- the trail you leave as you engage with others on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, commentary-filled sites like TripAdvisor, and beyond -- and calculate your reliability, consistency, and responsiveness. The result would be a contextual badge you'd carry to any website, a trust rating similar to the credit rating you have in the offline world. "Sure, there's always the argument that anyone can be an ax murderer," concedes TrustCloud cofounder Xin Chung. "But you get a lot more indicators in data exhaust than you do in walking up to somebody in khakis and a crisp white shirt on the street. I'd pick the data exhaust any day."
Of course, there is one company that is already collecting a ton of that data exhaust on its own site: Facebook. "Think of sites like Yelp and eBay," says Carl Sjogreen, manager of Facebook's platform product team. "They invested a ton of resources for building a notion of reputation online, but all based on pseudonyms, like joebob77 on eBay. We decided early on to be a social-networking site based on your real identity with your real name." With more than 600 million registered users, 250 million people engaging with Facebook on external websites every month, and social plug-ins that are creeping into an estimated 10,000 new websites a day, Facebook has the potential to become the arbiter of online trust. "The incentive to be a good player in that ecosystem goes up dramatically when it's associated with my real identity," says Sjogreen, "because if someone leaves a bad review of me on AirBnB, that will carry with me to the rest of the web."
Last February, on the evening before the North American International Auto Show, in Detroit, Lisa Gansky gave a TEDx talk to an audience of some 300 people in the Fisher Theatre, including designers from brands such as Ford and Lincoln. She asked the crowd what percentage of time the average person uses his car. While a couple of folks mumbled a guess, no one was prepared for the statistic Gansky had at hand. "Across the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe, it's 8%," she said. "Which means that over 90% of the time, this thing that costs us a lot of money is just sitting around."
Gansky had been invited to explain "the mesh," a concept she coined in her book by the same name, which was published last September (as was Botsman's). Both authors believe the development of this mesh of shared things will affect not only the way we consume but also the way successful companies will be built. Gansky, a tech entrepreneur who made tens of millions of dollars selling startups to AOL and Kodak, thinks this means that the car companies must start behaving like a platform. "It would be really great," Gansky told her audience, "if any moment now, you guys could start rolling share-ready cars off the assembly line."
Cars are the ultimate expensive underutilized commodity. Eleven years ago, Zipcar started convincing urbanites that they could shun car ownership and enjoy the perks of access without any expense or inconvenience. Zipcar is now getting ready for its IPO. But a slew of new venture-backed car-sharing and ride-sharing startups have recently emerged, and their business model might be more efficient than Zipcar's. Zipcar, which has yet to turn a profit, is saddled by the expansion and maintenance of its fleet, a cost that now clocks in at more than $90 million. Platforms like RelayRides, Zimride, Spride, and Getaround don't own any cars -- they simply enable the sharing of autos owned by individuals.
The economic incentive to share your second-most-valuable asset with a stranger may be compelling. "The average person using RelayRides makes $250 a month renting," says Shelby Clark, founder of RelayRides, which is backed by August Capital and Google Ventures. "Some users are making enough on RelayRides that it's offsetting their entire car payment. They're basically getting a free car." And since RelayRides has a $1 million insurance policy covering both sides during each reservation, it's low risk.
And then there are the noneconomic benefits. Clark says that when people's mobility costs shift from being fixed (ownership) to variable (renting), they make more efficient decisions about when they actually need to drive. "Studies have shown," says Clark, "that the average car sharer drives 40% less than the average owner." Shareable's Gorenflo believes this makes car sharing the "gateway drug" to other types of sharing. "Historically, cars were the vehicle into hyperconsumption," says Gorenflo. "It looks like they could be the vehicle out of it too."
Car manufacturers are starting to pay attention. In early 2010, Peugeot rolled out a mobility rental service called Mu. A membership gives people access to not only customizable Peugeot cars (fitted with bike racks, snow tires, and TVs) but also to electric scooters and bikes. "In the biggest cities in Europe, we see people giving up ownership of the car to switch to sheer usage," says Peugeot's Nadège Faul. By the end of 2011, Mu will expand from six cities to 70. "We are convinced it's a new age of car manufacturing," she says. "Either we take care of it and recognize this new market or we might just as well lose these consumers for good."
German car manufacturer Daimler is taking this new reality even more seriously. Its Car2Go service is similar to Zipcar's, except that it doesn't require a reservation or a two-way trip. Car2Go's mobile app allows a person walking down the street in Ulm, Germany, or Austin (its two pilot cities), to locate a Smart car on that block, access it immediately via a windshield card reader and PIN number, drive it anywhere locally, and leave it there for someone else to use. The fuel-efficient Smart car has a 100-watt solar roof, which powers the car's telematics and its battery. "According to a Frost & Sullivan study from 2010," says Car2Go managing director Robert Henrich, "the revenue in the car-sharing market will soon be in the billions. This is the order of magnitude we are looking at." Henrich will begin commercializing Car2Go this year, with plans to expand to 100 cities in the U.S. and Europe.
Daimler is investing so much in this market that it has started developing apps that work for any car - not just a Daimler-made vehicle. Last September, Daimler's innovation group in Germany started piloting Car2Gether, which offers an app to match local drivers with people looking for a ride. Riders submit a request to a driver - who can be driving any kind of car, not just a Daimler - and both profiles are linked to their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. After the ride, both driver and passenger rate each other. "We want to make this a social network on wheels," says Michael Kuhn, project manager of Car2Gether, who doesn't even know if Daimler will - or can -commercialize the service. "It's all about access trumps ownership," says Kuhn, sounding far more Silicon Valley than Stuttgart, Germany.
The carmaker realizes that sharing systems are going to be created whether it joins the party or not. "If you don't build a value cycle," says economist Haque, "one will be self-organized. And it will commoditize you." Whether it's moms opting to buy baby clothes from other moms through ThredUp rather than visiting Baby Gap, or neighbors borrowing a drill through NeighborGoods instead of going to Target, consumers - or, perhaps more appropriately, citizens - are being connected in a way that cuts out the corporate middleman. "We often think about this stuff purely as secondary markets," says Haque, "but I think there's a deeper truth here, which is we're learning we don't have to obey these industrial rules of producer versus consumer. We can take the stuff we have and cycle it."
The sharing economy is at one of those interesting junctures where no one knows how big it might get or how many industries and companies it might affect. Best Buy and Lowe's, to cite two relatively unlikely candidates, have started to contemplate how it might impact retail. "I would say this notion of sharing is something we've been talking about in the last 12 months," says Lowe's VP of new business development Jay Rebello. "Social networking is impacting the definition of what a community is, and, in the past, people wanted to accumulate more stuff. More recently, we're seeing people view that differently." And in sectors like banking, where Wall Street's behavior has led to immense consumer distrust, disintermediation via sharing is becoming a reality. "We benefited enormously from the banking crisis," says Giles Andres, CEO of Zopa, one of the several peer-to-peer lending sites, like Lending Club, that have emerged over the past several years. "That was the catalyst for going from early adopters to a more mass-market crowd."
"I think P-to-P banking is going to be hugely disruptive to the banking industry," says Haque. He may be right. Still, it's hard to envision a big peer-to-peer market in $1 million mortgages, for example. As he himself says, "The finance guys are proficient on maintaining their stranglehold on the status quo, trying to convince us that without them we'll fall apart." But Haque's faith is based on the principle that's at the very heart of the new sharing economy: the resilience of distributed systems. He offers as parable the way that villages and communities survived the Irish banking crisis of the late '70s, during which bankers - yes, bankers - went on strike. They warned the public that the economy would collapse without a banking system. "What happened instead," says Haque, "was a P-to-P banking system emerged out of nowhere. The local pubs became the de facto banks, lending money to their customers. If you think about it, who is a better judge of character in Ireland than the bartender?"
He laughs. "The economy did not stop growing -- it didn't even falter."'
Neuroscientist David Eagleman's talk on the multiple selves of the brain - some great stories and insights in this one!
We humans are complex beings with many possibilities. Empire has demonstrated our capacity for extremes of individualistic greed, hubris, deceit, ruthless competition, and material excess. Yet most people daily demonstrate our human capacity for caring, sharing, peacemaking, and service.
The former are the possibilities of our lower nature; the latter, the possibilities of our higher nature. Contrary to what morally challenged market fundamentalists would have us believe, both are within our means. What in fact makes us distinctively human is our capacity to choose which of our many possibilities will define us as individuals and societies.
We humans have a complex three-part brain. At the base is our “reptilian” brain.
It coordinates basic functions, such as breathing, hunting and eating, reproducing, protecting territory, and engaging the fight-or-flight response. These functions are essential to survival and they are part of our nature. The are not, however, characteristic of our human nature, but rather of our reptilian nature—defined by the most primitive and least-evolved part of our brain.
Layered on top of the reptilian brain is the limbic or “mammalian” brain, the center of the emotional intelligence that gives mammals their distinctive capacity to experience emotion, read the emotional state of other mammals, bond socially, care for their children, and form cooperative communities.
The third and, in adult humans, largest layer is the neocortical brain, the center of our capacity for cognitive reasoning, symbolic thought, awareness, and highly developed self-aware volition. The neocortical brain is the source of our capacity for choice, including our capacity for moral choice, and our capacity to decide whether to create an economy that celebrates and rewards our reptilian nature or our distinctively human nature.
Most of the development of the limbic and neocortical brains essential to actualizing the capacities that make us most distinctively human occurs after birth and depends on lifelong learning acquired through our interactions with family, community, and nature. Developmental psychologists describe the healthy pathway to a fully formed human consciousness as a progression from the self-centered, undifferentiated magical consciousness of the newborn to the fully mature, inclusive, and multidimensional spiritual consciousness of the wise elder.
Scientists who use advanced imaging technology to study brain function confirm that the mature human brain is wired for caring, cooperation, and service. Their studies reveal that merely thinking about another person experiencing harm triggers the same reaction in a mentally healthy adult brain as that of a mother who sees distress on her baby’s face.
Conversely, engaging in an act of cooperation and generosity triggers the brain’s pleasure center to release the same hormone that’s released when we eat chocolate or engage in good sex. In addition to producing a sense of bliss, this hormone benefits our health by boosting our immune system, reducing our heart rate, and preparing us to approach and soothe.
Positive emotions like compassion produce similar benefits. Negative emotions, by contrast, suppress our immune system, increase our heart rate, and shift us into reptilian mode prepared to fight or flee.
It is entirely logical that we humans have an instinctual desire to cooperate and protect the group. We are helpless as infants and even as adults are individually weak. As a group, however, we are the strongest of Earth’s living creatures. This in turn creates a moral obligation to use this power responsibly for the good of the whole. These findings are further confirmed by the pleasure that most of us experience being a member of an effective team or extending an uncompensated helping hand to another being.
Behaviors driven by our lower, more narcissistic, orders of consciousness are perfectly normal for young children, but they become sociopathic in adults and are easily manipulated by advertisers, propagandists, and political demagogues. Tragically, persons who have been thwarted on the path to maturity are those most likely to engage in the ruthless competition for positions of unaccountable power—and to abuse that power when they succeed.
Just as we have chosen to create economies that reward and celebrate the sociopathic greed and ruthless competition of our reptilian nature, we can and must now create economies that nurture and reward the caring, sharing, peacemaking, and service of our distinctively human nature.'
There are some powerful think tanks promoting “green” ideas around the world, especially when it comes to green growth, green technology, and green jobs. In a stunner, CASSE prevailed over them all as it was named the Best Green Think Tank of 2011 by the sustainability gurus at TreeHugger. Despite a miniscule budget and a skeletal staff that consists almost entirely of dedicated volunteers, the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy overcame odds almost as long as its name.
Perhaps it’s not all that shocking of an upset after all. With each passing day, the public is becoming more skeptical of the status quo and more receptive to CASSE’s message. Infinite economic growth on a finite planet makes no sense. It’s a difficult message to hear and internalize, especially amidst the constant clamor for evermore growth. But acceptance of this message is a prerequisite to making the transition to a steady state economy, and CASSE is the leading organization calling for this transition.
As TreeHugger notes, “When it comes down to advocating for what we humbly submit to readers as the single most important economic concept of the 21st century, CASSE comes out on top.” And CASSE is in good company – awards are piling up for people and organizations daring to challenge the orthodoxy of perpetual economic growth:
• The New Economic Model, a project of nef (the New Economics Foundation), has been named a 2011 semi-finalist in the Buckminster Fuller Challenge. And nef was the 2010 winner of the TreeHugger award given to CASSE this year.
• The Post Carbon Institute won a DoGooder Nonprofit Video Award for its outstanding “300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds.”
• Herman Daly won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Council for Science and the Environment.
• The Global Footprint Network won the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship.
These awards help validate the messages being delivered by CASSE, nef, Post Carbon, GFN, and dozens of other organizations. And they increase public awareness of noteworthy efforts. But more importantly, they provide inspiration for us to follow the lead of these organizations. Underdog victories prove that the little guy can win the game. Their stories help us realize that we have the power to accomplish big things.
Underdogs of the world unite!
In this case, the underdogs are all the people who are distressed about the direction humanity is headed. We are the people craving a sane solution to climate chaos, mourning the culture of materialism, searching for solutions to the ongoing assault on nature, and hoping for an end to poverty. It will take unprecedented commitment, hard work and perseverance for us to overcome greed-based corporate agendas, outdated economic institutions, and our own reservations about saying and doing what is necessary.
Now, however, is the time for underdogs of the world to unite in action. As TreeHugger astutely observed, “In all honesty awarding the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy a Best of Green Award this year is as much about promise as past action.” We need to fulfill the promise and find a way to run the economy on something other than endlessly expanding consumption. If you want to join the underdog movement for a sustainable economy, please consider taking some simple actions to raise awareness about the perils of perpetual growth and the positive possibilities of a steady state.'
Local politics - schools, zoning, council elections - hit us where we live. So why don't more of us actually get involved? Is it apathy? Dave Meslin says no. He identifies the 7 barriers that keep us from taking part in our communities, even when we truly care.
Reposted in full from the ABC, 11 April 2011
'Within minutes of its launch, the 'slow down and enjoy the ride' commercial had been viewed by thousands of people around the world.
The three minute Office of Road Safety ad was broadcast simultaneously on three television stations last month but its spread online has been rapid in its own right.
In simple terms, the campaign encourages motorists to slow down.
It hardly sounds compelling but after decades of road safety advertising that has had a limited effect on the state's road toll, this campaign appears to be getting the message through.
So much so, people from around the world have been logging on to YouTube to view it, and they are doing it over and over again.
So what's so different this time around?
The campaign has been two years in the making.
Derry Simpson from 303 Advertising says she spent countless hours poring over research, listening to focus groups and watching old campaigns.
She says it became immediately clear that if this campaign was to be effective, a new approach would be needed.
"We needed to move away from the enforcement and consequence model," she said.
"It was becoming quite clear to me that a lot of the traditional campaigns were becoming a form of wallpaper."
Derry Simpson says more than 80 per cent of people admit to speeding but men aged 17 to 30, who are in the highest risk group, were becoming especially resistant.
"I could see that the ads were starting to lose traction and that particularly younger males were very quick to dismiss them," she said.
"The problem is, somewhere along the line, most of those people think they are in control, and they think their speeding is ok."
Slow Movement
The concept that would eventually shape the ad fell into place when the speed of life was taken into account.
An Italian group dedicated to slowing down life's pace, whether it be cooking, travelling or parenting, came to be known as the 'slow movement' and broadly refers back to when life was simpler.
It began in 1999 but its popularity has surged in recent years thanks to social media.
A professor of social marketing Rob Donovan says it is clear the ad has struck a chord.
"I think what the Office of Road Safety has done is picked up on a social movement and embedded an advertisement in that; they have made it something that is broader than just slowing down on the road," he said.
He says the ad's appeal is broad because it has been framed in a positive way.
"What they [the advertising company] is doing is tuning into the underlying need that people have about wanting to slow their lives down and do things in a less complicated way.
"This campaign taps into the anxiety that people have about what they might be missing out on while they are stressed and rushing from place to place," he said.
"It's not that people are stepping back and going wow what a great road safety campaign, they are going wow, what a great idea about how I should live my life."
In a major coup, internationally known author and Slow Movement contributor Carl Honore has also come on board with the campaign.
It's the first time the author of 'In Praise of Slow' has chosen to endorse a road safety campaign, despite numerous requests from around the world.
Going Viral
Even those closely involved with the 'Enjoy the Ride' campaign were surprised at how quickly it took off on the internet and other social media.
Since its launch on March 19th the ad has been 'tweeted' 314 times, there have been 207 blog posts since, and more than half of those were recorded in the last week.
5,104 people have shared the clip on Facebook.
The clip posted on YouTube has had over 63,000 views and almost 30,000 of those were in the last week alone.
The Office of Road Safety's director of strategic communications Roger Farley says the ad is reaching those who are typically the most elusive.
"What's interesting is that those people who are tweeting and facebooking and blogging about this campaign are the younger audience who are very media savvy and who are the hardest to get a message through to," he said.
He says the move to create a more positive campaign rather than one which focussed on shock tactics has been a success.
"We have turned the whole thing on its head and lots of people have come to us and told us that things are getting too fast paced so that's why the advertisement is making such a difference," he said.
"We have had such a positive response and people are actually saying wow this is fantastic, where can I get a copy of it, can I buy it? I mean that is unheard of. "
It was interesting because we purposely kept road safety out of the equation until the final scenes.
It was more about the other things in life that can be improved if you slow down, and then road safety comes in at the end," he said.
Mr Farley says there was some concern about the strategy.
"There was a lot of anxiety associated with the campaign because we really were doing this for the first time.
We had a fair idea it was going to be a success but people have really taken the message on board, above and beyond what we ever could have anticipated," he said.
The council's chairman D'Arcy Holman says the campaign was a real change of thinking but it's been a total success.
"Every dollar that we have to spend on road safety campaign is so precious so we certainly can't afford to have advertising out there that isn't effective," he said.
He says the ad is just one part of a campaign.
"We need to remember this will be used in conjunction with other road safety messages.
The concern is that the minute you take those other campaigns away, then people will start to speed again, they will start to drink drive," he said.
You don’t have to be a therapist to realize all this creates lasting psychological effects. It thwarts the connections between people that encourage us to congregate, cooperate and work for the common good. We retreat into ever more privatized existences.
Of course, this is no startling revelation. Over the past 40 years, the shrinking sense of community across America has been widely discussed, and many proposals outlined about how to bring us back together.
One of the notable solutions being put into practice to combat this problem is New Urbanism, an architectural movement to build new communities (and revitalize existing ones) by maximizing opportunities for social exchange: public plazas, front porches, corner stores, coffee shops, neighborhood schools, narrow streets and, yes, sidewalks.
This line of thinking has transformed many communities, including my own World War I-era neighborhood in Minneapolis, which thankfully has sidewalks but was once bereft of the inviting public places that animate a community. Now I marvel at all the choices I have to mingle with the neighbors over a cappuccino, Pabst Blue Ribbon, juevos rancheros, artwork at a gallery opening or head of lettuce at the farmer’s market.
But while New Urbanism is making strides at the level of the neighborhood, we still spend most of our time at home, which today means seeing no one other than our nuclear family. How could we widen that circle just a bit? Not a ‘60s commune (“pass the brown rice, comrade, and don’t forget your shift cleaning the toilet ”), but good neighbors with whom we share more than a property line.
That’s an idea Seattle-area architect Ross Chapin has explored for many years, and now showcases in an inspiring and beautiful new book: Pocket Neighborhoods: Creating a Small-Scale Community in a Large-Scale World.
He believes that groupings of four to twelve households make an ideal community “where meaningful ‘neighborly’ relationships are fostered.” But even here, design shapes our destiny. Chapin explains that strong connections between neighbors develop most fully and organically when everyone shares some "common ground".
That can be a semi-private square, as in the pocket neighborhoods Chapin designed in the Seattle area. In the book’s bright photographs, they look like grassy patches of paradise, where kids scamper, flowers bloom, and neighbors stop to chat.
But Chapin points out these commons can take many different forms—an apartment building in Cambridge with a shared backyard, a group of neighbors in Oakland who tore down their backyard fences to create a commons, a block in Baltimore that turned their alley into a pubic commons, or the residential pedestrian streets found in Manhattan Beach, California, and all around Europe...'
nef will build a comprehensive new macro-economic model for the UK predicated on respect for planetary boundaries and global equity of resource use. Principally designed to catalyse the transition to a low carbon, high well-being future economy, the model will be developed through rigorous economic analysis over three years.
“We’re obviously delighted to be named a semi-finalist in the Buckminster Fuller Challenge,” said James Meadway, senior economist at nef and project lead on the New Economic Model. “Our project for a New Economic Model is a perfect synergy with Buckminster Fuller’s own approach to change. As he said: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.””
“As the world faces the challenges of climate change and energy depletion to rising inequality and financial instability, the need for a new economic model has never been greater. At nef, we believe that only systemic change will bring about a future of well-being, prosperity and ecological balance. The prize money from BFC will go a long way towards funding both the theoretical work on economic modeling and our public engagement strategy to chart the course for a better future.”
After an initial rigorous vetting process by BFI’s multi-disciplinary review team, which included an in-depth interview, the New Economic Model was chosen from a pool of hundreds of entries from over 35 countries, to be one of 21 Semi-Finalists this year. It will now be featured as a top tier project in BFI’s Idea Index and featured on their website for the remainder of the program cycle.
Semi-finalists will be reviewed and discussed by the 11 distinguished jurors, which includes Valerie Casey, founder of Design Accord; David Orr, writer and professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College; Andrew Zolli, producer of PopTech and Danielle Nierenberg, Project Director of State of World 2011; and Sim Vanderyn, visionary ecological design pioneer.
Finalists will be announced May and the winner, runner up, and honorable mention will be announced at the conferring ceremony in New York in early June.
The Buckminster Fuller Challenge is the premier international competition recognizing initiatives which take a comprehensive, anticipatory, design approach to radically advance human well being and the health of our planet’s ecosystems. The 2011 Semi-finalists are providing workable solutions to some of the world’s most significant challenges including water scarcity, food supply, health, energy consumption and shelter. The Challenge is a program of The Buckminster Fuller Institute which aims to deeply influence the ascendance of a new generation of design-science pioneers who are leading the creation of an abundant and restorative world economy that benefits all humanity.'
