As people around the world await the inauguration of U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama on January 20, it seems that every week brings news and controversy that heightens expectations for 2009 to be a turning point in the American response to climate change. We recently learned of yet another encouraging development on Capitol Hill, this time in the United States' federal approach to ecosystem services.

On December 18, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer announced that there will be a new office in the USDA: the Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets. According to an official release, this office, along with a federal government-wide Conservation and Land Management Environmental Services Board, will "assist the Secretary of Agriculture in the development of new technical guidelines and science-based methods to assess environmental service benefits which will in turn promote markets for ecosystem services including carbon trading to mitigate climate change."

Worldchanging ally Dr. Trista Patterson, an ecological economist with the USDA Forest Service, tells us that "this new office of Ecosystem Services and Markets will be responsible for coordinating many federal agencies including Agriculture, Interior, Energy, EPA, Army Corps, Commerce, Transportation, Defense, Council of Economic Advisors and White House Office of Science & Technology."

Ecosystem services, which you can read more about in our archives via the links below, are a means of connecting economic systems to ecological systems. Basically, pricing ecosystem services gives us a way to calculate what nature already provides for free into the business plan. All industries on the planet are linked in some way to the natural environment whether the connection is obvious, as is the case for resource industries such as logging or mining, or more indirectly, for many businesses who simply rely on a healthy environment to maintain healthy employees, healthy customers and a functional working and distribution infrastructure.

But the disconnect between the numbers that show up on a balance sheet and the real numbers when it comes to environmental degradation and its impacts, is dangerous. Without factoring in environmental costs and benefits, companies and even governments miss a huge part of the picture when evaluating present and future costs and dividends associated with a project. Placing monetary values on the services that ecosystems provide, from flood control to climate management, is an important step toward making the invisible visible, and creating a set of tools for making clear decisions on difficult issues where business and environmental issues clash.

Schafer has chosen Sally Collins to be the first Director of the Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets (OESM). Collins, who has served as Associate Chief of the USDA Forest Service for the past eight years, has championed work in ecosystem services and markets within that agency, as a concept to promote sustainable land management. According to the USDA, this is how the OESM will work, at least in its first year:

OESM will provide administrative and technical assistance to the Secretary in developing the uniform guidelines and tools needed to create and expand markets for these vital ecosystem services and will support the work of the Conservation and Land Management Environmental Services Board. As directed by the authorizing legislation the first ecosystem services to be examined will be carbon sequestration. The Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets and the Conservation and Land Management Environmental Services Board will be established to implement actions authorized by the 2008 Farm Bill.

The Conservation and Land Management Environmental Services Board, as defined by this charter, in accordance with the 2008 Farm Bill, is chaired by the Secretary of Agriculture, and comprises key White House advisers including the Secretaries of Commerce, the Interior, Energy, Transportation, and Defense; the EPA Administrator; the Assistant Secretary of the Army; the White House Council of Economic Advisors; and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. This new role in developing policy regarding ecosystem services adds yet another dimension when we consider Obama's recent picks for these positions (particularly the choice of former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture, which has generated some skepticism). But the inclusion of so many highest-level advisers, across so many departments, is also a sign that the federal government understands the crucial concept of interdependence when it comes to environmental policy.

In 2007, Worldchanging contributors Hassan Masum, David Zaks, and Chad Monfreda posted an interview with team members of the People & Ecosystems program of the World Resources Institute. The Washington D.C.-based think tank has produced tools and leading original research that inform both the scientific and policy communities. In the interview, the WRI team addressed points that stand out now, when viewed against the USDA announcement.

Research analyst Evan Branosky commented on the need for a better understanding of the problem and solutions as obstacles to the creation of a meaningful and unified ecosystem services model:

I've found that potential stakeholders understand the concept of trading quite well. This is due, in part, to the advent of carbon markets. The main criticism (and sometimes, skepticism) is more focused on the regulatory driver and design of the market. No one argues that emissions trading is a tool to efficiently regulate CO2; they argue instead about the science of global warming, the regulatory driver behind the program, the design of the market structure, and the market's geographic scope.

GIS Research Analyst Stephen Adam (who has since left WRI) discussed the need for a federal office to unify the ecosystem services approach:

Based on my experience, what's most needed to move implementation forward is political buy-in. While some individuals, businesses, and local governments will adopt ecosystem-minded policies and practices, it'll take a progressive federal government to allocate the necessary funds and create incentives for long-term programs oriented toward ecosystem goods and services. The debate over ecosystem goods and services will no doubt continue over the next decade, but government intervention and support is vital in the mainstreaming of ecosystems.

Revisiting that interview, it seems that a lot of hopeful progress has been made in the less than 18 months since it was published. Of course, the creation of a federal office is merely the first step of a long journey, and the impact of the office on U.S. markets, domestic ecosystems and even international policies remains to be seen. But recognition at a federal level is a huge step forward, particularly because it seems that the question of "does climate change exist" and "should we do something about it" is quickly fading from U.S. politics (case in point: this recent video message from Obama). We hope to see a lot of progress in this arena in the year to come.

Read more about ecosystem services in the Worldchanging archives:

Ecosystem Services of Tropical Forests to be Protected with Precedent-Setting Memorandum

Ecosystem Goods and Services Series: The Biophysical Basis

Ecosystem Goods and Services Series: Valuation 101

Moving Ecosystems Services from Theory to Reality

A Price Tag on Puget Sound

Photo: Lower Falls, Yellowstone River Canyon, Yellowstone National Park. Credit: flickr/v1ctory_1s_m1ne, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by Julia Levitt in Columns at 3:14 PM)

The Washington Post is reporting that President-elect Barack Obama has asked Dr. Sanjay Gupta (who we recently interviewed) to serve as surgeon general:

The offer followed a two-hour Chicago meeting in November with Obama, who said that Gupta could be the highest-profile surgeon general in history and would have an expanded role in providing health policy advice, the sources said. Gupta later spoke with Tom Daschle, Obama's White House health czar and nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, and other advisers to the president-elect.

The Michigan-born son of Indian and Pakistani parents, Gupta has always been drawn to health policy. He was a White House fellow in the late 1990s, writing speeches and crafting policy for Hillary Clinton. His appointment would give the administration a prominent official of South Asian descent and a skilled television spokesman.

What the post doesn't mention is that Dr. Gupta would bring to the administration a much deeper grounding in both global health issues and urban health innovations than recent surgeons general. Given his polished presentation skills and his fame, he may be able to make excellent use of the bully pulpit his position provides to educate Americans on the importance of an active U.S. role in global health issues, and the health benefits of sustainability and smart growth.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Health at 2:54 PM)

Iran is introducing the latest solar technologies to cut its oil consumption and bring cheaper electricity to its civilians

by Alok Jha

A concentrating solar power (CSP) plant in Spain that uses panels to reflect light on to a central tower to produce electricity. A pilot scheme using CSP has been started in Iran. Image credit: AP

Renewable energy experts in Iran have been quietly working on capturing sunlight to power their country.

According to officials, Iran has started 2009 by inaugurating a pilot solar plant in Shiraz, Fars province. It is a concentrating solar power (CSP) system, using parabolic mirrors to focus sunlight onto a tube of water that is super-heated to make steam that is then used to turn electricity-generating turbines.

According to the Mehr Iran news agency, Iranian energy minister Parviz Fattah said: "The country backs the use of alternative and renewable energy sources. In future alternative energy sources will be greatly developed in the country. The growth of investments in this sphere is expected."

The solar radiation hitting the Earth contains around 10,000 times the energy needs of the world's population. CSP is seen by many as a simpler, cheaper and more efficient way to harness the sun's energy than other methods such as photovoltaic panels. But it only works in places with clear skies and strong sunshine. As such, large CSP plants of up to 20mw each are already in construction in the sunnier parts of the world.

Spanish firms, in particular, are moving quickly with CSP: more than 50 solar projects around Spain have been approved for construction by the government and, by 2015, the country will generate more than 2GW of power from CSP, comfortably exceeding current national targets. The companies there are also exporting their technology to Morocco, Algeria and the US.

At present the Iranian plant is small (just 250KW, probably enough for just over 200 family homes while the sun is shining) but the locally-built mirrors join thousands of smaller-scale solar-thermal installations already in place around the country.

Whether Iran has plans to build bigger solar plants or add photovoltaic panels to those plans is unclear, but an ambitious move in this direction would be a good idea. Not only because the region has a huge resource of sunlight falling onto it, so tapping even a small proportion of that would be a cheap and clean way to provide energy for the country.

This is an excerpt from Tehran Looks to the Skies for Cheap Power from the Sun, which originally appeared in The Guardian. Alok Jha is a science and environment correspondent at The Guardian.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Energy at 10:45 AM)

According to the research-based predictions of urban affairs and planning expert Arthur C. Nelson about half the buildings that Americans will use in 2030 will have been built after 2000. This gives us Americans an opportunity to effect massive change on the built environment if we make deliberate choices starting right now.

I recently came across a post about the Hurriquake Nail on the always-inspiring tech blog NextBigFuture. The Hurriquake, designed by Bostitch engineer Ed Sutt, is a study in practical world-changing innovation: it combines simple building technologies like threading and a spiral shank, placed at exactly the right points along the nail so that it anchors deeply into wood, holding steady where it needs to most, and creates wobble-free joints at the points where wood planks are most likely to begin to weaken.

According to Next Big Future, the nails (which fit into a modern nail gun), "add $15 to the price of a home and make a house 50% more resistant to a hurricane or strong winds (or over pressures from a nuke)."

To underscore the importance of this statement:

If every building could survive 5PSI then there would be no building failures for category 5 hurricanes or less and potentially no deaths outside the 5PSI radius of a nuclear blast for anyone inside a building. This would reduce the casualties from a nuclear bomb by half or more.

This thought led me to revisit the concept of passive survivability -- an idea we've discussed on Worldchanging here and here. Buildings that can withstand forces of nature and war will mean fewer devastated families and landscapes in the face of the unthinkable. Getting all new buildings up to this standard would be ideal and not out of reach; targeting necessary facilities such as hospitals, which are most needed in the aftermath of disaster, is a logical starting point.

The Hurriquake nail is not brand-new; it has been widely used since 2006. In fact, NextBigFuture goes on to profile several other developments -- including blast-resistant wallpaper -- that could help secure structural integrity without leveling and rebuilding from the ground up. But I think it is a particularly apt example of the kinds of innovations we will need in the coming decades Taking advantage of the next 20 years to redefine our built environment as one that works harder to serve its inhabitants while extracting a lesser load from the planet will mean investing heavily in technologies like the Hurriquake nail, which provide the most improvement at the most accessible cost in both dollars and labor, and which can easily be integrated into built environments around the world.

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(Posted by Julia Levitt in Shelter at 8:27 AM)

Jubilant environmentalists trade high fives, carbon permits

We tend to see a lot of handwringing over the fact that Europe has a carbon cap in place, yet they’re still adding coal to the mix. But stories like this never seem to get reported the other way. Did you hear the good news? Dynegy scuttled six coal plants because of the U.S. carbon cap:

“The development landscape has changed significantly since we agreed to enter into the development joint venture with LS Power in the fall of 2006,” said Bruce A. Williamson, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Dynegy Inc. “Today, the development of new generation is increasingly marked by barriers to entry including external credit and regulatory factors that make development much more uncertain. In light of these market circumstances, Dynegy has elected to focus development activities and investments around our own portfolio where we control the option to develop and can manage the costs being incurred more closely.”

“Regulatory factors” refer to a host of potential legal obstacles, but the chief among them is the anticipated passage of a federal cap-and-trade bill sometime in the next several years. Unlike some market observers, energy developers aren’t watching for the price of carbon to pass the magical point at which clean coal or solar or whatever becomes cost-competitive. Rather, they’re looking ahead many years, performing scenario analysis, comparing cash flows, and making investments accordingly.

“External credit factors” refer, in part, to the ongoing financial crisis. But the credit squeeze affects other forms of energy development much as it does coal-fired plants, so Dynergy may also be referring to the fact that banks were tightening lending for projects with massive carbon exposure long before the crisis hit. And again, this tightened credit is a direct result of (as-yet-unwritten) federal cap-and-trade legislation.

Needless to say, many factors may have played into the decision to shut down those coal plants: grassroots pressure, lawsuits (real or threatened), disastrous publicity from the sludge spill, the imminent changing of the guard at the EPA, state-level permitting difficulties, etc. But as long as we’re handing out credit, let’s not forget the most obvious and compelling factor. In a carbon-constrained economy, no one wants to double down on coal.

Adam Stein is a co-founder of TerraPass. He writes on issues related to carbon, climate change, policy, and conservation.

Image by Flickr user DanieVDM.

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(Posted by Adam Stein in Energy at 3:38 PM)

by Jay Walljasper

During the holidays, people gather together with their families (parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, close friends) for food and kinship. These gatherings, especially in the United States, can be a rare chance to witness domesticity expand beyond the narrow circle of the nuclear family: mom, dad and the kids.

It’s interesting to note that this familiar nuclear family has been the organizing principle of Western society only since the Industrial Revolution, and that in many parts of the world today a broader network of extended family and fellow villagers are still the primary social glue. I remember a Brazilian friend, who grew up middle-class in cosmopolitan Sao Paulo, telling me that he was a teenager before he was completely sure which people living in his house were blood relatives.

Margaret Mead, the most famous anthropologist of the 20th Century, once commented that, “Ninety-nine percent of the time humans have lived on this planet we’ve lived in tribes, groups of 12 to 36 people. Only during times of war, or what we have now, which is the psychological equivalent of war, does the nuclear family prevail, because it’s the most mobile unit that can ensure the survival of the species. But for the full flowering of the human spirit we need groups, tribes.”

The evolution of society into these smaller family units offers a freedom and flexibility unknown to our ancestors. Few of us today would want the details of our lives (from the time we awake in the morning to the person we marry) to be managed by a chief, priest or patriarch. Even the extended families that dominated the world of our grandparents or great-grandparents would seem stultifying.

Yet, if we looked deeply into our souls, many of us today might admit there is also something attractive about being an intimate part of a wider tribe. Even with our cherished freedom, there is something a bit lonely about our modern existence of tight little families living isolated in their privatized homes. Few of us know our neighbors in any meaningful way, and the rest of our family usually lives far away. When we encounter problems or simply are in a mood to celebrate, there are surprisingly few people to turn to.

Huge industries or government agencies have arisen to meet the needs once take care of by grandma or the “uncle” next door who was not really related but you’d known him your entire life.

Many people today worry that this institutionalization of many basic human activities, from raising kids and caring for the sick to baking birthday cakes, carry a heavy price. This dependence on professionals cuts us off from the rich web of personal relationships that have long sustained human culture. Indeed, it can be argued that as a species we have been shaped through evolution to live as part of these sort of emotional ecosystems, and that the atomized patterns of modern society is one cause of today’s unprecedented levels of mental illness and senseless crime.

Few of us, however, are in any position to move back in with our grandparents. But a growing number of social pioneers are looking for other ways to enjoy both the stimulating possibilities of the modern world and the comfort of our communal heritage. This can be something as simple as neighbors sharing a potluck meal and an in-depth conversation on a weekly or monthly basis. Many groups, such as home-school families and single-parent or gay and lesbian families, are banding together in new kinds of family networks, sharing time and tasks on a regular basis, and being there for one another in a way that goes beyond the usual parameters of friendship.

Co-housing communities, a clear-eyed updating of the commune movement of the 1960s, represents an even bigger step in forging a new kind of extended family not based on blood. Well-established in Northern Europe and now taking roots in North America, these are communities of people who have chosen to live together and share some elements of their daily lives, recreating in a conscious way what happens naturally in traditional villages as means of survival. There are more than 100 co-housing developments built or under development in 34 states and three Canadian provinces, part of a growing world-wide phenomenon in Europe, England, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

There’s great latitude in how communal these communities want to be, with some that share meals every evening while others that simply have a common space like a clubhouse where neighbors can interact both spontaneously and in regularly scheduled events that offer a satisfying sense of belonging.

All these experiments in creating a new kind of family are important steps toward bringing a greater sense of “we” into modern life. And given the stormy economic forecast, they are also very important for helping people remain healthy, happy and hopeful in the days ahead.

Jay Walljasper, co-editor of OnTheCommons.org and senior fellow of Project for Public Spaces, is author of the Great Neighborhood Book.

This piece originally appeared on the Ode Editor's Blog

Image credit: Ode

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Community at 2:44 PM)

From the discovery of intelligent life somewhere else to a web-based revolution in education, certain future milestones seem to hold the power to change everything that happens afterward. The online intellectual forum The Edge recently posted ideas about what those keystone events might be, in our own lifetimes and beyond.

More than 150 thought leaders, including philosophers, writers, archaeologists and scientists, answered the 2009 Edge Question of the Year: "What Will Change Everything?" And, more specifically, "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"

Two particularly good answers addressed climate change. As we know, climate change is already impacting the atmosphere, the oceans and the land on Earth. A few months ago, we wrote about how it is beginning to affect our minds. And as we begin to notice how climate change is rapidly reshaping big pieces of our mental and physical worlds, we might also want to take a closer look at how it will affect other aspects of our lives, writes William Calvin, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington and author of Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change. Answering this year's Edge question, Calvin writes that climate is changing the practice of science itself:

Climate may well force on us a major change in how science is distilled into major findings. There are many examples of the ponderous nature of big organizations and big projects. While I think that the IPCC deserves every bit of its hemi-Nobel, the emphasis on "certainty" and the time required for a thousand scientists and a hundred countries to reach unanimous agreement probably added up to a considerable delay in public awareness and political action. Climate will change our ways of doing science, making some areas more like medicine with its combination of science and interventional activism, where delay to resolve uncertainties is often not an option. Few scientists are trained to think this way — and certainly not climate scientists, who are having to improvise as the window of interventional opportunity shrinks.

Calvin writes that climate will not only change the way scientists report their findings, but it might also affect what scientists conduct research on, suggesting that many scientists may soon be called to participate in one of the most concerted problem-solving efforts in history, the likes of which haven’t been seen since World War II.

Although it is already vital that we act quickly, there are a few events that could change how rapidly and forcefully we should take on this challenge. Geoscientists have identified seven “sleeping giants” -- events like the disappearance of the summer ice sheets over the Arctic Ocean -- that, if awoken, could change the way we play the game. The other sleeping giants include an increased melting and glacier flow of the Greenland ice sheet, "unsticking" of the frozen West Antarctic Ice Sheet from its bed; rapid die-back of Amazon forests; disruption of the Indian Monsoon; release of methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, from thawing frozen soils; and a shift to a permanent El Niño-like state.

West Antarctica and Seven Other Sleeping Giants was Laurence C. Smith, professor of Geography and Earth & Space Sciences at UCLA, answer to "What Will Change Everything." Smith suggests that by continuing to pump climate changing greenhouse gases into the air, we are to poking these slumbering giants with big sticks.

Unfortunately, the presence of sleeping giants makes the steady, predictable growth of anthropogenic greenhouse warming more dangerous, not less. Alarm clocks may be set to go off, but we don't what their temperature settings are. The science is too new, and besides we'll never know for sure until it happens. While some economists predicted that rising credit-default swaps and other highly leveraged financial products might eventually bring about an economic collapse, who could have foreseen the exact timing and magnitude of late 2008? Like most threshold phenomena it is extremely difficult to know just how much poking is needed to disturb sleeping giants. Forced to guess, I'd mutter something about decades, or centuries, or never. On the other hand, one might be stirring already: In September 2007, then again in 2008, for the first time in memory nearly 40% of the later-summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean abruptly disappeared.

Although the consequences of waking these giants are terrifying, it’s certainly no time for paralyzing fear and loss of hope. Quite the contrary; this should be a motivating call to devise and mobilize action to decrease our climate changing emissions. We can take this opportunity to be the biggest game changer of them all – human action to greatly reduce our impact on the Earth.

So what do you think will be the biggest game-changing ideas and events? What will change everything?

Image: Planet New York::Hall of Science. Credit: Flickr/Sam Rohn - Location Scout, CC License.

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Columns at 10:47 AM)

As we look forward to the new year, we've also reflected on the old, and rediscovered some of the great events, innovations, interviews and debates that 2008 had to offer. For the next week, we will be sharing our picks from the Worldchanging team's best work from the last 12 months. Come back each day for a new collection of posts on topics from climate change to transportation, energy to health and society.

Today's Topic: Best in Essays

Coverage of big-picture topics like climate change and politics stirred up predictions, ponderings, discussions and debates at Worldchanging. Members of the global Worldchanging Team mused about the future and transformation, and we spent a lot of time thinking and writing about what will come next. We believe strongly in the value of imagining and discussing our future today so that we can craft new visions and prepare for the changes that we need. Judging by he lively debates that we see in the comment threads, it seems that many of you agree. Today we present our collection of the best essays from 2008:

What's No Longer Impossible?
Sarah Kuck
April 14

The Ninja Gap
Ethan Zuckerman
June 5

Letter from Tällberg: Let's Talk about Transformation
Alan AtKisson
June 30

The Outquisition
Alex Steffen
July 12

Imagine What Comes After Green
WorldChanging Team
July 14

The Apocalypse Makes Us Dumb
Alex Steffen
July 15

The Problem With Walk Score, the Possibilities of Carbon Goggles
Alex Steffen
July 31

Tiny Science, Big Implications
Julia Levitt
October 9

An Invisible Solution to the 'Quiet Crisis'
Eric Roston
October 24

Letter from Stockholm
Alex Steffen
October 26

Moving Beyond Sustainability to Environmental Effectiveness
Colin Beavan
October 28

Chop Wood, Carry Water
Zaid Hassan
November 3

Evolution of the Web
Jon Lebkowsky
December 17

This piece is part of our Year in Review series. Use the following links to view more of our favorites from 2008:

Best in Climate Change
Best in Business
Best in Cities
Best in Energy
Best in Health, Food and Society
Best in Transportation
Best in Politics

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Features at 4:52 PM)

As we look forward to the new year, we've also reflected on the old, and rediscovered some of the great events, innovations, interviews and debates that 2008 had to offer. For the next week, we will be sharing our picks for the Worldchanging team's best work from the last 12 months. Come back each day for a new collection of posts on topics from climate change to transportation, energy to health and society.

Today's Topic: Politics

Photo credit: flickr/selena marie, Creative Commons license.

Here at Worldchanging, we believe that the right leadership, especially in the form of smart regulations and policies, is an indispensable tool for supporting needed shifts in systems from energy to smart growth to transportation.

During the past year we've witnessed and written a lot about the glimmers of hope that have shone from the global political arena. Today, we look back at our coverage of political events that have sparked ideas and stirred up action, from the election of Barack Obama as the next American president to a series of eloquent and passionate pleas for change from our society's greatest thinkers. Below is a collection of our best posts on politics from 2008:

Can We Solve It Like This? Why the We Campaign Needs Change
By Alex Steffen
April 7

Using Disasters for Systemic Change
By Matthew Waxman
May 16

One Approach To Sustainability: Work Less
By John de Graaf
June 20

Grassroots Lobbying: Use Ideas, Not One-Click Campaigns
By Heather MacIntosh
June 24

Al Gore, Clean Energy and A Better Nation
By Alex Steffen
July 21

The Candidates and Climate: A Persistent Air of Surreality
By Alex Steffen
October 7

Climate, Energy and Environment Secretary?
By Alex Steffen
October 9

The Real Problem With Foreign Oil? Climate Change
Worldchanging Team
October 16

Citizen Diplomacy and Global Innovation
By Alex Steffen
October 17

To The Next U.S. President: 100 Words for 100 Days
Worldchanging Team
October 29

Inaugurate Change
Worldchanging Team
November 6

Charting a Course for the First US CTO
By Nancy Scola
November 18

Jim Hansen's Letter to Obama
By Alex Steffen
November 24

This piece is part of our Year in Review series. Use the following links to view more of our favorites from 2008:

Best in Climate Change
Best in Business
Best in Cities
Best in Energy
Best in Health, Food and Society
Best in Transportation

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Features at 7:13 AM)

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Watch videos, hear interviews with Worldchanging team members or search our friend list for those changing the world in your neighborhood. Already friends with Worldchanging? Invite your other friends to join today. Connect. Communicate. Change the world.

Happy New Year!

The Worldchanging Team

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 10:49 AM)

As we look forward to the new year, we've also reflected on the old, and rediscovered some of the great events, innovations, interviews and debates that 2008 had to offer. For the next week, we will be sharing our picks from the Worldchanging team's best work from the last 12 months. Come back each day for a new collection of posts on topics from climate change to transportation, energy to health and society.

Today's Topic: Transportation

The way we get around impacts numerous other big-picture systems, including the way we use energy, the health of our bodies and our communities, the growth patterns that can protect or degrade our land, and our economy. For this reason, the transportation sector has always been one of our favorite places to look for new innovations. This year, we covered how these innovations, like bike sharing and bus rapid transit, have continued to become widespread and popular; and looked more closely at what transportation will look like in the future. Below is a collection of our best posts on transportation from 2008:

My other car is a bright green city
Alex Steffen
January 23

Taking Aloft With Sustainable Biojet
Patrick Mazza
April 7

The Nexus of Peak Oil, Climate Change and Infrastructure
Sarah Kuck
June 15

The Autobahn's Future and One-Liter Class Racing
Gifford Pinchot III
June 23

San Francisco Goes Wireless and Real-Time to Reduce Traffic
Adam Stein
July 16

Bike, Meet the City. City, This is the Bike.
Mary Catherine O’Connor
July 17

Crunching Some Numbers on Paris Bike-Sharing Program
Adam Stein
July 16

Does the Water-Powered Car Really Work?
Adam Stein
July 15

Aviation X Prize
Alex Steffen
July 18

Cut Your Carbon and Save on Auto Insurance
Adam Stern
July 27

How Much Does Transportation Really Cost
Hassan Masum
September 7

Copenhagen, Melbourne & The Reconquest of the City
Chris Turner
December 10

Could Cell Phones Enable Bike-Sharing in the Developed World?
Jay Walljasper
December 15

This piece is part of our Year in Review series. Use the following links to view more of our favorites from 2008:

Best in Climate Change
Best in Business
Best in Cities
Best in Energy
Best in Health, Food and Society

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Features at 10:05 AM)

As we look forward to the new year, we've also reflected on the old, and rediscovered some of the great events, innovations, interviews and debates that 2008 had to offer. For the next week, we will be sharing our picks from the Worldchanging team's best work from the last 12 months. Come back each day for a new collection of posts on topics from climate change to transportation, energy to health and society.

Today's Topic: Health, Food and Society

How will the future affect our health and our societies? Perhaps more importantly, how can we begin to change our approaches to social and civic life now, in order to create the kind of future that we want? In the past year, many of our posts discussed what the future might hold for what we eat, what we learn, how we spend our time and how we relate to one another. Today we look at the best posts from 2008 that discuss health, food and society:

Neighborliness, Innovation and Sustainability
Alex Steffen
April 7

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
Clay Shirky
May 7

Scenius, Innovation and Epicenters
Alex Steffen
June 26

Facebook, Coca-Cola and Medical Aid in Africa
Hesseltje S. van Goor
August 6

Can Sustainability Save the Midwest?
Sarah Kuck
August 12

Locavore Valley: The Next Big Boom?
Julia Levitt
October 13

New School Sustainability: Majors Making a Difference
Sarah Kuck
October 20

Making Social Equity an Issue of Public Health
Lori Williams
November 18

The Transformative 120: Text Messages Prove a South African HIV Lifeline
Nancy Scola
November 25

The Future of Public Lands in the United States
WorldChanging Team
November 28

Peak Population and Generation X
Alex Steffen
November 29

Local Food Plus: A Model for Food Citizenship in North America
Kathryn Cooper
December 2

">Students, Seniors and Social Biodiversity
Julia Levitt
December 5

Worldchanging Interview: Dr. Sanjay Gupta on Health Solutions
Sarah Kuck and Julia Levitt
December 10

This piece is part of our Year in Review series. Use the following links to view more of our favorites from 2008:

Best in Climate Change
Best in Business
Best in Cities
Best in Energy

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Features at 11:19 AM)

As we look forward to the new year, we've also reflected on the old, and rediscovered some of the great events, innovations, interviews and debates that 2008 had to offer. For the next week, we will be sharing our picks for the Worldchanging team's best work from the last 12 months. Come back each day for a new collection of posts on topics from climate change to transportation, energy to health and society.

Today's Topic: Energy

Image credit: Green Plug

We read numerous reports this year making the compelling argument that the world's energy markets are slowly shifting to take advantage of what we get for free from nature: wind, sun and heat. In 2008, we saw the markets for wind power, solar energy and geothermal heat starting to compete with dirtier, harsher, more (truly) expensive sources of energy, and we were encouraged by predictions for a more dynamic, interactive, smarter grid. And we told many stories about the smart entrepreneurs who will help push these game-changing innovations along. Below is a collection of our best posts on energy from 2008:

Green Buildings and Smart Grids
By Patrick Mazza
April 14

Gasification Experimenter's Kit
Jeremy Faludi
May 29

Decoding the World's Best Energy Policies
By Kathryn Cooper
July 8

Human Ingenuity at the World Wind Energy Summit
By Kathryn Cooper
July 19

Staking the Vampire: The Future of Recharging
By Glenn Fleishman
August 11

The 3TIER Tour
Sarah Kuck
Oct. 8

Reader Report: Solar Innovation in Costa Rica
By Max Levin
Oct. 23

Pop!Tech: Rice Power to the People With Husk Power Systems
Robert Katz
Oct. 28

Smart Garage: An Integration Revolution
Julia Levitt
Oct. 30

What Would An Optimistic Forecast for Renewable Energy Look Like?
Sarah Kuck
Nov 13

This piece is part of our Year in Review series. Use the following links to view more of our favorites from 2008:

Best in Climate Change
Best in Business
Best in Cities

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Features at 5:00 AM)

I love airline route maps. I’ve fallen asleep staring at the tangle of possible journeys so often that I sometimes confuse the capillaries I see with my eyes closed with the red paths of Northwest flights hubbed out of Detroit and Minneapolis. I love the questions the maps raise: why is there a direct flight on Air Canada from Halifax to Fort McMurray in Northern Alberta? (Lots of Nova workers in the oil sands, I suspect, but I never would have asked the question without the map.) Why is Chengdu such an important Chinese air hub? Why does MIAT (Mongolia’s airline, affectionately known as “maybe I’ll arrive tomorrow” by regular customers) fly to Berlin, and no other western European cities? Does a direct Air Madagascar flight to Milan imply a strong Italian-Malagasy connection, or was Malpensa just one of the few airports where they could buy a landing slot?

These maps are deceptive in a way. They let you know what’s possible, but not what actually happens. The Northwest map will show you flights from Detroit to both Albany and Bozeman. While it’s good to know that it’s possible to get between those cities by flying Northwest, it doesn’t tell you how easy or difficult it might be to make that trip, how often those flights run, or how many people choose to make that trip. That’s okay - the job of maps is to tell a traveler where she can go, not where other travelers choose to go. But trying to extrapolate too much from a map of infrastructure may be a mistake - is the Ulaanbataar/Berlin link the sign of close governmental and trade ties between Mongolia and Berlin? Or an accident of history, airport capacity or other factors?

This lovely video gives a different picture from the route maps. It’s a simulation of global air traffic from the fine folks at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. The map uses data from Flightstats.com, and overlays their position on a Miller cylindrical projection. Compared to some of the other flight data porn the folks at ZHAW have churned out - like their amazing Radar mashup of flights over Zurich, using live transponder data from aircraft - this was a pretty simple hack.

I’ve watched the video half a dozen times today, getting different insights each time. Popular routes become apparent - the arc of travel from the Northeastern US to London, Paris and Amsterdam runs west to east as night falls, and reverses as morning breaks. The popularity of that ocean crossing vastly outpaces traffic across the Pacific, connecting Tokyo, Manila and Beijing to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. There’s more traffic from Brazil to western Europe than I would have guessed, and virtually no traffic across the southern Atlantic or Pacific. Domestic traffic in the US, India and China, and intra-EU travel is vastly more common than trans-oceanic travel. As the US is covered with yellow dots representing airplanes, international travel looks like a rounding error in comparison to domestic flights.

It’s not a map you’d want to use in planning your vacation, perhaps, but it would be a useful one to turn to if you were tracking the spread of an epidemic, for instance. If you’re studying SARS, it’s useful to know that you can, theoretically, get from Guangdong to Johannesburg - it’s lots more useful to know that most of those travellers are heading to Hong Kong, Toronto and New York City.

It’s a map of flow, not of infrastructure. It reveals infrastructure - the location of airports, the preferred air routes followed - because they appear as bright spots, places where lots of flow originates. A map of infrastructure - a map of potentials - shows every airport as co-equal; a map of flow shows you which airports are heavily used, which are pivotal nodes in a network. If you’re an executive at a fast food company, an infrastructure map of highways is moderately helpful - it’s obviously wise to place your stores in places where drivers could theoretically reach them, rather than in the middle of a desert. (No one told Pacific Bell this, obviously, before they erected the legendary Mojave Phone Booth.) But a map of flow is what you really need, showing where drivers are likely to go, and where they’re likely to come purchase your grease-laden wares.

It’s hard to map flow. Infrastructure tends to stay put. But people, cars, and shipping containers move all the time. To build accurate maps, you can’t simply plot the location of an airport once - you’ve got to map each plane that flies during some period of time. Things that don’t stay put aren’t always happy about being mapped. In simplest terms, maps of flow are a form of surveillance. Mapping your personal “flow” - in the way that the BBC is tracking a shipping container around the world - would likely be a gross violation of your privacy, as it would probably reveal more about you than you’re strictly comfortable sharing.

My friends Sandy Pentland and Nathan Eagle have been experimenting with something Pentland is calling “reality mining“, using surveillance of individuals via their mobile phones to extrapolate information about social networks, individual health and events in the news. Eagle tells me that the system was so effective, it could determine which of the anonymous participants were dating, and was able to correlate behavior to events like the Red Sox World Series victory, during which cellphone users clustered in bars and crossed the river to celebrate near Fenway. Unsurprisingly, a lot of sponsors are interested in this research, including mobile phone companies and advertisers - it’s not unrealistic to believe that mobile phone companies might, at some point, offer you free basic phone service in exchange for your behavioral data (collected by tracking your phone) and the opportunity to target ads to you based on your location. (See Blyk, a free mobile phone service in the UK, targetted to young people and ad sponsored…)

The maps Pentland and others are making tend to make us the most nervous when we place ourselves in them as individuals. We wonder what a map of our actions will tell others. We’re generally more comfortable with them in aggregate. Leaving the Berkman Center, I look at Google Maps to see whether the traffic heading west on Route 2 or I-90 is lighter. This is a useful thing and I’m very glad that someone is monitoring road conditions and letting me make intelligent decisions about which way to drive. On some level, I realize that my beat-up black truck is part of the overall picture represented as a green, yellow or red line. But that map generally doesn’t make me uneasy in the way that a map that allowed you to click on it and see “1999 Toyota Tacoma, 27 mph, heading west on Massachusetts Ave, MA license plate 345 GDF”. The former reads to me as mapping of flow, the latter as surveillance, but it’s not entirely clear to me where the line should be drawn between the two ideas.

The map above is called “In Transit” and is part of the Cabspotting program run by the Exploratorium, using data from Yellow Cab and visualisations by the folks at Stamen Design. All yellow cabs in San Francisco are equipped with GPS and report their location to dispatchers, automatically, once a minute - they’re being surveilled so that dispatchers can respond to requests for cabs or deploy cabs to another part of town. In this visualization, those minute-by-minute accretion of data points are blurred into lines, showing the paths that cabs take. And these paths can reveal some interesting things about how people flow through the city of San Francisco.

Those who know San Francisco will immediately pick out the major highways - 101, 280 and 80 - and the paths across the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate. It’s not hard to intuit where downtown is, to get a sense for the comparative popularity of various routes in and out of the city. The blank spots, on the other hand, are a little confusing. The area near #5 on the map is the Presidio, a former military base that’s now a park… which helps explain why there’s not much cab traffic through it. The areas just south of #4 and #7 aren’t parks - they’re Potrero Hill and Dogpatch, neighborhoods that are better known for industry and low-income housing than for tourist attractions or dot.com startups. To their southeast is a large blank patch on the map: Bayview and Hunter’s Point, a predominantly African-American neighborhood that surrounds a former naval shipyard. In other words, some areas are blank because there’s no good way to drive a taxi there. In other cases, they’re the neighborhoods where few people call for a taxi… or where the taxi drivers aren’t willing to go. The street map helps you figure out how to get from 3rd Street and Evans Avenue to Union Square, while the flow map makes it clear that you probably shouldn’t count on hailing a taxi to make the trip.

Maps of infrastructure visualize what it’s possible for people to do. Maps of flow show what they actually do. The two may diverge sharply.

A few years ago, if you wanted to send an email to a friend across the street in Accra, there’s a good chance the message would travel through the US or the UK on the way. Ghana had several competing internet service providers, and each provider bought internet connectivity from a different vendor. The vendors’ networks connected, just not in Ghana. So sending email across town meant sending a message on one ISP, to the US, transferring over to the other ISP, and back to Ghana, a journey that involved two satellite hops to cross the Atlantic. This is called “trombone routing”, and it’s generally something to be avoided.

If you mapped the network traffic of Ghanaian internet users - the flow - it sure looked like they were sending a lot of bits to and from the US. This might have been a result of trombone routing of emails between Ghanaians. Or it might have been because many websites are hosted in the US, and Ghanaian users wanted to read cnn.com, espn.com, etc. Knowing which it was mattered - if lots of traffic was local, it would make sense to construct an Internet Exchange Point (IXP), a crossing point for local ISPs to exchange traffic. If it was mostly requests to US webservers, the IXP wouldn’t save much money and probably shouldn’t be built. An infrastructure map would be no help - almost all traffic needed to go through the US, even if the intent was to communicate locally. To build a map of flow, Ghanaian ISPs would need to monitor their traffic, distinguish between domestic and foreign requests, share this information with fellow ISPs and make a decision regarding the utility of an IXP.

Ghanaian ISPs made the decision to build the Ghana Internet Exchange not based on understanding their own flow, but by looking at the behavior of other African exchange points. When ISPs in Johannesburg started exchanging traffic directly, they discovered that roughly 50% of their traffic was local to South Africa. The administrators who set up an exchange point in Nairobi saw roughly 25-30% local traffic. The disparity? There’s a lot more web servers hosted in South Africa than in Kenya, and hence more local traffic. To make the decision to build an IXP on a rational basis, you need to know not just the flow of internet traffic, but the flow the traffic would take if it were routed via an IXP. You need to know not just what users are doing, but what their intention is. This is a tough enough mapping challenge that you end up guessing, not analyzing.

The distinction between maps of infrastructure and maps of flow matters to me because I think it can help explain certain misconceptions and misunderstandings about our connected world. My contention - with very little to support it, frankly - is that we tend to assume more connections than actually exist. We see a map of infrastructure that shows it’s possible to fly from Antananarivo to Albania and assume, on an unconcious level, that the connection is routine, frequent, common. We look at maps of the internet - a near-worldwide tangle of undersea cables - and assume that data flows everywhere, connecting every one of us.

A map of flow would help us understand a more complicated reality. You can fly from Antananarivo to Albania, but you might be the only person this year to make the trip. Traffic flows between Ghana and the US via the Internet. We can see a cable - SAT-3 - that connects West Africa to the global internet through Europe and India. A map of flow could tell us whether that connection is symmetric, whether Americans are looking for information from Ghanaweb as often as Ghanaians are looking at ESPN or CNN. If we could see flow, we might detect the dark spots, the places reached by infrastructure but disconnected - through language, economics, or force of habit - from global flows.

This piece originally appeared on Ethan Zuckerman's personal blog, My Heart's In Accra.

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Big Systems - Global Institutions, Governance and History at 8:35 AM)

As we look forward to the new year, we've also reflected on the old, and rediscovered some of the great events, innovations, interviews and debates that 2008 had to offer. For the next week, we will be sharing our picks from the Worldchanging team's best work from the last 12 months. Come back each day for a new collection of posts on topics from climate change to transportation, energy to health and society.

Today's Topic: Business

Photo source: Flickr, Creative Commons license.

In 2008, we saw more businesses than ever before asking how they could improve their bottom lines while decreasing their negative environmental and social impacts. Companies producing everything from automobiles to iPhones are reassessing their business models as sustainability continues to prove itself as the new shrewd tactic for making business better, improving the lives of millions around the world, and building a better future where companies can thrive. And as smart entrepreneurs search for this elusive balance, the way the world does business will be forever changed. Below is a collection of our best posts on business from 2008:

Nau: An Elegy
By Alex Steffen
May 2, 2008

"B" is for Beneficial: The B Corporation
By Sarah Kuck
May 22, 2008

Proudly Made in China: NEST Collective
By Erica Lee Schlaikjer
May 25, 2008

Missing the Market Meltdown
By Amory B. Lovins
May 30, 2008

From Sampling to Monitoring to Gulping Data Down in Great Big Chunks
By Alex Steffen
June 9, 2008

The Problem with Big Green
By Alex Steffen and Julia Levitt
June 24, 2008

Interview: Kavita Ramdas, Global Fund for Women
By Britt Bravo
July 2, 2008

The iPhone, Now in Green(er)
By Nancy Scola
July 25, 2008

Could Globalization Be Going In Reverse?
By Alex Steffen
August 4, 2008

PIG 05049, a Conversation with Christien Meindertsma
By Regine DeBatty
August 12, 2008

Alternative Trade Networks and the Coffee System
By John Thackara
August 12, 2008

Advance Market Commitments: Bringing Medicines to Developing Nations
By Lori Williams
November 11, 2008

Is 'The Old Economy of Car Dependence' Over?
By David Goldberg
November 14, 2008

This piece is part of our Year in Review series. Use the following links to view more of our favorites from 2008:

Best in Climate Change
Best in Cities

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Features at 7:08 AM)

Recently, I've been buried in a bumper crop of lazy dystopias.

Now, I'm not against dystopian fiction as a means of social critique. Not at all. I think showing how present intentions may come to grief is necessary art. Not every creative act needs to embrace the politics of optimism.

But I am bored by imaginings of collapse that follow tired patterns. I am even more bored by futures that refuse even to invent a new visual aesthetic.

Just to pick (no doubt unjustly) on one example:

Why is the dystopian future always literally dark? Why is it always raining or overcast? Why is the architecture always a mix of hyper-modernism, brutalism and squatter slum? Why is the politics always so transparently totalitarian, so fascist-plus-rebels? Why is it so retro and abstract?

Why doesn't the dystopian vision ever include sunshine and children playing in its ruins? Why does it not include the constant, untiring efforts of most people to do what they can with what they have to improve their situations? Why are most people in the dystopian future always powerless to change anything? I could go on, but you get the point.

The biggest problem with dystopian fiction is not its pessimism. I do think there's a serious issue about who's interests are best served by making people fear the future, but I think the biggest problem with most dystopian fiction is its laziness and derivative quality. Lazy futures act like visionary static, crackling and dirtying the signal-to-noise ratio, making it harder not only for truly insightful futures to be found, but corrupting the ability of normal people to see why those visions are worth understanding.

Better by far to not envision the future at all, than to make a lazy dystopia.

Give us the new stuff!

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Imagining the Future at 9:02 PM)

I realize now that I've been delinquent in recommending Dan Hill's truly excellent speculative essay The Street as Platform, which explores a cross-section of all the ways that urban environments have become suffused with data. It's one of maybe 25 things I read this year that actually changed the way I see things in daily life:

We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street.

...[T]his is all everyday technology - embedded in, propped up against, or moving through the street, carried by people and vehicles, and installed by private companies and public bodies. Each element of data causes waves of responses in other connected databases, sometimes interacting with each other physically through proximity, other times through semantic connections across complex databases, sometimes in real-time, sometimes causing ripples months later. Some data is proprietary, enclosed and privately managed, some is open, collaborative and public.

Those who are paying attention already know that the information richness of urban environments is already changing what's possible within them, even spurring new forms of entirely urban innovation. I can see no reason why this trend will not accelerate, and very few reasons why it might decelerate.

I think the implications for sustainability and social innovation could be profound.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Leapfrogging at 7:45 PM)

Here's a thought I've been kicking around, and I'd like your ideas. What if, contrary to conventional wisdom, climate change is not actually primarily an energy problem, and by thinking of it as an energy problem, we risk making huge mistakes in the coming years?

What do I mean by energy problem? A problem caused by our choice of energy sources.

Given that a large percentage of greenhouse gasses comes from the burning of fossil fuels, it seems odd to contend that climate change is not a problem created by our energy choices. Certainly, no one with any credibility denies that coal, oil and gas use is changing the climate, and I don't mean to suggest that at all (though it is also worth not losing sight of the considerable emissions that come from farming, forestry, the chemical industries and other sources).

What I mean is that when we look to address the central challenge presented by climate change -- creating widespread prosperity while lowering, and then eliminating, emissions -- changing energy sources might play a much less important role than we've been trained to think. The kind of energy we use, in other words, while important, may not be anywhere near as important as three other considerations: whether we use the energy we create at all; how we use it; and how we live.

Whether we use the energy we generate: much of the energy we generate is wasted in the process of generation or transmission (56.2%, here in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration). As I understand it, by wasted we don't mean that it's used, but not used effectively. We mean that it is not used at all. It is the current dumped into the ground by power plants whose generation exceeds demand and other generated energy that accomplishes no task.

Based on what I've been told and read, much of that systemic waste is an attribute of badly-designed big systems, and could be eliminated through a variety of different new approaches, from smart grids to more efficient turbines to the harvesting of waste heat in industrial processes. As I understand it, no system can be perfectly effective at eliminating wasted energy, but if we managed to slash energy waste in half -- all other things being equal -- it'd be like eliminating roughly 25% of our energy-related emissions.

How we use energy -- what I've heard described as energy efficiency at end use -- is equally important. Amory Lovins has consistently pointed out the myriad ways in which our current uses of energy are extremely inefficient. We all know about the energy savings of a compact fluorescent lightbulb over an old-fashioned incandescent light bulb. Well, on a metaphorical level, our society (especially here in the U.S.) is nothing but old-fashioned light bulbs, nothing but opportunities for improvement. As has been pointed out again and again, not only are large energy savings immediately possible, but many of these energy savings pay for themselves or already profitable, while many others would become profitable with even moderate carbon pricing and/or green tax shifting.

How we live may be the biggest nut to crack. As we've discussed before, where we live has more to do with the amount of energy we use -- and the amount of energy we could save -- than almost any other factor. We can save huge amounts of energy by stopping sprawl; encouraging smart growth, good design and transit; using density to promote green building and green infrastructure; and emphasizing a prosperity based on experiences rather than stuff and product-services rather than products. These are steps that eliminate the need to use energy in the first place, while delivering the same or better quality of life. To extend our light bulb metaphor, it's like not needing to turn on a light in the first place, because you have a window through which sunlight is streaming.

In fact, if what we're committed to is prosperity, rather than a particular suburban SUV-and-McMansion vision of wealth (I, at least, am convinced that vision is a doomed project over the medium-term no matter what path we take), then a big shift towards bright green living might be possible even with only modest shifts in the sources of energy -- if the shifts in the uses of energy were large enough. A radically more-efficient society of compact communities with a variety of transportation choices, green buildings and smart infrastructure, run off an only slightly-improved mix of energy sources might be more sustainable than a society that continues on our current path of increasing sprawl and waste but uses twice the proportion of clean energy that it does today.

Obviously, we want both. We want renewable, low-carbon energy fueling a compact and efficient society. But attempting to meet the increasing energy demands of an essentially unchanged (and rapidly spreading) vision of suburban prosperity (whether in suburban Atlanta, suburban London or suburban Shanghai) through the provision of more and more and more clean energy seems pretty much guaranteed to fail. And in a society with limited resources and attention, pushing a strategy based primarily on clean energy may in fact reduce our ability to go after other, more important systemic solutions. (For instance, here in America, I would rather see a national smart growth agenda than a national clean energy subsidy.)

So maybe it's time to stop calling climate change an energy problem?

What do you think?

(Image: K2D2vaca, Creative Commons.)

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Columns at 2:57 PM)

The recent snowfall here in Seattle, and its impact on all of the city's neighborhoods, has helped us see many of the things we take for granted in new ways. It's easier, for example, to imagine no cars when there are barely any in sight, letting pedestrians and people using alternative forms of transportation (like snowshoes, toboggans and cross-country skis!) own the roads for a few days. In addition to speculating on the snow, we've seen some new developments in sustainable building design, innovative use in public space, and more. Though our Seattle staff is out of the office for most of this week, here's a roundup of the recent work that has appeared on our local Seattle blog that we hope you'll enjoy:

Eco-Laboratory
As Justus Stewart puts it, we now live in an era where the
"living building" level of green building should be the norm. A team of exceptional young designers here in Seattle is pushing this vision with an award-winning concept.

Incentive Zoning: A Good Plan For Affordable Housing?
There's been a lot of buzz in the news recently about the City of Seattle's draft incentive zoning code provisions, a piece of legislation designed to promote the creation of affordable housing. Here's how it works…

Snowbound Community Building
The break in routine was also enough to help envision a different kind of downtown, where most of the noise in the air comes from people, and where crowds walking down the street are the norm.

Local Business Profile: Lighting Design Lab
Jennifer Power sits down with Jeff Robbins, lighting specialist, to find out more about the history and goals behind this energy-savvy Seattle lighting resource.

Burien/Interim Art Space
On January 24, Burien will unveil a project that transforms a vacant construction site into a public gathering place for community members of all ages. Ashley DeForest reports.

Alex Steffen to Ron Sims: The Viaduct and the Seawall
To support the surface/transit option and to underline the key reasons for repairing and enhancing the seawall, Worldchanging Executive Editor Alex Steffen sent the following letter to King County Executive Ron Sims.

Are you here in Seattle? We'd like to hear from you! Check out the local blog and leave comments, or contact editor[at]Worldchanging[dot]com if you have ideas or would like to write.

Photo credit: Photo credit: flickr/arycogre, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 8:37 AM)