Transforming Cultures

Currency symbol of the Potomac

If you’re carrying around Potomacs in your wallet or purse, let it be known that you can spend them here. Here at the Worldwatch office, that is. Yep, one copy of State of the World 2010 will cost you twenty Potomacs. Come by the office and we’ll exchange you a book for one of those golden Harriet Tubman bills. We’ve already had some sales and will be using our Potomacs to purchase coffee at Qualia, just down the street.

No idea what I’m talking about? Unless you live in the D.C. area, you’re not really supposed to know.  Local currencies are designed to strengthen and enrich communities of people who wish to be connected by more than the internet, highways, and credit card transactions. And such currencies are on the rise especially because of society’s newfound desire for economic transparency. More and more, people want to know how much of their money falls into the hands of polluters, criminals, foreigners, and bailed-out bank and auto execs. The use of local currencies eliminates most if not all of these concerns as participating businesses are typically well-rooted in the community and genuinely interested in its health and well being. Local businesses also tend to buy more from local suppliers, reducing the miles that their goods travel, and making the supply chain more traceable.

Potomacs were launched as D.C.’s local currency in May 2009 and are currently accepted at five businesses and one NGO (us!) in the District. So when a Potomac is spent at one of these places, it has nowhere to go beyond the cash register but on to another Potomac-accepting business. That means 100% of the value of a Potomac (1 Potomac = $1) stays in D.C.!  Compare that with the Federal Reserve Notes you’re used to exchanging and which are nearly impossible for any single consumer to trace beyond their pocket: An economic impact analysis performed in Austin, Texas showed that for every $100 spent at a local bookstore, $45 re-circulated in the community. $100 spent at Borders bookstore, a massive national chain, yielded far more appalling results: only $13 re-circulated. These numbers speak to the economic resilience created by local businesses as well as the potential for local currencies to strengthen that resilience.

Famous faces in Washington history grace the front of Potomac bills

Since trading twenty bucks for my first wad of Potomacs I’ve asked a couple businesses whether they accept the currency – a bar and a pet store to be exact. The bar man didn’t quite have time for my explanation and the pet store owner was completely resistant to the idea, insisting that Potomacs are too easy to counterfeit. These are legitimate excuses. Not all businesses – even local ones – have the time to account for dollars and Potomacs separately or verify the authenticity of every Potomac bill.  Then again, if we are to become a society that values, rather than ignores, the impact of our actions then our perceptions of time and economic value must change.

Local currencies are often named after rivers. For example, the Columbia Hour in Washington state and Anacostia Hour in Maryland, reflecting their purpose: to flow through communities, bringing neighbors and natural resources closer together. Thus local currencies are a bold economic step toward a vibrantly interdependent future.

Come by Worldwatch to spend Potomacs or find out more about them. Or visit here:

http://Ecolocity.ning.com/group/communityexchange

Advertising expenditures worldwide fell 2 percent in 2008 to $643 billion, according to Worldwatch’s newest Vital Signs Online trend, which expands significantly on the discussion of advertising found in chapter 1 of State of the World 2010. While that’s bad news for the advertising industry it’s good news for the world. Even better news for the world: ad expenditures are projected to decline another 11 percent in 2009. Yes, I’m sure some won’t be happy that I’m celebrating the decline of an industry and the resulting loss of jobs, but let’s be honest: advertising stimulates consumption (or 1 percent of the Gross World Product wouldn’t be spent on it), consumption at current levels is undermining Earth’s systems, and we depend on Earth’s systems for our ability to thrive as a species. Translation: the reduction of total advertising expenditures selling consumerist dreams will improve human security. You won’t see that in Advertising Age!

But what you will see is more good news. In the January 25th issue, Emma Hall writes about Spain’s probable new ban on “advertising certain beauty products and services ‘that encourage the cult of the body’ on TV before 10 p.m.” Super! No more primetime ads for diet products, plastic surgery or other products that play off and fuel insecurities of the body. And Ms. Hall points to other exciting possibilities as well: France is trying to add warning labels to airbrushed images to make it clear that models don’t really look that good.

Ads Courtesy of Adbusters

Of course, as Jonah Sachs and Susan Finkelpearl discuss in their article Social Marketing: From Selling Soap to Selling Sustainability, advertising can be used to promote sustainable living as readily as excessive consumption, but they also note that less than a fraction of a percent of the industry goes to these types of advertising, so restrictions on the most pernicious forms of advertising is exciting. One day, maybe $643 billion will be spent promoting how cool it is to walk to work (and only work half time), live in very small homes, go to community theater instead of zoning out in front of televisions, repair your old appliances, vacation in one’s own region instead of in far off places, and so on. But until then, a decline of the industry is a welcome development, as hopefully it’ll lead to a strategic redirection along these lines.

It’s been a busy week here at Worldwatch, first with launching State of the World 2010 to the media and then sharing it with the environmental community here in DC. Soon we’ll have video from the symposium, but in the meantime, I wanted to share with you the link to our long listing of news clips covering the report. Great reports from all over the world. Happy reading! (And take a look at this engaging new video from Voice of America, which has some great images of consumerism, though it does somehow makes me looked obsessed with Hollywood movies, which when they draw attention to sustainability I guess is quite true!).

On Monday, the global launch begins with events in England, Finland, and Norway. Take a look at the plan here. And stay tuned for stories from the road there. I’ll have the chance to explore some pioneering projects while traveling and will report back.

A final note: a special thanks to the Transforming Cultures Project Assistants, Jana, Jonathan, Margy, and Vanessa, that have been helping to spread the word about the new report. Thank you!

Standing over a tabletop computer screen depicting a dark and stormy sky, I become the Climate God, tasked with reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and saving humanity from dangerous climate changes. At my will I wield my climate-crushing powers by choosing a “solution card” and throwing it on the screen, thereby enacting policies and making the world a brighter place.

Choosing the Wind Energy card, I place it in the stormy sky, and a ray of blue light shoots from the card into the small bright spot in the corner labeled “Energy Supply.” The ray of light passes through three barriers that diminish its strength: Electric grids still can’t handle lots of wind power; energy policy still favors more carbon-intensive electricity; and the public still isn’t sold on the idea. With the mere click of a button, I resolve these barriers and watch as global greenhouse gas emissions drop from 36,284 to 34,686 Gigatons of CO2 equivalent (Gt CO₂e).

100 solutions remain to be wielded, each one with its own barriers, and each reducing emissions from various sectors of the economy. But I fear I will soon grow tired from resolving the barriers – technological, political, infrastructural, and cultural – associated with each solution. I am in need of the most powerful solutions. And yet, among these 101 choices, I know there is only one that touches on every single greenhouse gas emitting sector. There is only one that can make all barriers easier to overcome.

When I place the Stop Over-Consumption card in the center of the screen, a rainbow of light shoots in all directions, to every corner of the sky. With lifestyle and political barriers resolved, every sector grows brighter and emissions drop drastically. In energy supply alone, emissions are reduced by 3,610 Gt CO₂e, more than twice the reductions from Wind Energy. I have found the most powerful of climate solutions and it is the least godly of them all; a shift in the values and behaviors of everyday humans.

This scene occurred in Copenhagen, during the launch of the recent Worldwatch Report Renewable Revolution: Low Carbon Energy by 2030. The Bellona Foundation had on display their 101 Solutions table (pictured) at which anyone could play Climate God, as I did.

I was impressed at the level of detail and data communicated through the display and was encouraged to find Stop Over-Consumption such a powerful card to “wield.”

Experience the power yourself by playing the Online Version.

Erik finds himself siding with Rush. Is Doomsday closer than he realized?

On Tuesday we launched State of the World 2010 and I wanted to share a bit of the ripples the report made–both good and bad.

There were lots of positive news stories that allowed us to convey the key message of the report: that we need to intentionally transform cultures–making it as natural to live sustainably as it is to live as a consumer today. I won’t go into these though as they’re all on the Transforming Cultures News page. Enjoy!

But I did want to share with you one article that has led to interesting ripples, that of The Guardian’s “US Cult of Greed is Now a Global Environmental Threat.”

Unfortunately, this misrepresents the report quite significantly. Greed is not a concept discussed much in State of the World 2010. Never in the overview chapter and doing a search of the PDF, while it came up a few times in discussions of ethics and voluntary simplicity, most of the times the word greed was found in the report, it was in the form of “agreed.”

To put it simply: whatever culture you’re part of, that culture shapes your reality. If dogs are seen as pets, the odds are you’ll like dogs, and even perhaps own one, fall in love with one, and spend tens of thousands of dollars on it over its life. If, on the other hand, you live in a culture where dogs are seen as food, you’ll probably never think twice about eating them. We are pretty much blank slates at birth and cultures–through social interactions with parents, teachers, friends, the media, objects, and all other human-created elements–shape our realities.

Thus, people aren’t consuming massive amounts of stuff because they’re greedy, but because it’s “natural” for them to do so. They don’t think about the fact that their pets have more ecological impact than people living in developing countries because that’s not even on their radars. Greed doesn’t play into this for most people, and this is certainly not just a U.S. phenomenon. Consumerism is now a cultural pattern that circles the whole world.

So, with that said, I find myself somehow agreeing with Rush Limbaugh’s attack of The Guardian’s interpretation of State of the World 2010. Weird, isn’t it. Responding to The Guardian, Rush lambastes the idea that America is to blame:

RUSH: As if on cue, from the UK Guardian, a liberal rag: “US Cult of Greed is Now a Global Environmental Threat.” I’m going to read this story, or excerpts of it, and I want you to understand something as I read this to you. This is exactly what President Obama believes. This is exactly what all leftists, wherever you find them in the world, believe. This is what all leftists are taught from the earliest moments they start school all the way up to institutions of higher learning. What you’re going to hear here is exactly what Obama believes….

So again, it’s America’s fault, we are stealing the world’s resources, we’re using far more than our share, we’re destroying the climate, we are creating pollution, we are depleting the earth of its resources. And this has been the case since Paul Ehrlich came out with The Population Bomb. Every prediction in it false, did not come true. But this is part and parcel of what President Obama believes. He believes this country is guilty. He’s a leftist, this is what he does; this was what he was taught. This is why he’s cutting this economy down to size.

To clarify I don’t agree that this is what Obama believes—if he did he would have focused his first year more strongly on climate change and truly shifting America’s economy away from consumerism and unsustainable lifestyles (for example rolling out a “Cash for Clunkers” program that paid people simply to get rid of old cars, not trade them in for new ones).

But what I do agree with is that this isn’t “America’s fault” meaning Americans‘ fault. Consumerism is at the heart of our culture. We’re not greedy, we’re just living how we’ve been taught to live–by parents, teachers, our country’s mythology (follow the “American dream” we’re taught from childhood), Hollywood, and of course, by marketers. As Jonah Sachs and Susan Finkelpearl discuss in their article, we’ve been sold stories for decades telling us that our happiness, identity, and success stem from what we wear, eat, own, and use. How can that not lead us to defining ourselves through our consumption patterns?

The sad truth is that we can’t keep defining ourselves as consumers on a planet that is finite and fragile. If we don’t move beyond consumerism, the climate will change, as will other ecosystem services that humanity depends on, and we–not the Earth–will suffer the consequences. It seems the right loves to bash Malthus and Ehrlich, but of course they were right (another point of disagreement with Rush so maybe my reaction is not so strange after all). Malthus and Ehrlich were not wrong on content, just off by a time factor. They underestimated human ingenuity on providing food and goods for our growing population. This delayed the inevitable. But eventually the pressures on the planet have built up and thus, sadly, the crash will be even greater when it comes. That won’t mean the end of humanity, but it will probably mean centuries of insecurity as the human population adjusts to a new ecological reality.

Finally, so you can see it for yourself, there is a link to the press release, press conference statement, and accompanying slide show under the new website section: For the Media. Note that greed isn’t mentioned anywhere in these.

Last week I watched the 3D blockbuster Avatar, where a giant mining corporation uses any and all available tactics to access the mineral “unobtanium” from under the land of the Na’vi, a tribe of intelligent aliens indigenous to the planet Pandora. The corporation starts with building schools and offering other things valued by humans and when that fails, the corporation uses military force to evict the Na’vi from their land.

At moments I felt like I was watching a remake of the documentary I saw a month before, Crude, which chronicles the extraction of oil by Chevron-Texaco from the lands of 30,000 Ecuadorians in the tropical forests of Ecuador. Of course, there were some superficial differences—the Na’vi were blue, 10-feet tall and could literally link up with the forest ecosystem of which they were part. The Ecuadorians aren’t 10-feet tall or blue, and cannot literally connect with the spirit of the Earth (Pachamama as Ecuadorians call this or Eywa as the Na’vi call the spirit that stems from their planet’s life) but they are as utterly dependent—both culturally and physically—on the forest ecosystem in which they live and are just as exploited by those that see the forest as only being valuable as a container for the resources stored beneath it.

Both movies were fantastic reminders of human short-sightedness, one as an epic myth in which one of the invading warriors awakens to his power, becomes champion of the exploited tribe and saves the planet from the oppressors; the other as a less exciting but highly detailed chronicle of the reality of modern battles—organizers, lawyers, and celebrities today have become the warriors, shamans, and chieftains of earlier times.

Two highlights of these films:

At the end of Avatar, Jake Sully—the warrior hero—asks Eywa to please help fight off the humans, for they will destroy Pandora just as they destroyed Earth, saying something like “there is nothing green on our planet any longer.” Interestingly, Eywa listens and the wildlife of the forest drive back the colonizers. Stay tuned for the planetary response of a feverish Earth. Don’t expect charging rhinoceroses and pouncing tigers as we’ve killed most of them, but the dramatic shifts triggered by climate change will do more to crush human transgressions than any Toruk could.

And watching Crude, I couldn’t help but find it amazing that one of the leading characters of the film (albeit never acknowledged) was the oil used to maintain our consumerist way of life—some of which was certainly extracted from the very forest in contention. From charity concerts and countless flights from the U.S. to Ecuador by lawyers involved in the case, to the plastic (i.e. oil-based) rain barrels to provide drinkable water to those living in the now polluted forests and even the film equipment itself, oil is ubiquitous in every scene (and every facet of consumer societies). So fighting exploitation of delicate ecosystems and the exploiters themselves is certainly important—whether in our myths or in real life settings—but without finding sustainable sources of energy, and especially shifting cultural norms so that we expect less consumptive lifestyles, we will never stop seeking out new sources of oil, unobtanium, or whatever mineral is central to our economies at that moment. And if indigenous people live on top of these deposits, well, they’ll either need to move or be moved.