The Country Of The Future  

Alex Steffen at WorldChanging is still hopeful that America can be Emerson's "country of the future" (lets hope he is right - though I tend to think that countries aren't where the future is being created) and is planning to release a new book called "Bright Green" in the near future - Worldchanging and The American Future.

Here at Worldchanging, solutions are our business. We've spent the last five years exploring the world's most innovative ideas for addressing the planet's most pressing problems. Today's our birthday, so we thought we'd take this chance to let you know about our new plans.

Until now, we've largely focused on discrete innovations. Even our book is a compendium of individual insights, solutions and approaches. We've assembled a larger and larger pile of pieces to the puzzle of how to build a better future, but we've never really attempted to put those pieces together, instead allowing the existence of those puzzle pieces to imply that an assembled puzzle is possible. We've written much about the tools for building a better future, and not enough about that future itself.

But people need a new future. In fact, one could reasonably argue that people need a new future now more than any time in the history of the species. Our present way of living is an ocean liner colliding catastrophically with the iceberg of ecological and economic reality -- a collision that threatens to essentially destroy civilization -- and yet we cling to it with white knuckles, in large part because we can't really imagine another way of living. Given the choice between a sinking ship and dark uncertainty, most of us tend to hold tight to the rails and hope for the best.

If we are going to convince large numbers of people to embrace the kinds of creative, large-scale change sustainability demands, we need to offer them something more than scattered, loosely connected possibilities. We need to show them a new, brighter future, a plausible, inspiring, achievable -- and sustainable -- future towards which people can aim their aspirations. We need to invite people to abandon that sinking ship and swim for a future that works.

Imagining that future still strains our foresight, but more and more clearly it lies within the boundaries of possibility. We have much of the toolbox of solutions we need to build a bright green future: designs, technologies, policies, practices and insights that we can use to ratchet down the ecological impacts of nearly any aspect of our civilization. Some large gaps remain -- no one has yet invented a realistic sustainable model of the aviation industry, for instance -- but between solutions that already exist and new innovations leaping off the drawing boards now, we can at very least trace a plausible path from here to a bright green future.

That future is simply unattainable without America's wholehearted commitment. To begin with the obvious, we Americans are intimately connected with the causes of much misery, from our climate emissions and runaway resource use to our rogue-state diplomacy, and the simple cessation of that stupidity would go a long way towards making possible the good. But that's not the limit of the leadership the United States can offer. Simply, America remains the epicenter of possibility in the human imagination. No other nation has as thorough a sense of idealism and open-hearted mission, no matter how badly worn it may seem today. We are, even now, despite it all, still the place where many people who want to change the world struggle to arrive. What Emerson said in 1844 remains true today: “America is the country of the future. It is a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations.”

If the world is going to figure out one-planet prosperity, a bright green way of life that can lift everyone out of poverty while averting catastrophe, to some very serious extent, we Americans will need to invent our own version of it first.

Of course, America is far from sustainable today. Upper-middle class Americans, whose idea of prosperity is increasingly emulated around the world, often have ten-planet ecological footprints. Even middle class Americans weigh in at four to five planets (almost twice the ecological impact of the average European).

We need to show the possibility of a way of life every bit as prosperous as -- indeed, more attractive than -- the lives of today's American upper-middle class, but lived within reasonable ecological limits: prosperity with a small enough environmental impact that it could be shared by every person on the planet. We need to show that way of life, demonstrate its realism, and distribute tools for building it.

That is exactly what Worldchanging intends to do in the next twelve months, with four new projects.

We're launching a major book, tentatively titled Bright Green. With clarity, forceful arguments and concrete proposals this heavily illustrated book will show the American people that the tools exist, the thinking exists, the solutions are possible to build a country that's more prosperous, more just, more creative and so green that its practices could be emulated by every person on Earth without destroying the planet. Even more, it will show that transformation can be accomplished not in centuries or a number of decades, but in years, quickly enough that the model we create can spread around the world. It will illustrate that if we do it right, we will have better lives and be safer, happier, healthier and more connected to our friends, families and communities.