An Interview With Alex Steffen  

Dave Roberts at Grist has done an interview with Alex Steffen of WorldChanging, which covers all sorts of interesting stuff - parts 1, 2 and 3. As usual Alex talks about all sorts of interesting stuff - when you have a bit of spare time read though the whole thing.

DR: Again there this theme that ties together democratic culture, open-source technology, and distributed power systems. Another feature of those systems is the ability to degrade gracefully. Modularity allows individual pieces to fail without broad, systemic failure -- in contrast, again, to nuclear power, where one piece's failure could lead to catastrophe. I just read an article today in which somebody claimed that the costs of the Chernobyl meltdown were greater than the value of all the energy provided to the Soviet Union by nuclear power throughout its existence.

AS: Yes, so improving the reliability of the system through openness has real value. But there's a second and to my mind sometimes more important benefit to these open and collaborative approaches, which is that we innovate more quickly. Right now we are entering a period I like to call the Tech Bloom. A lot of people think that when the tech boom ended, technological innovation went flat. The exact opposite is true. We are seeing many, many more people inventing many, many more useful things at this moment than we have ever seen. There is an explosion in innovation happening all around us. A big reason is that many of the people doing the inventing are sharing their inventions as freely as they can.

Why does that matter for the environment? Because much of the destruction caused by American consumerism is accidental. Americans, as we've all heard, make up five percent of the planet's population, but use between 20 and 50 percent of its resources and energy sources. Our economy generates nearly one million pounds of waste per person per year. Most of that isn't used to make anything. Amory Lovins and his crowd found that we almost never achieve a better than 6 percent efficiency in the way we use materials. The rest is just pure waste. As William McDonough says, "What people see in their garbage cans is only the tip of a material iceberg." You might say that our society's major product is not wealth, but waste.

Nobody set out to design a system that works like that. It's an accident of history. We can design systems that create a minute fraction of that waste, deliver the same -- or better -- products, often save money, and make us more competitive in the process. We can break the connection between wealth and waste.

Think about that for a second. The implications are huge, if we're used to thinking that wealth causes environmental destruction. Because if we're only, say, one-twentieth as efficient as we might be, the main thing stopping us from being just as rich, with one-twentieth of the ecological footprint, is innovation.

No nation on Earth has more opportunity to innovate. The United States is not only the richest nation on the planet, it's also home to the largest educated population, the most scientists, designers and engineers, the biggest universities, charitable foundations and research labs. If anybody has the money and brainpower to create a future that's not only green but bright, it is us. So then the question becomes, just how innovative are we ready to get?

And if the answer is, we're ready to get revolutionary in our approach to design and innovation, we need open source, we need free exchange of ideas, we need public information and collaboration and the whole Tech Bloom package.

Because that's how we will get not only the pace of innovation we need, but products of innovation that will serve the public good.