Generation ME2

Remember the “ME” generation? Generation Me describes anyone born in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s — so that in 2008 this means people between the ages of 9 and 38. The focus, so-called marketing experts reminded us was on Self, me, mine.

Yet this is now the generation that is most comfortable living in cyberspace in a social network. Generation ME2 lives in network of continuous communications that includes Facebook, MySpace, personal blogs, and even the website Twitter which keeps “me” linked to every other “me” with a simple question: “What are you doing now?”

If a social network can be considered ME - my small SELF linked into a social group - which includes all my friends and acquaintences and people who want to hang out with ME - then does this group have a social intelligence that is equal to the sum of its parts … Is the group IQ greater than the individual identities.

Research conducted by the Co-Intelligence Institute suggests that a community of people (whether a group, a company, a town or a nation) is better equipped to be wise than a single individual.

This is true, says CII despite the fact most of the communities we live in or with are clearly foolish, small-minded, unconscious and/or destructive.

However, when we tap into the wisdom of a group or community, we access multiple perspectives. Although an individual can consult books and friends and critics, in the end we are limited to our own single perspective. We look at the world from one place, one history, one pattern of knowing.

Tapping the wisdom of a community online - on Votelink, for example - simply accelerates the process of discovery, innovation and resolution.

Detour.

It seems to me that most people living in America grow up with the mindset that taking the main road is the way to get ahead, get “there” faster … wherever *there* is … and ignore the side road.

For a world rushing headlong toward extinction, trying to consume everything in sight, another option might be to take the slow route … a detour away from the edge.

Here’s an example of what I mean. Life slows down … way down … in this simple, unforgettable video. Those who take it live a little more of life along the way.

El Chorro

El Chorro is located in southern Spain. Originally built in 1901,
this walkway now serves as an aproach to makinodromo, the famous climbing sector of El Chorro.

Thanks to Dan.

In One Year

I’m going to leave the 2020 and 2050 energy planning to the experts. For myself, I’m just going to focus on the next year.

In one year, what changes can I make in my life that will bring me to a ZERO carbon emissions lifestyle quicker than 2050 or even 2020.

I’m not suggesting that I can get there in one year, but if I had 365 days to make a few important changes in my lifestyle, what would they be. And, I’m not suggesting that it will simply be a “carbon weight loss diet.”

I intend to see the changes ripple into all aspects of my life. This includes my family, friends and community. When people see me on the street, I want them to see the changes I am making, not just me. I want them to look at the “me-I’m-becoming” not just at me.

Does that make sense? It’s as if I don’t have to say a word. My life and style will say it all.

As a first step, I think I’m going to take a look at other cities around the world, where people live the livestyle I’m headed toward. I live in Boulder, and although we get 340 days of sunshine a year, we also get 4-5 months of cool, winter weather. Cooler perhaps, because of climate change?

And like it or not, I’m dragging my two dogs, Rory and Paris along on this journey with me.

Here's an Alternative to a Hybrid

I went looking in my spam folder for missing email, and discovered a very not-so-novel but good idea. The email’s headline promised to show me a way to get twice the mileage or more from my car. I took the hook…. here’s what I learned.

Paul Pickthorne has created a website called Smuz that lets me enter my zipcode here then shows me jobs that are close to home. There’s nothing really novel in this idea … I can read the local paper and get the same information … however, what makes it unique is that it causes the user to focus ONLY on jobs that are local and within walking or biking distance from home.

Most local newspapers show jobs in the region, not within walking distance. Pickthorne’s twist is the VERY local angle. His idea: don’t buy a hybrid. Instead, change your job. With rising gas prices, it’s a timely, good idea.

In One Day....

An article is making its way around the Internet, reminding us that our Winter purchase of summer fruits from South America is killing tropical and migratory birds. Why? because migratory birds - who spend the winter months in the tropics, along with local exotics - are landing in southern fields and orchards sprayed with DDT.

It seems that as our American appetite grows for out-of-season fruits, farmers in Latin and South American are responding by expanding their fields and using a pesticide as harmful to humans and wildlife as DDT.

Songbirds and DDT are on my mind this morning because, without much thought, I took a knife and sliced into a ripe cantalope and this morning. It almost tasted as good as Colorado’s Rocky Ford cantalope that floods the local markets in late summer. Cantalope, of course, is out of season in Colorado where we’re just taking our first steps away from Winter.

Winter is still lingering in Boulder. There is snow on Flagstaff Mountain. My storm windows are still up. They won’t go into storage until all of the local ski areas are closed for the year. Although my last ski day for the season was Friday, today may be the last day I eat out of season fruit. And, I’ll take on the wager of the first person who bets that I can’t stick to it.

Remember the book Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, and its warning about the dangers of DDT? Sadly, it took eleven years, from the date of its publication in 1962 to create a shift of policy. A lot of unnecessary deaths happened during those years. In 1973, the use of DDT was finally banned from the United States.

I’m not waiting that long. I’m betting that with a simple change of mind, I can create a shift of habit, in one day. If you see me eating cantalope between now and August, it will be California organic, or fresh frozen last summer from Rocky Ford.

Shifts Happen

Well I saw it firsthand. The shift Barack Obama is talking about, happened, right there in Macky Auditorium on the CU-Boulder campus.

I had gone to listen to a talk by former Senator Timothy Wirth, now president of the UN Foundation and Better World Fund. Because the main auditorium was filled to capacity, I was directed upstairs to the balcony.

As I climbed the stairs a fellow passed me, going downstairs. “Is it that bad?” I asked … because Wirth was only 10 minutes into his talk. The response, “He’s talking about the environment, and that’s not his area of expertise.”

The fellow was right. When I took my seat in the crowded auditorium, I was surprised to see Tim Wirth reading from a prepared script. The information was “old news” to a well-informed Boulder audience, and some of his facts - I know for a fact - were more than a year old … such as the “fact” that 600 U.S. mayors have signed a climate protection agreement act. That was a 2006 number. That number is over 800 now.

Interestingly, several people in the main auditorium were getting up to leave, and when Wirth asked for a show of hands of people who considered themselves environmentalists, I too decided it was time to leave.

It seems that in a smart town like Boulder, people no longer want to waste their time being talked to … they want to be inspired to take action. We want oratory. Someone who speaks from the heart; who looks us in the eye as they talk. We want someone to pull us out of our ordinary lives and inspire us to take responsibility for our own lives, not just fix things for us.

We’re no longer teenages. Americans are moving into adulthood and ready to take on the responsibilities that go with a new level of maturity.

We already know the well worn facts about climate change, the risks ahead, the need for action, what we really want is to walk away inspired to take that action, right now, right here in our own lives.

Monday night, I attended a funny book review by Doug Fine who has written a book titled Farewell My Subaru about his move to rural New Mexico to live off grid and be self-sufficient. The audience laughed along with the author as he described the chaos of his first year living off grid. Now that was inspiring! It filled my head with new ideas on how to grow myself into a self-sufficient lifestyle right here where I’m planted, in a community that feels like home.

The Environment is the Envelope

Today, I’ll attend a World Affairs Conference talk by former Colorado Senator Timothy Wirth on the University of Colorado campus in Boulder. Tim is the President of the United Nations Foundation and Better World Fund, a fund set up by Ted Turner to support the work of the UN.

Tim Wirth’s talk will focus on the theme that “The Environment is the Envelope” within which all human activity takes place. His speech is a call for sustainability in an age where financial collapse captures the news headlines, and the state of the world’s environmental is generally ignored.

If people only respond to events that personally touch their lives, what would it take to take personal responsibility for your local environment. The following four blogs written by individuals who are taking LIFE seriously, marks the emergence of a trend at the very local level to pay close attention to the sustainability of our own hometown.

The four blogs include: LovelandLocal, Stepwisefamily, EcoYear, and PeakSoil. Thanks to Boulder County Going Local for spotting these “nutrients for the soul.”

Good-bye Gasoline?

Could Israel be the first country in the world to run its automobiles free of gasoline by 2020? In an ambitious project that could scale to the rest of the world, Israel plans to be the first country in the world to mass produce electric cars by 2012. As a fuel-constrained country, Israel’s goal is to have all gasoline fueled cars off the road by 2020.

The Israeli electric car venture is a joint project between car manufacturers Renault, Nissan and Project Better Place, a green technology company founded by internet powerhouse, Shai Agassi. With an interest in alternative energy and climate change, 40-year-old Agassi founded his company in October 2007, to focus on creating a green transportation infrastructure based on the electric car.

The smart looking, 200 mile-per-charge electric car grew out of Agassi’s partnership with Renault and Nissan. It has a quick change battery pack that can be exchanged “hands free” in minutes with assembly line precision, when the car pulls into a battery change station.

Yesterday, Project Better Place announced that Denmark has become the second country to sign up to Shai Agassi’s ambitious plan to wean the world off transportation based on fossil fuels. In Denmark, Agassi’s company will partner with Danish utility Dong Energy.

Evolving Democracy

One person, one vote is a great idea, but what if everyone talks to each other, ideas are exchanged, and the voting outcome changes as people begin to understand one another.

Votelink represents a new evolution in democracy. Votelink is a new way to bring cities, neighborhoods, non-profits, ad-hoc groups together for quicker, more meaningful civic engagement.

Over the next few weeks, you’ll see an evolution in Votelink’s civic engagement system. We are launching new software that will help any community reach out to 100% of the community. It can be used to dissolve conflict and move from polarization to consensus and resolution on any hot issue. It can help engage neighborhoods in civic activities.

If you want to be included on our e-mailing list, just send an email to me at alexia@votelink.com

Lights Off ... To Save Your Life

Don’t bet the farm on coal-futures. While carbon sequestration R&D is the big bucks favorite of politicians in the U.S., Germany is turning the problem of emissions from coal-fired powerplants on its head.

According to Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute and author of Book, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, coal use in Germany has dropped 37 percent since 1990; in the United Kingdom it has fallen by 43 percent.

So why is the U.S. holding tight to its coal industry? Worldwide, solar cell production is doubling every two years, making it the world’s fastest growing energy source. If the U.S. ever got serious about investing REAL money in solar, it might double every 18 months, or every year.

Coal-fired powerplants are used for generating electricity. However, says Brown, electricity used for lighting around the world can be cut by 65 percent through efficiency improvements like switching from incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescents.

Turning out the lights of LA (and other mega-cities) at 10 PM, and turning off the “ghost” appliances, computers and other electronics that continue to draw electricity when not in active use, would largely eliminate the need to use coal.

Turning out the lights at 10 PM is not such a radical idea. According to Bent Formby and T. S. Wiley, authors of Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival, keeping lights on at night during the winter months puts a great amount of stress on the bio-body of humans, and may be the underlying cause of many modern day diseases.

Generation 2020

Benson’s in. ConocoPhillips is settling in right behind him. The symbolism can’t be missed. Big Oil’s ConocoPhillips is hunkering down in an empty business complex across the highway from SUN corporation – to focus on a big coal issue: carbon sequestration plus hydrogen R&D. ConocoPhillips will also serve as a corporate learning center for its global network of employees.

Take the road from their new headquarters a few minutes to the west and you end up in the Republic of Boulder, which gave Barak Obama one of his biggest caucus wins in the State of Colorado. Head the other direction on the highway and you’re pointed toward Denver and Bruce Benson, former head of the Republican Party in Colorado, now anointed president of the University of Colorado.

Governor Ritter timed the release of a media announcement of SUN’S “mystery” neighbor ConocoPhillips, to coincide with the choice of Bruce Benson as President of CU.

At a cost of $200,000 in taxpayer money, Benson was the only candidate singled out from a review of nine possible choices. The presidential slate was cleared of all other candidates before the committee announced their choice to the public, and the public rightly responded with outrage… to no avail.

Benson represents the fossil fuel era, and its tight hold on the future. His choice as President of CU, symbolizes the lock the past has on the future. Ditto for ConocoPhillips. Carbon sequestration is still an unproven technology and it will take billions of dollars of R&D to test whether it is truly viable or not. Under funded, a solar economy will require billions of actions by ordinary citizens to bring it into reality.

The solar transition could happen a lot faster, of course. But it will take the next generation of leadership to get us there.

The transition to the future , I think, is also represented by our current choice of candidates for U.S. president. For many Boulderites, McCain, Hillary, and Obama represent the past, present and future, in that order. The reason that Obama is attracting such big crowds of first time voters, I think, is because his ideas and his ability to mobilize millions of people to take an uncommon action, symbolizes what will be needed in the future, to overcome the mistakes of the past.

These young voters are Generation 2020. The world we have created is what they will have to mobilize to overcome, tomorrow.

The Hungry Dog Index

I visited Cuba several years ago as a “medical missionary.” I’m not part of the medical profession nor am I a missionary. It’s just that it seemed to be the easiest way to get a visa to travel there and the group I was traveling with did distribute donated medical equipment.

When I returned home to the U.S., however, I did become a missionary of sorts for I had seen first hand some of the things that Fidel Castro had accomplished, during his 50 year rule.

These included universal education Kindergarten through College for all Cubans. With a 95% literacy rate, Cubans are some of the best educated people in the world.

If they choose, they can even receive free medical training to become a doctor or nurse. In exchange, these medical students must agree to spend two years after graduation, working in a barrio in a poor country somewhere in the world.

Under a long standing embargo, Cuba trades this intellectual capital for goods, services worldwide, and Venezuelan oil.

Cuba has survived more than 40 years under a U.S. led embargo, and survived the loss of oil from Russia in 1989. Several films have recently been made that depict how this tiny country, living under the shadow of the U.S., has made the transition to life without oil, chemicals, or pharmaceuticals.

Lacking access, chemical companies have had to sell their GMO and other fertilizer products elsewhere. Today, Cuban farms remain chemical free and organic. Lacking access, pharmaceuticals companies have had to sell their pills and prescriptions elsewhere. In modern day Cuba, most medical treatment is based on preventative medicine and herbs.

And yes, they also live with a limited food supply, in fact, you can measure the well-being of any Cuban community by looking at the condition of their dogs. I call it The Hungry Dog Index. In Cuba almost all dogs are small dogs. In Havana, they are bone-thin and hungry, because there is very little surplus to share. In the countryside, the dogs are also small, but find enough for a daily meal.

As the leadership in Cuba now passes from Fidel Castro to his brother Raul Castro Ruz, one can only hope that the U.S. doesn’t get the urge to rush in and annex it to Miami.

Measuring the IQ of Cities

Forbes Magazine recently tagged college towns, including Boulder, CO as some of the smartest cities in the U.S. because of the brainiacs - the brain power - of the people who live there. Individual IQ is one way to measure smart cities, and yet, I think there is also another way, based on the WISDOM of the collective community.

Do communities have an IQ, or intelligence? Can some communities be thought of as smart, vibrant and engaging, like a child who excels at everything, while others are seen as slow to change, perhaps backward, or fearful? Can communities be measured and ranked according to their IQ that doesn’t simply total the sum total of smart people living in town?

If so, which communities would rank as the top 100 smartest in the world? Which would be #1?

Researchers, of course, can rank the top 100 cities in the U.S. in terms of their population, median age, price of housing, number of college educated residents, the fastest growing, or those with the highest median household income. But can they tell us which has the highest community IQ? Which city or town has the highest collective wisdom?

Measuring the collective intelligence or IQ of any community is not the work of pollsters. It can’t be assessed by surveys or statistics. Rather, it must be discovered by studying the quality of civic engagement in any community. This community IQ is based on five key elements:

Openness: How open is the community to new ideas and creativity?

Flexibility: How many ways can residents engage in civic life?

Access: How close to NOW can citizens engage?

Leadership:  Does everyone have a chance to both lead and follow? Speak and be heard?

Action: How quickly are best ideas integrated into community life?

In reality, a community’s IQ is measured by the active civic engagement of its citizens and their openness to new ideas. It is also measured by their ability to both lead and follow, speak and be heard, and by their willingness to integrate best ideas community wide, to the benefit of all.  

More than centers of commerce and industry, today’s smartest cities are those that reach out to empower the best and brightest and most creative aspects of each citizen. When cities learn how to tap into the collective wisdom of local residents, the community itself becomes a whole lot smarter.

Next week, I’ll illustrate how this collective wisdom is raising the IQ of a small town in Northern California called Willits.

Resource Wars or Resolution?

Could the grab for biofuels be the start of resource wars, pitting scientists against farmers who for the first time in their lives are no longer “dirt” poor?” Around the world, farmland, tropical forests, grasslands and peatlands are being cleared for biofuels crops, and farmers are starting to put money in their own pockets.

Cash in the pocket means more to most farmers than the global warming impact of their collective actions. In responding to the urgent global need for alternatives to fossil fuels, these farmers got caught in the middle of a firestorm.

In response to need, these farmers did what they know best: grow things. They were encouraged to invest their time and energy into growing biofuels crops by corporations, government agencies, and news media because only a year ago biofuels was the next BIG thing.

It’s not. Now, two studies published in the journal Science last week have reinforced the urgency of moving quickly to a second generation of biofuels. The two studies, one produced by a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota, and the other by researchers from Princeton University, found that biofuels can actually produce more carbon dioxide emissions than they save—if they force natural habitats to be converted to cropland, releasing the carbon contained in trees and grasses and in the soil they grow on.

According to the WorldWatch Institute: clearing land for biofuel crops—especially when it involves the loss of forests, peatlands, and grasslands that are nature’s premier method of carbon capture—is a bad idea. The reason is clear: the world’s forests and grasslands contain an enormous reservoir of carbon, which will add to greenhouse warming if it’s released to the atmosphere. Even switchgrass, if grown on land now being grown to produce corn, could increase emissions by 50 percent if it forces the clearing of new land to grow food.

The larger problem, of course, is a human problem. Farmers are making money growing biofuels crops; corporations investing in biofuels are making a lot of money.

However, trying to change human behavior once lifestyles start to improve involves a lot more than explaining the urgency of the problem.

Governments need to act swiftly to ban the clearing of forest, peat and farm land where the use of biofuels is for export. The shortcut solution is to pay farmers NOT to grow biofuels except for LOCAL use.

Will government staff recommend this solution? Only if they understand the urgency of the problem. And only if they are willing to go beyond their own job security and paycheck, to put into effect actions that benefit the entire planet.