the green thing blog

A reminder of why it's good to Walk the Walk even if there are other low-carbon forms of transportation around ;-)

An oldie but goodie...

Watch Al Gore's eloquent and convincing entreaty to the climate negotiators at the December '08 UN conference in Poznan, Poland.

If we can marry Gore's climate-specific "it can be done, it must be done" passionate rhetoric (which echoes Obama's "Yes we can" rallying cry) with Obama's ability to take action when he takes office, we should be in good shape for the UN Copenhagen agreement in Nov/Dec this year.

Keep everything crossed!

According to this article by JWT's director of trendspotting and former AdWeek interactive editor Ann M. Mack, we're starting to care less about ourselves and more about other people and our communities:

• "...people are thinking less about "me" these days and more about what "we" can do-collectively-to address the challenges of modern society. After two decades' worth of 24/7, in-your-face, "famous for being famous" celebrity culture and reality TV, the focus is returning to the collective-driven notions of community and working for the greater good. Cynicism is taking a backseat to pragmatic idealism and the rise of collective consciousness."

I certainly hope that's the case. 

I've thought for a while that a major social shift is taking place, moving away from "what's in it for me" consumerism to more of a "we're all in it together" community-conscious values.

Certainly technology is helping this shift. It reminds me of Clay Shirky’s observation that in the past only small things could be done for love, while the big things were motivated by money: today, big things can also be done for love.

To reprise something I blogged about elsewhere in the past, I think this is part of a broader search for meaning in our lives.

However many holidays we take or cars, iPods and stainless steel hobs we accumulate, Nobel Laureate economist Robert Fogel’s words keep coming back to haunt us:“People have enough to live, but nothing to live for; they have the means, but no meaning.”

Despite fifty years of GDP growth, says economist Richard Layard, surveys in Britain and American consistently report back that we haven’t got any happier. Quite the opposite, mounting evidence of unhappiness like rising crime (one in three young British males are convicted of a crime before their thirtieth birthday), alcoholism (since 1950, more and more people are dying from liver cirrhosis everywhere except France), clinical depression (on the up since World War II), youth suicide or days off work is all around us.

As a result, more people are trying to find meaning in social contribution. According to Charles Leadbetter and Paul Miller’s Demos report, The Pro-Am Revolution, volunteering in Britain nearly doubled between 1994 and 2004. In the order of 23 million adults contribute around 90 million hours of voluntary work each week. In those seven days: 18,000 Samaritan counsellors give over 51,000 hours of emotional support, nearly 175,000 Meals on Wheels are delivered by the 95,000 members of the Women’s Royal
Voluntary Service and 43,000 St John Ambulance volunteers provide first aid training for the best part of ten thousand people. 

Volunteering in the Information Society, a paper by Manuel Acevedo for the World Volunteer Web, cites research showing this is a global phenomenon.

• Between a third and half the population of the European Union are members of voluntary organizations, or approximately 100 million people. There are more than two million volunteering organizations in the European Union as a whole. Operating expenditures of voluntary organisations as a percentage of GNP ranged from 4.8 percent in the UK to 2 percent in Italy [O’Donnell 2001]

• Research coordinated by Johns Hopkins University estimated that the 'voluntary sector'accounted for around 4.6 per cent of the GDP of the 22 countries initially surveyed. The research revealed, moreover, that in addition to paid staff (19 million), the sector was sustained by voluntary labor equivalent to a further 10 million full time employees, excluding volunteers in religious organisations. [Pratt 2002].

• In 1997, the National Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating in Canada showed that 7.5 million Canadians volunteered, or 31.4% of the population aged 15 and over. The aggregate hours of volunteer time amounted to an equivalent578,000 full-time jobs. [Industry Canada, 1998]

Now we have a vastly expanded range of ways to make these meaningful contributions online. A range of communications technologies which amplify individual voices in the public sphere make it quick and easy to donate anything from spare computing cycles to help cure Cancer or take part in the world’s largest experiment to forecast the effects of global warming, to time answering questions in medical support forums, and helping mobilise the masses to “Make Poverty History”.

Not only are there many new, global channels to find meaning by giving, but people can see the cumulative effects of their participation as it happens. This is an entirely new and extremely powerful combination: the collective power of connected individuals; ‘network effects' making the whole ever-greater than the sum of the individual contributions; and people perceiving the  growing force of their individual contributions massed together, which stimulates more of the same behaviour.

Brilliant and prolific technology writer/thinker and digital culture expert Kevin Kelly was wondering what to do with all the packaging styrofoam he'd accumulated over the years from the many bits of computer kit he'd bought.

The answer was obvious - get the foam cutters out and turn junk into art by making this magnificent 6 foot high Recycled/Reborn Styrobot.

Stunning.