Seattle City Council endorses Happiness Initiative

I'm a little late blogging this, but the City Council has unanimously endorsed our Happiness Initiative.  Council President Richard Conlin presented the formal proclamation to us last Monday:

The full text of the proclamation is on our website (PDF), and for me the key part is this:

The Seattle City Council encourages organizing local town meetings in libraries, community centers, and other public gathering spaces in Seattle neighborhoods, where residents discuss the survey and objective data, identify actions they are taking and want to take, and recommend action ideas for neighborhood organizations, city agencies and the City Council.

The Seattle City Council intends to consult the available happiness data and the recommendations from these town meetings as it pursues future policy options in a time of scarce resources.

Local media picked up on the story:

KING-5: City Council aims to make Seattle happy

KPLU: Seattle council wants you on the ‘happiness team’

What gets you fired up?

I haven't always worked in sustainability, and at first glance my path to this work looks rather random.  I originally moved to the U.S. to work in a specific lab, towards a PhD in biologically-based artificial intelligence.  In some ways it is far enough removed from what I do today that I joke about this being "a former life", but my interests haven't changed - only my priorities.

I grew up an environmentalist - first in the narrow "we must save beautiful places" sense, and as a teenager moving to a much broader understanding that we have to take care of the environment because threats like climate change have the potential to hurt so many people so badly.  I've also always felt that the world can only be understood with scientific tools, and unfortunately happened to start university (in the U.K.) just as Greenpeace was ramping up its campaign against genetically modified foods.  The problem wasn't the cause itself, so much as the horrifyingly anti-science rhetoric used.  Flyers that scaremongered about "alien viral DNA" had the opposite effect on me: they blinded me to the [more complicated, but nonetheless important] real issues around GM food.  Overall, the shriekingly science-phobic campaign gave me such a bad feeling about the environmental movement as a whole that I ignored it for years.

What brought me back was a combination of the complex systems work I was doing on the way to a PhD, and Jared Diamond's book "Collapse".  The more I learned about complex systems, the more frightening the IPCC's climate change predictions started to sound.  With a proper understanding of feedbacks and tipping points, climate change went from being a vague theoretical worry to a convincingly real threat to cities and agriculture.  Meanwhile, "Collapse" showed me how real the risk is that as a global society we won't manage to respond usefully to what's going on until it's far too late.  The last thing I wrote on my academic blog sums up the human side: Why I found "Collapse" so depressing.

All of this made me feel that the global environmental crisis was simply too important and too urgent to ignore.  I dropped out of the PhD and started looking for work in the sustainability sector.  In the four years since then, I've become convinced that the real action is on the social side.  The science is well enough developed that we know what needs to be done.  The technology is good enough that we have the tools to do it.  The problem is educating people, and changing behaviour at every level from individuals to governments.  I've been looking for tools to push back the materialism and atomisation that lead to collapse, and help bring about a world in which we all understand what we really need, and look out for each other, because we need that for humans to continue to thrive.

So now I find myself running a training program, and helping out wherever my skills are relevant with the Happiness Initiative, which is all about the change in values and the public conversation that needs to happen.  And now I'm experimenting with something new: working on a collaborative handbook for social change campaigns.

One of the things we need to understand to make social change campaigns effective—to make them recruit people to causes we believe in instead of driving them away—is what motivates people to care about an issue.  Joe Brewer and I have plenty of ideas, but we want some personal stories.  What kind of social change do you care passionately about, and what got you engaged?

Why (and how) to focus on behavior change

Last year, we hosted a workshop called How To Bring About Large-Scale Behavior Change, taught by Joe Brewer.  It was our best-attended workshop of the year, and people loved it and seemed to leave it buzzing with ideas, so we're running it again, only this time we're going further.

The one complaint that many participants had last year was that in a one-day workshop (realistically 6½ hours after breaks are accounted for) with a lot of material to cover, there wasn't enough time for hands-on practice.  This time round, we're breaking it into 3 half-day sessions, with a couple of weeks between each so people can mull over the material, and the final one will be devoted to practice and feedback:

• On July 30, we'll start with Getting the Big Picture, covering the theoretical background from cognitive science, and examples of successful behavior change campaigns that we can learn from.
• On August 13, we'll have Tools for Social Change Campaigns, in which Joe will introduce a 'designers toolkit' for social change, applying the groundwork from part 1 to practical methods for understanding and driving the process of change.
• On September 10, we'll finish with a Design Lab for Your Campaign.  Each participant will create an action plan for a behavior change campaign, and we'll critique each others' so we can all learn from each other.

I'm really excited about this class, but we also recognise that a lot of people who are interested won't be able to make it to three separate sessions spread out in time like that.  If you're one of those people, we have an alternative for you: we're raising money to write a Designer's Manual for Large-Scale Change which will be free to download and stand alone as an introduction to the same ideas.  Here's  short video of Joe introducing the project:

We would of course very much appreciate your contribution; if you'd like to donate or read more, head over to:

http://rockethub.com/projects/1910

As with many of the classes we put on, I am sometimes asked why Sustainable Seattle is interested in promoting this particular topic.  The environmentalist angle on this is that I firmly believe that we already have all the technology we need to deal with the environmental crises looming over us, and what we really need to do is persuade people to make the right choices.  Lately we've been talking about happiness, and the links to that are are actually quite similar.  Whether we look at individuals' happiness, or the ways that each of our behavior affects everybody else's happiness, we find ourselves presented with a quite well developed body of knowledge about things we could be doing to make the world, and yet most people aren't doing them.  Many of these things are well-known and very easy, so clearly we need to get better at persuading people.

Whether your interest is in persuading people to give up smoking, drive less, get to know their neighbors or lobby politicians, you'll need to use the same insights about psychology and culture, and the same techniques based on those insights.  Why don't you join us this summer to learn how?

http://sustainableseattle.org/training/257

Teaching our children well

Next Thursday evening we'll be hosting a workshop, taught by eco lifestyle coach Gina Diamond, on the subject of Raising Environmentally Conscious Kids.  In Gina's words, the workshop is:

"designed to empower parents, teachers, and guardians to help children embrace their connection to the Earth and make choices that are compassionate, sustainable, and respectful. Participants will be asked to reflect on how they do and can model the principles of living consciously, while learning the four elements of humane education and how they can be applied to successfully raising the next generation of planetary citizens."

It's only a two-hour session because we're conscious that many parents will have a hard time carving out even that much time, but having been to one of Gina's classes recently, I know she can say a lot in that time, and that you'll leave with a lot of things to think about and ideas to put in practice.  For more information, see our website:

http://sustainableseattle.org/training/245

While that workshop is for parents, guardians and teachers, Seattle Audubon recently sent us an announcement of some summer camps they're putting on for kids:

Is your child fascinated by the creatures and foliage found outdoors? Need to find some fun summer activities? The Seattle Audubon Society is currently accepting registrations for its summer Nature Camp at Magnuson Park.

Nature Camp gives children the opportunity to learn about the animals, plants, and habitats that make up our beautiful Puget Sound region. Weekly sessions for students entering the 1^st through 6^th grades offer exciting activities, games, crafts, and field trips led by trained adult Naturalists. Choose from 10 different one-week sessions held between June 27 and September 2, 2011. Students entering grades 7 through 9 can choose from three Teen Trekker camping trips in July and August. Scholarships are available for those in need.

Volunteer opportunities are also available for high school students.

Find out more online at seattleaudubon.org, email naturecamp@seattleaudubon.org, or by calling the Seattle Audubon Nature Shop at 206-523-4483.

How to measure race

I am working on a minor update to the happiness survey that we're trying to get everybody to take (fairly successfully - we had more than 6,000 responses the last time I checked).  I don't get to just dive in and rewrite the survey, which is for the best really - while it will take much longer to do this collaboratively, we'll end up with something much better in the end. But I do have today and tomorrow set aside to update the online survey app, and one of the things I'll be doing is adding a race question to the demographics page. 

I had initially been the advocate of leaving this question out, for reasons that I now think were hopelessly naïve. The main reason I wanted it left out is that race is a social construct that only means as much as we decide to make it mean. Idealistically, I would love to stop the world from talking about race altogether. The trouble is that while race is a social construct, racism is real both as a lamentably common individual prejudice and as a series of institutional barriers to success, and not talking about this doesn't make it go away. Instead it makes the institutional side harder to address and sends a misleading signal that we don't care about the issue, so the survey will now include a race question.

That, though, opens its own can of worms. The secondary reason I don't like asking race questions is that it's impossible to ask the question right. We have two options: make everyone write their own in (a nightmare for data analysis!), or make people choose from a frustrating list. As an example of why these lists are so frustrating, consider the "Caucasian" category that is often what I am expected to check. It means different things in different contexts:

• Its origin is synonymous with "Indo-European", in that it describes an inferred migration of people out from the Caucasus, into most of Europe and some of Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, bringing a language family with them.
• In the US, it's generally used as a shorthand for "white".
• In Singapore it seems to be shorthand for "of European descent".
• In Russia it means "from the Caucasus region".

So is an Iranian a Caucasian? By one or two of those definitions, yes, but how many people here in the US would recognise Iranians as such? As a Jew, am I? I fit the other two definitions, but I don't check this box - partly because my ancestors were not part of the Caucasian migration and partly because I think it's important to be counted, I usually write in "Jew". But I suspect most people round here would tell me I'm Caucasian and I should stop making life difficult.

And then there's the question of resolution. Which groups we lump together and which we split is very much a product of which questions we're trying to answer. Given that our purpose is to get at how big an effect racism has on peoples' happiness, we could almost get away with asking "are you a member of a race or ethnic group that is discriminated against in your country?", but we already ask whether people feel discriminated against in their own lives and we want more objective information to go with that. Yesterday I found a fascinating reference for the diverse ways race questions are asked around the world: everything from Canada's breakdown of First Nations into different subgroups from those we talk about in the U.S. to Brazil's shades-of-brown palette and Bulgaria's "Bulgarian or Turk or Gypsy or Other".

For the time being, we're running with the US Census categories because at least in this country those are sort of understood, and we can credit/blame the Census Bureau for the particular selection. But we really want this survey to make sense internationally. We have a Spanish translation almost ready to go, Arabic and Chinese in the works, and groups interested in using the instrument in a couple of far-flung other countries already. The other internationalization issues are relatively easy to work out—the update I'm doing this week will make it handle non-US location coding properly, and there are a few questions that need slight rewording—but I still really don't know how to ask the race question right and there's no "official" answer from the UN to guide us. Is there an appropriate universal way?

- posted by Eldan Goldenberg

Films about activism at the Seattle Jewish Film Festival

Our neighbours the AJC put on a huge annual festival of Jewish film.  This year, one day (this coming Monday) will be devoted to films about Jewish activism in Africa.  This one in particular struck me as an account of a wonderful project that makes the world better in several ways at once:

Delicious Peace Grows in a Ugandan Coffee Bean

Many lives revolve around the coffee bean, the second-most traded commodity in the world. Historically, in Uganda, coffee farmers saw only small profits due to low international prices, inefficient government marketing, and exploitative intermediaries. In 2003, a Jewish coffee farmer in Uganda approached his Christian and Muslim neighbors - all struggling coffee farmers - and asked that they put aside their differences and join forces to forming Delicious Peace Coffee Cooperative. To further economic development, they partnered with an American fair-trade distributor to produce Mirembe Kawomera Delicious Peace Coffee [click to purchase], the first organic, kosher, Fair-Trade Certified Ugandan coffee to reach the U.S. market. The standard of living of the farmers is now improving, and their message of building bridges of peace and fair wages is spreading to coffee customers in the United States. In particular, their efforts have inspired many Jewish congregations, social action committees, Bar/Bat Mitzvah Projects and interfaith groups across America to purchase and raise awareness about the farmers' coffee. 

posted by Eldan Goldenberg 

DataCamp Seattle!

Reposted from the Code for America blog:

City governments have a lot of information which is useful to all of us. This ranges from maps of local parks to building footprints to real-time 911 calls. We all have an interest in our budget information, legistlative documents and other resources that we use in collective decision-making and deliberation. Not all of this information is currently available for all cities, even though much of it is public record. The “Open Data” movement is a way to work on getting information into machine-readable formats, allowing for easy publishing, sharing, and reuse.
We’re hosting DataCamps in CfA’s cities this year to build communities around making city data more open and accessible to allow citizens to help cities work better.
DataCamp is a event focusing on skill-building and collaborative work on city data. It is an opportunity for interested parties in a city to work together, and build a network of people with shared interested in improving civic communications and information management.

The Seattle event will be this coming Saturday, and here are some more details:

WhereSocrata Office101 Yesler Way, Suite 502Seattle, WA 98104
WhenFebruary 19, 2011 10 a.m. - 5:30 p.m. (Registration at 9:30 a.m.)(President’s Day Weekend)
ScheduleRegistration: 9:30 a.m.Introduction: 10:00 a.m.Hands-on Workshops:  10:15 - 11:45 a.m.Workshop presentations: 11:45 - 12:00 p.m.
Lunch 12:00 - 1:30 p.m.  (Socialize with people you don’t know!)
Project Introductions: 1:30 - 1:45 p.m.Project time: 1:45 - 5:15 p.m.Project presentations & Closing Circle: 5:15 - 5:30 p.m.
Afterwards: Drinks/dinner with anyone interested in attending.
CostFree - but you must register at http://datacampseattle.eventbrite.com/
What to bringBring laptops & power strips if you have them.If you are working on a project with city data, bring your project ideas. Be aware that you will probably have 2-3 real working hours with anyone who is interested in helping you. So frame your project so that folks can pitch in and get something done by the end of the day. If you have questions/ideas please get in touch. We would love to discuss.
If you use a technology-based tool that you feel would be useful for others to learn, bring a demo. Examples: data scraping, embedding datasets, 'open data for journalists', using map data, etc.
There is room for 50 people.
Questions?If you have any questions about this event, please contact the Code for America team via email: seattle (at) codeforamerica (dot) org
About this DataCampOrganized by the Code for America fellows, who are in Seattle for the month of February.
Code for America, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, is a new public service, sort of like a Peace Corps for Geeks. The fellows are partnering with the City of Seattle to create solutions that allow for collaborative problem solving between the city and local civic leaders and community organizers. Learn more: codeforamerica.org/seattle, Twitter: @cfaSEA, email: seattle@codeforamerica.org
Socrata is a Seattle-based company that provides cities with a way to make data open and accessible for all. In addition to their work with data.seattle.gov, Socrata was recently spotted during Obama’s State of the Union address: Socrata helped the White House to publicize their log of visitors. Learn more: socrata.com
Seattle is a pioneer in the use of digital technologies in support of open data and online civic engagment. Seattle is participating in the first ever year of Code for America.

Sustainability in Operations and Supply Chain Management

Following is a guest post by Ron Sullivan, the director of sustainability at APICS Puget Sound.  Ron will be teaching a workshop—Six Solutions for Sustainability—for us next month, and this is what he hopes the workshop will help participants to do:

Sustainability: the New Dimension of Operations and Supply Chain Management

We hear bad things about the environment, and one thing is certain:  the solutions must engage businesses of all kinds.  New ways of thinking will inform a company’s course.  The result is a vision of the future based on systems thinking and the concepts of the natural step, cradle to cradle design, the triple bottom line, and the continuing influence of the quality movement started by Deming. 

We can structure sustainability efforts into two types.  The first is incremental, expanding the intent of continuous improvement activities, for example reducing waste.  The second is transformative.  New products such as solar and wind power supplanting coal are an example.  We have to consider both types of change. 

Some of the changes we will see require a fundamental rethinking, a paradigm shift.  An example is our current economic theory with its almost religious obsession with profit.  A new theory is emerging that is compatible with the triple bottom line. 

The changes are part of an extension of current responsibilities in the field combined with more extensive work with other functions in the company, which in sum lead to a new strategy for the business.

About the presenter:  Ron Sullivan, CFPIM, combines a career of over two decades in manufacturing companies with studies for the past four years at the University of Washington focused on the environment and sustainability.  His professional experience includes procurement, materials management, and systems analysis.  He is the director of sustainability for the APICS Puget Sound Chapter, and developed and presents the “Six Solutions for Sustainable Business” seminar which will be presented for the fourth time on March 5 at Seattle University.

Designing the future

Our training program started the year with a bang: 3 diverse workshops and a brownbag in January. We covered recognition for sustainable businesses, how to keep resolutions and change our own behavior, working with nonprofit boards, and conflict management. The very first slide shown in the first workshop got straight to the point with this framework:

1. AWARENESS (current state of self and society)
2. FUTURE VISION (where you are going)
3. GOAL SETTING (how are you going to get there?)
4. ACTION (work towards vision one step at a time)

I participate in as many of the workshops as I can (it's a huge perk of being the organiser, really), and I was present for this one. The instructor, Gina Diamond, started the workshop with a reminder of a crucial first principle: we make the future ourselves, even if we do it accidentally and without thinking. The rest of the workshop was about using this framework to make the future deliberately so that our own lives and society at large can be something we look forward to.

I thought this was the perfect way to kick off my working year, because really that's what everything we do at Sustainable Seattle is about. Whether it's the indicators (current state of society), Dream A Sound Future (where are we going and where could we go?), training and business assessments (how to get there) or on-the-ground projects around Seattle (working towards that vision one step at a time), it's all about deliberately making our future a good one.

I found Gina an inspiring teacher, and I'm working on bringing her back in May to lead a workshop about raising eco kids. Meanwhile, she'll be teaching another workshop--From Awareness to Action--this Saturday, and it sounds like it will expand on this framework.

posted by Eldan Goldenberg

Move in with us!

We're looking for people to share our office.

In the short term, we have two desks we can rent out, for $100/month each.  It's a pretty modest office but it does have some good things to offer:

• A very convenient location, in the Vance Building, the downtown Seattle home of many environmental and social justice groups.
• Fast, reliable wireless internet.
• Use of a laser printer.
• Use of a colour scanner.
• Our glittering conversation.

We have computers you could use, but they're so old and slow that this will be better suited to someone who can bring their own computer in.  If you are interested, please contact Eldan Goldenberg: eldan@sustainableseattle.org.

In the longer term, our lease is up in March, and we're figuring out what to do then.  We may move to a smaller office, but we're also very open to the possibility of sharing an office with like-minded people or organisations.  If you might be interested in banding together with us for that move, please let us know.

The Future We Deserve

Talk of "the future" often means speculation about future technologies. A lot of these are tremendously exciting—imagine what we could do with genuinely cheap energy!—but they won't be what brings us the wonderful future we surely all want. Everything we need for that is already out in the world, and while much of it was invented relatively recently, it's all been successfully piloted somewhere.

Brazil[1] and China[2] have shown us two radically different methods for bringing millions of people out of poverty. Finland, Korea and Japan know how to give every child an education that lets all have a chance to fully participate in society[3]. Costa Rica has shown how to stop deforestation[4], and China how to start replacing lost forests[5]. Germany has proven that places with no natural advantages can generate electricity without pollution[6], and build houses that barely need heating[7]. Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Tokyo and New York City all allow people to move around without destructive dependence on cars. Milwaukee is the home of a revolutionary farming technique[8] that grows incredible quantities of vegetables and fish from tiny plots of land, with minimal energy, year-round in a harsh climate.

I am bullish the technology we already have.

Yet I am quite pessimistic about what the future has in store for us, because we don't deserve the future we want. While the unfairness of life to individuals is a truism, as a species we'll get exactly the future we deserve because we will have made it for ourselves.

Consider a small example. This morning I stepped in dogshit on the way to work, because one of my neighbours couldn't be bothered to clean up after their precious poodle. As if the antisociality of this weren't obvious enough, round here we've been bombarded by messages[9] reminding us how destructive pet faeces are to the universally loved local waterway and its charismatic megafauna. Yet my neighbour couldn't even spare the few seconds to deal with it.

Dog turd is not the most important issue facing the world today, but it is a symptom. As a global society we know how to make the world better for all of us, instead of continuing to step in each others' dogs' shit, but doing so involves decision after decision in which individuals must concede a little self-interest for a greater externalised benefit. And if we can't persuade our neighbours to scoop poop, how will we ever persuade enough people to accept paying to educate the kids across town, or taking a little longer to get to work so people downwind don't have to breathe our cars' exhaust? Never mind the bigger problems that need action co-ordinated between countries that have never trusted each other....

When it becomes unthinkable to let our neighbours step in our dogs' shit; when we finally accept that we are our brothers' keepers; then we will deserve the future we want and we'll find we already know how to get it. We don't need a technological revolution. What we need is a moral revolution.

The above is a draft submission for The Future We Deserve, a collaboratively-written book about the future.  Feedback is very welcome.

The importance of speaking up for what you believe in

I had the pleasure of representing Sustainable Seattle at Worldchanging's Future City event last Friday.  The main attraction was seeing the Mayors of Portland and Seattle be interviewed by Alex Steffen, who asked a series of questions about how to achieve sustainable urban development; a crucial issue since, as Steffen pointed out, the world's urban population grows by 200,000 people per day.

"Team Mayor" only had about half an hour on stage, which is a pity as they touched on a lot of important issues without having the time to really explore many.  The part I found the most interesting was Portland mayor Sam Adams's response to a question about how individuals can help political leaders be effective.  He talked about how it's never safe to assume that because you got your person elected you can just sit back and see things happen; instead it's important to keep engaging, keep writing to politicians, and keep articulating what you want.  And not to only write to politicians about what you oppose: writing to people in support of what they are promoting helps them get it done, because every letter is counted, and a stack of supportive emails is useful ammunition for your representative.  He finished with an exhortation that's worth quoting verbatim:

Don't take for granted that you live in a liberal city. Get off your duffs and speak up for what you believe in.

Subsidising good food

Here in Seattle, the farmers' markets are often the best place to find locally and sustainably produced food.  Unfortunately there's a bit of a perception that they're an expensive luxury, unaffordable to many people.  This is not generally true, but the perception can be enough to scare people away, so the Neighborhood Farmers' Market Alliance has been working to break it down.  For some time, they've accepted food stamps in many forms, and today they announced a new initiative:

The Neighborhood Farmers Market Alliance (NFMA) brings equal access to local food by offering a $10 bonus to EBT (food stamp) users during autumn’s peak harvest.

...From Wednesday, September 29, through Sunday, October 10, the NFMA will provide all EBT cardholders with $10 in Market Bucks per day when they purchase at least $10 with their EBT cards.  The Market Bucks are unrestricted cash equivalents in $2 increments, and may be used at any of the NFMA’s seven neighborhood farmers markets until December 31, 2010.  “We’ve seen a dramatic increase in EBT use at our markets, up 60-200% at some of our larger markets like the U-District and West Seattle. But these customers are still a fraction of our customer base. It’s been a hard season for farmers, and many people are still out of work, so this is a way for us to support both groups,” says Chris Curtis, Executive Director of the NFMA.

The Market Bucks program was launched earlier this year as a stimulus program for farmers, and has already resulted in $5000 worth of coupons redeemed by farmers market customers. Curtis explains, “We decided to fund the Market Bucks program to help farmers after the economic downturn last year, but with this year’s weather negatively affecting many crops, it was more important than ever to give their sales a boost.” 

EBT card holders can experience their own economic boost at the following locations:

Columbia City Farmers Market, Wednesdays 3-7pm: Sept 29 and Oct 6

Lake City Farmers Market, Thursdays 3-7pm: Sept 30 and Oct 7 

Phinney Farmers Market, Fridays 3-7pm: Oct 1 only

U-District Farmers Market, Saturdays 9am-2pm: Oct 2 and 9

West Seattle Farmers Market, Sundays 10am-2pm: Oct 3 and 10

Broadway Farmers Market, Sundays 11am-3pm: Oct 3 and 10

The $10 EBT Bonus Program is paid for by the NFMA, a non-profit organization that runs seven vibrant, food-only farmers markets throughout Seattle.

We're very pleased to see this: everything good about farmers' markets is worth more, the fewer barriers there are to every single person being able to shop there.

How to talk about climate change (or any other issue, for that matter)

One of the most important things that sustainability advocates can do is to persuade more people to care about the issues we find important, and to support solutions that will work.  Because—thank heavens—we don't live in a dictatorship, we must do this to make progress.  It's difficult, frustrating work, but we have some resources and ideas to help.  The things I'll be writing about in this post are specifically for talking about climate change, because it's one of the most difficult issues to do this with, but the advice translates to any contentious or sensitive issue you want to persuade people to listen to you about.

Joe Brewer, who is part of our Leadership Circle and taught last month's How To Bring About Large-Scale Behavior Change workshop, recently published an excellent article: Responding to Climate Skeptics' "Change Argument".  You should read the whole thing, but the gist is that it's essential to build trust in order to be listened to at all, and to understand where the skeptic is coming from in order to respond well to their argument.  This is good general advice that we should all follow, and in the article Joe expands on this and adds some specific advice about climate change and some common reasons why people who are neither malicious nor stupid continue to deny that there's a problem.

I can read as many articles about this as I like, but when it comes to using the theory there's no substitute for practicing.  To give you a chance to practice how to talk about climate change, we are putting on an evening workshop on October 7th called Stop Global Warming With Words.  It will start with a short lecture by Louise Stonington, but most of the time will be devoted to practicing your message, and giving each other feedback on this.  We hope it will serve as a good warm-up for the 10:10 campaign and worldwide work party.

We're also planning another intensive workshop with Joe early next year - watch this space for details.

Streets For All - a social justice issue

We are among the many endorsers of the Streets For All Seattle campaign. This is a campaign to make sure Seattle lives up to its fine words about building a street grid that works well for all users, not just those that have cars. This means continuing to improve the pedestrian environment, bicycle infrastructure and transit network. In the short term, the campaign is focussed on raising $30 million in new dedicated annual revenue to stave off cuts in bus service, double the city’s commitment to the underfunded Pedestrian and Bicycle Master Plans, and build critical elements of Seattle’s transportation infrastructure.

There are a lot of good reasons to support this, including public safety, the need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, the health impacts of driving, the city's mandate to achieve carbon neutrality and the state's mandate to reduce motor vehicle miles traveled. Today I want to talk about another: social justice.

It's depressingly common to see sustainable urbanism painted as a luxury for the rich, but in fact it's car-dependent cities that fail the poor. Owning and driving a car is stunningly expensive - on average over $9,500 per year according to AAA. That's not far short of the entire annual income of someone living on the poverty line, and while it's certainly possible to run a car more cheaply than this average it's unavoidably an expensive thing to own and use. By contrast, a typical bus pass (one zone, including peak times) costs $972 per year for an adult and considerably less for youth. Or a solid, reliable new bike costs under $500 to buy and very little to keep in good working order after that. But the practicality of these alternatives depends heavily on where someone lives: like most cities Seattle has a fairly strong relationship between property values and rents and the ease of getting around without a car. This makes the extra costs associated with running a car effectively a penalty for not being able to afford to live in one of the more central, better-connected neighbourhoods in town, which serves to worsen wealth inequality.

To make things worse, there is a strong correlation between race and car ownership, so car-biased infrastructure is also white-biased infrastructure. And then there are all the people who can't drive, whether through disability, old age or being too young - all of whom are left out by car-centric infrastructure.

Streets For All is trying to fix this pressing inequity by directing more of our limited civic resources to transport infrastructure that doesn't require a car to use. There are a few ways you can help:

1. Write to the City Council. Letters and emails to the Council are counted, and seeing a wave of support for something does sway their deliberations.
2. Go to a budget hearing and speak up for this cause. This cycle's hearings will be in Northgate on September 29th, South Seattle Community College on October 13th, and the council chamber on October 26th - more details in this PDF.
3. Come to a PARK(ing) Day event tomorrow (Friday), to reclaim a little space from the car. It's a simple, fun way to show what else is possible. Parking spots around town will be reclaimed to turn them into temporary parks - here's a PDF map of the sites.

Community Indicators work in Truckee Meadows, NV

[cross-posted to our Sustainable Cities blog]

The Community Indicators Consortium has been hosting a series of webinars about community indicators and performance measures. The overall arc has been about how some local governments have successfully integrated community indicator work into how they measure their own performance, which is of interest to us because we hope to achieve the same with b-Sustainable. I've listened to the first two and would recommend them to anyone else interested in this kind of work; they've also been kind enough to make recordings available online.

Yesterday's was a case study from Truckee Meadows Tomorrow. I took some notes, which reflect my own biases and interests but may be worth sharing:

• The big impetus for starting their indicator work was a 1990s forecast of enormous population growth for the region - not unlike what PSRC is supposed to be preparing us for here
• The first round of indicator development was done by giving participants monopoly money to "buy" indicators with, as a way of prioritising the most valued n indicators. Apparently they don't use that procedure any more, but it sounds better to me than the more standard focus groups they've switched to, because it gives the meekest person in the room as much of a voice as the loudest. I'd be interested to hear why they switched.
• They're down to 33 indicators now, and even with those they have 10 quality-of-life categories that group things together, and they get feedback that the 10 categories are much easier to get a handle on than the 33 indicators.
• The categories are: Arts & Cultural Vitality - Civic Engagement - Economic Wellbeing - Education & Lifelong Learning - Enrichment - Health & Wellness - Innovation - Land use & Infrastructure - Natural Environment - Public Wellbeing
• In the past 5 years, they've made a special effort to reach "unusual suspects" - identifying communities not represented in the earlier focus group work and specifically recruiting them to add input.
• Washoe County uses the QoL indicators to track its own performance.
• A lot of the work they do on the basis of these indicators is done by partners of the counties - either volunteerism or compacts with companies - http://www.truckeemeadowstomorrow.org/collaborate/100

If this sounds interesting to you, I'd strongly recommend downloading the webinar from their site: http://www.communityindicators.net/post/events,cic-webinars-archive,truckee-meadows-tomorrow-and-washoe-county

Triple Bottom Line Reporting workshop debrief

It took me a while, but I have uploaded slides from the Triple Bottom Line Reporting workshop we held in July. The first of these is the main presentation by Laura Musikanski, our Executive Director:

The second is a guest presentation by Burr Stewart, who also taught the Vizualisation Tools for Sustainability class in May. He tied the themes of the two classes together, talking about performance metrics and ways to use graphics as tools to make them more tangible and persuade people to pay attention.

Tim Abbe also gave a talk about the impacts of climate change and the kinds of decision-making we're going to have to do as climate change renders previously workable plans impractical, anchored in the example of Mount Rainier National Park's management plan having to adapt to changes in the behaviour of its rivers.

This was a very conversational class, with a lot of discussion of the material, and topic coverage really being driven by what the group showed interest in. Of course, this means that reading the slides is no substitute for being there, but we're sharing the slides so that at least some of the information can be as widely accessible as possible.

We talked a lot about measurement and reporting, the importance of standards so TBL reports can be compared with each other meaningfully (which is a problem right now), and why a company would be interested in doing this kind of disclosure, which isn't yet legally mandated. We also compared and contrasted a selection of CSR reports from www.corporateregister.com.

Personally, I was struck by two things from the class which made me more optimistic than I have been. One was simply how engaged and knowledgeable the group was. I still worry that the wave of sustainability awareness we're seeing is too little, too late, but it's encouraging to see just how much more widespread a good understanding of these issues is than even a couple of years ago, when I first started working with Laura on these TBL workshops. The other was seeing Nike's CSR report, dedicated to Neil Kearney, the previous head of the International Textile Garnent & Leather Workers' Federation. Not that long ago, they would have been demonising him as an obstacle to their business and here they are publicly thanking him for pushing them to improve their labour standards. If in one generation we could go from the murder of Chico Mendes to multinationals praising the gadflies who shamed them into doing better, perhaps there is hope for us.

August 21 is Earth Overshoot Day

What is Earth Overshoot Day? Well, just as there is a day in April on which people commemorate having earned their full tax payment for the year, this is the day by which we have already used our full share of natural resources for the year. Not as individuals, but as a whole world - everything after this Saturday is overdraft. Read more at the Global Footprint Network's site.

Tour de Fat recap

As promised, we spent the day of the Tour de Fat staffing the "Compost Offices" for New Belgium. It was a fun day, and a chance to learn a lot about how waste reduction works on the ground, and a bit about the company (check out their sustainability page - it's impressively comprehensive).

Lessons learned:

• An event like this can be run with minimal environmental impact: for example we managed a 95% waste diversion rate. I lost track of the exact amounts, but most of that was compost, with a small proportion of recycling, and only the remnant 5% going to landfill.
• Doing this takes a lot more work on the day than just dumping everything, and a lot of planning; one thing I was impressed with, for example, was that the food vendors had been pre-vetted for their ability to provide all compostable packaging.
• Staffing the waste stations makes a huge difference—we found a lot of inappropriately sorted garbage on the morning, from having left the bins out in the park overnight, but everyone is co-operative when pointed to the right bin.
• It didn't matter that the beer cups said COMPOST in big black letters on one side, or that there were signs up listing what went into which bin - people are creatures of habit enough that most automatically took those towards the recycling bin.
• But there are visual cues we can give people which help; a sort of Design With Intent for waste sorting. Here are two examples:
  • If you look at the picture below, the tiny office trashcan is for landfill waste, while the other two were recycling and compost - that made everyone who wanted to landfill stop and think. It was an accident originally—I hadn't realised we'd be handling landfill waste too, until it was too late to get official-looking bins for it so I improvised and raided our office—but it worked so well that I'll definitely repeat this next year and get intermediate-sized bins for recycling.
  • After this picture was taken, one of our volunteers (Tysan) hit on the idea of closing the lid on the recycling bins, to make people pause before dropping compostable cups in.
• And finally, one that I was taught repeatedly as a computer science student: document everything. Sustainable Seattle has done this job at the Tour de Fat before, but the people who did it in previous years have moved on and I had to rediscover a lot of things. I'm writing it all down, so even if it's not me next year they can do a better job of co-ordinating and spend half as much time on it.

A huge thank you goes out to:

• Everyone who volunteered on the day, especially the couple of people who stayed for much longer than you had signed up for.
• New Belgium Brewing for taking the sustainability of the event so seriously, and Brian Bogan there for being patient when I had to ask all these things he expected me to already know from last year.
• Cedar Grove Composting for collecting the material and turning it into lovely compost that will be used in Seattle parks, among other places.

More oil spills

Now that the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been at least temporarily staunched, BP is retrenching. They have a new chief executive and plans to set aside money that should cover their cleanup and compensation costs, and they're already talking about growth. One of the most interesting facets, to me at least, is that their plan rests on the assumption that they won't be found grossly negligent. I am no legal expert, but they may well be right, and that's a really important thing to understand. The media have had a field day excoriating BP as if they are uniquely bad, but really the problem is their whole industry.

I blogged about this back in June, and made the argument that the sheer scale of the oil industry makes spills simply inevitable. The news in the past week could not have done more to underscore that point. I learned that since the main Gulf spill started, there have been at least three other, unrelated oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. Then I read about the pipeline leak in Southern Michigan; an incident so comparatively minor that it only gets a paragraph in the New York Times, because 'only' 800,000 gallons of oil fouled the Kalamazoo River. Not to mention the spill in Dalian, China last week, or almost 1000 spills per year in Nigeria. To focus on one incident or one company is to miss the bigger picture that this ongoing catastrophe is ultimately caused by the embedding of oil products through every level of our economy, and getting oil is inherently polluting and dangerous.

The impact of all this is not trivial. Paul Crane, a friend of Sustainable Seattle, described a recent trip to his native Florida recently in the Pensacola News Journal:

As the plane banked over Santa Rosa Island I remembered the many times and ways I have traveled to Pensacola, both to visit and to live there.
As a small child detraining from the L&N Hummingbird at Flomaton and hopping another train to Pensacola's station; later, in grade school and high school when I came to live in Pensacola, with the smells of the Gulf wafting through the car window as dawn broke, after an all-night drive. I remember, at night, lying awake listening to the whippoorwills calling through the pine and oak forests and awaiting endless weekends in the beach dunes, wearing Saturday smiles with my friends.
Now, returning yet again for a visit, I gaze through from the plane on an almost apocalyptic landscape. The coastal barrier island appears a ribbon of white sand with people-less beaches. Lots of cars parked and people scurrying around upland, but human-less in or near the water on a sunny day.
Several hundred yards off shore, just past the murky water, in the littoral zone that was always light emerald green, lay a dark, shiny sheen of oil that spread to the horizon. A sick feeling rose in my stomach and a small tear whelmed in my eye. What I had seen in newsprint and TV screen was now live, right before my eyes.
Only later, when I made my way to Casino Beach for an attempted swim, was the grim reality realized. The best metaphor I could conjure compares the yellow front loaders moving sand as a funeral procession in front of the dying Gulf's dead zone, an aquatic graveyard. As one friend, a native, put it, "I took some of my first steps on that beach, as did my children and grandchildren."
Today the beach sand has been classified as hazardous waste, and the Gulf is dying.

It's worth reading his whole letter, which goes on to suggest some solutions (and assigns blame a little differently from me). I wanted to share this excerpt to underscore that this is not an abstrtact issue. In the end people suffer because of our insatiable appetite for oil.