For about a year and a half, Vancouver’s regional government has been running a pretty innovative initiative to discourage bottled-water consumption. Here’s a deliciously subversive decal from the tap water campaign that I spied on the back of one of Metro Vancouver’s trucks this morning.
The large type reads “Tap Water. Drink it.” and the secondary copy says “World Class Water: Mountain Fresh and Pure.” Here’s to truth in advertising.
Now, I haven’t yet seen this on a billboard anywhere; Metro would have a hard time coughing up the cash for an outdoor campaign. But how great would that be, if the kind of money that Pepsi and Coke pumped into Dasani and Aquifina, instead sold some of the finest water on earth, the stuff that’s piped straight to your house? Does anyone else out there know of a local government that is actively marketing its water like this?
Last summer, Metro Vancouver also partnered with Pacific Cinematheque’s Summer Visions Film Institute for Youth to produce a series of public service announcements about drinking tap water. They’re all pretty good, but here’s my favorite of the bunch:
Metro has been working on other programs as well. During the Olympics, Metro parked a Kewl Earth Water Wagon outside the Main Library downtown, and offered refills of fresh tap water to visitors and residents. According to corporate communications division manager David Hocking, some 4,700 people took the “tap water pledge” during the two weeks of the games, compared to 3,700 who did so during previous 17 months.
The regional government also developed a program with the new Fairmont Pacific Rim hotel. The property offers co-branded reusable Metro Vancouver water bottles for sale in guest rooms, for visitors who would prefer not to use the one-off bottles in the mini-bar when they head out on daytrips into the city.
This is all classic community-based social marketing. Metro isn’t trying to educate residents or drown them in brochures or make them feel bad—it’s working to build new social norms. How is it going? In 2008, as part of its Zero Waste Challenge, Metro set a goal to reduce the sale of bottled water in the region by 20 percent by the end of this year. Hocking says they’ll do a survey at the end of the year to find out how they did. I’ll let you know when he does.
My name is James Glave and I’m a father of two. Ours is a young commuter family, and my wife and I actively participate in many aspects of island life. I love this place, and I am proud to call it home.
My personal passion is climate change solutions, and the transportation, energy, and land-use strategies that have been shown to reduce per-capita greenhouse-gas emissions here in our region and around the world. We can talk about any number of issues, but in my mind, carbon is the ultimate deal-breaker. We simply don’t have an option other than finding ways to slash the stuff from our lives and community. If we don’t “act locally” on this “global” issue, it will eventually come home to our doorstop and find us where we live anyway.
The science suggests that climate change will, in the near-term, overwhelm our first responders and social services, exhaust our municipal budget, and place hardship on our population via skyrocketing food prices. In the long term (which is what community planning is all about, right?) it will ultimately result in waves of climate refugees flooding into Canada, and ultimately our community. This is not chicken-little stuff, it is exhaustively documented in reports by The Global Humanitarian Forum, the World Health Organization, Oxfam, and many other public agencies and non-government organizations.
Climate change is not an “environmental” issue, it is a civilization challenge. I believe we have a profound moral obligation to address it, wherever we live. I personally believe that we do not get an excuse or “opt out” pass to address climate just because we choose to live in a beautiful place that is “seen to be rural,” where fawns dance at the roadside and salmon thrash in the lagoon. We are not entitled to an exemption because we are surrounded by great natural beauty. This is not just “China’s problem.” We should see our emissions as an opportunity to lead, not barely squeak through our statutory obligations and hope nobody is noticing. That’s how we are not dealing with it now.
I frequently parrot the message that a lot of small actions can add up to big change. For proof, look no further than this short video clip I did over the summer, one of a series of greener-living advice segments for a real-estate website called Cyberhomes.
There I am, proving the point that easy gestures—in this case, unplugging idle electronic devices—can all add up. It makes sense on paper, which is why the “everyone do their bit” credo is the basis of many behavior-change campaigns. And sure, it’s all well and good to unplug a few video games, or enjoy a healthy bike ride, or savor the vegetables and fruits you grew yourself.
But what about nitrous oxide? You know, laughing gas?
My dentist offers it to me every time I go in for a new crown or onlay which, given the pathetic state of my teeth, is pretty much at least once a year. And I usually turn it down, because despite its jovial nickname, the stuff is effectively two kinds of bad in one bottle. Read the rest of this entry »
Why? Maybe it’s that it’s just not a very inspiring word. Maybe it’s that the term suggests that there is this “thing” out there called “the environment” that we need to buckle down and fix. To me, “the environment” feels more like an obligation than something to get excited about fixing. It’s a catch-all collection of planetary ills: Deforestation? Overfishing? Whales? Particulates? Mercury? E-waste?
Can we please turn down the earnestat a few degrees?
Look, you’re all smart people out there. Maybe we can put our heads together and come up with some more upbeat words to describe those of us who know everything is ridiculously out of whack, and are working on the solutions, at home, at work, around the neighborhood, or across the country. Something a little more, er, marketable….
Let me throw one out to start. For me, it’s still all about climate. Attentive readers of this blog will note that I’m a big supporter of the atmosphere. It’s in rough shape, and pretty much everything down here depends upon us getting it back into balance, asap.
British Columbia is about to lose 975 green collar jobs for the next eight weeks— and potentially longer. That’s because the only two industrial-scale Forest Stewardship Council sawmills in British Columbia—the same mills that sliced up the framing lumber for my Eco-Shed (see below)—are about to fall silent.
Tembec, the company in question, is shutting down its Elko and Canal Flats sawmills for two months as of early next week. When you factor in a third plant that will also spool down for the duration, 975 employees will be out of work.
The fact is, you don’t have to be a solar-panel installer to have a green-collar job. These mill workers were processing lumber from just about the only industrial forestlands in all of British Columbia that are truly managed sustainably. The vast majority of the rest are clear-cuts—the standard-issue take-no-prisoners logging strategy that has, over decades, devastated thousands of square miles of ecosystem in this province.
Here’s a snippet from Almost Green that explains why FSC lumber is so important:
In a nutshell, the FSC tree logo does for lumber what the Energy Star label does for appliances and windows—it lets you know you’ve made the greener choice. An FSC stamp guarantees that the wood adheres to a set of ten principles of forest stewardship, including a set of kinder, gentler harvesting practices. FSC-certified foresters work selectively—leaving tracts of trees intact—and pay close attention to issues such as erosion, wildlife habitat, streams, and lakes. The program was set up to protect biodiversity long before greenhouse gas emissions really hit the radar screen, but it certainly advances carbon-conservative practices along the way.
The shutdowns shouldn’t surprise anyone, really: As I note in my book, I only managed to get my hands on the ultra-rare Tembec eco-studs by pure fluke. (It pretty much fell off the back of a truck.) Tembec has shipped almost every stick of the dimensional lumber produced at Elko and Canal flats exclusively into the States—in railcar quantities, and likely to big-box home-improvement chains—and people just aren’t building much of anything down that way these days.
The company has failed spectacularly to market its responsibly harvested lumber here in B.C.—the place where Tembec’s sustainably managed forests grow, the place where the logs are cut up, and the place where the green-collar workers have been punching the clock and making it all work. As I document in the book, none of the local Home Depots and lumber yards I called had even heard of the stuff. Consumers can’t ask for FSC lumber if they don’t even know it’s an option.
Now, it isn’t just the company’s product that is heading south this week, it’s their business, too. A damn shame. Does anyone else see a lesson here?
The arch online magazine of politics and ideas has just posted an excerpt from Almost Green. The section in question is a bit of a romp — after obsessing over my neighbor’s exterior floodlamps for many nights, I launch a devious social-engineering campaign to convince him to turn the damn things off.
Salon will leave the piece up over the Thanksgiving weekend, which is awesome, because I figure we Americans will be turning to our computers in droves to escape our families! Take a look.
Nobody likes the middle. It’s the realm of compromise. It’s pretty boring, really. The place where you might find yourself “stuck.” All the really interesting stuff happens at the edges, right? Perhaps. But the middle is also a place of great potential, especially when it comes to triggering runaway social change.
Ecological “footprint” co-creator Bill Rees recently told me that when it comes to large-scale transformational change, there are four prime movers: Price signals (oil goes up, and SUV sales plummet); Catastrophes such as war, floods, and hurricanes represent another category. Coercion is another: The power of law, the foundation of civil society. Then there’s social change, “the cumulative effect of civil society, the counter-movements. But they can take decades.”
So on this last point, I’ve been thinking about behavior change as of late. With the new U.S. administration comes a completely new aura of hope about what’s possible. What will it take, I wonder, to trigger runaway social change, one of the four arrows in the Rees quiver that could prevent runaway climate change?
How do we get to the place where vast numbers of us understand that a balanced atmosphere is the key to prosperity, security, stability. That it is not only the path out of this economic crisis but also the key to our shared future. I sense large numbers of us — those who do get it — reaching and stretching and imagining. More than a million people have signed up for the We Can Solve It pledge.
We’ve seen some once-fringe green behaviors enter the normalsphere as of late. Cloth shopping bags are a good example. They’re now de rigeur for even the Lexus RX set. Ditto bottled water, sales of Dasani are plunging, as people discover that, wait, tap water works, too—and doesn’t have the scent of petroleum.
I’ve been thinking about these little shifts as of late, these little tremors. I’ve also been thinking about the people on the “continuum of green.” Here’s a slide I put together for a recent talk I gave the Interesting Vancouver conference.
Let’s put green types into three groups: the “baseline” greens, the “keen” greens, and the “bright” greens. Here’s how we might break them down by the things they buy, don’t buy, and do…
Baseline Greens : This is the realm of normalized planet-friendly behaviors, products and actions that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in most parts of North America. Here we’d place chestnuts such as recycling, composting, shopping for organic and fair-trade labels, cloth shopping bags, push mowers, programmable thermostats, re-usable aluminum water bottles, fuel-efficient cars, swirly light bulbs, bamboo pillowcases, hemp Ts, etc.
Keen Greens occupy the next level up the scale. These are folks who have made some kind of personal resolution. They’re mall averse, they love eBay and Craigslist, they have one car or a shared car, they’re avid cyclists, they’ve purchased carbon offsets, done some kind of home retrofit. They’re locavores and food gardeners. They volunteer. They shop for durability, not just price. They’re culdesactivists .
Finally, the Bright Greens. These people are simply ahead of their time. They’re revolutionary thinkers. They perhaps live in Eco-Villages, or want to. They have fashioned careers out of deep-green thinking, perhaps in renewable-energy research. They’re seed savers, and somewhat anti-fashion. They push the boundaries constantly. They’re not luddites working the farm, though, they’re very tech-savvy. All that said, they’re also somewhat socially isolated; they have trouble relating to “regular” people who don’t get what is going on in the world. In public, they are relentlessly optimistic. But privately, they are terrified that the change is not coming as fast as it needs to, and the clock is ticking.
So where will the change come from? I think it will come from the middle section of this continuum. The keen greens find inspiration in the bright greens, and “push down” better behaviors and choices to the baseline group, who in turn look up to them as models. It’s up to those who have made some changes to show the larger group just a few steps to the left that there’s nothing to fear. Now all they need to do is make it easier for them… more on that soon.
I’ve been trying to answer this question lately, and it was one of the things that pulled me into the Ecotourism and Sustainable Tourism Conference that has been running in Vancouver this week. Well, that and Anna Pollock.
In an industry characterized by a boggling degree of blah blah blah , Pollock is a real sparkplug. She heads up The Icarus Foundation , a non-profit that is working to make Canada a climate-friendly destination. The group published a report earlier this year that tried to get a handle on the staggeringly huge challenges facing the travel sector. Pollock pulled data from that report in a lunchtime keynote yesterday, and threw out a few challenges and nuggets, including:
To come even close to meeting a 30 percent reduction of carbon before 2020, the tourism industry must somehow head off the release of 2.2 billion tons of equivalent CO2. She called this “one hell of a weigh-loss program.” Indeed. I’m afraid it simply means parking jets, folks.
So anyway, the industry needs to do this even as global international arrivals and departures crest the 1 billion mark. And more airplanes. “In 2007, there are 19,000 airplanes in the sky,” she says. “But by 2027, we are talking about 35,800 airplanes. That means more airports, more freeways, more parking lots, more aiport hotels, more kiosks, more hamburger stands.”
We are moving from an industrial age to a networked age. “We have a swarm model — complex adaptive systems, small simple agents with limited intelligence, local decision-making capability, and a communication path to nearby peers that can outperform a large centralized processor. It is robust and flexible.”
Enough, already, with all the nomenclature, it’s a distraction. Ecotourism, sustainable tourism, responsible tourism, authentic tourism, aboriginal culinary tourism etc etc. “We are so busy looking inward and trying to define what makes us separate that we are not uniting and solving the big issues.”
Simplify the Message. “Guests don’t want to know if the place meets 1,0001 criteria. They are on vacation. Use plain language, like ‘good tourism’ or ‘tourism cares.’”
Incentivize: “The destination that makes the brave decision to only market ‘green’ suppliers will win in the next five years. Encourage every guest to embrace an ecological mindset.”
Stop Building: “See the value in non-development,” Pollock urged. “Start to see the opportunities where not developing a piece of pristine land will pay you more than developing it. I can see a time where you will be paid to become stewards, but only if you show leadership now.”
Slow Down: “Stop trying to do too much too quickly. ‘Slow travel’ is going to see some of the fastest growth ever seen,” she said, noting the irony.
Engage the Locals.
When Appropriate, Go Virtual: “Some people will choose to experience places in a virtual way,” Pollock said. “This community should not see that—or telepresence—as a threat. It may be our biggest ally.”
Also, I hadn’t seen this YouTube visualization of global aircraft arrivals and departures over a 24 hour period. Pollock briefly threw this up on the screen. There are a couple of these simulations out there, but this one is just fascinating to watch:
I am convinced that the jet age will inevitably begin winding down in the coming decades. It’s hard to imagine, but passenger aviation will return to the days where it was a rare experience, the purview of the affluent. Setting aside peak oil, I could imagine air travel becoming a socially taboo behavior as the “relocalization” trend pushes ever-deeper into mainstream consumer behavior. Frequent flier cards could eventually become anachronisms, like slide rules.
High-end video conferencing will solve some of this. Imagine a new category of business that provides very-high-quality and secure telepresence services to companies, a kind of virtual conference room and post-meeting “bar” for socializing and networking, available by the hour, for less than it costs to fly.
But all that won’t deal with the carbon-age hangover that is the personal relationships we maintain all over the globe, with family and friends. These people will still want to visit each other for many decades to come, and even after high-speed rail networks finally, inevitably spiderweb across North America, there is still that damn ocean in the way for many. Remember, you can’t hug over Skype.
I’m working on a presentation for Interesting Vancouver that I’m loosely calling the New Bill of Rights. In case you haven’t heard, we’re in a bit of a pickle, and while we each bring our own personal-life baggage to this perilous moment in history —ie, challenging legacy decisions regarding housing, vehicles, and so on — the time has come for bold thinking and big moves. The time has come to sweep away fear — of social backlash, of deep bright-green change — and turn up the volume. The time has come to hit the fast-forward button and demand our leaders use whatever means necessary to put the pieces of a better world in place.
We’re half-way there. I sense a rising chorus of individual voices out there who are literally crying out and scraping and scratching and clawing towards a bright-green society. They’re doing it one household at a time with more deliberate behaviors and more conscious purchasing decisions, or perhaps they are reaching over the back fence and dabbling in neighborhood-scale organizing — a process I call culdesactivism.
What this collective longing needs is a unified set of goals and principals, a list of things that are entirely within the realm of possible but kept at bay by the larger challenges of market subsidies and public policies engineered to preserve the brown status quo. We need to not think of this as a “wish list” but rather as a set of entitlements for the greater public good. We need to demand that greener choices exist, and that they come without premiums of price and life force. We need bold leadership to pour resources into these, to help avert catastrophe. Here are a couple to get you started:
1. I Have the Right to Efficient, Comfortable Public Transit. Here’s one of 206 new next-generation trams just rolling out in Berlin. It’s made by Bombardier, a Canadian company. There’s nothing like this in our cities. (Photo: IsarSteve.)
2. I Have the Right to Know What it Really Costs.This is the Pharos Lens, a project of the Cascadia Region Green Building Council. The lens is a concept hang-tag that would live at retail and convey to consumers, at a glace, a product’s various impacts. It’s a pilot program, and so far limited to the building-materials market, but there’s no reason we shouldn’t see this sort of thing on a package of pasta, or a pair of jeans. Food products come with a “nutrition label” for reasons of public health. It’s time we start thinking bigger to have the tools we need to make more informed snap decisions in the marketplace.
Now, what are YOUR demands? What would be in your New Bill of Rights? What is it time to stop pining for and simply demand with one loud voice? Perhaps if enough of us dive in, this might evolve into a kind of a petition to our leaders. Jump in the pool via the comments box, below.
I dropped Sabrina and Duncan at day camp and continued on down the road to my community’s recycling depot. There, I walked up to the big green "mixed plastics" bin and tossed in my FridgeSmart stackables, Ziploc Twist n’ Locs and, perhaps most painful of all, my beloved half-cup-size Rubbermaid Servin’ Savers — indispensable snack-stashers that fit perfectly inside my kids’ lunch boxes.
All these little tubs are now gone, casualties of a recent pact between my wife and me to minimize the amount of time our family’s food spends inside plastic containers.
It was a watershed moment for the two of us — the latest stop in a journey that has begun to wander into territory that I once reserved for a class of people I once referred to as "eco-fruitcakes." It has taken us beyond social norms, outside the fuzzy boundaries of mainstream consumer behavior.
Go ahead and laugh
It’s now socially acceptable to forgo plastic bags at the store — even Ikea is calling them "so last year." But my Servin’ Savers purge represents a far more radical act.
I can hear you snickering out there, and I don’t blame you. As far as eco-resolutions go, this one is probably both ridiculous and futile. We know that the lion’s share of our food — yogurt, milk, berries, applesauce, nuts, cooking oil, you name it — is sold to us in plastic packaging. For decades, industry and government scientists have assured us these "food grade" pots, tubs, and sacks are completely benign.
They’re lightweight compared to glass — which means less of a carbon penalty from shipping — and of course they’re recyclable. And as a former Servin’ Savers evangelist, I know the convenience is unbeatable.
But here’s the thing, Mr. Industry and Ms. Government. I’ve been struggling with a few trust issues as of late.
BPA blues
You see, when Sabrina and Duncan were infants, we often fed them pumped breast milk that we warmed up inside polycarbonate Philips Avent plastic bottles — bottles that we recently learned were leaching bisphenol-A, or BPA.
Unless you’ve been living on Baffin Island for the past six months, you know that’s bad news. Earlier this year, Health Canada declared that chemical "toxic" and stated that there is "some concern for neural and behavioral effects in early stages of development" for low levels of exposure.
On its Avent website, Philips today touts a redesigned BPA-free baby bottle that the company assures us it is developing "because we know that needs sometimes change."
Needs do change, yes. So do paradigms. And the thing is, I’m presently undergoing a shift so foreign and clumsy that it feels like puberty all over again. It boils down to this, Philips: I don’t trust you anymore. My consumer confidence has plummeted. In fact, it’s in the basement.
And it isn’t just you; I’m not tying this shift inside my head to this specific named chemical, this particular crisis-management episode. I’m not going to feel reassured when you switch over to a "safer" replacement that is equally convenient for me and profitable for you.
That weird plasticky taste
Oh I know, I know: The third-party research is solid; polypropylene and everything else with a number inside a triangle is perfectly safe. Plastic will remain a staple of our lives for many years to come. Hey, I’m touching it as I write this story.
But I don’t trust that science anymore, and as a result, I’m no longer going to eat off the stuff. I’m no longer able to brush aside the odd taste the water in my squeeze bottle assumes after it’s spent a hot day under my sea kayak’s deck rigging. I’m not going to microwave yesterday’s macaroni in the fresh-saver locking-lid container and then serve it up to my family. I’m not doing any of that anymore. This stuff is petroleum, and I’ve lost my enthusiasm for its endless miracles.
Maybe my Tupperware purge won’t mean a damn in the big scheme of things — petty acts of consumer disobedience don’t often cast so much as a ripple. But radical or not, Elle and I have set down some new ground rules around our place. Eventually we’ll get our hands on one of those Japanese stainless-steel lunch kits, but in the meantime, I’m packing Duncan and Sabrina’s lunch boxes with small glass mason jars and wax paper.
The wax paper is ok, but the jars suck. They’re heavy, and the counsellors at day camp are not very pleased to see my kids dealing with them on their field trip to the beach. After all, glass is a liability. It breaks.
Uncharted territory
I don’t know where this one is going, because the truth is, I don’t know who to trust. I find I’m running confidence problems in my head: I score one point to Canada’s new government for standing up to the Canadian Plastics Industry Association on this one — the lobbying has been intense. But then I dock two from that same agency for not telling me sooner, when I had two screaming babies around the house.
Please don’t paint me as a Luddite who would do away with life-saving medical devices and send us back to the oxen in the fields. It’s just nowhere near that clear-cut. Indeed, there are many scenarios where plastic is the more sustainable choice. I think of my lunch-kit reboot as the start of a personal investigation into my relationship with plastic; we can’t live without this stuff, but I wonder if maybe we can learn to live with less of it, or figure out how to deploy it more thoughtfully.
In the end, we only have our own gut to guide us on this stuff. And laugh if you will, but from here on out, mine is going to contain a few molecules less of Rubbermaid’s latest injection-molded god-knows-what
