Looking for a speaker for your upcoming conference, meeting or lecture series?

Alex Steffen (Worldchanging’s co-founder and editor, for those just joining us) is well known as a writer, editor and blogger, but he also is a popular public speaker, giving many talks a year at leading companies (including Nike, IDEO and Amazon), universities (including Harvard, Stanford and Yale), cultural institutions (from Barcelona’s CCCB to the Danish Architecture Centre) and major conferences (including TED, Copenhagen’s Bright Green, Design Indaba, Pop!Tech, Picnic and South by Southwest, as well as numerous professional associations).

Alex speaks about a variety of subjects, ranging from carbon-neutral cities to sustainable business strategy, innovative design solutions to futurism for an urban planet. Instead of leaving your audience feeling hopeless, Alex’s solutions-based talks will challenge your audience to think in new ways, leave them optimistic about the possibilities of a bright green future and inspire them to act.

If you’d like to book Alex for your own event, the good people at the Lavin Agency (which represents Alex) can help arrange that for you: it’s easy to learn more at Alex’s speaker page.

You can follow Alex on Twitter at @AlexSteffen.

In addition, Alex is available as a consultant for appropriate projects, and can be contacted through his soon-to-launch new website AlexSteffen.com.

You can also watch a number of Alex’s talks over the years on our website:

• at TED | 2007
  
• at Pop!Tech | 2006
  
• at Yale University | 2009
  
• at Danish Architecture Centre | 2008
  
• at Town Hall Seattle | 2009
  
• at Future City | 2010

“2050″ slide from Worldchanging’s “Future City” event. (The slideshow text was written by Alex Steffen; the slides were designed by Oscar Murillo with assistance from Amanda Reed)

Image of Alex Steffen at the top of the post by photographer Chase Jarvis as part of his “Seattle 100″ book project.

(Posted by Alex Steffen in Features at 5:15 PM)

This Banksy Simpsons intro is just brilliant, a perfect ripping away of the surface to reveal the problematic system beneath in a funny, cutting way.

Hello Simpsons‘ backstory!

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Media at 10:40 AM)

In preparation for our Future City event this Friday, we’re comparing progress towards urban sustainability in Portland and Seattle.

In its Cascadian context, Seattle is the middling city.

It’s true that it retains a vibrant central core, that it has had neighborhood planning since 1993, and that in general Seattle is more and more compact. Yet it is no Vancouver, where new development has brought the sustainability benefits of compact community to much of the city.

It’s also true that Seattle has a bold (if as yet underfunded) bike plan, a high level of commuter transit ridership, and a terrific new light rail line. Yet it is not Portland, where biking, walking and transit are more woven into the fabric of the city and its culture.

Seattle falls in the middle of the three Cascadian cities in all sorts of ways, from green building to green infrastructure. It excels in a few areas at the city level — for instance, Seattle’s utilities are national leaders in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, preparing the region for the impacts of climate change and promoting conservation — but as a metro region it is falling, by some measurements, behind cities like Denver and San Diego, at which, frankly, Seattle’s long turned up its nose.

The Seattle metro area’s growth management is weak, its regional transportation plan is hopelessly out-dated, and the political powers that be are driving forward a number of major new highway projects — including a waterfront tunnel and new cross-lake bridge — that are bound to not only soak up scarce transportation dollars but also lock the region into further car dependence. Meanwhile, the State of Washington has fallen to the back of the regional pack in legislating the kind of incentive shifts that are driving forward green development, renewables, district energy, sustainable design and innovative retrofit programs in other states. Perhaps nowhere else on the West Coast are the politics of sunk-cost thinking so powerful, even in supposedly progressive circles.

So bad is the regional record on land use, transportation and bright green economic issues that there are honestly times Seattle’s situation seems hopeless. Despite all its natural advantages and many achievements, it sometimes looks like Seattle will simply be drowned in a sea of sprawl, choked in traffic, and left to rust economically as the world moves rapidly into a post-carbon future.

But a countervailing force is showing itself as well: a concentration of some of the best bright green thinkers and innovators in North America. Seattle is home to an array of really brilliant people working in think tanks like Sightline and Stockholm Environment Institute; in advocacy groups like FutureWise and Great City, in start-up bright green tech businesses like FrontSeat and 3Tier; in leading design organizations like the Cascadia Green Building Council (authors of the Living Building Challenge) and AIA Seattle; in architecture firms like GGLO, LMN, Mithun, NBBJ, and Hybrid Architects and ORA Architects (winners of the 99K house competition); in media outfits like Publicola and Grist (and, of course, Worldchanging itself); and in a host of other great innovative projects. Writers, artists, designers, coders, engineers, ecologists, urbanists, food advocates, transportation geeks: Seattle has something just short of a bright green scenius emerging.

Perhaps even more importantly, these thinkers have a goal: carbon neutrality.

Now, it’s a little weird to write about the goal of the entire city of Seattle becoming carbon-neutral by 2030, since I’m the one who proposed it last Fall. I’m saved from immodesty by the fact that it’s no longer my goal at all: I’m pretty much superfluous to the carbon neutrality movement at this point. The goal is now on its way to becoming official city policy, driven by hundreds of smart, dedicated advocates and a responsive City Council (especially Council President Richard Conlin and Council member Mike O’Brien [disclosure: I campaigned for both of them as a private individual]). Carbon neutrality hearings are packed. Asked to form public teams and present recommendations for action, scores of leading citizens stepped up and just two weeks ago presented guidance on everything from zero waste to transit-oriented development policies. There is serious public momentum behind the effort, of a kind perhaps unmatched by any other North American city right now.

Smart people, a bold and necessary goal, and momentum: that’s a recipe for real change. Seattle’s well positioned to take leadership on thinking through the full implications of a bright green future. Which is good, because here’s Ecotopia’s dirty little secret: all the region’s cities are anything but sustainable, now.

Urbanites from Whistler to Monterey tend to overlook the importance of scope, scale and speed when we think about the strides we’ve made in sustainability. We like to ride our bikes (or talk about it at least), buy our local organic food, mention the latest green building, donate to environmental groups, go hiking or kayaking on the weekends. Yet the simple fact is that our lives are profoundly unsustainable, both in the sense that if everyone on the planet lived like we do, our combined impact would be catastrophic, and in the sense that the cities we’ve built are extremely vulnerable to the climate chaos, resource disruptions and economic turbulence we know lies just ahead. Our cities as they are now cannot last, period.

The region’s cities have achieved a small fraction of what they need to accomplish, and time’s running out. Current climate goals demand that the developed world be essentially climate neutral by 2050 in order to facilitate a 80% total global reduction in emissions and have any chance of stabilizing CO2 at 450 ppm — but a swelling number of climate scientists are shouting that even that goal is far too lax and our progress towards it too slow. Our observable emissions have been rising faster than predicted. Our existing national commitments are too weak to save us from a 4 degree Celsius rise. What’s more, our models have failed to take into account rapid and huge climate feedbacks we may be seeing, like the melting of the Arctic permafrost already underway. I suspect now that a realistic climate strategy — if by realistic we mean “one that won’t leave our grandchildren a catastrophic hell” — is something much more like carbon neutrality in the developed world by 2040, and worldwide by 2050, with a global goal of stabilizing greenhouse gasses at 350 ppm.

To do that, we need to rapidly decouple prosperity from pollution. Bill Gates is the most notable leader to take up the cause of a climate neutral economy this year, but thousands of others are seeing the outlines of the economy of the future in zero emissions technologies and designs. We know it is possible to build that economy. We also know that cities are the best leverage point we have for doing it. At the city level, systems are big enough to make a difference on big problems like climate change and materials depletion, yet small enough to grasp. If carbon-neutrality is going to happen, it’ll be lead by cities.

In short, we need trailblazing cities. That’s why we need cities that are willing to commit to carbon neutrality and back up their talk with funded plans and strong policies: establishing the greenest building codes in the world, rapidly reducing vehicle miles traveled per person, participating in regional foodshed protection, building green infrastructure. Perhaps most important are strong incentives for transit-oriented development, the political courage to override NIMBY opposition to compact communities and the willingness to massively shift money away from auto infrastructure and towards transit and complete streets (a shift Seattle’s Mayor, Mike McGinn, is a strong advocate for). All that coupled with a shift of philanthropic funding to support more political advocacy for urban needs, increased networking of urbanist interests, and more venture capital for design innovations — walkshed technologies and bright green industries — will make carbon neutrality not just a dream but a hard, achievable target.

For our region, the wealthiest and most naturally abundant corner of the Earth, anything less than that ambition tars us all with a profound moral failure. We have a chance, right now, to help lead the world in redefining what urban life can mean. No amount of virtuous living, not even a tidal wave of small steps, will make up for that lost opportunity, if in fact we lose it. Without action that responds to the scope, scale and speed of the challenges we face, nothing else much matters.

Seattle may well lag behind the rest of region in implementing change, but it stands on the threshold of taking a step that’s perhaps more important: committing to the right goals, and throwing the muscle behind those goals to set real, systemic change in motion.

Feature image of the Seattle waterfront courtesy of WSDOT via The Architect’s Newspaper.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Features at 12:00 PM)

It’s geek bait, really: a new study purports to solve transportation problems by using network models to let traffic lights self-organize into an optimal pattern. Over the last week, the blogosphere’s been buzzing a bit about the idea:

We’re fixed on the idea that lights should cycle on and off in a regular and predictable way, but this idea, they say, is unnecessarily restrictive. And less orderly patterns could be far more efficient… making traffic jams far less frequent.

Jams can arise, obviously, if traffic entering a road overloads its capacity. To avoid this, Helbing and Lämmer gave each set of lights sensors that feed information about the traffic conditions at a given moment into a computer chip, which then calculates the flow of vehicles expected in the near future. It also works out how long the lights should stay green in order to clear the road and thereby relieve the pressure. In this way, each set of lights can estimate for itself how best to adapt to the conditions expected at the next moment.

The problem is, great streets have many jobs, and moving cars is only one of them. Nothing is said here about the effects of this system on pedestrians or bicyclists. Indeed, no mention is even made of the fact that in many urban settings, cars moving at slower speeds makes everyone much safer (since cars moving faster get in more accidents, while drivers hitting pedestrians are much more likely to kill them when driving 40 miles-per-hour than 20). What optimizes an urban landscape for drivers may in fact make it dangerous, unpleasant, even unworkable for other people using the streets. Indeed, I suspect it’s likely that this system is the very opposite of deep walkability.

Seeing only nails, traffic engineers scramble to build a better hammer. The problem may be with the very job description traffic engineer, an outmoded concept which seems to define the responsibilities of those planning our roads only by the speed of the cars passing over them.

What we need are planners who see land use, housing, transportation and quality of life as interwoven aspects of the same system, and plan accordingly. We can’t build bright green cities by hacking the stoplights.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Transportation at 1:34 PM)

We’ve been covered passive houses and super energy efficiency in architecture for years, and I’ve noted with puzzlement the huge gap in green building standards between the U.S. and Canada (where LEED is often seen as the state of the art) and Europe (where the German Passivhaus standard, Bill Dunster’s ZED buildings and other comparable innovations have begun to become widespread).

So it was refreshing to see that gap explored (with a nod to bright green thinking in the headline, to boot) in today’s New York Times:

A so-called passive home like the one the Landaus are now building is so purposefully designed and built — from its orientation toward the sun and superthick insulation to its algorithmic design and virtually unbroken air envelope — that it requires minimal heating, even in chilly New England. Contrary to some naysayers’ concerns, the Landaus’ timber-frame home will be neither stuffy nor, at 2,000 square feet, oppressively small.

It has been a good deal more expensive to build, however, than the average home. That might partly explain why the passive-building standard is only now getting off the ground in the United States — despite years of data suggesting that America’s drafty building methods account for as much as 40 percent of its primary energy use, 70 percent of its electricity consumption and nearly 40 percent of its carbon-dioxide emissions.

The struggles the family profiled in the piece went through to get their home designed and permitted reflect the problems bright green innovations face on many front throughout North America. Though most North Americans don’t realize it, in many ways the U.S. and Canada are now far behind the curve, not only in green building, but in urban development, product design, clean energy and so on. We need to reinvent our material civilization if we’re to have any hope of reaching carbon neutrality, of course; but failing to do so also means missing out on the industries of the future, while Europe, Japan and China charge forward.

One of our board members, Rob Harrison, is an architect specializing in passive house design and sustainable building. I’m sure he’d be willing to answer questions, and engage in a dialogue about what green building could mean in the U.S. and Canada.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Green Building at 9:42 AM)