The analysis and interpretation of increase in average temperature of the Earth’s near-surface air and the oceans since mid-twentieth century and its projected continuation— Wikipedia
I have a few thoughts about what’s next for climate action in the U.S.
In the wake of yesterday’s devastating announcement that the U.S. Senate will not be advancing a climate bill, of any kind, there’s been a crash of morale across the spectrum of American environmentalists, climate advocates and bright green business types. And, yes, the Senate and the President have shown an extreme degree of moral cowardice on what is one of the most important issues ever to face our nation. Advocates who’ve spent years of their time and huge portions of their limited resources fighting for a climate bill have every right to be down.
But not to stay down. We already know what the next big battleground in this fight will be: the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA, it’s worth remembering, has the right — confirmed by the U.S Supreme Court — to regulate greenhouse gasses as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. That makes it both our next best hope… and the neoconservatives’ next target.
The stakes are high. The EPA has enormous capacity to create change, if the President were to direct it and act boldly. A recent study suggests that better Federal regulations on electricity generation, auto standards, landfills and appliances could spur a 22% reduction in greenhouse gasses by 2030. That figure, however, almost certainly low-balls the Federal government’s total capacity to make change, especially if it ties in policies that impact land use and transportation (not just fuel standards for cars). A climate-focused EPA, backed by a clean energy and smart-growth focused Administration, might actually do significantly more to build a thriving bright green economy than a milquetoast climate bill.
That’s why the minions of coal, oil and car companies are already gunning for the EPA, and we can bet that we have yet to see the full force of their hate machine turned on the EPA and its allies. That’s why it’s absolutely critical that the EPA not only be lobbied and pressured, but defended.
The best defense, I think, is celebration. The EPA is a great American institution. It has a terrific, and particularly American, story to tell about leadership in the face of environmental crisis. The EPA should be something every American values. It should be a source of national pride. Attacking the EPA is like stomping on the flag, or should be. That’s why the next big fight in the climate war is a cultural one: help the American people fall in love with the EPA.
Because the environmental movement is largely made up of technocrats — lawyers, scientists, policy activists — it often forgets the power of story. It needs to relearn, and fast, because this is a moment when policy matters a lot less than narrative.
How the American people react to attacks on the EPA will depend almost entirely on what they think the story of the EPA is. And that is subject to influence. Stories that celebrate the EPA and the Clean Air Act and their heroes and accomplishments can hep people understand why they value what the Agency has achieved (which is, after all, a heroic set of acts, as bold in their inception and for their time as putting a man on the moon).
There’s even a fabulous occasion to build on: the coming 40th anniversary of the founding of the EPA (by a Republican, Richard Nixon) on December 2nd, 1970. That’s a golden opportunity. The EPA is the nation’s environmental defense department, protecting us against pollution and planetary disasters: it ought to be celebrated with flag-waving and fireworks.
There ought to be a nationwide effort to celebrate the EPA and tell memorable stories of its successes. That effort should include strategic communications work in the next few months, pitching magazines and TV shows that have long lead-times to cover the anniversary, and offering helpful resources for telling one of America’s greatest success stories. (One thing in particular that ought to be done immediately is gathering interviews with old-guard Republicans who helped create the EPA; getting it on the record that this was a bi-partisan achievement, and something Americans of all stripes can support).
That effort should be followed by funding efforts through all levels of media, down to small-town rural America, to have locally respected figures share stories about things that are better now because the EPA acted then. Money and training should be provided especially to allies in red states to help get the story out. Church groups could be asked to celebrate the kind of caring for the vulnerable and for creation that the EPA represents. Hunting and fishing conservationists could remind their constituencies of the important roles the EPA has played in reducing rural pollution, keeping waterways clean and arguing for the preservation of habitat. There’s a lot to value about the EPA even if you’re a conservative, rural person.
Major tellings of the EPA story, from a PBS documentary to a Smithsonian show, should be encouraged, pushed, even directly commissioned if needed. Talks should be scheduled. Op-eds by leading thinkers solicited and placed. Holding the nation’s intellectual high ground still matters, especially in parts of red state America where hipper, more urban media have no reach.
Popular ideas channels should be courted. How about a “TEDxEPA” for the first week in December? How about a multi-group blogging effort putting out a story a day about the EPA, its history and its plans? How about getting the EPA’s Twitter feed (I assume it has one) picked as a suggested feed for a month, launching a ten-million-strong fans of the EPA campaign on Facebook, holding a big-prize video competition on YouTube? We’ve all seen the tactics, but when was the last time we saw them applied to celebrate a government agency?
Emergency efforts ought to be kicked into gear to help university students understand the EPA, and why they should support it. Campus action networks should be organizing everything from birthday parties to academic seminars about the EPA this fall. Those of us who are a bit older need to remember that for today’s college students, the founding of the EPA is ancient history, happening sometime between the emancipation proclamation and the emergence of Lady Gaga. They need to be given stories that help them understand why the EPA, and more importantly, the American environmental movement as a whole, is on their side.
A rapid-response network should be set in place to counter right wing lies about the EPA, to keep pressure on editors and journalists who run stories that lack integrity, to counter the Carbon Lobby’s latest talking points quickly.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Cultural outreach. Storytelling. Ideas-sharing. Celebration. Artistic competitions. Most of all, a huge strategic communications effort, starting yesterday, to brand the EPA as a great American institution on the side of the little guy: a patriotic success story about protecting average Americans and their kids from corporate polluters.
Bullet-proof the EPA with the love of the American people, and we may avoid a climate catastrophe yet.
I am the child of hippies. I have spent a fair bit of time in country places with solar panels and generators, composting toilets (or outhouses), water tanks and hoses and gardens, self-built homes and hacked pick-up trucks and home-made furniture. I was even born into a group of people who have owned and cared for and tried to restore a big piece of land in rural Northern California since the early 1970s; it’s a place I love deeply. I harbor the occasional fantasy about running off to that land to live. In some ways, I expect that I’m a perfect target reader for Nick Rosen’s new book, Off the Grid.
The story Rosen tells in Off the Grid is an old one, and a quintessentially North American one, that of the noble soul stepping away from the entanglements of modern life, going back to the land and getting off-the-grid. By ‘the grid’ here — and it almost begs ominous capitalization, The Grid — we are of course meant to understand not just wires and pipes, but also the corporations and wealthy men who control them, and the demands they place on us of conformity and servile obedience. In other words, one of the main problems with The Grid is that it’s owned by the The Man. Therefore, getting away from connection to The Grid is a primary step towards freedom (indeed, the tagline for Rosen’s site about off-grid living is “free yourself”). If you already got that idea, say, because your parents belonged to co-ops and left copies of the old Whole Earth Catalogs lying around the house, there’s not much to learn at that level from Rosen’s book.
That said, if you are planning to one day go back to the land yourself, you’ll probably love his book. It’s full of great anecdotes and characters, and the author clearly admires and gets the back-to-the-landers he writes about. Rosen also does a good job of explaining the political fights still facing those who want to make their own homes, produce their own energy and live their own way; and he does a fairly good job of sampling the current thinking about how best to live the off-the-grid life.
What I was hoping for, though, was something he definitely doesn’t offer, which is a glimpse of what a truly sustainable rural North American life might be like. If going back to the land is anything other than escapism, it has to be part of a larger movement to heal the country and the backcountry. For, right now, the state of rural North America is not sound. As I wrote earlier:
Rural North America is in sad shape. Rural poverty is perhaps even more startling than urban poverty these days, and the lack of jobs, education, health and financial resources is much more pronounced in rural areas. Virtually every measurement of human well-being is worse in rural counties (at least working rural counties, rather than rural suburbs) than in urban counties. Already, huge swathes of rural America are green and leafy ghettos, complete with welfare dependencies and drug addictions.
If managing in a catastrophe were just about growing your own food, many (but not all) rural people would probably be just fine. If it were about repairing your machines, maintaining your roof, keeping the well running, a good many rural people would be okay. But there’s a lot more than that involved in running the kind of society we all demand, things like public health systems, communications systems, transportation infrastructure, energy supplies, banking and finance, good governance innovations, an effective legal system, etc. Places with these systems do a heck of a lot better than places without them, and these are systems many communities are in a poor position to provide for themselves. In much of rural America, those systems aren’t even working very well today.
Going off-the-grid in rural areas needs to be, if it has any worldchanging aspirations, a part of improving that situation. That means, it needs to be based in thoughts about how it can help address systemic problems, especially in the United States where rural areas seem to suffer from a few major structural problems that make them less resilient than they deserve to be, and far less sustainable than some of us would like to think. Here are five examples of some of those major challenges in need of systemic solutions:
The first is that most rural areas have been run as resource colonies for most of their histories. An outside source of capital — the railroad, the coal company, the timber company, the Feds — came in and established the core infrastructure for the provision of a needed resource (corn, coal, boards, hydropower, whatever) to a distant urban market. The people who live in these resource colonies generally have little ownership and less control over either the resources or the infrastructure for delivering them to market. Generally, the result has been the economic necessity of exploiting those resources in unsustainable ways, weather it’s blowing up mountains to get at the coal beneath or strip-mining topsoil to maximize crop yields. The way most of rural North America runs right now is flatly unsustainable.
The second is that rural people and places are poor. That, in turn, means they lack capital. With the destruction of America’s small town banks and thrifts (you may remember the savings and loan crisis, the last big financial looting spree?), even the capital that had been accumulated was stolen away. It’s very hard to make significant changes without capital, and most of the countryside has no access to it: indeed, much of small town and farm America is leveraged up to its neck, contributing to the on-going farm crisis.
The third is that country life is massively subsidized. The roads, levies, water supplies and railroads that make rural life possible in North America are almost all tax-payer supported (indeed, there is a net outflow of tax dollars from urban areas to rural areas in both the U.S. and Canada). Of course, most of those subsidies have been set up to benefit the kinds of resource extraction efforts mentioned above — but rural life would become very much more difficult in many places if those subsidies were removed. Long expensive supply lines make places vulnerable in chaotic economic times.
The fourth is that much of the heartland of the United States and Canada seems particularly vulnerable to climate change and other environmental disruptions. Weather extremes, including prolonged heat waves and droughts, are predicted by some scientists to be at their worst in the Southwest and Great Plains. Climate shifts are already causing havoc with pollinators, leading to outbreaks of invasive species, devastating forests with pests, worsening floods and storms, and generally messing with the fundaments upon whose stability many communities are built. Already, the Southwest is essentially out of water, for instance.
The fifth is that rural life is extremely energy intense, especially in terms of oil, and we know that oil in particular, and energy in general, are about to get a lot more expensive. Here we need to acknowledge a side trend, which is exurban living in rural places. A significant number of people living in rural areas are living essentially suburban lives in a rural setting. They are not providing for most of their own needs; rather they’re just depending on very long supply lines to live consumer lives with prettier views (hence the joke “When you move out to the country you move into a car”). These lives in particular are the most vulnerable and least sustainable, yet also, paradoxically the most needed in many communities, since it’s these exurban residents who often bring needed professional and technical skills and capital back to rural areas (I read not too long ago about the trend of semi-retired doctors opening clinics in small towns, often providing people’s only access to primary care).
So, set up as resource colonies, poor, tax-subsidized, vulnerable to climate change and peak oil: what’s a rural community to do?
That’s a question I’d really like to hear smart, non-nostalgic answers to. It’s a question I hoped to find some answers to in Rosen’s book.
Unfortunately, it becomes clear by the end of Off the Grid that Rosen doesn’t actually really understand the problems facing rural North America, and has a fuzzy, romantic notion of what problems going off-the-grid actually solves. For instance, he is clearly not aware of the last decade or so of sustainability research:
“I’m not convinced that big, dense cities are greener than… lower-density towns and suburbs, where the bulk of Americans live. …Vast amounts of gas are used to bring in food from around the country, and the same buses and trains that liberate commuters from their cars are still energy intensive and polluting.”
Understanding why bright green urban living currently offers the best pathway to sustainable prosperity is a necessary precursor to beginning to imagine what its rural counterpart might look like. We simply know more about how to live a prosperous-yet-low-impact urban life than we do about how to live a rural life of equal prosperity with a small ecological footprint. It’s counter-intuitive, but true. If we assume that a family wants a North American middle-class level of comfort, consumer affluence, access to services and interaction with others, it’s currently much easier to provide them sustainably in an urban setting than any other. We have so far failed to imagine sustainable prosperity in a rural setting.
I can imagine cities that are intimately and equitably connected to not just their municipal watersheds, but their foodsheds and fibersheds as well. Cities which regarded themselves as part of an urban-rural fabric, and regarded the country people with whom they were enmeshed as partners in a way of life, instead of just mostly invisible poor people who grew their food and cut their trees. Some people bringing cultural interpenetration to that system — essentially urban people living off-the-grid in the country; essentially rural people bringing some agriculture and forestry into the cities — might really help strengthen those connections (indeed, at the moment, they’re basically the only people keeping those connections alive).
I’d really like to read a smart book about how those connections might be grown and strengthened and made more resilient in the face of the kind of dramatic changes unfolding around us. I’d really like to read a book about the systems-level innovations we’d need to do that: policies, financial models, new designs, etc. I’d really like to read a book about how it might feel to live in a world where city and countryside felt themselves to be part of the same fabric, with mutual respect and affection.
Unfortunately, I haven’t seen that book yet. We need it.
Global media thinker, writer and former Worldchanging board chair Ethan Zuckerman just gave a TED talk on the importance of seeking out global information in order to be better able to think about global issues:
Way to go, Ethan! Below you can find Ethan’s notes and slides from his talk in full. Additionally, Ethan has been doing quite a bit of blogging on other presenters at TED Global 2010. His posts are well worth reading, please visit these links for more:
Here are my notes – I can’t promise that what I say on stage will bear any resemblance to this, but this is what I’d planned to say. The slides are available at Slideshare.
As an American, I try to avoid forms of football that don’t involve men larger than me tackling each other, but it’s been hard to avoid the 2010 World Cup – when I go on Twitter, there’s been lots of unfamiliar terms in the trending topics list: “Vuvuzela,” “Furia Roja,” “Octopus”…
For a couple of weeks, the leading topic on Twitter was “Cala Boca Galvao”. Being a monolingual American, I obviously didn’t know what this meant. Fortunately, a number of helpful Brazilian Twitterers were happy to enlighten me. They explained that “Cala Boca Galvao” actually means “Save the Galvao” and was the rallying cry for an international campaign to save the rare Galvao bird…
which is in grave danger of extinction (this video helps explain the bird’s plight – it’s very much worth your time).
Actually, it’s a very sad situation – the Galvao bird isn’t just very beautiful, it’s evidently got narcotic properties, which have led some troubled individuals to engage in shocking acts of Galvao abuse.
Fortunately, people are stepping up to help. Lady Gaga has evidently released a new single – actually, several new singles – titled “Cala Boca Galvao”.
And as it turns out that the reason so many people were twittering “Cala Boca Galvao” – and the reason I should tweet it as well – is that ten cents would be given to the foundation to save the Galvao if I did so.
This was, of course, a prank – a very successful one. There’s no Galvao bird, no donations, no new Lady Gaga single, and I can’t speak to what Diego Maradona may or may not be snorting. Galvao Bueno is the football commentator on Rede Global, and his commentary evidently annoyed the Brazilian Twitter users enough that they organized a campaign to tell him to shut up: “cala a boca” means “shut your mouth”.
There’s a couple of lessons to take from this story. One is that the Brazilians are threatening to take the lead from the Americans and the Japanese in terms of engineering new internet memes, which might mean more inexplicable capoeira jokes and fewer Pokemon references, which can only be a good thing.
And it’s a reminder that you can’t go wrong online asking people to join your protest – no matter how silly it is – so long as all they have to do is cut and paste a phrase.
But the lesson I’d like to point out is that the world is much wider than we generally perceive it to be.
About 170 million people visit Twitter each month, and 19m (11.2%) are Brazilian. More than one in ten Brazilian internet users visits Twitter each month, which is a higher proportion than in most nations – of the big internet using nations, the only one with a higher percent of people using the tool is Japan.
There are millions of Japanese and Brazilian people on Twitter. If that seems surprising to you, it’s because most of your friends online aren’t Japanese or Brazilian. Twitter conducted a phone survey that revealed a quarter of their US users are African American… which was pretty surprising to most American users, who assumed that Twitter was just used by nerdy white guys.
What’s so surprising about this is that a picture of African-American Twitter is just a click away – Twitter’s trending topics usually aren’t about the world cup – they’re often conversations led by African-American Twitter users. Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg – a pair of visualization experts who created IBM’s ManyEyes software – examined a set of Twitter tags over a weekend in May and discovered that there’s a heavy degree of racial segregation in Twitter use… and not just in ways you’d expect – “cookout” was a term mostly used by black Twitterers, and “oil spill” was a predominantly white topic.
Tools like Twitter – tools that give us a view of the world through our friends – can trap us within what my friend Eli Pariser calls “filter bubbles” – the internet is too big to understand as a whole, so we get a picture of it’s that’s similar to what our friends see. If our friends are Brazilian, or know some Brazilians, perhaps we got the joke about Cala Boca Galvao very quickly – if not, we miss it. The wider world is a click away, but whether we mean to or not, we’re usually filtering it out.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to work.
In 1995, Nicholas Negroponte, then the director of MIT’s Media Lab, began his book “Being Digital” with a story of how atoms are different than bits. He’s attending a meeting on the future of the US technology industry, and he can’t get his head around the idea that the water on the table in Florida is from Evian, France – someone’s gone through great trouble to move these heavy glass bottles filled with heavy French water all the way to the US. The future isn’t about moving, selling and trading these heavy atoms – it’s about the movement of weightless, speedy bits.
On this point, it turns out that Negroponte was wrong. In 2010, it’s frequently the case that atoms are more mobile than bits.
Fiji Water is now challenging Evian for leadership in the American “imported bottled water” category – and I’ll spare you the rant about the absurdity of that particular category – and simply mention that you’re a hell of a lot more likely to encounter water from Fiji on any given day in the US than you are to encounter news from Fiji, never mind film or music from Fiji, despite acute political injustice taking place in the country.
The infrastructures of a globalized world lead us to believe that we’re living in a flat, Friedmanesque world. From London, Bangalore’s just one hop away, and Suva’s just a hop further.
Once we stop looking at the infrastructure – the roads, the air routes, the shipping lanes, the cables – and start looking at the flows of traffic, it becomes very clear that some parts of the world are far more connected than others. Globalization is unequally distributed. London and New York are a whole lot closer than Johannesburg and Rio.
I’ve spent much of the last decade studying how news media pays attention to the world, because there’s a phenomenon I find deeply unsettling.
When I was growing up in the US the 1970s, 35-40% of an average nightly newscast focused on international stories. The percentage of international news in an average newscast now 12-15%.
As Alisa Miller, the president of Public Radio International, pointed out in a TED talk in 2008, this can lead to a rather distorted picture of the world. The image her talk centers on is a cartogram – it’s a map that’s been distorted to display a variable, scaling a nation in terms of the media attention it’s received.The attention to the US, and to a very small set of other nations, creates a few bulges of interest and vast areas of no coverage at all.
Before you dismiss this as being merely a problem of American television news – which I agree is dreadful – let me tell you that I’m seeing the same phenomenon in top quality American newspapers like the New York Times, which pays far closer attention to wealthy nations than to poor ones, which means that you’re more than 8 times as likely to find a story on Japan in the Times as you are one on Nigeria, despite the fact that the countries have comparable populations
Most media I’ve mapped show this GDP bias. The BBC shows a different bias – the coverage of poor countries that used to be part of the British Empire is excellent, while the coverage of those that weren’t formerly pink on the map tends to be weak.
My hope was that the rise of the internet and digital media would mean we’d see a wider picture of the world because it’s so much easier to report from overseas than it was three decades ago – instead of shipping film footage from a war zone to the UK to have it developed and then broadcast, you can post video to YouTube.
There are notable exceptions – bloggers paid very close attention to the green movement in Iran, for example – but my research suggests that the most popular bloggers are at least as tighly focused on these wealthy, high attention countries as mainstream media. There’s lots of bloggers from the developing world online – infrastructure – but very little attention – flow – going to their sites.
And the media we’re collectively creating on sites like Wikipedia shows these sorts of biases as well – this is a study done by Mark Graham at the Oxford Internet Institute down the road, showing articles on Wikipedia that have geocoding information. It gives a sense for some of the geographic biases we see on Wikipedia as a whole, and the strength and weakness of the project in covering different parts of the world, though it’s not the same as a map of all articles by geography in Wikipedia and may overstate the disparities I’m trying to point out here.
The promise of the internet – the idea that everything is just a click a way – is that, here in Britain I can read newspapers from Australia, India, Nigeria, Ghana, Canada, at no cost and end up with a wider view of the world. The truth is that – on average – I won’t. I analyzed data from Doubleclick Ad Planner, looking at the top 50 news sites in each of thirty countries – in the UK, over 95% of traffic to the most popular news sites is to domestic sites. It’s one of those rare cases where the US can accuse the UK of being more parochial than we are – we like the BBC, the Telegraph, the Guardian, and as much as 6% of our news readership is of British media. But it’s not just the US or the UK – you’ll see that 94% of news read by Indian internet users – who are on average a lot wealthier, worldlier and English-literate than the average Indian citizen – spend 94% of their time on domestic news sites.
It’s data like this that’s leading me to conclude that the internet isn’t flattening the world the way Nicholas Negroponte thought it would. Instead, my fear is that it’s making us “imaginary cosmopolitans”. We think we’re getting a broad view of the world because it’s possible that our television, newspapers and internet could be giving us a vastly wider picture than was available for our parents or grandparents. When we look at what’s actually happening, our worldview might actually be narrowing.
Having this wider picture of the world is critical for global survival. In the course of four days at TED, we’re going to hear about problems like global warming, pandemic, collective security that can’t be solved by individuals or by nations acting alone – they’re global problems and they’re going to require global solutions. And because the theme of the conference is “The Good News”, it’s worth pointing out that the most exciting opportunities – to make a difference, to make something beautiful or to make a profit – are global in scale. We need to build solutions based on massive, transnational cooperation, which needs to begin with dialog that crosses linguistic, social, national lines
So here’s the good news – we’ve got the tools we need to do this, the infrastructure that could make the world a wider place. And we’re starting to figure out what we’d need to do to build connections around the world that are real, not theoretical.
For the last six years, one of the central joys of my life has been being part of the Global Voices community. This group of bloggers from around the world has been focused on reforming the world’s media by amplifying voices we don’t hear very often – the voices of people in the developing world who are expressing themselves online. You’ll be surprised, I’m sure, to learn that we haven’t yet reformed all of global media – it’s going to take a few more years, I suspect. But what we’ve learned is that there’s a couple of techniques that are critically important if you want to get a picture of a wider world – and more importantly, if you want to build tools, systems and institutions that help people experience a wider world – these turn out to be helpful tools
Cast a Wider Net: Raising Voices
First, it’s worth remembering that the world wide web is hardly worldwide. This composite picture of the earth at night is now a decade old, but it still serves as a pretty good portrait of the 1.8 billion people who are online and the 4.8 billion who aren’t. (This image, by the way, appears to be a mandatory part of each TED conference – I just hope I’ll be the first to show it this year…)
Those dark spots on the map aren’t silent – they just tend not to be well represented in the world’s media. Through Global Voices, I have a lot of friends in Madagascar, and I can tell you that one of the central annoyances in their lives is being better known for the Dreamworks film than for the natural wonders of their nation.
Foko Club didn’t start as a project to change international perceptions of Madagascar – it began as a club for high school students to learn English. That turned into a club for people interested in the internet, which became a blogger’s club, which spread nationwide.
Foko became something else in early 2009, when Malagasy politics descended into chaos as the mayor of the largest city, Antananarivo, overthrew the president with the backing of the military. The new government silenced most independent media, the online space was one of the few places where people could report on the demonstrations and suddenly the high school students associated with Foko were reporting breaking news with their blogs and cellphone cameras. If we want a wider world, we’d find ways to raise voices in places we don’t often hear from, like Madagascar
Here’s the trick – you probably don’t speak Malagasy. Even if you do, the internet is becoming a profoundly polyglot space, which means that, while there’s more content online every day, there’s a smaller percent of the internet that each of us, personally, has access to because more is in languages we don’t speak.
When we encounter words we don’t understand – either in the real world or the online world – we tend to ignore them. And the internet is wired to ignore them as well – search Google for “apple” and you might get Spanish language pages with the word “apple” in them, but you won’t get ones with the word “manzana” or “ringo.”
In their new web browser, Chrome, Google did something very smart and subtle – they detect the language of the page you’re looking at and offer to translate it for you. You can set the browser so that it always translates Chinese for you… which means that if you follow a link to a Chinese-language site, you don’t automatically hit the back button as soon as you see incomprehensible characters
The problem is that Google’s using machine translation, which is pretty impressive between English and French, and pretty painful between English and Chinese. What I want is a button that lets me request a human translation of a page I’m interested in and either pay someone via Mechanical Turk to publish that translation, or let a volunteer know that there’s someone who wants to read that page in translation.
It turns out that volunteers are capable of translating far more than you might imagine. This is Zhang Lei, who was living in the US during the run up to the Beijing olympics, when there was a lot of US media scrutiny focused on China’s human rights record in Tibet. Lei felt like the language barrier between Chinese and English speakers was leading to a lot of conflicts that were unnecessary, so he started organizing friends to take on the task of translating influential English-language media into English
Yeeyan’s got 150,000 registered volunteers, and they publish 50-100 articles each day, featuring content from The New York Times and sites like Read Write Web. Before they were briefly shut down by the Chinese government, they had a partnership with the Guardian to provide the official edition of that newspaper. So here’s my question: where’s the English-language version that’s giving us insights into what’s being said in Chinese media? If we want a wider world, we’ll take translation seriously, and work to make it routine, transparent and by default
Filter Failure: How Curators Overcome the Flock
So we can imagine a future where projects like Foko help us hear voices from all corners of the world, and where Yeeyan translates into languages we understand. How do we decide what to read?
The world’s far too big for any of us to experience personally, and the internet’s at least as overwhelming. YouTube recently announced that people are posting 24 hours of video each minute of each day – if you wanted to watch a day’s worth of videos, it would take you almost four years, and that’s without stopping to sleep, use the bathroom or get the psychotherapy you’d desperately need. We need filters so we can cope with all this information.
We tend to use two types of filters to manage the internet – search, which is great at telling us what we want to know, and social, which promises to tell us things that we don’t know we want to know. There’s a lot of people trying to engineer serendipity by taking advantage of the fact that not only are you on the internet, your friends are also on the internet. And if your friends – or just someone with similar interests – finds something that’s interesting, it might be a serendipitous discovery for you as well.
There’s just one problem with this method. Human beings are herd animals. Like birds of a feather, we flock together. And so what you see on a site like Reddit or Digg – or what links you get from your friends on Facebook or Twitter – is what the flock is seeing. The flock might help you find something that’s unexpected and helpful, but it’s not likely to find you something from halfway around the world.
Meet Amira Al-Hussaini. She’s the editor for the Middle East and North Africa for Global Voices, and she’s got one of the hardest jobs I know of, which is helping distill the chaos that is the middle eastern blogosphere into a couple stories we publish on the site. Oh, and she’s got to do it a way that makes the people she’s representing – Israelis and Palestinians, Syrians and Iraqis – feel represented fairly. But her toughest challenge is finding the story that’s going to capture your attention, either because it’s funny, or surreal, or moving or just beautifully told.
Helping you find things that are fascinating, but outside of your normal orbit is what a good DJ does, or a museum curator, or an editor. The people who are good at it are experts – they’ve got a deep understanding of what you know, what you don’t know and what you might like to know. It’s hard to automate – I think it might actually be impossible to automate – and that’s okay – the internet can superempower curators, letting them help much larger audiences stumble on serendipity. For a wider web, we need this third form of filtering – we need search, social, but we also need these shepherds to help us break out of our flocks and find different voices.
Putting it into Context: Bridge Figures
When we hear voices from under covered parts of the world, when we’re able to read voices in other languages, when skilled curators push us outside our comfort zones, we find can find ourselves in some unfamiliar territory.
This image is from of one of the internet’s best technology blogs, Afrigadget. The blog features a wide range of hackers on the African continent, from software developers to blacksmiths. The message of the blog isn’t to teach us how to make a cold chisel out of the drive shaft of a land rover – it’s to teach us something about how reuse can lead to creativity and how people innovate from constraint.
To get that sort of message, we need context for an image like this one. And for context, we need a guide.
Erik Hersman is the founder of the Afrigadget blog. He’s an American geek, who’s the COO of an award-winning and influential software company. He’s also an African. He was born in Southern Sudan, went to high school in Kenya, speaks fluent Swahili. He’s a guy who’s got one foot in each of two worlds, and he’s passionate about explaining each of those worlds to the other. Erik is a bridge figure, and he’s the rare individual who can get American geeks interested in Kenyan blacksmiths and vice versa, because he understands both worlds and can build links between the two.
If we want a wider world, we need to celebrate, recognize and amplify the influence of these bridge figures.
And we need people to walk across these bridges.
If I played linebacker in the NFL, I think I’d probably spend my off season nursing my wounds and spending my money. Dhani Jones spends his time traveling to different countries and finding different athletes to train with and learn from. He’s got a show on the Travel Channel that’s pretty remarkable – not just because it’s fascinating to watch a professional athlete learn the skills required to play water polo or fight muy thai. It’s fascinating because Dhani is somehow able to project a sense of openness, good humor and approachability that lets people connect with him in whatever country he’s visiting.
Dhani’s a xenophile – a person who puts in the hard work needed to cross bridges and interact with a wider world. I watch him because he’s an inspiration as well as a teacher as I learn how to experience the world in all its diversity and complexity.
My challenge to you in this room isn’t just to be a xenophile or to be a bridge – most of you already are, or you wouldn’t be at a conference focused on ideas from around the globe. My challenge is this – help me figure out how we build the new tools, reform the educational systems, immigration systems and government as a whole so that we empower the people who want to make the world wider. How do we cultivate xenophiles, celebrate bridge builders and rewire the media so we’re experiencing a wide world and not just our flock? That’s what I’m working on and I’d love your help.
Two stories I came across yesterday struck me as particularly indicative of the gulf between the speed at which global change is unfolding and our perceptions of the urgency of the issues. There’s often a presumption that we have decades to change (so change can begin gradually) and decades more before we have to worry about impacts. The evidence, though, increasingly points to a much shorter horizon for action and adaptation.
The first story reports on a big Stanford study which combined the latest suite of climate models to understand how climate change already under way is likely to affect the hottest extremes of weather in the Western U.S.:
“The results were surprising. According to the climate models, an intense heat wave — equal to the longest on record from 1951 to 1999 — is likely to occur as many as five times between 2020 and 2029 over areas of the western and central United States. …
The Stanford team also forecast a dramatic spike in extreme seasonal temperatures during the current decade. Temperatures equaling the hottest season on record from 1951 to 1999 could occur four times between now and 2019 over much of the U.S., according to the researchers.
The 2020s and 2030s could be even hotter, particularly in the American West. From 2030 to 2039, most areas of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico could endure at least seven seasons equally as intense as the hottest season ever recorded between 1951 and 1999, the researchers concluded.
“Frankly, I was expecting that we’d see large temperature increases later this century with higher greenhouse gas levels and global warming,” Diffenbaugh said. “I did not expect to see anything this large within the next three decades. This was definitely a surprise.”
The second story told of a new report from the venerable insurance company Lloyd’s of London and the Royal Institute of International Affairs (often called Chatham House) finding that Peak Oil, rising global demand for energy and the need for emissions reductions (not to mention the vulnerability of energy infrastructure to climate change and political turmoil) are very likely to bring big shifts in energy prices in the relatively short term:
The review is groundbreaking because it comes from the heart of the City and contains the kind of dire warnings that are more associated with environmental groups or others accused by critics of resorting to hype. It takes a pot shot at the International Energy Agency which has been under fire for apparently under-estimating the threats, noting: “IEA expectations [on crude output] over the last decade have generally gone unmet.”
The report the world is heading for a global oil supply crunch and high prices owing to insufficient investment in oil production plus a rebound in global demand following recession. It repeats warning from Professor Paul Stevens, a former economist from Dundee University, at an earlier Chatham House conference that lack of oil by 2013 could force the price of crude above $200 (£130) a barrel.
You can read the Lloyd’s/Chatham House report directly here.
Both of these studies bear further examination and debate, of course, but the overall trend which I see them contributing to has become increasingly clear: a growing chorus of those tasked most explicitly with responsibility for our future — doctors, generals, diplomats, scientists — all telling us that when it comes to planetary crisis, the future is now.
Contrast that urgency with the political debate in most countries. What we see is an appalling gap between our elected leaders’ perception that these are problems for future generations to solve and the reality that we’re already dealing with them today.
There’s a quote that’s been bouncing around the Worldchanging office recently: “When there’s a gap between perception and reality, more reality won’t close the gap.” The gap between the political perception of our problems being slow and distant and the reality of acceleration and imminence points again at the importance of stories that help change our perspectives on scope, scale and speed.
Is the new humanitarian design coming out of the U.S. and Europe being perceived through post-colonial eyes as colonialism? Are the American and European designers presuming too much in their attempt to do good?
What’s more, Nussbaum says, we ought to be focusing our efforts closer to home: “And finally, one last question: why are we only doing humanitarian design in Asia and Africa and not Native American reservations or rural areas, where standards of education, water and health match the very worst overseas?”
Of course, Emily Pilloton of Project Hhas shot right back, saying it is Nussbaum himself who is out of touch with the younger generation of humanitarian designers, designers who are well-aware of the cultural and political landscapes in which they’re working, and are in fact increasingly focused on problems closer to home:
It is only through this local engagement and shared investment that the humanitarian design process shines. It is through this personal connection to place and people that the human qualities of design rise to the top of the priority list, through which our clients are no longer beneficiaries, but experts and co-designers right there with us. In his infamous address titled “To Hell With Good Intentions,” Ivan Illich puts this beautifully: ‘If you have any sense of responsibility at all, stay with your riots here at home…You will know what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how to communicate with those to whom you speak. And you will know when you fail. If you insist on working with the poor, if this is your vocation, then at least work among the poor who can tell you to go to hell.’ We all have to learn how to be citizens again: citizens first, and designers second. Citizenship is inherently local, defined by our connection and commitment to the places we best know and most love.
In the last few days, there have been different takes on this debate from leading thinkers like Cameron Sinclair, Susan Szenasy and Robert Fabricant. Now, I have conflicts of interest all over the place here — Emily and Cameron are friends, I’ve sat on a panel and shared ideas with Susan, and Worldchanging’s discussing a project with Frog Design — so I’m not going to take sides, but I find the conversation extremely encouraging.
That said, some things are missing here, I think. In particular, the whole discussion has glanced over two critical realities: the scope, scale and speed of the planetary crisis we face, and the profoundly unequal distribution of access that exists to tools of innovation globally. I don’t have time to write a proper essay today, but I’d like to share a few thoughts.
Most of us in the Global North are out of touch with the scope, scale and speed of the problems we face. We live in a global civilization that can measure its life expectancy in decades if it continues to operate as it does today. We know that we’re straying beyond a series of non-negotiable ecological boundaries (the most obvious being the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere). The predicted consequences are profound in a way that’s difficult to fully grasp, but could well involve the complete collapse of large portions of human society and almost unimaginable suffering and destruction.
“This is not a small probability of a rather unattractive outcome,” as Lord Stern, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, reminds us. “This is a big probability of a very bad outcome.”
This planetary sustainability crisis is impossible to tackle unless the Global North redesigns its own prosperity to be at least carbon neutral (and probably actually carbon negative) by 2050. Because it takes time for innovations to spread and become universal, that 2050 goal, in turn, means innovating many of our urban land use, transportation and energy systems (as well as the products and services we use) to be carbon neutral by 2030. Zero impact is the only rational goal, and we need to be working towards it right now.
In addition, between two and four billion young people are expected to raise themselves into the global middle class in the Global South over the next 40 years, and billions more poorer people will have to find stable systems of survival in a rapidly changing world. The new global middle class can only adopt a bright green, climate-responsible model of prosperity if such a model is available when they need it. That forces us to confront a second planetary reality: the international distribution of problem-solving resources is profoundly unfair.
A gigantic imbalance in capacities and resources exists between the Global North and Global South. This is, obviously, not to argue that Southern designers, engineers and entrepreneurs are less capable (or less innovative) than their Northern counterparts. If anything, the evidence points to the opposite conclusion.
But in Northerners’ desires to avoid the pitfalls of cultural imperialism and the failed model of top-down aid (and, let’s be honest, to be seen to be down with other cultures), we go whistling past the mountainous reality of power inequality in our global society, and the extent to which, in a knowledge economy, that power is about the ability to generate and deploy ideas.
The Global North has the vast majority of the world’s finest universities, libraries and broadband connections. It has the lion’s share of the best-trained designers and professional innovators: there are probably more top-level product designers in New York than in all of India; probably more top-flight software engineers in the Bay Area than in all of Africa. That’s not even getting into corporate R+D labs, incubators, fellowships, internships and all the other capacity that spins off the design, technology and engineering industries: almost all of which are in the developed world.
What’s more, we know that innovation sparks from clusters of talented people in close proximity — from scenius — but it catches fire when exposed to capital, subjected to debate (in magazines, at conferences, on campuses) and connected to networks of other equally talented professionals in other fields. Most of those clusters are in the Global North; the remainder are in places (like Sao Paolo and Shanghai) that are already approaching “developed” status. Hotbeds, conferences and venture capital are not fairly distributed around the Earth.
It’s a harsh reality that the vast bulk of the world’s ability to solve system-scale problems is concentrated in wealthy countries. If a bright green model of prosperity is going to be invented in time for billions of young people to adopt it, big chunks of it will have to come from the Global North and be spread through partnerships between the North and South.
Obviously, complexities abound. Some of the world’s most innovative thinking is happening on “the edges” of the wealthy world, in newly emerging economies. The Global North often stifles innovation with outdated codes and regulation. Many designers in New York or London may mot have the foggiest clue what on-the-ground challenges present themselves in the cities of the Global South, and so lack the ability to design solutions at home that will have a broader value. Many people cannot afford to participate in the major capitalist forms of innovation diffusion. Furthermore, flowing innovations to the bottom billion is wrought with difficulties. Some nations suffer from a hipness invisibility (what some have called the Ninja Gap), which makes them unable to draw even the most modest notice from folks in a position to help them solve problems. Finally, the ability of experts operating in ignorance of context to screw a system or place up beyond recognition should never be underestimated.
Yet, yet, yet… the reality is that we inherited a broken future, and designing a better one is going to take the whole-hearted participation of hundreds of thousands of creative, innovative people in the cities of the Global North. It’s going to take grappling with remaking our own cities and systems into sustainably prosperous forms — and doing it with an eye to global realities, the need for innovation diffusion and the cultural minefields involved. It’s ultimately going to take redesigning (or at least reconsidering) pretty much everything about the way our cities work.
So, perhaps it’s worth shifting the debate a little to discuss the obligations of not just humanitarian designers, but all designers to design responsibly? Maybe presumption is less the problem than a lack of planetary thinking.
Image from Design for the First World, “The Rest Saving the West,” a competition commenting on the cultural presumptions of northern designers.
I am the child of hippies. I have spent a fair bit of time in country places with solar panels and generators, composting toilets (or outhouses), water tanks and hoses and gardens, self-built homes and hacked pick-up trucks and home-made furniture. I was even born into a group of people who have owned and cared for and tried to restore a big piece of land in rural Northern California since the early 1970s; it’s a place I love deeply. I harbor the occasional fantasy about running off to that land to live. In some ways, I expect that I’m a perfect target reader for Nick Rosen’s new book, 
Bruce Nussbaum has stirred up a fierce debate with his new article 