Yes, it is all one word, do not adjust your monitor. WorldChanging. I don’t remember the sequence of events, either I was checking out the WorldChanging web site and decided it was time to read An Inconvenient Truth, or I was reading the book and started to check out the web site. In either case, while reading An Inconvenient Truth, I decided to pick up WorldChanging (the book), which has a foreword by Al Gore (our greatest living President).
The book is subtitled, A User’s Guide to the 21st Century. Their mission, the book and the web site’s, is “to provide the tools, models, and ideas to create a bright green future.” This includes ideas about preserving our environment, lowering your carbon footprint, etc. - but WorldChanging also considers social justice issues. It’s pretty groovy. But this isn’t your father’s smoke-dope-in-the-desert-free-love- -and-macrame-your-own-underpants-style kumbaya environmental movement we’re talking about.
The book is divided into seven sections that move outward from the personal and immediate to the global. The sections are called: stuff, shelter, cities, community, business, politics, and planet. The book is 600 pages (on recycled paper), so there’s lots of stuff to mull over.
Each section has a jillion small articles about anything and everything. It’s a great resource and may work best as a comprehensive reference document for how achieve that “bright green” future. The book is hopeful and upbeat, as the “bright green” future terminology implies. The authors fully believe that we have the technology and the ability to shape a world that is sustainable and equitable. (Social Justice also plays an important role in the WorldChanging world view.)
The book’s approach is also relatively guilt-free. There are a lot of ideas presented, pick those that will work for you and follow through. Easy. Of course, if you drive a Hummer, you’re still a craphead. No getting around it. Sorry.
If you left An Inconvenient Truth feeling hopeless and guilty, this may be the book for you. I highly recommend this book for all you right-thinking positive cats out there. It would also make a spectacular gift for that totally “aware” chick or dude in your life. Proceeds support the WorldChanging org.
January 25th, 2007 at 9:57 am
Great post. Serious subject matter. Will check out the book. (Need all the help I can get.)
But - I am still laughing at the line, “your father’s smoke-dope-in-the-desert-free-love- -and-macrame-your-own-underpants-style kumbaya environmental movement we’re talking about.”
Well done. What a mind.
January 25th, 2007 at 10:30 am
Ditto the laughter over the other Beth’s favorite line.
I’ll have to pick this up. And will you sneer at me when I admit that I want it because it’s also pretty?
January 25th, 2007 at 11:31 am
Al Gore reminds me of The Firesign Theatre’s line about Ben Franklin: “The only President of the United States who was never President of the United States.”
This sounds like a great book to have, and “An Inconvenient Truth” is next on my Netflix queue.
And since I’m a little older than most of the BGB crowd, that would be my brother, not my father.
January 25th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
Of course, feel free to continue to macrame your own underpants if that’s your thing.
ATL Beth: I won’t hold it against you. Good design is part of the new way of doing business. There’s no point making good earth-friendly things that no one wants because they are hideous.