WorldChanging Canada

Interview with Gregory Greene, Documentary Filmmaker

2009-11-14T18:37:49Z

Gregory Greene is a documentary filmmaker based in Toronto, who directed "The End of Suburbia" and "Escape from Suburbia".

Hassan Masum: What motivates you personally to spend your time making films?

Gregory Greene: When we first started doing “The End of Suburbia” back in May 2003, I lacked a focus. I’d been shooting travel shows and documentaries on a variety of different subjects, but I always felt that I hadn’t found my true path. When we first started doing “The End of Suburbia”, I really felt it resonate.

I had always been into ecology since I was in university, but peak oil brought all of these things into sharper focus, and actually gave us a timeline, and a real sense of immediacy that, at least for me, climate change as a motivator never really did. It does for other people, but never really did for me. It sort of got lost in a bunch of different issues, and mixed around.

And the fact that we were the first film to start exploring peak oil in any depth - being involved in that first iteration of it made me more interested, and kept bringing me in deeper and deeper. So my motivation is just a constant fascination with going deeper, and trying to figure out how we’re going to get through it.

HM: Now, a lot of people have these ideas in their mind, but few people actually make the step from thought to action. So what actually made you take action and make the movies?

GG: Well, the first one... I mean, it just happened. The first documentary just happened. I collaborated with another fellow who is an editor, I was a director-cameraman, and so we just came together and we did it. It took about a year, and we were looking for a producer and we were looking for a broadcaster, and everybody kept saying to us, “What’s the answer? You’ve presented the problem; what’s the answer?” We kept saying, “Well, there is no answer!” I mean, there’s different answers, but there’s no one answer.

We stayed very independent. And I think being independent kept it fresh for us, and keeping it fresh keeps you motivated to go on to the next documentary, because you haven’t been trampled down by executive producers, or by bureaucrats, or whatever. So having the freedom to keep exploring and going in the direction you want to go kept motivating us to do the first film, and the second film, and now the third film.

HM: What has your biggest challenge been?

GG: The biggest challenge for me has been to keep positively focused in the moments of greatest need - mostly financial. Lacking the resources to do all the different things you need to do to make a large documentary. It sounds cliché, but it really is the biggest hurdle for us. I’ve got lots of energy and lots of ideas and I just want to keep going and going and going, and you keep hitting these walls, where you just don’t have the resources to do it. So, yeah, I guess the answer to that must be money. [Laughs.]

HM: [Laughs.] Like so many of us.

GG: Yeah, there’s no difference between me, in that sense, and just about anybody else who’s trying to do this stuff.

HM: What are your thoughts on the explosion of documentary-like short videos online these days? I’m thinking of things like "The Story of Stuff" and so forth. Those have had huge reach, in the range of millions in some cases. Obviously the cost is much less. So, is there a route there to help people overcome the cost barrier?

GG: Yeah, I think making short docs and short little clips is both more cost-effective, and in the age of ADD, it’s where people’s attention spans are. We’re actually basing our online component for the new project on short clips, but we’re going to be mounting it in an open source environment...so anybody can go onto it, download the clips, or edit them together on our site. So we’re going to be able to create a site for mostly young people to create their own short videos, based on our media and media that other people upload.

HM: Choose-your-own-story kind of thing.

GG: Create your own story!

HM: Fantastic! What kind of options are there for people to take action based on your film? In other words, in the ideal case, what would you most want people to do after watching your film?

GG: I think right now, the most ideal thing watching any of the first two films would be to join a transition town group. Transition town groups are just growing so quickly - I’m not sure what the secrets of their success are, but I’m going to be exploring that, so I could hopefully answer that in the next film. But I think getting involved in the transition town movement, and bringing in new people - especially people who don’t identify traditionally with the green movement.

HM: What has the experience of meeting all of these people who are front-runners or pioneers or experimenters been like at a personal level?

GG: At a certain point, when I was getting the third documentary started, I realized that somehow over the last six years I’d met, not everybody, but almost everybody - and people that I hadn’t met yet, there were people eager to introduce me to those people. So that was quite a momentary revelation, and that’s hugely exciting, and inspiring.

HM: One content question: If you think about the film itself, there are a lot of local-scale ideas in there, things like food gardens and so forth. There’s also some degree of discussion of larger-scale issues; things like economic resilience, tax shifts, and so forth. What do you see as being the key actions required to take the local ideas to scale?

GG: This is the subject of our third film, “Resilient City”. It’s to take all of these very small, quaint, bucolic ideas and see if we can create a new sort of urban avant-garde with that, that can help start to prepare cities for the effects of resource depletion, and climate change, and the real elephant in the room is urban migration, in the next few years.

I think two billion people are set to move into cities in the next thirty-odd years. Can we create waste systems that are closed-loop, and don’t damage our bio-region? Can cities and bio-regions grow a majority of their own food? Can we create distributed energy, so that when parts of the grid go down like they did in 2003, we can keep the lights on, and keep things powered up? Can we create transit-oriented development in our cities fast enough to deal with the population influx and again, the concomitant decline in resources?

HM: If you actually plan to talk about entire cities making these changes, you are obviously going to have to build coalitions of quite diverse partners. Diverse in all kinds of ways. Ethnically, diverse class-wise, economically and so forth, so... Let me just push you a little bit, because to make a movie, and have people come to the movie, and talk about it afterwards, that’s an easy step. How will you personally become part of the coalition that actually pushes people to make change, or acquires actual investment to build change?

GG: This is a really weird thing that happened to me after we released “The End of Suburbia”. It became the best-selling Canadian independent documentary ever. Two guys in a basement spent eight thousand dollars to make the doc, and...

HM: Eight thousand dollars!

GG: Eight thousand bucks.

HM: Wow.

GG: It was more by the end of the time, but the actual cash to make the documentary initially was eight thousand dollars. We were funded by Visa and Mastercard, as we’d joke about it.

I used that success of our first documentary. It started to open up networks, which is what we used to shoot “Escape from Suburbia”, and create discussions or participate in discussions around the media that we’d created. We want to do the same with the third film, but we want to do it a bit more proactively. We want to use the promise of us shooting a documentary on transition towns to start more transition towns, because everybody wants to be on TV. [Laughs.]

So the prospect of actually being in the official story of this activist movement that is becoming global very, very quickly, and being in the middle of that by virtue of the fact that we’ve created the documentaries that have really helped that movement to grow - we hope to push it. We hope to actually help set the agenda a bit.

For me, it’s sort of reaching out into parts of the community that white, middle-class green people aren’t thinking about enough. We have to think about social justice. We have to think about economic justice. And I know green people think about that all the time, but when I point out at a lot of green meetings that “Everybody is white, middle-class, and has anybody noticed that?”, everybody looks around and they’re all kind of surprised, in a pleasant way, but... that and a few other things that I hope we can influence in not only the distribution of our documentary, but in the creation and the telling of that story.

In Toronto, I pushed a couple of people that I know, talking about the transition town movement, and now they’re starting a transition town. I started talking with friends of mine in Ohio and said I was interested in shooting a documentary, and now each of those friends are with a bunch of other people, starting transition groups in Ohio. So I’m in a really privileged place of being in the middle of a lot of the really influential people in the movement, if you want to call it that. I want to keep pushing those people to start transition groups.

I think that’s not a direct answer to your question, because that’s still the easy part, and still part of the making of our own documentaries about this. I think the tough part is going to be when... At least for me, over the next few years involved in transition groups, it’s to try to bring people together and keep them together.

The one thing I learned after “Escape from Suburbia” is that the democratic movement is by nature democratic, so it’s very fractious, and people don’t listen to each other very well sometimes. So I hope I can rise to that challenge of being a bit of a diplomat - helping people to hear each other, and listen to each other, and work together. And I think being a media worker, it’s easier, because I’m not trying to set any particular agenda, or I’m not seen as doing that. I’m seen as a storyteller, telling their story. I don’t know if people put more faith in me that way or trust me more, but it’s a privileged position that can be used to help people succeed and keep groups together, and...

HM: It sounds like you’re acting as a real catalyst.

GG: That’s the word. I hope that that’s exactly what we do. Our documentaries have acted as a catalyst, and no one’s been more surprised at how that panned out than we are. We never thought that this would become what it’s become.

Yeah, I hope with the third film we could be a catalyst on a global level, and reach out beyond the sort of green, white, middle-class groups and start to bring more people in - because that’s the story we want to tell.

HM: Greg, thanks so much!

Random Hacks of Kindness

2009-11-13T22:23:01Z

An event currently underway in Mountain View, California, brings coders together with experts in disaster relief for a three day code-jam. The problem definitions, use-cases, and descriptions of proposed apps make for fascinating reading. This is a model worth watching that could be replicated in other domains.

Oil 101

2009-11-13T12:00:00Z

By Milan Ilnyckyj.

Written essentially in the style of a textbook, Morgan Downey’s Oil 101 moves systematically through the major areas of knowledge required for a basic understanding of the global petroleum industry. These include:

The history of oil use, including predictions about the future
The chemistry of crude oil
Exploration for and production of oil
Refining
Petrochemicals
Transporting oil
Storing oil
Seasonal demand variation, pricing, and oil markets

Downey covers each in a clear and informative manner, though he sometimes delves into a greater level of detail than most amateurs will prefer. For instance, some of the forays into chemistry are at a level of sophistication well above what casual readers are likely to retain. That said, the book is laid out in a highly structured way, so it is easy to gloss over technical portions without losing track of the overall structure of the text.

One thing the book strongly demonstrates is the enormous amount of expertise and capital that have been developed within the petroleum industry. For instance, the section on how offshore oil platforms are constructed and operated shows what an astonishing number of things can be executed deep underground, from a steel platform above the ocean’s surface: everything from horizontal and vertical drilling to the assembly of steel pipes (cemented in place), the use of explosives, the installation of automatic or remote-controlled valves, the injection of acids and chemicals, etc. The discussion of refining and transport technologies and infrastructure is similarly demonstrative of sustained investment and innovation. While it is regrettable that all of this effort has been put into an industry that is so climatically harmful, it does suggest that humanity has a great many physical and intellectual resources to bring to bear on the problem of finding energy. As more and more of those are directed towards the development of renewable energy options, we have reason to hope that those technologies will improve substantially.

The final portion of the book, about oil prices and forward oil markets, was the least interesting for me, as it deals with complex financial instruments rather than matters of chemistry, geology, etc. Still, for those who are seeking to understand how oil prices are established, as well as what sorts of financial instruments exist that relate to hydrocarbons, these chapters may be useful. Downey does provide some practical advice to those whose organizations (companies, countries, etc) are exposed to changes in oil markets: “The decision not to hedge [Buy financial products that reduce your exposure to a risk of major price changes] should be an active decision. Management should clearly inform investors why they decide to face the full volatility of the oil market when they have an opportunity to manage the risk.” Managing such risks on an individual level has been discussed here before.

All told, this book is well worth reading for all those who are curious about the energy basis for global civilization, why it is established the way it is, and some of the key factors that will determine which way it goes. Downey is a low-key proponent of the peak oil theory. He argues that reserves, especially in OPEC, are inflated and that a peak and bell-shaped drop-off in production are inevitable: probably between 2005 and 2015, provided depletion occurs globally at about the same rate as it did in the United States following their peak in 1970. For those hoping to grasp the implications of that projection, as well as those hoping to plan for a world based on other forms of energy, the information contained in this book is both valuable and well-presented.

Article copyright Milan Ilnyckyj. sindark.com.

Some WorldChanging Canada articles related to oil include:

Mapping US Oil Imports Over Time | Garry Peterson
Gauging 21st Century Environmentalism | Simon Donner
WorldChanging Canada Interview with Lester Brown | Mark Tovey

Europe offers 95% by 2050

2009-11-12T17:00:00Z

There's an exciting deal on the table leading up to Copenhagen. Europe has offered 95% GHG cuts by 2050, and 30% cuts by 2020 if other countries sign up for similar targets at Copenhagen.

Stemming the tide of greenwashing

2009-11-12T14:18:00Z

This article was written by Peter ter Weeme in May 2008. We were delighted when this article was re-published in a B.C. textbook as a way to teach high-school students environmental and media literacy. This month, along with our regular fare, we're showcasing some of our best, in celebration of three years of WorldChanging Canada.

This past week, I was again struck at all of the attention the media is placing on all things “green”. Green really is the new black (though have you noticed that lots of companies are now touting blue as the new green?).

I don’t know about you, but some days I feel like I’m drowning in a green tsunami that’s engulfing the world. With Earth Day behind us, I had hoped for a break from more waves of environmental cheerleading. Not so. Companies continue to rush in with green claims.

The media is taking notice. On one day this past weekend, I read three articles in three different newspapers about greenwashing. In one of those articles in the Boston Globe, the reporter, Beth Daley, recounts how the Chevy Tahoe was recently named the "Green Car of the Year." This for a vehicle that gets 20 miles per gallon!

The irony of this award is not lost on others. Daley quotes David Champion, director of Consumer Reports’ Auto Test Division as saying, “How a 6,000-pound behemoth can be the green car of the year is beyond me. It's a marketing exercise rather than reality."

To add fuel to the fire, many of you will have heard about a recent study by TerraChoice Environmental Marketing called the Six Sins of Greenwashing. In that study, TerraChoice reports that all but one of the environmental claims being made on more than 1,000 reviewed products were either false or misleading.

Some of those claims were most likely stretching the truth on purpose. However, others were simply the product of uninformed or naïve and overenthusiastic marketers. But, lest you despair that all of this’ll go unchecked, there’s lots going on to wrestle greenwashing to the ground.

For example, new online watchdogs like www.greenwashingindex.com draw attention to the most egregious greenwashers. As well, if you want a website that delivers the straight goods on (primarily) British companies, George Monbiot’s Turn up the Heat does an admirable job.

Governments are also stepping up to address greenwashing with some urgency. The Canadian, US, UK and Australian governments have all fast-tracked efforts to address false environmental claims within the past six months. New regulations are on the horizon.

To complement this work. on June 5, the Canadian Centre for Policy Ingenuity and a Vancouver-based company called Big Room are convening an influential group of Canadian leaders from the advertising, public relations, non-governmental, and environmental standards sectors. The goal of this half-day session is to build an understanding of the current “eco-marketing” landscape and begin exploring a common set of principles that will guide the industry on appropriate green product claims.

For those who are more discerning, along with websites, there are a range of product verification marks—respected eco-labels such as EnergyStar, the Forest Stewardship Council FSC mark and the USDA “organic” logo. Those marks can help you make more informed choices.

But how can you trust these ecolabels to have integrity? The old adage of “buyer beware” continues to be as relevant as always. It’s up to you to do the research and identify the ecolabels you can trust.

To help you with that, the folks at Big Room provide another great resource with their www.ecolabelling.org website, a global, independent database of ecolabels. The site profiles and categorizes more than 400 of them, dozens I never knew existed. Plus, Big Room has more plans to really make the site the indispensable resource on ecolabels. If they can help us compare “apples to apples”, they’ll have a winner.

In the meantime, it’s good to have a healthy dose of skepticism, access to the Internet and other people in your life you can trust. Jointly, those tools will help you avoid being misled on your good intentions.

Front page photo credit: Benjamin Dudoit

For more on greenwashing, see:

Green Leadership Overcomes Greenwashing | Kathryn Cooper
The Missing Link | Jordy Gold
Selling Sustainability the Mr. Clean Way | Chris Turner

Edmonton prepares urban forest plan

2009-11-11T17:00:00Z

With inspiration from the one-tree-per-child model in Calgary (which now has half a million trees under its management), Edmonton is preparing an urban forest plan to manage its "green infrastructure", citing the many services trees provide.

New Resource: The Living Planet City

2009-11-11T09:50:00Z

By Christa Morris.

“Welcome to the Living Planet. It’s clean, it’s efficient — and it’s doable. Today.” This blurb appears on the front page of WWF Canada’s new website, the Living Planet City, which launched in September. The Living Planet City’s bright animation of thriving urbanism (pictured right, in a screen shot) illustrates 20 big ideas to make any city more sustainable.

In the “west end,” a combined heat and power plant uses “waste” heat energy to provide chilled water for a nearby supermarket. In the “east end,” a municipal waste station feeds into a biofuel plant, complete with solar, green roofs on top. At the waterfront, wave, tidal and wind energy power the city while a rapid transit station ferries people back and forth: all this with plenty of park space.

Clicking around brings up summaries of the technology and provides links to learn more. Once properly informed and inspired, visitors are encouraged to get the ideas out there by sending a link to elected officials, friends, and business owners. You can even send a suggested message to your slated Copenhagen representative.

Good start! But is it good enough?

Maybe, maybe not. Take away the windmills, dull the colors, and it looks just like my pollution-steeped hometown. On one hand, it’s important that WWF wants to promote the Living Planet City as “doable,” suggesting that every city, without changing drastically in function or appearance, can be sustainable and clean. Normal city-dwellers can get behind it, and that is the point.

On the other hand, the Living Planet City could be bigger, bolder, and more beautiful. For instance, although promoting EVs, the cityscape is still a maze of roads. Where are the bike lanes? Where are the inner-city walking-only zones? With 350 ppm as our goal, we have to completely re-imagine our way of life, not simply find alternative ways to power our current one.

As one of the first people on the comment board pointed out, there's no single right answer out there. Toronto is a whole lot different than Copenhagen, the commenter says, and so its future of sustainability will look a whole lot different, and maybe include more cars. How do you adapt and perfect a Living Planet City when there are so many varying starting points, and thus, varying challenges? One solution would be to make the city as interactive as its sister site, “the Living Planet Community.”

In the Living Planet Community, you can commit to any number of thousands of climate-friendly actions or add your own, and the site will calculate the GHG reduction you achieve. You can even create groups—of friends, coworkers, or strangers—and set a goal for GHG reduction while engaging in planet-friendly competition.

Why not merge this community and the city? Why not provide a menu of tools, such as wind farms, solar panels, green roofs and bike-sharing programs with which you can remodel your own city? Why not allow users to add their own tools, such as third-place studios or greywater systems? Why not take it further, with a sustainable Sim City-esque program, where, after creating your city, you get realistic feedback on its CO2 output? A well-designed simulation could train leaders (and future leaders) to see the changes necessary to achieve emissions reduction goals in their unique cities.

The Living Planet City is a great idea that will no doubt serve to spread knowledge and inspiration, and for this reason, WorldChanging applauds WWF Canada: it’s only a matter of taking a great idea to its full potential.

This article by Christa Morris originally appeared on WorldChanging on September 4, 2009.

Learn more about sustainable cities in the WorldChanging Canada archives:

City Changing: Re-mixing Built Environments | Madeline Ashby
Toronto's Tower Renewal | Madeline Ashby
Walk Score | John Lewis
Vancouver Makes Bright Green Future its Official Goal | Julia Levitt
Localizing Roadmaps | Mark Tovey
Sustainable Sanitary Sewer for Victoria | Mike Thomas

Alex Steffen at Town Hall Seattle Nov 11 & 12

2009-11-11T04:34:49Z

Greeting Worldchangers,

Our two night event at Town Hall Seattle starts tomorrow! We are thrilled to invite you to Town Hall’s Center for Civic Life for an evening with Alex Steffen, Seattle City Council President Richard Conlin, Seattle Mayor-Elect Mike McGinn and the Worldchanging Team.

Each night, the doors will open at 6:30 pm. Come early and come hungry as Seattle's street food perfectionists from Skillet will be serving up delicious pre-talk snacks outside Town Hall. After a bite to eat, head inside to visit with other worldchangers and our fantastic sponsors: The American Institute of Architects, The Bullitt Foundation, Climate Solutions, The Community Coalition for Environmental Justice, The Fremont Brewing Company, Greendrinks, Groundwire, PubliCola, People’s Parking Lot, Three Degrees, Undriving, Urban Land Army, Seattle Tilth, The Sierra Club, Sightline, Sustainable Industries and Sustainable Seattle.

At 7:30 pm, Alex will give a 90 minute talk about the planetary challenges we face and cutting edge ideas about bright green solutions, sustainability and urban innovation. Night One features thoughts on our global future, while Night Two focuses on opportunities for Seattle. Tickets are $5 and are going fast. Details and links for purchasing are below. We strongly encourage you to purchase tickets in advance if you want to be sure of a seat.

After Alex's second talk on Thursday night, join other Worldchangers in the Town Hall lobby for great conversations, networking and delicious beer from the artisan brewers at The Fremont Brewing Company.

Good food, great drinks, inspiring people and provocative thinking -- all in one place! We are so excited about this event, and hope to see you there. The talks will also be recorded by KUOW-FM (NPR) and the Seattle Channel for broadcast on radio and television, and are being shot by a documentary film crew, who will be releasing the edited video as podcasts, so even if you're going to miss the events themselves you will have some chance to hear what Alex has to say.

Thanks,
The Worldchanging Team

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Alex Steffen: Building a Planet with a Future
A two-night talk presented by Town Hall’s Center for Civic Life, 11/11 and 11/12

A New Global Future - Night One - Alex Steffen, introduced by Richard Conlin

Nine billion people on a straining planet is a recipe either for catastrophe or transformation. Which future we get - tragic disaster or sustainable prosperity - will depend largely on the choices we here in the developed world make. What is possible for billions of people rising out of poverty will be determined largely by the shape of the economy we create in places like Seattle. How do we understand what a bright green future looks like and how do we propel our region toward it? This first night will explore the breakthroughs in renewable energy, green building, clean technology, smart infrastructure and sustainable design that can enable the Pacific Northwest to not only help lead the planet away from catastrophe, but also to become an economic power house.

Seattle's Bright Green Moment - Night Two - Alex Steffen, introduced by Mayor-Elect Mike McGinn

Cities are the engines of a bright green economy. A new urban way of life is emerging that is not only ecologically frugal, but wealthier, healthier, and more enjoyable. At the same time, smart cities are becoming the hothouses of sustainable innovation, growing the designs, technologies, policies, and start up companies that will thrive in the new global economy. Learn how leading urban regions like London, Copenhagen, Melbourne and Seoul are scrambling to rebuild themselves on bright green lines in order to lead in the economy of tomorrow. Join the conversation on how we can use cutting edge practices such as innovation networks, metropolitan coalitions, and government 2.0 to break through the logjams blocking Seattle's progress to build a more vital, sustainable and prosperous home.

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Tickets are $5.00
Click here to purchase tickets for the 11th, here to purchase tickets for the 12th.

Both talks will be in the Great Hall at Town Hall Seattle, and start 7:30 p.m. (doors at 6:30 p.m.). Each talk is 90 minutes, no intermission. Presented by Town Hall’s Center for Civic Life.

Image credit: Mikael at Copenhagenize.com

Citizens' Assemblies: Wise Democracy from the Minipublic

2009-11-10T10:54:00Z

This article was written by Jason Diceman in September 2008. This month, along with our regular fare, we'll showcase some of our best, in celebration of three years of WorldChanging Canada.

Politicians should take note; there is a new answer to some of the toughest questions of our times. When presented with an issue with no obvious popular and sensible solution, or a situation where a legislature is unable to make progress on an important topic, 100 random citizens can be called on to solve the political puzzle, as they did in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Ontario (my home province).

Following the 2001 election, the newly elected premier of BC followed through on a promise to create a citizens' assembly to consider changes to the provincial electoral system. In 2006 the Ontario government followed suit as part of their democratic renewal efforts. Both citizens' assembly projects followed an innovative model designed by former BC politician, Gordon Gibson, and were given a clear and independent mandate by an all party committee.

Each assembly process began with tens of thousands of written invitations sent out to random citizens all across the province. Through several stages of positive responses and further lottery selection, the members of the assembly were narrowed down to 158 in BC and 103 in Ontario. Members came from every electoral riding. Their ranks included equal numbers of women and men, and spanned the demographic spectrum in rough similarity with census data. While not absolutely perfect, this was a more representative sample of folks than I have ever seen at any town meeting or campaign rally.

Central to the citizens' assembly model is the learning phase. In Ontario and BC, members spent six weekends learning about the topic from panels of experts, custom educational materials, and a staff of adult educators selected and trained to present a range of perspectives in a way that avoids biasing the process. By the end of this learning phase these assorted bus drivers, home makers, blue-collar managers and school teachers were able to debate election reform at a Masters level.

Following this learning phase, the assembly members took part in a series of public meetings and opportunities for comment from the public, giving members a greater understanding of the varied views and opinions within the population.

Finally each assembly went through an exhaustive six weeks of facilitated consensus driven deliberations and structured decision-making. Members talked in small groups and large groups, debated, researched, weighed options, heard concerns and voted step-by-step through each of the key decisions required to find a common answer. In the end both BC and Ontario citizens' assemblies ended with over 90% of their members voting in favour of a common final recommendation. As the third party evaluations and academic reviews have come to prove, these staggering majorities were not the result of charismatic manipulation, authoritative coercion, or exhausted frustration. These results represent over 100 random people approaching full agreement on an open ended question—on an issue as complex as election reform. This was achieved by a thorough understanding of the options and respectful discussion with the stated goal of seeking the best solution that would be in accord with the commonly recognized values of the people. This was an example of the wise and practical democracy most of us assume is impossible. As Gordon Gibson expressed it "For someone with a faith in democracy, this was like seeing God."

To put this demonstrated model of the citizens' assembly into context let's quickly look at some more traditional methods of hearing the 'voice of the people' on public policy:

Elections: Candidates often win less then 50% of the votes cast, (but still more than their multiple competitors). Voters are generally poorly informed by combative media campaigns and are unable to recall much detail about the policy positions of their favourite candidates. Once elected, politicians are driven by short term public perceptions and party rivalry in order to secure a re-election.

Expert Panels: In formal committees, politicians and government bureaucrats are informed by select experts. The members of these committees are often well informed about their subject matter, but without any necessary grasp of public values. The selection of experts may bias the advice.

Opinion Polls: These telephone surveys are a result of top of mind reactions to yesterdayís sound bites and newspaper headlines. They superficially reflect public values, but without the educated, deliberated, and reasoned conclusions one would want to steer a society by.

Focus Groups: Focus groups typically have a small number of people at the table who are usually not informed about the issue at hand. Depending on the facilitation, focus groups may yield results that are uninformative, and not highly representative of the values of the population as a whole.

Town Halls & Hearings: Comments from the floor in a public hall have always been abused by the loudest and most charismatic speakers who are first to speak their complaints and accusations to the room. While iconic of our early democracy, the self-selected public speakers who tend to participate are often driven by personal or interest group agendas and are quickly situated in Us-VS-Them debates. These are not well informed, representative, or consensus-driven events.

In comparison, the citizens' assembly model is what deliberative democracy theorist Archon Fung calls a "minipublic," that is "...an educative forum that aims to create nearly ideal conditions for citizens to form, articulate, and refine opinions about particular public issues through conversations with one another." It is one of few processes where the shared values of the public are directly applied to policy recommendations, rather than guessed or assumed by privileged individuals—sometimes with their own agenda. That said, the citizens' assembly model it is not a perfect system. It is susceptible to manipulation or corruption by incompetent staff, or can be directed by a biased chair, possibly appointed for political reasons. According to the third party evaluations, this was not the case in Ontario or BC.

Both the BC and Ontario Citizens' Assemblies on Electoral Reform ended with referendums (similar to U.S. ballot initiatives) that were carried out as an addendum to the provincial elections. That is, the thoroughly debated, close-to-consensus recommendation of over 100 random citizens (who had been highly educated on the topic at hand), was subject to 60% approval by a general public that was overwhelmingly uninterested and uninformed about the subject matter. In BC the proposal won 57.7% of the votes, but did not pass the 60% threshold required. In Ontario the proposal only received 37% support. One theory for the difference between the two is the much higher level of media coverage of the citizens' assembly process that occurred in BC, i.e. the more people learn about the citizens' assembly process, the more likely they are to support its recommendation. In any case, referendums are dependent on expensive media campaigns and commercial news coverage with often trivial, controversy seeking, and superficial rhetoric. Without a complete overhaul of the media system, like public opinion polls, referendums are not appropriate mechanisms for wise policy decisions. In short, the citizens' assembly model works to produce useful recommendations to government and like any legislative commission or committee, should not be required to pass a referendum.

Beyond these two Citizens' Assemblies on Electoral Reform, Canadians have and continue to use similar random selection, educated and deliberative citizen panels to inform various government decisions, such as the newly starting Ontario Public Drug Programs Citizens' Council, the ongoing independent Canada's World project, or some of the many citizen dialogues conducted by the Canadian Policy Research Networks. Based in Toronto, a young firm called Mass LBP is aiming to make a business out of citizens'-assembly-inspired public consultation.

Internationally, many governments and non-government organizations have conducted similar processes under many different names: Consensus Conferences, Study Circles, Planning Cells, National Issues Forums, 21st Century Town Halls, Citizen Juries, and Citizen Panels (among others). Each model varies in the number of members, the amount of time given to education and deliberation, and the facilitation process, but as Matt Leighninger of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium suggested at the BC When Citizens Decide conference, "We should avoid 'modelitis' that focuses on the difference between models rather than the similarities. The larger context is more important then the specifics of the model." That larger context most importantly includes the political will of the government to listen to recommendations from its citizens.

Looking to 2009, we will see elections in Canada, the Unites States of America, Germany, Mexico, India, Japan and over 50 other counties. These politicians will all be facing such challenging issues as climate change, public education reform, strains on health care, improving child care, supporting minority rights, addressing aboriginal land claims, fresh water protection, demographic shifts, sustainability and development. When looking for direction on such complex issues, there will be many that seek advice from business leaders and experts, some that carry out traditional consultations with the usual suspects, but only a courageous few that will take the political risk to champion citizens' assembly like process that will have actual influence based on the deliberation of informed random citizens. These few pioneers will be the examples for future democratic leaders and we should give them our support.

You can learn more about deliberative democracy processes at the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation's Learning Exchange.

Jason Diceman is a stakeholder engagement consultant with LURA Consulting and author of the popular Dotmocracy Handbook for large group decision-making.

Policy from the People | Jason Diceman
Coalition and Parliamentary Democracy | Dominic Rossi
Dotmocracy in Venezuela | Karl Schroeder

Climate science and policy-making

2009-11-09T09:27:00Z

By Milan Ilnyckyj.

I wrote the following to serve as a one-page introduction, laying out some of the key items for consideration and listing some of the most accessible and reputable sources of information about climate change. For more information on specific subjects, see my climate change index.

The key elements of the general climate science and policy consensus are:

On average, the planet is warming.
Most of this is because of human emissions of greenhouse gasses.
Continued warming would be harmful, and perhaps very risky when it comes to human welfare and prosperity.
By most accounts, the cost of mitigation is less than the cost of adaptation. Some anticipated changes may overwhelm the capacity of human and natural systems to adapt.

While there is a public perception that there is a lot of scientific disagreement about the fundamentals of climate science, this really is not the case. Back in 2004, a survey of peer-reviewed work on climate science demonstrated this. There is also a notable joint statement from the national science academies of the G8, Brazil, China, and India.

1) Climatic science and history

There are some good primers available from reputable organizations online. For instance, the United Kingdom’s Met Office has a quick guide.

The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the most authoritative review of the scientific work that has been done on climate change. The summary for policy-makers for the synthesis report is available online.

For detailed information on the physical science of climate change, the technical summary of the IPCC’s Working Group I report is a good resource. Unlike the summaries for policy-makers, which are vetted though a quasi-political process, the technical summaries are prepared exclusively by scientists.

For Canadians who want to read one book about climate science and policy, I recommend University of Victoria Professor Andrew Weaver’s book: Keeping Our Cool: Canada in a Warming World.

For those looking for a concise history of the entire development of climatic science, starting in the late 1800s, I very much recommend Spencer Weart’s The Discovery of Global Warming. In addition to the book form, it is available free online.

For a more specific history of what we have learned about climate from ice core samples, see Richard Alley’s The Two Mile Time Machine. For an excellent (though somewhat technical) discussion of the relationships between the carbon cycle and biological organisms, see Oliver Morton’s Eating the Sun.

2) Climate change mitigation

Ultimately, the only way to keep the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere constant is to reach the point where humanity has zero net emissions. Getting there fundamentally requires two things: the shifting of the energy basis of the global economy to low- and then zero-carbon sources, and the stabilization of the biosphere through actions like ending net deforestation.

Three excellent books that evaluate options for moving to a low-carbon economy are:

George Monbiot’s Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. (In which he considers how the UK could achieve truly dramatic rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions)
Joseph Romm’s Hell and High Water (focused on the United States)
David Mackay’s Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air (in which he evaluates renewable and efficiency options from first principles, but in a very accessible way – available free online.)

On the costs of climate change mitigation, the most comprehensive work is probably that which has been done by Nicholas Stern, beginning with the Stern Review. The review’s executive summary is also accessible online. More recently, he has argued that the costs of inaction are even more significant than those projected at that time.

On the political and ethical side of things, the best short summary may be Stephen Gardiner’s article “Ethics and Global Climate Change,” published in Ethics. Volume 114 (2004), p.555-600. One key idea related to international equity and climate change mitigation is contraction and convergence: an arrangement in which the emissions from all states eventually fall to zero, but where the per-capita emissions of developed and developing states also converge over time.

3) Other major climate change issues

Other areas relevant to climate change policy-making include:

Abrupt and runaway climate change scenarios
Adaptation to climate change
Carbon sinks (physical, such as the oceans, biological, such as the forests, and geological, such as rocks that erode and form carbonates)
Economics (carbon pricing, risk management, etc)
Emission pathways (and their international breakdown)
Equity issues (historical responsibility, climate change and development, etc)
Global politics and international law
Planning and design (cities, buildings, etc)
Science (climatic equilibria, models and projections, etc)
Sociological and philosophical issues (ethics, communication, political theory, etc)
Targets (stabilization concentrations, temperature change, etc)
Technologies (renewable energy, transport, nuclear, efficiency, etc)

I can recommend resources in all of these areas, if someone has a particular interest.

4) Good sources of climate related news

Probably the best scientific climate change blog is RealClimate.

Good responses to climate ‘skeptic’ arguments can be found in the How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic series. I also keep track of my own arguments with climate change deniers.

Climate coverage in mainstream media sources is often inconsistent in quality. The BBC and The Economist often publish good information, but also sometimes include incorrect or misleading information.

5) A few key graphics

This ice core record of carbon dioxide concentrations illustrates one major reason why we should be more concerned about human-induced climate change than about natural variation. Our use of fossil fuels is generating a spike in greenhouse gas concentrations that is set to rise far above anything in the last 650,000 years, at least.

The above shows how observed warming is inconsistent with climate models that do not incorporate human greenhouse gas emissions, but consistent with those that do.

The wheel on the right depicts researchers’ estimation of the range of probability of potential global temperature change over the next 100 years if no policy change is enacted on curbing greenhouse gas emissions. The wheel on the left assumes that aggressive policy is enacted. (Credit: Image courtesy / MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change)

I would be delighted to answer and questions, or suggest further resources in other areas of interest.

Last updated: 6 November 2009

Article copyright Milan Ilnyckyj. sindark.com.

Why You Don't Need an iPhone

2009-11-08T17:35:59Z

By Victor Galaz.

Wired Science reported on a project a while ago, based on innovative ecological crowd-sourcing in New York. The idea was quite simple. “Participants in the NYC Cricket Crawl will go out between dusk and midnight to record cricket calls for one minute, and then immediately send their results and location to the scientists by cellphone. The researchers are hoping to find evidence that the Common True Katydid, once plentiful in New York City but now rare, is still thriving in some regions of the city.” Quite innovative approach if you ask me, and the results are now up on their website.

But actually, many of the most innovative uses of information and communication technologies does not at all require fancy (and expensive) mobile technologies such as sound-recording iPhones. The Economist’s September issue features the role of simple cell-phones in emerging markets. The most interesting examples are from Kerala (India) and Niger. In the first case, the spread of cellphones seems to have increased fishermen’s profit by 8%. The reason was that fishermen ”could call several markets while still at sea before deciding where to sell”. In Niger, increased mobile-phone coverage seems to have reduced price variation for grain, between local markets. As the Economist reports ”during a spike in food prices in 2005 grain was 4.5% cheaper in markets with mobile coverage”. You can find a beautiful documentary of the societal impacts of increased use of mobile phones in Africa here.

A range of additional example of smart uses of quite simple communication technologies, such as SMS-messages and e-mail-lists - can be found in the health community. The moderated e-mail list ProMED has become a fundamental tool for rapid dissemination of information during health contingencies. Bangladesh as an additional example, is conducting active Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza surveillance through an Short Message Service (SMS) gateway to collect data and report on disease and death in poultry. Since October 2008, 21 HPAI outbreaks out of a total of 35 have been detected through this active surveillance programme.

Simple technologies, big impacts. Even in an era of rapid information technological change, less is more.

This article by Victor Galaz originally appeared on Resilience Science.

For more, see Using the internet to provide early warning of ecological change

Nicholas Stern's reason for Canada to take a leadership role in climate solutions

2009-11-08T14:00:00Z

Nicholas Stern was interviewed recently on TVO's the Agenda. With all of Canada's advantages, he says, if we say we can't we can't do it, who's to fault other countries for saying it can't be done?

Getting Used to the Mess

2009-11-07T14:00:00Z

By Eli Malinsky.

Recently, we hosted an intimate discussion with Fast Company co-founder Alan Webber. The conversation was wide ranging, attending to different facets of "Innovative Leadership". One thing that Alan mentioned was the need to begin to develop more coherent and clear language - that the multiplicity of terms (e.g., social enterprise, social innovation, social entrepreneur, social finance, venture philanthropy, etc) - and their uncertain definitions - is a hindrance to "The Movement". This lack of clarity, the argument goes, is holding us back from our potential to drive social change and to engage an active audience.

This provoked me to think a bit about the duplication we see across the social change sector. There is incredible duplication of effort as individuals and organizations seek to solve certain (identical) problems in isolation from each other. Or, sometimes, knowing exactly what the others are doing, but preferring instead their own approach. I made reference yesterday to the fact that i know of at least five initiatives that trying to create a "Facebook for social change". There's also a million water projects in different parts of the developing world, and inadequate strategies for sharing experiences, models etc. This type of duplication - and the concomitant challenge of information sharing and pattern-seeking - plays out it in hundreds of sectors, issues and places around the world. The result is a failure to capitalize on and learn from the best possible innovations/strategies that address social concerns of all varieties.

This issue is further compounded by the deep themes of "scale" and "replication". How do we make sure that good ideas are replicated in other regions of the world? How do we make sure that good ideas grow to become ever more powerful?

The assumption here, and in Alan's remarks, is that we need to get a bit more organized. That the incoherence is preventing us from achieving our potential. That there's too much noise and insufficient signal.

To some degree, I agree. These are messy times. The pace of change is quickening. Technology is rapidly transforming all variety of activities. To me, the central questions are: Is this the storm before the calm? Will this intensity, this incoherence, sort itself out? Or is this storm going to keep a'rumbling?

In the old days (i.e., print paradigm), certain themes, memes, organizations and narratives dominated. They achieved a position of dominance through any variety of means. And "dominance" wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Many of these ideas and structures did us a lot of good. And this paradigm was very good at keeping things easily understood and organized. You could get a handle on things. There was a clear narrative.

Now it may be possible that this new "messiness" is just a moment of transition. In survival of the fittest fashion, the best ideas, projects, strategies, narratives, etc. will sort themselves out and our world will be a bit cleaner once again. Our brains can finally get a bit of rest.

But what if that's not the case? What if the messiness is here to stay? What if the plurality of narratives, the multiplicity of perspectives and approaches is just the new way of doing things?

This seems to pose a challenge to scale and replication. If it's not clear which ideas are best, how do we grow and replicate their impact? It also poses a challenge to our institutions, which are used to linearity and clarity. It's also a challenge to our brains, which have been made used to the same. (I don't think our brains are 'naturally' linear, but that our pedagogy and social reality trains us to be this way).

But maybe that's okay. Perhaps there will just be a preponderance of ideas and ways of approaching issues, that are context specific and locally rooted. Perhaps we're just going to have to get used to this messiness, and the fact that there is no clear coherent narrative. It may be difficult - even confusing or downright terrifying - but maybe it's just the way things is.

I acknowledge, of course, that this is a classic modern vs postmodern conundrum. But the whole concept came into sharper relief yesterday in the context of the social change sector. Should we be marshalling our energy to find accord on certain terms, concepts and strategies? Or is our energy better spent trying to come to terms with the messiness and developing ways to succeed despite it?

This article by Eli Malinsky was originally published on CSI Buzz.

Image Credit: Darren Hester

Environmental beliefs protected in UK

2009-11-06T21:11:45Z

A judge in the UK just ruled that employees with green beliefs cannot be fired from their jobs because of them.

From Extraction To Consumption: Oil, An Exhibition By Edward Burtynsky

2009-11-06T14:00:00Z

Below is a piece from The Guardian about Edward Burtynsky's most recent photography show, Oil. It mentions two exhibits currently running in the States. There are also three upcoming exhibits of Oil in Canada:

In 2010, Oil will appear at The Rooms - Provincial Art Gallery, St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada, May 7-August 15, 2010.
In 2011 Oil will be showing at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada in January - March (exact dates TBA), and at the Ryerson Image Arts Gallery, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, from April - September (exact dates TBA).

Mark your calendars!

From oilfields to expressways, from Canada to Los Angeles and to the Middle East, the acclaimed photographer Edward Burtynsky's obsession with oil has taken him from extraction to production to consumption. In this exhibition, running until 28 November 2009, Burtynsky tracks this controversial, valuable and increasingly scarce resource. The New York gallery at Hasted Hunt Kraeutler is hosting the exhibition and it is presented in conjunction with the publication of the artist's new monograph, Edward Burtynsky: Oil (Steidl 2009), and a major museum show at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, which will run at the same time.

This piece originally appeared in The Guardian.