Breakthrough Generation

The American climate change movement has come of age, and has begun to set its sights on bigger and bolder goals – out with light bulbs and clotheslines, in with Lieberman-Warner. Outside of the rarefied circles of the Sierra Club and the eco-blogosphere, however, it seems that few Americans have got the memo. Even as cap-and-trade legislation dies an undignified death and the U.S. blows the rest of the world a big raspberry on emissions targeting, “green” living gets trendier and trendier. Americans from all walks of life are getting in on the fun – from your average Joe switching light bulbs and browsing the aisles of Wal-Mart (now stocked with organic food and Clorox’s green cleaning products) to moneyed elites enjoying green spa treatments. Sometimes these actions are motivated in part by increasingly costly electricity and gasoline, but others involve price premiums and extra effort, and clearly reflect a desire to “do something green.”

It’s with this odd dynamic in mind – small-scale practices proliferating like never before, larger mobilization lagging – that notable enviros like Al Gore exhort us to change power plants and politicians as well as light bulbs. Ideas like this reflect an assumption implicit in the shift that initiatives like Gore’s We Campaign hope to make: that the little bit of attention people are now devoting to personal practices can be substituted for or supplemented by a bit of attention to politics. But there are some tricky differences between these two forms of action, differences that make such a similar transition tricky to pull off. Political and macro-level economic action employ tactics that seem distant from the cause at hand – there’s nothing inherently eco-friendly about writing a postcard, making a call, or even paying a carbon tax – in the pursuit of abstract and uncertain results. In contrast, a couple that plans a “green wedding” (apparently “the hottest trend for summer”) has proof of their individual good work in the form of recycled invitations and organic flowers – a far more satisfying result than a pledge to consider an emissions standard at some point down the road.

To use Malcolm Gladwell’s turn of phrase, personal practices are a lot “stickier” than broader action. In The Tipping Point, Gladwell shares the tale of a Sesame Street spot that was awfully bad at teaching the day’s lesson. Children weren’t picking up on the reading techniques being introduced because they were too focused on Oscar’s entertaining antics in the background. As Gladwell writes, “Oscar was sticky. The lesson wasn’t.”

The Oscar dilemma must seem familiar to today’s climate activists, who lament the disconnect between the entertaining antics of personal consumption and the broader changes that remain to be accomplished. The key is to make Oscar work for us, not against us. Like Oscar, personal practices are “sticky,” and for good reasons: they are accessible, concrete steps that satisfy those who take them. Instead of demonizing them as “greenwashing” or dismissing them as petty, today’s climate activists must recognize what makes these practices “sticky” and apply them to the broader fields of politics and energy development. What forms of action will provide the immediacy and concreteness of effect necessary to attract the public, as personal practices have? The movement is just beginning to consider these questions and has already begun to spin out some exciting ideas, from CarrotMob to local energy cooperatives. What more can we imagine?