The Bright Green City

Alex Steffen's Optimistic Environmentalism

Environmentalists have been talking for decades about “sustainability” — the need to live in a way that doesn’t deplete natural resources. But a sustainable society appears to be at odds with our economy’s imperative for growth. Alex Steffen believes that prosperity doesn’t have to come at the expense of the environment and could actually help save it. Part environmental consultant, part futurist, the forty-two-year-old California native has been writing and lecturing around the world about social innovation, sustainable cities, and what he calls “bright green” environmentalism. His Seattle-based nonprofit organization, Worldchanging, runs an online magazine (worldchanging.com) and has published a bestselling book, Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century (Abrams).

Steffen’s commitment to environmental ideals can be traced to the communes where he grew up. “I spent my formative years in California during that period of time in the 1970s when the counterculture was on the rise and the Whole Earth Catalog was on everyone’s coffee table,” he says. “Trying to think differently about society and take a creative approach to life was the norm for me.” After graduating from Allegheny College in 1990 with a degree in history, Steffen worked abroad for three years as an environmental journalist, covering the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Brazil and Japan’s controversial fast-breeder-reactor program. He did his graduate work at the University of Washington’s Jackson School of International Studies, then worked as a columnist for the Stranger in Seattle, as a radio producer and guest host for Seattle npr affiliate kuow, and as a television news analyst.

Wanting to actively support the causes he had been covering for the media, he became a communications consultant for environmental groups and nonprofits, but after four years he grew disillusioned. “I was stunned to find that almost no one had any idea what a sustainable world might look like,” Steffen says.

So Steffen began writing a book depicting a sustainable future. He spent six months traveling the country and talking to scientists and environmental activists. The book deal fell through, but he came away feeling hopeful, having discovered just how many people were thinking about sustainability. Along with his friend Jamais Cascio and others, Steffen decided to create a blog about changing to a more efficient way of life. “Within less than a year it was either make it a job or stop doing it,” Steffen says, “because it was taking up all my time.”

Seven years and thousands of posts later, his “combination blog-magazine-think-tank” offers a vision of ecological problem solving that doesn’t shy away from prosperity. Steffen has replaced what he calls the “alarmist model” of environmentalism with one that promises a better future. He’s not unaware of the potential for failure — Steffen says we have at most twenty-five years to transform our civilization if we want to avert ecological catastrophe — but he prefers to focus on possible solutions that can be pursued by ordinary people.

His latest concept is the “bright green city.” A cofounder of Seattle’s Livable Communities Coalition, Steffen coined the term “bright green” to describe the combined aim of reduced environmental impact and improved design. He says “livable” cities will have lower carbon emissions and increased economic competitiveness, along with healthier populations and a greater sense of community. Efficiency, according to Steffen, will be achieved not by driving hybrids on our daily commutes or using Energy Star appliances on our two-acre suburban lots but by building compact neighborhoods in which people can walk or bike to school or work and share services and resources, saving both money and the environment. His forthcoming book, Bright Green: A Worldchanging Guide to a Future That Works, describes how we might transform our cities and suburbs over the next twenty years.

I attended a sustainability conference in Pasadena, California, where Steffen delivered a keynote speech titled “My Other Car Is a Bright Green City.” We spoke later that day. Though Steffen had a bad cold, his energy level and passion were undiminished.

Cooper: You’ve said, “To be antitechnology in this day and age is to be antienvironment.” Can you elaborate?

Steffen: Around the middle of the century we’ll see global population peak at something like 9 billion people, all of whom will want to live with a reasonable amount of prosperity, and many of whom will want, at the very least, a European lifestyle. They will see escaping poverty as their nonnegotiable right, but to deliver that prosperity at our current levels of efficiency and resource use would destroy the planet many times over. We need to invent a new model of prosperity, one that lets billions have the comfort, security, and opportunities they want at the level of impact the planet can afford. We can’t do that without embracing technology and better design.

Cooper: You told a cnn reporter that we’ve got twenty-five years to save the world. How did you come up with that number?

Steffen: Well, nobody is sure, but the best information of which I’m aware is that we need to end up with probably no more than 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and allowing levels to rise over 450 could well trigger a series of catastrophes. We are already up to almost 390, and global production of greenhouse gases is accelerating. If we don’t start making profound changes, we will hit that tipping point within the next couple of decades. In fact, there are already worrisome signs, such as polar ice melting at a rate we didn’t expect to see for at least twenty years.

Although climate change gets all the press, we’ll face a number of other serious concerns in the near future. The capacity of many ecosystems around the world to provide the resources we need is collapsing. The rate of species loss is accelerating. We’re headed toward not just peak oil, but peak everything. When you look at all of these trends together, you start to realize that by the year 2050 — and that’s a conservative estimate — we’ll need to have eliminated global greenhouse-gas emissions and also greatly reduced the impact our way of life has on other natural systems. We can’t do that globally if we don’t have an effective model in place here in the developed world by 2030. One of the heads of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that if we haven’t made profound changes — in the way we look at the environment and the incentives we’re offering and the kinds of research we’re doing  — within the next five years or so, we’re going to miss the turn. In other words, we have five years to start making big changes, twenty years to finish making them here, and at most forty years to spread those changes to every corner of the earth.

Cooper: So how do we start to build a sustainable society?

Steffen: I think we’re still figuring that out. Big chunks of our infrastructure, our existing cities, our manufacturing base, and so on are radically unsustainable, but we have enormous amounts of money, energy, and materials invested in them. I think the most graceful solutions are ones that take what already exists and remodel it in a way that’s new, sustainable, and even charming. Retrofitting historic buildings to make them green, for example, not only conserves the resources that went into the building in the first place, but preserves the cultural identity of the building.

Cooper: But I’ve also heard you say we need to invent a sustainable life “from scratch.”

Steffen: Although we should use what we have whenever possible, this really is a new endeavor for humanity. It’s not a matter of going back. There’s a temptation to believe that we just need to return to an earlier way of life, but I see little evidence that people are willing to give up modern comforts and safety. If we are going to reform our wasteful ways — which for middle-class Americans at this point might mean using one-tenth the resources we currently use — we’re going to have to invent new methods of delivering prosperity. Restraining prosperity simply will not work.

Cooper: Author Derrick Jensen, in a talk he gave in Toronto, said that the only sustainable way of life humans have had was during the Stone Age.

Steffen: I have problems with the ethics of that statement, because it ignores the catastrophic human suffering that would be involved in a return to a Stone Age way of life. We know that way of life can’t support a population in the billions, so trying to go back to it would require the death of most of the world’s people. Beyond that, I think it’s obvious that nature is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Humanity, Inc. We have the capacity to take it down with us if we choose, and people who are put into desperate situations will do just that. There’s this sort of college-town anarchist idea that if we let it all fall apart, out of the ruins will come something clean and noncommercial and egalitarian and more in touch with nature, but that’s just crazy. Hungry people don’t think about the future. As my colleague Alan AtKisson says, a world of starving people will be a world without panda bears, dolphins, or rain forests. By the time we got back to the Stone Age, we wouldn’t have the same world we had during the Stone Age. We can’t go back; there’s no “back” to go back to.

There’s a similar, equally deluded idea from the other side, which is to assume that technology will magically find a way to let us continue living wasteful, suburban lives based on throwaway consumption. At the wildest extreme are those who argue that we need to look for ways to “geo-engineer” the planet — for instance, by creating artificial volcanoes to fill the atmosphere with particles that reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the ground. Saying we need to rush back to the caves and saying we need to “terraform” the earth are different sides of the same coin: both are profound retreats from the responsibilities of our day, and both ignore the amazing opportunities we still have available to us to create a sustainable society.

The choices we make today will determine the choices our descendants will have for thousands of years. This is a critical moment, too critical for us to get lost in fantasies.

Cooper: You’ve said that we need a “bright green revolution” in this country. What are the signs that this revolution is happening?

Steffen: Well, we’ve seen the election of a U.S. president who acknowledges the magnitude of the problem and the necessity to innovate to meet it. That’s a damn good start. We’re also seeing massive investments in clean technology and green buildings and renewable energy. We’re seeing huge shifts in public opinion and a surge of consumer interest in products that are environmentally friendly. Literally millions of people are changing their lives and trying to make a difference. In conference halls and barrooms all over the world, people are coming together to talk about sustainability. Thousands of civic groups have sprung up to address societal transformation. There’s been an explosion of websites and books and television shows and documentaries about climate change. I think the revolution is happening; the world is getting better. The only question is: Is it getting better fast enough?

Cooper: But how do you market sustainability? How do you make it look desirable and fun and fashionable?

Steffen: I think in a lot of ways that fight’s already over. Green has already become the new black. It’s already hip and trendy. Driving a Hummer brands you as a jerk, and eating organic already shows your good taste. But we can’t shop our way to sustainability. The problems we face are of such magnitude that we can’t just replace a few of the products and machines we regularly use with others that are slightly greener. If we’re going to avoid catastrophe, we have to redesign the systems in our life, not just replace the individual parts.

Cooper: OK, so replacing suvs with hybrids, for example, won’t save us, but shouldn’t we be driving hybrids as an intermediate step?

Steffen: People tend to assume that the answer to the ecological impact of automobiles is to redesign the car itself, but the problem with cars isn’t under their hoods, and the negative impact of driving them has little to do with their means of operation. It’s more about the roads we build and the parking cars require. These huge areas of impervious ground surface are ruining our water quality. I read recently that we’ve paved an area the size of Connecticut for parking in the U.S. There are also the negative impacts of cars that we don’t think about: the brake pads wearing down or the engines leaking oil. Add to that the ecological impacts of manufacturing a car in the first place: mining all that metal and producing all those plastics and adhesives. The new-car smell we’re so used to is the product of adhesive off-gassing.

Cars are incredibly toxic from start to finish. We could drive the greenest cars in the world, and the other negative impacts would still be there. If we’re serious about sustainability, we need to replace the system.

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