The Great Disruption (33 page)

There are millions of people in community organizations driving these changes in behavior.

I think one of the more interesting organizations is the 1 Million Women campaign, led by suburban mother Natalie Isaacs. Listening to Natalie speak passionately about what got her involved reminds us just how important each and every individual is and what a profound difference we can each make.

Natalie, a mother of four from Sydney's northern beaches, got frustrated at the lack of action on climate by the men in politics in Australia and realized her best response was to do something concrete and practical. So, with the support of my wife, Michelle, she founded the 1 Million Women campaign with a simple idea. Natalie realized that women were often in influential positions both at home and in the workplace to make things happen. They made 70 percent of consumer decisions in the household. Not one to think small, she thought: “What if we could get one million women across Australia to each commit to reduce emissions by a least one ton by taking simple, easy steps?” She then created a Web site at www.1millionwomen.com.au to makes this task easy, with accessible actions anyone can take, many of which save money and all of which make them feel good.

Within a short time, women all over Australia, from CEOs to suburban mums, became engaged in the idea of women leading action on climate. It took 1 Million Women just a year to have one of the highest membership numbers of environmental organizations in Australia. Every day more women sign up, committing to take direct practical action to start the transformation of our economy.

Women can make a disproportionate difference in this area and are behind many of the interesting new entrepreneurial ventures springing up around the world. They are clearly good at running businesses as well, with recent data
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showing that women-owned business in the United States grew twice as fast as other types of business between 1997 and 2008. So clearly Natalie is not alone in knowing how to make things happen!

There are many more examples of people showing how creative alliances and thinking can make change happen.

In Australia, a group of men have started the Men's Shed movement. They realized that many men become isolated in their community, especially when not working, and as a result they don't talk about health and emotional issues. Recognizing that “men don't talk face to face but shoulder to shoulder,” they thought they'd get them doing things together. So the Men's Shed movement was born to create places for men of all ages to come together and do practical things while making new friends and building community. The movement has taken off, with Men's Sheds being started all around the country and now spreading internationally.

Another creative model is led by Dr. Andrew Venter of the Wildlands Conservation Trust, which now has twenty-five hundred “tree-preneurs” in twenty-three communities across South Africa. These “tree-preneurs,” including children, are given seedlings of indigenous trees and are asked to nurture them until they get to a certain height. Wildlands then buys back the small trees for credits, which the tree-preneurs take to “tree stores” and exchange for bicycles, clothing, blankets, and food. So while for them money doesn't grow on trees, food, clothing, and bicycles do! Wildlands Trust then plants these trees in urban greening and forest restoration programs, generating further local employment and carbon credits for businesses to buy.

Another great example of market principles being applied on the ground is E+Co, a nonprofit taking a business approach to bringing clean energy to villages to reduce poverty. As they say: “E+Co finds great entrepreneurs. We help them establish clean energy businesses. Then we invest. It's that simple.” It clearly works, with projects now operating in Cambodia, China, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Ghana, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Mali, Morocco, Nepal, Nicaragua, Philippines, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Thailand, The Gambia, Uganda, Vietnam, and Zambia.

Over fifteen years, E+Co's investments and advice have supported 1,200 entrepreneurs to bring clean energy to 5.6 million people. In the process they have displaced 22 million liters of kerosene and 670,000 barrels of oil and saved 4 million tons of CO
2
from going into the atmosphere. The really interesting thing is they've done all this with an 8 percent return on funds used.

Individual passion and commitment can make an enormous difference in the world and power great change. Fifteen years ago I met Jack Heath, who had been deeply affected by youth suicide in his family and decided to do something positive in response. A former diplomat and senior adviser to Prime Minister Paul Keating, Jack invited me to join him on the board of his new Australian organization, the Inspire Foundation. Inspire established a youth-driven, Internet-based support service for young people called ReachOut (www.reachout.com). Jack realized that the Internet provided an accessible, anonymous, twenty-four hour and affordable way for young people to seek help and Inspire broke new ground using technology to deliver cost-effective social services, winning numerous awards for doing so in the late 1990s. What Jack also proved was that with the right support, young people can connect and help each other through tough times and the service is now spreading across the world.

This is being supported by Rupert Murdoch, who described Jack as “an extraordinary man.” The late Helen Handbury, a major early supporter of Inspire in Australia, was Rupert Murdoch's sister and he is now continuing her work, using his influence to help Inspire spread the support of ReachOut to young people around the world, starting in the United States and Ireland.

There is no doubt that as we enter times of great change, examples like Inspire, 1 Million Women, Freecycling, and many others show the power of the Internet to bring communities of people together virtually to build resilience and connections while driving change in how we behave. What they also show is that individuals, like Natalie Isaacs, Peter Blom, Deron Beal, Mike Hawker, and Jack Heath, can have a great impact when they act on their beliefs and use their passion to make things happen.

It's important to remember how
anyone
can make a difference when they decide to. While these people are in my view heroes they are also just ordinary people who decided to act and as a result are doing extraordinary things. As Jack Heath's wife, Catherine Milne, said of Jack in a national television profile: “He is not a saint but rather a flawed man trying to be good.” We are all flawed, we are all ordinary, and we can all make a significant difference
if
we choose to act.

Of course, there has never been a shortage of ideas and talking about how to make the economy more sustainable, communities stronger, and our lives more satisfying. What these examples show is that people have stopped talking and started acting. After thirty-five years of observing great initiatives and projects around the world like the ones just described, I'm convinced we are ready to take such ideas to scale, for three reasons.

The first, as covered throughout this book, will be the physical imperative to change. This cannot be underestimated as a motivator. When our backs are up against the wall, progress will be rapid and barriers that have seemed immovable for a long time will rapidly fall.

The second reason is the power of networks and global connectedness to drive change, incredibly quickly, through communities and around the world. These trends apply to how we change our attitudes toward issues such as consumerism as well as to how we take new technologies and ideas to scale and get them rapidly adopted.

This area was well covered in the book
Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.
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This fascinating and highly regarded research by Harvard professor Nicholas Christakis and the University of California's James Fowler showed the scale of our potential and also the power of individuals changing as a leverage point for group change.

Mathematical analysis of a network of twelve thousand people showed, for example, that you are 15 percent more likely to be happy if someone you are directly connected to (a friend) is happy. It goes further. At two degrees of separation, you're 10 percent more likely to be happy. At three degrees, 6 percent. This might not sound like much, but consider what it means—the fact that a friend of a friend of a friend (someone you've probably never met) is happy makes you 6 percent more likely to be happy. Compared with this, having a salary $10,000 higher makes you only 2 percent more likely to be happy.

What is the relevance of the power of these social networks in our case? Quite simply, it shows how behavioral and attitude change can lead to a cascade of change once people in prominent positions in the social network are converted. When something becomes normal or socially expected, it can spread rapidly. With our social networks now global, it's easy to see how fast an idea like “shop less, live more” could spread.

The third reason the period we are entering will see rapid acceleration in these shifts is that, collectively, the myriad examples like Generation Investment Management, Triodos, Sodra, Ocado, 1 Million Women, and Men's Sheds are actually no longer marginal. While not mainstream in the public consciousness, they are collectively approaching critical mass, and some are already there. Even though government and media focus obsessively on what they see as the mainstream economy—large global corporations—these are just one part of what makes the society and the economy work.

Many more people work in small to medium enterprises than in large companies, more people work in co-ops than in large companies, nonprofit community organizations make up a substantial sector of the economy and are growing rapidly, more money was invested in renewable power generation in 2008 and 2009 than in fossil-fuel generation,
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there is more growth in organic food than in industrialized food, and so on. The future is here, and it's more widely distributed than most of us think.

The main message here is not the many exciting ideas but the extraordinary capacity of human ingenuity to find solutions once we're motivated, along with the power of our social networks and Web-connected world to take these solutions to scale at an amazing pace.

Such a rich field of possibility. This is going to be an exciting period in human history.

And so we approach the end of our story. But before we do, and remind ourselves what's next, let's recap.

The end of economic growth and the realization that climate change is a threat to the future stability of the global economy and society will trigger two parallel responses. The old economy response, defined by actions like those outlined in the one-degree war plan, will appear to take off first and will get the most public and political attention. I believe this will be in full swing by the end of this decade, but it will certainly not be far away. For the immediate future, this will be our most important task. We have to roll out new technologies on a massive scale to prevent the climate from tipping over the edge. We will mobilize mind-boggling amounts of money, people, and focus to this task, and we need to do so as fast as we possibly can. This will be seen as a massive economic transformation. It is true it will be massive, but it will not be a true transformation.

That transformation will start at the same time but build more slowly. This will be the genuine transformation of the economy and society to a steady-state, sustainable economy, built on the pursuit of quality of life, a more equitable sharing of the world's wealth, and learning to operate in harmony with the ecosystem's capacity to support us.

While this transformation won't initially dominate public and political attention like the one-degree war phase, it will be both more profound and more sustained. It will be characterized by a broad social movement that will start building this new economy in a practical sense, while also developing its intellectual framework and political momentum.

This movement will have understood the lesson of climate change—there are limits we can't cross—and will seek to embed this idea deep in our cultural understanding. In this way we will come to understand, slowly at first but building over time, that the physical economy cannot grow and will need to be reinvented and redesigned at all levels.

This approach will not be an underground or marginal part of society. This is why I am so excited about the place we have arrived at in our story. People around the world are waking up every day to where we are and where we have to go.

Some come at it from the point of view of science, seeing the numbers and the physical limits. Others approach it from the economics, recognizing that the economic and financial consequences of moving beyond the limits will inevitably flow back into the economy and have an enormous impact on the value and competitiveness of companies and countries. Some people approach all this from a values perspective, observing at both a personal level and a societal level, that despite extraordinary increases in material wealth over recent decades, lives in the West are not improving in quality. They see trends like California building one new college over the past twenty years while it built twenty-one new prisons, and they know something is profoundly wrong when this occurs in the richest country in the world.

Others come at the issue as academics, studying the data of human development and progress and comparing this against measures of economic wealth. They conclude, now with a strong evidence base, that our current model isn't delivering. They have the data that shows while the average wealth of society is increasing, average quality of life is not improving.

From all these different angles, millions are coming to the same conclusion, and their numbers are growing rapidly. They know we have to change—what we expect, how we behave, and what we aspire to. There can be no technology fix for flawed human values; we have to change the values.