Modeshift

Welcome to Mode Shift, a blog that chronicles accelerating transition in American life. Mode Shift looks at the economy, clean energy,  competitiveness of state and metropolitan regions, politics and policy, and the swift development of online communications and media. The focus is new forms, new techniques, the new rules of the game  in economic development and communications. I’m interested in change and how people respond to it. Never has change occurred as fast as it is today. I’m intent on applying to Mode Shift’s reporting and commentary nearly 30 years of accumulated knowledge and experience in writing about technology, government, business, transportation, agriculture and the environment. This blog, in short, is about evolution. And that also applies to the career of its producer, a journalist and public policy specialist, a non-profit executive and grass roots organizer, a smart and lovable guy who was raised on the East Coast, educated in the Mid-Atlantic, and lived in the Deep South, the West Coast, and Washington, D.C., before alighting here on the northern coast of Lake Michigan.

I came to this part of Michigan as a young man in 1990 and as a national correspondent for the New York Times. I began living here full-time as correspondent and resident in 1993. Not long afterward my new career as a public interest advocate began along the same route taken by thousands of other American environmental activists. Basically, it ran right past my doorstep.

In February 1994, just three months after I’d begun living and writing full-time as a New York Times national correspondent from a tiny cabin in the woods of Manistee County, a landman from the natural gas industry knocked on my door. The stranger said the entire region was the target for aggressive drilling. I joined a group of neighbors in forming the Michigan Communities Land Use Coalition (MCLUC) to make the case for energy development practices that were sensitive to the land and the communities that inhabited the land. MCLUC recruited local governments and other state environmental organizations as allies.

The work to bring reason to natural gas development quickly grew into the largest and most influential grassroots environmental advocacy campaign in Michigan. It also led to start of the Michigan Land Use Institute, which was based in Benzonia and formally incorporated on April 22, 1995, the 25^th anniversary of Earth.

At the heart of the Institute’s distinctive approach to reasoned advocacy was an independent news desk, staffed by editors, writers, and designers that produced some of the best reporting in the country on land use, Smart Growth, energy development, transportation, urban development, local foods, and other subjects. During the 12 years that I spent at the Institute from 1995 to 2007, I served in almost every senior leadership position. I helped the organization grow to a peak of 21 staff members working out of Traverse City and four regional offices, and my work as a writer and editor helped to make Smart Growth the design standard for cities and suburbs across the country.

Since leaving the Institute I’ve expanded my work to include new specialities as a multimedia producer, communications specialist, and strategist. I’ve been recognized nationally as one of the leaders of a new dimension in environmental journalism made possible by technology, markets, urgency, and civic participation. I’m currently the director of media and communications for the US Climate Action Network, a coalition of 90 public interest organizations focused on solving climate change.

Prior to joining USCAN, I was director of communications for the Apollo Alliance, a coast-to-coast coalition of labor, green, business, and government organizations building a clean energy economy in the United States from its headquarters in San Francisco. I’m also the senior editor of Circle of Blue, a Traverse City-based online multi-media news organization reporting on the global fresh water crisis. And I am  a regular contributor to the New York Times, Grist Magazine, and Yale Environment 360, as well as an online communications, infrastructure, and message specialist who consults with for-profit and non-profit businesses and organizations across the country.

——————————————————————————

There were innumerable ways in 2007 to start Mode Shift, but the most appropriate was to begin in Buckfield, Maine, a cross road town in the woods about 80 minutes north of Portland. Buckfield’s been around since the early part of the 18th century. Still it’s entirely safe to note that never in the hamlet’s history has it encountered anyone quite like Fritz Grobe. I met Fritz last week at the door to his home, which is easy to find on North Buckfield Road. It’s the one with the rows of empty 2-litre bottles of Diet Coke on the stoop.

You probably never heard of Fritz, even though in the early 1990s, when he was in his 20′s, Fritz won five gold medals in international juggling competitions. And if you haven’t heard of Fritz, you certainly never heard of his partner, Stephen Voltz, a 49-year-old lawyer who practiced in Massachusetts before striking it big with Fritz last summer in the world of viral video. Still, you may have seen “Experiment 137,” the video Fritz and Stephen (Fritz on left, Stephen on right in pix) produced to explore in frothy glory what happens when Diet Coke and Mentos mints mix. Last summer, on June 3, Fritz and Stephen completed their new EepyBird.com Web site and posted Experiment 137. Stephen then emailed his younger brother, David Voltz, who lives in San Francisco, to tell him about the site and the video. David emailed a friend, who emailed another friend, and before the end of the day the video was posted to Fark.com, an influential Web agregator site, and Eepybird.com had 14,000 page views. On its first day.

The next day someone posted Experiment 137 to Slashdot.org, an important technology site, and tens of thousands more viewers tapped into the video. On Monday, a producer who’d seen the video on a German technology site, called from the David Letterman Show and invited the EepyBird duo to perform on national television. Their lives haven’t been the same since, nor has the infant business of selling entertainment on the Internet. A full account of EepyBird’s contribution to the online entertainment space appears in the February 20, 2007 edition of the New York Times, which sent me to Buckfield.

WASHINGTON — Last week in Pittsburgh, Van Jones, the 39-year-old founder of Green For All and one of the people who introduced the idea of “green-collar jobs” to both Democratic presidential candidates, brought more than 600 veteran union and environmental organizers to an awed hush. His address on the potential of the green energy economy to produce millions of jobs and a pathway out of poverty for disadvantaged inner city residents was a tour de force in mixing statistical analysis of global climate change, projections of industrial revenue in the developing wind and solar industries, and social justice metaphor and emotion.

Today, during the Take Back America conference here, an even larger audience heard from Majora Carter (see pix), the executive director of Sustainable South Bronx, a seven-year-old green advocacy and economic development group that has produced a new riverside park, promoted and installed green roofs, developed a state of the art green-collar job training program, and generated new jobs and hope in a Congressional district that is the poorest in the nation. “We went from here,” said Carter, her arms spread to the two screens displaying pictures of garbage dumps, incinerators, and refuse-strewn lots in her neighborhood, “to here.” The PowerPoint switched to a shot of the inviting, green, Hunt’s Point Riverside Park along the Bronx River.

The two presentations struck me as seminal. Never in my experience in the environmental community, a personal history that stretches back to the first Earth Day in 1970, has there been two young leaders as incandescent as Carter and Jones. And never in the history of modern American environmentalism have the two most exciting and important leaders been African American. Environmentalism has gained something it never earned before: soul and street cred.

After her talk, which was received with a standing ovation, Carter told me, “The work now is solutions-based. We’re applying our knowledge, our research, our advocacy to places to help people participate in this new economy. We are on the cusp of something so huge.”

When I asked her what she meant, Carter said, “We’re activating the green economy to transfer wealth and the capacity to participate to include poor people. We’re reaching across the traditional lines. It’s a very big change and a very big opportunity for everybody.”

It helps in image-conscious America that Carter and Jones are uncommonly beautiful and stylish. It also helps that they can communicate in whatever realm they need to. Carter was raised in the South Bronx, and has said in interviews that she knows the streets, and that her childhood included instances of abuse. Yet she also was educated at Wesleyan, where she received her degree in 1988, and later earned a Masters at NYU in 1997. In 2005 the MacArthur Foundation awarded her one of its “genius” awards.

Jones was raised in Jackson, Tennessee, attended the University of Tennessee in Martin, and Yale Law School. He is well-known in the San Francisco Bay Area for challenging police practices. His environmental roots are firmly planted in the same soil as Carter’s. Both see the emerging green energy economy as a way to revive job prospects in low-income neighborhoods abandoned by most American employers. In retrofitting buildings to be more energy efficient, in manufacturing solar energy systems, in installing green roofs and new parks lie solutions to joblessness, national security, and climate change. Theirs is not an environmentalism meant to point fingers. Instead it’s an environmentalism intended to wrap eager arms around capitalist opportunity.

Such a different message. Things change. So do leaders. These two have arrived at the perfect moment.

WASHNGTON — The Hip Hop Media Lab, an online non-profit that introduces low-income kids to the possibilities of making money with their creative talent, is a partner this week in producing the annual Take Back America conference. So is MoveOn.org, Living Liberally, Netroots Nation, and USAaction. This is the sixth edition of a three-day fest designed to introduce liberal America to some of the movement’s new icons — the New Organizing Institute, Hip Hop Caucus, and One Hood, among others — and to pay homage to some old ones — Jesse Jackson was in attendance today.

To be sure, the conference affirms earnest goals that would make America better. Those include ending the war, winning the 2008 presidential election, burying freemarket conservatism, promoting a national health care program, and developing a new economy that rebuilds the American middle class. Behind the broad themes are specific concerns — clean energy, environment, social justice, global climate change, media reform, restoring trust and faith in the legal system, and dealing with the crumbling banking system and housing markets are much featured in plenaries and sessions.

The important question, of course, is whether progressives can actually take back America. They’re making progress. A white woman and a black man are contenders for the presidency. Global climate change is a top tier public concern in the United States and around the world. Clean, green energy — renewables, energy efficiency, clean vehicles, rapid transit, high performance buildings — represents one of the largest and fastest-growing industrial realms in the United States.

Last summer, the American Solar Energy Society published a study that found 8.5 million Americans already work in green-collar jobs and that the various green energy and energy efficiency industries added $933 billion annually to the nation’s gross domestic product. Those industries included manufacturing the equipment and production of solar, wind, biomass, hydropower, hydrogen, and fuel cell power. It also included building efficient buildings and vehicles. By 2030, the authors predicted, 40 million Americans (1 in 4 working Americans) would be in green collar jobs and the value of the green collar industries in which they worked will add $4.3 trillion to the US economy.

But does all of this add up to a narrative that the majority of Americans 1) understand, and 2) embrace. That, friends, is not at all clear. Republicans built the governing majority that has essentially ruled America for a quarter century by convincing people that a handful of core ideas — tax cuts, deregulation, self-reliance, free markets, security, and prayer — represented the core chapters of the great millennial story of America. That it didn’t work is self-evident. The Republican narrative has produced one disaster after another — Iraq, mortgage crisis, dwindling incomes, widening gap between rich and poor, sanctioned torture, Katrina and New Orleans — and has given progressives an opening.

Yet can they jump through it and win? Maybe. And it’s not because of how progressives talk about their issues? They say too much with words that most people can not taste, touch, and see. One session here, for instance, is called, “Imperial Sorrows: The Domestic Costs of Policing the Globe.” Say what? Another is called, “Enpowering Workers: Progressive Imperative.” Who are we talking to? The introductory government class at Penn?

But we just might win because of two other progressive strengths that fit the 21st century. We’re much better at building the unlikely alliances, executing the effective convenings across race, class, regions, and workplaces that is so vital in this collaborative century. Labor, greens, Latinos, African Americans, women’s rights organizations, business executives, progressive think tanks, diplomatic organizations, research groups, city and state leaders are among the 2,000 attendees. And progressives do a very good job disseminating their work in their own media, much of it Web-based and on independent broadcast outlets.

The media center here is one of the conference’s nerve centers. Dozens of broadcasters congregate morning to night on “radio row,” interviewing attendees and guests. Behind a blue curtain in the same room is “bloggers row,” where roughly as many digital scribes work. And behind us are representatives of familiar magazines — Ms.Magazine, Mother Jones, The Nation, Washington Monthly, In These Times — and even more that I’m just coming to know — My DD.com, and Tapped.

PITTSBURGH — On the day after he buried his father, Van Jones, arguably the most thoughtful and dynamic young leader in the American environmental movement, addressed the Good Jobs, Green Jobs conference this morning. Jones, who bore his grief in occasional tears, told the more than 600 people in the room that this gathering was such a seminal event in the construction of a new green/labor/business governing coalition in the United States that his father wanted him to be here.

“He had some principles,” said Jones, who is head of a new California-based group named Green For All. “He stood up for the little people. He was born in abject poverty in Memphis. He joined the Air Force when he was 17-years-old in the middle of the Vietnam War so he could send a check to his mother. He had some principles. He came from the generation that had dogs sicked on them. He was in Memphis when Dr. King was killed and I was in utero. He had some principles. And the most fundamental of them was to stick up for the little people. Don’t leave anybody behind.

“My father got out of poverty,” Jones continued. “He could have bought a big house and could have left the community. He raised us right there.”

Jones stopped at this point. The room hushed. With a tissue, he dabbed at the tears on his cheeks. He bowed his head for a moment and then looked straight ahead. “We need to have principles,” he said. “What we need is to minimize the pain and maximize the gain for the little people, the ones too easy to leave behind.”

Aside from the riveting emotional content of the moment, there are a couple of big points worth noting about Jones’ appearance, and especially the steady evolution of a national political leader capable of tieing together the four essential social and economic movements — environmentalists, civil rights activitist, labor, and progressive businesses — that now have the opportunity to take back America. And it’s no accident that Jones, whose work until the couple of years was distinguished by defending citizens against the police in Oakland, has become a bona fide star.

The environmental movement, with all of its lily white warts and scientific hyping of minimal risks and upper crust chic, has nevertheless been the most important and durable movement on the left during the entire attack on America by what Jones calls “the pollution-based economy,” and “a government on the side of the problem makers.” By tying his work to the green movement, he broadened his base, linked to the considerable wealth on the green left, and found allies in the media and in Democratic politics. In 2007 he emerged in a column by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, shared a stage in New York with President Bill Clinton at the Clinton Global Initiative, and worked with California Senator Barbara Boxer to hone the legislation, affixed to last year’s federal Energy Bill, that will train over 30,000 low income people in green collar jobs.

It also helps that Jones, who’s not yet 40, the grandson of a southern black minister, and a Yale Law School graduate, knows a little about cadence, metaphor, story-telling and theater. The man knows how to talk.

Today his message was this: “There is nothing standing between us and the green economy but our own cynicism, our lack of trust in each other, fear of success, and our being used to being small,” he said. “We have the obligation to be right and in the majority.”

Jones noted that during the Depression farmers, students, working people, and intellectuals built a permanent governing New Deal coalition that defeated Fascism, built prosperity, and created the middle class. He stressed the need to think about the opportunity that lies before the nation to build an economy that helps working people and the environment, that “lifts the nation and everybody in it.”

“This is not a problem we solve that is built on marginal fixes,” said Jones. “We have an economy based on hurting poor people and hurting the planet. We’re talking about an economy about helping poor people and helping the planet. In order to get that change out of the system we need a movement, we need a coalition that can last over time, that can govern for decades. The government is on the side of the problem makers in this economy. It’s time to build a government on the side of the problem solvers in this economy. It’s time to build an economy that leaves nobody behind.”

PITTSBURGH — A long time ago as a young reporter in Pennsylvania I attended a conference in Philadelphia that focused on the ties between jobs, the environment, and the economy. Essentially, said speakers from the state’s environmental community, there were more ties linking working people and environmentalists than hindrances. It was a novel thought then. It’s less so today. In fact, given the rising cost of energy, the threat of global climate change, and dwindling manufacturing and industrial jobs, the gathering strength of the labor and environmental alliance seems almost natural.

Today I’m attending the first of the two-day Good Jobs, Green Jobs conference here in Steel City. There are nearly 800 people in attendance, about roughly split between labor and green, with an important smattering of business executives. What’s remarkable about all the various words and phrases and proposals flying about here — words like efficiency, clean energy, renewable energy, prosperity, transformation, and jobs — is how this economic strategy has so clearly attained a non-partisan frame and an air of inevitability. Who of a right mind can disagree with the idea that in the vast economic transition occurring here and around the world lies the tremendous opportunity to make money, save money, develop new technology, and open new service and industrial sectors that offer good paying jobs? The presidential nominees from both parties are using the same words to describe this new path.

There’s no end to the barriers that will slow progress. For one, there aren’t many lawmakers in state Legislatures or in Congress, Republican or Democratic, willing to switch the spending priorities of the billions of dollars they control in public treasuries. Yet it’s those public funds that are essential to catalyze some of the research and development that is necessary to fill in the gaps in our knowledge, and the holes in the market that can propel development of new tools. There’s also no assurance that the unity about energy that marks this moment will be with us in five years.

Katrina Landis, the chief operating officer of BP Alternative Energy, reminded a plenary session today that three times since the 1970s Congress has promoted the tax credits and subsidies that leveraged new developments in renewable energy nationally, and three times Congress also has let those credits expire. She added that if Congress does not renew the production tax credits that are currently in effect, it will cost the United States economy $19 billion and over 116,000 jobs.

Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club, took a different tack to the same point. He noted a conversation he had with Jack Welch, the former chief executive of General Electric, who said that GE’s business was largely dependent on new jet engines that were constantly being redesigned, and by the sale of two other major products that hadn’t been substantially redesigned for decades — power plants and light bulbs. The technology for the first is 50 years old, and the technology for the second is 100. In sum, Carl argued, energy production and use is the least innovative sector of the American economy. His suggestion: redesign energy markets to prompt innovation and high performance.

Today, the Apollo Alliance, which now employs me as communications director, released a new guide for cities to take advantage of the potential for green jobs. Take a look at Green-Collar Jobs in America’s Cities.