Modeshift

If you’ve followed what’s going on here in Michigan you know that we continue to lead the nation in too many categories that aren’t welcome — joblessness, rates of obesity and heart disease, income gap between wealthy and poor, racial segregation, home foreclosures. And we are at the bottom of the heap in categories that define well-being – income growth, business starts, educational achievement, the quality of our big cities, state fiscal health.

There are many reasons why Michigan has slid so far from its stature as an economic powerhouse capable of generating the good life for so many people for decades. The short answer is that our autocentric manufacturing economy, and hierarchical way of making decisions, is obsolete. Moreover, our comfort with Michigan’s divisions – political, racial, religious, class, and geographic — is preventing our ability to decide what to do in a century defined by collaboration.

But as I’ve discovered in so many other places, when you toss aside all the pretense and posturing, break down all the bluster and nonsense that keep us apart, you find that people do share values and principles. That common ground is, in fact, the very ground that lies beneath their feet, the ground that supports their neighborhoods, their schools, their businesses, their children, and themselves. The land, and the communities and culture that have grown up around our places, is what unites people. 

Last week I was in Knoxville, speaking at a large Quality Growth conference attended by 700 people. The people I met said they were very concerned that record levels of business, housing, and infrastructure investment produced by a new wave of population growth will ruin what is known as the East Tennessee experience. It’s a mix of mountain geography and culture, the hard woods and green pastures, the poverty and independence that fostered a way of life firmly based in family, freedom, hard work, and forbearance.

In February I was in Salt Lake City, which also is growing fast. There people have gathered around the idea that record rates of population growth threatens a high desert religious way of life that treated mountain vistas and great expanses of rangeland as precious gifts of God. The residents of the Wasatch Front, some of the most conservative and independent people in America — it’s Utah after all – nevertheless have reached agreement on an extraordinarily progressive course of action. They are taxing themselves to build light and heavy commuter rail lines, protect farmland and open space, promote energy efficiency, and build new communities around transit stations and stops. They also have convinced the very same Republican government they sent to Washington to quit toying with protections for the gorgeous and job-producing federal wilderness that lies at their doorstep.  

Here in Michigan, people also come together around our shared natural heritage. This state pioneered many of the environmental protection measures that became national policy. We were the first to outlaw DDT, the first state to establish protections for wetlands and natural rivers, fresh water dunes and inland lakes and streams. Michigan has the largest state-owned public domain east of the Mississippi, more than 4 million acres. And Michigan brokered a deal with the energy industry in 1980 that allowed for drilling on state lands in exchange for investing royalties in a state-managed account, the Natural Resources Trust Fund. The Trust Fund has paid for permanently preserving tens of thousands of acres of wild land and open space in Michigan, including more than 6,000 acres of coastal Lake Michigan dunes and forest in Benzie County, where I live.

Michigan’s geography has always been its economy. Only today it’s not about chopping down 17 million acres of old growth, as Michigan did 110 years ago. It’s about conservation and intelligent investment in resource-based industries. Michigan’s development strategy, still heavily dependent on jobs we can’t keep in a global economy, needs to be based much more firmly in its natural heritage. One state agency, Travel Michigan, seems to truly recognize that fact. Last year, Travel Michigan worked with McCann Erickson, the big Birmingham advertising agency, to produce a series of video spots, narrated by Tim Allen, that every Michigan resident ought to see. 

Melinda Remer, the agency’s marketing director who helped to conceive the project, told me today that the first three videos, which focus on Michigan’s natural and cultural assets, were released in May 2006 and cost $36,000 to produce, and were part of a $7.5 million multi-year marketing campaign. Over the summer they helped to attract more than 1 million visitors a month to Travel Michigan’s Web site. Two more videos, one of which will explore Michigan’s cities, are due to be released next month.   

Check all three out. They just make you want to tap every Lansing lawmaker on the shoulder. See. Quit your political gamesmanship. Stop spending money on what doesn’t work. The land, the water, our forests, Michigan’s great institutions, our towns, our schools, our neighbors. That’s what matters. That’s why we love Michigan.  

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Metrophile is an interesting offering on Wired’s blog network. It covers trends and fashion and art, the urban snackage that makes living in the metropolitan space a more inviting existence for growing numbers of Americans, young and retired. 

The International Herald Tribune launched its Business of Green blog last month, and it’s alreadys one of the savviest forums for global business and environmental trends on the Internet. The New York Times carries the blog on the page it’s hidden deep in the bowels of NYTimes.com that feature some of the best reporting on the site.  

Metropolis Magazine, a national monthly published in New York, has consistently been one of the most perceptive places to read about metropolitan design trends.  Metropolis editors have always been interested in the relationship between urban culture, politics, governing, and design. The book’s reporting covers architecture, interior design, product design, graphic design, crafts, planning, and preservation. I visited late last year with Martin Pedersen, the executive editor, in the magazine’s crowded hive of a fourth floor office on w. 23rd Street and found him personable, approachable, and very sharp.

I’ll be writing a piece for Metropolis later this year out of St. Louis that describes how four convening organizations shaped the landscape, economy, and quality of life there.  The region’s light rail system, historic neighborhood development, park expansion and repair, and recreational trail network became realities in large part because of the role convening organizations played in encouraging unlikely allies to work together.

Another place to follow urban design and social trends is Dwell Magazine. The magazine’s Web site has gotten much more accessible in recent months, as has its archive. Robert Sullivan, a regular Dwell contributor, visited us in Michigan last year to report on progress we’re making to help the state’s cities be  better places to live.  A link to the article is under Articles and Appearances on the right sidebar to this page. 

Monica Evans, who co-founded and oversees the regional chapter of the Sierra Club in northwest Michigan, reminded us this week of the Step it Up rally to accelerate action on global climate change. She and her colleagues are hosting a regional event in downtown Traverse City on the afternoon of April 14, starting at 1:30 in the Chase Bank Courtyard across from Horizon Books downtown. There’s a parade and a potluck dinner afterward.

The Traverse City rally is part of a national day of action organized by environmental writer Bill McKibben, the author of the 1989 best seller on global warming, ”The End of Nature,” and his students at Middlebury College in Vermont. The frame for the national action is to pressure Washington to begin aggressively cutting carbon emissions and protect America’s right to an optimistic future. The energy behind the campaign was drawn initially from Bill’s capacious mind and especially his expertise on global climate change.

But Step It Up also is a quintessential example of the power of social media. It’s grown into a national event due in large part because the communicating and organizing reach of the Internet is linking so many people together who care about the warming earth. Bill took a page out of MoveOn.org’s playbook and deployed what are now routine online information and advocacy tools — email, digital photography, video, audio, YouTube, blogs, action alerts, and archives. He stayed on message, persisently sending focused appeals to gather on American street corners. People responded. One of those corners is the place where Front Street and Park intersect in downtown Traverse City.

For those of us who live along the northern coast of Lake Michigan this is personal. Lake levels have been low for several years and are dropping again. We just ended the warmest of the 15 winters I’ve been around this place. Crystal Mountain, where my wife works as a ski instructor, closed today, 10 days ahead of schedule. During the week between Christmas and New Years Day, traditionally the busiest ski days of the year – and the most economically important – there was no snow at all. My daughter and I ran the snowless cross-country ski trails in our shorts and tee-shirts. The resort laid off over 50 employees. Jim  MacInnes, Crystal Mountain’s general manager, says the ski season starts a week later and ends a week earlier than it did in the 1980s.

When President Bush and his fellow warming skeptics argue — there are a bunch of those folks sitting on county and township boards around here – that reducing global warming gases affects the economy I’ve always wondered whose economy is he talking about? The struggling snow sports industry of the Upper Midwest? The Colorado Plateau ranchers and farmers challenged by a nearly decade-long drought? The small stores and family businesses in New Orleans drowned by Hurricane Katrina?

Bill McKibben and his colleagues are performing a public service. Step It Up is a model for the kind of home-grown, street level campaign that online tools and techniques are able to turn into a mass movement.  Frankly, it’s essential. In a world with climbing energy prices, rising land and housing costs, declining incomes, record population growth, battled hardened political intransigence, and several potential environmental calamities converging at once, expecting leaders to do more than talk is folly.

A quick tour through the presidential campaign Web sites of Barack Obama (see yesterday’s post), Hillary Clinton and John McCain makes that point clear. All talk about the global climate, and all have proposed fixes — like promoting ethanol production and “clean” coal — that have no promise other than making favored constituencies richer and global conditions worse. 

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The Los Angeles Conservancy, the largest local historic preservation group in the United States, produced a terrific online multi-media exhibit of Wilshire Boulevard called Curating the City. Using motion graphics, mapping, text, photographs, and digital hotspots, the program explores the history and geography of one of the nation’s iconic roadways, the West Coast equivalent of Detroit’s Woodward Avenue or Philadelphia’s Broad Street. 

What’s so cool about this example of multi-media storytelling is how quickly it loads and how easy it is to use. The prompts are readily visible, and the graphics are strikingly good. The public interest measure of this application, moreover, is how Curating the City invites viewers to consider visually how much of Wilshire Avenue has resisted decades of change even as it’s undergone momentous transformation. It’s that knowledge of place that drives how metropolitan regions react to the myriad forces of change that are ever-present. Using multi-media tools to enable people to see the context of change is vital to making measured decisions in all the realms of urban design. 

Tom Friedman has a very interesting piece in the March 16 edition of the New York Times that reports the back story of the announcement last month that TXU would not build eight high-polluting coal plants in Texas. Turns out that the new owners of the utility were concerned about the public relations fallout from the battle they’d been engaged in with grassroots groups in Texas, and national environmental organizations, particularly Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council. 

The campaign against the plants involved the public’s growing knowledge of the costs of climate change, as well as the influence of the Internet and social media to inform and motivate the opposition. Friedman reports that some heavy duty Wall Street financiers also were involved. In the new era of public interest advocacy, the convergence of money, communications, research, and public opinion has the power to move major corporations concerned about their place in a global world.

Here in Michigan, we found similar publilc interest success three years ago when a Texas energy developer arrived in Manistee proposing to build a big coal-fired power plant. Residents put together a profoundly convincing case about the environmental and economic costs to the city and the region if the plant was approved. They also discovered that the developer could largely avoid paying municipal taxes, thus saddling Manistee with all of the costs associated with the plant, including rebuilding roads and providing police, fire, and emergency medical services. That evidence and more was disseminated over the Internet, fostering a very lively email conversation, and ultimately drawing over 1,000 people to three public hearings, after which the city ultimately turned the plant down. 

In 2007 a new mainstream thought has entered the conversation about coal-fired plants in Michigan. Not a single new one ought to be built in the state, ever. The same thought has crossed the national intellectual radar lately. Amanda Griscom of Gristmagazine reported last week that James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the world’s top climate scientists threw down the gauntlet. ”There should be a moratorium on building any more coal-fired power plants,” Hansen told the National Press Club. 

The evidence is powerful for developing cleaner and more economically productive energy sources, like solar and wind. The costs of coal are clear. And enough people know the basic parameters of the debate to make a ban on new coal plants plausible. Facts well-disseminated to an interested constituency has completely altered the balance of influence on the usefulness of coal as a fuel for generating electricity. And it’s happened Mode Shift fast.

One of the rules of journalism that I learned a long time ago is that it’s okay to be ahead, but not okay to be too far out front. Another rule  is conflict sells better than cooperation. 

Mode Shift, which describes the political, cultural, and economic context of a civic movement that is changing patterns of metropolitan development, is ahead of most other forums in covering these stories. But it’s not too far ahead, which is probably good.

The hard part is that the American Mode Shift is principally a story of collaboration to invent novel ideas that are actually yielding promising results. In other words it’s a good news story, and that violates a basic tenet of journalism in the good ‘ole USA. 

Nevertheless it’s comforting to know I’m not alone. Along with the Web site of the Michigan Land Use Institute, and Smart Growth America, there are a handful of other forums that I pay attention to that are chronicling similar ideas and their results, especially those based in the West.

One of the best is New West, based in Montana, which approaches the Mode Shift from a multi-state perspective and does a very good job corralling trends and breaking news.

Another is Tidepool, based in the Pacific Northwest and now managed by the smart people who work for writer Alan Durning at the Sightline Institute in Seattle. Tidepool’s frame is much greener than New West’s, but that fits the ecotopian empire that lies between Vancouver and northern California. 

A third forum that is starting to pay more attention to the wave of green, energy efficient development strategies is Grist Magazine, also published n Seattle. Chip Giller, Grist’s founder, is a Brown graduate and a writer and editor from suburban Boston who was exposed very early to high concept environmental ideas. His baby sitter was Bill McKibben, author of the 1989 classic “The End of Nature,” and arguably the best environmental writer of his generation. 

I played a cameo role in helping Chip launch Grist, actively contributing pieces for tiny fees that helped to generate credibility. I also participated in the three-day strategic planning session several years ago  (McKibben and John Pascantando, the director of Greenpeace USA, also attended) that helped Chip turn Grist from a tiny start-up to the power house Web publication it has become.

But Chip, (see pix) whose picture graced the cover of Vanty Fair’s Earth Day edition last year, hasn’t been that interested in the greening of metropolitan development strategies until lately. Last year I tried to interest him a series of pieces that described how several cities were taking steps to become greener and more prosperous, and that the strategy was being embraced by dozens more regions. Chip’s response : “Oh, you can be our good news reporter.” Ouch! It was the green equivalent of ”if it don’t bleed it don’t lead.” Nevertheless I see more of the Mode Shift in Grist’s report than I’ve seen previously.

The tie is Grist’s concern with global climate change. But whatever the frame, the reporting leads to the same conclusion. Cities are becoming the new incubators of environmental and economic policies that make them greener, more prosperous, and better places to live and do business. It’s good to be ahead. Just don’t get too far out front. 

Ryan Burke is a student at the University of North Carolina who until Valentine’s Day this year rolled through his undergraduate career in a veil of unmistakable obscurity. But this is the age of social media, when ubiquitous video cameras, email, and the Internet can vault creative instinct to unimaginable heights of notoriety. YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and legions of video file-sharing sites have enabled young people to reveal, expose, share, and broadcast every aspect of their lives. Social media is responsible for great poetry, deep textual conversations, as well as Girls Gone Wild.

Burke knows this and put the anything goes culture to work last month to prove a personal point about trust, fidelity, a boy’s wounded heart, and the power of public exhibition. He confronted his girfriend, who he’d learned had been cheating on him.

It wasn’t so long ago that such knowledge was confined to a close group of personal friends. But like a 17th century Puritan, Burke made his ridicule and anger known on the technological grapevine, posting a message on Facebook about his plan to conduct a public dumping. The scene of graceless personal petulance and community condemnation that unfolded in The Pit before some 3,000 other students was simultaneously ugly and impressive.

It revealed the power of social media to inform, recruit, motivate, inspire, entertain, and disgust.  It is that kind of ubiquitous influence that makes social media such a new and critical part of the nation’s evolving political, economic, and cultural geography. 

It took me a long time, too long in fact, to get a grip on this blog thing. Time constraints. Fear of not being able to commit. Uncertainty about audience. Distrust of the forum.

Like, dude, what was I waiting for? Turns out this is the deal for writers. More to the point, it’s the deal for any public interest minded soul intent on making a difference, wherever they are. Reason. The Internet is a global information and dissemination banquet, and like hungry guests at a Long Island bar mitvah, Web site visitors want to be first in line for the best stuff. The trick is to provide the digital delicacies that awake the uninformed, provoke the knowledgeable, and keep everybody coming back for more.

So far, the response has been earnest enough to make writing here every day a priority. But I also want to help you gain just a little taste of why I’m so enthused. Look at the range of interests and expertise already available in the Internet space, and being explored most successfully by new adapters, most of them born after 1975. Here is a collection of upcoming Internet media gatherings and conferences. Click on a couple of the conference links and you’ll see how rich and stoked this sector is, and it’s just going to get hotter. Never before have creative people, political people, public interest organizations, writers, creeps and heroes and cranks had access to a mass audience, literally with a click. 

You have the creative folk figuring out how to turn the currency of fame gained on the Internet into real money. Here’s Justin Kownacki’s “Something to be Desired,” an online sitcom that he’s busy marketing to the world. The acting’s a little rough and the scripts aren’t yet Steven Spielberg quality, but you get the point.

Now there’s nothing stopping smart and dedicated journalist types of the old school from adopting the tools of the new school. It’s like transforming an old Carnegie Library into a modern temple of information, like the Salt Lake City Library (see pix). One thing we old school reporters know how to do is structure and frame non-fiction story telling. So we gather some bright younger folk around and collaborate. It’s happening at the Michigan Land Use Institute. Julie Hay has turned out a couple of nice pieces with Sound Slides of late. Doug Rose, our incomparable Web coordinator, is becoming a technical producer, and is preparing to post video interviews that we produced at the Seeds of Prosperity conference earlier this month. We have plans for a regular online TV interview and news show, regular videos, motion graphics, and interactive multi-media. The tools are available. The narrative of how communities are changing the rules of the development game to respond to the new signals of this century is compelling. The audience is clearly eager. 

It’s easy to grasp how telling stories in video, audio, sound slides, motion graphics, interactive multi-media, and social media expands the audience and interest in any idea. So that’s why the Institute is so intent on moving as quickly as it can to gain new expertise. Very few public interest organizations on any side of the political spectrum are as expert in the new media as they are in understanding coalition building or lobbying to extend their influence. Those that can skillfully apply the new media will have enormous space to make their case. 

This is the second weekly installment of Flip, Modeshift’s exploration of the best examples of online tools to build connections between people and places. I’ve got several for you to see. Spend some time with these. They’re all terrific.

The Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington in Seattle produced this interactive production to explore several ancient settlements in Puget Sound. The production mixes text, audio, video, and motion graphics.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York did this wonderful interactive production for Tall Buildings that is really easy to explore and does a nice job of non-fiction storytelling. 

Fuji Film produced Forests Forever, an exploration of the biology and life cycle of forests that is set up to mimic a video game, although it includes such high quality pictures, audio, text, and motion graphics it could and should be used as a high school or university teaching tool.

The idea here is that online communications produces an entirely new means for joining people to their places. That is the connection, tying our spirit to our places, which produces, like the fresh spring buds of a Benzie County cherry tree, the fruit of new ideas that make our lives and communities better.

SALT LAKE CITY - Matt Leighninger published an interesting piece this week on Tompaine.com about how local governments are finding new ways to get things done, particularly across jurisdictional boundaries. “Local leaders are recruiting large, diverse numbers of people and involving them in small, deliberative groups, big action forums and ongoing structures like neighborhood councils,” Leighninger wrote.

Leighninger’s “deliberative groups” are the same thing as ”convening groups,” my term for describing the new alliances of untraditional allies that are forming serendipitously across the country. These convening organizations, which differ in their form and function from traditional civic groups — chambers of commerce, rotary groups, Lions Clubs, and the like — arise out of the need for communities to find a way to negotiate the conflicts that too often occur at the intersection of politics, commerce, and advocacy.  Their role is to help resolve big public interest issues — like traffic congestion or rapid transit or affordable housing — that cross jurisdictional boundaries and the lines between the public and private sectors.

In their form and function, convening groups are entirely an artifact of the 21st century. They are needed because government by itself, at every level, is incapable of efficiently achieving big ideas. And the new communications technology — blogs, email, Web sites, chat boards — provide convening groups wtth the ready means to communicate with themselves and to engage in dialogue in real time with folks in their communities. 

I first recognized convening groups in Michigan. The West Michigan Strategic Alliance in the Grand Rapids region, which represents businesses, local governments, farmers, neighborhood groups, environmentalists, and others, formed to prevent the region between Michigan’s second largest city and Lake Michigan from becoming the Midwest’s version of Los Angeles.

In Traverse City, the Land Use and Transportation Study Coordinating Group is 34 representatives of local governments and civic organizations formed out of a hotly disputed proposal to build a highway and bridge across the Boardman River. The group is now managing a $1.36 million federally-financed scenario planning project to develop the reasoned alternative to the highway.

Here in the Salt Lake City region, Envision Utah formed in the 1990′s to help growing suburbs bring order and environmental sensitivity to third-world growth rates. An ally has been Salt Lake City’s two-term Democratic Mayor Rocky Anderson (see pix), who’s administration has been defined by Anderson’s insistence that the city take the lead nationally in curbing the production of global climate change gases. The city’s single-minded pursuit of that goal, coupled with Envision Utah’s trend setting program of land conservation and growth management has made the largest region in the most conservative state an unexpected model of how to build a clean, green, land-conserving, and prosperous new economy. It’s really something to see.