Modeshift

You may have missed this little note out of Wall Street last week but many of the renewable and alternative energy funds are doing very well. The New Alternatives fund is up nearly 37 percent the last 12 months and 20 percent so far this year. The Guinness Atkinson fund is up 17 percent and 27 percent while the Wilder Hill funds, which launched last fall, are each up about 11 percent this year. By comparison, reports CNN, the S&P 500 has climbed about 21 percent over the last 12 months and is up about 5 percent this year.

The surge in renewable funds is part of a much larger two-path conversation happening on energy in the United States. At the grassroots, and in the investment portfolios of folks with a little dough there’s a tremendously interesting discussion about what will replace fossil fuel in an era of climbing prices, escalating environmental contamination, and soaring temperatures. Over the weekend, for instance, 3,000 people and 120 clean energy vendors showed up at the second annual Michigan Energy Fair in Onekama, Michigan, which is about a driver and a three-wood long. From Vespa scoooters to hybrid vehicles of every make, to windmills and solar displays,  off the grid, and non-toxic energy efficiency, to design and architecture and much more, the energy fair offered a fine exploration of what’s available for an ordinary Joe to get tuned up to the new cost and supply realities of the 21st century. 

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You may recall that Veep Cheney once called conservation “a personal virtue” that had no place in a national energy strategy. Like almost everything else out of the current administration, what nonsense. In fact conservation represents an authentic response to scarce oil and high prices, as well as to global climate change. In essence, many of the products for sale at the fair framed sipping rather than slurping as a virtue. The market and consumers will steadily move conservation and alternative means for generating energy to the top of the national priority, regardless of what political folk think. That was perfectly plain in Onekama.

The big question is whether the elected leaders at the state and national level will catch up. That is not at all assured. Just before the Michigan Energy Fair got started the U.S. Senate approved an energy bill that significantly raised fuel mileage standards in cars and light trucks for the first time since 1975. The lawmakers also approved subsidizing 36 billion gallons of ethanol production at 51 cents a gallon. There was no new incentive for renewable energy, no shift from fossil fuels to clean sources, and fortunately no spending to turn coal into fuel, which is what the Nazis did in World War Two.

How much of the Senate bill will stick? Probably not much. The Michigan House delegation is determined to blow up the mileage standards, saying it threatens the domestic vehicle manufacturing industry. The industry has been dying for 30 years, so you have to wonder about that one. The Japanese don’t mind the higher standard. They’ve already reached 35 miles per gallon in Europe. And don’t be surprised if the coal boys in the South, West, Midwest, and mid-Atlantic somehow convince taxpayers to shell out billions to turn black rock into liquid diesel-like fuel. It’s a grim world when the grassroots go one way and the elected state and federal officials go another. Something about that campaign finance reform we ought to take a look at. 

So just in case you’ve been wondering where I been, you need look no further. I spent Monday night and half of Tuesday in the Munson Hospital ICU recovering from taking a pretty nasty spill — that I do not remember — off my road bike. The details aren’t grim. I apparently hit a patch of sand and went down hard enough for my helmeted head to bounce. A friend and witness who owns a couple of coffee shops in town was in the vicinity and said I never lost consciousness and was apparently moving around. I don’t remember a thing until I woke up in ER near dark and saw my wife and three teenage kids looking at me with that unmistakable mask that kids wear when you’ve given them a good fright. Injuries are a 5-stitch cut over my eye, a mild concussion, and literally four small road rash patches — one on my forehead, an elbow, a knee, and shoulder, all on my right side. My wife has gotten me to promise not to ride for another day or two. I still feel a little woozy, though not bad. If everything is better tomorrow I’ll go back out.

Mike Moran, a journalist, editor, and multi-media specialist who spent nine years of his career at MSNBC.com, an incubator of great talent and technique in the late 1990s, has been executive editor since August 2005 of CFR.org, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Internet site. CFR.org, one of the best sites in the non-profit universe, is doing a lot of things very well in making the complex world of foreign affairs simpler to understand, easier to access, and a much more compelling narrative of our time. 

One of the more interesting sections of the site is the multi-media section, which presents the richest collection of first-rate multi-media productions I’ve come across on any news and information site managed by a non-profit, and among the best in any realm, mainstream media Web sites — NYTimes.com, Washingtonpost.com — included. The site publishes timelines, photographs, audio, and motion graphics about issues as diverse as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and the conflict in Darfur. 

I spoke with Moran today for a piece I’m reporting for the New York Times on multi-media producer Brian Storm, another former MSNBC.com staffer who’s moved on to launch and oversee Mediastorm.org, the hottest independent multi-media production shop in American journalism. Mediastorm produced CFR.org’s first crisis guide on Korea in January, the Darfur piece  in April, and is working on another guide to the crisis in the Middle East. 

Moran also told me that the new multi-media productions, and several more features including podcasts and complete video of Council meetings and speakers, has helped to drive traffic to CFR.org from 109,000 visitors and just over 400,000 page views a month in May 2005, to 390,000 users and 1.4 million page views in May 2007. Moreover, visitors who used to spend an average of six or seven minutes on the site now typically spend 12 to 14 minutes. More evidence about the power and influence of new story telling tools.

Here’s a great example of how to deploy Internet technology and interactivity to conserving farmland. The Michigan Land Use Institute just posted the latest version of our Taste The Local Difference Web site, which links buyers of local farm products to sellers. Here’s a new facet of the site that enables wholesale suppliers and buyers to connect very quickly on the Web, an online wholesale market as it were.   Just great work by the Institute’s Entrepreneurial Agriculture Project and our Web producer, Doug Rose. Nice job guys. 

On the day late last month that Rachel Carson would have turned 100 years old I posted a piece on Mode Shift that focused on the surprising failure of the nation’s major environmental organizations to defend the mother of modern environmentalism. The free market right has set out on a deliberate path to diminish Carson, and by extension the American environmental community, as credible in responding to the consequences of industrial technology. The attack on Carson is an important facet of the free market right’s campaign to diminish the reach of local, state, and federal safeguards. And it’s been remarkably effective and destructive. The federal government, for instance, has no strategy for responding to global climate change because of its sympathy to free market assertions that the science of climate change is deeply flawed.  

In any case on Tuesday this week John Tierney, an influential free market science writer and columnist at the New York Times, leveled a broadside at Carson in the pages of Science Times. Calling Silent Spring a “hodgepodge of science and junk science,” Tierney accused Carson of using “dubious statistics and anecdotes (like the improbable story of a woman who instantly developed cancer after spraying her basement with DDT) to warn of a cancer epidemic that never came to pass. She rightly noted threats to some birds, like eagles and other raptors, but she wildly imagined a mass ‘biocide.’”

I know Tierney and worked with him at the Times in the early 1990s, when he joined the paper. He’s smart, thorough, and delights in being a contrarian on environmental issues. He wrote a famous piece questioning the value of recycling, essentially saying that recycling wastes more energy and materials than it saves. In another piece for the Times Magazine, Tierney singlehandedly changed the public’s view of Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich when he reported on a bet that Ehrlich made with Julian Simon, an economist at the University of Maryland. In 1968 Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which predicted a runaway global population boom (he was right on that) and mass starvation globally and food riots in the United States in the 1980s (he was wrong about that).  Ehrlich bet that the prices of five key metals would rise as a result of population increases and scarcity of natural resources. Simon bet that innovation would drive prices down. In 1990, Ehrlich conceded defeat and sent Simon a check for $576.07, the amount that represented the decline in the metals’ prices after accounting for inflation, he reported.

Now Tierney is after Rachel Carson, using as the basis of his critique a 1962 review of Silent Spring in the journal Science written by I. L. Baldwin, a professor of agricultural bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin. Baldwin’s review was the subject of debate as intense at the time as Carson’s ground-breaking journalism. Her assessment of the toxic trail left by pesticides in plants and animals was defended and confirmed then by independent scientists, some of them working at the behest of President John F. Kennedy. And they’ve been reconfirmed time and again in the real world since.

Pesticide use has resulted in mass killings of songbirds and wildlife, and the poisoning of farm and industrial workers. I personally reported on the consequences to production workers in Lathrop, California in the 1980s who were left sterile because of their exposure to the pesticide DBCP during its manufacture. I reported on the incidence of young children who’d been born deaf in a California community where the drinking water supply had been contamined by DBCP and other toxic farm chemicals. 

I tracked through the forests of western North Carolina in the early 1980s, identifying uncommon rates of death and illness in communities exposed to the defoliants 2,4-D and picloram, which were used to kill broad-leafed trees. The mix of 2,4-D and picloram, by the way, was sprayed in Vietnam, was known as Agent White, and was used to clear forests where Agent Orange didn’t work. A military study of the effects of Agent White, which I found in the library of Auburn University in Alabama, said that Hmong tribes exposed to the defoliant displayed levels of cancer and birth defects far in excess of neighboring communities that weren’t exposed. 

So you can’t tell me that Rachel Carson’s reporting inspired “chemophobia” as Tierney charges, or is exaggerated or untrue. What he does is focus the knife edge of an eloquent rhetorical attack on the outer membrane of Carson’s reporting, such as the predictions she made that haven’t come to pass — a big loss of robins, for instance. He doesn’t note that such a prediction might well have come to pass, and fortunately hasn’t, because several of the most toxic compounds she critiqued, especially DDT, have been banned for agricultural use. 

I appeal again to the major national organizations to get involved in setting the record straight about the value of Carson’s journalism and scholarship. Their credibility and the salience of the environmental movement’s science is at stake.

Here’s a name worth paying attention to in the space where sustainable business practices and the non-profit sector cross. He is Joshua Scott Onysko, a 30-year-old native of Rhode Island who turned a bonding experience with his mother making organic soap into Pangea Organics, a very successful Boulder-based manufacturer of organic body and skin care products. I first learned of Onysko and Pangea Organics from a friend in Saugatuck who was as enthusastic about the company’s all natural French Rosemary with Sweet Orange facial toner as she was about the box it came in. The package contained Genovese Italian sweet basil seeds embedded in the 100 percent post-consumer moulded fibre. The compostable box is designed to be moistened and planted. Two to three months later sweet basil will sprout from the seed bed.

Not only is the idea and execution of a plantable package just totally cool, it also indicates a facile business executive who is dialed into his customers’ values, as well as global market trends. I made a couple of calls, knocked around the Internet, and discovered that Onysko, who says he never gained a formal education, even as a grade schooler, is quite the instinctive entrepreneur who knows his way around a growing business. He also views himself as an agent of social change and is using the revenue and profits of his growing $2 million, five-year-old company to build the Pangea Institute, a non-profit devoted to teaching business executives how to be more environmentally sensitive and economically sustainable. 

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His own company, he says, operates a 10,000 square-foot manufacturing plant that is completely wind-powered. None of his employees earn less than $12.50 an hour, and receive generous health, dental, and eyecare benefits. Pangea employees manage a 3,000 square- foot organic garden that produces food that an onsite cook turns into a daily lunchtime feast. His line of soaps and other skin and body care products, Onysko says, supports 40,000 acres of organically grown oils and other crops around the world, much of it produced by women. 

The neat compostable package with embedded basil seeds was developed by UFP Technologies, a 44-year-old maker of custom packaging based in Georgetown, Massachusetts. UFP Technologies described its cutting edge package this way: ”Molded Fiber, a division of UFP Technologies, manufactures the customised shells, which are made from 100% recycled paper fibres and offer a cost-effective, environmentally friendly alternative to petroleum-based packaging materials. Pangea Organics recently redesigned packaging for its entire product line, and UFP Technologies provided recycled moulded fibre for a visually appealing packaging solution.”

It’s just this kind of union between a bright young entrepreneur intent on making things better, and a mainline technically savvy manufacturer willing to be inventive that is the essence of the Mode Shift we’re seeing in business, communities, and in peopleorienting their lives to respond to the powerful market forces that are reshaping the world.

Remember in the 2004 presidential campaign when George W. Bush and John Kerry briefly sparred over the price of gas? Democrats predictably blamed “Big Oil” and promised Congressional investigations. Republicans blamed Democrats and environmentalists for blocking efforts to build more refineries and drill for more oil, especially in Alaska. The tussle failed to attract more than the attention of a couple of political reporters. Why? Gas prices nationally were $1.80 a gallon, and only in California did they rise above $2 a gallon.

Well get ready for $5 a gallon fuel next summer when the price of gasoline becomes the issue of the presidential campaign. At that price, gasoline will top Iraq as the top concern of most voting Americans. And get ready for the Republican message machine to do what it does best: focus on a single issue, identify villains, command the message agenda, propose actions that working people find plausible, dial into its constituency, and pull the G.O.P. into position to win an election it has no business even being competitive in.

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Here are the suppositions and observations upon which this scenario is built. First, gasoline prices have climbed nearly 60 percent over the last five months — in January the national average was $2.33 a gallon – and this month reached $3.65 a gallon in northern Michigan, just 35 cents less a gallon than the $4 level I predicted in April. The knife edge that separates demand and supply is so sharp now that any number of supply disruptions in the United States or overseas – storms, plant outages, strikes, pipeline failures, shipwrecks – can cause prices to rise 25 cents in a day, as we saw here in late April. It’s easy to forecast $5 a gallon next summer. The underlying market forces are pushing prices inexorably higher.

Second, fuel prices affect every American, regardless of whether they live in cities and barely use their vehicles, or live in the suburbs and rural regions and drive 20,000 miles a year or more. The rising cost of fuel is one of the most closely watched indicators of economic and social well-being because until the nation figures out that cars, highways, strip malls and parking lots are no longer the best measure of what makes a place great, the United States will continue to experience a collective stomach ache in most households, and in some real hardship. This month my family’s fuel bill rose from the $325 a month that we normally spend on gasoline to over $500 a month. I earn a decent living and we are fortunate to be able to fold the extra cost into our budget. But for hundreds of families in this rural region who drive as much or more than we do, an extra $175 a month for fuel is the difference between survival and foreclosure.

The Traverse City Record-Eagle reported on Sunday that home foreclosures have quadrupled in northwest Michigan since 2000, and with gas prices climbing the numbers will accelerate. School administrators in our rural district anticipate enrollment will drop in September by 81 kids, a six percent decline from enrollment this year. In other words, 35 families with children are expected to leave Benzie Countyover the summer.

Third, the suburban and rural voters affected most by $5 a gallon gas live in predominantly Republican red counties. Though they may be disillusioned with George Bush and his administration of inept managers (I’m being delibarately kind out of respect for my GOP readers) they are still inclined to vote Republican if the party convenes around a candidate and a message that makes sense. For the G.O.P message masters, $5 a gallon gas is an easy one. They know high gas prices aren’t just an irritant for their working family constituency in the suburbs and rural areas. It’s an emergency. They can lay the blame at the feet of liberals who blocked the oil industry from developing new reserves and used regulatory barriers to impede construction of new refineries. They can convince their  voters that the solution lies in electing Republicans who will open offshore fields and the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge to exploration, limit the reach of onerous regulations that further limit supplies, and offer even more subsidies and incentives to the oil industry to build new refineries.

Whether the Republican solutions have any merit — and none of them do — is not the point in a presidential campaign. As we’ve learned in this century, facts and truth are not necessarily the most important building blocks to credibility. More important for the anticipated Republican message is that the Democrats, once again, have no message on gasoline prices. Check out House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s grand standing on the issue in Washington earlier this month (see video). The Center For American Progress, a prominent Democratic activist think tank in Washington, is a good example of the Democrats’ absolute failure to anticipate and respond to the issue. The Center’s recipe for dealing with high gasoline prices involves (1) blaming the oil companies, (2) comiserating with consumers, and (3) noting that lower prices would be a benefit to millions of Americans. It’s pathetic.

If Democrats fail to develop a clearer and more relevant response to $5 a gallon gas — some mix of unexpected short-term relief like a gas tax moratorium with a realistic menu of emergency and longer term fuel economy rules, vastly increased investments in alternatives to driving, and incentives for designing more compact communities — they are likely to lose the White House again.

Across the country this weekend, and especially today, thousands of Americans honored Rachel Carson, the author of “Silent Spring,” who was born 100 years ago on a 65-acre farm in Springdale, Pennsylvania, northeast of Pittsburgh. Carson’s legacy was extolled by grassroots activists, lauded by newspaper writers, and commemorated by institutions. She also was villified as a cause of global genocide by conservative free market critics, and a Congressional resolution honoring the centennial of her birth was blocked by a Republican Senator from Oklahoma. 

All the attention to her birthday is a fitting measure of Carson’s lasting influence as the mother of modern environmentalism, except in one more arena you’d expect her life to be celebrated: The national environmental groups — Environmental Defense, the Sierra Club, Audubon, World Wildlife and the Natural Resources Defense Council. But if you take a look, there’s not one word on any big green home page about Carson. Big green’s silent spring for Rachel Carson is more than a shame. It’s a hazard for all of us. Here’s why.

 In ”Silent Spring,” her 1962 tour de force of investigative journalism, Carson collected disparate scientific findings on the effects of chlorine-based agricultural chemicals on wildlife and built a powerful new narrative about the consequences of industrial technology on the environment. Almost every achievement of modern environmentalism – from the development of federal and state laws requiring sharp reductions in exposure to toxic air, water, and land pollutants, to government agencies to enforce and advance the statutes, to the vast expansion of scientific inquiry into new threats, to the development of a national community of big and small organizations dedicated to environmental protection, to a much safer and cleaner environment, to the recovery of bald eagles, to the embrace of environmental goals as arguably the largest and most influential grassroots movement on the planet today –  can be traced back to Carson’s probing research and lucid prose.

It’s gratifying to see the nation honor her life.

Tom Henry, the fine environmental reporter for the Toledo Blade, joined the dozens of newspaper correspondents and editorialists who remarked this weekend on Carson’s invaluable legacy. “She changed the way life could have been for today’s 302 million Americans, as well as millions who preceded them,” he wrote.

The Kennedy Library convened a forum on Saturday that featured Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, and Stewart L. Udall, the Interior Secretary during the Kennedy administration who convinced the young president to convene a panel of the National Academy of Sciencies, which confirmed Carson’s findings, and who was a pallbearer at Carson’s funeral in 1964. 

Her hometown has an afternoon of festivities today at the family’s homestead that includes a farmer’s market, a sampling of great food by local chefs, a one-woman show about Carson’s life, and a bluegrass band.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, where Carson worked as a writer for 15 years, plans a number of commemorative events this spring and early summer including guided walks today at the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge in Virginia.

But accompanying the ardent support for Carson’s legacy has also come a well-coordinated rhetorical attack by freemarket writers and a prominent conservative Oklahoma Senator, Tom Coburn, who question the scientific accuracy of her critique of the hazards of pesticides.  The opposition’s thesis, an update of the chemical industry’s unsuccessful effort to smear Carson in the early 1960s, is that “Silent Spring” overstated the risk of human exposure to DDT and that in doing so caused a mass panic that prompted governments to ban its use to control malaria. Carson’s critics then elevate that argument to (1) accuse her of fostering a worldwild resurgence of malaria-related illnesses and deaths; and (2) accuse her of being among the first to deploy hyperbolic, sky-is-falling rhetoric that has damaged the environmental community’s credibility.

Just as the radical right has used its “sound science” message to peddle myths that have slowed progress on global climate change — here in northern Michigan Republican Grand Traverse County commissioners argue that global warming is a fraud perpetrated by Al Gore – the focus on Rachel Carson’s scholarship is designed to till the fertile fields of misinformation for ideological advantage. 

The problem is that the authorities on the staffs of the national environmental groups, by not firing back, have enabled their opponents to frame lies, make them national talking points, and gain an advantage in the marketplace of ideas.

Now I understand there is a lot going on in the world — energy, climate change, attacks on the regulatory framework, loss of habitat — and the big green groups are certainly invaluable in moving the world closer to solutions. But allowing opponents to environmentalism take unanswered shots at Rachel Carson is inexcusable. Carson is the movement’s towering historic figure. She’s as significant to American environmentalism as Martin Luther King Jr. is to the civil rights movement, or Billy Graham is to evangelicals. America’s African American leadership would never allow white supremacists to sully Dr. King. Nor would evangelicals stand by and allow Reverend Graham to be soiled.

Big green groups are savvy enough to know that personality and symbol are powerful drivers of public attention. Movements are born and sustained by elevating their leading figures to position of national stature and history. The radical right understands that, which is why they seek to diminish Rachel Carson’s legacy. Weaken the legitimacy of historic figures and you diminish the movement. Not even Environmental Defense nor the National Audubon Society rose to the occasion. Environmental Defense was founded in 1967 by four scientists who’d taken up where “Silent Spring” left off and gained the first court injunction in the country to stop the spraying of DDT on Long Island, N.Y. They turned to National Audubon’s Rachel Carson Memorial Fund for money to get Environmental Defense started. You have to wonder, what are these people thinking? On her 100th birthday, the most significant environmentalist in history took a bit of a needless beating.

Not long after he earned a graduate degree in journalism from Northwestern University Carl Ganter made a name for himself here in Traverse City, his hometown, as a young writer and photojournalist with an unerring grasp for great stories, and a superb eye for color, light, character, and drama. He could make an ordinary windmill, its blades lit against a dramatic dawn sky, look like the most exotic piece of energy technology ever invented. His wife, Eileen Ganter, is a radio producer and a visionary whose unpredictable wit and style makes it a riot to be around her. Even before they were married in the late 1990s, Carl and Eileen were a journalistic team known not just for their ability to join superb story telling skills with cutting edge technology, but more importantly, for their ambitiousness.

In 1998 the Ganters toured the Great Lakes aboard an iron ore carrier and produced a report that married sound, photographs, and text for ChicagoTribune.com that was among the first great pieces of multi-media journalism ever on the Web. Their 2000 film, With These Hands, which chronicles the lives of four farmers on Old Mission Peninsula north of Traverse City, is a tour de force in the early application of multi-media tools to non-fiction story telliing, and arguably the finest documentary ever produced in northern Michigan. 

The point is that the Ganters are journalists who think big, and have the skills, moxie, and entrepreneurial spirit to execute expansive ideas. Their newest project is Circle of Blue. In its basic concept, Circle of Blue operates on two levels. First, it is a classic communications project designed to use the tools of journalism to inform and mobilize grassroots action to solve the freshwater crisis. One of every three people on the planet lives without adequate clean water or sanitation; 6,000 people, mostly children, die each day from preventable, water-related diseases.

Second, Circle of Blue leverages the Internet’s ability to foster online communities by reaching into billions of homes and generating active conversations. The idea is to produce first-rate multi-media story telling to elevate freshwater scarcity as a top planetary priority, and then to generate an active dialogue that focuses on solutions. In essence, the Ganters have set out to build a global social movement around something as old as great narrative structure, and as new as multi-media and the Internet.

Last weekend I spent two days with Carl and Eileen, and about two dozen other terrifically talented journalists, photographers, lawyers, researchers, designers, technical specialists, and Web geeks from around the country who are helping to launch Circle of Blue. It was like attending the Web equivalent of the first fission reaction, which occurred almost 70 years ago at the University of Chicago. Just to give you an idea of the kind of talent amassed around Circle of Blue, take a look at the Web sites of some of the people who came for the weekend. 

The lead researcher for the project is Peter H. Gleick, a MacArthur “genius” award winner and president and co-founder of the Pacific Institute, a water research center in Oakland California.

The project’s Web designer is Shane Iseminger, founder of Colorado-based Ethos Media, which designs and builds some of the country’s best Internet sites, and took charge of designing Circle of Blue’s first phase site. 

One of Circle of Blue’s primary goals is to serve as a kind of central command center for linking the world’s great scientific, academic, government, and non-profit digital data bases about fresh water. Alon Halevy, a professor of computer science and engineering who just left the University of Washington to take up a data base development position at Google, is assisting Circle of Blue in building what Halevy called “data spaces” to tie the world’s fresh water data bases together.

Lastly, one of the country’s finest multi-media journalists, Brian Storm, is involved in helping the Ganters conceptualize and execute the state of the art storytelling that will draw the fresh water crisis closer to the center of the planet’s top list of concerns. His Mediastorm production company has almost no competitors in the quality of the journalism, or the capacity to keep people riveted by a new approach to non-fiction story telling. Tour Mediastorm.org and see what much of the new journalism of the early decades of the 21st century will look and feel like. 

Circle of Blue has been five years in the making, starting with the Ganters’ coverage of water issues at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 for MSNBC.com. Carl also has served for four years on the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Water Working Group. When you talk to Carl and Eileen it becomes readily apparent that the global fresh water crisis, caused by shrinking supplies and tightening access, is another of the immense social and economic problems rooted in environmental degradation that government has no capacity to solve. 

Rivalry, partisanship, and diminished statesmanship; government is mired in the hierarchical political operating principles of the 20th century, when division trumped collaboration. In the 21st century, people at the grassroots understand the immense transition confronting their families and themselves. They know because many have access to new knowledge provided on the Internet. That same tool empowers people by connecting them in ways not available prior to 1994, when AOL and Compuserve first offered dial up service. Circle of Blue taps into that power and expands it with a new narrative. The project’s development is well worth watching as a model for what is possible when people acquire new tools that provide answers instead of inaction. 

This part of Michigan, where sable sand and blue water meet, is rich in people of intelligence and talent who came from someplace else.  Texas and Ohio, New York and Arizona, Pennsylvania and Indiana and Missouri. They all have a story about how they got here.  

And then there’s the story told by Jerry Linenger (see pix), a retired physician and astronaut who was raised in Eastpointe, just outside Detroit, and decided to settle in Leelanau County because he saw it from space. I met Linenger last weekend at a strategic planning conference in Elk Rapids that was organized by Circle of Blue, a new Web-based communications project designed to foster a global social movement to address the worldwide freshwater crisis. Jerry was among the two dozen creative people from across the country — journalists, Web-techies, multi-media specialists, designers, researchers, event coordinators — who’d convened for two days to offer suggestions about how to move the project from its promising start-up phase (Coca-Cola just invested) to a secure operating position. 

Linenger, who completed two orbital missions in his career — including spending 132 days in 1997 aboard the Russian Mir space station – kept the conversation grounded by offering consistently fascinating perspectives about water that were drawn from his time in space. He explained that aboard Mir, water was so precious that two drops on a cloth served as the source for his irregular space “baths.” He described the orbiting space station and the planet, both set against a vast blackness, as ”closed ecosystems” similarly vulnerable to disruptions in the supply of water, energy, and oxygen, the basic life-sustaining resources.  And he talked about how he and his Mir comrades survived energy and water shortages, equipment failures, and a fire that burned for an hour because their instinct was to cooperate instead of perish.

Linenger, who is 52 and has lived for eight years  in Suttons Bay with his wife, Kathryn, and four young children, published  a successful book in 1999, Off The Planet,  about his Mir experiences. I had a chance to ask him during a free moment on Saturday how he got to northern Michigan. He smiled and said Michigan’s green mitt, surrounded by the blue Great Lakes, is one of the most recognizable and truly beautiful sights from space. He said that only the Himalayas, the Caribbean, and the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia compare. He also said that Sleeping Bear Dunes, the centerpiece of our national park here, is easily seen from space, a great slash of white that drops headlong into Lake Michigan on one side. And on the other side is a string of inland lakes that from space look like a necklace of pearls. 

“I could have lived anywhere,” he said. “But when you see this area from up there it just hits you how beautiful it is. I told Kathryn, and said, ‘northern Michigan. That’s the place.’  She said, ‘sounds good to me.’”