Modeshift

Laura Dunn, a young Yale-educated director (see pix) who lives in Austin, Texas, is creating a stir at some of the country’s important film festivals, including Sundance, with The Unforeseen, a feature-length documentary about the consequences of runaway development and sprawl.

Writer Dennis Conroy, who saw The Unforeseen at the San Francisco Film Festival last month, offered this assessment: “A modest real estate developer, [Gary] Bradley had big ideas. His concept was the 4,000-acre Circle C Ranch, an upscale subdivision—a city within a city—a few miles upstream from Barton Springs, a much-loved water wonder in Austin. Partnering with the corporation Freeport-McMoRan gave Bradley economic clout but also proved to be his downfall, for the company had an egregious environmental record that sounded alarm bells among Austin’s burgeoning environmental movement. The Unforeseen chronicles the ensuing battle among Bradley and the developers, the environmental activists (including Robert Redford, who learned to swim in Barton Springs), politicians and property owners. 

“Dunn does not oversimplify the issue but instead asks complex questions: What are an individual’s rights to own, develop and sell property; How much growth is good; When does public space turn into a marketplace; and, Who is accountable for the repercussions of this growth? Though Dunn attempts to present Bradley and other small developers not as villains, her “paved paradise” lament is palpable. The Unforeseen reminds us that Barton Springs is emblematic of the struggle everywhere to balance natural resources with economic growth. As journalist William Greider concisely puts it, “Growth itself is not the enemy, it is the nature of that growth—the quality within.”

Dunn’s previous work on environmental topics include Green (2000), an exploration of Louisiana’s petrochemical alley, Become the Sky (2002) about the energy industry in Texas, and mai mayim, (2005), “a documentary that explores the Middle East conflict from within the context of the ecological need for water in Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority,” according to her two birds film Web site.  

I learned about The Unforeseen from Laura’s husband, Jef Sewell, who co-founded Amplifier, an interesting fulfilment company in Austin that I’m writing about for the New York Times. Amplifier’s  clients include some of the hottest entertainment properties on the Internet, including Askaninja.com and TikibarTv.com.  Next month, while I’m in New York, I hope to catch The Unforeseen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I haven’t located a trailer, but as soon as I do I’ll post it on Mode Shift. 

The push back by the old and new media to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposal to cut state funds to the agency overseeing the development of a 700-mile high speed rail network in California appears to have influenced the Republican governor’s view.

On Friday, Schwarzenegger (see pix) published an op-ed in the Fresno Bee extolling a high speed system. Thanks to Marcel Marchon’s Trainblog for keeping us current. “The promise of high-speed rail is incredible,” wrote the governor. “Looking forward to the kind of California we want to build 20 and 30 years from now, a network of ultra-fast rail lines whisking people from one end of the state to the other is a viable and important transportation alternative and would be a great benefit to us all.”

So what’s the rub? Schwarzenegger wants a business plan for the $40 billion rail network. ”Identifying the exact funding sources for large transportation projects is more problematic, which is why we need the authority to come up with a well-thought out financing proposal before moving forward.” 

Makes sense. What doesn’t is diverting $2.5 million away from the California High Speed Rail Authority, which is charged with developing the business plan. It’s like sending a kid to the corner store to buy a $3 gallon of milk, and giving him only $1.50. A little attention paid to Schwarzenegger’s proposed fiscal derailment may have kept the money in the rail agency’s budget. On Thursday, May 10, a California Senate Budget Committee is holding a hearing on the state transportation bill that should include discussion of the governor’s pr0posal for high speed rail funding.

Next up is whether the planned November 2008 referendum, during which Californians will decide whether to spend nearly $10 billion to start building the first high speed lines, will remain on the ballot. Scwarzenegger doesn’t want to conduct the vote.

Importantly for California and the nation, it’s the first instance that I can recall that proposed taxpayer cuts to a high speed rail proposal became a political issue, and generated significant citizen and media responses. Californians understand the value to their lives and their state in making this mega investment in new transportation technology. And as California goes, so goes the rest of the country. It’s a promising trend in every way.

Outside.in is a Web site launched last year to gather the panoply of writers doing place-based blogging. The site is the brain child of Steven Johnson, a  prominent writer and blogger in New York who’s written five books and contributes to, among others, the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Johnson was helped by John Geraci, a social media specialist, and John Seely Brown, the former chief scientist of the Xerox Corporation and member of the board of Amazon and the MacArthur Foundation. Outside.in has done a good job of raising venture capital because its business strategy is to adorn the local reporting and commentary with local advertising. When I log in, for example, the page that pops up is an amalgamation of articles nominally linked to Grand Rapids that are contributed by bloggers as well as mainstream and new media sites.

A few days ago Outside.in posted its ranking of “America’s Top 10 Bloggiest Neighborhoods.” The number one position is taken by a Brooklyn neighborhood that I suspect is very close to Steven Johnson’s. The number two bloggiest neighborhood is the Shaw section of the District of Columbia. Neighborhoods in Portland, Chicago, San Francisco, Miami, and Los Angeles also make the top 10, along with two inner ring suburbs of Boston (see pix).  Outside.in said it based the analysis on the company’s close tracking of local bloggers in over 3,000 US neighborhoods during the past six months, and by measuring a number of variables: total number of posts, total number of local bloggers, number of comments and Technorati rankings.

As a promotion vehicle, the list is very creative. But as a measure of urban vitality, Outside.in’s Top 10 bloggiest corresponds closely with the consensus list of America’s top big cities as well. Urban vitality has long been measured by conventional 20th century standards – income growth, job creation, real estate values, crime and safety. New tools of measurement also are becoming more accepted – acres of parks and open space, miles of regional rapid transit, number of LEED-certified buildings and green roofs, ability to attract and retain college-educated young professionals. The Outside.in ranking suggests one more measurement of a metropolitan region’s superior quality of life: the number of place-based bloggers. After all, the richness of the human conversation also points to a place that people want to be.

Nielsen Buzzmetrics, which has offices in New York and Cincinnati, is one of the top shops for using Internet search engine technology and sophisticated analysis programs to understand consumer attitudes and predict powerful trends. The company combs millions of conversations occurring on blogs, message boards, and in chat rooms, sifts out salient details, and analyzes the results to forecast consumer behavior and values. 

Earlier this month Pete Blackshaw, one of the company’s senior leaders, published a Buzzmetrics brand association map (see graphic) that outlines just how deeply environmental values and ideas have penetrated in American society.  The connection that Americans are now intuitively making between the term “eco-friendly”  and such things as building materials, transportation fuels, and lifestyle choices helps to explain why green ideas are so hot, and to some extent, why cities are experiencing a powerful demographic and economic revival.

The Buzzmetrics map illustrates how Americans have finally embraced the idea that environmental ideas, for too long associated with saving the natural world, apply to their personal realm. Now that is old news to the ecologically aware among us who eat organic food, ride public transit, turn off the lights, mulch with decayed leaves, fertilize with horse manure, and vote for green candidates. But for most Americans it’s a pretty new concept. More than almost any piece of data I’ve encountered, the Buzzmetrics map shows that more Americans than ever get the connection between stabilizing natural conditions and their own well-being. When ordinary folk can track the term “eco-friendly” to bamboo floors, the Prius, hemp clothing, and living cities you know we’re getting somewhere. Of such linkages are organizing principles made. It’s why New York Times columnist Tom Friedman earlier this month called green the “new red, white, and blue.”

What’s not as clearly shown in the Buzzmetrics association map is where green values are growing their deepest roots. But there’s a hint in the connections between the “eco-friendly” at the map’s center, and the outer ring’s proximity to “living cities,” “conservation,” and “lifestyle.”  Nowhere is “highway,” “big-box,” “parking lot,” “congestion,” “traffic”, “subdivision,” or any other brand associated with suburbs mentioned.

In list after list of the cleanest, safest, most exciting, and best places to live and do business in the United States, American cities are showcased — Tulsa, Knoxville, Charlotte, Boston, Seattle, San Diego, Dallas, Portland, Chicago, Charleston. Suburbs are almost never mentioned, and for good reason. Suburbs represent a brief experiment in wasteful patterns of 20th century development that the 21st century has only begun to punish with falling real estate values, rising taxes and living costs, struggling schools, increasing violence, and deteriorating infrastructure. Funny. Those are the very same conditions that in the 20th century prompted people to flee cities.

It turns out that cities, with their parks and water fronts and transit lines and historic neighborhoods, existing infrastructure, and countless flat roofs that can be turned into urban gardens, are a lot easier to make greener and more energy efficient than suburbs. And now that downtowns are magnets for new housing, cities are also producing the human communities that young people, empty nesters, and couples without children say they can’t find as easily in the suburbs. The Buzzmetrics brand map shows that underlying the gathering mass movement in America back to cities is an intuitive understanding that cities now are cleaner, greener, and much more adaptable to the century’s new market conditions than the suburban places from which they came.   

Perhaps not since the very first one 37 years ago has Earth Day attracted the credibility or the genuinely intense national and global focus that it has this year. Thousands of grassroots celebrations, including the annual march in downtown Traverse City today, are occurring this weekend. In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a moderate Republican, introduced a green investment plan and policy strategy for transforming the nation’s largest metropolis into an even more transit-friendly, energy-efficient, environmentally-sensitive place to live and do business. In Dallas, people “danced for the planet.”  The covers of Outside, Vanity Fair, and dozens more national and regional magazines focused on Earth Day related personalities and issues. Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, outdueled Arnold Schwarzenegger for the cover of Fortune’s green issue. Tom Friedman, the New York Time’s foreign affairs columnist, in a widely read Sunday Times Magazine cover piece all but placed a personal call to Al Gore to be the nation’s first “green president.” The U.N. Security Council this week, for the first time, formally assessed the consequences of global climate change to international security. As Larry the Cable Guy would say, “I can do this all day.”

What accounts for Earth Day’s flush of new energy? Here are three reasons among many. Global climate change is providing new evidence of the power of science, policy, and economics to help people recognize an urgent threat and seize on realistic and necessary solutions. Businesses and governments have plenty of irrefutable evidence that the new path to prosperity is closely tied to using natural resources, particularly energy, much more efficiently; pollution, it turns out, is the same thing as throwing away money. And the right wing attack on environmentalism and environmentalists has run its course. When a southern American city is drowned by a hurricane, the tundra is melting in Alaska, and a drought worsens conditions for agriculture on the Colorado Plateau it’s just plain silly, and enormously damaging politically, for the Republican leadership to be so lame on things green.

Here’s one more thought. Earth Day’s attractive maturity is tied to how the generation that brought it to life has gotten much more comfortable with its competing values. Earth Day, in effect, also is Boomer Day. It celebrates the essential conflict — the duel between self interest and the public interest – that has made the Baby Boom generation both mystifying and miraculous. Earth Day, and the ideas and practices that it represents, is the Baby Boom’s greatest contribution to our time because it’s truly us. The day reflects Baby Boomer’s  conviction that we can have it all if we just tweak and adjust and think much differently about how we integrate manmade and natural systems.  Now that it’s completely plain that the more sensitively we treat the earth the better off we’ll be in every aspect of our lives, Baby Boomers have the satisfaction of knowing that they were right. 

The first Earth Day, Wednesday, April 22, 1970, was a beautiful spring day across the United States. The event’s founder, Wisconsin’s Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson, and its coordinator, Harvard law student Denis Hayes, envisioned a national day of ”teach ins,” similar to those occurring on college campuses to rally support to end the Vietnam War. Senator Nelson, who died in 2005, said his “primary objective in planning Earth Day was to show the politial leadership of the nation that there was broad and deep support for the environmental movement.” Senator Nelson was amazed at how the country responded. Pete Seeger performed at the Washington Monument. Mayor John Lindsay banned cars on Fifth Avenue in New York to make room for demonstrations and events. Public speeches, parades, rallies, marches, sit-ins and teach-ins occurred in thousands of communities. Congress closed and political leaders went home to participate in local gatherings. The first Earth Day prompted legislatures in 42 states to pass resolutions commemorating the date, and 20 million Americans took part in Earth Day activities, the largest national demonstration in American history.

Earth Day certainly made its mark on me. I was a Highlands Junior High School eighth grader and had just turned 14 on April 22, 1970. The White Plains public schools in New York were closed to allow students to participate in dozens of activities around the city. I convinced Andy Feinman, the other half of what our kindergarten teacher affectionally referred to as the “gruesome twosome,” to come with me to paint the grimy walls of the White Plains train station and to help drag tires and other old stuff from out of the bushes and the nearby Bronx River.  Joe Lelyveld, who would later become the paper’s executive editor, reported on our work in a front page article the next day in the New York Times. “Students from Highlands Junior High School painted the city’s ramshackle train station and landscaped its grounds,” he wrote. 

Though we didn’t know it then, Earth Day came to represent my generation’s best and worst traits. I wanted to make my life matter, to engage in good work that helped people and made a difference. That’s the focus on the public interest that made Baby Boomers tolerable. But I also wanted something back: recognition, money, satisfaction, notoriety. That’s the focus on self involvement that drives our parents and children bananas. It turns out that we’re really an investment oriented bunch. We like to put energy into saving the world. But we also look for a personal return.

Earth Day, and environmentalism, is the perfect synthesis of those competing values. As a public school student I was interested in protecting forests in New England in large part because I liked to hike in New Hampshire’s White Mountains and Maine’s Mahoosics. As a young freelance writer in the Deep South in the early 1980s, I reported on and ended the use of a Dow defoliant that was damaging the western North Carolina woods and the people who lived there. I also discovered an insatiable market in the mainstream media for investigative environmental stories that I rode into the Washington bureau of the New York Times. I got the job by nailing an interview with Bill Kovach and Howell Raines, the bureau chief and deputy, that occurred on Earth Day in 1985. Ten years later,on April 22, 1995, Earth Day’s 25th anniversary, I left the Times as a full-time correspondent to found the Michigan Land Use Institute, a statewide non-profit environmental research, advocacy, and communications organization that is now one of the largest state-based green groups in the country.

Yesterday while running in the Platte Plains section of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (see pix), this idea of Earth Day’s real meaning to the Baby Boom generation — weighing the public interest and self-interest – came to me.  The 71,000-acre national lakeshore, which was established six months after Earth Day, is where our region’s green forests, blue skies, and sable sand beaches meet Lake Michigan’s clear water.  A decade ago, when the Michigan Land Use Institute was brand new, we helped protect Sleeping Bear’s boundary from an ill-advised idea to swap private land for public land for a new golf course within the park’s boundaries. We made the case that allowing such a swap in one national park would compromise the legal principle — the authority of government to take private land for public purposes for perpetuity — that had established every national park since Yellowstone. My glorious run, alone with the trees and the spring peepers, on trails that dipped and rose over Sleeping Bear’s dunes and swales, was made possible in part because I’d played some small role in ensuring that the park’s boundaries were not compromised.

Every decade or so I celebrate Earth Day by doing something big.  This week I bought a brand new Mercury Mariner hybrid, which gets 30 miles per gallon. I drove it out to Sleeping Bear, about 10 miles away, comfortable in the knowledge that I was reducing emissions of global climate change gases, national security threats caused by dependence on foreign oil, and my own fuel bills. The car’s purchase, moreover, is made possible by the salary my environmental organization pays me, along with the fees my environmental freelance reporting generates. 

My friend Andy Feinman, who lives in Albany with his wife and two sons and is a stock analyst, called this week. We both celebrate birthdays around Earth Day. I told him I’d sold the Oldsmobile van that replaced the Oldsmobile Bravada that replaced the Ford Ranger that replaced the Ford Explorer that I used to drive. We talked about the high mileage, new technology, and the hybrid’s efficiency and reasonable price after discounts. ”It’s amazing,” he said. “You’re still driving American cars.”

“The Mercury is a good car,” I responded. “Besides, this is Michigan. Driving American is a good thing here.”

Summed up, my new green car serves several noble public interest goals, and a couple of satisfying self-interest needs, too. And there you have it, the essence of Earth Day as Boomer Day.

For longer than I care to recount Rush Limbaugh has been in my life. My work takes me on the road, as it’s done for three decades now, and sometime in the early 1990s I scanned the AM dial and happened on his show. He was an amusing host then; funny, well-informed, voluble, not nearly the sanctimonious blowhard, fabricating tool of the radical establishment right that he’s become. Rush attracted so many listeners to his noon to 3. p.m. show that his fans gathered in “Rush hour” lunches around the country. It was pretty plain that he was important. In 1993, on the same day that the World Trade Centers were bombed the first time, I was among a group of New York Times national correspondents who’d gathered at the upper West Side Manhattan townhouse of our national editor, Soma Golden Behr. We were talking about the increasingly aggressive and rightward shift we were seeing around the country — property rights everywhere, Sagebrush rebellion  in the West, the re-emergence of the Klan in the South, the skinheads in Detroit. I’ll never forget Peter Applebome, who was the Atlanta Bureau Chief, noting the emergence of “this guy” Rush Limbaugh who’d attracted quite a following in the South. Other correspondents chimed in that they’d been listening in their territories too.

I listen to Rush much less frequently now, not because I’m uninterested in keeping track of influential views from across the ideological spectrum, but because he’s so irritating, particularly when he talks about the environment. Rush deliberately misleads, misinforms, denies the facts, and legitimizes the specious. In Rush’s world global warming is a farce made up by Al Gore and his ilk. Environmentalists are wacko tofu-eating elitists. ”Sound science” is whatever the White House says it is.  

The danger, of course, is that Rush’s credibility with millions of Americans is still too high. He’s an enabler for delaying action on global climate change, energy independence, and environmental stewardship.  And while the tide of history is inexorably pushing the United States to a new, greener, cleaner, more energy-efficient era, Rush and his alliance of radio wing nuts and the political leaders they support are holding back intellectual and technological transformations that will make this nation a much better place.

James Wolcott covers some of this same ground in a new piece in the green issue of Vanity Fair this month. The money section:

“For us non-dittoheads (that is, the unconverted), a more fitting memorial to Mount Rushbo might be a diorama of the environmental destruction that he did so much to enable in his multi-decade reign of denigration. Global warming’s most popular denialist, talk radio’s most imitated showman, conservatism’s minister of disinformation, he has injected millions of semi-vacant American skulls with a cream filling of complacency that has helped thrust this country into the forefront of backward leadership. He has given Republican lawmakers the rhetorical cover fire to do nothing but snicker as the crisis emerged and impressed itself on the rest of the world. He conscripted concern for nature as just another weapon in the Culture Wars. May the grasses of his favorite golf courses go forever yellow and dust storms whip from the sand traps.”

Rush, though, is in trouble. Radio was the communications platform that fostered the radical right’s agenda across America. The Internet is the platform that is gradually weakening that agenda’s foundation. Media Matters for America, which closely tracks the tone, civility, and accuracy of political conversation on television and radio, has built much of its reputation on documenting Rush Limbaugh’s factual inaccuracies. The Web site has revealed Rush, who prides himself on his ability to conduct intelligent conversation across a wide spectrum of issues, to be nothing more than a fabricator on matters of science and the environment. For a radio host whose reputation is built on ideology and expertise, such persistent reporting is enormously damaging.

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As a communications strategist, I often tell policy groups that they’re making a difference when their opponents start to whine, call them names, and otherwise divert from their core message.  Rush’s audience is diminishing, according to broadcast audience tracking companies. And Rush is responding with unprovide attacks on his critics in way that illustrates weakness not strength. Media Matters reported the latest outburst yesterday.

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen how broadcast words have consequences for those they’re aimed at, and for those who did the aiming. The heap of shattered conservative pundit careers is growing. Ann Coulter last summer said the widows of men killed on 9/11  were “reveling in their status as celebrities,” and early last month called presidential candidate John Edwards a “faggot.” Both comments were recorded on video tape, rocketed across various Web sites, were rebroadcast on national television. Ann Coulter is done as a credible voice. She’s become a sideshow.

 Don Imus’ racist and sexist remark about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team was seen as out of bounds. He’s gone. 

Rush is cagier, but he’s slipping. 

A final thought: One of the intriguing elements in the narrative of all of these people is how some of my liberal media friends say ‘free speech’ is diminished when ideologues suffer for their remarks. Frankly, that’s nonsense. Nobody denied Coulter or Imus or Rush or any other broadcast personality the right to speak. The public just insisted that facts and authenticity and some measure of truth underly what they said. The public also expressed its right to say, “Enough.”

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In May 2004 when writer David Brock launched Media Matters For America, the Web site that specializes in documenting the lies and other distasteful discourse that permeates talk radio and TV, I paid immediate attention. 

Mediamatters.org went up near the top of my favorites list for a couple of reasons. The reporting was entirely new and airtight — the Web site made very good use of on-air clips and transcripts. The frame was values driven and righteous. Brock and his staff served to answer the question a lot of us had been asking of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly and the boneheads at CNN talk shows for years. Did you hear that? Can he really say that?

Just as significantly, MediaMatters represented the blossoming of the new Internet-based media that was asking different questions, reporting angles never considered by the mainstream media, and doing it on a new global medium accessible to thousands of readers. Rush Limbaugh’s career has been slipping ever since MediaMatters began keeping a daily log of his hateful, error-filled enabling of the radical right.  And with the development of broadband and video file sharing sites, Media Matters has become the central watchdog of the cable news and television talk show discourse, too. 

This week MediaMatters displayed, more emphatically than ever before, just how significant a force it and the Internet media have become. And conversely, why the mainstream media’s role is gradually waning as a source of original reporting and taking on the role as amalgamator and synthesizer.

MediaMatters, which attracts about 120,000 visitors a day, was the first to report Don Imus’ racist attack on the Rutgers women’s basketball team, which reached and lost the national championship game last week. Had there been no MediaMatters it’s almost certain Imus’ act of career suicide — he called the team of mostly African American players “nappy headed hos” – would have gone unaddressed. Imus’ many friends include a host of white bigfoot magazine, newspaper, radio, and television journalists and broadcasters who regularly appear on his nationally broadcast show. They  didn’t think the attack was a big deal. Some of them — Howard Fineman, Tom Oliphant, Mike Lupica  – raced to Imus’ defense in the days after MediaMatters’ reporting began to generate the national storm that is ending his career. Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain, displaying more evidence that he’s lost his political pitch, said Imus deserved a second chance. 

After all, several of the major figures in the story had issues of their own. Brock himself was once a media hitman for the radical right, writing vile pieces for the American Spectator about Anita Hill and Bill Clinton before recanting and veering left. Al Sharpton, who called for Imus’ removal, once championed a young black girl, Tawana Brawley, who made up from whole cloth a story of how she’d been attacked by whites and smeared with feces. Jesse Jackson, who’s been calling for more civil discourse on rap records and the like, referred to New York during his 1984 presidential campaign as “Hymietown.”

The authenticity of MediaMatters’ reporting on the Imus remark and its aftermath kept the story in a firm path. MediaMatters compiled the clips, transcripts, video files, and commentary — all available with a mouse click — that gave the running story new content, pace and context. That made it much simpler for readers to draw conclusions, bloggers to make assessment, and for mainstream journalists to stay abreast of events. Rarely has a single news desk so completely owned a major national political and cultural news event.

The real value of what MediaMatters did, of course, is open new ground in the ongoing epic of race, class, and equity in America. The saga had a main character — a media humpty — who made a hateful remark that is causing him to publicly break into a dozen pieces. Last night MSNBC removed him permanently from its airwave. CBS Radio, which broadcasts the radio show, is sure to follow. Imus’ brand is so grievously injured that the car, soap, food, media, and travel companies that supported his show aren’t going to threaten their brands.    

This blog, Mode Shift, is intently interested because race touches everything, particularly where we choose to live. Anything that can lead to understanding helps. In Michigan, the most segregated state in the country, we are especially mindful. The sprawling patterns of development that emptied Michigan’s cities and prompted suburbs to consume land at a pace four to eight times faster than population growth, were largely caused and are still the result of racial distrust. 

The inability of southeast Michigan to develop a regional rapid transit system is defined by public officials as solely a matter of money. But those of us who’ve worked hard to dig out the facts and talk about the problem know that at the very core, the lack of a rapid transit system is because of discomfort – I use the word carefully — the mostly white suburbs and the mostly black cities have about linking to each other. 

Michigan residents last year approved a measure making affirmative action illegal. For decades our legislature has systematically skewed its public investments for roads, sewers and other infrastructure toward the suburbs, and away from the cities. Michigan’s many barriers to achieving a more competitive economy and ending its obsolete political and business operating systems is tied to the state’s commitment to division instead of collaboration and cooperation.

MediaMatters played a role in the Imus affair that not nearly enough mainstream media are pursuing.  It broke a big cultural and economic story, served as a forum for discussion, fed the conversation with new facts, context, and Internet links. By the strength of its original reporting, MediaMatters also pushed the conversation about race a few steps forward and served the public interest. Nice job. 

If you’re interested in what happens beyond the borders of the United States, then you also know that an awful lot of what’s reported as foreign news is distilled through the filter of government to government action, diplomat to diplomat negotiation. 

A different kind of communication is now available on the Internet, which fills that huge space between the conversation among international elites and the conversation occurring at the grassroots. Few Web sites are doing that as well as GlobalVoices online.org, which has secured an international network of young bloggers to report on ground level events. Some of the bloggers are so good that national governments have imprisoned them.

I note the existence of GlobalVoicesonline because the American Mode Shift is predicated on this country’s capacity to be much better at getting along with our global neighbors. This is a century in which we’re gradually learning how to do more with much less, and in the process also realizing we can lead richer lives that give us more time, more freedom, more rights, more opportunities. Much of the improvement will come with redesigning cities to be more ecologically sensitive, energy efficient, architecturally welcoming places to live.

But we won’t be able to achieve that more worthwhile future as long as the United States continues to give much the world the back of its hand. In the 2oth century we lived so profligately that we had to reach into every corner of the globe to grab the natural resources what George Bush I famously defined before the first Gulf War as our “American way of life.” The world is pushing back, outcompeting us in labor markets, innovation, and sustainability.

Europeans, for instance, enjoy more vacation, more time with their families, a higher standard of living, and use half as much energy as Americans do. The French just unleashed a new intercity train (see pix)that can go 3oo miles per hour, is quicker city to city than a jet, and uses much less energy. Indian computer and software engineers are returning to their home country because entrepreneurial opportunities are greater there than here. 

GlobalVoicesonline’s network of citizen journalists is dedicated to broadening cultural understanding and improving global journalism. It was developed by Ethan Zuckerman, an activist and researcher focused on information technology and information development, who is based at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. His online project, which he founded with a Berkman Center colleague, Rebecca MacKinnon, features stories from over 100 nations and is visited by 200,000 readers a month. Zuckerman also is a contributor and board member of Worldchanging.com, a Seattle-based global news portal. In 2002, Technology Review Magazine awarded Zuckerman the Technology in the Service of Humanity Award. In 2003, Fortune Magazine named him as one of the top 10 innovators under the age of 40. The World Economic Forum named him a Global Leader for Tomorrow in 2003 and a Young Global Leader in 2005.

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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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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