NV1 – climate change and the intentional community
According to Jason Mogus, in the Northern Voice session “User Generated Contact and Activist Campaigns,” the tipping point for climate change occurred somewhere around Jan 2007. People are coming together in a cumulative way, there being as many as 50 local meetups organized for the Vancouver BC area in just one month. This begs the question of how this tipping point occurred.
This winter was unusually harsh for illness around the pacific NW. In fact, some refer to the Moose Flu for those who went to Northern Voice healthy and returned to face a week of the crud. Myself, I escaped the crud only by having had it already. There I was, some week in January, in bed and watching TV. Like he has every sick day I’ve had when I was a little girl, Bob Barker came onscreen. It was very different watching him as an adult. The sets were old and 70’s looking. It brought back memories of that episode of Seinfeld where the set from the Merv Griffin show came into Kramer’s hands. You could see the dust even though the cameras. The contestants were way fatter than I remembered. And they were about my age. The font of their name tags was the same. They stood in those little podiums in the showcase showdown, straining in their stirrup pants to not suffer the indignity of bidding “over” yet numerically closer.
Bob was older, of course, and maintained a kind of dignity that his sets did not. He shook as he held the microphone, knowing the song of the lines so well, introducing the models with the clever themed presentations. Of course this was not nervousness but simply old age. This was one kind of gift to us he gave. Another gift was tacked on right at the end, where Bob took 2 seconds of airtime to remind us to “please control the pet population. Spay or neuter your pet.” These 2 seconds under the complete control of someone so respected just for the longevity of his work, not to mention the cultural signpost it provides. This is the reverse of blogging, heroic, one person, doing what he wants to broadcast to millions for the duration of our lives with that 2 seconds. In blogging, we make one statement that may or may not be read, and stands on its own as a reference. What Bob had was like a monarchy, powerful but ultimately not scalable. As a blogger, you have democracy or even anarchy, thriving on the association of person to person and meme to meme.
Given these two experiences, it seems to me that the reason the tipping point for climate change occurred, is it had both the monarchy and the democracy. It had Al Gore, at the top, and environmentalist hippie do gooder bloggers (and I mean this with the greatest respect) forming the long base of the pyramid. Perhaps working from both sides is the key to the tipping point?