Where Dark Green Meets Cleantech (Or, Beyond Shades of Green)

A little while ago, Alex Steffen of World Changing offered a critique of the permaculture-inspired Transition Towns initiative--a grass-roots, peak oil/climate change adaptation movement that has gone viral around the world in the past three years. While Transition Town is centered on local community organizing and action, its focus is not on lobbying or protests, but on building local businesses, institutions and structures that can weather energy-descent. Steffen would describe these people as “dark greens,” a brand of environmentalist who emphasizes local community action but can tend toward collapse-thinking or doomerism. As Steffen puts it:

“Transition thinking seems obsessively focused on coordinating individual actions (like helping people barter their free time or connecting people who want to garden); even at its most ambitious, it generally focuses on building alternative systems (say, starting a local currency scheme) rather than reforming the larger systems that shape life all around us (say, starting an actual credit union or rewriting banking regulations). Part of this is the legacy of the counter-culture out of which it emerged. Part of this is that Transition Towns aim to offer a way to step out of emotional paralysis by saying ‘just go ahead and do something, anything.’ Part of it is intentional: groups spread more rapidly when the demands placed on their members are minimal. However, the approach also betrays a far darker mindset.”

That darker mindset, argues Steffen, is a morbid (and he would say delusional) focus on collapse-mitigation rather than visioning a different kind of future. It is an approach, he seems to think, that is not only self-limiting but immoral. “Dark Green” according to Steffen, stands in contrast to “light green” and “bright green” environmentalism. “Light greens,” he says, tend to emphasize lifestyle/behavioral/consumer change as key to sustainability, or at least as the best mechanism for triggering broader changes.

Light greens strongly advocate change at the individual level” as a means to broader social change. Steffen is (very rightly, I think) critical of the idea of “privatizing responsibility” for the environmental crisis. “Bright Green,” (the group Steffen self-identifies with) is, by contrast, “a belief that sustainable innovation is the best path to lasting prosperity, and that any vision of sustainability which does not offer prosperity and well-being will not succeed . . . Bright green environmentalism is a call to use innovation, design, urban revitalization and entrepreneurial zeal to transform the systems that support our lives.”

How real—and how significant—is the apparent cultural rift between these different groups? It’s a topic that’s been on my mind a lot recently. A few weeks ago I enrolled in a course for “Cleantech Executives in Transition” held out of New York University Polytechnic and sponsored by New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, a state agency tasked with promoting energy efficiency , promoting alternative energy and protecting the environment . The course is taught out of NYU Polytechnic’s “business incubator” a program in which green startups are given access to space and resources to help get their businesses off the ground; the purpose of the course is to prepare experienced leaders at the executive level for transition into “green” careers, with a focus on entrepreneurship.

As a permaculture teacher and designer, I felt a little strange in the class at first; I don’t precisely fit what one might think of as a “green entrepreneur.” The permaculture movement as a whole is typically skeptical of anything that smacks of a “technofix” solution to the world’ s converging ecological and resource crises (an attitude that puts most permaculturalists firmly in the “dark green” camp). While permaculture theory and practice is firmly based in the science of systems ecology, culturally permaculture has been associated with 1970s “back-to-the-landers”—people not necessarily moved by the idea that, as one of the NYU professors put it, “cleantech is the greatest opportunity for wealth creation since the industrial revolution.”

I had my own preconceptions about the kind of people who would be in the course – finance people, “money” people. To my surprise, though, participants exhibited a much greater diversity of interests, skills and world-views than I expected. I began to wonder if my own stereotypes and preconceptions were, at best, oversimplified, or at worst, entirely unhelpful. I also wondered if Steffen’s “shades” might be as misleading as they are illuminating.

Rob Hopkins, the permaculture designer who founded the Transition Town movement, responded to Steffen’s argument by pointing out that the Transition movement is already engaged with much of what Steffen says we should be doing.

“My sense is that Transition does not fit neatly into the ‘mostly judgmental’ Deep Green category in which Alex places it, indeed having as much in common with his ‘Bright Green’ approach. Transition is about bringing insights and observations from the ‘deep green’ into the ‘bright green’ (although I think this classification is clumsy), arguing that the rebuilding of local economies is not about a retreat into survivalism . . . but is actually the only practical (in the context of energy descent) way of realising the kind of entrepreneurial zeal he is so keen on.”

To be fair to Steffen, there is probably a lot that “deep green” could also learn from “bright green” – things about business, finance, planning, etc. that will be necessary to make any transition effective. But Hopkins is also right to express skepticism about the entire classification system. Forget about how well Steffen describes or understands Transition; many of his own views would seem wildly fanciful or terribly pessimistic to a lot of “cleantech” types who believe that hydrogen-powered autos are just around the corner. Consider his take on suburbia: “In the absence of an as-yet-unseen, brilliant solution, the outer ring suburbs, especially those recently built with funny loans at the far edges sunbelt cities, are probably just destined to become semi-rural slums.”

Elsewhere he writes that “I believe building compact communities should be one of America's highest environmental priorities . . . in fact, our obsession with building greener cars may be obscuring some fundamental aspects of the problem and some of the benefits of using land-use change as a primary sustainability solution.”

It could be argued that these sentiments put Steffen more in line with “out there” thinkers such as Ecocity Builder Richard Register and transit activist Alan Drake (thinkers who believe that we can an should reduce our total energy consumption by orders of magnitude, to 5-10 percent of current use) than with many “cleantech” types who think that we can ramp up renewables to meet our current consumption.

Rebuilding cities for “access by proximity” (as Register puts it) and for transit is a “power-down,” or “transition” strategy as far as I can tell. It seems that we are entering a historic juncture in which all of our preconceptions not just of what the future will look like but of who we are and how we see others will be turned upside-down. Maybe in a few years (as we head over the edge of the peak oil cliff) these kinds of distinctions (between shades of green) will feel hopelessly anachronistic. Then again, maybe they already do.

Comments

[Charles Fourier]

Author stated:
"To be fair to Steffen, there is probably a lot that “deep green” could also learn from “bright green” – things about business, finance, planning, etc. that will be necessary to make any transition effective."

There are fundamental flaws to a green growth paradigm too. Shades of green classifications are put in place by "business as usual" pundits who still want us to believe that a green tech economy will save the day and we'll be able to just continue the same wasteful and ineffective practices as we have done up to this point in human history without the necessary changes. The fools paradigm of expansion + exploitation + elite rule = progress or prosperity is what "green techies" still want to advocate despite its obvious non-relevance to the biophysical and socio-cultural demands of 21st century life or any time prior for that matter.

These folks continuously want us to think we can just expand forever without any cognizance of our limits to growth and its strain on or exceeding the boundaries that maintain our basic life support systems.

Any reorganization or rebuilding of our communities and bioregions must take into account the need to mitigate energy descent and all the problems this axiomatic issue has and will bring. Anything else is just wishful thinking...

What is the new magic elixir (with an EROEI equivalent to early energy concentrations/densities of fossil fuels) that is going to power this new green tech revolution?

[Gerald Anderson]

Contrary to The End of Suburbia I think
suburbia could become a source of food.
I still cannot see why the inner city
is more desirable. I love the rural countryside and want to design my place
-farm to be to be a attraction to city folks.
VSFF or Vacation Supported Farm and Garden.
I could no doubt use help with a over all
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[Lakis]

Charles,

I'm pretty sure Steffen wouldn't say that "we'll just be able to continue the same wasteful and ineffective practices" nor would most serious "cleantech" people. The question is how much faith we have in the power of innovation. I lean toward skepticism on many fronts, but not all. And one doesn't have to believe in a "magic elixer" to hope that some combination of technologies could help mitigate energy descent.

We will obviously have to cut consumption dramatically but what form will those cuts take? I don't think anyone knows for sure. I can visualize various possible scenarios.

I do agree with you that there appears to be a contradiction between the endless economic growth and the resource limits we're facing, so I have serious doubts about the viability of our financial system. But how will that play out? Will there be no investment at all? Will inflation wipe out fiat currencies? If so, what currency system will governments put in place? (Hyperinflation is not necessarily dieoff). Maybe "cleantech innovation" should include financial innovation that takes limits to growth into account.

[Lakis]

Gerald,

I have struggled with the urban/suburbia/rural issue myself, and come to the conclusion that everyplace will have its problems. I like your idea of designing your place as attractive to city folks. It seems to me that making the connection between urban and productive rural landscapes (i.e. sustainable farms) will be a crucial adaptive response as we head forward.

David Holmgren (co-founder of permaculture) shares your view about the adaptive potential of the suburbs. I'm not so sure. Especially in the U.S., so much of the suburban stock is so poor, and so poorly designed . . . but I think it depends on many factors. The beauty of permaculture is that it can in principle be applied anywhere.

[John]

Bernanke likes to remind everyone that he is an expert on the great depression and knows how to prevent it from happening again in the US. Apparently he is also an expert on Japan and its struggle with chronic deflation following its housing bubble in the 1980's. In fact Bernanke wrote an article in 2000 titled "Japanese Monetary Policy: A Case of Self-Induced Paralysis," where he goes on to lecture BOJ officials about what they could and should have done differently in order to to avoid a deflationary outcome. He goes on to postulate that the BOJ was not trying hard enough to stimulate the economy and that 0% interest rates are just one tool to beat deflation. The Fed Chairmen even goes so far as to assert that he knows how to escape a liquidity trap caused by 0% interest rates. The reason I bring this up is because it gives people a good idea of what Bernanke's next move may be. The US is dangerously close to falling into the dreaded "liquidity trap" as deflation takes hold and monetary policy loses its effectiveness.

Here are some of his suggestions to the BOJ:
http://blackswaninsights.blogspot.com/2010/08/bernanke-explains-how-to-escape.html

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