21st Century Plowshare

Meadow Identification Guide

Thanks to the impressive April efforts of about 100 Meadow Volunteers, and the financial support of donors and sponsors, flowers are blooming in tree pits all over Bed Stuy!

Here's a guide for spotting what we have planted, complete with latin and common names. Stay tuned for next year's Meadow Plans, a weed identification page, so that you can help the wildflowers you see without pulling out wanted plants, and a general re-tooling of this blog, because that's the great thing about having a blog. You can just start, and let it figure out its own purpose. This blog's purpose has wavered and floundered, but is finding itself as we speak.

Centaurea cyanus, or Cornflower, or Bachelor's Buttons (annual)

Cheiranthus allionii, or Siberian Wallflower (biennial--leaves only this year, next year look for blooms!)

Chrysanthemum leucanthemum, or Ox-Eye Daisy (perennial, unopened buds are edible)

Chrysanthemum maximum, or Shasta Daisy (perennial)

Coreopsis lanceolata, or Lance-Leaf Coreopsis (perennial)

Coreopsis tinctoria, or Plains Coreopsis (annual)

Cosmos sulphureus, or Sulphur Cosmos (annual, won't bloom until late summer or fall)

Cosmos bipinnatus, or Wild Cosmos (annual, will keep flowering until frost)

Delphinium ajacis, or Wild Larkspur (annual)

Dianthus barbatus, or Sweet William (biennial or short-lived perennial, edible flowers)

Echinacea purpurea, or Purple Coneflower (hardy perennial)

Eschscholzia californica, or California Poppy (annual)

Gaillardia aristata, or Perennial Gaillardia or blanketflower (perennial, blooms through fall)

Gypsophila elegans, or Baby's Breath (annual or tender perennial)

Helianthus annuus, or Wild Annual Sunflower (annual)

Hesperis matronalis, or Dame's Rocket (short-lived perennial)

Lavatera trimestris, or Rose Mallow (annual)

Linum grandiflorum rubrum, or Scarlet Flax (annual)

Linum perenne lewisii, or Blue Flax (perennial, blooms in spring so look for it next year)

Lupinus perennis, or Perennial Lupine (perennial)

Nemophila menziesii, or Baby Blue Eyes (annual)

Papaver rhoeas, or Red Poppy (annual)

Ratibida columnaris, or Mexican Hat (hardy perennial)

Rudbeckia hirta gloriosa, or Gloriosa Daisy (tender perennial)

Rudbeckia hirta, or Black Eyed Susan (perennial)

Silene armeria, or None-so-Pretty (annual)

Bed Stuy Meadow: Results!

An explosion of none-so-pretty, baby's breath, coreopsis and poppies on Lewis and Jefferson, along with a cosmos plant that isn't blooming yet.

It's offically Wildflower Season in Bed Stuy! It didn't work everywhere, and I don't quite know why yet, but am guessing that many flowers got choked out by weeds, and many other flowers got pulled as weeds or mowed. Hardly surprising, much of the neighborhood is under excellent care.

That doesn't mean there is nothing to see. I have spotted Coreopsis, none-so-pretty, baby's breath, bachelor's buttons, dame's rocket and all kinds of poppies, and there are lots of cosmos, or maybe daisy plants out there that are getting enormous and have yet to bloom. I don't even know what I haven't seen yet! My own walks indicate very little in the Mansiony Southlands and Condo-ey Northlands, and more in the kind of blown out area where I live. The best two Wildflower Habitats I have seen so far is the housing project on Gates and Lewis and the huge vacant lot that you can see from the Myrtle stop on the JMZ. Whoever bombed that lot deserves a pat on the back--it is chockablock with dame's rocket and bachelor's buttons that are easily visible from the platform!

Get out your cameras, take a walk, and head over to the official Bed Stuy Meadow flickrpool! And stay tuned for an Offical Identification Guide.

Thanks again to all the sponsors, small-time donors and the volunteers who made it happen!

Meadow Results!

It took longer than I thought it would, it's subtle, and it's not happening everywhere... but these are genuine wildflowers growing in vacant lots and tree pits!

An Actual Meadow of cornflowers seen from the Myrtle Avenue stop on the JMZ:

A tree pit on Van Buren and Lewis:

A tree pit on Kozskiuzko and Stuyvesant that looks like it's on its way to being brilliant:

And more of these sweet yellow flowers on Stuyvesant, maybe around DeKalb?

I also saw a lone poppy and more of these cute white flowers in a vacant lot on Monroe around Nostrand or so last night, but it was too dark to take a good picture. And there's another field of coneflower madness on Nostrand around Gates.

It's happening, and I must say the sensation of coming across the flowers is delightful, like finding treasure! Congratulations and thanks again to the army of volunteers who spread seeds and gave money!

July is time for treasure hunts!

Beating Flowers Into Plowshares?

Big thanks to Lisa Bowden and Kore Press for asking me to write an essay about the transition from art to... whatever 21st Century Plowshare is becoming. You should go read it.

Seriously, things are getting interesting in Bed Stuy. While there are just about zero wildflowers, there is talk about starting a nonprofit whose goal is to ensure that there is no such thing as vacant land in Bed Stuy--that every single lot is either turned into a community garden or interim-farmed.

Right now this is mostly just talk, but I don't doubt the seriousness of the people I am working with and of course, I do believe in followthrough. We may fail, but something will happen. This blog is nowhere near dead. I'll be writing more about this Urban Farm Syndicate... whatever it becomes.

Breakthrough Institute v. Waxman-Markey and Climate Change as a Cultural Problem

Jesse Jenkins is waxing graphically on the complexity of climate change, and using that complexity as a reason to decide that cap and trade is insufficient, and that the real solutions are in the development of new technologies. And I am not a policy expert myself, but I call bullshit, for cultural and practical physical reasons.

First, one of the best aspects of Waxman-Markey is the fact that it exists as an appropriately scaled step in the right direction. It's like a parent coming into the room. I believe that this alone is enormous cultural tonic that will stimulate the positive drive to solve for climate change that most people want, but that we have no culture or language or shared psychological space to support.

The worst aspect of the climate change debate is the way it consistently brings out the worst in people. This creates a culture that every sane and moderate person is right to want to turn away from. The deniers are holding on to their wrong point of view way past the point of being reasonable and are generally letting themselves become tools of a strategy to delay action as long as possible because they are frightened. And environmentalists are running around on the comments section of blogs like Climate Progress talking in terms of hostile takeover, namecalling, and, just to put a nice fascist cherry on top, climate enlightenment.

Seriously. People are using the term climate enlightenment. And climate trauma.

Everyone is operating from a place of weakness, and this creates a culture around solving this problem that's heavy on fanciful flights of denial, imaginative totalitarian solutions, shrill voices, and comment moderation. It is entirely possible that Waxman-Markey would do little to untangle the complex flow chart above, but would do much to moderate and enrich the culture of climate change debate, simply because it would affirm in a broad way that the problem exists, and is under the purview of a responsible and responsive democratic government. Even if it doesn't do much, it could do a lot simply by providing a strong empathic, democratic trellis on which to train a grownup approach to solving the problem.

That said, I have sat patiently through many a presentation in which it was argued that we actually have the technology to fix climate change now, and that thinking about this in terms of some sort of technological superbreakthrough is both unnecessary and overly, dangerously hopeful. Or to put it another way, it's a big and complicated problem, but it's not that complex. There's too much CO2, methane and a handful of other greenhouse gasses. Let's cut the amount that we emit, starting now! We are enormously dependent on fossil fuels right now, but that doesn't mean that we don't any use clean energy and that we can't step up clean energy solutions, electric cars, government subsidized weatherstripping, Oprah-style boiler giveaways and other solutions right now. Today.

Or think of it this way. You have solved problems of your own in your own smaller-scale life, and you know as well as I do that the only way to start solving that enormous-looking problem is to take the first small step toward fixing it, even if that first step isn't enough, or isn't the exact right step. You can't lose fifty pounds without going for that first walk around the block, or making that first decision to eat one cookie instead of a bunch. You can't make anything without starting, and it's often hard to know where to start. And the practical power of Waxman-Markey is that is it gives a whole lot of people who want to start thinking about taking practical steps structured permission to start.

Climate change is a devil of a problem because it's large and potentially catastrophic, but at the same time persistently invisible and future-oriented. This makes it a collective problem of mind as much as a collective practical problem. There is a wide gap between how we (and I mean different camps, all claiming the status of We) imagine climate change and its solutions and what will actually occur. And the only way to manage that gap between what we imagine and what exists is to allow solutions to evolve incrementally and respond to what each solution yields. Waxman-Markey is the first serious large-scale actual poking of the problem that the United States has attempted. Rather than whinge about it before it even happens, I think that the best response is to entertain it, and see what it gives us, and respond strongly to what happens outside our jumbled collective mindscape.

Or to put it another way, we are all standing around imagining all kinds of scenarios, and judging Waxman-Markey against what we think will happen, even though the problem is external to us. This approach is very human, but it's less helpful than just admitting that we don't know exactly how to fix this problem or how any individual solution will unfold, and to try something that seems sane anyway, and asking the external problem to guide us.

Come Wonk With Me: From The Inner Tyrrany of Eco-Ritualism to Legitimate, Large-Scale Action, With A Sincere Hope That Environmentalists Don't Fuck It Up

I've been following the cap and trade v. carbon tax non-debate debate. And honestly, this choice of reading material has left me dyspeptic and hungdog, with my hands all permanently wrung out.

I feel that I have more than said my peace about why I think Waxman-Markey is worth supporting in the comments of the two great Climate Progress posts about the subject, as well as probably-too-excited-for-publication email to the already-excitable Andrew Sullivan. Kevin Drum is already going Steven Segal on cap-and-trade doubters. There is no reason to keep shouting what he said! This is not going to be a post about whether you should support Waxman-Markey.

I want to take a step backward and talk about why it's important to jump in the policy fray at all, and what it means that most of the discourse is between environmentalists. This blog is about creating a positive and effective culture of environmentalism--in remaking our relationship to our earth in a way that's honest and undogmatic. Public. Guilt-free. Giving a shit about policy debate takes a little effort, but it's a big part of that honest relationship with the earth that we all seem to want. Policy is important for a reason so basic that I risk looking like a simpleton attempting to unpack it.

Policy is important because it's big enough. Policy is genuinely scaled to the crisis at hand. What you personally do about Waxman-Markey is way more important than your Sigg bottle or your lightbulbs or how many times a week you use your car.

This is elementary, right? Of course it's much more important to put a price on carbon in general than it is to worry about how much carbon you, puny human, emit. Duh! And yet it's important to linger here. It's important to use the current debate about Waxman-Markey, whether you support it or some other imagined legislation, as a lever that pries us off of one of the most destructive tropes of the environmental movement as it currently exists: the wrongly-scaled push for you to take personal responsibility for your small-scale consumer choices.

It's critical to stop framing environmentalism in terms of your personal consumer decisions.

That's hard to write. I am a light-shutter-offer myself. I don't countenance waste and have spent a lot of money this year on heat-exchanging whatzits, insulation and other efficiency-builders for my home. I loves me a low utility bill, and I would never deny anyone else that frugal pleasure. That's not what I am talking about.

I'm talking about that person you know who's going or went "Green" and has been a total pain in the ass ever since. It's hard to blame that individual Greenmonger. I have been that person, and you might have been too, and even if you've never personally taken someone else's kitchen scraps home to compost them, you probably love and empathize with someone who has. This behavior used to make sense. In a world where George W. Bush was president and didn't believe that anthropogenic global warming existed or that pollution was bad or that bodies like the EPA did legitimate work, personal consumer choices and small-scale eco-rituals were all anybody who was freaked out about our environmental woes had, and doing something always feels better than doing nothing. The problem with this particular course of action, of course, is that to the uninitiated it read poorly. The harder the individual Greenmonger (myself included) worked at trying to minimize her own personal impact, the more egotistically out of touch she seemed to the people around her. The result was a vicious cycle of very little progress: scores of people who really did want to care were put off by the one co-worker who kept digging in the trash and nagging people about Vampire Power. Environmentalists became the ultimate Debbie Downers--the ones who couldn't stop reminding you that this or that product that you use every day is toxic, talking about the horrors of factory farming when you're trying to eat, or the worst--expounding ad nauseum on the benefits of not buying anything unless the canvas bag was at the ready and otherwise living difficultly. Dick Cheney's evil prophecy was more than fulfilled. Environmentalism didn't just become a matter of personal virtue. Environmentalists became Victorian scolds with a wrongly-scaled sense of their own impact on the world and an impaired sense of humor.

Most people who are bothering to read this blog have probably struggled with their own inner environmentalist. It's impossible to live without anxiety and proselytizing in a world where it's common knowledge that most building materials and carpets and such are for outdoor use only, and yet are being put in buildings where you can't even open the window. I am not interested in mocking environmentalists because they are easy to mock. This mockery is a means to a specific end. I want to understand the cultural milleu of Waxman-Markey, a bill that gets a strong B+ from Climate Progress, and that seems to be getting its strongest pushback not from climate change deniers but from Climatologists and myriad other people who think it's not good enough, or total enough. People who are probably otherwise understand that representative government is better than fascism, but who are writing on Climate Progress right now that the only reasonable course of action is immediate government seizure and shutdown of all coal-fired power plants, no matter the cost. No matter the economic repercussion.

That's a tyrannical thing to think and say. I think it's honestly dangerous to think of climate change as a problem that's above the rule of law, as if the CO2 in the atmosphere was more real than or otherwise trumps government. And the only way that I can begin to understand that totalitarian drive is to admit how totalitarian I can be with myself, and to understand environmentalism as a movement that has for too long been too individual.

When environmentalism is a matter of personal virtue, then it all boils down to a relationship between your personal resolve and this unending series of disgusting threats. And when you've organized yourself as an environmentalist in this way, it's not just hard to think in terms of compromise, it's weak. Compromising with yourself is nothing more than pussing out--it's what you do when you allow yourself to eat the second bowl of ice cream, or sleep too late. Uncompromising, overcoming relationships between the self and an external reality are the stuff of athletes and heroes. Being totalitarian with yourself is a virtue--you are not a democracy. I think that this is why it's such a slippery slope to go from buying the toothpaste that isn't full of sweetener to showering with a bucket so that you can flush your toilet or water plants with your gray water, even though you live someplace that's actually got plenty of water.

This is all fun and games when it's between the ears. But it's no way to work with a group or otherwise think large scale, and our environmental woes, from pollution and climate change to stripmining and the Pacific garbage gyre, are global in scale. I don't want to discard environmentalism's reliance on personal virtue because I don't identify with it, but because I do, and because I know that very little of the material in my own Environmentalist's Internal Dialogue is suitable for public democratic discourse. If I talked about Waxman-Markey in the same language and on the same terms that I use to talk to myself about the lights in my own house, I would sound like a Little Hitler too. And that's a non-starter. And I care way too much about climate change to allow it to continue unabated because a bunch of environmentalists mistakenly believe that democracy is less natural or less real or less of a force than the rising levels of CO2 in our atmosphere.

So I am giving myself a break in the name of fighting climate change. I am going to take the elevator, guilt free, and stop looking for manual doors instead of automatic ones, and stop collecting my usual (and embarrassing) damp sack of teabags at work that I usually bring home to my compost pile, and otherwise curb the relentless urge to eco-ritualize every single choice, and instead I am going to write my congresspeople and the White House and tell all those people that I support Waxman-Markey, despite its imperfection, despite its slow start. I am doing this after rationally calculating how much more effective it is to fight for large-scale compromise than it is to continue this rigid, private, WALL-E meets Rainman meets Bill McKibben kind of life that I used to call "action" in the Bush Dark Ages.

And I sincerely hope you join me.

Word Up!

If you care about how environmentalism is currently messaging itself, then it's been a busy few days.

Joe Romm started late last week with a post about some unnamed presentations he's been sitting through, in which he broke away from the verbal ghettoes of "alternative" "green" and "renewable" energy, and dropped the most sensible parsing of energy policy I have heard yet:

clean, safe sources of energy that never run out.

What a great start! Who doesn't want clean, safe sources of energy that never run out? Who doesn't find that phrase comfortingly security- and abundance-oriented? Deliciously frugal and prudent? In this political landscape, what possible argument can you have against clean, safe sources of energy that never run out? It's the kind of phrase that cuts through a lot of nonsense, and throws how confusing the rest of the environmentalist message is into sharp relief.

Clean, safe sources of energy that never run out is the kind of phrase that shows you how vague, equivocal and unvisual "climate change" is, and that "global warming" sounds downright positive.

Cut to a Friday New York Times article, which reads kind of like a profile of ecoAmerica, a nonprofit whose mission is to appropriately message our environmental woe, and kind of like an expose of ecoAmerica, because the occasion for the article was a little mistake. An internal summary of ecoAmerica's latest efforts was recently and accidentally sent around via email to a whole bunch of news organizations.

The upshot of the Times article is that ecoAmerica seeks to replace certain key terms like "climate change" and "global warming" with "talking about our deteriorating atmosphere," and other talking-point-style ways to reframe the old, tired argument away from the image of Jimmy Carter asking us all to don sweaters

(yes, we really have been engaged in this debate for that long)

and toward "saving money for a more prosperous future," and otherwise speak in aspirational terms while assiduously avoiding sciencey jargon. The article ends with Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University stating that ecoAmerica's campaign was basically deploying all the same strategies conservatives have been using, and that this is a cynical and ineffective thing to do.

This morning, Joe Romm basically agreed with Brulle, in an article that gently mocked the (highly mockable) phrase "our deteriorating atmosphere" and laid out a convincing argument that ecoAmerica's plan for reframing the argument wasn't just cynical and ineffective, but downright "suicidal."

As an idealist, I wish this bullshit didn't even matter, but in a world where it's hard to see that Clean Coal is an oxymoron and in which we are still chewing on the content of Carter's Malaise Speech, it obviously matters more than anything else. More than whether you've got the right lightbulbs, or how you got to work today, or your Sigg bottle. And while I do believe that ecoAmerica is doing some things right,

(it turns out, interestingly, that they are responsible for the still-fabulous clean, safe sources of energy that never run out)

there is a lot going on here that's wrong, wrong, wrong--suicidal, even! Parroting conservative tactics at a time when only 20% of the electorate is willing to identify as Republican, Specter is more or less openly stating that he switched parties because conservatives have come down with The Crazy and the most important conservative voices are not actual leaders but Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh is behind the curve at best! Replacing "climate" and "global" with "atmosphere" amounts to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic! We have lived through eight years of The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations! We know by now that treating people like they can't understand things like science or the nuances of policy is a self-fulfilling prophecy!

Messaging about climate change that works is going to tell a compelling narrative that empowers us to overcome a specific, visualizable threat. If we were smart, we would ditch any talk about the climate, globe or atmosphere altogether and talk about the quality of human lives as the planet continues to heat up. We would bypass Carter and get all JFK on the problem! We would talk about how we put a man on the moon, and how close at hand the technology that will give us cleaner air and water and a more livable planet is, and how innovative we are that we have this technology at our fingertips, and generally inspire an entire bored unemployed and dejected manufacturing class to a brand new greatness!

If we were smart, we would stop trying to hoodwink people with talking points and instead enlist them as warriors in a specific fight for a bright, clean, prosperous future!

If we were smart, we would stop acting like people don't care and instead create opportunities for large numbers of people to care in a public, action-oriented, community-based way!

And hey, wait a minute! We are smart! Enough with the cynical politics of yesterday! EcoAmerica, I want you to help me and the rest of my nation get busy creating a new, spectacular vision of tomorrow!

Going Nuclear

There's a really interesting debate about nuclear power bumpin' on Infrastructurist.

Frankly, I don't know enough to have an opinion about nuclear power, but I will be following this particular debate closely and working in as much outside research as possible. The larger point--whether the environmental movement as we now know it is clinging to principle at the expense of actual forward movement--is very much germane to the 21st Century Plowshare agenda.

On Not Breaking Someone Else's Sidwalk

I stole this image from Colin Purrington's Flickr account.

When I was a visiting artist this week, I had an interesting conversation with an student at MICA who wanted to take bricks out of Baltimore sidewalks and plant destructive weeds in the spaces left behind--weeds that he hoped would grow so perniciously that he hoped they would destroy the rest of the sidewalk. He thought it would be a great environmental gesture.

As an artistic gesture, it's right on the money. It's got tension; it's edgy; it's clearly oppositional.

But you know, artists don't innovate enough, and are way too invested in doing something that reads like an artistic gesture. And so I hope he keeps trying, and goes further in his mind to find a gesture that isn't oppositional.

If there is one aspect of our environmental woe that separates it from all the other problems we face, it's that there is no us and there is no them. It's fundamentally not an oppositional problem. While it is true that climate change deniers, oil lobbyists and other stakeholders confuse this truth by being against sane climate change policies, the bottom line is that there is nobody who exists (or who can exist) outside this climate. It's not like Ghandi fighting for India. We can't take people who don't agree with us and put them Somewhere Else. And for that reason, it makes no sense to act as if this Somewhere Else exists when we debate policy.

Just as people who own property don't have a choice but to be invested in the state of their sidewalk, everybody who consumes energy has a huge stake in the existing energy infrastructure. We also enjoy representative government. So if a specific climate policy is going to work, a strong majority has to be on board--there can be no unilateral climate policy revolutions. This means that the way things work now has to change, and it has to change in a way that's at least somewhat consensus based. There can be no breaking of anyone else's sidewalk.

Now, to be honest, what I just wrote reads to my own eyes as frustratingly namby-pamby. I am ready for my revolution, dammit, and don't want to go considering the needs of anyone else, because I have effectively demonized coal in my own mind and have moved on. But it's more complicated than that.

Michael Shellenberger has been writing interestingly about Sherrod Brown, democratic congressman from Ohio. Brown clearly sees the threat--he's no denier. And he clearly sees that he's got the most to gain from good climate policy in the form of manufacturing jobs, as Ohio's unemployment is significantly worse than average. The man wants good climate change policy. But he also sees that he's got the most to lose from a Cap and Trade program or any other form of taxing carbon. His state is highly dependent on coal, and so just making carbon expensive will simply make his state's economy unlivable. He wants change, but his people are already too poor to absorb a transition.

It's an interesting dance that requires monumental (if wonky and subtle) creativity. Brown understands the need to make carbon expensive, but the reality is that there can be no stakeholder that's left with a broken sidewalk. Shellenberger points to Brown and his colleagues in Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania and other carbon-intensive states and sees an opportunity to make climate policy that actually passes and actually works because it focuses exclusively on addressing their needs: on jobs and lowering the cost of clean energy. He argues that this amounts not to selling out or being weak, but to putting the horse before the cart.

But of course, I went to art school myself, and know that bold action is oppositional, and must admit that I have been looking forward to the bold, oppositional gesture of a Huge Carbon Tax, even though life just doesn't work that way.

In fact, what's been getting me out of bed in the morning these days is all this overwhelming evidence that life doesn't work in a lot of the ways we have been thinking it did. In fact, you could look at the modern era, with its Industrial Revolution and all its world-warring and its relentless drive to individual expression and its reliance on an avant garde and maybe breathe a sigh of relief because maybe we are starting the next phase, in which we all just admit that bold opposition is a spent tactic, and come up with something more interesting and more useful.

It's going to continue to be an interesting ride.

Beaters to Batteries!

When Joe Romm, the terminally grouchy Grand Poobah of Climate Change Bloggers, is spreading good news about environmental policy, you know that the news is genuinely good. He's calling Obama the Green FDR, and has compiled a list of things Obama has already done to turn this boat around.

I really like it when Joe Romm focuses on good news. I think it's good leadership on his part. The organizing principle of 21st Century Plowshare is that good begets good, that the biggest problem with environmental activism is that the news has been so dismally bad for so awfully long that our minds and souls got stunted. The future sounded so hopeless that it became impossible to see that the environment is worth making less poisonous and disgusting right now, for selfish reasons, and that the moral and economic imperatives of fixing the climate are both more urgent and more satisfying than previously marketed.

All in all, it's an amazing time to be alive. Not only is there a company that has actually committed to deploying electric car infrastructure in Israel, Denmark, Australia, Canada and Hawaii...

...and not only will this infrastructure lower the cost of driving to the point that it is cheaper to use an electric car than an internal combustion engine...

...but we seem to be at a moment in history when it is actually possible to implement this technology across the entire United States.

In the last 100 days, CO2 has become a pollutant. Green jobs are no longer an idea, they are becoming policy. And to top it all off, Ford and GM are on life support! It's an amazing stroke of luck that the Federal Government cares a lot about when you are going to buy your next car.

Here's why. Personal vehicles represent almost 25% of the carbon emissions in the United States. And even if global warming didn't exist, internal combustion engines emit all manner of nasty particulate matter and ozone that leads to asthma, sinus headaches, and other upper-respiratory problems. A world without internal combustion engines is a healthier world--it's that simple. And since the economy seems to have the American car industry by the balls, we have an amazing opportunity to help the Obama administration truly affect large-scale change.

I pledged to myself some time ago that my 91 Nissan Pickup would be my last internal combustion engine. And right now, I think that if every single person in America who wants an electric car effectively communicates that they are holding on to their dollars until they get one, then there is no political or economic reason not to create the kind of electric infrastructure that Shai Agassi and Better Place proposes.

Do you want electric cars, which emit nothing and are as carbon-neutral as we can make the grid? Do you want them to cost less per mile than gas-powered combustion engines and travel effectively over long distances? We have the technology, political will and economic reality to actually make this happen. All that's missing is a clear message from me and you.

The first thing you can do is sign Better Place's petition. You can also do more. And it will be fun. Over the coming weeks, 21st Century Plowshare will be rolling out a comprehensive campaign in which your personal pledge not to buy a car until you can buy a low-cost electric car will be broadcast to the people who need to know: everyone from the major auto companies to your congresspeople to the President himself, because there is simply no reason not to.