21st Century Plowshare Manifesto v. 1.0

This is a slight condensation of the talk delivered at Pecha Kucha NYC, March 23, 2009.

Exactly one month ago, I launched a website called 21st Century Plowshare. Its goal is to make the shift from talking about "the environment" to acting on behalf of it, by shifting the conversation away from shame and guilt.

My hypothesis is that environmental action should delight people.

There are a lot of folks providing practical environmental solutions--I don't do that. I am working to overcome the existential problem of climate change: the way it fucks with human scale and induces an overwhelming sensation of powerlessness in most of us, and alienating zealotry in a chosen few. These problems of mind make action impossible, so it follows that the only real actions that matter are acts of reframing and recalibrating our sense of self to the crisis at hand.

The Maiden Action is underway, it's called Bed Stuy Meadow. April 11th, volunteers will sow wildflower seed on every square inch of neglected, untended soil in the entire neighborhood of Bed Stuy, where I live.

Bed Stuy Meadow is not a beautification campaign. Its a gesture that re-calibrates our sense of what individuals can achieve, makes people feel good, and turns "the environment" into an actual place instead of a concept.

So for these reasons, it's not just about Bed Stuy--it's about placing one neighborhood into a global context. It's an exploration of scale and effort that anyone can join. It is funded by donors and corporate sponsors, and is being perpetrated by seventy-eight volunteers and counting.

While this is a global action, it was designed with Bed Stuy in mind. Its low-slung, long-blocked, expansive territory is more like an urban prairie than urban jungle or forest. Bed Stuy's proliferation of vacant lots is both the bane of its existence and its most underrated resource.

The Meadow is a guerrilla gardening project in a neighborhood that's home to the first and best guerrilla gardeners. It's a community project in a neighborhood where many blocks successfully fought urban blight, using their community boards and block associations in the dismal 70's and 80's.

Wildflowers tend to grow wherever seeds are cast--they love poor soil, they love to be ignored and most Bed Stuy blocks get at least decent sun exposure. So on a practical level, this should actually work.

By July, there should be so many wildflowers on every single block of every single street that a relentless, dizzying visual unity is created that will make walking the streets feel really good. In fact, there should be enough flowers to make this project interesting to a global audience.

I want so many wildflowers that Google Earth is compelled to re-photograph the entire neighborhood, and scores of people come visit Bed Stuy for the first time ever this July.

I want the idea to be so infectious that it continues to receive financial support from places beyond Bed Stuy itself. I have raised about a third of the $2000 budget for this project, and most of the donors are local, but as word spreads, I am getting donations from Manhattan and beyond.

This is important because every single person who donates $10 or more to the Meadow gets a seed bomb from the project in return--a physical representation of my neighborhood spreading to other boroughs and other states. It should spread worldwide.

I am also fielding email from people who want the idea to spread, or are turned on by the idea, and are offering different ideas. There is talk of Williamsburg Meadow and Crown Heights Meadow. A number of people want to turn empty lots into parks and forest gardens. I am talking to a landscape architect about putting real plants on the so-called Williamsburg Bridge Greenway.

There is nothing practical or useful about Bed Stuy Meadow. But it has provoked almost thirty people to give me money and (as of March 18th) almost eighty people to sign up to volunteer. By April 12th, whether the seeds grow or not, more than 100 people will have done something hopeful and large-scale to change a specific environment.

If and when the seeds become flowers, word about the project will spread beyond Bed Stuy. The core of donors and volunteers will watch this action evolve into flickrpools and maps of mini-meadows in distant states, human-interest news stories, new Google Earth satellite images of the neighborhood. There is a lot of joy and power in finding that bigness and interconnectedness.

It is counterintuitive, but by celebrating enormously we are putting ourselves in a position to truly take responsibility for our environmental fuckups. It is counterintuitive, but we can't feel personally bad about this horrible image if the goal is to fix it.

Popular environmentalism is mostly about Personal Virtue--it emphasizes small choices and is overly dependent on Old-testament style lists of supply-chains and processes that mostly work to shape the existing consumerist model, sometimes to absurd effect. It's too small.

And the environmentalist avant garde consists mostly of puritanical reactions to overconsumption that are equally small-minded. Every person in this room could give up refrigeration and enjoying showers and not make a difference to the climate because the earth is vast!

That's why it's devastating that many environmentalists act as if environmentalism can't or shouldn't be mainstream--as if it's an exclusive club of true believers. This positioning leads to marketing disasters on your marketing disasters!

Worse, it misunderstands the scale and severity of the situation. There is no point in creating a dialogue about right and wrong when all hands are needed on deck and there's no time to debate! The current situation demands total inclusivity.

The culture of shame that surrounds our wrongs isn't going to fix anything. What we need is proof that we can do things right. Al Gore talks about this in terms of finding "moral courage," and the bottom line is that shame and guilt induce the opposite--a paralysis of bickering.

The moral courage to act is something we will give one another only if we replace personal virtue with a discourse of radical inclusivity that is still being defined, with new posts and cockamamie ideas almost every day, on 21st Century Plowshare.

I invite everyone to join me. Sign up to throw wildflower seeds. Donate ten bucks. Leave a comment. Email me about an idea of your own. Help me figure out what works!

Comments

[Peter Bilton]

Great talk the other night. You nearly inspired me to yell "f*ck compact fluorescent lightbulbs!" into the crowd, but then I decided that would be rude.

[Magazine]

This century will remain in the history of humanity as a very dirty one, with a lot of traces remaining in the environment.

[zma]

Great post!

[motor trade insurance comparison]

You are actually writing for a great deed as only few people think of environment and I am also making my fellows aware of it by making them not to throw garbage or wrapers here and there at road and also not to use crackers a lot etc.