Dug up from the vaults! I just came across this piece I’d spoken, then jotted down a couple of years ago.  I figured it might be appropriate to pop up here,  since nothing else is going up this week. While I’d roll these concepts out differently now, it’s still fun to see how some of us in the Detroit scene were rolling out these ideas only a couple of years ago — and now to see how dramatically the national conversation about Detroit has changed. What seemed pie-in-the-sky only two years ago is now being seriously discussed around the globe. How quickly things can change. Anyway, here’s the piece:

This is a paraphrase transcript (written after the fact) of a brief talk that I gave in Ann Arbor as part of the Sustainability Salon series at the Crazy Wisdom Bookstore in April, 2008. I liked how it came together and so I wanted to capture the thoughts in written form. I believe this is a pretty accurate representation of what was said – and I think I squeezed it all into a 12 minutes introduction, which is surely a sign that I could have another career as an auctioneer. That’s partly why I wanted to try getting it down into written form where there’s more room for absorption and debate. Thanks for letting me share it with you.

Good evening, everybody, and thank you for having me here. It’s an honor to get to be up here with the rest of the panel and to share this time with all of you here. Sustainability is a topic that I’m passionate about, and I’m honored to have this chance to join you in discussion about it.

I live in the nuts and bolts of green buildings and sustainable development on a daily basis, and I talk to people about the practical things they can do to green their buildings. But today, I’m going to step back a little bit and share some of my views on the bigger picture. I’m hopeful that this will help us in our discussion about how we collectively tackle sustainable development.

I think there are primarily two major tasks ahead of us today in the world of sustainable development. The first is to take all the good work happening around green development and expand it. The truth is that a tremendous amount of good work is happening around these topics, and we just need to grow it in a BIG way – on steroids! We know what the things are that we need to do, we just need to do a lot more of them. That’s a big part of our task, and bravo to moving it forward.

The second task is that we have to solve the impossible problems. Because there are certain things that we haven’t figured out how to do yet. We need to find the answers to those things, and that’s what I want to focus on tonight. Besides, it’ll be fun. So this is our second task: to solve the impossible. As an example, I’d like to offer some of the work that I do, and talk about why I think Detroit can save the world.     [laughter]

Hey folks, just a heads up that Powering the Nation just posted a guest blog I did for them on the future of energy. Yep, that’s me on the list, right above John Kerry.

Here’s the list of guest editorials:
http://unc.news21.com/index.php/opinions.html

And here’s a direct link to my full article:
http://unc.news21.com/index.php/opinions/277-the-energy-challenge-act-today-shape-tomorrow.html

photo by max greenberg

Do you know the difference between Hell and Harmless? Most people have a clear-cut sense of the difference in at least one place: Casinos. Hell is having poorly defined boundaries in a place designed to take your money. You can go in, play some games, maybe even win a few, boost your confidence, and try for more. You can come really close to winning big. Close enough that you’ll come back at it sure that you’re on the trail for success. For many people, this is an intoxicating recipe that can lead to bad choices. And for the addictive personality that is driven by an unchecked need, this setting can lead to disaster. Hell. Each step of the way may seem like an okay choice, a risk, but a calculated risk (that wasn’t really calculated) that never seems quite catastrophic.

Harmless isn’t actually that hard. I have friends who’ll go to a casino and consider it an evening’s entertainment. They’re clear that it’s entertainment and not really expect to make money off of it. Still, knowing the powerful pull of the win, they’ve got a very simple guideline. They’ve got what I call Casino Rules. You set a clear limit. After that limit you stop. You can stay and play all night if you want to, but you walk in the door with a set amount of cash, and that’s your limit. If you have wins, and are making money, you can play all night. Or you can play small and stretch it out. Or you can quit while ahead. But if you use up what you walked in with, then you’ve hit the limit. And you stop. No borrowing from friends, run to the bank, or visit to the ATM. It’s a simple rule, and it’s effective.

Casino Rules can apply to any potentially risky behavior that may have gradual steps of loss. Like the proverbial frog in boiling water, gradual steps make it difficult to see the big picture and how far you’ve come from your starting point, or when you’ve gone over the edge into danger. This is a common problem with addictions of all sorts. It’s also a problem with economic risk-taking of various kinds from investing to entrepreneurial get-rich-quick schemes. The power of graduated steps to keep us in the present and lose sight of the whole path can be very useful when pursuing a positive goal that’s hard to achieve. For example, dieters often do well to just focus on losing 5-10 pounds at a time, since the task of losing 40 would be too overwhelming.  But if the path is one of damage and hurt, then the same principle is dangerous. Limits to the losses you’ll suffer must be clearly set at the beginning of the road – before you’re too far along the path and only seeing each gradual step in front of you. Thus the Casino Rules.

Casino players and stock market investors all have clear guidelines that they use for setting these limits. So why don’t we, as a nation of petroleum consumers, have a similar rule? Michigan’s had enough trouble the past few years. But now we’ve been hit with the worst oil spill in our history with approximately 1 million gallons released into the Kalamazoo River, on a pipeline that had been cited for poor maintenance earlier this year. So far, the oil hasn’t hit Lake Michigan, and EPA predicts that it won’t, but the very thought is quite chilling. The Great Lakes are the largest liquid repository of freshwater on the planet.

We cannot just take each accident at a time. We must use Casino Rules. We must set a limit with a fresh perspective. When is it enough to be beyond reasonable risk? If we address each crisis by itself, we may never make a solid long-term decision. If we’d set such a limit in 2009, the gulf spill would likely have surpassed it already. Instead, we focus on the crisis and the clean-up. Then do the same in West Michigan. And do the same off the coast of California. And do the same off the coast of Massachusetts. And in the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary. And in Florida, Texas and more. The list is already longer than you think, just in 2010.

We need  (as a state or a region or a nation or a world) to set a limit. Where’s the threshold? How much oil will spill before we collectively agree to change our reliance on it? We must set the limit, and we must set it now before we end up in an addicts anonymous chair, introducing ourselves and telling the story of how we wrecked our lives and betrayed our children to a silent, empty room.