A few years ago, I read an inspiring article on Treehugger that changed my whole attitude toward solar-powered homes. I had been thinking that solar was a multi-thousand dollar commitment that required complicated wiring and hard-to-understand deals with power companies. It turns out solar is (like marriage) something you can transition to slowly as your means permit.

The original Treehugger set-up (which is based on a post from Off-Grid.net) promises to keep the initial set-up at under $600 and indeed it does:

However, when I set out to purchase all of those items, I found the reality to look more like this:

Maybe the professionals have a line on super-cheap (and discontinued?) solar products, but it was clear that their recommended gear was not going to work for me at the price suggested. I’m the kind of guy who likes to let other people make my mistakes for me (which is why I love libraries) so I became nervous when the exact system they mentioned wasn’t available. I considered getting an all-in-one kit like those from Sunwize, but for $600 I would end up with a 5 watt panel and a 19 amp hour battery. If I wanted to get ripped off, I’d buy ridiculously expensive Chuck Taylor knock-offs.

Eventually, I had to bite the bullet and learn me about some solar. I bought a Kill-a-Watt monitor and went from plug to plug measuring my appliances. Then I did some reading about solar systems in general and what I could expect from the sun in my area (San Francisco). Finally, I did a lot of online research and came up with my own shopping list:

Close enough! There are some definite improvements to my own list, if I do say so myself. The obvious ones are the bigger inverter and charge controller—the latter especially important, as it will allow me to support up several more panels and batteries when I’m ready to grow. The battery is AGM (Absorption Glass Mat) which is safer and can take more punishment than the slightly old school gel batteries. Finally, the size of the panel doubled and is a size that’s not discontinued. The Uni-Solar panels from the original plan are definitely the way to go, as they’re light-weight, glass-free, shade-tolerant, graffiti-proof, and lots of other hyphenated descriptors.

Still on my list is a digital multimeter, because not knowing the precise number of volts here or amps there is going to drive a number-obsessed fellow like me crazy. Oh, and I need to talk to my landlord about all this… you don’t think he’ll mind, do you?

The last few years, controversy has followed around Adam Werbach like a shadow. From his landmark “Is Environmentalism Dead?” speech to the work with Wal*Mart that’s left even his supporters scratching their heads, all along he’s promised that answers were coming. Answers have finally come… and in a form no less substantial than a total re-imagining of “sustainability” and a model for organizing how we tackle it as a planet.

Instead of spending the rest of this post explaining exactly what that is, here’s a full transcript of his speech and more about the platform from which he’s planning on doing his part. Yeah, it’s an advertising company—get over it. Now that we’re on the same page…

Though he namechecks Switzerland for the name Blue, it’s clear that this vision is the thoughtful and considered construct of one who has faced his demons—the IPCC reports things are worse than we’ve feared even as carbon emissions continue to rise, all the while Werbach’s been a leader in the Green movement—and emerged a wiser man. Environmentalism, despite all the dire warnings and alarm bells, has succeeded in little more than everyone feeling scared, guilty, or just angry. Now he’s ready to stop saying “the world is ending” and move from crisis to possibility.

In this way, he aligns himself with similar transformative thinkers—notably Van Jones (unfortunately, no relation). Though I haven’t heard yet if Jones endorses a “Blue” re-framing, he’s certainly been wary to define Green as limited to the organic foodfest or Prius-equals-redemption model popular among the gatekeepers of Green. His anxiety around the Eco-Apartheid that we seem determined to create and the consequences it would have on lasting sustainability are addressed by Blue in ways Green pays only lip service.

Also sharing this vision might be Alex Steffan of Worldchanging, who recently declared that “optimism is a political act.” Indeed, Blue is accepting and positive on a scale that makes even Bright Green (which “forgoes the bleakness of protest and dissent for the energizing confidence of constructive solutions”) seem a bit dim. Blue will likely mean saying yes enthusiastically to things to which we’ve been trained as activists to say no.

Werbach recalls:

I remember the conversation with Jan when she told me that her new PSP was a diet. “Really?” I asked, obviously disappointed that this born leader had chosen to go with something so…ordinary.

“What do you mean, ‘Really?’” she snapped back.

“Well, I just figured that sustainability—I said it slowly this time—has to have something to do with protecting the earth.”

Jan gave me a kind sigh. “Where do you think all that food is coming from?”

This letting go will be absolutely necessary to reach the most startling aspect of Adam’s plan. We have five years to grow Blue to one billion people (for reference, that’s about the size of the Internet). If we’re going to move at the speed necessary to address climate change, that’s the number of people we need to reach. That means we have to talk about things that address the concerns of more that just “Mac users… coastal states and college towns”. The impossible mass of the American Midwest, land of strip malls and big box stores, must in turn be joined by the waking giants of India and China and all feel as much a part of Blue as I now do.

I have to admit I think the name is unfortunate. Yes, it’s next on the spectrum but that wavelength is already well-tread by the U.S. Democratic party and yet another color name makes the “Blue is the New Green” jokes unavoidable.

Here are a few metaphors that I hear thrown around in activist circles that, as Inigo Montoya might say, “do not mean what we think they mean.”

Low-hanging fruit

The first is not unique to activism, business uses it left and right as well. In case you happen to have never been in a meeting when someone uses it, the phrase “low-hanging fruit” is meant to convey benefits that can be attained with minimal action. So, if I want to get 500 signatures to put in a bike lane, the low-hanging fruit might be bike messengers. I could probably quickly acquire a few hundred signatures with not a whole lot of effort.

The problem is, that’s not how you pick fruit. Fruit is normally picked starting with the “high-hangers” for two important reasons. First, pickers start at the top and fill their basket as they go down, otherwise they’d be climbing with ever-heavier loads. Second, the fruit lower on the tree is partially shaded by the higher branches and often last to ripen.

So, for the bike lane example, the “low-hanging fruit” would be folks whose names would make it more difficult to get others to sign and who probably aren’t high value names to begin with. Elementary school kids, maybe.

Silver bullets

Silver bullets often come up when we’re looking for a simple solution to a complex problem. An example might be installing solar panels in remote African villages. This fairly simple solution manages to address issues ranging from social (providing power without making the community reliant on fuel) to environmental (cleaner than coal or nuclear) to political (no foreign-owned powerplants requiring a government-owned grid).

However, the term comes to us from old European legends about werewolves. Werewolves, immune to normal bullets, can only be killed by silver ones. Far from being simple solutions, silver bullets are actually more difficult to make than regular ones and substantially less bang-for-the-buck, as silver is both softer and more expensive than lead. In short, you’d probably want to avoid using a silver bullet unless you’re facing something like a werewolf that can’t be defeated through conventional means (which addressing energy needs in developing nations just may be).

Radical

Perhaps the most understood metaphor, yet one that activists employ to the point of self-identity, is the notion of “radicalism”. Literally “radical” refers to the root of something, most often a plant. Activists who identify as “radical” maintain that they are getting to the root of the problem—with the implicit or explicit suggestion that all other strategies will fail to produce true change. Accusations of not being radical enough equate to not being serious about one’s beliefs.

Again, reality begs to differ.

Instructions for removing an unwanted tree all begin with cutting the tree down first. Once you’ve removed a tree’s leaves and its ability to photosynthesize its food, it’s much easier to deal with the leftover roots. The stump can continue to generate new growth, but diligence will ensure that it never amounts to a new tree, leaving the stump to eventually die. Removing stumps is so difficult that the most common methods include drilling poison-filled holes and setting them on fire.

Knowing the truth behind this metaphor encourages a remarkably different angle for activism than “radical”, namely removing the ability of destructive systems to feed and perpetuate themselves before attempting to address the “root” of the problem. Maybe everyone working on corporate power should switch to campaigning against advertising. Afterall, it would be difficult for companies to lobby Washington if no one bought their products.

It’s hard being a complete douchebag these days. Movies have trailers that specifically tell you to turn off your ringer. With the sullying of hands-free headsets, the “you think I’m talking to you, but I’m actually talking to someone more important” trick that used to be great fun is now played out. Next to go was the “even though I’m actually talking to you, you’ll notice I’m wearing my Bluetooth earpiece at all times in case someone more important than you wants to talk”. Sheesh, it’s almost as if people are deliberately making it rough for you to show how unimportant they are.

Yes, it’s time to bring your douchbaggery into 2008 with this amazing Bluetooth handset.

The idea is simple. Bluetooth microphones and speakers are now getting so miraculously tiny, they can be placed into a ring. But, as a fucking douchebag, you might ask, “why not two rings?” You could put the microphone into a pinky ring and the speaker into a thumb ring and I think you know where this is headed…

You’re once again the envy of all your douchebag friends as you use the universal symbol for “hold on, I really need to take this one” to, in fact, “take this one”. Confuse those Luddite Midwesterners by talking to “imaginary friends”. A quick “call me” gesture after a lovely date could actually be arranging a booty call once you’ve dropped off the Nice Girl. The possibilities are endless!

What are you waiting for? Buy one today! Operators are standing by… no wait, they… they’re actually talking to people… that’s really confusing.

Okay, first you need to watch the original. This is a real ad from a real politician who is really running for president of our country. No doctoring, no mashing-of-up, nothing like that. People made this sans irony.

Now you can skim through “Planet of the Arabs” which made it to the top of Digg three days ago. It’s a compilation of Hollywood movies featuring vicious stereotypes of Middle-Easterners.

The two were clearly made for one another, so I got them drunk and they got busy.

Note some important improvements to the original advertisement:

1. I removed the video footage of Benazir Bhutto. Some might consider it risky, since she was only tragically murdered a week ago, and might turn out to have been a “bad guy” after all. Oh, and Rudy himself was quoted saying, “I think it’s inappropriate to see [her death] in political terms.” So out it comes.
2. Also, if you’re kicking Arab butt, you need an action movie star. Inevitably, there will be a movie someday about September 11th starring Rudy Giuliani, focusing on he bravely prevented one of the greatest tragedies in our nation’s history. But until that day, Chuck Norris is the go-to guy.
3. Oh, and the end title needed to be in Trajan. Everybody knows that. Der.

Just on the off chance that Rudy happens to win the Republican nomination and subsequently the presidency, I’ve taken the liberty of already starting a “Pre-emptively impeach Rudy Giuliani!” petition over at Care2. Feel free to go ahead and make some protest signs, too. Oh, and somebody should tell CodePink.

It really is a mixtape, too. It has two sides and each is less than 30 minutes, so you could theoretically copy them onto a cassette… you know, if you had one… uh, and a device you could use to record onto it. Let’s be honest, this is going straight into iTunes.

Side A - Out with the Old (download)

The first half is a mix of tracks of my own that I happened to have laying around from the last two years or so. Maybe you’ve heard them, maybe you haven’t. Either way, I had to do something with them because I’d like to move past them and they’re in the way. Sedate and serene, this mix hovers around 120bpm.

Side B - In with the New (download)

Two-thousand eight is already full of hope. The topics range from personal endeavors to national politics to global challenges but, regardless, my hope that the year sounds something like this. Mercilessly bouncy, I have a hard time not dancing to these songs. None of them are mine, but they represent a sound I’m interested in (especially Rex the Dog, he’s so dreamy). Consider it a statement of intention at an effervescent 130bpm.

I’ve decided against attaching a track listing of the second mix, for fear that roving Googlebots will discover I’m giving away free music and notify The Man. Email me if you positively must know a track.

Switching to Blueprint has left the Stanifesto design with some rough edges… look for that and many more things to be resolved in 2008. Official “Resolutions” to come!

No one knows the answer better than organizations that try to navigate the dark and often deadly middle ground between “selling out” and “dropping out”. They receive criticism (both sincere and feigned) from concerned parties on either side of them in the activist spectrum.

For a good example one need not look further than Act Now Productions. Founded by environmentalism’s Wunderkind turned L’Enfant Terrible, Adam Werbach, Act Now has come under… let’s just say “scrutiny” for working with everyone’s favorite discount superstore, Wal-Mart. Since the partnership began, talk of Act Now is met with (depending on company) eye-rolling distaste or backhanded compliments. As to whether they were hypocrites or irrelevant, I’ve always wondered.

An article in this month’s Fast Company tried to set the record straight. They acknowledge that Act Now has its critics, from smaller radical organizations to Werbach’s previous employer Sierra Club, but mostly stick to puff piece territory, covering the controversy of working with Wal-Mart in far greater detail than the work itself. It ends with the uplifting quote from Werbach on his ability to change a trans-national corporation, “I’m going to try. I’m trying.”

Much more troubling is the single line slipped in slyly, “Wal-Mart would not allow Fast Company to interview employees”. I was not the only one to notice it, as San Francisco alternative weekly paper SF Weekly ran an article the following week tearing apart the Fast Company piece.

[A]fter reading the Fast Company piece, and doing a little more reading and talking to people, I’m afraid Werbach’s detractors are right. His current role as Wal-Mart’s greenwasher-in-residence is almost certainly doing more harm than good.

SF Weekly author Matt Smith calls up Wal-Mart employees and asks them about the measures mentioned in the Fast Company piece. Not many have even heard of any, those that have say they’re being perverted by middle management into ways to make employees’ lives harder. The goal of greening Wal-Mart is being translated into moralistic, high ground arguments on why associates need to lose weight or stop smoking.

Upset with the pictured painted by the extremes of the two articles, and the vast room in between, I gave up and went to go talk with some folks from Act Now. They were hosting Sze Ping from Greenpeace China and it was a great opportunity to call them out on the two articles and get at the truth.

Everyone I talked to had read both and were eager to share their perspective. For the most part, they thought both were crap (my paraphrasing, they were very polite). They acknowledged that the Fast Company piece was fluffy, saying that it skipped both the really good and the really bad things that Wal-Mart is doing. “They have to be diplomatic,” someone offered. Similarly, the SF Weekly article garnered sighs. “We only started the program in April and Wal-Mart has over a million employees, I’m sure it’s not hard to find some who haven’t heard of it.” Even so, they’re thankful that someone’s keeping an eye on them. “It’s understandable. It’s about accountability.”

Sze Ping shared some of the clever ways that Greenpeace China gets around the rigid state censorship. “We can’t praise, but we can’t criticize. And we certainly can’t stay silent.” Instead, they’ve partnered with Coca-cola to co-brand energy-efficient technology throughout the upcoming 2008 Olympics in Beijing. In the U.S., this would be a sin, the ultimate sell-out. In China energy-efficiency is a more radical path to sustainability than dropping a banner in Tiananmen Square. “But you would get a free plane ticket to somewhere,” Ping laughs.

Ultimately, Act Now agrees that Wal-Mart, like China, is dark territory. It embodies the difficult decisions that activists have to make. Just as we can’t solve climate change without addressing the industrial explosion in China, we can’t transform corporate America without someone working on Wal-Mart. Both involve rolling up some sleeves and getting dirty, compromising ideology for progress. Hypocrisy and irrelevance both become tools in the social change toolkit to find the position in the spectrum where your pressure has an effect on more than your own ego.

Two years ago, I returned from the desert to find that Hurricane Katrina had ravaged the Gulf Coast and all but destroyed the city of New Orleans. So distant from the conventional vectors of information distribution is Black Rock City that I had remained completely isolated from the reports of devastation and subsequent tribulation until my return. This year, I quickly scanned the newspapers while gassing up the borrowed station wagon in Reno. Any calamities? Seeing none I had assumed I was safe, my week spent in the desert a welcome departure from the mundane plodding of civilization.

When finally reaching cell range, my phone lit up with three messages from my father. A sense of dread filled me instantly. My father is not a loquacious man and is normally content to leave one message and wait for a return call. Something had happened. I called him and his first words were a shaky, “have you talked to your sister?” Unfortunately I hadn’t and he had to tell me the story himself—an ordeal that I could tell was difficult, as he was just starting to make sense of the grief dealt him a few days before.

My aunt was barely fifty, her birthday back in June, and in many regards still the baby of the family. She was my father’s youngest sister and, due to a combination of maintaining a relentlessly youthful spirit and never having children of her own, had taken decades to escape the “Kids Table” at Thanksgiving. Her room, when we’d visit, was called the Magic Room, because each shelf contained fascinating objects, artifacts, and gadgets that would delight us to the point of requiring the door to be locked unless we obtained adult supervision. She was a constant ally to we children, letting us watch television far too late and do dangerous things with fire when our parents were distracted. Despite being in my father’s generation, she was one of us.

She had survived a heart attack three years ago, which betrayed her vim and vigor as finite. Taking her for granted as the heart of the family ceased, poking fun at her for arriving late to Christmas seemed less funny, and goodbye hugs (of which I shared many with her, living on the other side of the country) became lingering and immensely thankful. For three years, we all felt terribly lucky to have her. I can say, with colossal gratitude, that our last goodbye hug was the most devout perhaps of our entire lives.

But a goodbye hug is a poor exchange for a human life and Mary’s passing resounds the indisputable truth that my interactions with friends and family are all too often goodbye hugs. This is the cost of “following your dreams” and moving over two-thousand miles from those who raised you, loved you, and taught you to follow your dreams. As my father, sister, aunts, uncles, grandmother, and cousins all crowded a hospital room to offer whatever support they could, I was in the middle of a desert in Nevada on some journey of self-exploration and self-expression that seems woefully shallow in comparison. My only solace is that, just like with that unstoppable storm two years ago, all that I truly could have offered was another heart to share the burden of loss and another shoulder to cry on.

Many awareness campaigns begin with the very sincere but unfortunately naïve sentiment, “If only people knew the truth…” Armed with little more than that, they spend millions of dollars on celebrity-endorsed commercials, speaking tours, and marketing campaigns that does little more than leave people disempowe(RED).

That’s the sad end to the second half of the sentence that people never finish. “If only people knew the truth, they’d be even more scared than they already are and feel even more powerless than they already do.”

I’m not speaking from a high horse. Consider the tragedy going on, as we speak, in Darfur. I’m aware that it’s going on, I even have friends intimately involved in the struggle. Throw it into a blender along with the perpetual occupation of Iraq, our Constitution being shredded by an outlaw Executive Branch, corporations scrambling to make money from climate change instead of fight it… hit purée and try to drink that concoction. Anyone who claims to be truly aware of what’s going on it our world and not clinically depressed is lying. So I turn away and try to concentrate on the things I have some control over. Let me be clear, awareness-raising efforts on the Darfur issue have made me less inspired to take action.

To eat my own medicine, let me end the ranting about how activism is screwing the proverbial pooch by encouraging blissful ignorance over action and start offering some solutions. Similar to “the only thing we have to fear“, solutions are the solution. However, most of the solutions that organizations offer are signing my name to a declaration, spreading the word, and giving money. Of these, giving money is the only action that actually affects an outcome. Sure, spreading the word might indirectly—but only by encouraging more people to give money.

The solutions that get me really excited are the ones that openly share campaign strategy with me. MoveOn.org’s emails typically, even when asking for money, lay out a clear plan for how I help. Maybe they want to hire more on-the-ground organizers for an upcoming primary, maybe they want lots of lawyers to email Alberto Gonzalez, either way I can see their strategy and—by taking part—I see how my actions are part of something larger that needs me.

The core of this is that those people enlightened to the point where they feel responsibility for the world and want to take action won’t feel satisfied with activism that strips them of that responsibility. Which is a good thing, because “absolution activism” is a false solution anyway.

Back to the signs that have gone up in my neighborhood. They are a clear example of taking the “If only people knew the truth…” to an illogical extreme. Being a big city with nice weather, San Francisco has more than it’s share of homeless out on the streets. My neighborhood is not the worst in the city in that regard, but the only that I’ve noticed to try to address the problem by putting up infographics about what is and is not acceptable behavior.

There’s a lot more to say on this topic and, like many of my posts, this one has seemed to get away from me without my feeling like I’ve reached any sort of clarity. I expect this will not be my last word on the current disempowering nature of activism. Comments are welcome from those who both seek inspiration and to inspire.

Stan is currently in the desert of Nevada and “robo-blogging” while he’s gone. He wrote this last week and set it to publish today.

SHAC is a bit of a legend in activist circles. They believe that animals should be afforded the same rights and liberties that humans are and make the argument in terribly compelling ways. But beyond that, they use extremely effective but very controversial means to make their issue heard. It might mean visiting the personal residences of scientists that perform cruel animal testing and shouting at them with megaphones all day and night. It might mean protesting the New York Stock Exchange with such vehemence as to cause Huntingdon Life Sciences to be de-listed on NYSE. It might mean taping two pieces of black paper end-to-end in a circle and faxing it to Huntingdon Life Sciences, just to use up all of their fax paper and toner.

Ironically, it was this last act that they were finally busted for. Facing a heap of charges from destruction of private property (toner!) to conspiracy, the SHAC 7 were all convicted on felony charges. When asked why they did all of this to save a few animals, they said “I’m sure people through-out history were asked the same question—all this for a Black? Or all this for a Jew? Yes, all this for an animal.”

I went with several other activists to see “Your Mommy Kills Animals” (named for a brochure distributed by PETA) to learn more about SHAC. What we got was an exposé on how animal rights groups all hate eachother and destroy property a lot. However, it was just subtle enough to masquerade as a critical look into what strategies work and which don’t.

The first clue that there might be something awry were these two talking heads that the documentarians kept interspersing right before or after potentially compelling arguments from the very eloquent SHAC 7. They seemed to subtly undercut the logic of the protagonists. The first was David Martosko, of the Center for Consumer Freedom, and the second Iain Murray, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. These are Right Wing think-tanks that basically get paid to spew bullshit for video cameras. CEI, as I may have mentioned before, are the brains behind those fabulous “Carbon Dioxide: They call it pollution, we call it life!” commercials.

It turns out the producer of “Your Mommy Kills Animals”, Curt Johnson, has also produced “Michael Moore Hates America” back in 2004 and his next film is called “Devil’s Weed”, described as “a documentary that examines the loss of civil liberties associated with the public smoking ban in Minneapolis, Minnesota.” Co-producing is Maura Flynn of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Yes, a loss of civil liberties… We all recall Amendment 7: “Congress shall make no law preventing you from smoking in bars.” I wonder if we lost that with the Patriot Act?

There were other moments that made me doubt the film’s sincerity, like the poor music choices (I’m sorry, busting out Rage Against the Machine for a movie supposedly made in the last few years?) and the repeated use of the most violent and confrontational footage they had. It all came unraveled when I was talking to two animal rights activist friends who had wanted to go see it and asked me about some parts of the movement that I soon realized were obviously glaring omissions in the documentary. Clearly, its point was not to plant the seeds of knowledge in those looking to learn more about animal rights, but to sow the seeds on dissent within the movement itself. To the animal welfare people, it showed a crazy and out-of-control animal rights faction. To the animal rights people, it showed a hypocritical and ineffectual animal welfare industry. The Sea Shepherds hate SHAC for being young punks, SHAC hates PETA for selling-out, everyone hates ALF because they threaten people’s lives.

This is not the case, while I’m sure that everyone gravitates to organizations most in line with their own politics, most of the organizations I know more than casually understand the “spectrum theory” of activism. More radical groups need less radical groups to act respectable in order to negotiate, less radical groups need more radical groups to provide pressure to bring power-holders to the table. The animal rights movement is the same way. Even if “Your Mommy Kills Animals” tries to deceive you into thinking they’re at each other’s throats, if you go to the SHAC site and check out their links page, the very first one is to PETA.

This is the first of a few posts I’m robo-blogging from Burning Man. I wrote it last week and set it to go off today.