Function Dictates Form

“Function dictates form” is a belief that the on-the-ground, real and specific changes that any group or person advocates for are a reflection and an embodiment of the new reality that this person or group would create. In other words, the “function” of the group—the policies it advocates for, the actual reforms it pushes—exemplify the “form” of the change the group is promoting. The function of large scale government investment dictates a form for society that is new, forward-oriented, and empowering.

We here at Breakthrough (Generation) are often accused of wanting to techno-fix our way clear of any serious social or cultural change. In other words, a will to create clean energy so that we can maintain our overly consumerist, overly isolationist, and overly self-involved American lifestyles is often projected onto BTI and BTGen. This is far from the case. Instead, we are believers in what I call the “function dictates form” model of social change. A discussion about function versus form might benefit all of us who wish to bring change to the world, be it to solve climate crisis, lift billions out of poverty, redefine the American city, or achieve energy independence from foreign oil.

Regarding Breakthrough Generation, Our Controversy and our Perceived “Tech-Fix” Fixation

But the fact remains that when we put our money into technological innovation in this country, we are able to achieve at a pretty rapid pace…If the money and the motivation were there, I don’t think it’s wrong or ignorant of me to say that we could be taking potentially massive strides in clean energy technology.

I am going to apologize up front if this is too self-referential for some people’s tastes.

Right now, I am two parts confused, one part troubled and (I’ll admit it) one part amused regarding the flak we at Breakthrough Generation have been drawing the past few days on ItsGettingHotInHere and the conversations it has sparked and mood it has set in the office. I don’t think any of us are any less determined to advance a mission we see as essential, but how we do so and what that means has been the cause of some serious discussion.

The smart and passionate people I work with are working through some serious inner turmoil over the direction the movement represented on IGHIH is headed. I have come to question whether this movement is even capable of seriously advancing an agenda of clean energy, global prosperity and just and equitable social change. My new friend and BTG summer fellow Helen Aki posted a serious, thoughtful and questioning post on IGHIH hoping to explain where we are coming from, and where we would like a place on the quilted mosaic of the youth climate/energy movement, and thus far she has been met largely with bitterness and a refusal to recognize even the goodness of our intentions. Yes, we have been criticized for our style, but also for content and beliefs that are projected upon us and that we do not hold.

Are we part of an Environmental Movement? (Or, What to do When Energy Becomes Our Number One Priority)

I have said before that I don’t consider myself an environmentalist. You might be saying, “What is this kid doing at a think tank which is so clearly ecologically concerned if he doesn’t think he is an environmentalist? Wham-bam thank you ma’am, you ARE an environmentalist.” Well, let me explain what I mean. Some of my friends went to Powershift, and I stayed on campus to pursue other interests. I started going to Student for Environmental Action (SEA) meetings on my campus to increase my social connections. It was at SEA that a friend lent me Break Through, which made it clear that climate change is an existential crisis. If it is not stopped, climate change poses a direct threat to our country, our society, our world, and our ability to help everyone on this earth—by improving the lives of those in this country, by creating the conditions for modernization abroad, by helping governments discover their ability and responsibility to lift their citizens out of poverty, by empowering people everywhere.

I see that our civilization’s great strides towards global prosperity are taking a toll on our planet—but it doesn’t have to be this way. In the end, I see that these two problems—the ability to give every person the right to life, quality of life and life choices, and the ability to treat our Earth responsibly are linked. This link is energy: how we use it, where we get it from, how we think about it. The existential crisis of climate change is so exhilarating and momentous because, in solving this crisis, we have the opportunity to create a society that both treats the planet responsibly and allows for universal well-being for all people.

The Semantics of Poverty Discourse is Holding Us Back

Poverty. It’s hard for me to have anything but the most visceral, gut reaction to poverty. Coming from a city that is both the seat of the national government and that has the biggest income difference between the top and bottom quintiles of any major city in the country has imbued in me a serious, emotional, and resolute attitude towards poverty. I am a definite proponent of pragmatic political and social thinking. But when it comes to poverty, pragmatic thinking seems so often to steamroll over the lives of those who are already so down, that I cannot adopt any of this thinking or weave it into my worldview or ideology without feeling like I have betrayed and given up on myself, my city, and millions of American and billions of world citizens. The way in which we think about and frame the problem of poverty and inequality is not one that will facilitate lasting change. It is time for a new frame.

It is time for a new approach to clearing this great and long-lasting hurdle of poverty. Few things are of as much importance to me as ending the dehumanizing language and thought associated with those in our society who don’t have the means to make ends meet. We must change the language in which we discuss, and the ways in which we think about, overcoming this momentous challenge. This will help us clear the hurdle.

Polar Bears or a Clean Energy Economy: What can make us Great?

The time for the environmental movement to become great has arrived, and we must grab this opportunity by its horns before it passes us by.

Despite what my you may have derived from my previous posts, I think that the environmental movement is a good movement. It has done good work cleaning up smog, fixing the ozone, and cleaning up lakes and rivers. The results, like the movement, have been pretty good. But the time for good is over. The time for the environmental movement to become great has arrived, and we must grab this opportunity by its horns before it passes us by.

I spent a good chunk of my Sunday afternoon reading sections of Good to Great, by Jim Collins. The book studies businesses that made a lasting, sustained transition from a “good” company to a “great” company. Collins wrote about corporations, but what he said can be applied to any organization of people, including environmental NGO’s or the movement itself. Collins dug up articles and conducted interviews with executives from these companies, including businesses like Walgreens and Circuit City, to learn what these companies had done in common during the point of their transition from good to great. He identified a few different practices and factors, including the presence of adversity, honesty about the brutal facts, and identifying what each company had the capacity and potential to become the best at. It’s critical that we similarly apply these to our movement in order for us to be great:

Energy Independence and Investment is What Captures and Stores Public Support

Lieberman-Warner has been stopped way short of the finish line, and this provides us with an opportunity to look at how, and if, the Lieberman-Warner bill, and the coalition surrounding it, is effective. Did the people come together and throw their collective support behind L-W? Was the public outcry against the pro-coal politicians so loud that it could not be ignored? Did even its most ardent supporters realistically think this bill would pass? No. Perhaps the time has come to stop treating our climate bills as a roadmap about where to go next, and actually look at where the country is and see where our people stand, and help build this into real, actionable, cohesive legislation.

As studies have shown time and again, Americans are highly motivated and show broad support for achieving energy independence, and are incredibly receptive of and confident in large scale investment in accelerating the transition to a clean energy economy and infrastructure. This is partially because of America’s priorities in terms of tackling problems that face the country, and also because a solution like investment in energy independence lines up with where Americans feel our strengths as a nation lie. Investment in new areas of research and implementation relies on American ingenuity, a quality that many Americans believe is our best means of overcoming any crisis facing our country. For reasons of national and economic security, energy independence is widely supported issue amongst the American people. In addition, Energy independence has proven to be much more important to the American people than global warming action.

What Sort of Individual Action Helps Establish a Politics of Possibility?

With Barack Obama as the democratic nominee for the presidency, a long and arduous primary season seems to be slowly but surely winding down. Talk around the office between the summer fellows has drawn a lot of parallels between Breakthrough’s ideology and Barack Obama’s message, and it seems that, if not in the same words, Barack Obama is working towards the same asset-based, inspiring politics of possibility that we aspire to bring to society. All this has brought an important question to my mind: what kind of individual, personal actions can help focus each of our efforts on a politics of possibility?

Growing up in the Washington D.C. area, political talk is all talk—shop talk, dinner party conversation, idle chatter, pre-preview movie theater whispers—all anyone talks about is politics. I entered my first year of college in the Boston area last September, and the election and political talk, while not as pervasive, was definitely in the air. This didn’t strike me as all that odd until a friend who grew up outside Boston told me that this level of talk about the political process, in fact any level, was completely new to her. Upon further reflection, I was surprised and encouraged by the level of political conversation that had sprouted up, not just on my campus, but apparently across the country. The candidates were strong willed, and Obama especially seemed to galvanize supporters in a way that had not been seen for a while. Obama clearly reaches and brings to the fore an active, politically interested aspect to many Americans.

The Market: Means, Not Ends

Debate on Lieberman-Warner—the “Climate Security Act” which emphasizes curbing carbon emissions using cap and trade but pours pitifully small amounts of money into clean energy—began this week on the floor of the Senate. Even if it does nothing else, the legislation draws attention to the unequivocal connection between our free market and our carbon emissions. It is worth understanding the connection to bring us to an understanding of how to overcome ecological crisis.

It’s high time we examine our assumptions about the politics of and surrounding market capitalism and how it affects climate change action. The typical liberal view is pretty much one of market-dirtiness—the market is a naturally greed-oriented, self-oriented and corrupting institution. In the minds of these leftists, the public sector exists to help the public, and the private sector exists to help themselves. Liberals then take this view to one of two places: the first is a socialist tendency to want to control as much of the market as possible, expanding the public sector and shrinking the private. The other place liberals go is to ignore the market, wash their hands of its dirtiness and condemn it as irredeemable.

From the Meat to the Message: The Importance of Translating Complex Theories into Simple Messages to Create Big Movements

As Breakthrough Fellows, we are here to learn the details and finer points of the philosophy of the Breakthrough Generation. Give us two hundred pages to read for tomorrow, and it’s done; ask us to write a couple hundred words about the subject matter, and it’ll be (basically) complete by mid-day. However, Breakthrough is meant to galvanize an entire generation of youth, regardless of how deeply immersed in the issues each person is. We do not have the luxury of sending out readers to each person whom we would like to sign on to our mission. Even if we could, to paraphrase Break Through, people aren’t looking to subscribe to data or science or even facts; people sign on to ideology, to the story that we are telling.

It is important for us to keep in mind that if we want our message to spread, it must be one that is inclusive and inspiring, yet grounded and relatable. When Kennedy said, famously, “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” he created a message that the entire country could sign on to. There was no specific promise, no detailed explanation of a plan; there was simply an ideal, an entire system of thoughts and beliefs condensed into a short sentence. It is this type of message that will help us tell our story at Breakthrough.

The beginnings of my Breakthrough

*note: This is a reflection on Breakthrough (the book) that I was asked to write for my first day at Breakthrough (the office).

“The crises we face demand not that we wake up to reality but that we dream differently.” -Breakthrough: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, page 272.

I have never considered myself an environmentalist. I stumbled upon Brandeis’ Students for Environmental Action (SEA) because I knew a few of the kids in the club and was interested more in making friends than in helping the environment. I began going to weekly meetings sometime in mid November. Someone had recently read Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, and recommended it to the entire group to begin reading over Thanksgiving. The first meeting back after Thanksgiving, many of my friends and fellow club members began discussing Quinn’s story of a sentient, telepathic gorilla life-tutor and his self-hating human pupil. I had no idea what this book was about at the time, but I was a little scared by the rhetoric my friends had begun to adopt.