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.

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.

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:

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.