It was the first time I had been to George and Katherine’s house.  I got off the boat, walked up the road, and turned right on Church Street.  As I walked I gawked at the sprawling old-world summer mansions on the right side (the water side) of Church. Woodwell’s is on the left, and is smaller and more subdued, except for the giveaway large solar thermal system on an outbuilding to the left. Built by George 26 years ago, it has provided half the home’s heat and hot water ever since.  But the house is a big old leaky rambler needing many fixes.  We’re doing some of them now, as partial steps toward George and Katherine’s eventual goal: eliminating the use of fossil fuels altogether.

Several of our carpenters were working there.  Just as I turned into the driveway our foreman, Pete D’Angelo, was ripping a 2×4 on a table saw and the grain was running all ragged so it bound up and kicked back on him. He turned to one of the carpenters, Curtis, who was right next to him, and said, “What else could possibly happen to screw me up today?”

At that moment he turned and saw me walking up the driveway, threw his hands skyward, and said, “Oh no – not him!”

I checked out the job.  Tough work.  Tearing stuff apart, re-working, insulating, and airsealing in a messy old attic with cast iron pipes and BX cable running everywhere.

As we looked at the work Peter (who is also one of my co-owners) revealed to me that I was the least of his problems on this particular day, unlike on so many other days.

I was glad to hear that but troubled to see how hard this important work is.

Unlike the Carriage House, the Woodwell project does not qualify as a true Deep Energy Retrofit as we’re only doing a part of what needs to be done – picking the low hanging fruit.   Hopefully, over time, we’ll be able to do the rest.

On the Vineyard we have another complete Deep Energy Retrofit in progress,  for Bill Lake and Morgan Hodgson in Aquinnah.  Bill and Morgan bought a typical patched-together summer camp from the 50’s on a beautiful site overlooking Lobsterville.  The realtors were selling it as a tear-down (obviously nobody would want that worn out hunk of junk) but Bill and Morgan were interested in saving it and fixing it.  It had charm, character, and some good parts – why cart it all away to the dump?

We helped them figure out how to make sense of it.  This is a gut re-hab, which makes it easier.  When it’s done, it will still be a charming old camp but with more light and space and new aesthetics.  And it will perform, in terms of energy use, comfort, and durability, nearly as well as the high-performance new buildings we are making these days.  In my last post I said  “On the Vineyard we have approximately 18,000 existing buildings.  Each will – at some point – need to be brought into the 21st century, or just thrown away.”

One down, 17,999 to go.

The Lake/Hodgson House and the Woods Hole Research Center Carriage House will be, when completed, the first true Deep Energy Retrofits our company has produced.  Sometime in the future, when we have monitored and measured, I will quantify what this means, discuss the components, tell of the successes and failures, and try to explain what it takes to do these (aside from committed clients, which is the most essential requirement).

Meanwhile, on March 6^th we are hosting an open house at Lake/Hodgson’s, mid-construction, with bones exposed, so people can see what goes into such a project and how it’s done.  We will examine the troubles and the triumphs midstream.  If you’re around, join us.

I’ll be there – if the carpenters don’t kick me out first!

No more.  He just finished the rocker.  I’d show a picture but I don’t have one yet that does it justice (I do have a picture of a prototype reclaimed wood SMC floor lamp he made; here it is).

Pinto’s a superb woodworker (and one of my fellow owners at South Mountain), a sublime musician, a great Dad, and many other things that make me proud. (No bias here, of course).  The rocker is so artfully crafted that to look at it takes your breath away and to sit in it makes you sink into reverie and wonder who will be sitting in that chair in 200 years.

Pinto grew up watching and helping my colleagues and me build.  He wandered around the shop.  He made stuff all the time.  I didn’t grow up with that.  But I did have shop class in seventh grade with Mr. Eddy.  I built a slalom water ski out of mahogany.  To bend the tip I had to slice it with a bandsaw, glue in lots of small pieces and bend it on a form.  I wasn’t that good with a bandsaw, so if you look at the edge of the ski in the picture below (I still have it today; it’s gathering dust in the rafters of our shop)  you’ll see that the laminations wander.

Can you tell?

The laminations may wander, but the ski is true and the experience of shop class was so memorable that I remember it clearly almost 50 years later.  The thought of that shop class – which is a dying part of our educational system – leads me to the juxtaposition of craftsmanship, factory-produced housing, and the work ahead.

In a 2006 essay called “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” (which has become a book of the same name that I haven’t read – the subtitle is “An Inquiry into the Value of Work”) the author, Matthew Crawford, makes a case for the importance of manual work and craftsmanship:

“Skilled manual labor entails a systematic encounter with the material world, precisely the kind of encounter that gives rise to natural science.  From its earliest practice, craft knowledge has entailed knowledge of the “ways” of one’s materials – that is, knowledge of their nature, acquired through disciplined perception and a systematic approach to problems.”

Eliminating shop class assumes that it is a good idea to herd everyone into college and get them busy in front of a screen as soon as possible.  It assumes that there is little to be learned from manual labor and little value to society.  But who’s to say that the “jobs of the future” in a “post-industrial” economy are more fulfilling or more valuable?

Meanwhile, Inga Saffron wrote an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer in January called “City’s Green Groundbreakers”  about the Philadelphia Four, a group of rising design firms that see architecture “as a weapon in the battle to stave off environmental ruin.”

The four are convinced that conventional building methods are as obsolete as “hunting and gathering.”  Building takes too long, wastes too much, and costs too much.  “Rather than attempting to make our system greener, these architects are bent on overthrowing it,” says Saffron.

It’s all about digitizing what we build, electronically sending models to factories, building under controlled conditions, and snapping together components on a site.

Doesn’t sound so new, does it?  It’s the old modernist call to arms, which has been going on for a century, and still nobody’s figured out a way to do it better than the Sears Roebucks kit homes of the early 1900’s, which combined craftsmanship with factory production and automation.

(Between 1908 and 1940, Sears customers ordered about 75,000 houses from the Sears Roebuck mail-order catalogs. The houses were shipped by rail all over the country.  Each kit home contained 30,000 pieces, including 750 pounds of nails and 27 gallons of paint and varnish. A 75-page instruction book showed homebuyers, step by step, how to assemble the pieces.  Many of those houses still exist.)

Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake, the elders of the Philadelphia Four, wrote a manifesto called Refabricating Architecture in 2003 that says that buildings should be produced like airplanes and cars.

I’m not convinced.  A large part of the process of building has already found its way to the factory – building is more a process of assembling manufactured parts than ever before.  Maybe most of what can successfully be produced in factories already is.

This is especially true of the big work ahead in the building realm, which (in the times of diminishing resources and declining population to come) will be about fixing the buildings we’ve got in transformative ways.  Deep Energy Retrofits for profound energy use reduction, increased comfort, and greater durability.

Here on Martha’s Vineyard there are 18,000 existing buildings.  Each will – at some point – need to be brought into the 21st century, or just thrown away.  This is true of the entire developed world (in the developing world the story may be different).

This work is not going to happen in a factory.  It is going to happen with teams of well-trained designers, engineers, technicians, analysts, craftspeople, tradespeople, and laborers.”  The digital information will flow from studio to site rather than from office to factory.  Much of the digital information will be collected at the site, in the same way that  a craftsperson collects information “through disciplined perception and a systematic approach to problems.”

Craftsmanship is the practice of staying with a pursuit for a long time and boring deeply into it to get it right.  That’s not something we want to disappear; it’s something we want to encourage.  We’re trying to learn to do Deep Energy Retrofits this way.  Let’s bring back Shop Class, get the kids away from the screens for a bit, and let them make their own wandering saw cuts which will, in due time, straighten out.   Mine did.  Sort of.

The house needs a new boiler, so it’s a good time to think hard about the best approach to heating and cooling for the next 20.  It needs a new roof so it’s the one chance they’ll get (for decades) to add insulation under the roofing.  Is it worth it?   Is now the time to add a solar electric system to stabilize long-term energy costs?  A detailed energy evaluation will determine the answers to these and other questions.

When we discussed solar electric I was struck by a comment they made (I’m paraphrasing but I think this is close):  “We do not want to look at that option as ‘making a statement’.  Until our country makes a serious commitment to doing what we must, and we’re all in it together, we’ll base this decision on economics.”

I thought that was particularly well put – clear and simple.  The implication:  the massive political failure that has led to our current predicament is holding people back.

My friend Matthew Kiefer recently wrote an essay in the University of Colorado Law Review called “Toward a Net-Zero Carbon Planet:  A Policy Proposal“ in which he says that “the global economic adjustment now underway was in part caused by a prolonged period of living on excessive credit – of borrowing from the future.  In a similar fashion, we have borrowed the planet’s carbon absorption capacity to finance our economic growth, and after more than a century, the debt is coming due.”

He calls for a scientifically derived balanced carbon budget to replace the current arbitrary greenhouse gas reduction targets.  Carbon sub-budgets could then be allocated to each nation, each region, each state, each city, each town, even each neighborhood.  Those affected would have choices about how to implement.

My client would be part of something instead of feeling like a lone wanderer spitting into the wind if he puts some solar panels on his roof.

I should add that here in Massachusetts the Department of Energy Resources is about to announce a very strong solar electric incentive program that is likely to make many people install solar who previously might not have – like my clients.  The economics will look better than ever.  I don’t know the final details yet – more about this later – but the intention of the program is to encourage the installation of 400 megawatts of solar electric in the coming years.  The current installed PV capacity in the state, after years of attractive incentive programs, is right around 20 megawatts.  The 400 megawatt goal amounts to 20 times more in the years to come – quite a commitment, and a giant leap forward.

Unlike yesterday’s Massachusetts senate election, which was a backward stumble. Ted Kennedy’s none-too-happy about this one.  Hopefully it will serve as one big wake-up call.

My family and I (wife, kids and grandkids) visited my parents in Palo Alto, California over New Year’s.  We stayed at the Stanford Faculty Club in the middle of the very quiet – on recess – Stanford campus.  The Stanford Bookstore – one of my favorite bookstores anywhere, and I rate bookstores like food critics rate dinner – is a three minute walk away. 

So I decided to spend time in the bookstore every day, and carefully evaluate books for reading. I looked at a lot of books.   I was trying to look at each one carefully enough, and read enough of it, to determine whether once I got it out of the store, it would grab my attention deeply enough – and for long enough – that I would actually read it.  The goal is to get my percentage up, way up.

Among the books I spent time with were:

• Tracy Kidder’s most recent book, Strength in What Remains, an against-all-odds story about a kid fleeing to New York to get away from the genocidal war in his native Burundi;

• Kurt Vonnegut’s new collection of previously unpublished stories, Look at the Birdie – I don’t read much fiction these days, but I love Kurt Vonnegut;

• Journalist Amanda Little’s book Power Trip, an account of a cross-country road trip to discover the impact of fossil fuels (and the need for alternatives).

• Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s latest intellectual tour-de-force full of radical solutions to our current economic predicaments;

• Glimmer, written by Warren Berger and subtitled How Design Can Transform Your Life (and Maybe the World), in which he collaborates with celebrated Canadian designer Bruce Mau to explore the power of design to solve business and social problems.

• The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs, Michael Belfiore, a look under the hood of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—the maverick and controversial group whose work has had amazing civilian influence in addition to its impact on the military.

There were many others, too, and I would like to read every one of those books listed above, but in the end I only bought one, and it was an odd choice.  It was written by Tina Seelig, a professor of entrepreneurship at Stanford, and called What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20. The book was written in response to the coming-of-age of her son Josh.  Wondering about how he would make his way in this world, she looked back at her life, and her teaching methods, and produced a provocative manifesto for the young.

The reason I chose it is because my daughter is grappling with the same issues – where does her true passion lie and what kind of career and life will she develop?  I thought it might be a good read for both of us.  She hasn’t read it yet – she left two days ago for a winter of wildlife research in Costa Rica with Global Vision International, which will surely be more life-changing than any book her father could toss her way – but I have, and it was worth it.

What sold me – as I sat at the bookstore with a pile of books stacked on the broad arm of a comfortable chair – was a story at the very beginning about an assignment she used with her students.  She gave them an envelope with five dollars of “seed funding”, granted plenty of planning time, and then allowed them two hours, once they open the envelope, to generate as much money as possible.  She says, “Most of my students eventually found a way to move far beyond the standard responses.  They took seriously the challenge to question traditional assumptions – exposing a wealth of possibilities – in order to create as much value as possible.”

The teams that did best didn’t use the five dollars at all.  They realized that the money framed the problem way too tightly, and that five dollars is essentially nothing, and that the assignment is really to figure out how to make money when you start with nothing. .  They identified problems they experienced or noticed others experiencing – problems they might have seen before but had never thought to solve and became very inventive.

One group set up a stand in front of the student union and offered to measure bicycle tire pressure for free.  If the tires needed filling, they added air for a dollar.  They had the uneasy feeling that they were taking advantage of their fellow students, who could go to a nearby gas station to have their tires filled for free.  It turns out their first few customers were grateful and that they were providing a convenient and valuable service.  Nonetheless, after the first hour, they stopped asking for a dollar and requested donations instead.  Their income soared.  Experimenting along the way paid off.  The iterative process, where small changes are made in response to customer feedback, allowed them to optimize their strategy on the fly. Afterward the students agreed that they would never need to be broke, since there is always a problem at hand waiting to be solved.

What a lesson.

“Being in business,” says Seelig,  “should be like traveling in a foreign country.  Even if you prepare carefully, have an itinerary and a place to stay at night, the most interesting experiences usually aren’t planned.”  You meet someone who leads you to an extraordinary place, you have unexpected encounters, and the most memorable parts of the trip are the surprising parts that happened into your path.

Come to think of it, I think I knew all that when I was 20, and the reason I read the book is that I’m now re-learning it.  It’s about resilience, which may be the successor to the idea of sustainability.  Since change is inevitable the impacts may be dependent on our ability to harness the unexpected.

Wind has been in the local news in four distinctly different regards at once:  the release and reaction to the draft Massachusetts Oceans Management Plan, the public coming-out of a new organization called Vineyard Power, the continuing saga of Cape Wind, and the adoption of a new wind by-law in Aquinnah.

Before diving in, some context might be useful.

According to Lester Brown, the president of Earth Policy Institute and the author of Plan B 4.0,  the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) has identified 1000 gigawatts of potential offshore wind energy on the U.S. East Coast.  That’s an extraordinary number.  A gigawatt is 1000 megawatts.  The size of the proposed Cape Wind project is 420 Megawatts.  That means NREL has identified the potential for 2500 Cape Winds on the East Coast.  That’s right – two thousand five hundred.  Coupled with similar West Coast potential, there is offshore capacity sufficient to power the entire U.S. economy.

How much offshore capacity does the U.S have at present?

None.

Not so in Europe and Asia.  Wind energy is growing, worldwide, at a furious rate.  Last month, according to “Progressive Investor” ,  “Spain supplied 53% of its electricity from wind” with more than 10 GW (24 Cape Winds) installed.  They are expecting another 5.3 GW (12 more Cape Winds) online by 2012.  That’s just Spain, with a coastline roughly one quarter of the length of the U.S. coastline.  Will we even have our modest first effort –  Cape Wind – installed by 2012??

The U.S. is now a full decade behind the rest of the developed world in the transition to renewable energy and the battle to tame climate change.  We’re discovering the shame of following for the first time ever.  As David Orr says in his new book Down to the Wire “The global crisis ahead is a direct result of the largest political failure in history.”  We have been at the forefront of that failure.

Here in Massachusetts, however,  the political commitment to change is strong.  The Deval Patrick administration has been stellar, demonstrating serious leadership and investing heavily in diverse renewable energy initiatives.

Several months ago the Patrick administration released their draft Oceans Management Plan for Massachusetts waters. Although pleased by this pro-active planning, I was disappointed to see that the competing matrix of uses left very little area available for offshore wind development.  The only areas identified as suitable are near the Vineyard and the adjacent island of Cuttyhunk.  I assume there must be others.

But that was not the primary concern for most Vineyarders.  The designation of our waters drew a swift and negative reaction from local community and political leaders,  and a demand for local control.  Some accommodation has been reached, but at this point, it seems that the state government’s resolve remains firm.  They may add to the area (that’s good!) and they may award a stronger voice and greater community benefits to the Vineyard (that’s good!) but they will not let NIMBYism rule the day (that’s good too!).

A group called Let Vineyarders Decide formed to demand alterations to the state plan.  Meanwhile, the real good news is that during the last two years a new organization called Vineyard Power  has been in the design and formative stages and has now completed a business plan and formal incorporation.  This is a citizen-owned cooperative that will “secure our energy future and keep control in our community.”  Electricity will be generated from offshore wind turbines and distributed to co-op members through the existing grid. Go here to join now.

This exciting development is the perfect Let Vineyarders Decide vehicle.  We’ll own it and we will make the decisions.  Where will the turbines be? We will decide.  Fortunately, one of the Let Vineyarders Decide organizers also serves on the Vineyard Power advisory board.  This promotes important dialogue.

When it comes to wind turbines, location always seems to be the rub. The current debate, it seems to me, is missing the point.  Sometimes, when we’re busy formulating an answer, we fail to identify the right question.  For years people have been debating the location of Cape Wind – is this the right place for it or should it be at Otis Air Force base, or someplace else?  Now we’ve got the same thing going on with the Oceans’ Management Plan.  Right place or wrong place?

Wrong question, it seems to me.  We need as many locations as possible, as much investment as possible, as much political support as possible, as much local support as possible, and as many local community benefits as possible.  We need, finally, to end spurious arguments about birds and fish and instead do the best possible job of mitigating environmental harm that we can.  We need to learn from the rest of the world, which has addressed the issues thoroughly; we are not the first people ever to contend with this.  The town of Aquinnah missed that boat; they created an impossibly long, confusing, obstacle-filled wind by-law, which may effectively outlaw wind energy in that town. I hope not.  Read it here, if you can.

We need to stop running around in circles, get off the dime, and move forward.I think we will.  Initial perceptions can change dramatically, as they have in so many places.

Years ago, after the first large wind turbine in Massachusetts was installed in the town of Hull, I drove along Nantasket Beach and through town with my daughter and a friend.  Suddenly the immense wind machine, owned by the local municipal utility, came into view.  My daughter Sophie gasped:  “It’s huge.  Scary.”  We parked in the parking lot just steps from the machine and walked to it. The tower is 165’ high and the blades extend 75’ above that. It is almost noiseless – it makes a gentle whooshing sound. As we walked away we turned and stared back at it.  Sophie said, “It’s quite beautiful, isn’t it?  Especially because of what it does.”

That’s my girl.  Perceptions can change in a heartbeat.

The Hull machine, right on the beach, adjacent to the high school and a residential neighborhood, and in plain view of downtown Boston, was so successful that the town wanted to do another – three times the size.  They polled the residents who live in the shadow of the beast.  Of the five hundred respondents, 480 supported more turbines.  That’s 96 percent.  You tell me: when are 96% of people positive about anything?

This degree of support is a common reaction, world wide, in areas that are making the commitment to large-scale wind energy. Not before development, when many are scared, but after development, when consciousness seems to shift.

Remarkably, the citizens of our small sister island Cuttyhunk, whose waters the draft Oceans Management Plan also designated for wind development, are pre-development supporters.  Yes, in my backyard, the citizens say!   They are attracted to the economic benefits, but they also say that they would favor wind development even if there were no potential financial benefits, because “we all have to do our part”.  Because if they’re not in our backyard they’re in someone else’s.  I expect this attitude to become pervasive in the years to come – a collective un-tethering from the urge to reactively say no to change.

Because as some do battle with large-scale turbine development, many others are battling, as author Bill McKibben says, “to see them not as industrial eyesores, but as part of a new aesthetic.  The wind made visible.  The slow, steady turning that blows us into a future less hopeless than the future we’re steaming toward now.”

I’m glad for all the discussion, for the intensity of feeling, and for the widespread community involvement.  While I may not agree with all that’s being said, it’s essential that everyone is heard.  I hope that ultimately we’ll realize that we, as stewards of an area with an inexhaustible resource, have an obligation to find comfort with its use.

And there’s more.

Rodney North of Equal Exchange (the Massachusetts-based worker owned co op fair trade coffee company)   made me aware of an article on the New York Times Economix blog by Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at University of Massachusetts.  In “The Case for Worker Co-ops” she says, “Since many of our most prestigious economic institutions have embarrassed themselves at our expense over the last year, maybe it’s time to look around.  Worker-owned and -managed businesses combine the romance of entrepreneurship with solid family values and commitment to community. What’s not to like?”

In addition to the Mondragon/US Steelworkers agreement and the worker co-ops featured in Michael Moore’s new movie, she says, “Rousing examples abound.  CNN Money recently profiled six worker-run businesses including Pelham Auto, whose mechanics have cheerfully fixed every car I’ve owned for the past 20 years.” One of the companies CNN profiled, by the way, is South Mountain.

But all this attention being paid to worker co-ops makes Folbre, the economist, wonder what the economic research says.  Not much, according to her.  Worker owned and managed companies are “largely ignored in economics textbooks.”

I have found that even the socially responsible business movement, to my ongoing surprise, pays little attention to true workplace democracy.

But she does, at least, find a little research – or maybe it’s just opinion.  Mostly it’s about the troubles – or potential troubles – with employee ownership.  One of these is that worker-owned and managed companies, with more complex goals than maximizing profit, tend to be less growth-oriented than other companies.

“Don’t tell Wall Street,” says Folbre,  “but that could be a good thing.”

I want to say more about the USW/ Mondragon agreement.

The Mondragon initiative is not the first innovative Steelworkers alliance.  In the 1990s, the USW helped found the Blue-Green Alliance together with the Sierra Club  and other environmentalists and they have been involved with Van Jones’ Green For All.

And now, if this new alliance works, it might make a system of worker-owned enterprises assembled with the purpose of a green restructuring of the U.S. economy. That  could be a powerful force.

The USW-Mondragon collaboration grew out of a ‘green industrial revolution’ project that created a partnership with Gamesa, a Spanish wind turbine firm, to retrofit abandoned steel plants in the U.S. (40,000 U.S. manufacturing facilities have closed since the beginning of the current economic crisis) and produce wind turbines (there are 200 tons of steel and 8000 moving parts in every large wind turbine).  Gamesa’s connection to nearby Mondragon brought the USW and the co-operative giant together.

While this historic business alliance gives hope to the possibility of reviving manufacturing (and the communities that have been devastated by the losses), there is also congressional activity coming along to support employee ownership.  According to the Vermont Employee Ownership Center, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont will introduce two new bills that would seek to expand employee ownership in the United States. 

The first, the Worker Ownership, Readiness and Knowledge (WORK) Act would create an Office of Employee Ownership and Participation within the Department of Labor to promote employee ownership and employee participation in company decision making.  The second bill, the U.S. Employee Ownership Bank Act, would provide loans and loan guarantees to employees to purchase a business through an ESOP or a worker-owned cooperative.

On the eve of the Copenhagen meetings, this collection of related activity is heartening.  Perhaps the most important thing about the expanding co-operative business movement, in the long run, may be  as an avenue to the large-scale collaborative alterations to the architecture of the economy that will be necessary if we are to successfully tackle the challenges of climate change and the post peak oil transition to come.

“The Mondragon cooperatives and the United Steelworkers have announced an historic partnership through which they will buy or start manufacturing businesses in the U.S. and Canada that will combine Mondragon’s democratic structure of ownership and governance with collective bargaining.

It will take many years to implement.  But particularly in the face of the economic crisis that has exposed Wall Street’s failure to provide responsible stewardship of the economy, this is a very heartening development.  Together, these two institutions have the resources, technical expertise, and vision to demonstrate to the public that it is possible to structure and run large corporations in entirely different ways than what we have become accustomed to.”

The Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (MCC) is the world’s longest-running, highest-grossing, most successful experiment in workplace democracy.  Now 53 years old, the Basque association of worker cooperatives consists of roughly 260 cooperative enterprises with more than 100,000 employee owners.It is the seventh largest corporation in Spain and the world’s largest industrial workers’ cooperative.  Its enterprises include its own university, research center, and bank.

In January 2001 I visited Mondragon with a small group of Americans for a four-day examination of the culture of both the town and the MCC. Having used a version of the Mondragon principles as the basis for the restructuring of South Mountain Company fourteen years before that, it was thrilling to get a firsthand look at this system of worker-owned cooperatives that appears to be unparalleled in its dynamism and its impact on a region.

Mondragon has created a total system wherein people can learn, work, shop, and live within a cooperative environment. The town, in its isolated valley, has a vital, prosperous feel—a small bustling city with a comfortable mix of young people from the university, new middle-class families, and those who have been in the valley for generations. The surrounding hills are verdant and productive, dotted with villages and farms. The MCC’s influence reaches into every aspect of community life.

I’ve always wondered why the amazing story of Mondragon is such a secret in the United States.  It has attracted significant attention worldwide, but far less here. Even the U.S. based socially responsible business movement pays it little mind (as it does the issue of ownership in general).  Is the idea that capital is a tool, rather than the residence of power, too radical to embrace?  Instead of awarding profit and control to capital, Mondragon has succeeded by awarding profit and control to labor in a system of democratic capitalism.  It has developed an enduring way to use capital productively and distribute income equitably at the same time.

For too long the idea of worker-cooperatives as a potent business model has flown under the radar, but in Michael Moore’s new film:  Capitalism: A Love Story (marquee photo)  people all over the country have been seeing worker cooperatives and workplace democracy in action.  He presents them as a possible solution to the undemocratic, inequitable and greed-driven economy that he spends most of the film building a case against.

Featured on film are Alvarado Street Bakery in Rohnert Park, California, and Isthmus Engineering in Madison, Wisconsin.  Scenes of workers making decisions, working on production lines, and eating and laughing together paint a picture of worker cooperatives that stands in marked contrast to the exploitation and abandonment shown in other parts of the film.

The new Mondragon/Steelworkers association will further raise the profile of cooperative business in the U.S.   More importantly, it may jump start the crucial re-industrialization of the nation that is so essential to our future.

In the Steelworkers announcement of the agreement USW president Leo Gerard says, “We see Mondragon’s cooperative model with ‘one worker, one vote’ ownership as a means to re-empower workers and make business accountable to Main Street instead of Wall Street.”

I’m excited by the prospect of seeing where this will lead.

Brown is a proponent of Design Thinking – every problem, in his view, is a design issue and can only be solved with Design Thinking.   He says, “I want to challenge designers to transform design practice.  There will always be a place for the artist, the craftsman, and the lone inventor, but the astonishing pace of change in the world demand new approaches to design:  collaborative, in a way that amplifies, rather than subdues, the creative powers of individuals; focused but flexible and responsive to unexpected opportunities. . . The next generation of designers will need to begin looking at every problem – from adult literacy to global climate change – as a design problem.”

He recently published a book called Change by Design. Reading the book reminded me of my own brief encounter with IDEO two years ago.

As a Stanford undergrad Deb Meisel worked a summer at South Mountain as an intern. She did some great work helping us develop a manual of information and company practice for new employees. When she left she was looking forward to an exciting opportunity: working at IDEO.

Not long after I was in Palo Alto and Deb took me for a whirlwind tour of IDEO.  It was unlike any other company tour could possibly be.

The Palo Alto offices (there are now additional offices in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, New York, London, Munich, and Shanghai) are a campus that has developed over time in a sprawling set of old commercial buildings and back alleys near downtown, the ultimate “low-road” facility.  Outside they are unimposing and unremarkable.  But open any door and watch out!!  Walk in and it’s truly psychedelic.  Everywhere you look there’s stuff you want to examine, touch, read, explore.  It’s like a carnival, a bazaar, and a museum rolled into one.  Overwhelms the senses.

Here there’s a glass cylinder piled full with crude foam prototypes of computer mouses.  Then there’s a graphically beautiful poster meant to hang in a hospital room that says “Here’s what’s going to happen to you while you’re here and here’s what it’s going to be like” and elegantly explains each step and tells you all the things you never know in hospitals until they rudely happen to you.  Bikes hang everywhere on cables up in the high warehouse-like ceilings (One of the IDEO designers, years ago, got tired of tripping over all the bikes clogging the passageways every day.  He invented a cable system to raise and lower them, built it that night, and the next day bikes began to hang from the ceilings).  There’s a beautifully appointed employee eating and gathering space.  A curving glass showcase displays the various iterations – about thirty of them – of Palm Pilots.

We walk into buildings, out of buildings, down alleys, and into other buildings.  We come to the Toy Lab.  This is the only place at IDEO where people are not working on projects for clients.  Here, a team of creatives spends all their time making new toys.  The Toy Lab is out of this world.  I want to take a picture.  Not okay.

And then to the Kitchen, where test cooking is done and food products and packaging are developed and on to the shop.  Oh, the shop.  Huge, cluttered, and organized. Rows of Bridgeport Millers, bandsaws, and every imaginable kind of metal and woodworking tool.  This is where prototyping happens, where people make things over and over, trying different versions, experimenting.

It’s 6 in the evening, and all the buildings are semi-occupied and busy.  Deb says people work at all hours.  They work when they want.  People look purposeful.  At the same time, they look relaxed.  Some have their feet up on their desks.  Some are munching.   Some are hunched at computers; others are engaged in animated conversation.

All this happened in 15 or 20 minutes.  I kept wanting to stop and spend an hour or two here, there, and everywhere.

It’s an intoxicating place, a collaborative Mecca, the reflection of an ethos that knows, as Brown says, “that all of us are smarter than any of us.”  The long-term global transformation ahead will require more than political will and appropriate investment; it will also require collaboration, the kind Tim Brown refers to, but possibly of a type and scale heretofore unknown.   We will need new tools, new abilities, and new ways of working together. New forms of governance and business.

I read a few passages from Change By Design at the most recent meeting of our Design Group. I am convinced that the future of our industry – and our business – is the fusion of Tim Brown’s Design Thinking and Stewart Brand’s Planet Craft (see Whole Earth Discipline).  Seems like a vast virgin forest of opportunity . . .  and necessity.

He says that  “The global crisis ahead is a direct result of the largest political failure in history.”  

Orr, a professor of environmental studies and politics at Oberlin, goes on to say that “No national leader has yet done what Lincoln did for slavery and placed the issue of sustainability in its larger moral context, . . . and cast it as the linchpin that connects all other issues. Adoption of a robust energy policy is the fastest and cheapest way to improve the economy, environment, health, and equity, and increase security.  It is the keystone issue, not just another stone in the arch.”

The book is stark, blunt, and powerful.

“None of us,” says Orr, “asked for these challenges.  But it has been given to us to lay the foundation for a durable and just global civilization, to secure the gift of life and pass it on undiminished to unnumbered generations, No previous generation could have said that, and none had greater work to do.”

In his view, it’s all about politics.

And he’s hard on pathological optimists like me.  When I was done I needed a lift.

I thought maybe I would find it in Stewart Brand’s new book, Whole Earth Discipline:  An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.

In 1969 Stewart Brand released The Whole Earth Catalog, a “book” that probably had as much influence on my life as any other.  On the frontispiece of the original classic there is a statement of purpose that begins with the now-famous sentence, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” Whole Earth Discipline begins with this, “We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it.”  That sums up what’s happened during the 40 year interval.

In this book Stewart closes the loop. In his inimitable way (expository writing doesn’t really get any better than his, in my view) and with the same deeply thoughtful, fearless, always-wry, story-filled and at-the-same-time analytically and argumentatively complex way that he has for four decades, Stewart shakes it up again.

He comes at the issue very differently from Orr.  In Brand’s view it’s all about science and technology.  But the two books share a fundamental underlying principle:  There’s no time to lose and the work ahead is daunting.

But this all goes back a long way, too.  In his classic 1973 economics text, Small is Beautiful, Britain’s EF Schumacher’s argued that a linked system of small-scale local economies would be more effective, resilient, and people-centered than a large multi-national economy.

In the Next Whole Earth Catalog, published in 1980, Stewart Brand said about Schumacher’s book, “Few books have exerted such leverage on an Age as this one . . The wonder of Schumacher’s work is his eminent practicality. . .  with good sense and a mature spirituality [he] comes on like John Henry against the mega-machine, sure that he will win. . .”

Now Brand is promoting the mega-machine.  But Schumacher himself, according to Susan Witt of the Schumacher Institute, said that if everyone were for small, he’d be for big, and it wasn’t just being contrarian. “It was a question of balance,” she says.  “Even in the 1960’s and 70’s when he was writing and speaking, he understood that the balance was tipping too much toward large scale economic institutions and there needed to be a correction towards the local and regional.”

Orr argues for the same, but also for massive international political change.  Brand does too, but he believes that “at this whiplash moment” we need more than political change and re-localization.  “If the transition to a less livable Earth is already under way, we’re ants on a burning log.  We can rush around all we want; there’s nothing in our ant repertoire that can fix the problem.”

Brand adds four elements to the usual environmental repertoire:  embracing urbanization and greening the cities (where, he says, 80% of the world’s population will live by mid-century), stepping up the use of next-generation nuclear power, bio-engineering to feed a changing world, and geoengineering, if necessary, to “change the climate back.”  It’s bold, it’s futuristic, it’s risky, the last three are anathema to many environmentalists, and it’s Brand, through and through.

Underpinning both books is the understanding that the key to our future is the rapid phase-out of coal.  Even environmental activist Bill McKibben makes the point, in Stewart’s book,  that  “Nuclear power is a potential safety threat, if something goes wrong.  Coal-fired power is guaranteed destruction, filling the atmosphere with planet-heating carbon when it operates the way it’s supposed to” [my underlining].

One thing Brand is not concerned about is over-population – he demonstrates clearly that we are headed toward planetary population stabilization (and probably reduction).  It’s those of us already here that he worries about.  “Five out of six people live in the developing world – about 5.7 billion in 2010.  One way or another, the world’s poor will get grid electricity.  Where that electricity comes from will determine what happens with the climate.”

Throughout his career, Brand has been a prognosticator – his predictions are legendary.  Some of them, as he is quick to relate, have been way off the mark.  Some, however, have not.  He says now that  “The shift from dread to action is under way.  The outcome is wholly uncertain.”

At the end,  he summarizes the book with a few pithy sentences:  “Ecological balance is too important for sentiment.  It requires science.”

“The health of natural infrastructure is too compromised for passivity.  It requires engineering.”

“What we call natural and what we call human are inseparable.  We live one life.”

And it’s one world.  Tomorrow is the big day of the worldwide demonstration to cut global carbon dioxide levels to 350 parts per million, the upper limit of safety.

McKibben, the chief organizer, says that the 4000 demonstrations and gatherings that take place in 170 countries will be the most widespread day of political action the world has ever seen.   I’m sure Orr will be there,  in his town, and Brand in his.

I’ll be over at the East Chop Light in Oak Bluffs.  See you there.

In 2005 the Japanese Ministry of the Environment approached an advertising agency called Hakuhodo. They wanted help getting the Japanese people involved in meeting Japan’s Kyoto commitment. Hakuhodo suggested creating a campaign to mobilize the collectivist ethos of Japanese society toward the goal of reducing emissions 6 percent.

They called the campaign Cool Biz. Within one year a staggering 95.8% of the Japanese population recognized the slogan.

It was about air conditioning. Generally the setpoint was 79 degrees F so businessmen in suits and ties could work comfortably in their offices in the hot summer. The Cool Biz program recommended that everyone wear casual clothing June 1 to October 1 so the setpoint could be raised to 82 degrees F. Huge energy savings, but how could they overcome deeply ingrained cultural practice in this traditional and hierarchical society?

Rather than an advertising campaign, the Hakhoto team set up a Cool Biz fashion show at the 2005 World Exposition in Aichi. Dozens of CEOs strutted around wearing casual lightweight clothes with open necks. Even the Prime Minister was featured in newspaper and TV stories tieless and wearing a short-sleeved shirt.

The event caused a sensation. The message was clear: it’s okay to depart from convention to protect the environment. Within 3 years 25,000 businesses signed on and millions of individuals made commitments on the Cool Biz website. The program saved over 1 million tons of carbon emissions in 2006, and it has spread to China, Korea, and other parts of Asia.

It’s the power of effective storytelling coupled with imaginative leadership.

The people are probably happier too, don’t you think?  Pretty soon they’ll all be going barefoot.