Go West?

09 Aug 2010 – Mark Lee

While this blog entry’s title is phrased as a question, it is too late for me. In late March of this year, I relocated with my family from London to Berkeley, CA, in the San Francisco Bay Area. This at a time when the world is in so many ways looking east, and when ‘Change We Can Believe In’ looks like it may prove to be frustratingly incremental instead of immediate and/or transcendent (though I would say wait to judge this until after the US mid-term elections, when I suspect the Obama administration will finally resolve it must fight its corner far harder).

From dot.com to (maybe) dot.green

This is the second time I have moved to California. I did it in 1998, when the whole world was watching Silicon Valley lead the dot.com boom.

This time I move here hopeful that the US is poised to embrace sustainability leadership in a way it has failed to in past. The need to do so was underscored by my colleague Patrin Watanatada’s recent blog entry My Country, My Self which spelled out the challenge of living sustainably here, where just paying taxes and using the existing infrastructure results in a lifestyle that consumes the equivalent of three Earths per person!

Open Borders and Brainpower

So what will make things change, and, specifically, what will make them change here? I believe the proven ability of America to absorb huge new numbers of people makes it distinct from basically every other nation – Kotkin’s The Next 100 Million makes this case compellingly. America remains young and absorbs the best ideas from around the globe through immigration (which has been slowed post 9/11 but is still volumes beyond what most other countries – and their power structures – even imagine allowing).

Partly thanks to immigration, but also due to factors like counter-culture, outstanding universities and IP protection (letting inventors profit), this is a society loaded with multiple smart nodes (especially metros) at least capable of innovation, something Richard Florida depicts wonderfully in his recent Atlantic Monthly piece, The U.S. Brainpower Map.

Creative Edge?

So openness and sheer mental horsepower are reasons to hope, but brainpower does not guarantee creativity, which is critical to the leaps in scale and speed of sustainable innovation that will be necessary to lead a revolution in the economy – a revolution that must go far beyond the relative simplicity of eco-efficiency to provide greater social and economic equity if we are to achieve a Brundtland-level version of sustainability. And here things do not look universally bright. Po Bronson, writing in Newsweek this July outlines a Creativity Crisis that we have to see as dire for US innovation generally, sustainability included, if it is allowed to persist.

Watch this space

A few months into my latest US sojourn, I am still reading the weather (unsettled!). But it is exciting to be back in California (a state with such an amazing history of leading change, currently mired in budget and perhaps even constitutional crisis) for this next chapter of my life and work.

I’ll blog more on US sustainability leadership in coming weeks and months, watching, among other things, for signs that the creativity crisis is recognized and being addressed such that the great advantages of openness and brainpower, as well as the optimism that persists in this country, even in recession, might yield positive change, which is part of the adventure I anticipate sharing with my new / old neighbors.