Many consider Americans to be polling as angry, but anger isn’t the emotion driving the national public agenda right now. It’s fear. Anger is just the fiercer face of fear and right now, Americans are afraid of nearly everything.

Who could blame them? A sour job market is keeping unemployment at 10 percent, the nation is still stuck in two wars, one of which is looking more perilous and unwinnable. The cost of a college education continues to go up, but it’s value seems diminished with so many out of work college grads. Americans have piled up a mountain of personal debt, from underwater mortgages to credit cards, to student loans. It seems we all owe corporations some massive amount cash. Those same corporations sell us over priced homes, take tax payer bailouts, reap huge profits our backs, dump oil into the Gulf of Mexico and for good measure invade our privacy regularly.

In a climate of circuitous bad news and reasons to be fearful, it’s not surprising that the common response is anger. The Tea Party movement has a seductive libertarian streak, but what the right is doing is capitalizing on the overwhelming anger and fear in the populous. Afraid you will lose your job – punish the undocumented worker, worried about the deficit – punish the unemployed , punish the environment, call healthcare reform socialism, call the President Adolf Hitler. Scream and yell “drill, baby, drill!” who cares if there isn’t enough oil to cover our needs no matter how deep we go? Fear trumps change.

Yet there are greater existential threats, ones that this congress will not take on. The cap and trade bill, as you have no doubt already heard, is stalled in the Senate. Democratic Party leadership has decided to set it aside to fight for another day. Essentially the leaders of the Democratic party decided that passing cap and trade isn’t worth the political fight in a midterm election year. The Democrats are already set to lose substantial seats in the House and Senate and could lose control of one or both chambers. And so the Democrats have decided it is better to try and stem the tide of losses they face in November (despite having control of the executive branch) than to use their vast majorities while they still exist. This is the great danger of our current political climate, we are too scared to take on the biggest if our problems. Our elected leaders are more concerned about keeping their jobs, than they are about doing them. Climate change is real and it’s happening every day, little by little and if we don’t stand and fight to stop it, if we don’t stand and fight to solve this energy crisis, our children and our grandchildren will pay a horrible price for our failure. The great recession will barely be a blip in history if we don’t work to solve the very real problems our planet is facing today.

But in the grip of this recession fear is all we know, it’s all we understand. We’re not thinking about what might happen to our grand kids, we’re hoping we can keep putting food on the table for our children. We’re not scared about what’s coming out of our tail pipe. We are scared that we’ll lose our house.

If our politicians, who do not face those same fears are still too afraid of losing their well subsidized jobs to take action against the greatest threat man kind has ever foreseen, then it’s time the fight for smarter climate policy move away from the political sphere and into the drawing rooms of America.

It’s time for the designers, artisans and builders of America to fight for sustainability in every project they undergo, whether that project needs to meet a LEED certification or not. The time for half measures and talk are over. We, the professionals of this nation are alone in this fight. We must assert our values in the work we do everyday, because no politician or political body will do it for us.

The pundits all say it. The skeptics believe it, they all say that America can never be a “green” nation. We will never lead the world in sustainability. America will fall behind because she doesn’t care about the environment she only cares about rabid consumerism, after all the “green” brand has already been bastardized beyond recognition anyway….

Enough.

Of course green will never scale. Green will never scale because “green” doesn’t mean anything. “Green” is a movement, a way of thinking, it’s not a product. There wasn’t a “mobility” movement that spurred the automobile to scale, there wasn’t an “information” movement that got a computer on every desktop in America. These were incredible products of immense value to their customers to the point where most Americans can’t fathom the idea of living without a car, a computer, or (multiples of) both.

When skeptics tell you “green won’t scale” tell them “you’re right.” But also tell them what will scale. What will scale is a superior class of building accessible to all. Tell them that what does scale are profitable retrofits of existing buildings. The conversion of buildings from energy sucking, health depriving, creativity sucking, productivity killing cinderblock dungeons to life affirming, productivity enhancing, health improving, energy neutral spaces that people are actually thrilled to live and work in every day will scale.

Enough defending green. Start providing such a vastly superior product it doesn’t have to be defended.

Green means defending Al Gore. “Green” means fighting with Glenn Beck. Green means having your building being spoken of in the same breath as organic home remedies. Green means fighting about how many degrees it was in Antarctica this winter or the distance between polar ice chunks…meanwhile our building stock still sucks.

Forget green. Make it better, better does scale.

As the world braces for a tsunami, I’m working to understand this idea of “not being connected” as proposed by a CNN guest. CNN often has so-called ‘subject matter experts (SME)’ to support a given news segment. This morning they played host to a Georgia Tech Assistant Professor of Geology.  CNN’s SME made an academic case for all of the recent earthquakes in Haiti, Japan and now, Chile to be completely unrelated or connected. Really? His opinion got me to thinking about a larger issue affecting our country.

Last I’d checked, we were on one planet and to suggest that what happens on one side of the planet doesn’t affect the other is, in my opinion, elementary. You may as well say that it’s impossible for me to have  stomachache and headache at the same time. When I look at the overall sentiment of our country, I believe we are infected by a condition I call Issueitis – the separation of pressing issues for the benefit of ego. Case in point, yesterday’s political theater of a health care summit. The idea of having a summit on what should be afforded to everyone is beyond me but that’s another issue.

Our inability to see the interrelationship of our most pressing issues prevents us from identifying sustainable solutions thus resulting in endless debate, division and lack of progress. If you were to ask three different people what these recent earthquakes represented, you’d get three different answers. Here’s my take at their responses:

An Apocalyptic: “The Myan prophecies are being fulfilled.”

Religious leader: “God’s telling us something.”

A Geologist: “They’re unrelated.”

What school of thought you believe ultimately rest with what you identify with most. I propose we open our minds to truly understand the world is getting flatter with each passing day, embrace differences and promote solutions instead of division.

I spent this past Saturday hanging out with my brother-in-law Mike and my niece, Olivia. Watching her this weekend made me think of sustainability. Holding my three-month old niece gives me a tangible feel for the future. At one point I was in a room with all of my sisters my neice and my mother, three generations of women.

The eldest born in the 50’s (sorry Mom) and the youngest born in 2009.  Looking at them all I can’t help but think of how much the world has changed over the source of that time-for a little perspective, Dwight Eisenhower was President when my mother was born…her grandchild was born at the beginning of the Obama administration. What amount of change will take place over Olivia’s lifetime? Will we create a sustainable culture in the US in her lifetime? Shouldn’t we? Shouldn’t we make certain hers is a life free from an energy crisis? Free of water shortages and dirty air? Shouldn’t she be able to grow up in a world where she can be anything she wants to be and not be concerned about the ramifications of her actions on the planet…because her way of life is part of a sustainable system and culture?

Olivia and her generation will face a whole host of challenges we can’t even imagine yet. Creating a truly sustainable culture will be the work of generations…but shouldn’t we give her a head start?

“There are always two parties; the establishment and the movement.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Once upon a time in a land far away…

The last decade is not that far removed to start a fable but one thing is for certain, there were some characters and plots that took shape-for better or worse. What should we expect of the next year, decade? A foundation for the coming years was being laid in the latter part of the decade that hinted we may be seeing an era of personal accountability, corporate responsibility and community engagement. It’s evident in almost every aspect of our lives; from the All-State commercials on responsibility to Subaru contributing apart of every vehicle sale to a charity of your choice.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HNKqffU3Cc

If you’ve read my other blog posts, each is sprinkled with a sense of optimism and cautiousness. I don’t doubt we have what it takes to create a more just, equitable society but am often leery of the human element. Given the right opportunity, visions of sustainability, curbing climate change and any other worthy cause can go out of the window. Take a look at the weeks that followed 9/11. Everyone was patriotic; American flags were on nearly every lawn, car and bumper sticker. At that time, I felt a sense that our States, well, were United. Though quite horrific, those events have fallen into memory and serve as a guidepost that marked a decade. Do we move on or dwell on the past you ask? We move on with the same conviction that together we are stronger than any challenge our nation faces.

As a 30 year old American, this new direction is somewhat of a culture shock. Many in my generation were raised on the premise of “more, more, more” being the standard for success. We believed that having the biggest house, car, bank account and TV signified status or “making it” -- I don’t think that will be the case as we move forward. I’m not suggesting we don’t want to be successful in our respective careers but the way we measure success has no doubt changed. In James Bedell’s “Why We Will Save The World”, he noted that “people are the new profit” and that “less is the new more”. I couldn’t agree with James more.

“So goes GM, so goes the country.”

The US automobile industry was pushed to the brink of disaster before an overhaul began. I personally didn’t support the auto bailout or any other federal intervention but was aware that without it, it could have easily tilted our country in another depression-easily. So what of capitalism? I’m not an economist but am of the opinion that the human element trumped reason on this one.

Moving forward our industries must evolve and commit to investing in R&D, infrastructure and education. Watching CBS Sunday Morning’s recent coverage of the last decade showed that the US created 0% jobs (zero) in an entire decade. Our labor market is suffering because we haven’t worked to create new industry domestically and trade policies have effectively shipped American ingenuity abroad for production and redistribution back to us.

With a defunct energy policy, declining dollar, lackluster labor and housing markets, the push is now toward sustainability, efficiency, buying local and community engagement. What happens when our GDP is growing, our communities are stable, CO2 emissions decrease and rail becomes a viable transportation alternative in the states? If our economy is to grow, history shows us that we’ll need innovation to push the limits of what we can accomplish. As those innovations come to market, legislation will be slow to understand the affects they’ll have on the public long after fortunes have been made and fortunes lost, hence the financial crisis.

I advocate growth, change, prosperity and hope. However, I’m well aware that what goes up must come down. America will recover. We will prosper again and again, we will become complacent.

I look to the past for clues and I’m cautiously optimistic we’ll get it.

**

Download Build2Sustain’s White Paper “It’s Time To Jump Into Sustainability”.

This Monday, December 7th -- the world will have it’s eyes focused on the events happening in Copenhagen, Denmark. The hugely anticipated ‘Hopenhagen‘ meeting (otherwise known as the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference) will bring together global leaders focused on making a unified effort to better the planet. Copenhagen is dubbed as “one of the greenest cities in the world” -- further providing a great atmosphere for this importance meeting.

As you can imagine, a gathering of this magnitude put creative minds all around the world at work to bring about awareness. One of the best online catalogs of global campaigns is Osocio -- led by the very talented Marc van Gurp.  The site recently featured some campaign ads focused on Hopenhagen and via his Twitter, Marc shared a link to some very interesting additional campaigns. Check some out below and here for the rest:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-39b6Tex04

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SbyHuwARhE

Photo, Flickr

I live a double life.

Most recently that life has been spent amid a cacophony of rumbling trains on the elevated subway line outside my window, the din of car horns from the drive-through fast food restaurant below my building, shrieks from emergency vehicles, bangs and clashes from the construction work on Columbia’s new campus across the way, shouts from passersby, and yes on rare occasions, gunshots.

In contrast, I spent the majority of my life – I’m only 35 – in rural America where the audible equivalent to my current urban context consisted of insects louder than the 1 and 2 trains rumbling above Broadway, roosters and wild turkeys announcing the coming daylight, solitary cars on the highway just down what use to be a dirt road when I was a kid, the distant haunting drone of the Silver Meteor or the Palmetto passing through town three miles west, and, though with more frequency but less suspicion, gunshots.

Lately, I’ve been giving a considerable amount of thought to just how these two extremes, both of which I love for peculiar reasons, are actually two sides of the same coin. On Wednesday, May 23, 2007, that coin got a tad bit weighted to one side as scientists from North Carolina State University and the University of Georgia projected that the earth’s human population, for the first time in history, had become more urban than rural.

Even as these scientists urged us to avoid placing greater importance on urban populations in light of these findings, much of academia rushed to exploit and skew this information with untold numbers of urban studies. Urban had become academically fashionable in a way it never had been before. In actuality, we’re not talking about some dramatic shift; the United Nations estimated that by 2010, less than two months from now, there will only be a 2.6% difference in favor of urban population numbers!

This isn’t a zero-sum game. Urban and rural communities are not in competition with each other – at least they shouldn’t be considered that way. Rural communities produce goods and resources that are then processed by our cities for both urban and rural consumers. Interestingly, researches suggest that if either had to sustain themselves without the other, “few would bet on the cities.”

But there’s a dark side to this relationship between urban and rural communities. NC State and Georgia researchers concluded that not only do rural areas have more than their share of poverty and low education attainment, but they also receive a disproportionate amount garbage, polluted air, contaminated water, and hazardous waste produced by their urban counterparts!

Urban America, regardless of its newly established majority standing, can not afford to continue dumping on rural America.  While one might go so far as to consider this immoral, I believe it’s just plain dumb. Cities need the resources provided by surrounding rural areas for their continuation. Conversely, rural America cannot be left out of the conversations that are going on across this country regarding infrastructure, sustainability, community empowerment, education, and the arts.  It just will not do.

As I continue to discover the similarities and differences between my double lives, I look forward to sharing them and making the connections more mutually meaningful. Moving forward, it’s quite clear there can be no healthy urban America without a equally healthy rural America.

As I typed the title of this post, even I cringed. Anyone who thinks they’re a social media “guru” or “expert” or whatever, is wrong. Why? Because Web 2.0 style social media is too new to have any experts. How can you be an expert on Twitter when it’s only really been around for three years, and popular for one? How can you know how to treat Facebook when the functions keep changing. In truth, no one is really sure what the effect of updating your status and tweeting your thoughts constantly will do to our culture yet. We’ve moved beyond insta-polling and gotten to the point where Twitter can tell you what the world is saying about any subject almost instantly.

Within this tapestry of intermingling voices (that was a pretty way of describing what others might call “noise”) there are real communities forming, there are real examples of the social web becoming a way for people to gather and create something, a positive force for good. Some examples….

The 12for12k movement led by @dannybrown, he crowdsources – leveraging social media to raise funds for different charities all year. His work and the work of all those donating their time and money is changing the world in a positive way by personally linking others on the social web to their movement. It’s a massive shift in the way we think about charity donation. It’s web based, diffuse, and personal–you feel like you KNOW those who fight for 12for12k because, well, you do.

What if you are struck by a personal tragedy, say contracting cancer? Today, you can leverage the social web to make a difference. That’s what Drew Olanoff is doing via Twitter. His @drew account, followed by over 10,000 people is inspiring people to fight cancer. Not only has he partnered with @livestrong to raise money, including auctioning his twitter handle to Drew Carey, but he’s done something bigger. He’s attacked cancer with his unique brand of humor. Now anyone on Twitter that has something to complain about can #blamedrewscancer it’s a way to use humor to raise awareness across the web and anyone can participate. That’s the power of social media to do good in our society.

But if you’re like me, you want to do something practical. You want to use the social web to solve a problem. I want to make our building stock in the US more sustainable, so I’m starting a company called Build2Sustain to do it. Part of starting that company has been signing on an advisory board. Every single member of that advisory board is someone I began conversing with through Twitter. Reading their thoughts on sustainability and the building space, I got a sense for their thought processes. We tweeted, we emailed, we spoke on the phone, now we work together to try and build a business that might help the world in some small way.

The walls have been broken down and now if you really are committed to an idea or a cause, you can find others who are too. You can reach out and get inspired through the work of others, join a cause or start one of your own.

I woke up this morning and went about my normal routine but today was different. I could feel it building inside me. A sense of hope springing forward as I began to think about the generational challenges we are faced with and why this generation, our generation is ready for them. I look at what we can do, and what we are already doing and I realize that we will overcome not just this economic crisis, for those come and go. But we will overcome the crises of education, of health care and of energy within our lifetimes. Before I start to sound like too much of a salesman for the current administration, I want to share why I think our generation-the new professionals are uniquely suited to the age we were born into.

1. People are the new profit. If you read the commentary on web 2.0 and the future of the internet there is no end to the hand-wringing that goes on among the older set. The old saw goes “that’s great, but how do you turn a profit?” It’s not that we are a generation of socialists unconcerned with profit and loss, it’s that profit isn’t the driving force behind our motivations. Facebook began in a dorm room as an experiment in connecting people on campus. Google strove to create the better search engine. Netflix changed the way we rented movies. The list goes on, but profit wasn’t the driving force behind any of these ideas at the start, in the beginning it was about solving consumer’s problem. These companies have created new verbs, “google it”, he “friended” me, oh just “netflix” it. Fundamentally changing the way we do things, by solving a problem, rather than selling a bill of goods.

2. Small is the new big. If there’s one concept our generation is reflexively against it’s the concept of “too big to fail” entrepreneurship is something we all have a stake in now. We are a generation that maintains blogs and tweets to the world. We are our own ventures, our personal and professional lives are no longer as separate as they once were. For our generation ideas move as fast as you can type and hit the send button, so work happens wherever, whenever. Perfect for when the problems are global in scale and complex in nature.

3. Forget the suit, just bring your brain. The people at companies changing the world come to the office in sneakers and a sweatshirt. Power isn’t the currency anymore. We’ve changed the game, now it’s ideas and collaboration that build the better mousetrap.

4. This isn’t an age thing. Our generation is the most blind ever. Race, color, creed, gender, these matter less than what you bring to the table as a person and as a professional it doesn’t matter how old you are, it doesn’t matter where you grew up. Our generation looks to leaders like Google, like Ecko, like Apple, you know what all of their leaders have in common? Nothing, and that’s exactly how it should be.

5. Not afraid to dream. Rare is the person of our generation who can’t quote Star Wars, or didn’t watch Sesame Street and the Muppets as a kid. Those kids grew up and gave us Lord of the Rings, and Pixar and Slumdog Millionaire. We’re a generation that’s not afraid to dream big, we’ve been doing it since we are little. The naysayers see us a generation afraid to grow up. They’re wrong. We’re a generation that remembers what it is to dream, what it is to want something better, and will always work to make it happen.

6. Apathetic we are not. Young people fueled a political campaign and elected a president. Faced with eight years of leadership that completely rejected the values they hold dear this generation rose up and elected a new face to the scene. He might have been untested, but it was his ideas and rhetoric that drove President Obama to the oval office. His campaign’s ability to make every voice matter, to make every volunteer action important and open the halls of power to the masses that made him this generation’s choice for the Presidency. President Clinton had to beg young people to go vote, President Obama was their champion.

It’s not that I am arrogant about who we are and where we’re going, it’s not that I hate the ‘boomers or resent having all of these problems to solve. It’s that I think our generation is uniquely suited to problems that lie ahead. Ones where millions of brains will be needed to fundamentally shift our way of life from waste to sustainability, from consolidated power to diverse networks, from me to us. Our generation will spend the better part of our lifetimes calming the seige of global warming, ending the world’s carbon addiction, finding better ways to educate our kids and making sure we can all grow up healthy. We will lead the nation to a brighter day, one brilliant idea at a time.

I wrote this some time ago as a personal blog post. I was inspired at the time. As a new contributor to Aribra I thought it would be a way to introduce myself. Here are some of my reasons to have tremendous hope for our future.