Hasta La Ideas

Full-on piece from Alex on Wednesday at Worldchanging:

Small steps, personal responsibility. incremental reform, gradually better standards, 50-year targets for action — most of the solutions offered in the green tool chest right now are, unfortunately, completely insufficient. Not insufficient in the sense that we’d like them to be better in a perfect world: insufficient in the sense that if we do them all, we still face a strong possibility of planetary catastrophe and the collapse of civilization.

We need to challenge the assumption that we can live much as we do today, with improved gadgets and standards (suburban, consumerist life with an electric car here, a green building there, a CFL in the next room). We can’t. It won’t work. We need to change how we live. If we’re smart, we’ll end up better off — with more wealth, higher qualities of life, healthier families, and safer communities — but we must start to talk not about doing things differently, but about doing different things.

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