81 Quotes by Alex Steffen

You don’t change the world by hiding in the woods, wearing a hair shirt, or buying indulgences in the form of ‘Save the Earth’ bumper stickers. You do it by articulating a vision for the future and pursuing it with all the ingenuity humanity can muster.

At its very heart, Worldchanging is about using the best of people’s new ideas, bringing them together and applying them to the massive problems that we all face.

In almost all city governments in America, the small group of people who don’t want change are able to block change.

Cities are responsible for the vast majority of the creation of the economy. They’re also places into which we pour the vast majority of resources, the vast majority of energy and the places where a huge percentage of the decisions about how systems are built and how products designed, etc., happen.

There’s more to being an environmentalist than occasionally signing an online petition and mailing your check to the Sierra Club. Really the most effective environmental actions you can take have to do with crafting your home and surroundings, your workplace decisions and your investment habits.

I think we’re going to start to see a new model of civic advocacy where people get together once in a while to protest, but it’s more about an ongoing, sustained engagement in issues, networks and communities about which people care.

The planet’s biggest problems have to do with sustainability, environmental decline, global poverty, disease, conflict and so forth. Really, they’re all interconnected – it’s one big problem, which is that the way we’re doing things can’t go on.

By fundamentally changing how we design the places and systems that enable our daily lives, we can slash emissions way beyond the immediate carbon savings – because our own personal emissions are just the tip of a vast iceberg of energy and resources consumed far from our view.

Cities offer us powerful leverage on our most stubborn, wasteful practices. Long commutes in our cars, big power bills from our energy-hogging buildings, shopping trips to buy stuff that’ll spend a few short months in our homes and long centuries in our landfills.