From My Window, I See Things Slowly Turning Green

A riddle: What do algae destined for power generation and a forest managed dually for habitat and for world class coffee have in common?

If you’re thinking both are green, literally and figuratively, you’re close to target. If you’re seeing evidence of transformation leading us in the direction we need to go, you’re closer still.

Generally a patient sort, I’d act rashly if I had a magic wand. I’d wave into place a saner, redesigned top-to-bottom global economic system. Right now. I suspect many who engage with the Tonic community feel similarly impatient, knowing that we can do much better for ourselves and for the natural systems that sustain us. In the meantime, we make the best choices we can as individuals, and find it to be important and uplifting to recognize, applaud, and support progress as it appears.

In Tanzania, land management practices achieve the twinned yield of highly prized coffee beans and expanded habitat for chimpanzees. The compelling conservation story allows local farmers to enjoy a premium price, greatly beneficial to the welfare of the local population.

Venice, Italy, moves forward with plans to turn the algae that famously blooms in and clogs its canals (along with additional, lab-cultivated algae) into biofuel.

These are projects that differ in location and in focus to the point of perhaps seeming wholly unrelated. I’d suggest that what we see here is akin to standing with your nose to a Seurat painting: You see a few dots of different color that don’t seem to connect or reveal anything of sense, until you take a few steps back, and something of real meaning and beauty arises. (Advisory note: I do not recommend trying this exercise with an actual museum collection pointillist painting. You’ll be escorted out without the chance to delight in that $12 museum cafeteria grilled cheese for which you were hankering.)

What we do, how we do it, and the very ways in which we choose to be and to move within the world are all ripe for dramatic change. I refer you to a recent cover story in Time magazine. Kurt Andersen therein describes the American era of excess as over, and presents a case for why this is a very, very good thing. It’s a compelling, oddly uplifting argument.

It will, though, still be OK to want and to acquire things that we may not absolutely need. It will be OK to plug in and to crank up the volume. Best that the goods and services we purchase come our way by having left a minimized footprint. While we make our collective way, however (im)patiently, to a fully transformed state of affairs, we can choose our coffee and our gadgets and our clothing and such consciously. Markets respond as more of us do so. It’s happening.

Looking out my window as April begins, I see that things are turning green. The change is of course imperceptible in real time, but I know that when I look again after a few days, they’ll be greener still.