Excerpted from a proposal by Vinay Gupta:

“All over the internet there are small and large communities of practice – centers of excellence in organic farming or living cheaply or doing home solar. There are professional networks for architects and designers. There is a grass roots movement which has been running since at least the 60s and perhaps before that, learning and maintaining knowledge.

Without meaning to sound alarmist, I’d like us to consider that the time may be at hand where we have to turn the very large number of people with green leanings into effective political and financial pressure groups. There is no guarantee that the nation state or the international agency is the right level of political action to solve environmental problems: while international agreements have done very well in certain areas (the ozone layer, for example) so far nobody has got a realistic handle on CO2 or the ways of live which are crashing our global biodiversity. We may need new approaches to solve these problems.

The problem is that individual action seems too weak: ok, I could buy more CF bulbs and be a little greener, even if I like incandescent light a bit more… but so what? Sure, I could walk more and drive less… but so what… Sure I could… individually, I feel like my actual impact is negligible. And it is.

Symbolic, token green action is personally satisfying, and may indeed be building necessary momentum and infrastructure for transforming our society, but it has little overall effect. Everybody expects somebody else to Do Something and, in truth, many of the worst problems are systemic and deeply entrenched. How energy efficient is your apartment building? If it leaks like a sieve, is there anything you can do about it? Not much, not really…

There are, however, a few clear winners we need to get behind, technologies and ways of life which could, with appropriate support, really change the way our society impacts our planet.

I’d like to pick three examples.

The first example is Green and High Performance Building. Pretty simple, really: cut the energy used to heat, cool and light your home by 75% in some cases. If a couple of hundred thousand people on the internet mobilized behind this, how much could we cut our collective environmental impact? Even if only 10% of us migrated into green dwellings over the next decade, how large would the net savings be for the group which supported this effort? Living in a green house is probably the best thing you can personally do to reduce your environmental impact.

The second example is Hypercars. Although for most of us, our homes have around twice the CO2 emissions of our cars, transport still has huge impacts on how our society functions. While “efficient cars” may be the wrong approach in the long run (see New Urbanism for a better idea) the car is still a critical battleground over the short term, particularly given the geopolitical importance of oil. The green benefits of getting america off oil would only be the beginning: imagine the “oil peace dividend.”

The extremely rapid sales of hybrid vehicles are a great start, but a more efficient powertrain is only the start of designing efficienct vehicles. While I am agnostic-leaning-atheist on the hydrogen economy part of the hypercar concept, still the super-lightweight 200 mpg diesel hybrid has its appeal! How do we, as potential customers, catalyze the car companies to give us their best and push the technology envelope as far as possible to get the most efficient vehicles that are financially and technologically feasible? Do we, as potential customers, have a role in the vehicle design process?

The third and last example is Organic Farming. The number of reasons organic farming is the Right Thing are beyond immediate measure. It may not be the only Right Thing (I might be quite partial to vat grown meat), but for reasons from soil preservation through to personal health, organic is a boon. Ideas like Community Supported Agriculture have already shown that community organization can help produce a feasible, financially sustainable livlihood for organic farmers. I do not know how far organic food can replace our current pesticide-and-fertilizer food economy: there may be limits both economic and physical – but clearly we could as a culture support a much, much larger and more competitive organic farming industry. Could we do the same kind of grass-roots communit activism to create “community supported builders” (CSB) and “community supported cars” (CSC)? I am sure there ways of using our collective buying power to create the new products we want.

So let’s put these three changes into context. If you are reading this the odds are very strong that you live in the North, that you are one of the richest human beings on the planet, that you have a computer and a roof over your head. If this describes you, then consider this: if you had a green home, a hypercar and ate all organic produce, your net environmental impact could be 25% of what it is now.”