Reviews

Armstrong, M. (2019). Review of “Life After Carbon” by Pete Plastrik and John Cleveland. Solutions 10(1): 83–84. https://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/article/review-of-life-after-carbon-by-pete-plastrik-and-john-cleveland

Reviews Book Review

Book Review

by Michael Armstrong, City Scale REVIEWING Life After Carbon

by Pete Plastrik and John Cleveland

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ife After Carbon opens with Dean Stewart, an aboriginal guide, leading a tour along the Yarra River in the center of Melbourne, Australia.

Stewart is instructing a group of urban sustainability professionals to walk as if they are “many people with a single footprint,” elegantly summarizing the potential efficiencies of urban systems. But Stewart goes further, noting that for millennia people have drawn together to trade information, stories, goods, and services, and these same forces are the foundation of cities today.

Stewart’s observations articulate the core premise of Life After Carbon: Cities present tremendous opportunities to apply the collective ingenuity, efficiency, and adaptive capacities of city dwellers and urban systems to the monumental challenges of climate change. As daily headlines juxtapose dramatic climate impacts with perilous policy decisions, authors Pete Plastrik and John Cleveland, keen observers of the past decade of urban climate initiatives, deliver an optimistic guide to where, how and why mayors and dedicated civil servants are determinedly applying Stewart’s wisdom.

Life After Carbon is a “projection of possibilities grounded in what is already happening.” To draw this trajectory, Plastrik and Cleveland locate current climate action in the arc of cities through history, providing a concise review of the forces shaping cities,

from the specific (e.g., automobiles) to the general (e.g., consumerism). Their familiarity with the successes and challenges facing cities makes for a rich narrative of anecdotes and lessons from the experiments that cities are conducting as they address climate change.

Plastrik and Cleveland bring deep experience in public policy and private-sector economic and community development. In recent years their insights into networks of people and organizations have informed, among other things, the development of several influential local government practitioner networks, including the Urban Sustainability Directors Network and the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance. (Full disclosure: The Innovation Network of Communities, the organization for which Cleveland and Plastrik serve as President and Vice President, serves as the fiscal agent for City Scale.)

Plastrik and Cleveland organize Life After Carbon around four concepts that characterize the transformational potential of 21st-century cities. First, building on Richard Florida’s thesis that the global economy is now powered by the innovation, diversity, and proximity that cities foster, they explore the notion that a transition to clean energy presents unparalleled economic opportunity. Second, they illustrate the potential resource efficiencies inherent in dense networks of buildings and transportation systems.

Life After Carbon by Pete Plastrik and John Cleveland

Third, they show how leading cities are integrating natural systems into the urban fabric. Last, they examine the adaptive capacity of city dwellers.

Critically, these concepts are central not just to responding to climate change but to delivering on the potential that draws people to cities in the first place. Fundamentally, Plastrik and Cleveland are exploring what makes cities desirable and successful in the long run. Solving climate change is an essential element of this success, but Plastrik and Cleveland underscore that cities will need to “recast the purpose of their climate efforts into the broader goals of creating a better city.”

Within this framework Plastrik and Cleveland detail dozens of examples of city innovation: Singapore’s recognition that, where it once viewed itself as a city of gardens, it is in fact “a city within a garden”; the revitalization of Mexico City’s historic Zócalo district through the siting of a bus rapid transit station; Oslo’s move to eliminate

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Fox, M-J. (2019). Review of “A Finer Future” by Wijkman, Lovins, Fullerton and Wallis. Solutions 10(1): 84–85. https://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/article/review-of-a-finer-future-by-wijkman-lovins-fullerton-and-wallis

Reviews Book Review vehicles from its center city; Boston’s engagement of 30 powerful institutions to establish and implement a climate action plan that spans public policy and private investment.

Many of these initiatives are in the early stages. They are pilots, plans, and programs that are signaling ambition and generating the kind of information that can only be gained by trying Plastrik and Cleveland highlight the experimentation that characterizes these cities’ work: Test, evaluate, report, revise.

Life After Carbon arrives at an auspicious time. With national governments in the United States, Australia, and even in Europe undermining the transition away from fossil fuels, local leaders around the world are championing climate action more assertively than ever. Cities have key roles to play both through their own authorities over land use, transportation systems,

housing, and commercial buildings, and perhaps still more so as the level of government closest to the community.

Mayors tend to be pragmatists; their staff are well grounded in constituent priorities; and local government is typically the least partisan level of government. At the same time, cities are asking themselves if their actions can deliver on these pledges: Can cities reinvent transportation systems, transform markets for energy-using products, and influence energy supply decisions with the speed and scale that is required? Life After Carbon suggests that they can.

Plastrik and Cleveland masterfully organize and structure their observations. Life After Carbon is a highly readable tour of committed civil servants advancing ambitious work in a range of contexts. It is an important detail that, for all of the focus in this book on cities and local government,

Plastrik and Cleveland are clear-eyed that life after carbon will require all of this and much more: “Cities cannot complete the journey by themselves.”

Life After Carbon recognizes and celebrates that urban climate innovation is not the product of government alone—it requires community, business, and professionals of many disciplines. In the realm of local government, success on climate demands engagement not just from prosperous coastal cities, but from smaller communities, culturally conservative regions, and suburbs that can work together at the metropolitan scale, with their utilities, and in coordination with states. Within the larger landscape of action that is urgently needed to address climate change, Life After Carbon aims its spotlight on heartening examples from cities around the world, illuminating innovations and teeing up the hard work ahead.

Book Review

by Mairi-Jane Fox REVIEWING A Finer Future

by L. Hunter Lovins, Stewart Wallis, Anders Wijkman, and John Fullerton

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ccording to the opening line in A Finer Future, “This book is a warning.” Subtitled creating an economy in service to life, this book is also an expansive vision-giver. What distinguishes A Finer Future from many other books in this field, in my view, is its devotion to providing a powerful, actionable, constructive alternative story to the current fearfocused, anti-neoliberal battle cry so many ardent activists share in attempt

to rally environmental action. It is a book that asks us to source from real-world possibilities, rather than desperation and panic. To that end, the book is designed as a guide for those who urgently desire to spur environmental and social justice action towards a regenerative world through the power of storytelling. It also provides in depth discussion of current and possible regenerative initiatives within finance, corporations,

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A Finer Future by L. Hunter Lovins, Stewart Wallis, Anders Wijkman, and John Fullerton

Reviews Book Review agriculture, and energy. A strength of this books is the focus on hopeful actions currently happening—not only possibilities or theoretical solutions. Readers of this journal will enjoy that the book is primary focused on solutions primarily—only one of five sections of the book recounts the problems we, as solution-seekers, likely already see while the remainder of the text endeavors to deal with solutions. And while some of the problem-focused section is rich in data and research about the intensity of the environmental and social challenges we face (deeply rooted in citations), the primary problem highlighted and then tackled in the remainder of the book in the need for a new, compelling narrative to catalyze system change— the highest leverage point for change, a new paradigm for what is possible.

The book is laid out in five sections.

Sections one and two focus on the why and how of “buying time” while the remaining three sections offer ways to redesign “how we make and deliver everything.” All three chapters in Section 1 provide the foundation of the book by illustrating the problems we need to address to move towards a more regenerative future and avoid collapse. Rather than purely bombarding the reader with dooming statistics, the authors take a refreshing tact of inviting the reader to imagine living in a future where many of the impending problems have been solved, thusly demonstrating the power of story.

The authors claim, “in the absence of positive vision, voices of fear fill the vacuum.” The vision provided is rooted in the authors’ detailed explanation of a regenerative economy—they do not assume the readers have any background on this topic.

Section two is a short section detailing specific methods and frameworks

for “buying time” through relatively low-hanging fruit including addressing material flows through a circular economy (again no prior knowledge assumed) and through both building and vehicle energy efficiency. The bulk of of the solutions in the book are found in Sections four and five titled “Transformation” and “Systems Change” respectively. The chapters in the “transformation” section focus on finance, corporations, agriculture, and solar power with the emphasis that change is currently underway in these arenas. These chapters are densely packed with hope and examples; and they are rich with actionable ideas and fodder for a future that looks very different than the present. (Though notably, in the view of this reviewer, the disruption of crypto-currency was not covered in the finance section.)

Ideally, actors in each of these arenas would read their corresponding chapter and find inspiration to make changes. Section four houses fewer examples of mini-revolutionary actions in specific sectors and moves towards examples of “feasible” possibilities for system change through governance actions and policies that the authors claim “have been or are being implemented somewhere on Earth.” The section is a catch-all for many critical topics. In it the authors discuss the imperative of alleviating inequality within and between countries, touch on the topic of how the nature of work will likely evolve as the economy changes, suggest a need for alternative measures of societal success other than growing GDP, call for a global values shift, and offer solutions for broken political systems. It reads as a mini-book on the subjects, concluding with a strong and specific call for action through a catalogue of possible personal behaviors. The final section

of the book titled “A Finer Future is Possible” circles back to the necessity of a compelling vision of the future. In this shortest section in the book, the authors chose to give copious space to futurist Alex Steffen’s speech at the The Nature Conservancy’s 2015 annual trustee meeting which opens with “We meet to speak of great ancestors.” Mirror the imagining of a future provided in the first section of the book where “the tide was turned,” the excerpt of the speech is goose-bump inducing and deeply compelling. If you read nothing else in the book, read section 5.

The entire book is infused with the authors’ lively, engaging, and bold tone. Based on this tone, it is likely that the authors would be captivating speakers on the topic! While readers who already agree with the authors may feel enlivened by the occasional brashness of the authors (one example is the out-of-the-blue reference to “America’s Child in Chief”), other readers may be turned off or simply disappointed by such language. Is there a place for name calling or villainizing in a regenerative world?

Perhaps the book intends to simply preach to and catalyze the choir, but in doing so it may miss opportunities to recruit new regenerative chorus singers. Contradictorily, the authors also make attempts to drop the villain narrative and be more inclusive by finding fault in “the system we have designed” rather than in “greedy capitalists.” They even claim “This is neither a left wing nor right wing exercise,” but this reviewer is not certain that a person that leans right would find themselves welcome while reading the book. But to be fair, this may not be the purpose of the book!

Rather than changing attitudes, the goal of this book may be to spur action

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Gordon, W. (2019). PIPs Rewards: Valuing the Good You Do Every Day. Solutions 10(1): 86–87. https://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/article/pips-rewards-valuing-the-good-you-do-every-day

Reviews Book Review in those with attitudes similar to the authors. One the topic of inclusivity, it was significant to this reviewer that with a few exceptions a vast majority of the thinkers highlighted in the quotes that framed each section and each chapter were men (mostly white men). Along this line, readers interested in the gender dimensions of a transition to a “finer future” should not come to this text for ideas or encouragement. Another possible concern about the book is that despite

offering examples of solutions from diverse geographical locations, is still reads as EU and particularly US centric. It is clear that an effort was made to be global, but still the bulk of the examples in the book come from the US. Despite this short coming, the authors do highlight solutions a various geographical scales including global, national, regional, municipal, the individual level.

Ultimately, A Finer Future is a confident, accessible, visionary call

for a better story of the future. Pulling on many important voices in the field of sustainability and regeneration, the authors provide a detailed and animated vision that ought to be widely heard. The authors fulfil the call from Pete Seeger mentioned in the book that “The key to the future of the world is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known.” A Finer Future delivers a compendium of these hopeful stories leaving readers catalyzed to take action.

Media Review PIPs Rewards: Valuing the Good You Do Every Day

by Wendy Gordon

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magine earning points for the good you do everyday, then turning those points into great deals on healthy, organic and local food or to pay school expenses. That’s what’s possible with PIPs Rewards, a new mobile engagement platform with its own currency of good—‘Positive Impact Points’ or PIPs. Created by 3P Partners, Inc, a Certified B Corp, the PIPs Rewards App provides its customers (institutions such as universities, municipalities and businesses) a light, low-friction tool with which to verify, reward and reinforce positive impact behaviors among students and staff.

PIPs can be earned for a wide variety of daily life behaviors including but not limited to: riding the bus, biking, bike sharing, recycling, refilling water bottles, shopping responsibly, joining in a fitness class, completing mindfulness activities, attending a cultural event, volunteering, and participating in a group game. Once earned, PIPs

can be converted into valued rewards: great deals on local and organic food; healthy personal care products; responsibly made clothing and gear; fitness classes; shared services, etc. They can also be donated to charity, and, starting in fall 2018, a student’s PIPs can be used to unlock matching funds for the singular purpose of paying “stay in school” expenses.

Available on Android and iPhone, the App gathers behavioral data intelligence using a variety of means—API integrations, beacons, sensors, QR codes, and transaction reports. These deep connections to apps, devices and reporting tools make the experience so light-touch and friction-free that a good many actions are verified and recorded without the user taking her phone out of her pocket. It should be noted that while the app is free and available to anyone, there are a number of earn and redeem options that are exclusive to users at affiliated institutions.

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PIPs Secret Sauce

The PIPs App is unique among engagement platforms in the following ways: • Action data capture/ verification—API integration, sensors, scanners, transaction reports, etc—keep the App so light and effortless to use that PIPs can be earned without a user having to take her phone out of her pocket.

• The resulting data analytics with deep engagement metrics provides customers (usercommunities) with real-time behavioral data for continuous improvement of user experience and optimization of outcomes.

• High value rewards, such as using PIPs to pay school expenses or for discounts on healthy food, up the app’s stickiness and fuel continuous engagement in PIPs positive impact earn actions.

• Principles of behavioral psychology, from loss aversion and

Reviews Media Review social norming, to competitions and valued rewards, are applied to turn positive impact choice-making into a highly rewarding “cycle of good.”

• Network effect among multiple brand partners eager to be part of an ever-expanding PIPs ecosystem of beneficial products and services.

PIPs Pilot at CU Boulder

University of Colorado—Boulder (CU Boulder) contracted with 3P to test the PIPs Rewards App among its students during Academic Year 2017-18. CU renewed its subscription for three more years and is looking to the PIPs App to help it meet two important goals: • Increase student retention and • Drive up engagement in sustainability and healthful behaviors Usage and impact has exceeded expectations. Key milestones from the CU Boulder experience include: • User Growth: °° 1600 students, or 5 percent of the student body, participated in the pilot during Academic Year 2017-18. °° Six weeks into the 2018–19 Academic Year, over 1000 new students—roughly a third the number projected for the year—had already downloaded the App and started using it.

• User Engagement: °° Earn Actions: Users are taking an average of 7000 PIPs-Earn actions a month, including but not limited to riding the bus, biking, refilling water bottles, recycling, volunteering, joining in fitness classes, and participating in games and challenges.

°° During the pilot, students redeemed about 60 percent of their PIPs they’d earned, and received over USD$10,000 in cash value in the form of gift cards and discounts on local and organic food; healthy personal care products; responsibly made clothing and gear; fitness classes; downloads (music, e-books); used books; shared services, etc.

• Impact: °° During the course of the pilot, student engagement in just 5 actions (biking, recycling, riding the bus, carpooling and refilling water bottles) eliminated over 16,000 lbs. of CO2 emissions. °° CU received American Association of Sustainabiity in Higher Education (AASHE) Innovation Credits by implementing the PIPs app on campus, helping them achieve STARS Gold Rating status.

Two New App Features Launched in Fall 2018

Responding to customers’ needs and objectives, 3P has added two new features to the PIPs Rewards App: • The Carbon Drawdown: It is now possible using the PIPs App for one or more institutions to compete in a fun, easy-to-play inter- or intra-campus race to see who can reduce their carbon footprint the most. Players engage in five or more everyday actions that help to drawdown the institution’s overall carbon footprint—including the basics: riding the bus, biking, carpooling, refilling water bottles and recycling. Their actions and

Wendy Gordon

University of Colorado student using the PIPs Rewards app while recycling on campus

their corresponding CO2 savings are tracked, aggregated and displayed in the individual and team leaderboards, so players can see in real time how they are stacking up against each other.

• PIPs for School: The PIPs Rewards platform has a new use option for students. It is now possible for students to direct their wellearned PIPs toward school-related expenses (tuition, loan-repayment, enrollment fees, etc.). Students who do so will be able unlock matching funds provided by a new public foundation, the PIPs Education Fund.

Such valued rewards may increase the App’s stickiness still more than what’s happened thus far. With the access to education gap only getting worse, and as little as USD$1,000 in debt enough to force a student to drop out, innovative platforms like PIPs Rewards could help students bridge the gap through engagement in purposeful behavior.

To learn more, please contact wendy@pipsrewards.com

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