New Dimensions

Protecting our environment is no longer just the job of environmentalists. With the reality of global climate change upon us, we're all waking up to the fact that saving the planet is everybody's business. But how can we make a difference fast enough to avert a global crisis?

Climate scientists tell us that we have less than ten years to dramatically cut our carbon emissions before we reach a point of no return. Yet most of the large-scale solutions on the table will take far longer than that to implement. Fortunately, necessity is the mother of invention, and among the climate change pioneers there are those who feel that, if we step out of the box of the traditional social change model, we'll discover that we already have everything we need to make a huge dent in our carbon footprint-almost overnight. This "new social change formula" serves as the focus of this dialogue with David Gershon, who says, "What we've been looking at is a strategy I call 'Cool America.' The core of that program is a cool community campaign which is scaling up eco-teams within a community . . . This is a bold idea, and says if 50 to 90% of the carbon footprint of a community is the residential sector, and we've been able to demonstrate that 25%, on average reduction per household participates, we can scale up these eco-teams and can get this 20% reduction by 2010."

Program #3224