Harnessing the Power of Technology to Help the Environment

From a young age, NationSwell Council member Chris Thomas was interested in the way technology affects human behavior. “How does it augment or utterly interrupt our lives?” he wondered. “How does it make life better or worse?” That line of thinking took him to a series of lucrative corporate jobs. But seven years ago, burnt out on the commercial applications of tech, he took a job at Greenpeace and transitioned into advocacy. Now the chief innovation officer at Sierra Club, one of America’s oldest conservation groups, Thomas is building a tech platform to better engage the club’s members. He’s still asking himself similar questions — “How does technology get people to actually change their world?” — but they feel all the more important, as the earth warms and climate skeptics take prominent government positions. NationSwell spoke to Thomas at his office in San Francisco.

People tend to describe the public versus private sector as diametrically opposed: one’s idealistic, the other greedy; one’s slow to act, the other efficient and innovative. Did you have any difficulties in your transition out of the corporate world?
To me, it felt quite seamless. I quickly saw that a lot of what we’re trying to do in nonprofits is similar to the profit-driven world. A lot of it is about educating people, getting them passionate or interested in what you do, then converting them to — for lack of a better word — transactions, whether they’re buying something or taking action. We are idealists, but we’re also very businesslike in the way we employ technology and use data. The history of these movements is very much driven by ideology: showing up, power to the people. Those are all great constants, and they work really well. But to do them at scale and to get into the minds of a more diverse, broader group of people, we have to employ the technology in a similar way that Nike or Apple would market and convert people to buy their products.

In your experience, what’s the most effective way technology can benefit the environmental movement?
Climate change is a really big issue. It’s complex, long-term, and its urgency is hard to grasp. People feel like it’s in the hands of big corporations and governments, and therefore they’re completely disempowered by the scale of the problem. It doesn’t feel like enough to recycle or buy a hybrid car. That’s a challenge for us.

One thing we can do, using tech, is to provide people with a broad array of opportunities to take action. Traditionally, we’ve asked people to show up for meetings or rallies, and that requires a deeper level of investment than doing something online. The key thing we can do here is to turn all those transactions into data, then use that to create meaningful feedback for the user. If we can give content back to them, then that creates a much more empowered feeling: “Me and other people like me are actually moving the needle on this.” You start to close the power gap. Tech removes the vagueness of “I took an action,” “I showed up” or “I gave money.” A great example is recruiting 25 friends from Facebook, and they go out and each recruit three or four more people. We can track the different concentric circles radiating out from that one recruitment that you did, and we can show the impact you’ve had. At the end of the day, maybe you recruited thousands of people.

[ph]

What’s the next generation of the environmental movement going to look like?
Older organizations, including my own, have always had this model where we’re doing the work on behalf of society, and they support us either by signing petitions or giving us money. What organizations like us need to do now is come down off that hill and actually create communities and empower people. The next generation is less interested with what you represent on some vague emotional level, but more about what you can do to help them engender change, to connect them to solutions. They don’t want to hear the talk; they want to see the action. We know what the solution can be, but we need to create tools for them to access it.

What do you wish someone had told you when you first joined the organization?
If you ask our really passionate grassroots organizers in the field, they don’t quite see how what I’m describing fits with the work that they’re doing. They’re out in the streets and working very directly with people, in a community-oriented way. When you start talking about scale and tech projects, they’re not sure where you’re coming from. And I don’t blame them! We have to figure out how it fits with the legacy models of organizing and movement-building that we’ve employed, in this organization’s case, over 125 years. Where does tech fit with that, and where does it depart from that?

In my approach, as a technologist, I started by laying out our essential problems and then trying to figure out solutions for them. One thing I could have done differently, in retrospect, is getting more familiar, at a deeper level, with organizers, understanding what their direct needs are and what they’re trying to accomplish, rather than coming at it from a top-down executive approach. Getting my hands dirty with them for some months would have been a potentially more helpful way of approaching my projects, and it would have built more connections and trust at that level. That is stuff I’m doing now. But we’re also very far along in the work we’re doing, so I’m having to put things back together: introducing stuff to them and answering questions about why we chose to make it in a certain way.

What are the most pressing environmental issues that the next administration must address
Certainly we need to deliver on the promises of the COP21 that happened in Paris, being part of that accord that every major nation on the planet has signed on to. All the leaders of the world currently believe that climate change is real, and that we have a responsibility to do something about it. Our president-elect, shockingly, does not fit with that. He’s in complete contradiction with the will of the rest of humanity, and that, to us, is really alarming, very dangerous and destructive to the work that we’re trying to do. We’re trying to find a way forward, especially in clean-energy solutions. We think this is a pivotal point for humanity, where we have a world that every year is getting hotter and hotter. We’ve got to do something about it: It’s more urgent now than ever.

3 Reasons Why Sunday’s Historic Climate March Could Be the Start of Something Huge

Thousands of protestors will cram the streets of New York City this Sunday, calling on world leaders to help stop climate change. But they’ll also have another message: “Welcome to a new chapter in the fight against global warming. This time it’s going to work.”
The People’s Climate March is expected to be the biggest-ever collective action against global climate change, and organizers are hoping the protest will mark a watershed moment in their fight.
For years, scientist and activists have been pleading for coordinated action to halt the warming of the planet, but world leaders have repeatedly failed to rise to the challenge. Since the disastrous United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen in 2009, global summits have not forged worldwide consensus on how to achieve the U.N.’s stated goal of restricting any future global temperature increase to no more than two degrees Celsius.
This weekend’s march is set to coincide with another one of these global meetings: The U.N. Climate Summit 2014. No decisions will be made at the event, which will be attended by 125 world leaders, including President Obama. But the summit will lay the groundwork for landmark U.N. climate conferences this December in Lima and next year in Paris.
Despite the failures of the past, organizers of the People’s Climate March see at least three reasons to hope this year.
[ph][ph][ph]

Now Banned in Hawaii: Plastic Bags

We’ve heard of city-wide plastic bag bans, but a whole state? Now that takes chutzpah. As LiveScience reports, Hawaii is the first state in the whole country to ban the use of plastic bags, which means residents now have the minor inconvenience of bringing their own reusable bags, or using paper bags, at stores or restaurants. Plastic bags for bulk items such as meat, grains and produce will still be available.
It’s a small price to pay when you stack it up against the environmental cost of using plastic. When plastic bags aren’t taking up space underneath the kitchen sink, they’re discarded and end up surfacing in tree branches, polluting landfills and oceans, and being eaten by unsuspecting animals. Not only are plastic bags a menace to the planet, but their production also sucks up resources: It takes 12 million barrels of oil to manufacture the 102 billion plastic bags that Americans use annually, according to the United Nations.
MORE: These Women Are Doing Something Amazing With Simple Plastic Bags
As Robert Harris, director of the Sierra Club’s Hawaii chapter, told the Huffington Post: “Being a marine state, perhaps, we are exposed more directly to the impacts of plastic pollution and the damage it does to our environment.” With Hawaii leading the charge against plastic bags, hopefully other states will soon take notice.