The Geography of Hope

The latest installment in my monthly sustainability feature series for the Globe & Mail is now up at the website. I'm particularly pleased with it, in that it's a sort of proflile of Adam Werbach, former Sierra Club wunderkind, whose "Is Environmentalism Dead?" speech was the catalyst for my book. (Before I read Werbach's speech, I was still thinking that the best way to rally the troops around climate change was to write a loving portrait of a drowning Pacific island; after it, I went looking for hope.)

Many fine nuggets often wind up on the cutting-room floor in the daily newspaper biz, but in this case there were two lines in particular that I felt formed the crux of this story - the two-sentence summation of Werbach's challenge to the ranks of traditional environmentalism:

Does the Sierra Club really think it can change the behaviour of a constituency that large faster than Wal-Mart can? If the problem is universal, doesn’t the solution by necessity include the nine in every ten Americans who shop at Wal-Mart? Aren’t we all in this together?