Up in Ontario

WorldChanging's Vancouver book launch

Last night the Duck and I attended the book launch for WorldChanging at Workspace.

The Worldchanging book is beautiful, and, at first glance, will act as a great resource for us to make good decisions on an ongoing basis. Yet I have a few concerns about WorldChanging and its way of doing things that make for contradictory messages.

• Why create such a big book, which consumes such amounts of paper, fuel and electricity, to get a message out? Why not publish a PDF or other electronic format with an option to have it produced as a book?
• Why push the purchase of the book through a big business like Amazon.com rather than small, local bookstores and businesses?
• Why insist on such a divisive approach to the world? (For those not in attendance, the host of the evening, Alex Steffen, referred to 'us' and 'them', to 'sides' and continually juxtaposed WorldChanging with another world view, characterized by oil companies. I was left to assume that he meant Conservatives, but this is just straw-man posturing and combative opposition, where each side reduces and imitates the other and people tune out. See: U.S. politics. Certainly not in my mind any way to get to better ways of living or change the world.)
• Why blame the publisher of the book for not allowing the contents to be published for free? If the World Changing crew had wanted to make the contents of the book available, over the web, say, they could have negotiated that into their publishing contract. See: Lawrence Lessig.

Though I think the group of folks involved with World Changing are committed and geniune in their desire to affect change for the better, something about the event last night struck me as a little off. Perhaps it was a lack of transparency in their answers to questions. Perhaps their lack of history or participation with a local community here in Vancouver made the event feel like a whistle stop without much built-in momentum.

I don't know what it was and I don't want to cut down the remarkable efforts they've made to get this book out. We bought a copy and we'll be glad to give it a thorough testing. They've done a tremendous job putting the thing together and rallying effort and attention.

Overall it just felt like they knew they were right in what they were doing. They were very sure of it. And that didn't feel right to me.