Alex Steffen

Futurist

1968-01-01

Alex Steffen is an American writer and futurist known for work on sustainability and bright green environmentalism. Wikidata lists his birth year as 1968.

Quotes by Alex Steffen

In almost all city governments in America, the small group of people who don't want change are able to block change.
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I think there's a gigantic generation gap in terms of how people understand the Internet and how much they think technology is an important factor in social change.
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There are plenty of people out there talking about how difficult it is for some of us to just deal with all the stuff we already have, from packed closets that need organizers to storage spaces to maintenance costs, etc. Lots of people are reevaluating whether or not they need giant garages full of stuff and finding that they don't.
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More is not better. Better is better. You don't need a bigger house; you need a different floor plan. You don't need more stuff; you need stuff you'll actually use.
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If mass media, social isolation in the suburbs, alienating workplaces and long car commutes create a bunker mentality, the Internet does the opposite.
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When the Internet really first started to hit, people felt this would be the death blow: after suburbs and long commutes and television and the death of the family dinner, this would be the last straw that would totally break society.
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Climate change is not a discrete issue; it's a symptom of larger problems. Fundamentally, our society as currently designed has no future. We're chewing up the planet so fast, in so many different ways, that we could solve the climate problem tomorrow and still find that environmental collapse is imminent.
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Make no mistake: Tackling climate change is vital. But to see everything through the lens of short-term CO2 reductions, letting our obsession with carbon blind us to the bigger picture, is to court catastrophe.
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What makes creative people tingle are interesting problems, the chance to impress their friends, and caffeine.
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For carbon-neutral cities, there are things worth talking about in how our consumption patterns can change - sharing goods, etc. - but those are a fraction of the impacts of transportation and building energy use. If we need to choose priority actions, the most important things are to densify, provide transit, and green the buildings.
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Deep walkability describes a city that is built in such a way that you can move from one area to another on foot, on bicycle, on transit and have an experience that remains a pleasant one, that you feel you are welcome not just in the neighborhood but moving between neighborhoods.
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Americans trash the planet not because we're evil, but because the industrial systems we've devised leave no other choice. Our ranch houses and high-rises, factories and farms, freeways and power plants were conceived before we had a clue how the planet works.
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There's no law of physics that says we have to be an unsustainable society - in fact, quite the opposite. The planet's ready to work with us if we're ready to think differently, but we do have to make that jump and start to do things in new ways.
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The brutal reality is that newer, more sprawling suburbs - and especially the cheap boom-years exburbs - aren't just a bit unsustainable, they're ruinously unsustainable in almost every way, and nothing we know of will likely stop their decline, much less fix them easily.
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Cities offer us powerful leverage on our most stubborn, wasteful practices. Long commutes in our cars, big power bills from our energy-hogging buildings, shopping trips to buy stuff that'll spend a few short months in our homes and long centuries in our landfills.
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In tough times, some of us see protecting the climate as a luxury, but that's an outdated 20th-century worldview from a time when we thought industrialization was the end goal, waste was growth, and wealth meant a thick haze of air pollution.
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