Be Decent: Environmental Activism 2.0 (Paperback or Softback)

From pollution to public health, the life-threatening challenges that we were warned about decades ago are no longer conceptual concerns that our children and our grandchildren may face one day. We are experiencing the impacts of climate change, systemic corruption, social injustice, accumulating pollution, and countless other global issues right now.

Some of us are seeing them knock on our doorsteps, like a wolf in the night creeping around our neighborhoods with a mind to swallow us up whole. But why is this all happening? We are seeing an increased frequency, size, and destruction of wildfires across the West. Same goes for the hurricanes across the Southeast and the tornadoes of the Midwest. The global pandemics are growing more likely. These risks are not giving way any time soon — it is time for an all-hands-on-deck effort to make this world a safer, healthier, and happier place to live. But, of course, all hands-on deck has historically excused the captain. And in America, our captain is the federal government; and sadly, our leaders are doing nothing but maintaining a status quo that is slowly killing our planet.

Fortunately, however, there is a steady and trustworthy solution we can turn to. No, not our centralized political or economic leadership: decentralized digital technology. Millennials and Gen-Zers grew up watching their government and economic systems fail because politicians and business leaders either live in denial or put their profits before the people.

But we’re a resilient bunch, and those of us most impacted by the failures of our centralized political institutions aren’t just taking it lying down. We are now seeing a mass mobilization of people innovating new ways to harness decentralized technologies (“decent tech”) to empower a new phase of environmental activism that rises up from the grassroots. Digital technology is growing increasingly decentralized, and as is our opportunity to solve our local and global environmental problems for ourselves.

To do so, however, we must think more deeply about decentralized technology as a tool that increases our power to stimulate positive change starting from the grassroots. The world has seen a proliferation in technology since the first industrial revolution, and over the centuries increasingly sophisticated technologies have changed the way we live, work, and interact with each other. Reasonable minds can reasonably differ regarding whether our society is better off for all the progress we have seen in digital technology over the decades. But all such critiques aside, modern technology has made water cleaner, sanitation healthier, air purer, and the environment safer for billions of people around the world.

Digital solutions to real-world problems have extended the length of and improved the qualities of our lives. And more to the point, technology has helped local communities solve their most pressing social and environmental problems — which are largely ignored by the higher-ups. In fact, computing technology is the best tool we have to protect ourselves when the people we put in power simply won’t. We can do this by using the power of digital technologies to mobilize effective grassroots movements. And thanks to the growing trend towards decentralization, this is getting easier every day. In fact, the increasing number of technological tools that do not require lasting association with a centralized controlling organization — i.e. decent tech —are the most powerful weapons in the modern advocate’s arsenal.