25 Oct SXSW Eco ’12 Buys Into a More Corporate Approach

At this year's SXSW Eco conference, I was actually surprised when looking at the schedule. I am not sure whether the buzz from last year's conference hadn't really worn off yet or not, but I was expecting something…more exciting. In quick summary, my memory of last year's conference is that it was groundbreaking. It was big time. It was nothing of the normal Austin environmental conferences or gatherings. It had people that meant to change the world. People that sat on panels that sounded like just by going to the panel, you might change the world. Or be inspired to do so after the closing party at least.

This year, panels were geared towards showing off what large corporations (and some small) were already doing, and certain tactics that your business might glean from them. The message I got loud and clear was that the only way to change anything anymore was to go work for a green business or green the one you already work for. Business was still the answer though in most all of the talks. How to get people to like your particular business better. What Walmart is doing right. Etc., etc. Really? Have environmentalists really resigned to this mode of change? Last year many of the panels were focused around people power, what you and I could do if we just did it, and systemic change. If we organized it, if we built it, if we voted for it, if we demanded it. Excitement was building around the Occupy Wall Street movement that started in New York City two weeks before last years conference. The demonstrators were demanding accountability in our government and on Wall Street for the economic situation that many of the large banks had created. The energy was rife with a notion that hadn't been uttered in a while. Change was being talked about my almost everyone that I spoke with at the conference. People were in the streets again. They thought maybe it is finally happening, maybe something is finally changing. Maybe people are waking up.

A year later most of the sister Occupy protest camps that popped up all over the United States and internationally have died down to the core people who just aren't ready to give up yet. Everyone else seems to have given up. A brilliant combination of police, city, and media silencing everywhere, including Austin, has made for the ultimate fizzle in a once shining new protest model for the real change and community that most people desire today. That includes environmentalists. We know that in order for people, and really all life as we know it, to have a fighting chance of survival, things have to change pretty drastically. There was some talk of this at the conference this year, but most of the sessions I attended focused on stop gap business solutions to get people engaged with what your business is doing. We do need people to be engaged with what we are doing but we need what we are doing to be absolutely amazing, radical, and paradigm changing.

Understand, please, that I come from a place of young restlessness and climate anxiety. Being born in the late 80's, when my parents were starting to hear about this new alarming climate science, I have grown up my entire life with the notion that if we don't change something soon we are all going to perish in a literal hell. I have my whole life wanted to make society change. I want the revolution to happen, I don't want to talk about your social media metrics or whether or not you can even really have social media metrics. It has been more than 20 years. Maybe I should just give up my hope like everyone else seems to have and just resign myself to business strategy and administrative work with the mental excuse that this is the work that will actually change something, not demanding it. No, that will just agitate people or make them uncomfortable and that isn't good.

All hope was almost wrecked until Annie Lenard came to speak as the final Keynote. I wish she had been the absolute final speaker because her message to get back out and get active, to demand the change we want to see, is exactly what I needed to hear before I hung myself with my twitter handle. She spoke to the fire that needs to burn in all of us to actually change anything. We can waste time debating over which solutions we should be pursuing or we can get into the streets with our neighbors and build the ones we want to see, city politics and governments be damned.