Franke’s visual essays have been spreading virally over the past few years with mentions on major blog sites like Kottke and Treehugger. Now they are gathered together in a book, Bothered by My Green Conscience (New Society) and I think it gives us a very good reason to still value having a bound and printed object that we can share without peering into a screen.

Franke’s essays are illustrated guides to her process of changing internally and externally- we literally see into the conscious and unconscious thought process as she decides to take real action in dealing with the personal effects of climate change. Not content to simply change lightbulbs and stop drinking bottled water, Franke (with her husband) sells her SUV, rips up her driveway and plants a garden (battling a confused bureaucracy in the process) and writes a moving letter to her unborn grandchildren, a letter bemoaning in advance our pitiful lack of effort to improve a world we’re destroying. This essay, To My Future Grandkids in 2020, goes beyond the humor of the situational earlier essays and paints a poignant picture as Franke attempts to explain our collective failure to change things now when change is required- an explanation written for a generation yet to come.

The essays must be seen to be appreciated. Combining text, illustration and collage, they express the messiness of creativity and the beauty of action. This really is a book to give to your friends and family. Though we’ve never met in person, Franke and I are friends, separated by 80 miles of Lake Ontario water. We’ve been corresponding for several years now and I’ve had the pleasure of seeing these essays appear on her blog. When the book arrived in my mail I realized that they were deeper and more thought-provoking when revisited in this format.

I have a three year-old Honda Accord that is about to come off of a lease. I have three options: Turn the car in, lease another on very favorable terms or buy the car, again on favorable terms (it’s very low mileage). All three probably cost me a similar amount. I either continue making a payment for a new car or for the existing one. Most leasees would go for the new car.

In the Marcc 2008 issue of Metropolis magazine (sorry no link that I can find) Roberta Gratz has an essay on the environmental impact of historical renovation as opposed to tearing down and building a new ‘greener’ building. She notes that:

” The greenest building is one that’s already built”

The struck me as being very relevant to two themes of this blog and my life these days: The hidden carbon cost of apparently environmentally-friendly products like organic produce (shipped how far to reach a wintry city like Rochester?) and the fact that when I buy something used I’m keeping its materials out of landfills and eliminating the need to make something new.

So I decide to buy the car I have already rather than buy a new one and thus add a carbon-intensive new motorized object to our collective environment. And while I have a dream to build a contemporary urban living space, I think I have to find a building and reuse it rather than build new. The ‘cost’ of tearing down and recycling or landfilling the building would far outweigh the advantages of ‘green’ new construction.

We cannot think about environmental issues the way we did in the past. Food that is grown without pesticides and fertilizers is great until you ship it a thousand miles to the consumer. That shipment just wiped out any advantages from an environmental perspective (the health advantages are also offset by the emissions associated with the travel). There is no free lunch for those who believe that they do right by buying this stuff.

Economically, with a recession upon us, the current administration’s solution is to hand out money and tell people to go forth and consume. This will allegedly stimulate the economy by increasing demand which in turn increases manufacturing. There’s only one problem with this: We live in a world that has fundamentally changed. If we all keep consuming at some point we turn all the raw materials of the planet into manmade objects. Not a pretty picture.

I saw a headline today that there are worldwide grain and food shortages because of American farmers growing corn for ethanol, a fuel most of us cannot use or afford if not subsidized by the government. The complexity of the idiocy behind this is mind-boggling.

The point here is that you cannot take a short term, simplistic approach to any purchasing decision these days. Do I buy a Prius to get an extra 20 MPG when that decision pushes a car somewhere into a landfill and adds another, albeit efficient, car into our global inventory? That’s the kind of question we have to ask ourselves in an environmentally damaged world.

Guy Kawasaki offers a great photo tour of this new building funded by Yahoo’s Jerry Yang and his wife. The tour gives a great overview of the current state of green building technology.

Viewing the solutions to climate change from a global perspective can be daunting but it’s important to remember that, on a personal level, these solutions are local. I live in a mid-sized (1mm+ regional population) city with a relatively compact footprint. The highest impact we can have here in Rochester would be a 10 year, all hands on deck initiative to leverage that footprint into a fully green city with a high density center, a state of the art light rail system and sustainable energy generation processes that utilize our abundant water, wind and geothermal resources. It is completely doable here and, with gas prices skyrocketing ( I paid 3.49/gallon yesterday!), there will be a viable short term economic justification for going green now.

WorldChanging has a long draft piece on green cities that outlines the why and how of this concept. This is not a futurist manifesto, it is a cogent argument for moving forward now. From an economic development perspective, devoting our local resources to a plan like this would immediately turn us from a provincial outpost into a global city.

It’s called vision and leadership.