Seattle’s Alex Steffen,
founder of WorldChanging.com
Photo by Rich A. Huston
October 2005 | Feature Story
Blog Wild
Seattle’s Alex Steffen knows
eco-apocalypse. His website, attracting 200,000 visitors each month, aims to inform and change the world, one screen at a time
BY Silja J.A. Talvi
From where Alex Steffen sits, fingers poised over his keyboard, anything is possible. The tools, the ideas, the brains and bodies are all there, able to bring about a better and healthier future for Mother Earth and her inhabitants. That’s the fundamental idea behind a groundbreaking Seattle-based blog WorldChanging.com, which now draws an estimated 200,000 readers per month.
Those readers—who come to the site from all over the world—are drawn to WorldChanging.com’s snappy, front-page, heavily hyperlinked blog entries on subjects ranging from the possibilities for rebuilding New Orleans to the potential applicability of nanotechnology for the needs of developing countries. It is citizen journalism at its finest, and a clear look at one future of media.
“Problems have gone on for so long that the only thing to do now is to imagine their end,” says Steffen, who serves as the executive editor of the non-profit WorldChanging.com. “I think people are genuinely tired of bracing themselves for the worst. What we’re talking about [on this site] is building a culture that’s capable of solving these problems.”
In and of itself, all of this seems like a daunting challenge. Environmentally speaking, things aren’t going well at all. Human beings, as a species, have interfered in just about every way imaginable with this planet’s bounty and its natural, self-sustaining rhythms.
Steffen, 37, understands how it is that people lose hope and start to feel altogether powerless in the face of the overwhelming evidence of ecological imbalance and environmental disasters. The fact is that temperatures are rising and glaciers are melting. Storms and tsunamis are wreaking havoc on an unprecedented scale. Waters and ground soils are contaminated with deadly chemicals and pollutants. Coral reefs are disappearing at an alarming rate. Irreplaceable old-growth forests and precious rainforests alike have been plundered without regard for any long-term consequences.
In 2005, half of our entire world’s population (at roughly 3 billion individuals) lives on less than two dollars per day.
Steffen knows all of this backward and forward. As an environmental journalist and essayist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal (to name just a few), he took on complicated environmental stories in his attempt to get the word out through hard-hitting environmental journalism. Eventually frustrated with what he saw as the constrictions of mainstream journalism, Steffen moved on to high-profile consulting work for non-governmental organizations and environmental non-profits across the world.
Wearing down
Through it all, Steffen says, the reactive nature of the work he was engaged in was wearing him down, leaving him without a sense of progress and forward movement.
“It takes a real toll on people’s psychology to be dealing with [the specter] of eco-apocalypse,” he explains, “especially when it feels like there’s no end in sight.”
In 2002, Steffen set out on a solo journey. His trip across America took him to neo-hippie eco-communes, from the grime of Los Angeles to the glitter of Las Vegas and to the bowl of New Orleans—where he penned an article about the likelihood of the levees bursting in a major storm.
By the time he made his way to Florida’s Key West region, Steffen had endured a car accident, and was just about flat broke. Worse yet, he felt disappointed that he had not actually found evidence things were getting better on a large scale—not nearly fast enough, in any case. What Steffen found were hundreds of individuals—innovators, scientists, community organizers, farmers, business owners and working-class folks—coming up with unique ways to repair or reverse the problems facing their families and communities on a daily basis. They weren’t waiting for tragedies or calamities to hit; they were doing the work now.
An epiphany came somewhere between the car wreck and before the money ran out.
“I realized that if we are to be truly serious about building a sustainable society, we have to move beyond responding to the worst of the bad stuff,” he says.
It was, in many ways, a matter of being in the right head space at the right time. Steffen launched the blog that was to become WorldChanging.com. Steffen had always considered himself a tech geek who thrived on scanning volumes of data, articles, research studies and Web sites that would feel like information overload to most other people.
In early 2004, when Steffen went online to put up the first entries on his site, personal and political blogs were really just beginning to take off. The “blogosphere” then existed mostly in the realms of technology and the multi-billion dollar sex industry.
But about a year ago, the tools were spread widely enough that more people started using them for more serious purposes.
“The debate in the blogosphere is definitely happening in a distributed way,” Steffen says. “Rather than having one person sitting down and writing a 200-page book about a topic, you have 200 people writing one page about that topic. You end up getting a healthy debate on the issues.”
Little more than hope
Still, WorldChanging.com was launched with little more than a bit of hope that word might get around about this upstart environmental blog. From the initial 50 readers who came to check out what Steffen and his peers were writing about, the word did start getting out—link by link—to hundreds and then thousands of people who were impressed by the rigor and energy being put into the site.
“Our goal was to make sure that everything passed the‘sniff test’,” explains Steffen. “We’re not saying that this is the objective truth, but that we think there’s something here worth taking a look at. We expect that if our readers are interested in finding out more they’ll follow the link, then make their own decision about that information.”
The scope of that information on WorldChanging.com is truly impressive. Curious about what geotourism, smart clothes and green museums have to offer? How about the ways communities can collaborate on their scientific and technological resources to outsmart an avian flu pandemic?
There’s simply no limit to the topics being explored here: blog entries about the use of organic farming to increase profits for poor farmers; a historical look at Inuit fishing rights; the use of cell phones for civic empowerment; and successful microcredit lending practices in Brazil make for fascinating reading. It says something that nearly a quarter of a million people are coming to this site every month when you consider than an estimated 10 to 15 million blogs now exist in the world.
Consider, too, that WorldChanging.com hasn’t invested a single penny in advertising or marketing, although it gained a fair amount of notice by winning a 2004 Utne award for cultural coverage and a 2005 Webby nomination (the equivalent of the Academy Awards nomination for the millions of sites on the Web).
WorldChanging.com’s cadre of regular readers is a testament to the fact that there’s nothing quite like it on the web. As it stands, three-fourths of WorldChanging.com’s readers are North American with an additional 15 percent coming to the site from Western Europe. Already, one in ten readers is accessing the site from the developing world—something that speaks to the international relevance of what’s being covered on the site.
The site now includes more than 3,500 archived blog entries, adding to its growing positive reputation. “We’re information addicts so that others don’t have to be,” Steffen admits. “On average, I read 100 blogs, several newspapers and at least 50 other things that people send me.”
Steffen said one of his colleagues follows 300 or so RRS feeds (RSS feeds refer to XML-based file formats for web syndication used by news Web sites and weblogs).
Changes for WorldChanging
Big developments for the site are already afoot. While WorldChanging.com started out as a primarily left-coast affair (Steffen and managing editor Chanel Reynolds are based in Seattle, senior contributing editor Jamais Cascio is in San Francisco), the full roster of editors and regular contributors to WorldChanging.com increasingly reflects an internationalism not usually seen in American blogs. The blogger roster includes correspondents in Copenhagen, Mumbai, Ottawa, Paris, Toronto and Turin. Because of the growing international readership, there are plans to begin translating some or all of the content into other languages, including Spanish and Japanese. An anthology of WorldChanging writing is anticipated in the fall of 2006. That book will come out in a good old-fashioned print format.
So, would Steffen ever consider returning to the print world?
Steffen thinks about this for a moment and admits that newspapers and magazines have a particular kind of “firepower” that is difficult to match online, especially when journalists and editors team up to produce hard-hitting exposés and illuminating features.
Yet that’s a world he’s happy to leave too. “Print is like an expensive cocktail party with great hors d’oeuvres,” Steffen says. “You’re there, and you get to talk to all the important people. But what’s happening on the cutting edge of journalism is more like going to Burning Man in the desert. I find Burning Man more interesting than cocktail parties. If there’s stuff happening in the streets, why would you want to go back to the suites?”
Silja J.A. Talvi is an award-winning journalist who writes the EM Column and frequent features for Evergreen Monthly.
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