Anonymous
Isla Vista and UCSB aerial photo by John Wiley
Source: World Business Academy
David Gershon, a senior Fellow of the World Business Academy and founder of the Empowerment Institute, an organization dedicated to making social change on large scales, was featured at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) this week.
Most recently, Gershon has focused on making solutions for climate change a reality, and one of his current projects called Cool Block is set in the tight community of Isla Vista, which houses most of the UCSB population and many long-time locals.
On Wednesday, Gershon will presented a systemic strategy to help Isla Vista become carbon neutral in five years that can be scaled throughout the world.
In the Spring quarter of 2019, Gershon co-lead a course at UCSB titled “The World in 2050: Sustainable Development and its Alternatives” in which upper-division students enacted Cool Block. Cool Block is a community program that gives “block leaders” a toolkit to inspire climate change action on their blocks and in their larger neighborhoods.
The purpose of Cool Block is to set feasible, obtainable goals block by block to bring together the power of bottom up collective change. Cool Block groups meet every other week, depending on their personal schedules, and work together to reduce their carbon footprints, become more disaster resilient, and build community livability.
How will Isla Vista become the first carbon neutral community in just five short years? Cities make up nearly 70 percent of global carbon emissions, and 70 percent of those emissions come from residents’ lifestyle choices.
If you can empower residents to adopt low-carbon lifestyles, you can activate the whole system of bottom up and top down change.
Isla Vista houses a unique population largely composed of UCSB students and faculty, making it a socially aware, environmentally conscious, and highly educated area. The organizing and brain power of this community is like no other, and student groups and faculty members are already coming together to be the first place to take the steps that the world needs to see.
Gershon explains, “I have been searching 30 years for a breakthrough climate solution that can get traction and be scalable, and I believe I have found such a solution. The key is combining top down and bottom up approaches which have been insufficient on their own to gain traction. That’s what I’m working toward, one block, one community at a time, and we’re getting traction!”
Our society must evolve, and these students have the power and are ready to create the bottom up change that Gershon and many others deem necessary.
You’ve finally come up with a plan that everyone can understand!
Chip, let’s set up a task force and do just that.
CHIP – I usually disagree with you, but i LOVE the BS generator! So sick of meaningless babble!
Don’t tell Bruce Porter or Das Williams about this plan!
Wouldn’t it be great if IV Services Director Jonathan Abboud actually carried out this “Cool Block” plan and obtained proven results, before he tries to run for something else?
“ The organizing and brain power of this community is like no other” Thats for sure, they are good at Falling off cliffs, investments for slum lords, drunk college students, drug dealers and a few old hippies . Doesn’t equal a lot of brain power. The author’s goal is ridiculous. IV will always be filled with cars. The problem is too many people in too small an area. More people = more pollution. How about asking UCSB to stop increasing admissions and stop building tax free housing all over Goleta?
IV fights climate change, but ritually set their own sofas on fire every year. Yes, we want to learn from IV.
Yes, BS at its finest from Chip of SB.
IV residents also love the sport of middle of the night cliff diving.
Its like a word salad 🙂
Down with carbon! Up with alcohol! Up with weed! Wait a minute… alcohol and weed are both mostly carbon. Up with carbon!
It will get dropped like a rock when beer is banned in IV because of its copious CO2 emissions.
That makes my head swim, and I’m ashamed to admit that I use some of that jargon in my Dilbertian day job on PowerPoint slides.
They’re young. They can do anything they set their minds to and then some. Best of luck with this change.
Mr. Gershon has obviously never taken a stroll down DP. An “a socially aware, environmentally conscious, and highly educated area” it is not. Not to say that it doesn’t exist, but definitely not the culture. Just the amount of discarded crap they leave behind at the end of each year should tell you that!
What does bringing together the power of “bottom up collective change” actually mean? How does one “activate the whole system of bottom up and top down change?” How can “top down and bottom up approaches” work combined when they have been “insufficient to gain traction” on their own? Well, I have the answers, it’s really simple. First, we need to objectively matrix cross-media deliverables. Then we need to distinctively simplify goal-oriented virtualization. If we can pull that off, then all we need to do is compellingly recaptiualize global web-readiness. You can easily create your own plan to address climate change. Here is a great website that will practically write the proposal for you. https://www.atrixnet.com/bs-generator.html
It’s really not that hard to understand. But attacking the style in which the ideas were delivered is cheap and easy, and definitely easier than developing your own solution to this problem. As long as you think the status quo is a winning strategy, then keep up the good work!