Saving the World

What does it mean to "save the world," and how would one go about it? The phrase is used a lot in the sustainability community, but in an automatic, unreflective way. Some people take it as a given that saving the world is both well-defined and possible, and debate at length whether particular technologies or policy changes will accomplish that purpose, while others rail against the idea and call it an illusion, and say instead that we all are doomed. I've even been asked to be a panelist on a discussion of just this subject -- the title is "Can Science and Technology Save The World?"

But when I reflect on the phrase itself, what immediately comes to mind is the genre of super-hero fantasies, and their adult equivalents. King Kong rampages through Manhattan, our object of desire clutched in one fist while the other shoves skyscrapers out of the way, and our hero rushes to the rescue wearing spandex tights. Or, in a more mature version of the story (I'm thinking of Avatar as an example) the Evil Corporation rampages through the sky, destroying our object of desire's home and demolishing the Primeval Forest to make room for a mining operation, and our hero rushes to the rescue wearing a virtual reality machine.

Not very realistic, but such is the stuff our metaphors are made of. We are a species that spins stories, after all, to make meaning of our lives. But what does saving the world look like in the real world, when you strip it of the trappings of fantasy? Is the concept meaningful at all? And what about that business of imagining that we might be the heroes, the ones to accomplish it?

What does it mean to save the world?

I'm going to leave this question as a placeholder for now, and expand it later.

What role might I play?

I got onto this topic, this time around, through a comment thread on Ryan Bell's Year Without God blog. Ryan mentioned that he attributes the phrase "saving the world" more to white male privilege than anything else. I understood this to mean that he perceives it as a conceit, originating in the sense of entitlement that a white male God-child (to borrow a term from Robert Bly) is raised to consider his birthright.

As a person who carries two X chromosomes, I am positioned in these fantasies as the helpless object of desire, rather than the hero. And (as you might expect) one of my instinctive reactions to the thought of saving the world is to view it as utter hubris: How could I, one person among seven billion, hope to have any impact at all, let alone save the world? That sense of absurdity immediately pushes me toward skepticism.

At the same time, I'm entirely capable of identifying with the hero instead. I, too, was raised to imagine that it is possible for one person to save the world through heroic action, even if it's a stretch to imagine myself to be that person. And I was born into the dominant race in the most privileged nation on earth, at a time when feminism was a prominent social force, which made it possible for me to study at the most prestigious Institute of Technology in the world despite my chromosomal affiliation. It's not entirely inconceivable that I might be able to influence *something*, *somewhere*, even if it's not so grandiose as to single-handedly save the world. So I'm not ready to jump immediately to the opposite extreme, and declare the whole enterprise to be doomed.

How does change actually happen in the world?

The question then becomes, how *does* change happen? What can I do, realistically, to influence the course of events in the world? Write; teach; send letters to Congress; attend rallies; donate to non-profits? Live my own life as an example? I do all these things, and imagine them to be worth doing, but they do little to satisfy my sense of urgency around this question.

In his comment, Ryan lists a collection of potentially world-changing institutions. Although he perceives it as limited, his list is wide-ranging. He lists everything from business to art to politics to religion, and more. Note that he's thinking in terms of institutions -- the collective actions of organized groups -- rather than individual heroes. That clearly moves us a step away from Batman and toward a more realistic understanding of how the real world operates. Even when change is initiated by a single individual, it's mediated by many people acting together. So Ryan is contemplating not how to be a hero, but rather how he can plug into an existing organizational structure and either influence its direction or further its goals.

Another idea about change has become popular in my surroundings, though I'm not certain where it originates. This is the idea of becoming an Agent of Change. I've seen this described as an educational goal in schools that are pioneering a sustainability curriculum. The underlying assumption is that if we, as educators, are able to both teach our students about the challenges facing us, and teach them how to become effective Change Agents, they will then go out and transform the world. So the mythology of change is transformed, in this line of reasoning, from one of a solitary hero to one of an educational institution that turns ordinary people into Agents of Change.

What other ideas are out there? What does change look like, when you strip away the metaphors and examine it directly? I suspect that we might be more effective at it if we actually understood what we were doing.  This is another placeholder.