Worldchanging

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title: "Worldchanging" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["american-environmental-websites", "appropriate-technology-organizations", "defunct-magazines-published-in-the-united-states", "environmental-publishers", "environmental-magazines", "defunct-websites", "internet-based-activism", "magazines-established-in-2003", "magazines-disestablished-in-2010", "magazines-published-in-san-francisco", "magazines-published-in-seattle", "sustainability-organizations"] topic_path: "geography/united-states" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldchanging" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::data[format=table title="Infobox company"]

Field	Value
name	Worldchanging
logo	Worldchanging Logo 2007.gif
logo_size	230
logo_alt	Worldchanging: change your thinking
native_name_lang
type	Nonprofit Organization
industry	Environmental and social reporting
founded	2003
founders	Alex Steffen, and Jamais Cascio
hq_location_city	Seattle
hq_location_country	United States
area_served
owner
ratio
rating
website	www.worldchanging.com
fate	Dissolved in 2010. Later acquired by Architecture For Humanity
::

History

Worldchanging was launched in October 2003 in San Francisco by Alex Steffen, Jamais Cascio, and a core of initial contributors. In 2005, Worldchanging moved its offices to Seattle, Washington. In early 2006, Cascio left to form the website Open the Future.

From 2005–2010, Worldchanging was headquartered in Seattle with Alex Steffen as executive editor and editorial lead, Julia Levitt and Amanda Reed as managing editors, and several contributing editors including Jeremy Faludi and Sarah Rich. It relied extensively on an international network of writers and correspondents.

Worldchanging was overseen by a board of directors, led by Worldchanging's chairman, the environmental photographer Edward Burtynsky until May 2010. Worldchanging was supported by grants, book sales, speaker fees and reader donations.

On November 29, 2010, Worldchanging announced that due to fundraising difficulties it would shut down. It was acquired by Architecture for Humanity in September, 2011. That organization subsequently filed for bankruptcy in January 2015, and the Worldchanging website became unavailable around March 2016.

Content

cynicism is obedience. |author=Alex Steffen |title=Go Bright Green |source=The Guardian |multiline=y}}

Worldchanging practiced "solutions-based journalism": countering cynicism by highlighting possible solutions to the planet's most pressing problems rather than just reporting on those problems and their causes.

In the opening paragraph of its manifesto, Worldchanging declared:

Impact

This pithy remark is an indication of the impact Worldchanging had in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Much environmental reporting of the time was preoccupied with predictions of social and ecological collapse unless there was a wholescale retreat from industrial modernism. Worldchanging provided a welcome breath of optimism. It demonstrated that, not only were there solutions to even the most pressing problems, they were available now. This school of thought has come to be known as bright green environmentalism.

Reflecting on the closure of Worldchanging in 2010, Andrew Revkin contrasted its work with The World Without Us, which examined how quickly nature would erase the works of civilisation were humans to suddenly disappear. He summarised Worldchanging's work as taking on "the tougher challenge of charting life on the World with us".

Critical reception

Wired columnist Bruce Sterling called Worldchanging "The best collaborative weblog in the whole wide world". Journalist and author Bill McKibben considered it "one of the most professional and interesting Web sites that you could possibly bookmark on your browser". Author Architect Richard Meier named it as his favorite site and praised it for having "a wealth of information on sustainability".

Alex Steffen gave a TED global talk in 2005, and Jamais Cascio gave a TED talk in 2006.

Worldchanging won or was a finalist for the following awards and prizes:

Winner of the 2004 Utne Independent Press Award for Best Online Cultural Coverage.
Finalist in 2005 Webby for Best Blog.
Finalist in 2005 Bloggie for Best Non-Weblog Content of a Weblog Site.
Finalist in 2006 Bloggie for Best Group Weblog.
Finalist in 2007 Webby for Best Magazine.
Official Honoree in 2008 Webby.

In 2007, Time Magazine named Worldchanging one of the world's top 15 environmental websites. In 2008, Nielsen rated Worldchanging the second leading sustainability site in the world for 2007,

''Worldchanging'' book

In November 2006, Worldchanging published a survey of global innovation, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century with a foreword by Al Gore, design by Stefan Sagmeister, and an introduction by Bruce Sterling. It was a 2007 winner of the Santa Monica Library's Green Prize for sustainable literature, and received a 2007 Organic award. It saw translation into French, German, Korean and several other languages.

Reception

The book was well received on its release, and was rated highly by the general public on book review sites. The layout and design were also received favourably.

It was "emphatically recommended" by TreeHugger, who praised its structure and, while noting that the coverage was broader than it was deep, also noted that each section contained references to further reading material.

Publishers Weekly concluded that "it's hard to imagine a more complete resource for those hoping to live in a future that is, as editor Steffen puts it, 'bright, green, free and tough.'".

Writing in the New York Review of Books, Bill McKibben described the book as seeking answers to the question 'how we can radically transform our daily lives?'. He found it had a refreshingly pragmatic approach, although he also felt it placed a little too much emphasis on the individual over the Government as agents of change.

Looking past observations that "... it leans left and it appears to downplay the role of markets as a possible solution", ''Bloomberg Businessweek'''s Bruce Nussbaum found Worldchanging to be "full of innovation and pragmatic solutions.".

Writing in New Scientist, Andrew Simms was less enthusiastic. While he thought it made the "positive point that all is not hopeless, and that there are more ways of improving the human lot than are being used", he also thought it "betrayed a technocratic mindset that sought to impose solutions from outside a problem, rather than acknowledging that those inside a problem [refugees] know perfectly well what they need.".

In The Guardian, children's author Josh Lacey described the book as "a vision of how things might look if the geeks inherit the Earth." He found the brief articles contributed by over sixty authors ranged from practical suggestions for changing your daily life to simple inspirations, but that "... all this information is sandwiched between thick slices of polemic. The wide-eyed gusto does sometimes get a bit irritating." Lacey did conclude on a positive note, describing the book itself as "Elegantly produced and built to last" and that having all this information available to hand was "... a pretty good reminder of why books aren't yet redundant and probably won't be for a long time."

There were less favourable reviews. Several commentators asked how a website that promoted sustainability could justify consuming resources to publish a 600-page hardcover book and conduct a national tour to promote it (a sentiment foreshadowed by Sterling's reference to "a dizzyingly comprehensive chunk of treeware" in his Introduction on p 14). The book's publishers noted on the back page that they recorded the ecological costs and applied the appropriate offsets. The criticism may be taken as an illustration of the differences between 'bright' and 'dark' green thinking.

Revised edition

Worldchanging, Revised Edition: A User's Guide for the 21st Century was issued in 2011 as a revision with updated technological material, relating to sustainable living, including some 160 new entries relating to food security, sustainable transport, carbon neutrality, ecotourism and updated information on the emerging local food movement. Again, it rated well with the general public but, by the time of publication, Worldchanging had ceased operations and the book received virtually no coverage in editorial columns.

References

(3 May 2011). "Green Ethics and Philosophy: An A-to-Z Guide". SAGE Publications.
"Jamais Cascio". Open The Future.
"Our Team". Worldchanging.
"Board of Directors". Worldchanging.
Alter, Lloyd. (30 November 2010). "Worldchanging 2003–2010". Treehugger.
Hiskes, Jonathan. (1 December 2010). "Worldchanging's bright green contribution". Grist.
Minner, Kelly. (29 September 2011). "Architecture for Humanity Acquires Worldchanging". Arch Daily.
King, John. (January 17, 2015). "Architecture for Humanity shut; nonprofit helped disaster victims". San Francisco Chronicle.
Lacey, Josh. (17 March 2007). "Go bright green". The Guardian.
Bravo, Britt. (2 April 2010). "Sharing Solutions: An Interview with Alex Steffen of WorldChanging". NetSquared.
"About Worldchanging". WorldChanging.
Ross Robertson. "A Brighter Shade of Green—Rebooting Environmentalism for the 21st Century". EnlightenNext Magazine.
(2013-04-21). "A Brighter Shade of Green: Rebooting Environmentalism for the 21st Century".
Revkin, Andrew. (30 November 2010). "Farewell to a Great Web Effort at Worldchanging". New York Times.
Sterling, Bruce. (7 February 2005). "Viridian Note 00430: Goodbye Cruel World". Viridian.
Vanity Fair. (31 January 2008). "My Sites: Architect Richard Meier". Vanity Fair (vanityfair.com).
(5 April 2007). "The route to a sustainable future".
(21 January 2009). "Tools for a better world".
Staff. (February 2005). "The 2004 Utne Independent Press Awards". Utne Reader.
"The Webby Awards Gallery + Archive: 2005". The Webby Awards.
"Fifth Annual Weblog Awards". The Bloggies.
"Sixth Annual Weblog Awards". The Bloggies.
"The Webby Awards Gallery + Archive: 2007". The Webby Awards.
"The Webby Awards Gallery + Archive: 2008". The Webby Awards.
Roston, Eric. (17 April 2008). "Green Websites: Worldchanging".
"Online Consumers Call For Greater Transparency in Strategies for Environmental Sustainability". [[Nielsen Online]].
(March 2006). "Worldchanging (A User's Guide for the 21st Century)". Abrams Books.
"The Green Prize for Sustainable Literature". Santa Monica Public Library.
(1 February 2007). "organicARCHITECT Announces 2007 Green Products Award Winners". organicARCHITECT.
(13 September 2007). "Changer le monde : Un guide pour le citoyen du XXIe siècle". Editions de la Martinière.
(25 August 2008). "WorldChanging: Das Handbuch der Ideen für eine bessere Zukunft". Gebundene Ausgabe.
(1 March 2008). "Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (paperback)". Harry N. Abrams.
"Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century".
Polaine, Andy. (September 2009). "19 Books Every Design Professional Should Own". Core77.
Richard, Michael Graham. (28 November 2006). "WorldChanging Book Review". TreeHugger.
(30 November 2006). "Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century".
McKibben, Bill. (16 November 2006). "How Close to Catastrophe?".
Nussbaum, Bruce. (5 November 2006). "A Book For Going Green--A User's Guide to the 21st Century.".
Simms, Andrew. (19 December 2006). "Review: Worldchanging: A user's guide for the 21st century, edited by Alex Steffen".
Lacey, Josh. (16 March 2007). "Go bright green".
Twemlow, Alice. (Spring 2007). "Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century". Eye Magazine.
Woyke, Elizabeth. (6 November 2006). "No Trees Were Harmed".
Alex Steffen. (2011). "Worldchanging, Revised Edition: A User's Guide for the 21st Century". Harry N. Abrams.
(1 April 2011). "Reviews for Worldchanging, Revised Edition: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (paperback)". Harry N. Abrams.

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