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from Natural Life
Magazine, July/August 2005 Creating Social Epidemics In his best-selling book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, journalist Malcolm Gladwell explains why social change often happens quickly and unexpectedly, rather than slowly and incrementally as conventional wisdom would have it. He believes that ideas and behavior sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease and can be contagious in exactly the same way that a virus is. In fact, the phrase “tipping point” comes from the world of epidemiology. It’s the name given to that moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass and starts spreading very quickly through a population. I’m beginning to think we have reached, or are approaching, the tipping point for many of the ideas we have written about in Natural Life since 1976. On a visit this morning to my local farmers’ market, I noted that almost all the vendors were advertising something “organic”. On the twelve-block walk home, a Starbucks I passed had a display promoting shade-grown, organic, Fair Trade coffee. On the newsstand next door, a glossy city magazine boasted a hefty environmental feature, which was printed on post-consumer recycled paper. And I counted eight hybrid cars, a biodiesel bus and two gas-saving three-cylinder Smart cars. Dan Becker, Washington Director of the Sierra Club’s Global Warming Program recently said he believes that the auto industry is nearing the tipping point on clean cars. Canada and the state of Washington both recently adopted stringent clean car rules (sometimes called “The California Standard”), and the state of Oregon announced it would follow that lead. That will result in over 35 percent of new cars sold in the U.S. and Canada having to meet tailpipe pollution standards that are stronger that U.S. Clean Air Act. And that, says Becker, will tip the auto industry to make all new cars clean vehicles. “The automakers will find it financially impossible to make one clean set of cars for ten states and Canada, and a dirty set for the rest,” he explains. North American auto makers are losing market share to companies like Toyota and Honda, which have a huge lead in alternative fuel technologies, so laws in just ten states and Canada could force the Big Three auto makers to permanently abandon their gas guzzling ways. That’s how the tipping point works. Gladwell describes such changes as “social epidemics”. Epidemics begin with just a little input, but spread very quickly once they take hold. By embracing new ideas in our everyday lives, each one of us is contributing to reaching the tipping point for a thousand “positive” epidemics.
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