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.
Wendy Priesnitz, Editor
Read Editor Wendy
Priesnitz's blog
