Design as politics in a changing world

A well-written argument that [“politics”–built from mindfulness, personal commitment, and creative design–is as important to the climate crisis as science and technology](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/06/climate-change-needs-the-politics-of-the-impossible.html):

> [We have], basically, two ways out. One is extraordinary technology…[the other] is extraordinary politics: politics that goes beyond the usual interest-swapping and sets new commitments for the country and the world…

Does our culture still have the courage–and the harmony–to commit to real change based on moral beliefs?

> Consider the end of slavery—not in the US, but in the British Empire, which abolished the practice thirty years before the Emancipation Proclamation, by an act of Parliament, with compensation to slaveholders…the historians’ view these days is that British emancipation was, in fact, a wildly expensive and disruptive moral commitment, executed through extraordinary politics…

> [We need], in incremental and experimental ways, to keep building up a real politics of climate change. That politics will be both environmentalist and human-oriented, because there’s no separating the two in the age of climate change. It will have to ask how the peoples of the world are going to live together and share its benefits and dangers, and also how we are going to use, preserve, and transform the world itself.

That sounds like real design to me. See also Dan Hill’s [Dark Matter & Trojan Horses](http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2012/08/dark-matter-trojan-horses-strategic-design-vocabulary.html).