After even a cursory examination of peak oil and climate change one thing becomes very obvious - a lot of change is coming whether we like it or not and a lot of change is required to minimize the pain of the transition.

Change is happening in our society but it is painfully slow - our politicians play it safe, our businesses are far to often focused on the short term and the general population is more concerned with rugby and reality tv than the future their children will inherit.

So how do we increase the rate of change in our society?

One idea I am exploring is to focus on a specific campaign that is related to the fundamental issues of our times but is easily achievable and accessible to the majority of the population. By engaging as many people as possible in this campaign the aim is to increase our capability to tackle the next one, by taking small easy steps we can build our strength to take the large challenging ones.

The issue I chose was a nationwide campaign to say NO to plastic bags (www.noplasticbags.org.nz) - now I know what you’re thinking, isn’t that worrying about the cinder on the carpet when the house is on fire? It would be if it was an end in itself but it isn’t, it is a means to an end. A campaign against plastic bag has many things going for it;

Achievable : there are many national and international precedents, the trend away from plastic is clearly established

Accessible : everyone in the country uses plastic bags on a daily basis and it is an excellent opportunity to create public dialogue around sustainability issues

Fixed end point : the campaign to reduce emissions will go on for decades, plastic bags have a clear exit point when we can move on to the next campaign.

Win-Win : plastic bags are running on pure inertia and everybody wins when we get rid of them.

Photogenic : there are many compelling images that this campaign can use to engage the public.

The other idea I am exploring is how we can get a large amount of people to contribute small amounts of time to power the campaign. To take some of the models from social networking, open source software and online collaboration (wikipedia etc.) and apply them to a specific campaign for social change. So the heart of the campaign is a social network at noplasticbags.ning.com which is open to anyone who is interested and is very much an exploration in online collaboration that will be evolving over time.

I think the combination of these two ideas (small easy steps to build strength and many people contributing small amounts of time) have the potential to turn all this ’sustainability stuff’ into a truly mass movement. What do you think?