Worldchanging

» see worldchanging.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Worldchanging gave the language a phrase. Bright green was its coinage, meant to mark off the environmentalism that wanted better technology and denser cities from the older kind that wanted less of everything. The site existed to argue that most of the tools for a livable century already existed and were badly distributed, which in 2003 was an unusual position for an environmental publication to take.

Alex Steffen and Jamais Cascio launched it in October 2003 out of San Francisco, structured as a nonprofit. The format was a group blog before that was a settled thing to be, with contributors writing short pieces about one specific tool or project rather than about the state of the planet. The tagline under the wordmark said A bright green future.

This never reached me. I was finishing university in Ankara during the years it peaked and what I read in English was technical. Worldchanging belonged to a particular anglophone conversation running between San Francisco, Seattle and the design conference circuit, and no Turkish counterpart to it existed that I ever noticed. The interesting question now is not whether I read it. It is how a site with that much reach failed to find a way to pay for itself.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

The recognition was real. Utne gave it an Independent Press Award for best online cultural coverage in 2004, and Time named it one of the world's top fifteen environmental websites in 2007. By 2008 Nielsen was ranking it the second most-read sustainability site anywhere on the web.

In November 2006 the site turned into an object. Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century ran 608 pages, edited by Steffen, designed by Stefan Sagmeister, with a foreword by Al Gore and an introduction by Bruce Sterling. BusinessWeek put it on its best design books list for the year and the publisher still had it among their fifty best-selling titles in July 2008. For a group blog three years old that is an unusual second act.

~ the fall ~

The money never came from the site. Worldchanging was a 501c3 and the bulk of what kept the lights on was Steffen's speaking income, more than four hundred talks across five years, plus whatever the book returned. That works until the person doing the talking runs out of weeks in the year. The travel that funded the publication was also the travel that prevented the publication from being developed, and there is no clean way out of that.

There was no advertising business to fall back on and no membership program that ever got large enough. Nonprofit environmental publishing in 2010 was competing for the same foundation grants as everybody else, in a year when foundations had just finished watching their endowments halve. On 29 November 2010 it announced it was shutting down, and the 501c3 dissolved before the year ended.

~ what got buried with it ~

Seven years of writing was the actual asset and everyone involved knew it. The stated hope at closure was to keep the archive online somehow. Architecture for Humanity took over Worldchanging's assets in September 2011 and did keep it up for a while, which is the best outcome an orphaned archive normally gets.

Then Architecture for Humanity went bankrupt in January 2015. The Worldchanging site became unreachable around March 2016, and worldchanging.com does not answer at all in 2026. An archive that survives its publisher by depending on a second nonprofit has only moved the same problem one organization to the left.

~ the long tail ~

The second edition of the book came out in April 2011, five months after the site closed, this time with an introduction by Bill McKibben and a foreword by Van Jones. A revised guide to the future, published on behalf of an organization that had already dissolved, is a strange thing to hold in your hands.

The argument outlived the publisher. Bright green is now close to the default posture of climate technology writing, which means Worldchanging won the part it cared about and lost the part that pays rent. Steffen kept writing under his own name. The phrase went everywhere without the site attached to it.

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