March 7th, 2009 by Jess

You can’t read the news these days without being bombarded with news about how life as we know it is coming to an end. The mortgage crisis became the financial crisis. Next recession. Now, depression.

News about the global food crisis has been temporarily obscured by other concerns, but we will still face the challenge of feeding rapidly growing populations in developing countries. In the U.S. and other developed nations, obesity, childhood diabetes and heart disease are only a few of the manifestations of our distanced relationship with the food we eat.

Just a few years ago, we had until 2050 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid the tipping point. Then we had until 2020. And last Wednesday, someone said it was too late already. We have a plastic island of trash twice the size of Texas floating in the Pacific Ocean. Our rain forests are shrinking. Our reefs are dying. And I hope you don’t like seafood, because our days of living off the oceans are numbered.

Alienated individuals in collapsing communities. Education systems. Human rights. Genocide. War.

The list goes on and on. Being globally engaged is pretty depressing these days.

But if you dig a little deeper than mainstream media, you can find hope. Our near infinite list of problems may be matched only by the limitless ingenuity of the human species. We have at our disposal great technological resources, perhaps the most important of which grants us the ability to instantaneously transfer information around the world. Communication technology gives us the opportunity as a global community to work together to find solutions to our problems.

But we are not going to get there the way we have gotten here. Bigger, better, and more cannot be our mantra. We need to be smarter and faster. And we need to think outside the box.

Around the world, individuals and communities are finding solutions to the challenges we face today. The most effective of these, the most sustainable of these, the best of these are being discovered by people thinking outside the box.

I, for one, hope to have kids. And it would be great if they got to live on a healthier planet than the one we inherited. So I really want to encourage more people to start thinking outside of the box. It’s going to take all of us working together to get out of this mess.

Therefore, each week, the TN! Team bloggers will feature an Outside The Box project going on somewhere in the world. We all know about the problems. Perhaps by increasing our awareness of the innovations emerging all around us, we will each be inspired to be our own part of the solution. Be sure to check back over the next several weeks for our first featured project.