How I seduced my neighbors into going green

"The hardest thing you are going to do is change just him," she said. "Invite a few neighbors over and decide to do things as a group. Find a way not to be the dominant force in the discussion. Have somebody else lead it, so it will feel less like it is being forced on him. And if you can, hold your tongue when they decide to do a few things that you know maybe aren't so good or useful. You should applaud those ideas all the same."

"What if I worked the money-saving angle?" I offered. "What if I installed a compact fluorescent bulb in my own porch light and raved on about my savings?" This is precisely how many green-savvy companies, including Home Depot and Wal-Mart, are carefully and tentatively advancing a sustainable agenda. There's nothing about greenhouse gas emissions on my curlicue-light packaging. But there is a little blurb about how much money the bulbs could save. Is this the best route?

"The power bill can be a really helpful gambit," offered Townsend. "But the trouble with economic signals is that they can change. For example, power may get cheaper." That makes sense: take away the reason for the change -- saving money -- and you might take away the change.

We returned to the idea of peer pressure and having somebody other than me playing emcee.

"Food helps," said Townsend. "Having food and alcohol at a meeting really helps. And biting your tongue. If you offer a really nice evening, maybe trying a whole load of local foods, and they have eaten your food and drunk your wine, then -- and only then -- do you introduce the idea of changing habits as a group. You could approach it as a challenge to the next town over. But however you approach it, wait until they have eaten your food and drunk your wine. Then they'll feel beholden to you."

"This is starting to sound like a press junket," I said, feeling queasy, "or worse, a time-share presentation."

"Don't hit them up for what you want until they have already been wined and dined," she stressed. "If you try to talk to them first -- if you try to use the meal as a reward for action -- they will only do the minimum that they feel the food is worth."

So a few days later, I e-mailed around an invitation to a potluck dinner. I asked guests to bring something local to eat or drink and invited them to rent "An Inconvenient Truth" beforehand. Then I added the following:

"We would like to host an after-dinner discussion the same evening on the theme of how we can as neighbors reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, even in small ways. Perhaps we can share rides to the city when we need to go there, or even just a lift to the preschool one day a week. Perhaps we can commit to walking to the village or picking up things for each other. We all have different situations and challenges -- some of us commute regularly, others schlep kids all over the place -- I hope by putting our heads together, we can come up with a few ways to cut a little more carbon dioxide out of our daily lives."

I closed the message with a few stats on where most of our town's emissions come from (cars). I did not mention vanity-driven exterior lighting.

When people find themselves in a socially awkward situation, they often react with humor. Sure enough, the RSVPs were full of comic relief. "I'd be glad to pick your kids up in the new Hummer we just got," responded Marty, our compulsively sarcastic veterinarian friend. "Bright yellow. Like a school bus. Perfect."

Marty cc'd the whole invite list, and others ran with the ball. "We're taking the kids kayaking to hunt for the last albino baby seal," replied John, an actor friend who lives down the street.

Then the next-door neighbor who unwittingly inspired all these shenanigans in the first place chimed in: "We've been having problems with predators at our salmon farm, so we're scheduled to join the sea-lion hunt that day. The good news is that if we can make it back in time, we'd love to join you and will make sure to bring some fresh meat."

The change group was already working its magic.

I wanted to serve a local dinner. Of course, winter is about the worst time to try such a stunt. But Townsend had told me to make my neighbors comfortable, show them a good time. So I trucked down to my local Whole Foods and asked the butcher for some organic beef that was as regional as possible, within reason.

"All of our beef comes from an open-range ranch in British Columbia," she said, offering me a pamphlet with a picture of what looked like an honest-to-God cowboy on the front. The steer pictured inside looked happy enough; a few dozen of them browsed in a grassy field.

"I'd like to do a roast for about eight people. What are my options?"

"The prime rib is our best cut, lots of marble in the meat," she replied. "That would be very tender, really nice."

"How much?"

"Eight people?" She did the math. "You're looking at about $85."

I like my neighbors, but not that much. "What are my other options?"

"Chuck roast is a leaner cut," she explained. "But it'll be very nice if you cook it for a long time at a low heat."

Sounds easy enough. And at $26, I could afford to buy it, with enough left over for hundred-mile-compliant carrots.

"Keep a lid on it, keep it moist," she instructed, as she handed it over. "You'll do well with that."

Everything in the Whole Foods vegetable section was from California, so I dialed Capers, a natural-foods market a couple miles down the street that I knew specialized in local produce. "We've got Jerusalem artichokes and celery root," the produce manager offered. "Not too much else from around here at this time of year. Everything is sort of finished."

I had no idea what to do with either. "I'll be right over," I said.

Saturday rolled around. I couldn't quite remember, but I think the butcher instructed me to cook the beef for four or five hours at 275 degrees. Dinner was at 7 p.m. I carefully installed my precious planet-friendly roast on the oven's middle rack early in the afternoon. I placed it under a tent of foil with some water in the pan. A couple of hours later, as delicious aromas filled the kitchen, it was time to check on the meat's progress toward perfection. I extracted the evening's piece de resistance, pulled back the foil, and stuck my friend chuck with a meat thermometer.

Hope turned to dread as the red needle instantly zoomed past "beef-rare," "beef-medium," and "beef-well." Like a runaway boxcar, the thermometer's pointer only picked up speed from there. It moved onto other animals, rocketing right through "lamb" and barely pausing at "poultry." Finally, the gauge ran out of livestock options altogether and, after pulling a double-jointed full rotation, came to rest off the scale, in an unmarked zone that should properly be labeled tanned goods.

In panic, I reached for my mobile and dialed Beef 911. My wife, Elle, answered, and after listening to me describe the symptoms, pronounced the roast dead over the phone. "It's lunch meat," she said, clearly disgusted with me. "Go get something else and start over."

I hopped in the SUV and drove to my island's gourmet butcher shop. There I shelled out $60 for a prime rib roast from Alberta, for eight people, proving once again that when it comes to sustainable consumption, you can always do it almost right the second time -- for more than what it would've cost you from the beginning.

From there, the meal went together fairly well, for the most part. Although the geographically desirable carrots, celery root, potatoes, and onions all roasted up wonderfully -- alongside the not-so-local prime rib -- the knobby Jerusalem artichokes bordered on the bizarre. The only workable recipe I could find required peeling them -- an immensely tedious and dangerous task that Elle cursed her way through -- then layering them with sliced ginger in a gratin. It was awful.

Nobody seemed to mind. Five couples showed, and everyone got into the spirit. We quaffed Gulf Islands pinot gris and a fantastic meritage from the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia's answer to Sonoma. Organic chocolates rounded out the picture, crafted by an artisan operation on Bowen called Cocoa West Chocolatier, less than a mile from my kitchen.

With everyone suitably sated, I kicked off the discussion by introducing a special guest. Fellow islander Paul Welsh runs a public-relations firm and helped launch the City of Vancouver's climate change public-engagement program. The OneDay campaign is about small moves to change your routine for the better -- such as cycling to work, if that is realistic -- for just one day out of the week, or even one day out of the month. It stresses the easy stuff: Turn off that idling car, dial down the thermostat a degree or two, adjust the pressure in your tires. And, critically, turn off unnecessary lights.

"The OneDay program builds off one of the key tenets of social marketing theory," said Welsh. "And that is, if you can make a behavioral 'ask' of people that is easy, obtainable, and simple in its beginning, you can build momentum and make the 'ask' bigger a bit at a time. Make it small from the start, make it easy, and get emboldened by success early. Then you can ask for more."

OneDay is a clever, broad-ranging program. Anyone in any city or district anywhere in the world can download, for free, a OneDay start-up package that contains everything needed -- from logo typefaces to strategic brand advice -- to localize the scheme and roll it out in his or her town. The legwork has all been done; Welsh and others have engineered OneDay for self-replication. It is a virus of change looking for receptive hosts.

And it finds one in my living room. "Imagine OneDayBowen," suggested Welsh. I had all kinds of ideas. Our community could grapple with a dog's breakfast of climate challenges, such as low-density development, sporadic bus service, utter dependence on a carbon-spewing ferry and narrow, steep roads poorly suited to cycling. What if our Web site could form a hub for like-minded souls, a place to brainstorm and organize on-the-ground solutions like a network of community gardens or a car co-op?

Preprimed as they were with delicious food and wine, my guests were all over the idea. I'd invited Paul over hoping our friends and neighbors might like to not only turn off superfluous lights like the ones inside my Geochron, but also sample a few more of the program's baby steps ("wash laundry in cold water").

But within the space of an hour, the assembled would-be-greens went much further. It was as if I'd opened a faucet of pent-up forward motion. Shackled perhaps by the thorny social dynamics of the greener life, everyone had been looking at each other, waiting for someone to say, "Go." Someone just did, and that someone was me. At the urging of Jen, a contract business consultant, my guests committed on the spot to launching the whole program here as OneDayBowen. Another attendee -- Stuart, who works in the shipping industry -- went ahead and registered the domain name the very next day.

I handed each departing couple a swirly light bulb on the way out the door, and after the last guest had put on his coat and left, Elle and I started cleaning up in pleased silence. In the space of a few hours, what began as a contrived and manipulative plot to push my neighbor to switch off a few floodlights turned into the seeds of a grassroots movement. Townsend had warned me I'd be operating outside my comfort zone. She was right, but for the wrong reasons.

It wasn't that I felt like a slick marketing exec that evening. Welsh had played that role quite capably -- hey, it's what he does for a living. But I was still in psychological terra incognito. After a career spent looking on from the sidelines as a wise-cracking skeptic, safe as a neutral and "objective" journalist answering to nobody except my editor, I found myself drawn toward something else. Something unfamiliar, but also invigorating. Something we might call "culdesactivism."

That night, as I brushed my teeth at the window, I looked out across the yard. The lights were dark.