Eric Britton, Earth Car Free Day

Eric Britton is an international consultant, author, and founder of The Commons, a Paris-based nonprofit organization cosponsoring Earth Car Free Day.

Well, yes. No doubt John and the Fremantle crew had it right when they said, "The sun will never set on Earth Car Free Day." But they also said, "if we manage to get it right."

Come 19 Apr. 2001, we'll know one way or another if the sun will set on that day -- and at that point, our Earth Car Free Day movement will have moved past a very important milestone.

How are we going to look on the morning after? Will we all feel great satisfaction? Disappointment? Or will we just hide our heads in the sand, declare victory, and then skitter off to other, "better" things? (Which is what projects of this sort all too often do.)

To get a bit of a head start on reality, what if we crank up our imaginations and "go back to the future" for a moment -- and see what it may feel like once the sun finally has gone down on 19 Apr. 2001 on the International Dateline, somewhere near the distant Kingdom of Tonga.

Well, we are not completely ignorant at this point. After all, it's 25 Mar., our E-Day is less than a month away, and we already know a few things. We can, for example, get a bit of help here if we check out the new database that was painfully pieced together over these last few weeks and brought on line just last week. As of this evening, we can already see that the first 50 or so projects, plans, and propositions have already rolled in from more than a dozen countries. Hmm.

In addition to being encouraging from an Earth Car Free Day perspective, the list also has something terribly touching about it. If you look at the list, you will see that we have connected people from around the world working on a common agenda with a shared commitment to sustainability -- people from countries that have been unable to register any significant progress on the sustainability agenda over the past 15 years through conferences, treaties, or even veiled threats. In some cases, our teams come from countries in which government representatives have a hard time sitting at the same table, much less actually doing something useful together. Thus, what we are seeing here simply has to mean something that goes well beyond cities and cars, and is certainly worth thinking about, and possibly building on.

On 20 Apr., I think we would have to be quite mad if we didn't have a certain number of reservations about what we all managed to accomplish on this first big day. An Earth Car Free Day worthy of its name should have thousands of projects and bring together many hundreds of cities into a shared experience and a common learning system. We will almost certainly not get to those ambitious heights, at least not this first time around.

One reason is that we started with the planning effort back in early November, altogether too late for a pioneering effort of this sort with so much to do and to learn. Secondly, there can be no doubt that we needed more time and more resources in order to finish the necessary groundwork for the model Earth Car Free Day. It was not money that we needed, because Earth Car Free Day deliberately eschews money. But all those volunteers do need time.

(An aside on projects like this that take place, in our favorite phrase, "off the economy." Since they are handled by volunteers, who tend to treat time in a somewhat different way, specific deadlines are not as important as the job that needs to be done. As a consequence, there is a tendency for projects like this one to spin on longer than those that are done in the money economy. As a result, they can be better if the commitment and expertise are also there.)

So, to summarize: Our likely major shortcomings in 2001 are (1) not enough projects, (2) not enough of the information people need to learn deeply from each other, and (3) not enough interaction between the projects.

So I ask you: Is that failure? Have we all wasted our time?

It will be best to answer that question, not on 20 Apr., but in the weeks following. One of the main things that we are trying to encourage and support here is frank self-evaluation that we can share with each other. How useful it will be if we take advantage of our shared database and knowledge platform to remind ourselves, and our sisters and brothers in other cities around the world, about the lessons learned.

Let's also recall that every step of the way has been led by volunteer groups, people who were not being paid to do anything. One by one, they just figured that it was time to stand up and be counted. One by one, then 50 by 50, then 500 ... and keep your eyes open to see where this goes in the next few years.

I think our shared common judgment will be, "Not bad at all." Because of the database, a truth machine of sorts, we will be able to see both what we have managed to achieve and what we have missed. We will thus have identified our zone of ignorance, which, as Pascal told us a few years back, is the first step to knowledge.

And we will have made a pretty large number of new friends. People and groups around the world who not only share our concerns about sustainability and social justice, but who also have shown that they are willing to get together and do something about them. And almost every one of them surely would be ready to do it again -- together.

I think we will conclude that Alexis de Tocqueville would have been very proud of us when the sun finally sets on the Kingdom of Tonga on 19 Apr. 2001. Citizens who get together to do something themselves instead of waiting for someone else to do it for them -- this was the kind of active citizen democracy that Tocqueville surely had in mind 170 years ago.