{"id":29,"date":"2015-05-26T23:07:07","date_gmt":"2015-05-26T23:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2015\/?p=29"},"modified":"2015-08-28T10:34:44","modified_gmt":"2015-08-28T17:34:44","slug":"rewriting-the-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2015\/rewriting-the-rules\/","title":{"rendered":"Rewriting the Rules"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Steinberg surrounded\u00a0himself<\/strong> with books on popular science while he was writing the book Who Rules The Earth? How Social Rules Shape Our Planet and Our Lives<\/em>. The book, his third, is his most unconventional. \u201cIt\u2019s much more public-oriented than most academic books aspire to, and more research-based than most commercial nonfiction projects,\u201d he says, so he was searching for the right way to speak to a broader audience about an issue that\u2019s been his focus for the last six years: how environmental destruction is deeply engrained in the fabric of society.<\/p>\n

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Paul Steinberg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s more a grand tour than a focused spotlight. I\u2019m trying to take a vast literature and make it accessible and fun to read, and so I had to be present in some of the stories the book tells.\u201d<\/p>\n

For example, Steinberg, the Malcolm Lewis Professor of Sustainability and Society and professor of political science and environmental policy, recounts an experience that he had when he was a young Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia in 1989, when Charles Taylor was beginning his campaign to foment civil war. A taxi that Steinberg and his wife were riding in was commandeered by rebel soldiers, and though the soldiers eventually exited the taxi without explanation, and Steinberg and his wife were evacuated from Liberia along with other Peace Corps volunteers, Steinberg was left convinced of the fragility of national governance in West Africa and many other parts of the world and the dire implications that had for managing the earth\u2019s resources sustainably. \u201cIt made me realize we need institutions capable of governing over long time horizons,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Who Rules The Earth?<\/em>, published in March 2015 by Oxford University Press, focuses on how those institutions, or social rules\u2014which include laws, policies, city codes, cultural norms, contracts, design standards and constitutions\u2014shape everything around us, from the type of light bulb that illuminates the room to the toxicity of our water to our access to food. \u201cCivilizations all work through rules. The central argument of the book is that if we want to achieve sustainability, we need to change the rules. Plant a tree: awesome. Take public transit: fantastic. But we need to get involved in political and institutional change,\u201d Steinberg says.<\/p>\n

\u201cInstitutions are ideas with anchors attached\u00a0to them. We don\u2019t want clean water for a week. It\u2019s about putting in place new patterns of social interaction.\u201d<\/p>\n

He notes that the biggest challenge he\u2019s faced with bringing the book into the world has been scaling the walls of the ivory tower to find ways to share it with a broad reading audience. \u201cI\u2019d like to engage people who care about the environment, about sustainability, but aren\u2019t quite sure what it\u2019ll take to achieve it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plant a tree: awesome. Take public transit: fantastic. But we need to get involved in political and institutional change.<\/p>\n

\u2013 Paul Steinberg<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To that end, Steinberg worked closely with his Harvey Mudd students, and students from five other universities, on the development of a unique companion project to Who Rules The Earth?<\/em>: a set of multimedia educational tools on sustainability\u2014 including an animated film, a video game, a social media website, interactive \u201cinstitutional landscapes\u201d and a Facebook discussion group\u2014called The Social Rules Project, that, ideally, will give the book legs. A significant part of its audience will look a lot like his students: young people who care about sustainability, who recycle, who go to organic farmers\u2019 markets, but who are still curious as to what it would take to enact lasting change.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a strange moment when you recycle a can, and you walk those, say, 20 extra steps to the recycling container, and there\u2019s a nagging sense of\u2014does this matter at all? People intuit that small personal actions are not going to be enough. I hope that both projects will inspire people to complement their small everyday activities with engagement in social and political change,\u201d Steinberg says. \u201cSmall actions are great\u2014I\u2019m not saying they\u2019re unimportant, but meanwhile ocean levels are rising due to climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Who<\/a><\/figure>\n

Steinberg credits Harvey Mudd\u2019s Department\u00a0of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts for creating an atmosphere conducive to writing Who Rules The Earth?<\/em> \u201cMy department allows its members so much creative latitude in the kinds of questions we ask that it facilitates risk taking and a long simmering of difficult ideas. I was allowed to take my time with it. The department has been incredibly supportive from the very beginning.\u201d<\/p>\n

His students served as guinea pigs for many of the chapters of Who Rules The Earth? as they were in development. \u201cThey\u2019ve had a chance to help me vet many of these ideas from the start.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s already at work on his next project, a book that focuses on issues of how to bring about change in local government, but he wants to stop and bask for a moment in the publication of Who Rules The Earth?<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve spent my whole professional life studying social change, why some societies move toward sustainability while others are in a headlong rush in the other direction, and this book is the culmination of that investigation,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Steinberg surrounded\u00a0himself with books on popular science while he was writing the book Who Rules The Earth? How Social […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faculty"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}