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Last February, a small group of people living in the Peachtree Hills neighborhood of Atlanta decided that saving the planet wasn’t going to work.

Not that saving the planet isn’t a laudable goal. It’s just that saving the planet is far too big and too abstract to be meaningful in people’s daily lives. So they decided they’d work to save something else near and dear to them: money. They decided it was time to stop throwing money away on a bigger this and a bigger that. It was time to spend money intelligently, to reset the defaults on their own lives. With a little knowledge and a little work, they realized they could make their houses more efficient, their food more nourishing, and their lives more sustainable. If they could make simple changes that made their lifestyles more sustainable, then they would encourage and challenge their neighbors to do the same. If they worked together, the whole neighborhood could do it. Then maybe other neighborhoods. Then maybe the whole city. Then…well, you see where this is headed.

Thus was born the Greening Neighborhoods project, based on the idea that the real work for positive change can only come from the grass roots level. Greening Neighborhoods is a participatory, engaged effort where neighbors show neighbors how they can make the small changes that add up to a smaller carbon footprint for everyone. A pilot project was started under the leadership of architect George Hornbein. Green Peachtree Hills used neighbor-to-neighbor education, assistance, transparent cost tracking, and even a little good-natured competition to get people to improve the impact their neighborhood has on the environment, the economy, and on everyone’s lives. A central part of the project is the online Neighborhood Utility Calculator, where a household can easily track their utility bills to see how their conservation efforts are paying off – and those of their neighbors. This creates a visual record of resource use for the neighborhood on a household by household basis – letting us all see what has heretofore been invisible. Not only does this tell us how we’re doing overall, it shows each of us how we compare with our neighbors. Contests are held, knowledge is shared, ideas are generated, and little by little a worldview is changed.

Greening Neighborhoods provides a framework for households to see how the way they live compares with their neighbors. It doesn’t make people change, but if everyone sees how everyone is doing, over time it makes them want to change, too. Simply by sharing information and stories, knowledge and neighborly support, change happens.

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