Whether it is a hip downtown bar in Madison or a local tavern in rural Dane County, all of the cool kids in the establishment will be drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon. PBR has long been a cheap go-to beverage for blue-collar working folks, but its popularity among the urban hipster crowd is much more recent and unexpected. All jokes about saving water and drinking beer aside, the social process that transformed PBR from just another cheap beer to a national hipster icon can be a model for the process of environmental resource management.
A look inside PBR’s meteoric rise to success can be provided by author Malcolm Gladwell’s crisp and refreshing book “The Tipping Point.” Gladwell breaks down a plethora of social phenomena to show they do not occur by chance, but rather through a confluence of several factors that have the right formula to slowly ferment and then explode once a magic “tipping point” is reached.
Just as free beer does not show up out of nowhere, earth-saving environmental initiatives do not spontaneously happen. They require solid scientific solutions concocted by smart people. More importantly, they require social and political connections between disparate groups that are facilitated by folks who possess a special set of intangible smarts that only come around once in a blue moon.
In “The Tipping Point,” Gladwell identifies three types of these important people: mavens, connectors and salesmen.
The Madison lakes are a perfect example of a situation where an environmental tipping point is just what the thirsty bar patron ordered. Cow poop-laden runoff from Dane County’s farms is contributing nutrients to the lakes that facilitate the growth of evil algae. Finding a solution to the runoff problem will require the efforts of both pointy-headed academics in Madison and salt-of-the-earth farmers in the country.
These folks often agree about as much as the woman in those “great taste, less filling” commercials, so the services of the three special groups of people will be essential to ensuring that the Madison lakes are able to live the high life once again.
Once upon a time, hipster beer mavens reached the conclusion that PBR is the most ironic choice of the crappy beers. Madison is blessed with a full keg of similar environmental mavens. University of Wisconsin professors and Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources employees dedicate their time to researching ways to minimize nutrient runoff from agricultural lands, thus preventing nasty algae outbreaks in the lakes. These intellectual mavens have brewed up many good ideas, but without some additional help, their efforts will prove to be stale.
The keystone to environmental tipping points is the connectors. In the case of the PBR story, connectors are the hipster scene leaders who brought the skin-tight pants scene together with the “listening to Vampire Weekend is ironic” scene. Here in Dane County, a connector must be someone who can comfortably operate in both the fields of the farming community and the halls of the UW campus.
Connectors are super-important because more than anything, environmental resource management is a social endeavor that requires the cooperation of many groups of people. Lake-loving connectors in Madison are needed to gather academics, WDNR employees, farmers, and citizen groups together to find consensus on a strategy for cleaning up the lakes. .
Once the mavens identified what the cool kids should be drinking, and the connectors brought the cool kids together, it was up to salesmen to convince all the other kids that they too could be cool if they imbibe PBR. Salesmen are equally responsible for implementing effective environmental policies because the collective nature of the environment requires the participation of everyone. The salesmen are those people who are able to persuade even the most hardened skeptic a given policy is in both their best interest and the best interest of their surrounding environment.
Maven, connector and salesmen are not exactly job descriptions “Sconnies” put on their resumes. They are all inherent or cultivated traits only the choicest people possess. The biggest challenge of generating the political support for an effective watershed-wide manure management program is finding the lake-lovers in Dane County who possess these special abilities and are willing to contribute their unique abilities to the Madison lakes cleanup endeavor.
Implementing policies in Dane County that will effectively limit the nutrient runoff that reaches the Madison lakes has already proven to be a challenge, but if PBR can go from a has-been Milwaukee brew to hipster cultural icon, anything is possible. Generating the social and political will for environmental policies is 96 percent of the effort to improve the quality of the Madison lakes. Using the tipping point framework is an effective way of identifying the people and skills necessary to keep the Madison lakes as the central waters of the city’s social and economic well-being.
Zachary Schuster ([email protected]) is a graduate student studying water resources engineering and water resources management.
