I’m working on a presentation for Interesting Vancouver that I’m loosely calling the New Bill of Rights. In case you haven’t heard, we’re in a bit of a pickle, and while we each bring our own personal-life baggage to this perilous moment in history —ie, challenging legacy decisions regarding housing, vehicles, and so on — the time has come for bold thinking and big moves. The time has come to sweep away fear — of social backlash, of deep bright-green change — and turn up the volume. The time has come to hit the fast-forward button and demand our leaders use whatever means necessary to put the pieces in place of a better world.

We’re half-way there. I sense a rising chorus of individual voices out there who are literally crying out and scraping and scratching and clawing towards bright green. They’re doing it one household at a time with more deliberate behaviors and more conscious purchasing decisions, or perhaps they are reaching over the back fence and dabbling in neighborhood-scale organizing — a process I call culdesactivism.

What this collective longing needs is a unified set of goals and principals, a list of green things that are entirely within the realm of possible but kept at bay by the larger challenges of market subsidies and public policies engineered to preserve the brown status quo. We need to not think of this as a “wish list” but rather as a set of entitlements. We need bold leadership to avert catastrophe. Here are a few to start with.

1. I Have the Right to Efficient, Comfortable Public Transit. Here’s one of 206 new next-generation trams just rolling out in Berlin. It’s made by Bombardier, a Canadian company. There’s nothing like this in our cities. (Photo: IsarSteve.)

2. I Have the Right to Know What it Really Costs.This is the Pharos Lens, a project of the Cascadia Region Green Building Council. The lens is a concept hang-tag that would convey to consumers, at a glace, a product’s various impacts. It’s a pilot program, and limited to building materials, but there’s no reason we shouldn’t see this sort of thing on a package of pasta, or a pair of jeans. Food products come with a “nutrition label” for reasons of public health. It’s time we start thinking bigger to have the tools we need to make more informed snap decisions in the marketplace.

Now, what are YOUR demands? What would be in your New Bill of Rights? What is it time to stop pining for and simply demand with one loud voice? Perhaps if enough of us dive in, this might evolve into a kind of a petition to our leaders. Jump in the pool via the comments box, below.