It published newsletters and books about sustainability, bright green environmentalism, futurism and social innovation.

Worldchanging was launched in October 2003 in San Francisco by Alex Steffen, Jamais Cascio, and a core of initial contributors.

[11]It made me proud to call myself an environmentalist againThis pithy remark is an indication of the impact Worldchanging had in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Much environmental reporting of the time was preoccupied with predictions of social and ecological collapse unless there was a wholescale retreat from industrial modernism.

[15] Journalist and author Bill McKibben considered it "one of the most professional and interesting Web sites that you could possibly bookmark on your browser".

[16] Author Architect Richard Meier named it as his favorite site and praised it for having "a wealth of information on sustainability".

[28] It was a 2007 winner of the Santa Monica Library's Green Prize for sustainable literature,[29] and received a 2007 Organic award.

[36] Publishers Weekly concluded that "it's hard to imagine a more complete resource for those hoping to live in a future that is, as editor Steffen puts it, 'bright, green, free and tough.'".

[39] In The Guardian, children's author Josh Lacey described the book as "a vision of how things might look if the geeks inherit the Earth."

He found the brief articles contributed by over sixty authors ranged from practical suggestions for changing your daily life to simple inspirations, but that "... all this information is sandwiched between thick slices of polemic.

Worldchanging, Revised Edition: A User's Guide for the 21st Century[43] was issued in 2011 as a revision with updated technological material, relating to sustainable living, including some 160 new entries relating to food security, sustainable transport, carbon neutrality, ecotourism and updated information on the emerging local food movement.