Get off our asses!

Lately, I have climate change on the brain.  Perhaps it’s because the term is nearing an end, and my rock star classmates on Team Climate have helped our team dive deep into this issue and take both a 30,000-foot view and a frog’s eye view. 

Or perhaps it’s because I just spent six days at Grand Targhee Ski Resort at a training for sustainable tourism and though open, the snow depth was much less than normal for early December and the “3-foot dump” the weathermen predicted turned out to be less than 10 inches.  Or perhaps because up until a few days ago, “winter” in Bozeman was 58-degree days and green grass, and ski areas facing no hope of opening.  And we are not alone.  Utah, Colorado, British Columbia.  Ski resorts across the country are struggling to make enough snow to open for business. 

A new report by POW (Protect Our Winters) and the Natural Resources Defense Council concludes that rising temperatures are threatening winter tourism in 38 states.  The study “details how historical changes in the winter season have already impacted the ski tourism industry with a focus on the most recent decade's skiing statistics and a review of historical winter climate observations. It also considers what is at risk from the impact of future winter climate projections.”  It outlines the economics of climate change: over an 11 year period from 1999-2010, global warming cost the ski industry between $810 million and $1.9 billion; 13,000 to 27,000 jobs; and 15 million skier visits.

The report estimates some pretty dire numbers, including:

·      $1 Billion annual losses for the winter sports industries of snowmobiling and skiing

·      27,000 jobs lost

·      Snow depths in the west diminishing 25%-100%, depending on latitude and elevation

·      Snow season length in the northeast cut in half

With climate change also comes more frequent and severe storms.  Storms are occurring earlier and later in the season.  We are seeing more precipitation fall as rain than as snow, which impacts the snow pack both for winter tourism and for spring runoff/fire season.  Less snow = drier summers = more severe fires.  In Montana we are experiencing drier winters, and hotter/drier summers.  A bad combination. 

There is some good news though, on how the space program can help fight global warming (that is, as long as we don’t further cut funding with the upcoming fiscal cliff).  Thanks to NASA scientists, forecasters are able to predict extreme weather, map global salinity, use GPS to increase transportation efficiencies and thus cut emissions, provide multiple forms of data to understand the impacts of melting glaciers, and adapting rocket science to terrestrial energy generation to cut emissions. 

NASA can help us to understand the impacts of climate change, and hopefully to guide us on a path to address climate change before it is too late. 

I think Auden Schendler, the vice president of sustainability at Aspen Ski Co. put it best: "This data suggests there is monetized risk and the solution should be for the ski-industry leaders and trade-group leaders to get off their asses and move as if there was an existential threat to the business."  Get off our asses.  And do something, anything.

GDP v QOL

“We are persuaded to spend money we don’t have, on things we don’t need, to create impressions that won’t last, on people we don’t care about.” Tim Jackson, An Economic Reality Check

We are indeed living in interesting times.  There is a growing population that is questioning the viability of the foundation of our society, the Gross Domestic Product.  There is a (minority) viewpoint that maybe, just maybe, more “stuff” doesn’t equal more happiness. 

Where did this start?  Interestingly enough, there is a connection between happiness and GDP going back to the late 1700’s, when an Englishman named Jeremy Bentham outlined a philosophy to assess the merits of actions based on how much happiness said action produced, using pain and pleasure as measurables.  Which, not surprisingly, turned out to be problematic, given individuals vastly different perspectives on what constitutes pain or pleasure.  So a new measure was born.  “Economists, the most enthusiastic adopters of the concept, came to focus instead on the tangible expression of people’s needs and desires: what they were willing to spend money on.”

Consumption is generally viewed to be the silver bullet for a healthy economy.  In a recession?  Pump stimulus money into the economy, so we can buy more stuff.  Great idea!  But I’ll make sure to buy local, so I’m not lining the pockets of those greedy bastards that got us into this mess in the first place. 

Stacey Mitchell, in a TEDxDirigo talk “We Can’t Shop Our Way to a Better Economy”, outlines some pretty terrifying realities.  We are predominantly beholden to a handful of conglomerates.  “Over 40% of the nation’s milk supply is now processed by a single company…if you’re a dairy farmer, that means it’s pretty hard to get a fair price for your milk.  If you’re a consumer you still have this illusion of choice because this one company markets under dozens of different brands.”  “One third of everything we buy online now comes from a single company.”  She argues that buying local alone won’t get us out of the recession.  Yes, small farms are twice as productive per acre with fewer negative environmental impacts.  Yes, big box stores pay criminally low wages and don’t improve the local economies.  “If they aren’t outperforming, if they aren’t delivering better outcomes, how is it that these giant companies have become so dominant?  The answer is that they’ve used their market power and their political influence to rig the game.  Since 1995 we’ve given over $275 billion to farms through the farm bill; almost 87% of those dollars went to 10% of the largest farms, and most of the money was spent on a handful of big commodity crops, like corn and soybeans.  These are the building blocks of processed foods.  No wonder that a quarter pounder usually costs less than a pound of locally grown broccoli.”

She outlines the importance of communities in changing our economic structures.  Research shows that we are seven times more likely to have a conversation at the farmer’s market than a big box store.  Communities with locally owned businesses have stronger social networks, which give them an edge in innovation.  A locally owned bank that makes a 30-year mortgage doesn’t sell the mortgage—it’s in their best interest for the homeowner not to default, because a foreclosure for the homeowner is just as devastating to the local bank. 

To me this is a critical component of where we need to go.  Rather than looking at “How do we stimulate more spending to improve the economy” we need to look at Quality of Life.  Are our citizens able to access all of the basic necessities of life, are we able to provide them?  Are we designing communities that encourage social connectivity, mental and physical health, financial stability, and inclusion?

So where do we go from here?  Many are embracing the idea of Gross Domestic Happiness.  A group of foundations are developing a Social Competitiveness Index, which will “measure and compare the capacity of countries—government, the private sector and civil society, working together—to innovate and to test and scale up solutions to the social and environmental problems that they face in the 21st century.”  Some are pushing for “beyond GDP metrics”, and asking credit rating agencies such as Moody’s to rate the creditworthiness of companies and national economies by societal well being and quality of life, our planet’s carrying capacity and ecological indicators.  And many are choosing to buy local, to consume less, to hang out on their front porch with the neighbors instead of going to the mall.  I’ll be on my porch. 

“Our Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.  It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them.  It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.  It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities… Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play.  It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.  It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.  And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”  ~Robert F. Kennedy, 1968

A Call to Arms

 “Business is the only mechanism on the planet today powerful enough to produce the changes necessary to reverse global environmental and social degradation”. ~Paul Hawken

A Call to Arms (from Merriam-Webster)

1. A summons to engage in active hostilities
2. A summons, invitation or appeal to undertake a particular course of action

First known use: 1791.  Other uses found on Wikipedia and Google: British made plastic action figures (fitting, considering that plastic pollution is choking our planet); an episode of the television series Charmed; the first book in a sci-fi trilogy by Alan Dean Foster about interstellar war; or an album from hardcore punk band Sick of it All (well, that sounds about right).  And from Urban Dictionary: An event that causes people to become militant or vigilante, often, against the feel of the majority, or a large number of people. 

I found these Merriam-Webster and Urban Dictionary definitions both interesting and contradictory.  On the one hand, the phrase outlines a sure path to conflict, “active hostilities”; on the other hand, an invitation for collaboration.  I believe we are faced with both. 

Ray Anderson has given us a call to arms.  He calls out business for being a “major culprit in causing the decline” of our ecosystem.  He so eloquently states that we need a “clear, demonstrable alternative to the take à make à waste process of digging up the Earth and converting it to pollution.”  He urges us to take nothing from the Earth that the Earth cannot replenish, and to do no harm.  He has clearly demonstrated through the success at Interface that this is a very smart and lucrative business strategy.  We haven’t listened. 

Ray Anderson isn’t the only one urging business to change.  Organizations like 350.org and the Biomimicry Institute have come into existence because of the crisis we now find ourselves in.  Paul Hawken, in The Ecology of Commerce, outlines a change in the culture of business that includes quality of life and the restoration of human and natural capital; not that business needs to stop operating to save the environment, but that business is the only thing that can save it.  I’ve used this Paul Hawken quote for years; it’s actually the opening sentence on the business plan I wrote for YBP’s UnCommon Sense sustainable operations leadership program. 

Major corporations across the globe are recognizing not only the positive economic benefits of sustainability, but also the very real threats to the existence of their businesses if they choose to stay on the “business as usual” path.  Nike, once under fire for using sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) as the “air” in Nike air—SF6 is a greenhouse gas 22,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide—is now on a path to achieve zero waste, zero toxins and 100% recoverable product by 2020 (coincidentally, spurred by an epiphany after a presentation by Paul Hawken in 1995). 

Beyond business, the significance of our President-elect isn’t lost on me.  Obama has an opportunity to either seize or to squander.  He is serving his final term, so will (hopefully) not be timid in the face of potential re-election.  He may be timid for other reasons, but at least that obstacle is off the table.  Will we see Obama focus more intently on environmental issues, despite his radio silence on climate change during the campaign?  Let’s hope so.  Obama did say in his acceptance speech: “We want our children to live in an America that isn’t burdened by debt, that isn’t weakened by inequality, that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.” 

Adam Lowry, founder of Method, wrote in a recent article on what the election results mean for climate policy: “Obama’s #1 priority should not be policy change, but cultural change in Washington.  Obama needs to focus his leadership on fighting obstructionism on both sides of the aisle, and I believe his success or failure on green business and broader climate issues rests almost entirely on his ability to be effective in driving this cultural change that will eradicate obstructionism from Washington.  This is something that a single individual can do, but it will require a shift in Obama’s leadership from where he’s been focused (on policy, and the American people policy impacts -- a noble pursuit) to leading his colleagues in Washington much the way a CEO leads his company, by exemplifying the behavior he/she wants modeled, and making it unacceptable to bicker, fight, or undermine progress in the name of partisanship or personal gain.  If he’s successful in that, then the policy change we need on climate and green business issues is possible.  Without it, unfortunately, it is not.” 

I believe that Mr. Lowry is correct.  If we don’t do something to change our political culture, we stand next to no chance of making meaningful change in this race to prolong our time here on planet Earth.  Or is it Eaarth?

Bill McKibben, in Eaarth, outlines a bleak picture, not of our future, but of our present.  For decades we spoke about global warming in the future tense, and the importance of saving the Earth for future generations.  But the stark reality he outlines clearly demonstrates that climate change is not a future concern; it is a current reality.  And the damage done may not be reversible.  “We’re not, in other words, going to get back the planet we used to have, the one on which our civilization developed.  We’re like the guy who ate steak for dinner every night and let his cholesterol top 300 and had the heart attack.  Now he dines on Lipitor and walks on the treadmill but half his heart is dead tissue.  We’re like the guy who smoked for forty years and then he had a stroke.  He doesn’t smoke anymore, but the left side of his body doesn’t work either…No one is going to refreeze the arctic for us, or restore the pH of the oceans, and given the momentum of global warming we’re likely to cross many more thresholds even if we all convert to solar power and bicycles this afternoon.” 

So, back to business.  What can business do?  What will business do?  We’ll find out.  Grateful that we’ll all be on the front lines, changing business for good. 

“Unless somebody leads, nobody will.”  ~Ray Anderson

Economic Gardening: Planting the Seed for a Healthier Economy

"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus."
-- MARK TWAIN

 

When we look at assets and liabilities, we traditionally identify such things as cash, investments, inventory, equipment, or land as assets and accounts payable, salaries, and debts as liabilities.  This is all well and good, and easy to track from a numbers standpoint.

Thinking about assets and liabilities on a community level (using Montana/Greater Yellowstone as an example), we might identify as assets our 4-year universities and 2-year community colleges, and the students and families they bring to our communities from outside.  The tourism potential of our natural resources in our three National Parks and boundless recreation resources.  The quality of our schools, our hospitals, our emergency services, our roads.  The economic potential of our farm and ranch lands or timber on public lands.  Liabilities might include cheap outsourced labor, fewer skilled workers.  The seasonality of our economies, competition for tourism from other communities.  And more recently, the unpredictable yet measurable liabilities of wildfires, mudslides, record low snow years, or river closures due to drought. 

How do we grow our “assets”, that is, our GDP within our community, and increase our economy?  One traditional approach would be to identify some potential outside entity, a manufacturer or large tech firm for instance, and entice them to move their operations to your community.  Another might be to take advantage of a natural resource that can be extracted (or more appropriately, as in the case of the Bakken Oil Fields, exploited) for financial gain.  We don’t generally look at this from a systems perspective—how are our short-term actions today tied to long-term ramifications?  We’re just interested in creating jobs, any kind of jobs, to boost the local economy. 

Economic gardening flips this idea on its head.  Economic gardening asks, “What resources do we have here in our community already, in which we can invest and help grow?”  The concept is to grow an economy from the inside out. 

According to Chris Gibbons, the co-creator of Economic Gardening, “90% of the businesses in the United States have 10 or fewer employees, and never grow beyond that.  The stage 2 companies, those with 10-100 employees, have the greatest intention and capacity for growth.  This category comprises about 10% of the businesses in the country and about 38-40% of the job growth.  The larger companies, the Fortune 500 have not added a net new job in the US since 2000; they are moving jobs overseas.” 

YourEconomy.org, a free business census providing aggregate data on business performance over time from a local, regional and national perspective (a resource developed by the Edward Lowe Foundation, which houses the National Center for Economic Gardening), shows that “small businesses create the lion’s share of all jobs in the U.S. Recent job growth figures show that:

• Resident companies, those that are either stand-alone businesses in the area or businesses with headquarters in the same state, created nearly 100 percent of job growth in the U.S. between 2006 and 2008
• Of these resident establishments, self-employed individuals and companies with two to nine employees created virtually all of these new jobs”

This challenges the concept that the best way to grow your economy is to have a huge outside company swoop in and employ everyone, but rather the focus should be on small businesses and local entrepreneurs within your community to provide them with the data, training and resources needed to grow their operations.  “Recruiting a company is economic hunting, that is if you go and recruit a company to move into a town…if you stay and work with the entrepreneurs in a community, that’s economic gardening,” says Gibbons. 

Economic Gardening focuses on cultivating a culture to go beyond physical infrastructure and consider quality of life, intellectual capital, and cultivating local talent.  It creates a structure to provide information and data to businesses to help them not only survive but also grow and thrive. Small companies have a limited capacity to conduct market research, tools for team building and system development.  Economic gardening increases the capacity of those businesses to access and utilize information.  Additionally, an economic gardening culture helps facilitate connections among businesses and the resources and people that can take them to the next level; it inherently minimizes the competitive “winner takes all” approach to business and relies on collaboration and information sharing.  The Edward Lowe Foundation has a useful info sheet that dives deeper into this concept and offers tools, resources and certification programs.

I have a strong interest in this concept, working with businesses across Greater Yellowstone that primarily fall into the stage 2 or smaller categories.  What I don’t see in this equation of assets and liabilities so far are people, aside from the listing of payment for their services as a liability.  Why is it that we do not support or even realize our greatest assets, those of the people in our communities, who are passionate and dedicated to the community? People don’t move to Montana because they can make big bucks.  They move here because they love the land, they love the communities.  Or they grew up here are trying to figure out a way they can afford to move back.  In Greater Yellowstone we have a saying: “Our children are our greatest export”.  They can’t afford to stay here, because there aren’t enough jobs to entice them to stay, to allow them financially to stay.  So they move on, to communities that can provide them with a career and income to support their families. 

Montana realizes this, and has embraced the concept of economic gardening.  Local governments are employing economic gardening as a strategy for growth and community revitalization.  The Montana Economic Developers Association (MEDA), a statewide organization, has an economic gardening working group.  Its purpose is “to raise awareness among economic developers and share information regarding the process of Economic Gardening to encourage planned entrepreneurship growth in Montana”. 

To encourage planned entrepreneurship growth.  What a fabulous concept.  It’s one I hope more communities will embrace in the future.