Sunday, November 11, 2012

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


Sunday, November 4, 2012

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. 

A Poignant Plea from No Impact Man



Colin Beavan · 4,900 like this
11 hours ago · 
  • "Dear friends,

    I don't say this often but I am scared. Not scared to the point of paralysis. Not scared enough to run away. Not scared enough to stop trying to help. Not scared enough to think we're doomed. Just scared enough to feel worried for myself, my family, my friends, my community, my country, and my world.

    I was lucky when Hurricane Sandy hit. My daughter Bella and I put on our waterproofs in the early hours and ran around Brooklyn's Fort Greene park in the wind and rain with Frankie--our dog--and our Occupy Wall Street activist friend/hero Monica Hunken.

    That night, the lights flickered a couple of times. I lost my internet for three hours. Frankie the dog hid in the upstairs bathroom bathtub. That was the extent of it.

    But when I woke up, lower Manhattan was flooded and without power. All the coastal parts of Brooklyn and Queens from Red Hook to Coney Island through the Rockaways and Hamilton Beach were hammered. The wind had driven a fire through Queens that destroyed so many houses. And the world's most amazing subway system was brought to its knees. To say nothing of poor Staten Island and coastal New Jersey.

    We in the Tri-State Area didn't get Katrina. But we got a taste of her.

    Yes, there are some good parts. New Yorkers have been showing up some of the emergency shelters in such numbers that they have been turned away. There are donation drives and volunteer efforts. And about a gazillion New Yorkers have taken to cycling.

    But there is a lot of suffering. And a lot of fear not of what Sandy brought. But of what next year's storm will bring. And the year after that. And after that. First Irene, now Sandy, for how many years in a row can New York City withstand a "once in a century" storm, people are asking?

    I hung up the phone with a friend just a few minutes ago. She said, "In some ways, this is way more scarey than 9/11, because you get the feeling that it could happen again and again and again."

    In a coffee shop this afternoon, everyone at every table was talking about climate change. People are talking about where they will go next time. To an aunt's in New Hampshire. A friend with three cottages in Maine. People are talking about their escape plan for when New York stops functioning.

    Katrina, Irene, Sandy, droughts all summer, busted corn crops, water shortages in the southwest: it's hard to believe we aren't seeing what the climate scientists predicted. But sooner. Way sooner than they said.

    It feels ironic and sad. That the war in Iraq sparked by 9/11 may have got us what we wanted--control over more oil. But that burning that self-same oil has brought us another mini-9/11. Except that this one we are kind of doing to ourselves.

    Fracking--the drilling for natural gas by injecting poisonous chemicals into the same rock formations that our drinking comes from. Fighting in the Middle East. Drilling in the arctic. Mountaintop removal in Appalachia. Mining the Canadian tar sands. Building the pipelines. This is bonkers.

    Especially when the sun shines everywhere. The wind blows everywhere. The rivers run everywhere. We can generate our power in better, cheaper, safer ways.

    Of course, there are reasons for resistance. Our economy is based on fossil fuels. Changing it would be a gargantuan effort. There would be a cost to a transition. But the costs of not making the transition will be much higher. Ask the NY Mass Transit Authority, which is still pumping out the tunnels. Or ask the citizens of New Orleans.

    But this isn't a bitch fest. It's an appeal.

    Years ago, when I did the No Impact Man experiment, I went on the Good Morning America show and I said it wasn't important that all Americans did as much as I did. "We must each just do something," I said.

    I was mistaken. We must each do a lot.

    We all--including me--have a tendency to think that shaking our fist at the TV news or leaving an angry comment on a blog or "clictivism" is some sort of an expression. We need to do more. Not just more at home, but more in our civic engagement, more in the citizen guiding of how our society moves forward.

    In fact, I'd argue that we--all of us--need to find a way to dedicate at least some part of our lives to solving our problems. Climate change we need to fix, yes. But also we need to accept that the economic system we live in is driving that climate change. Consumption, as the basis for economy, has become like a winter coat that needs to be shed. It no longer serves us.

    Now, I'm not going to claim that I know what each of us should do, how each of us should help to bring about the Great Transformation. I don't think anyone exactly knows. This, by the way, was the great criticism of Occupy Wall Street, back in the day. That they didn't say exactly what we should do. They didn't make their demands clear, the press kept saying.

    That was Occupy's strength in my view. The willingness to bring attention to problems we don't quite know the solutions for. Occupy didn't have concrete demands because none of us quite know what we should be demanding quite yet. Occupy was saying "stop ignoring problems just because we don't know the solution!!!!!!"

    You may disagree with me. You may say, we know the solution, it's renewable energy. But where is the political will to bring that change about when the fossil fuel industry has spent $150 million in this election cycle?

    You may say, the solution is getting corporate money out of politics. But how do we do that when the politicians we need to vote for such a thing are the beneficiaries of that self-same corporate money?

    You may say, the solution lies in measuring Gross National Happiness instead of Gross Domestic Product. But how do we get that done?

    We have lots of ideas about what would fix things, but we have no idea how to actually get those ideas instituted. That's kind of where we are at a loss. How do we actually bring about the change?

    It's not to say we can't bring it about. But it is to say that a lot more of us are going to have to join the search for the solutions and the effort to institute them.

    In a way, what I am saying is the same as what Occupy said: "Stop pretending that you can't help just because you don't know exactly how to help!!!!!!"

    We all have to start dedicating some of our lives to these problems. Not just voting for the right people. Not just leaving comments on blogs. Not just having intense conversations over coffee.

    So what then?

    Here's a thought. Decide to dedicate five to ten hours a week to helping figure out what to do. Then use those five to ten hours to bring your personal gifts to the search for societal solutions and the means of implementing them.

    If you are political then, whatever side of the aisle you are on, start going to your party's meetings and insist that they address themselves to the major, new-world problems we are facing instead of grumbling over the same stuff they have for 50 years. Get them to try to be leaders instead of winners.

    If you are an artist or musician or writer, use your talents to bring more and more attention to our problems and the quest for the solution. Be a constant reminder of the peril our society and world faces.

    If you are a therapist or life coach, find a way to introduce to your clients the idea that the problems they face are the same problems all of us are facing. Financial insecurity, for example, is something we can fix together better than any one of us can fix alone.

    If you are a banker, bring your personal values and your heart and soul to work with you. The expression "it's only business" has to be jettisoned. This idea that the free market will fix things so we can ignore the dictates of our conscience needs to be fixed.

    If you have a spare bedroom, find an activist who can't drag themselves away from the work they are doing for all of us long enough to earn themselves some rent. Home and safety for those on the front line of social change is a wonderful service.

    If you have two feet, march with my friends at 350.org whenever you have a chance.

    All of us have our own ways to help.

    One thing is clear, whatever our individual contribution, every one of us needs to be moving back into the political system and the democracy. We are all so disgusted by it that our instinct is to abandon it. In this case, our instinct is wrong. We totally need to Occupy our democracy. We need to flood it with people, with us.

    Overall, though, my point here is that all of us have a role to play in our cultural healing. There is no leader who can tell us how to contribute. Each of us has to look around us and use our own minds and souls to see what needs doing and how we are best suited to do it. Each of us must contribute in our own way.

    I began this piece by saying that I'm scared. Because I am. But my fear is just a sign that I need to do something. There is really only one thing I know how to do--to write. And so I'm doing it. I don't know if if will help. But it is the one thing I know how to do.

    What is the one thing you know how to do? What is the one thing you can dedicate a slice of your life to?

    We can't leave it to the politicians or the designers or the Occupiers or the activists. It's up to each of us.

    Because--and I've said and written this many times--the question is not whether each of us is the type of person who can make a difference. The question is whether we are the type of people who want to try to make a difference. And Sandy has told us we all need each other to try.

    Love,
    Colin"