Personal Musings

Words And Meanings: We Go Where Language Takes Us

Thursday, September 04, 2008 / AS

Words influence us in many ways. Words can move us, alter our attitudes, and change our behavior. Politicians and judges know that their power to define words legally is the power to shape the future, which is why lobbyists and lawyers are highly paid to contort language beyond its plain meaning.

Of course, it isn't only the legal definition of words that matters. Advertisers are constantly reshaping our understanding of words like free and new to give their products fresh luster. In the area of sustainability, just consider how the emergence of words like stakeholder and transparency have changed our understanding of how businesses ought to behave, or how the phrase corporate responsibility, by expanding to include everything from human rights to community impacts to diversity, has raised the bar for companies.

For many Jews, the word kosher conveys deep meaning, associated with ideas such as goodness, purity, and quality. For me, it evokes memories of cheese blintzes, frying onions, and of my grandmothers, both of whom kept kosher homes and for whom preparing and serving kosher food was a way of saying, "I love you, so eat."

And in America, the multicultural melting pot, the word kosher has entered the vocabulary of millions of non-Jews as a synonym for legitimate, honest, trustworthy —a kind of verbal Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

But the meanings of words can be fragile — as a recent story out of Postville, Iowa, demonstrates.

The nation's largest producer of kosher meat, a company called Agriprocessors located in Postville, has been cited for violating a slew of environmental and safety laws including, most egregiously, those prohibiting child labor. State investigators identified 57 underage workers working at the company. The state labor commissioner said he had never seen anything like it in his thirty years in the field. Children as young as thirteen were reportedly wielding knives on the killing floor; some teenagers were working 17-hour shifts, six days a week. Allegations have also been made of sexual harassment, shorted wages, favoritism and bribery in work assignments, inadequate safety practices, food contamination, and environmental violations.

Of course, we always need to acknowledge that those accused of such misdeeds are innocent until proven guilty. But if even a fraction of the allegations are true, it's a terribly sad story, one that suggests a number of significant lessons. Among other things, this episode should lay to rest the common notion that child labor is not an issue in this country. In the Jewish world, it has also rekindled a long-standing argument about the meaning of the word kosher.

Most traditionalists say that kosher means simply that a food product conforms to the technical requirements of kosher practice as defined by Jewish law, interpreted by rabbinic experts, and certified by specially-designated organizations. If a cut of meat, for example, is taken from a permissible animal that has been slaughtered, processed, and prepared under rabbinic supervision, then it is kosher —period.

Many progressives, on the other hand, argue that kosher should embody a broader set of standards, closer to the secular meaning of the word, including healthy and safe workplace conditions, legal compliance, and environmental protection, as well as more general concepts of corporate responsibility and fairness.

A third position has also emerged, something of a middle ground, called Hekhsher Tzedek ("justice certification" in Hebrew), which seeks to create a new kind of certification alongside the traditional kosher one. This "God Housekeeping Seal" (forgive me) would include standards for wages and benefits, worker safety, animal welfare, and environmental protection.

Although many agree with the spirit of Hekhsher Tzedek, I think its practical effect may be to delay or derail the necessary expansion of the definition of kosher. According to The New York Times, Rabbi Morris J. Allen, who is spearheading the Hekhsher Tzedek campaign, disavows any desire "to change ancient kosher dietary laws, which are traditionally administered by Orthodox Jews."

With all due respect, I think this is a big mistake. Words must evolve if our thinking and actions are to evolve. In striking down the practice of government-sanctioned racial segregation in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court observed that the phrase used to justify it, "separate but equal," was a contradiction in terms. As the historic decision noted, "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

In effect, the court was declaring that the meaning of the word equal had to evolve to meet the demands of a higher standard of justice. Eventually, practically all Americans came to agree.

Perhaps the problem with the word kosher is that it's a relic of ancient religious practice now being applied in a modern, secular context —that of contemporary business practice. Relying on a separate vocabulary will almost always impede rather than hasten the transformation of mainstream thinking. We see this in the way the language of corporate social responsibility (CSR) tends to separate it from mainstream business thinking. CSR reports unintentionally provide an "alternative certification" separate from —and unequal to —the company's financial reporting.

Companies that claim to want sustainability as part of their DNA but who rely on CSR reporting as the chief mechanism are actually providing evidence that sustainability is not part of their daily business regimen but rather a separate way of thinking, relegated to a sustainability "ghetto" (to use another word with roots in Jewish history).

I think the time is ripe to challenge the traditionalists in both the Jewish and business practice by working towards one vocabulary, one way of measuring and reporting progress.

In time, this may entail redefining some basic business terms and concepts. Someday the word profit, for example, may expand to include, at least by inference, some indication of how the profit was made. (We already have phrases like blood diamond and dirty gold to describe illegitimate profits.) The simple word trade is developing a counterpart with ethical implications, fair trade. Economist Jeffrey Sachs suggests that we should think less about wealth and more about commonwealth. In all these cases, a change in thinking demands, or drives, a change in the very language of business.

Words shape thought; thoughts shape actions; and actions shape the future. Are profits made by exploiting workers or despoiling the environment kosher? It depends what you mean.

Think You're An Environmentalist? Prove You Mean It

Wednesday, August 13, 2008 / KW

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is a big boy —author of several best-selling books and one of America's most influential opinion-shapers about topics like globalization, economic policy, the "war on terror," and the energy crisis. Over the years, his ideas have been subject to plenty of scrutiny and criticism. But I was a bit startled to see his recent column on sustainable energy policy attacked by Daniel Luzer in the respectable Columbia Journalism Review not on the basis of any logical or factual errors but on purely personal grounds:

Friedman . . . is married to Ann Bucksbaum, the heiress to the $2.7 billion General Growth Properties fortune. Founded by Friedman's father-in-law in 1954, GGP is America’s second largest real estate investment trust and owns, develops, and operates regional shopping malls in forty-one states.

That's right, malls. Fat, energy-hogging, climate controlled, sprawl-inducing — many of the most palpable examples of American waste and ecological irresponsibility are owned and managed by Tom Friedman's family.

This makes [Friedman's] gee-why-don't-you-write-your-congressman naivete a little hard to take. Friedman actually has direct access to a company with some control over the level of waste the United States perpetuates on the world.

Is this fair or reasonable? Arguably not. Who knows how much actual influence Tom Friedman wields over the company his father-in-law founded? Nor does Luzer's article offer any information as to whether GGP has taken any steps to move the properties it manages toward greater energy efficiency or eco-responsibility. Apparently, as far as Luzer is concerned, the fact that GGP runs malls is damning in itself — and it thoroughly undermines Friedman's credibility.

This little episode offers an interesting reflection on the place of sustainability in the American dialogue today. Although more and more people now recognize the legitimacy of sustainability issues in the political and business arenas, there is somehow still a need to prove one's bona fides before advancing a sustainability argument —as though, unless you can somehow prove your personal purity, you're likely to be considered a hypocrite just for talking about sustainability. (Remember the attacks on Al Gore for owning a big house and flying around the world by jet.) And as Luzer's column suggests, criticism of your sincerity is just as likely to come from the left (i.e. from environmental advocates) as from the right (i.e. environmental skeptics).

It's funny: Anyone can make an argument on behalf of self-serving, absolute laissez-faire policies ("Down with regulation! Drill in Yellowstone! Pollute at will!") without having their right to make that argument questioned. The assumed sincerity of self-interest insulates the anti-sustainability crowd from this form of criticism. Environmental advocates are held to a higher standard, one that extends not only to their own behavior but even to that of that families.

If you're a CEO working to position your company at the forefront of the sustainable business movement, you should devote a little time to analyzing (and, if necessary, "cleaning up") your personal behavior as well, including the kinds of cars you drive, the houses you own, and the holdings in your retirement account. If your efforts on behalf of sustainability provoke resistance or resentment from any quarters, you can be sure all those purely personal matters will come under scrutiny —fair and reasonable or not.

If it can happen to Tom Friedman, it can happen to you.

Mall of America: An Amazing, Appalling Monument To An Era

Monday, July 14, 2008 / AS

I recently visited St. Paul, Minnesota, with my seven-year-old daughter to attend the wedding of a friend. At the suggestion of the bride, we stayed at the Radisson Hotel Bloomington, near the airport. "It’s connected to the Mall of America Water Park. Your daughter will be in heaven."

Now, I like Minnesota a lot, especially the Twin Cities: fabulous public universities, the highest literacy rate in the nation, and millions of my kind of people—progressive Democrats, and nice folks too. But this trip threw me for a loop, literally and figuratively.

We checked in and went straight to the water park. "America’s Biggest Indoor Water Park" does not nearly begin to describe the incredible size, variety, and complexity of its many features, which involve pumping millions of gallons of water up and down three-story water slides, surfing safaris, lazy rivers, family rafting excursions, gigantic buckets that fill until they tip over and douse you, artificial beaches with three-foot waves, and much more.

If you’re among those who are concerned about the wastefulness of shipping bottled water around the world, we are talking about waste of another order of magnitude here. Picture—as just one example—thousands of jets of water being pumped up a 30-degree incline so hard and fast that a 200-pound man can actually "surf" along it without ever slipping towards the bottom. And this thing runs from nine a.m. until ten p.m. every day, whether someone is riding the wave or not.

It's well known that Americans, who make up just five percent of the world's population, consume twenty-five percent of its energy resources. Who knew how much of it went to hanging ten in Bloomington?

Don’t get me wrong, my daughter and I had the time of our lives—screaming hilarity, endless giggling, and serious father-daughter bonding as we spent about the monthly income of the average Kenyan to cavort indoors while outside was one of the most beautiful early summer days imaginable.

I thought this was a guilty pleasure until we dried, changed, and crossed the street to experience the Mall of America (MOA).

Of course, it's the largest mall in America —which must mean the world, right? Wrong: A little research reveals that the Mall of America is actually seventeenth on the list of the world's largest malls. As measured by Gross Leasable Area (GLA), it's less than half the size of the South China Mall in Dongguan, China —yet another category in which the United States is being left in the dust by countries many of us still think of as second-rate competition.

Nonetheless, Mall of America boasts a startling list of superlatives. It has an amusement park at its center five times the size of the water park. We rode several different roller-coasters, including Pepsi's Orange Streak (see how I worked in the name of my client there?), but decided to skip the nausea-inducing Splat-O-Sphere after watching it haul 75 people up sixty feet, then drop them fifty-nine feet back down.

Of course, shopping is the main attraction. The mall directory lists over 520 retail stores and restaurants on three gigantic floors. The first-time shopper orients herself by locating the four humongous anchor tenants—Macy’s, Nordstrom, Bloomingdale's, and Sears—each of which occupies all three stories and is located at one corner of the mall.

I have written about over-consumption, but we need a new word to describe what happens at MOA. The term mega-consumption comes to mind. You can shop at 17 jewelers, get footwear at 24 shoe stores, and dine at any and all of 74 eateries. Looking for a souvenir to bring home? MOA houses 37 gift shops, from the ubiquitous Yankee Candle and Disney store to regional establishments like Love From Minnesota and the Minnesota Wild Hockey Lodge.

We were in Minnesota for exactly 41 hours (25 of them awake), enough for three trips to the mall. We found great clothing bargains for my fashion-conscious daughter as well as a lifetime supply of SpongeBob SquarePants memorabilia.

I'm still trying to recover from the trip. Not the expense, but the alternating sense of terror and glee that the mall and the water park inspired in me.

I wonder what people will see and think when they visit the same site two hundred years from now. My guess is that the water park will be long gone, a victim of rising energy prices and water shortages. But the mall may still be there, unless virtual shopping has replaced the real deal—or society as we know it has collapsed under its own weight due to causes it will take some future Jared Diamond to analyze and chronicle. In which case MOA will be an abandoned hulk, overgrown by the returning north woods and perhaps used for shelter by animals and the occasional homeless human.

The few witnesses who wander past will probably think, "In their time, they lived like gods." Then again, they may wonder, "What the hell were they thinking?" Maybe both.

This is the first in a new series of columns we're writing for Ethical Corporation magazine.

A Critic Shows How Reporters Get The Eco-Story Wrong

Thursday, June 26, 2008 / KW

Check out this nice little piece from the Columbia Journalism Review online about how and why environmental reporting goes wrong, often generating more buzz and controversy than information (let alone wisdom).

Some of the problems highlighted by author David Downs are pretty much unavoidable. For example, there's the need to constantly define and explain environmental terms and scientific principles, which eats up precious column space and frustrates journalists who want to write brief, snappy, alluring stories. Other problems are products of today's culture of journalism, such as the pressure to build stories around great quotes (whether or not those quotes are truly enlightening) and the urge to treat every factoid or scientific study as important (whether those details represent outliers or genuinely meaningful symptoms of real change).

In any case, it's clear that journalists and editors who read Downs's article and make a conscientious effort to avoid the mistakes he lists will do a better job of informing readers about environments issues. Come to think of it, there are reporters covering lots of other fields, especially politics, who could benefit from a similar analysis.

No Peace For The Guy With A "GetSustainable" Address

Saturday, April 19, 2008 / AS

This is starting to get annoying. Two years ago, when the book came out and I set up my mini-consulting firm, my genius computer guy Dan suggested I use the e-mail address andy@getsustainable.net. I thought that was kind of cute, so I said okay.

For about a year and a half, no one except people in my circle remarked on this address.

But about three months ago, something weird started happening. I was on the phone with Expedia trying to reserve a flight for the next day when the Expedia representative on the phone asked me for my email address. I said “andy@getsustainable.net” and expected to move on. Instead, a long pause ensued, then the guy said,”That’s cool, I’m into that” and proceeded to tell me about the solar panels he had installed on his roof in 1993. For about five minutes, which I did not have, he went on and on.

Just now, I was trying to renew my subscription to MLB.com so I could listen to the Sox game up here on the third floor, when after a ten-minute wait to get an operator on the line, I got one who wanted to know all about why I had the email address, what I did, and where could she get a copy of the book? (Hey, fair is fair.) She was way into recycling and human rights and was all about sustainability and, and, and ...

I put my foot down when she started to read from my website, and I realized that the Sox were scoring runs left and right (I could get the box score) and I was missing it. But she wouldn’t hook me up until she told me how important this was to her. Jeez ...

Anyhow, there is something going on out there. But I’m going back to andysavitz@comcast.net.

Friendly Adversaries —Green Activists And Environmental Executives

Tuesday, April 15, 2008 / KW

Our friend Joel Makower sends us a link to the latest issue of GreenBiz.com, one of the best online sites for sustainability news. Joel also links to stories about how diverse companies —Ford, Wal-Mart, Fiji Water, and Sierra Pacific —are all shifting their business plans in response to pressure from environmental activists. In his email, Joel then comments:

Such developments notwithstanding, my sense is that many of the environmental watchdogs have lost their bite. One reason is that while times have changed, many activists haven't. Yesterday's politics of complaint — of saying no and accepting nothing less than perfect — resonate less in a world where companies increasingly are on the march, proactively examining and addressing their impacts. With few exceptions (Environmental Defense Fund being the most prominent), NGOs haven't yet learned how to play "good cop," saying to companies the equivalent of "Thank you, now do more." It's always, "No, that's not good enough."

Still, as these stories suggest, the bad cop is still very much on the beat. This is a good thing. A healthy activist sector is much needed — and even welcomed by some corporate types. More than a few environmental professionals inside big companies have confessed to me their appreciation of activists in prodding their bosses in ways that the professionals hadn't succeeded in doing themselves. In some cases, activist campaigns justify the professionals' existence, giving them a new lease on life — or, at least, their jobs.

There's an old story about Franklin D. Roosevelt that captures some of this interplay. A group of activists met with FDR in the Oval Office to urge his support for some liberal reform (it doesn't matter what). After listening to their arguments, Roosevelt responded, "Okay, you've convinced me. Now go out and put pressure on me."

Roosevelt's point: Even a president can't always act with perfect freedom. He too faces constraints — powerful leaders in Congress, bureaucratic resistance and inertia, opposition from state and local government leaders, potential roadblocks in the courts, and so on. Sometimes a president needs "pressure" in the form of a visible, well-organized, vocal, and articulate public movement to provide him with both political cover and supportive energy that permits him to do what he really wants to do anyway.

Environmental activists can play a similar role as "friendly adversaries" for sympathetic executives inside corporate America.

Globalization Meets Localization —Trends In Collision That Can Work For You

Tuesday, April 15, 2008 / KW

Andy Savitz and Melissa Tritter have penned this story in the current edition of Ethical Corporation, highlighting a shift that has sneaked up on many of us in business — the emergence of "localization" as a force that is beginning to rival globalization in importance. (Actually those crazy Brits at EC insist on spelling it "localisation" — go figure.)

The story explains the new trend, describes how companies like PepsiCo and Whole Foods are capitalizing on it, and offers some advice for business managers on what it all means. The elevator version of their take-away:

The key is to be both big and small at the same time — big in terms of resources, scale, and positive impact; small in terms of supporting local economies and the consumers who care about them. To the extent that a large company can do all this, the same forces that are currently fuelling the localisation movement will support them, making it easier to do business in a profitable, sustainable fashion.

Follow the link to read the whole thing — worth a look, in our not-so-humble opinion.

It's All About Seoul

Wednesday, April 09, 2008 / KW

Congratulations to the crack Global Rights Department at our publisher, Jossey-Bass, for concluding a sale of the Korean translation rights to our book, The Triple Bottom Line, to Keorum Publishing Co. According to the company's website, Keorum Publishing's motto is "Enriched Lives, New Knowledge," which sounds fine to us.

Two, Three, Many Forms Of Sustainability

Friday, March 21, 2008 / KW

In a world where fast-growing giants like India and China are rapidly catching up to the West in terms of their consumption — and the burden they place on the environment — we sometimes assume that creating sustainable approaches to growth will involve impositions on the developing world.

This assumption helps produce friction around environmentalism between the world's haves and have-nots. The fear is that newly-enlightened Western thinkers will "change the rules" and prevent the countries of the global South from claiming their fair share of consumption — all in the name of sustainability.

But maybe there's an alternative. Maybe the peoples of the developing world will devise their own environmental solutions, based on ideas about respect for nature, our dependence on the planet, and the unity of life that are deeply embedded in traditional religions and cultures.

That's the possibility suggested by this NPR piece about business leaders in the Middle East who see sustainability as naturally linked to Islam and the traditional Arab way of life. Here's a quote from one of the Kuwaiti business people interviewed by NPR:

Think about it. This [the Middle East] is one of the hottest inhabited regions in the world and yet people lived here not only in days before electricity, but in days when people were dirt poor, I mean literally had nothing... There's still memory, individual memory of what it was like in the time before oil. There's still that link to a not-so-distant past.

Doesn't it make sense that peoples in the Middle East are more likely to draw inspiration for their own approach to sustainability from Islam than from Western environmentalists? — just as the peoples of India are more likely to be inspired by Hinduism, and those of China by Buddhism and Confucianism.

I'm no expert on any of these great non-Western faiths, but everything I know about them suggests that they are at least very compatible with the core concepts and ethical requirements of sustainability — at least as much as Christianity and Judaism, and arguably more.

As the global impact of this century's environmental challenges becomes more and more apparent, the need for a global sustainability movement becomes more and more clear. And while such a movement will require international cooperation and some universal standards —tomorrow's improved versions of Kyoto, if you will —it will also require roots in dozens of local cultures.

As a planetary people, we'll need many forms of sustainability, driven by leaders who speak not just in the accents of New York and Portland and Stockholm and Berlin but also those of Abu Dhabi and Mumbai and Kinshasa and Beijing.

Robert F. Kennedy On Sustainable Consumption And The Real Wealth Of America

Wednesday, March 19, 2008 / KW

I thought about Andy's provocative post on sustainable consumption when I discovered that yesterday was the fortieth anniversary of this speech by Robert F. Kennedy. Speaking at the University of Kansas less than three months before his murder, Kennedy contrasted mere consumption with real wealth. Here's an excerpt:

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product — if we judge the United States of America by that — that Gross National Product 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. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife [RFK is referring here to two notorious mass killings of the 1960s]. And the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

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.

One of the big challenges of the twenty-first century for us Americans will be to figure out new ways of measuring our national well-being, beyond traditional yardsticks like Gross Domestic Product. It will be an even greater challenge for business people to figure out how to define success in an era when pushing more stuff out the warehouse door may be an increasingly non-sustainable strategy.

But can anyone doubt that, in the years since Kennedy's speech, the challenge he set forth has become more, not less, acute?

Update: Thanks to Caitlin for sending us an updated link to the video for Kennedy's speech.

Getting Trumped On My First Speech On Sustainability

Tuesday, March 04, 2008 / AS

I do a lot of public speaking on sustainability, but my very first speech after The Triple Bottom Line appeared in print over a year ago is still the most memorable —not for the speech itself, but because of what happened afterwards.

I was running late for the airport and my cab was waiting in front of the hotel. Before I could sit back, the cabdriver asked: "How was your speech?" I looked up and saw, looking at me in his rear view mirror, an older cabbie with a scraggly goatee and a cloth cap.

I asked him how he knew I had been giving a speech, and he told me that the hotel concierge had told him. "What was it about?" he asked.

Hmmm, I thought, how to explain this? "Well, I am an expert on something called sustainability. It's about how companies are expected to do more than just make a profit, and I was speaking about how profits can actually be increased by good social and environmental performance."

He didn't reply, so I tried again.

"Sustainability is about how companies can do the right thing and make money at it."

He still said nothing.

Instead, he reached over into the front passenger seat, and, without taking his eyes off the road, handed back to me a fifteen-page, single-spaced manuscript entitled Sustainable World.

"Read this," he said. "I wrote it three years ago and have given out over 1,700 copies from this very cab."

Huh? The first paragraph began with a quote from the UN Commission On Our Common Future. As I read it, I had three thoughts.

The first one was: "Am I on Candid Camera?"

If you're too young to remember, Candid Camera was a TV show from the 1960s that featured practical jokes played on unsuspecting victims —an early form of reality television. Laugh if you will, but I have three jokester brothers, and it seemed entirely possible that one or all of them had hired an actor and rented a cab to do this to me on my maiden voyage.

I actually accused the cabbie of this. I really did. He assured me he was on the level and had never met my family.

As this sunk in, my next thought was: "Wow, do I have the right book at the right time, or what?"

And then, as I continued to read his highly articulate tract on what companies, governments and NGOs needed to do to save the world, a final and more somber thought occurred: "This guy is a competitor of mine. And at the moment he's 1,600 copies ahead of me."

In hindsight, I realize that the second thought is the most important one. When cabbies are talking and writing about sustainability, can real change be far behind?

Consumption — The Other Side Of Sustainability

Tuesday, February 26, 2008 / AS

In this post, I want to deviate from my usual discussion about sustainability, corporations, and profits.

I want to discuss something that rarely gets discussed in the sustainability world but which I think is going to be a subject of increasing attention. It's the fact that sustainability is really a two-sided coin. On the one side is sustainable production, which is what all of us in business like to talk about —how companies can get leaner and greener. But on the other side is sustainable consumption, which is something that we don’t talk about much.

I want to frame this issues by talking about globalization —not in economic terms, but in environmental and social terms.

One of the most interesting and important aspects of climate change is that it is a global issue with global impacts. If China continues to burn coal at the rate it needs to sustain its economic growth, Manhattan, Boston, and Miami will be threatened by rising seas, and farmers in Kansas and Nebraska will have to switch crops or move. When farmers in Brazil cut down rainforests, the temperature in Boise goes up.

There is no place to run from climate change. Polar bears living at the North and South Poles are threatened.

Globalization has also produced social impacts that are worldwide. We've thrown out most of our toys that were made in China, even after China executed the official who was in charge of product safety. (And we complain about tough government regulations here!) We import so many products from China that their product safety issues affect us directly. To some extent, the same is true for child and slave labor. China's social issues are also our issues, whether we like it or not.

And resource issues have also become global. We are due to run out of oil and a number of metals that we need to feed the manufacturing infrastructure that supplies us with everything from building materials to cutlery.

Water is the most dramatic example of the coming resources crunch. The list of areas that are likely to run out of water in the next thirty to fifty years is scary, and it is already happening right here at home. Las Vegas, the fastest-growing city in the U.S., is built in the middle of a desert, and the lake that supplies it with its water is drying up from the top and silting up from the bottom. Similar things are happening in many large areas of the world.

Andy Liveris, the CEO of Dow, has said that "water is the oil of the 21st century." The Pentagon has conducted scenario planning around the idea that the world will be engulfed in a series of regional wars fought over water in the next century.

But in this globalized world, consumption has not yet become globalized. It's well known that the United States, with only five percent of the world’s population, consumes twenty-five percent of the world's fossil fuel. We have only one fifth of the population of China, but we account for more global warming than they do (although the gap is rapidly shrinking).

Jared Diamond recently observed that the average American consumes 32 times as many resources as the average Kenyan. When you consider that a billion people live on less than $1 a day, that my lunch cost probably $20 and I am already thinking about dinner, you'd think the ratio would be even higher.

Now put this in a global context. It has been calculated that if the rest of the world were to start living at the same standard of living as people in the U.S., it would take twelve planet Earths to support our collective lifestyle. When I think about how much stuff I throw out every week, that doesn't really surprise me either. But as far as we know, we only have the natural resources of one planet Earth at our disposal.

The papers are filled with articles about how people in the West are obese, but you don't read very much about the fact that the economies of the West are also obese.

And you certainly are not likely to hear this from corporations that are in the business of selling more stuff. To the extent they are focused on sustainability, they are focused on being more efficient in manufacturing and selling us more stuff. But if you look at the numbers, the kinds of efficiencies they can make are not going to reduce our consumption to a sustainable level, not by a long shot. We can all buy hybrid cars and low-impact fluorescent bulbs, but that only slows the growth of pollution.

The fact is that we need to practice sustainability on both sides of the coin: sustainable production and sustainable consumption.

It's rare to hear companies say, "Consume less," and rarer still to hear them say, "Consume less of our products." A few years ago, McDonald's in France ran some ads saying, "If you have a weight problem, don't eat here so much." The corporate PR guys on Oakbrook Illinois found the people who were responsible and sent them to the (corporate) guillotine.

There are a handful of industries that are just beginning to address the issue of sustainable consumption.

Twenty-five years ago, when I was just getting involved in environmental matters, Massachusetts passed a law that would pay electric utilities for getting their customers to use less energy. Under the new scheme, the utilities would get paid the same, and in some cases more, if they sold less energy by convincing customers to use less, or to use it during off-peak times.

This became a national program called Demand Side Management (DSM). It has the potential to revolutionize the consumption of electricity all over the world. We need to apply this model to other areas of consumption.

Reducing our level of consumption is going to be tough for us in the developed world to swallow, and I frankly don’t know how it is going to happen. We have the strongest military in the world, now unconstrained by any opposing force. And we have proved very willing to fight to maintain our life style, with the war in Iraq (motivated at least in part by the desire to guarantee access to that country's oil reserves) seemingly just the latest example.

I think sustainable consumption will come about — if it does — through a combination of five factors:

Market forces. If you've traveled recently, you know that our standard of living is down because of the weak dollar. Imported goods are also more expensive. At the same time, the prices of gas and other natural resource will continue to climb. All of this will tend to bring our standard of living down, closer to that of the developing countries.

Regulation. China legislated only one child per family, and although I don't think we will ever go that far, I do envision more consumption taxes and possibly the rationing of various commodities. We are already going down that road with water use.

Technical innovation. Science may help alleviate the resources crunch. I'm thinking about things like genetically-modified organisms, clean hydrogen or nuclear fusion, and cost-effective water desalinization. But technology will not solve the problem. We're not quite as smart as we like to believe, and there is no technological genie waiting to grant our every wish.

International conflict. The next century will see a lot of battles over resources, and the West is destined to fight a number of wars like the war in Iraq — wars we realistically cannot win. These military defeats may be a necessary evil to wake us up to the need for sustainable consumption.

Redefinition of consumer preferences. This is the hardest one of all. It requires redefining quality of life by understanding that "Less is more." The simplicity movement needs to go from a cult to a mass movement.

I think you can see now why this topic doesn't get discussed much in business circles.

I had the pleasure of being a keynote speaker with Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia at a "net impact" event late last year. He has done as much as any CEO to make sure that his company is respectful and protective of the environment. Yet in front of 100 net impacters, he said (I am paraphrasing), "I have talked to some serious scientists, and most of them believe we have passed the point of no return. We have no hope left to save the Earth."

We all want to think we can go on living this way forever, and that our children should have more than we did. But deep down we recognize that this can't be the case except for a smaller and smaller percentage of us. Not only are there billions of people who want to escape from grinding poverty — and obviously deserve a chance to do so — but in addition the world's population is still growing. By 2050, it is projected to increase from the current six billion to nine billion, and three-quarters of this growth will be in the developing world. So we are going to have a lot more mouths to feed, hands to wash, and people without homes or hope.

I apologize if this message seems like a downer. Maybe I need to find my Prozac. But the issue of sustainable consumption isn't going to vanish just because we prefer to ignore it. I think we're grown-up enough to start talking about it. What do you think?

Catching Up

Thursday, January 17, 2008 / KW

Time flies when you're having fun, which I guess explains how two and a half weeks have elapsed since we last posted here: Christmas, New Year's Day, college bowl games, a wild and unpredictable presidential primary season, and an exhausting schedule of personal activities seem to have conspired to keep us away from our keyboard for an unconscionable period.

Our apologies. One day we will share with you some of our adventures during the past few weeks, including sitting in on twelve focus groups in four different cities across the United States to learn about the social and political attitudes of the Millennial Generation (under-30 Americans). Biggest takeaway: For the Millennials, the culture wars are over. It doesn't matter whether they are atheists from California or Evangelical Christians from Alabama; their attitude toward people of other religions, philosophies, and sexual orientations is live-and-let-live. Personally, I found this heartening news.

And on the eco-business front, here's a quick roundup of news and ideas you may find interesting — we did.

Seeds as intellectual property. Check out Grist, a green-oriented website we somehow didn't know about until recently, which actually lives up to its promise of "Environmental News and Humor." (Yes, they are funny ... when appropriate.) One of the more intriguing stories currently up on Grist is this account of how Monsanto's genetically-modified soybean seed business has put the company in the awkward position of suing farmers for unauthorized use of the intellectual property represented by those patentened gene sequences. And although the Supreme Court recently upheld one of Monsanto's legal victories, it doesn't strike us as a sustainable business strategy to be taking your own customers to court. In the long run, it won't work for the record companies, and it won't work for Monsanto either.

Creating a commons for eco-friendly thinking. By contrast with Monsanto, a consortium of companies, including IBM, Nokia, Pitney-Bowes, and Sony, is participating in a system for openly sharing intellectual property (specifically patents) with environmental benefits. As described here, this system, organized by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, encourages corporations to donate green-business patents for free use by other companies. For example, one of the patents being made available by IBM is for a less-polluting method of cleaning surfaces that the company designed for microchips but that might be useable for other products such as eyeglass lenses. (You can watch a video about it on YouTube.)

Obviously, there will be significant limitations to the kinds of patents companies will be willing to share. Patents related to a company's core business processes, those that provide a significant competitive advantage, and those with the potential to generate large licensing fees will probably not be donated to the Eco-Patent Commons any time soon. But it's very interesting to see some of the world's most innovative companies taking this fresh approach to managing the intellectual property they create. We'll be watching to see how significant an impact they have.

More on greenwashing. There's a new attempt to distinguish legitimate environmental claims by companies from illegitimate ones, following on the heels of the controversial "Six Sins of Greenwashing" report that we wrote about here. This new initiative is called The Greenwashing Index, and although I've spent quite a bit of time studying the site and trying to figure out how it works, I'm still rather confused. The idea seems to be that consumers can post ads on the site and rate them, on a scale of one to five, as to their honesty and accuracy. A score of one means a "good ad," and score of five "total greenwashing."

What puzzles me, though, is that the ratings seem to be very subjective. Although the organizers of the site have provided a set of five criteria that consumers are supposed to use, in the end anyone can post an ad on the site with whatever rating they want. It's not unlike the one-to-five-stars rating system for books on Amazon. Of course, the accumulation of many ratings from various individuals for a single ad should mitigate the subjectivity somewhat. But this system still seems to me an inadequate substitute for the hard word of actually examining and evaluating the environmental practices of a company — something that demands a degree of expertise that few ordinary consumers possess.

We'll keep an eye on the Greenwashing Index site. It'll be interesting to see how it develops over time. But somehow I don't think this will become the authoritative source for reliable evaluations of environmental claims that so many people seem to be looking for.

Business As Art

Monday, December 24, 2007 / KW

Edward Hopper Painting I enjoyed this article in the Washington Post by Robert F. Bruner, dean of the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. Inspired by a chance remark overheard at an Edward Hopper art exhibit, Bruner distinguishes between "painters" and "artists" in business.

In Bruner's formulation, "painters" are the technicians of business: accountants, engineers, financial analysts, logistics experts, and others who know how to get things done with efficiency and accuracy. They are essential to the success of any business. But much more rare — and perhaps even more important — are the "artists," whom Bruner describes this way:

Artists in business are visionaries, inventors, entrepreneurs and general managers, people who create something larger out of the assembly of resources. They are quick learners, they recognize problems and opportunities ahead of the crowd, they shape visions and enlist others in support, they communicate well and are socially aware (in the "macro" sense of understanding big issues in the world and in the "micro" sense of reading a room full of people to understand their issues). They serve with integrity, and, as leaders, they have a bias for action. Bill Marriott, chief executive of Marriott International, and Warren Thompson, of Thompson Hospitality, personify audacity and vision. Bill Crutchfield, founder of Crutchfield Electronics in Charlottesville, exemplifies social awareness when he argues that the most successful firms have a special "soul." Connie Hallquist, chief executive of Gold Violin in Charlottesville, and Patrick Sweeney, chief executive of Dulles-based Odin Technologies, personify superior communication. And so on.

Bruner's distinction is an interesting one, to which I'd add the following observation: That the work of a business "painter" can be objectively judged as either good or bad, right or wrong, correct or incorrect, while that of a business "artist" is measured on a very different set of scales.

What we think about a particular business visionary depends very much on out personal values. That's why millions of people have strong, often contradictory, opinions about today's leading business artists, from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs to Starbucks' Howard Schulz to Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin. And of course it's the same in the world of art; for every person who would name Hopper as his/her favorite painter, there's another who prefers Van Gogh or Velazquez or Van Eyck — and who's to say that any of these preferences is wrong?

And a corollary is that there are many different ways to be a business artist. To use one of Bruner's examples, in the hospitality industry, Bill Marriott is one kind of artist (and a very successful one), while my sometime co-author Jonathan Tisch of Loews Hotels is quite another, and Ian Schrager, often called the founder of the boutique hotel movement, still another. Each pursues his unique vision, and while the three sometimes compete in the marketplace, they mostly operate in separate arenas where all three can be winners.

Debates about corporate social responsibility sometimes devolve into arguments over whether personal values have any real place in business. To me, it seems obvious that they do — that business, like art, politics, education, religion, science, and virtually every other human endeavor, involves and expresses the whole person: body, mind, heart, and spirit. Our greatest business artists are those who successfully combine the widest possible range of human impulses and find ways to incorporate them all in the enterprises they create.

Is Wal-Mart Starting To Turn Its Red Home State Green?

Friday, September 07, 2007 / KW

Some observers are still wondering whether Wal-Mart is really serious about going green. But lots of people and businesses in and around the megaretailer's hometown of Bentonville, Arkansas, think so. In fact, they are betting their livelihoods on it, according to this story from today's Washington Post. Here's a key graf from the story, posted from nearby Fayetteville:

A wave of start-ups developing the technology to help suppliers prove their green credentials has swept into this sleepy college town, half an hour from the company's headquarters in Bentonville. [Eco-entrepreneur Daniel] Sanker is looking at ways to improve fuel efficiency in shipping. Others are developing agricultural-based alternatives to petroleum or studying how electronics can function at higher temperatures, thereby cutting energy use. The University of Arkansas has established the Applied Sustainability Center at the campus here using a $1.5 million grant from Wal-Mart.

The story goes on to say that space in a local research park that caters to green companies is already fully leased — and that the town has hired its first "sustainability director," whose salary is paid out of the energy savings his innovations produce.

Call me a latte-drinking New Yorker (actually I prefer a plain old java from Dunkin Donuts), but I was surprised a couple of weeks ago when the latest polls showed Hillary Clinton with big double-digit leads over every Republican rival in Arkansas, which is evidently the red state that Clinton has the best hope of carrying in next year's presidential race.

Maybe Clinton's years as the state's first lady aren't the only reason for the state's leftward drift. If the WaPo story is correct, Battleship Wal-Mart may be changing course surprisingly swiftly — and leading an entire flotilla of businesses in a new, more progressive direction. The long-term implications for the corporate and political culture of this corner of the American South will be interesting to watch.

Joel Makower: A Sustainability Tipping Point —Or Does It Matter?

Sunday, August 05, 2007 / KW

If you're not already visiting Joel Makower's blog on a regular basis, you should be. Joel is one of the most consistently interesting commentators on the environmental and sustainability front — and an excellent writer, to boot.

His last post is a great example. It tackles the much-debated question of whether sustainability has achieved a "tipping point" in the public consciousness. To Joel's credit, his answer is an honest, cautious "Not yet." (It's tempting for all of us who have been working in the field for years to want to cheer-lead rather than analyze issues like this objectively.) But then Joel goes on to make an even more important point — namely, that reaching a tipping point in terms of public relations or poll responses is, in a sense, irrelevant to the longer arc of how business practices are evolving:

The quality movement of yore represents a good analogy. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, "total quality management," popularized by American statistician W. Edwards Deming, was the rage. There were books, magazines, conferences, and untold experts making the rounds, preaching the gospel of kaizen, quality circles, and other business practices. Inevitably, it ran its course.

But when TQM faded from the limelight and the business media turned its collective gaze elsewhere, quality didn't go away; companies didn't revert to their old, inefficient ways. Quality became part of the fabric, eventually showing up in the form of six sigma, lean manufacturing, just-in-time inventory, and other business processes and strategies.

So, too, with the greening of business. Yes, some green products and companies will, inevitably, fail or lose favor. But the hardcore (and largely unsexy) stuff — energy efficiency, waste reduction, pollution prevention, supply-chain management, environmental reporting, etc. — will be around in one form or another for decades. So will the innovations, which are increasingly coming into the marketplace: green chemistry, biobased materials, nature-inspired design, cradle-to-cradle products, and all the rest. They're not going away once the green fever cools down.

Joel is right. Fads come and go, and there's little doubt that sooner or later the intense media spotlight attracted by Hollywood stars, Oscar-winning documentaries, and best-selling books will shift away from the environment to other important topics. But the underlying issues that the sustainability movement is grappling with are too important and too closely bound up with companies' bottom line to disappear altogether.

A decade from now, we may not still be reading magazine stories listing "Today's Top Ten Green Businesses"; we may not be seeing major corporations building entire marketing campaigns around their environmental innovations. Instead, environmental issues — along with social and economic issues —will have been incorporated into the fabric of everyday business, just as product quality, customer service, and efficiency have been today.

We'll still read about great sustainability programs — but they will be discussed in roundups of "Today's Greatest Companies," rather than being relegated to an environmental sideshow.

The embedding of sustainability into the structure of business processes will be the real measure of success for leaders of this movement — not feature articles in Fortune or stories on Entertainment Tonight.

Mark Buchanan on Business Ethics: As the Game Changes, the Rules Change, Too

Tuesday, July 24, 2007 / KW

One of the most interesting new blogs is The Social Atom, produced by science writer Mark Buchanan. Although Buchanan is a physicist, his primary interest is in the social sciences.

This recent post is a typically interesting one. Buchanan is responding to a profile of Howard Gardner, the Harvard professor of cognition and education best known for his concept of "multiple intelligences," in Strategy + Business magazine. According to Buchanan, the profile, which focuses on the theme of corporate ethics, is both inspiring and depressing:

Here's a man [Gardner] who is immensely well motivated and clearly a force for the good; for decades he's been writing books and talking to corporate leaders, trying to bring ethics into the corporate world. Yet he's clearly been encountering a deeply held view that sees ethical behavior as an "expensive luxury." The received wisdom glorifies the business importance of "hard-nosed" decision-makers who focus only on "the bottom line," and who know that greed is ultimately good.

Why do business people who are probably well-meaning, ethical people in their personal lives sometimes engage in selfish, unethical behavior in their corporate lives? Probing for an answer to this question, Buchanan describes a number of experiments in which social scientists tested the mechanisms by which "the tragedy of the commons" tends to be enacted in settings where both competition and cooperation are possible.

As Buchanan describes them, the experiments show that, where self-interested behavior goes unnoticed and unpunished by the group, cooperative behavior that benefits everyone (such as voluntarily contibuting to a common investment pot) tends to be extinguished over time. (After all, who wants to be the only "sucker" who contributes to the common good?) But where the experimental conditions are altered so that everyone's actions are transparent and there is the possibility of social sanctions against those who behave selfishly, then cooperative, mutually beneficial behaviors are encouraged and appear to remain the norm indefinitely.

Of course, it's dangerous to directly apply the results of simple experiments to the complexities of life. But it may be that the real world in which Howard Gardner, Mark Buchanan, and the rest of us are operating — in which a significant number of well-intentioned people are trying to "do the right thing" while feeling undermined by others who advocate a "greed is good, to hell with the rest of you" philosophy — is in the process of morphing from one experimental condition to another.

That is, as modern communication technologies expand their speed, reach, and power, business behavior is becoming more and more transparent; and as transparency increases, the possibility of meaningful social sanctions against antisocial business behavior becomes greater. These sanctions may take the form of penalties meted out by government. But increasingly they are taking the form of media exposure, PR disaster, customer backlash, and value collapse in the stock market — a costly modern form of social stigmatization as applied to corporations.

Who knows? Perhaps we are nearing a "tipping point" at which the number of business people who recognize the new "experimental conditions" and are prepared to adapt to them becomes so great that the overall norm shifts. It may be that, a generation from now, the kind of self-centered business behavior once taken for granted (despoiling the environment, exploiting workers, ravaging communities) will be largely unthinkable, simply because the social circumstances that once made it easy to get away with will have disappeared.

The Poorest Billions —Today's Entrepreneurial Frontier

Sunday, July 01, 2007 / KW

Speaking of Muhammad Yunus, I see that Business Week has just named him one of its Thirty Greatest Entrepreneurs of All Time, alongside such icons as Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Sam Walton. At first glance Yunus might seem a surprising choice, since many people think of him more as a humanitarian than a business person. But his Grameen Bank is a self-supporting, profitable business, and Yunus's mission in life has been to expand the benefits of the free market to poor people who are currently excluded from full participation in the capitalist system.

In this respect, Yunus is very much in the mold of Ford, Walton, and others on the BW list. Like them, he has innovated by developing accessible products and services that are creating whole new classes of consumers and multiplying the life options enjoyed by millions of people.

If the entrepreneurial frontier in Henry Ford's day was made up of millions of working-class Americans desperate for mobility, today it includes billions of people in the developing world eager to enter the mainstream economy.

Bjorn Stigson — A New Voice for Sustainability in the Blogosphere

Tuesday, June 26, 2007 / KW

Stigson In a world where everybody and his sister has a blog, it was only a matter of time before Bjorn Stigson, president of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, would have his own online platform.

Based on a first perusal, Stigson's blog looks well worth reading. In this week's post, he asks, "On energy and climate issues, is the United States an emerging world leader or a "cacophony of chaos", as one US Congressman described it?" Stigson then describes what happened when the WBCSD presented its document "Policy Directions to 2050" to an audience of lawmakers and business leaders in Washington D.C. recently, and while Stigson doesn't say it in so many words, the answer seems clearly to be closer to "chaos" than true leadership. But you can read his lively account and judge for yourself.

Summer Rayne Oakes — Eco-Model Extraordinaire

Friday, June 22, 2007 / MT

Summer Rayne Oaks There are many people spreading the gospel of sustainability these days, and in many different ways — but perhaps none in such a hip and stylish way as Summer Rayne Oakes.

One of the many hats I wear is Chapter Leader of Net Impact Boston, and two nights ago we put on our biggest event yet — the local launch party for SustainLane.com, a new web directory of sustainable businesses. It was a great opportunity to invite a speaker I’ve wanted to meet for some time now: Summer Rayne Oakes.

An environmental activist since childhood, Oakes has put together her unique basket of skills in a very compelling way — all in an effort to mainstream issues of environmental and social justice.

What are those skills?Well, for one, Oakes is about 5'11 and completely gorgeous, so modeling has always been a career path open to her.She is also artistically inclined, with an eye for fashion and an impressive portfolio of drawings. And she’s smart — she earned a degree from Cornell University and has written some impressive academic papers on very non-fashionable topics like sewage sludge. To top it all off, she’s a genuinely nice person who is easy to like and who cares about doing good in the world.

Put all that together, and what do you get?An amazing career that is going in about twenty useful and exciting directions at once.Here’s a small sample:

Oakes models for many eco-conscious labels, and also works with major companies like Levi’s to develop new earth-friendly apparel. And it’s not anoraks and Birkenstocks – more often it’s lace or leather. Sometimes even latex.
She produces and writes a regular feature for the European fashion magazine Lucire, each month going “Behind the Label” to explore environmental, social and ethical issues in the apparel industry.
Recently Oakes started SRO as a consultancy which “couples the power of research with the pulse of current trends" — advising companies on branding and communication strategies that are aligned with sustainable business practices.
Always the educator on environmental issues, she’s even come up with a K-12 curriculum called Ecofashion 101.
She’s about to publish a book that encourages girls to integrate environmentalism into their fashion sense. And yes, she actually did write it herself.
And if all that weren’t impressive enough, she’s working with the United Nations to develop and co-host an Eco For The World (E4W) “edutainment” series.

Her basic philosophy, as far as I can tell, is that fashion and celebrity, and the underlying force of branding, are powerful ways to spread ideas in our society — and can therefore be an asset to the sustainability movement. It’s a radical departure from the strategy that most activists take, but a great way to connect with mainstream audiences.

One of the ideas that Oakes referenced in her talk last night was the power of tapping into everyday conversations as a way to spread meaningful messages. For example, think of this conversation:

— Hey, great jeans.
— Thanks, man.
— Who made them?
— Her name is Jasmine.

Jasmine is one of the factory workers featured in an recent film called China Blue. Her story is powerful not so much because it is unique but because it is very common — she works long hours in a factory, so long in fact that she uses clothespins to hold her eyes open so she won’t fall asleep. Jasmine is the personification of the sweatshop issue, a familiar face at the end of the “supply chain.” Making sweatshop issues known, making them personal and memorable, and introducing them into everyday conversations — that’s a very powerful combination that can drive a new movement of consumer activism.

Oakes is a good example of two trends:

The new generation of activists, who are savvy about motivating stakeholders to influence corporate agendas, and are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their use of online platforms.
A push toward the "mainstreaming" of sustainability issues, which are no longer relegated to a small consumer niche.

To learn more about Oakes and her work, and by extension about the direction that young consumers and investors are headed, visit http://www.summerrayne.net/.

Savitz on "The Sweet Spot" at Ethical Corporation Magazine

Monday, June 18, 2007 / KW

Our esteemed host Andy Savitz talks about "the sweet spot" of sustainable business (and no, it has nothing to do with any sexual technique) in this very interesting podcast now available on the website of Ethical Corporation magazine. Well worth your time, as is the entire magazine (whose site is always available via the blogroll at the bottom of this page). Enjoy.