Patagonia founder takes aim: ‘The elephant in the room is growth’
By Hannah Miller
GreenBiz.com
Published March 01, 2013

After 30 years of path-blazing work, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard has a few mutinous attitudes about the world of green business. He hates the word sustainability. He doesn’t want to emulate Apple. And at his company, he says, they actually ask themselves: Does the world really need another polo shirt?

In a far-ranging keynote interview with GreenBiz Group Chairman Joel Makower at the GreenBiz Forum in San Francisco, Chouinard tipped many a sacred cow. He wondered aloud whether sustainability efforts are working, and remarked at the same time that the spread of green business practices “has happened so much more quickly than I could have imagined.”

“If these Fortune 500 companies are now cleaning up their act, then why is the world still going to hell?” said Chouinard to an audience of hundreds of CSR officers and aspiring eco-preneurs. “The elephant in the room is growth: you make an energy-efficient refrigerator, so then you buy two of them. Not one public company will voluntarily restrict growth to save the planet.”

Read more here.

Getting behind the psychology of sustainability
GreenBiz.com
By Hannah Miller

While helping to develop the climate change plan for Lawrence, Kan., sustainability journalist Simran Sethi was having trouble getting her message across to the Chamber of Commerce. “The science is uncertain,” one banker argued. She was shocked.

How could anyone still believe this? she wondered. Sethi, a journalism professor from “the green bubble of New York,” listened to the banker’s perspective — and heard it. He had a daughter with asthma, so in his view, air pollution was the salient idea, and a strong reason to clean up the local coal plant.

Read more here. 

Supposedly, a few years ago, “climate change” as a term began to replace “global warming” in popular speech and in the media because of a considered effort on the part of the Right.

This was presumably done because change is a neutral term, removes heat, pressure, the urgency of the need to restructure where we get our power. Therefore not actionable or even caused by humans. Sometimes climate change can even be a good thing, right?

Whether this is true or not (it may be a conspiracy theory, or it may have just happened… it encapsulates the war over how to talk about rising carbon levels.

A messaging organization called ecoAmerica has produced fascinating polls on this over the last couple of years, specifically looking at red or purple states and non-traditional demographics for environmentalists, based on the assumption that … well… very few environmentalists are intentionally doing this. The polls are very interesting; overall, they show a high level of concern about climate change with a low level of urgency when compared to other social problems.

Now, masochistic environmentalists know this and have seen this same list for years – crime, economy, national security, etc, then “the environment” shows up at about #12-14, pretty consistently. It’s one of the unquestioned assumptions of environmentalism, and after years of seeing it being referenced constantly by everyone from Greenpeace to CAP, I am pretty sick of it. Can you imagine where “desegregating schools to further racial equality” would rank in that list if the Civil Rights movement had run a poll of Americans in the 1960s? Maybe #2,911? We’re not popular so we might as well just pack it up!

There is really questionable logic in running a poll reaching thousands of people in which the categories of “environment” and “economy” are separated as categories. Every time we talk about these things as two nodes we are perpetuating the greatest mass confusion in human history – a recent mass confusion, but a very powerful one at all.

Such a list has nothing to do with how people actually make decisions. When asked to sign a petition, one doesn’t say, I consider affordable housing far more important so I can’t sign your petition on nuclear waste right now. Tremendous legislative gains have been made on policy areas that don’t show up in that list at all – it’s all how, what, when, where, and what words.

Happily, the surveys conducted by Lake Research for ecoAmerica also show that when presented with a variety of arguments – perspectives that emerged from the demographics themselves – Americans respond really positively to the idea of combating climate change, and a sense of its urgency and importance.

What’s interesting to me is that these motivations can be derived from traditional American values that have been mistranslated for decades between Right and Left: freedom, independence, a sense of American potentiality and exceptionalism that (on its face) calls for a rework of the space race. (But will probably be answered by an almost unrecognizably dissimilar arc).

I have also been thinking about how much of the climate conversation happens without any mention of cause. Where is this all coming from? Is this just happening spontaneously? Without a discussion of cause, we will be doomed to forever be taking out little tape measures every day and meticulously measure our carbon footprint.

NPR at al. have covered the fact that the strategies Big Tobacco employed for years have now been coopted by fossil fuel companies to drag out the “scientific debate” as long as possible. They’ve even apparently hired some of the same people. (“Wow, imagine that being your life’s work,” snorts Julia.)

If you search for climate change on Youtube, this Chevron ad is the first thing that pops up – you’d swear it was an EPA video -

The technologies and organizational structures required to mine and distribute petroleum, coal, and gas are very different than those required to capture power from renewable sources – the latter is much more the purview of electronics companies. Renewable energy is fundamentally democratic (all plants do is open up their leaves and point them at the sun) whereas fossil fuels are centralized, controlled, requiring private armies and government connections.

There is no such thing as a solar footprint.

Next: Part II: Burning Dinosaurs that God Said Didn’t Exist

Conditions we fail to notice at all shut down our observation, our criticism of the conditions of life, and even our acts to change it. It still, all, always, starts with words. Whatever’s there in the black box deep inside of you.
For the writers gathered in the Temescal Branch of the Oakland Public Library last Saturday (I think dissidents would be the proper word, that’s a great one), the question was, what keeps the words in?

Writer-of-writers Louise Dunlap, clad in a U.S. Social Forum t-shirt and a bike-titanium sense of humor, coaxed words, tears, laughter, squirming discomfort, and murmurs of Namaste out of a roomful of Bay Area writers.
Undoing the Silences was the title of the seminar, and going around the room for introductions, Louise asked us to tell our names, what we would write, our strength, our weakness, and what keeps us from doing this. The cloud of ideas and thought that emerged from the room was world-toppling as nuclei are: children’s books, naturalism, peace, harmony. I said I wanted to invent a new language, a statement which surprised even me.

But Louise was not there to coach us through our chicken-scratches – she had come to Temescal with New Village Press to address the blocked arteries.

“Fear and despair,” she said. “That’s what I am hearing.” Pixie cuts, curls, shorn heads all bobbed. I just sighed. (see The Rest of this Blog, by Hannah Miller.)

Apparently, there is a sort of judo you can do on these things, that Louise knows and practiced on us. They seemed rather innocuous, free writes with prompts like: Write about a time you last teared up. Write about a time you ate chocolate. Seven minutes each, for the express purpose of “removing the editor.” I wrote about my boyfriend and my work, and I learned a lot, but what really bowled me over was this magic being practiced on us.

Here’s the secret: what we often think is external – fear and despair created by the conditions of the world, or the futility of journalism, or the futility of organizing – is actually just our internal editor clocking in for their horrible, bloody, imagination-slaughtering shift.

The exercises Louise had us do really shut down the butcher; her book is a judo textbook for this sort of thing. It’s not completely obvious – why would shutting down your internal editor really work, if the world is burning up and everybody is still at each others’ throats etc etc? It works because of something very special that I was so grateful to learn: that creation has a buoyancy of its own, a self-contained power source, an explosive magic like a tiny seed in soil.

And it grows as you do it. Words create hope as they push forward, and hope does its own photosynthesis. Hope is its own power. Love is its own power. It is so mysterious, sharing the same undefinable properties as life itself.

“The goal,” said Louise, “is to find a channel where the words can come from your heart.”
May my heart never be blocked again.

Whales, in particular, have mysterious and complicated communication patterns. Gray whales in particular have literary forms that any media student would find fascinating. In each annual migration, the whale herd starts with a single song, uniform throughout the population. As the pods roam around the sea during the summer, the song is changed by each pod into individualized, diverse remixes. At the end of the year, the whales gather from all over the Pacific, and then sing their new songs to each other. Marine biologists have recorded the sound patterns, and plotted out where they change, but their meaning remains as inscrutable as some lost language or the mythologies locked within cave paintings. Where the important whale memes of 2012? Will we ever know?

I have been editing a book on biomimicry over the last month, a how-to guide on designing according to Nature’s inspiration. (Or Nature’s genius or Life’s genius, it’s said, all slightly different phrases, all doors hung on a doorframe.) The practice of biomimicry is really rather new, but it has already resulted in some amazing designs and also understanding of fundamental principles. PAX Engineering, for example, makes manufacturing devices based on their discovery of the tendency of water to flow in a spiral. What results from this practice is often strikingly beautiful:

Working on biomimicry – the little I’ve been able to do – feels like helping to transmit a message from Nature herself to human listeners. It’s casual and friendly, translation done by biologists who wade around in streams a lot and consequently have a good sense of humor. Biomimicry, in the end, is just about listening, and watching patterns emerge.

Most of the widely known examples of biomimicry are in the mechanical sciences, but I am fascinated at what it might meant for communication.

How does nature transmit information? How does nature store information? What would the media look like if it were shaped like natural systems? Our media system currently supplies and moves information with a brute, untempered force, creating as-yet-barely-understood negative effects in human neurology and psychology. As technology has advanced, simpler forms of media (a book or radio program which was the representation of a few human voices) has now turned into the fire hydrant of information that is the Internet. The place to change this is the interface, the way that humans access and relate to information – a place totally constructed by human beings, and capable of reconstruction as a totally different environment. Some of the most interesting places to see alternate Internet interfaces are in sci-fi – my favorite is still the oceanic one in Cowboy Bebop, where the Internet is a giant glowing sea and you access data by touching a pufferfish or kelp frond.

Biomimicry has made some strides in graphic design – with the Biomimicry Institute’s publications and, of course, Celery Design – and it’s amazing when you think about Benyus et al. going deep enough into Nature to develop Life’s Principles.

Wheel of Life’s Principles – check out AskNature,org

We have a media system regulated on the basis of scarcity, with careful control of resources and the resulting political warfare that develops around them. Abundance in the form of the Internet has breathtakingly appeared, like a flash flood in a desert that has not yet adapted to it.

But it’s not just the Internet. The number of radio channels on a dial is technically infinite, if we developed transmitters and receivers sensitive enough. Community media has a diversity of expression and topic closer to that of the natural world; I got to go to Davis Media Access this week as a part of helping Common Frequency build thousands of new radio stations, and I met this guy there, Emmet Brady, who not only taught biomimicry but has a show called Insect News Network, covering cultural entomology – which intersection between humans and bugs.

“Are there equivalents in bug communication for how humans communicate?” I asked him.

Without any pause all, he answered: “Ecuadorean treehopper ants.”

“Really? Why?”

“Well their communication is very complex. And they pass messages via the trees.”

Depending on what state you’re in, there’s a lot of incendiary Apocalyptic char to work with this year, and they are bringing in all manner of scientists and pols and economists etc. It will probably be moving, persuasive, and will completely freak out the last person in America who isn’t already totally freaked out about climate change. (Hopefully there will be contributions from the solutions-oriented as well!) And then they will all go to volunteer for Obama… er…

I like this project especially because it’s distributed science – that is, scientific inquiry conducted by a multitude of observers (usually Internet-enabled). Often the observers are amateurs, unpaid, even anonymous, and it’s typically used to break down enormous data sets and make them manageable. It’s so beautiful and makes the little part of my heart devoted to Amish barnraisings and UNIX coders just explode with joy.

People working together to solve a puzzle is always inspiring, partially because it’s very difficult to accomplish, especially in the hyper-hyper-professionalized realm of science.

Like playing Sudoku, but with little galaxies!

A Californian entomologist was randomly looking at photos, came across this shot by Guek Hock Ping, taken in a Malaysian park. Hadn’t recognized the pattern on the wings, so he emailed Guek, asked him to go back to the park and get some specimens, pop them in a container, and ship it to the British Natural History Museum. There you go. New species!

This holds so much promise that it’s almost silly when these things get reported. Why didn’t we think to do that before? Whatever creepy billion-dollar technology Facebook is using to identify your friends’ facial bone structure right now could be put to the use of science! Like how the space program gave us TANG, except the other way around.

The U.S. Geological Survey, which measures everything, had an analog crowd-sourced program called “The National Map.” For 20 years, they opened envelopes sent from all 50 states with scrawled corrections, “THAT ROAD ISN’T THERE” and so on. It was canceled due to budget constraints five years before social media was invented; it’s been resurrected as of this week. They are starting the first GeoData project in Colorado, and if you can make it past the massive wildfires, them you can participate!

The reason I got thinking about all of this in the first place was the utterly critical and mostly ignored quandary at the root of so many of our environmental problems: manufacturing chemistry. It is the picture in the dictionary next to downstream effects. Trees, fish, your kidneys, your children, your children’s children, your tree’s children’s children…

It also happens to be a huge data problem.

There are approximately 20,000 chemicals used in manufacturing globally, and only a tiny fraction of them have been studied for the most rudimentary impacts on human health, let alone several million other species. Even more disturbingly, the means by which designers and engineers choose chemicals for products is largely blind, uninformed, arbitrary, and bound by convention, whatever their own best intentions might be.

As sustainability has become valued in the marketplace, there have been more incentives to collate this information and make it accessible to designers and manufacturers. A lot of the work has been done in consultancies – my former employers at Cradle to Cradle, or the Green Screen by Clean Production Action. Autodesk and Google are also working on different versions of this, hopefully open and transparent.

I can’t help but think that there must be a way to apply crowdsourcing to this venture, the magnitude and importance of which is unfortunately understood now by a small group of people. There are flaps in the news about BPA or other toxins fairly often, but most consumers don’t know enough about manufacturing to know how much of the iceberg is below water…or how futile it is, really, to change one ingredient in a universally doped-up soup. The reality is, very little progress has been made on the area of toxics.

The thing with distributed science is, though, whether it’s blogging on carbon or identifying spiral galaxies, it never fails to illuminate. If there were just a CAPTCHA for the world of industrial chemistry…

June 26, 2012

On the day before the Rio+20 talks started, international executives sat in a conference hall, passed a microphone around like a guitar at a campfire, and sang an unlikely new song.

“Businesses like regulation,” said Adriana Machado, CEO of General Electric Brazil.

“Businesses like regulation,” said Adriana Machado, CEO of General Electric Brazil, speaking at the World Business Council for Sustainable Business’ daylong event. Machado cited government support for Brazil’s nascent wind industry as critical to its growth.

“We don’t like bureaucracy… but regulation is necessary to show companies who want to get better on how to get there,” she said. Many on the panel agreed.

As surprising as it may sound, Machado and her peers who are asking for more regulation are not part of a minority, at least when it comes to the green economy. On the eve of the Rio Plus 20 talks, PricewaterhouseCoopers released a survey of 141 CEOs that found not only high levels of concern about ecological factors in business, but a hope that the U.N. would push them for action.

read the rest here

June 25, 2012

The sharing economy was not yet a topic at the Rio+20 Earth Summit, but was everywhere as a theme or a tool, from talk of the “the commons” and co-ops to talk of new technologies that reduce consumption. Most of the emergence came in side events at the RioCentro or the People’s Summit, but the needle was moved in United Nations official policy, as well.

The International Co-operative Alliance applauded the U.N. for endorsing cooperatives in The Future We Want, saying that co-ops had much to contribute to the future of agriculture and poverty reduction. Lobbyists for the Commons had hoped to get the formation of a high-level commission to promote governmental programs and structures that would promote commons; they didn’t, but it remains a part of U.N. training for diplomats.

The Internet-enabled sharing economy as known in American business is a new thread in a cluster of similar ideas, whether you call them “local/community management” or “collective consumerism”. As Dr. Oksana Mont of Lund University puts it, “In Norway, car sharing is a business; but, in Turkey, it’s 10 family members sharing one car.”

read the rest of the story here

The Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development is an instantly assembled city of 50,000 of the most environmentally attuned members of our species. It is clumped by institutional affiliation, political inflection, age, and profession, strewn about the vastness of the jungle mountain mega-city of Rio de Janeiro and, apparently, managed with the same techniques that the United Nations uses for refugee camps. This is not entirely inappropriate, because all environmentalists are refugees. All human beings are refugees, actually, but only environmentalists know it.

The Earth Summit is physically divided into two camps of white tents: There is the U.N. Summit, which is very removed from downtown and rigorously guarded a la District Nine, and the People’s Summit, which has more informal dress and little orange signs hanging from some of the trees that read AREA DE CONVIVIENCIA or “Area of Conviviality.”

Everything is here – dashikis, Pakistani cameramen, Wen Jia-Bao. Every language is here. Every monstrous accidental thing that human beings are doing to the soil or the frogs is documented in bad Powerpoints made by beautiful, fusty academics; and so is all the work that is being done to bring back the soil and the frogs … by German scientists who study Indonesian fishermen, Peruvian organic-farm economists, scientists and the skeptics, the international aid groups…

read the rest here

“As an Indian, as someone from the global South, the ‘green economy’ means a way to market Western technology to the developing world. It is something for people who already have things; it is not for me,” says Abhishek Thakore, 30, a nonprofit leader from Bombay, on Tuesday. “But as a youth, it is innovation, a reduction in consumption, necessary for survival. It is the way I want the world to be.”

The theme of the United Nations Rio + 20 Earth Summit, “The Green Economy,” provoked complicated debates among U.N. delegations, protestors and civil society. Although many of the policy proposals themselves were universally embraced—organic farming, intercropping, soil management, support for public transit—the phrase itself brings ominous overtones in the age of Occupy, and in a world with vast disparities of wealth and resources. 

Earlier this year, the United Nations Environment Program outlined what it meant in its 626-page report “Towards a Green Economy: Pathways to Sustainable Development and Poverty Eradication,” including some familiar recommendations:

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