Shiny Green Button

The other day, in the parking structure at the hospital, I pulled into the first open spot and reached to turn off my car. That’s when I noticed the inconspicuous sign hanging on the wall, barely visible in the dim light:

FOR FLEX-FUEL VEHICLES ONLY

Begrudgingly, I shifted my non-flex-fuel vehicle into reverse, backed up and re-parked two spots down and across the aisle. But then I started to get slightly irritated: flex-fuel vehicles ONLY? Why?

It may seem like an insignificant gripe—it’s just one parking spot reserved for the lucky owner of a Prius, after all—but to me the sign represents a common problem in the way we, as a society, are trying to encourage change.

If 20 people a day do exactly what I did—pull into the spot only to have to repark a second later—how much extra gas gets wasted over the course of a year? And, really—is someone really going to go out and buy a hybrid just to be able to park 10 feet closer to the hospital entrance?

More importantly, there are much better ways to encourage us to change. Parking is obviously a necessity at a hospital, as many patients are immobile without a vehicle, but there could be fewer available parking spots to begin with. Or how about offer me a discount on my copay if I present a bus ticket receipt? Or if I bike or walk? Sure, there are problems inherent in a policy like that (how would a walker prove that they actually walked? etc.), but my point remains the same:

A half-baked attempt at encouraging more sustainable lifestyle choices means nothing if it has no meat to it. This particular example struck me as nothing more than a corporate nod (no, not even a nod—just a wink) to somehow prove how "green" the organization is trying to be. Who knows—maybe that hard-to-find flex-fuel sign even got them an extra point towards a LEED certification. But does that parking policy do anything substantive? My hunch is no.

And sure enough, as I walked away from my car towards the hospital entrance, another visitor pulled into the flex-fuel spot—and promptly pulled right back out.

I supposed I can’t really talk. I never would’ve seen the sign if I’d been a responsible person and biked to the hospital in the first place.

Last Saturday I found myself at Trader Joe’s without a reusable bag. Until then, I did a fairly good job remembering to use them. I stocked our cars with canvas bags. I turned back to retrieve them when I saw the reminder outside of TJ’s doors. "Don’t forget reusable bags," the sign nudged. I appreciated Joe’s help. And, man, did I love how it felt. I kept score with my aisle mates and pitied the poor, unconscious souls without the foresight to simply bring a bag. "What’s wrong with these people?" I’d think to myself. At the check out counter, I’d make eye contact with the bag packer, gently clear my throat and announce, "Oh, no need to use those, I brought my own."

But Saturday I forgot. And I hated it. All the judgment I leveled on my fellow shoppers returned to me. I could feel myself climbing off my perch and lighting onto another. This perch was not as lofty, but just as self-righteous. "What does one bag matter?" (Actually, it was four bags.) "It’s just too hard to remember. Screw it."

The truth was, I felt bad. Driving out of the parking lot, I realized something. In order to make lasting change in my behavior, I need help. Laws, rules, boundaries. I need regulations.

By the looks of it, I might get my way. We may be at the forefront of a more strict society—a glorious Age of Regulation, if you will. Here are just a few signs:

• After years of dodging meaningful restrictions in the US, the chemical industry will be held more accountable than ever by the European Union’s REACH program. Why does this matter to us? The EU’s incredible purchasing power can force global changes throughout the industry.
• Houston has the worst recycling rate among major US cities. Thanks to poor planning, cheap landfill fees and a proud anti-regulation history, Houston’s landfills are filling faster than they can dig ‘em. In an effort to move from worst to first, some Houstonians are advocating for mandatory recycling—complete with a fee-enforced waste limit—for each and every citizen.
• Los Angeles has joined San Francisco to ban plastic bags. Seattle is imposing a 20-cent fee for plastic and paper bags.

I think these are great. Bring ‘em on. While we’re at it, I’ve got another suggestion: How about banning all non-reusable bags? Then, if I forgot the bags, I’d have no choice but to step out of the check-out line, walk back to my car and get them.

Sure there’s consumer-imposed pressure for businesses to clean up their act. But when the bottom line takes on the common good, we all know who usually wins. What’s wrong with a little nudging now and then?

Just outside my office window, I have a spectacular view of the Columbia river. I’m on the Vancouver side, near the I-5 bridge that connects Washington and Oregon. A dizzying volume of stuff passes by all day long–cars and trucks, boats and barges, propelled by the engines of commerce. And then there are the trains. Shipping containers from China, stacked two high on flatbed train cars, rumble by, and I can feel the building tremble.

But the train that’s been catching my eye lately is the one filled with coal. Once a week, a row of open cars lumbers past, each filled with a huge pile of shiny black coal. It stretches on for more than a mile. So someone around here in the land of hydropower is burning a lot of coal.

It’s probably the coal-fired power plant in Boardman, the only one in Oregon, according to this map. This one plant, a tiny contributor to the Pacific Northwest’s power supply, pumped almost 4 million pounds of carbon (as well as 141 pounds of mercury) into the air in 2000. So when I see all the other coal plants on the map (and this map only covers the relatively coal-light American West), I can only imagine how long the trains hauling coal to their burners must be.

This past weekend, I fixed up my 20-year-old bike so I can begin commuting under my own power–to save gas and to try to reduce the amount of carbon I put into the atmosphere. But seeing the nonstop land and water traffic outside my window–and all that coal–makes my contribution seem puny indeed. Our whole economy (not just the Pacific Northwest’s, or the United States’, but the world’s) is like a runaway train, and it will take more than throwing an occasional bike across the tracks to slow it down, much less stop it.

So what to do? I think Mr. Gore has a good idea: "to commit to producing 100 percent of our [the United States'] electricity from renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources within 10 years." As Gore pointed out on Meet the Press recently, many people in 1942 thought there was no way America could build the planes and tanks needed to fight WWII so quickly. But, united by a common cause, the American people did it.

Here’s a thought: let’s start making the point that it’s worth our time and spirit to stop the carbon-burning train we’re all on before it ends in a spectacular crash. That means it will take more than do-goodniks like me riding their bikes to work. It will take a reshaping of the incentives that drive new businesses–perhaps through tax incentives for innovation and penalties for dragging of the heels. It will take our demanding change not just as green-minded consumers who buy organic breakfast cereal, but as citizens of the world as well. We all have a stake in this, so let’s stop finding reasons why we can’t do it and start getting things done. 

The results of a new poll of professional communicators (that would be my tribe) featured today on Ragan.com reveals that, surprise!, we want to amp up CSR communications and do a better job of measuring results.

As is often the case, the story’s lede was buried. Near the bottom of the article is this gem:

Only 22 percent of poll respondents said they plan to communicate CSR
programs using social media like blogs, podcasts and Facebook groups;
this response was unexpected given the popularity of these media.

What year is this? 2003? Who in their right communicator’s mind would not include social media in their planning? Setting aside it’s particular relevance to CSR, by now social media is no longer a curiosity or nice-to-have experiment. It’s practically required for any effective communications program, in some fashion.

To its credit, the Ragan story concludes with an extended quote from one of the poll’s anonymous respondents that gets right to the nut of the matter: “CSR is a growing trend among progressive organizations. If your organization is progressive, your communications efforts should be innovative.” (article’s emphasis)

This is the biggest area for improvement in CSR communications. Too much of it is based on an outdated model–the polished and predictable annual report–that doesn’t match the type of diverse and dynamic information that organizations need to share. Or people’s increasing expectations for greater access and transparency.

Some companies have realized this (Timberland, Dell and Starbucks come to mind) and are investing in social media to better connect with people. They’re encouraging and empowering conversations–not just between them and their constituencies, but among their constituents–rather than trying to precisely time and control how, when, where, why and to whom information is released. Sure, the risks are higher. But the benefits are, too.

Here’s why: So much of CSR is fundamentally about people and issues, both big and small, that impact lives and livelihoods. Data and milestones, while necessary to the story, aren’t the story. Relationships are. Ultimately, CSR communications are about fostering relationships between companies and their employees, customers and investors, governments, organizations and nonprofits, and local communities. Reports and case studies and brochures can only itemize and document and describe those relationships.

Social media, in contrast, is an ongoing manifestation of those relationships, not only representing them but also actively building and shaping them. In other words, you can’t separate how you communicate about your CSR activities from your CSR activities themselves. The medium is the message, as the adage goes. Communicators who don’t quickly wake up to this shift are about to become as relevant as the teletype.

Last night, my wife came in from the garden muttering to herself. She had spent the better part of the evening cutting back blackberry and morning glory growing through the fence from our neighbor’s property, pulling up a riotous patch of flowers (a pretty purple, but alarmingly pushy) and yanking down tendrils of ivy that were beginning to snake up a creaky box elder tree. It’s a constant battle to stay ahead of nonnative species. And it’s not limited to the backyard. A couple of weeks ago, I was fishing the Deschutes River in Central Oregon and was surprised to see nearly every rock studded with tiny black snails. I hadn’t noticed them in such numbers before. A sign near one of the trails explained the situation–the river has been infested with New Zealand mud snails, and anglers were urged to thoroughly clean their gear with bleach before moving on to another watershed.

All of which got me thinking about a point Michael Pollan makes about corn in his book Omnivore’s Dilemma. He says that corn has effectively cultivated and molded us to its advantage–not the other way around. We’ve invested untold resources giving corn every advantage over other species, dramatically expanding its range and virtually eliminating its direct competition (and natural enemies).

It seems to me the challenge of nonnative species extends to marketing, too. With growing interest in sustainability, mainstream brands are trying to break into the green marketplace. The danger to smaller, more modest brands–those that have been focused on the sustainability market all along–is analogous to what native plants and animals face in the onslaught of aggressive, fast-propagating invasive species. They’re at risk of being crowded out and overrun, which could greatly reduce the diversity of choices and overall health of the green marketplace.

As with corn, we’ve essentially evolved as consumers to serve and protect these megabrands. In general, we’re predisposed to choose them for their superior convenience or better price or powerful brand image, characteristics we traditionally have placed a higher value on than, say, their carbon footprint.

There are encouraging signs, however. The movement towards choosing locally-grown foods, for example, promises to encourage greater market diversity and expand the foothold of “native” brands. While it’s unlikely we’ll be able to break completely free of our economic monoculture any time soon, we can at least defend the diversity we have and seed new ground whenever we get the opportunity. 

I’m back. What–you didn’t notice I was gone? Well, no hard feelings. I’ll chalk it up to my fabulous teammates here at AHA! who live-blogged the Southwest Washington Sustainability Conference last week. Catching up with their posts almost makes me regret being out on vacation (almost, but not quite). On the whole, it sounds like it was a great conference, with many thoughtful speakers taking on vital and provocative topics.

If you were introduced to Shiny Green Button at the event, we hope you’ll continue to drop by our humble corner of the intertubes to keep up on the challenges of communicating sustainability. If anything is clear from last week’s conference, it’s that making sustainability real and meaningful to people–rather than casting it in marketing buzz or policy-speak–is key to accelerating beyond the talk & debate phase and into the action & results phase. Not to say talk and debate isn’t valuable or necessary, but the time to shift thinking, make tough decisions and change our collective behavior is long past due.

As an aside, we were thrilled to participate in the conference, and want to thank the folks with the City of Vancouver–and especially Loretta Callahan–for the opportunity to exercise our blogging muscles while getting an up-close view of our region’s burgeoning commitment to sustainability. Here’s hoping next year’s event will be even bigger and better, with more ways for everyone to interact and build on each other’s insights and perspective. See you there.

Disappearing water sources, acidic oceans, pandemics, tribal politics, world wars and hundreds of millions of environmental refugees. Eban Goodstein could talk about the effects of climate change forever. But, at the end of the day, he wants you to focus on three things.

1.) We can avoid these catastrophes

2.) We don’t have much time left

3.) We need a grassroots mobilization to do it

Goodstein is the director of Focus the Nation—an organization that holds a nationwide teach-in and brainstorming session that focuses on solving climate change. Last year, the event included over 1,900 schools and organizations. Attendees included governors, members of Congress and community leaders but the “focus” in Focus the Nation is on young people.

Throughout our history, change has always come from the young. It seems even more vital that this new generation—those under 30—lead the movement to reverse climate change. Older adults are not going to be living through these atrocities. They’re not as motivated, right? That’s the assumption I was operating under. But Goodstein facilitated a load of great discussion and brainstorming towards the end of the session that changed my thinking. Great ideas were everywhere I turned! And they weren’t coming from anyone under thirty. (I think there was one person in their twenties in the whole group.)

Young people are integral, but this movement is for everyone. All we need is urgency.

Visit FocusTheNation.org. Tell your kids, tell your friends. Get involved. Focus 2008.

Yoram Bauman is Geekaliscious.

Well what did I expect—with a name like Yorum? He’s tall, skinny, kinda concave in the middle, it’s possible that a former economist now working at Supercuts whacked his doo, but this guy has a wicked good sense of humor and the smarts to know how to use it.

As the self-proclaimed “world’s first and only stand-up economist,” Bauman started rocking the Vancouver, Hilton “casbah” at the Sustainabilty Conference and Trade Show with his now famous You Tube schtick (400,000 views and counting) on Mankiw’s Ten Principles of Economics Translated. Check it out. Even if you don’t:

a. give a rip about economics, or

b. give a rip, but feel utterly clueless whenever you hear things like “within the realm of supply of the macro economy’s micro side we can only conclude that polar bears are all for global warming”… it’s funny, you’ll laugh a lot and in the end you’ll feel vaguely like you got it.

Even more funny than Bauman’s routine were the slides of comments posted by You Tube viewers. One viewer wrote, “You’re funny, and I don’t say that to a lot of people. Lots of people aren’t funny. Lots of people are sad.” And then there was, “I spaced off listening to this, just like in my real economics class.”

Okay so maybe that doesn’t make you want to “smack thigh” here, but when projected on a giant screen in a room full of cheesecake eating conference attendees, it was hilarious.

Bauman riffed jokes not just on economics, which by the way has been an outrageously funny topic since the late seventies and Bauman has the jokes to prove it, but even gave quinoa, the Iraq war, his efficiency with the Spanish language a shot.

Bauman’s comedy was a welcome break in the heady stream of conference sessions. He is–and I think he actualy said this for real: bat shit crazy….but in a good way.

So now that I’m done with my post…two notes:

1. Was this the only session that was signed for the hearing impaired?

2. I sure hope those little green fir starts that graced all the tables in the main conference room, sprigging hopefully out of their soil wrapped plastic, get planted somewhere.

All blog posts on Shiny Green Button associated with the 2008 Southwest Washington Sustainability Conference reflect the individual views of AHA! employees and not the City of Vancouver. We want and encourage feedback, so tell us what you think. But please be respectful of our readers. Bloggers of Shiny Green Button reserve the right to reject comments containing offensive or inflammatory language.

We are obsessed with technology. Particularly in regards to transportation issues, the party line answer to our climate crisis, it always seems, is to create better and more efficient products that will drive us cleanly into the future.

But today’s transportation panelists at the Sustainability Conference expanded upon that single-tracked discussion. They said: unless we reduce the number of miles we travel, unless we switch to other modes, and unless we optimize the way we operate our vehicles, we will override every single gain we’ve made using cleaner technology to reduce emissions.

This is in part a land use problem. Limiting sprawl is a key part of reducing the number of miles that we have to drive. But as speaker Gail Achterman pointed out, there’s something else going on here. Sprawl has actually decreased in the Portland metro area—but vehicle miles travelled (VMT) is growing. Growing, in fact, at the same rate as consumption.

Achterman suggested that as women have entered the workforce, the need for driving has increased. We now spend less time in our homes, we work more, we bring our kids to daycare, we go out to eat. The way we live—in a society in which retail is king—is in part creating more and more miles over which we have to travel on a daily basis.

So what are the solutions to these lifestyle dilemmas? It goes beyond moving closer to where we work and buy groceries. Maybe it’s telecommuting, maybe it’s the option to work 4 days a week for 10 hours a day, or maybe it’s staggering work shifts to avoid one single rush hour. Or maybe it’s building a society in which we all have time to create more, grow our own foods and buy less.

But this is where I get stuck. In a nation that depends so heavily on our retail economy, how do we make the case to the government and big business that in order to make a real difference, the answer is not “buy more technology”? Maybe the answer is, simply, to buy less—of everything.

And the elephant in the room…

No discussion about transportation issues in the Portland-Vancouver region would be replete without mention of the Columbia River Crossing—and, remarkably, it didn’t explicitly come up until a member of the audience addressed it.

Now I am a lay person and I do not claim to have any great knowledge of transit or land use planning, but I will say this: I just do not understand the environmentalist opposition to the CRC. I just don’t. Extending light rail into Vancouver and building a bike-friendly crossing (as opposed to the terrifyingly narrow excuse for a pedestrian pathway we have now) is the best thing we can do to provide transportation options to commuters. It doesn’t matter how many lanes wide the bridge is—if the only reasonable mode of transportation it supports is cars, then we’ll always have a bottleneck.

Achterman very eloquently put it this way: “I believe this is our one big chance to turn the corner to a new transportation—by replacing a derelict facility with a sustainable facility that includes multiple modes.”

After all, we need to provide reasonable options and choices if we’re going to expect anyone to make lifestyle changes.

All blog posts on Shiny Green Button associated with the 2008 Southwest Washington Sustainability Conference reflect the individual views of AHA! employees and not the City of Vancouver. We want and encourage feedback, so tell us what you think. But please be respectful of our readers. Bloggers of Shiny Green Button reserve the right to reject comments containing offensive or inflammatory language.

Try this sometime. Pair up with a stranger. Hold both hands. Spend 60 seconds telling the stranger your life story, and another 60 seconds listening to his or hers. Then spend 60 seconds looking into the person’s eyes, not making a sound. Finally, close your eyes and imagine learning the next day that the person had died. Chances are, you’d feel it as a personal loss, your brief acquaintance having made that person real to you.

Translate that to the global context. We hear about people dying of malnutrition, but it doesn’t seem real. We’re numb to it.

Disconnection is an understandable reaction to the onslaught of alarming news. Ellis Jones is out to reconnect us, to channel our energy for good, as he said at the 2008 Southwest Washington Sustainability Conference. We can make a difference by spending our money in a way that supports a better world. It’s hardly radical, just a matter of democratizing capitalism, he said, by harnessing the vast power of consumer spending for global good.

Isn’t it inspiring to realize that the choices we make as consumers matter to the planet? It may not be enough to solve the huge problems we face, such as global warming, but it is an essential complement to the big-scale fixes we are sure to be seeing.

Jones makes it easy to choose wisely by explaining his reasoning in The Better World Handbook and layout out the practical options in The Better World Shopping Guide, a book and website rating zillions of everyday products according to the manufacturer’s social and environmental responsibility–in short, what they do with your dollars. Now that I know about this enlightening, well-researched and even life-changing guide, I won’t be without it.

All blog posts on Shiny Green Button associated with the 2008 Southwest Washington Sustainability Conference reflect the individual views of AHA! employees and not the City of Vancouver. We want and encourage feedback, so tell us what you think. But please be respectful of our readers. Bloggers of Shiny Green Button reserve the right to reject comments containing offensive or inflammatory language.