7gen Bloc

It was my great pleasure last week to welcome Otto Scharmer to our office. Otto co-authored the book Presence with Peter Senge and he brought his students from MIT to our office to explore Seventh Generation and to ask questions about any and all aspects of the company.

Everyday as I read through the news, I'm committed to not let it get me down. And as you know… that ain’t easy. Well, it just got a lot harder.

Over the weekend, someone at the office pointed out to me that Philip Slater, a columnist at the political blog the Huffington Post, had written an article in which, as part of a larger argument, he said our decision not to sell our products to Wal-Mart was evidence that I was practicing “prissy puritanism.”

If I could say it any better I would. But Thomas Friedman’s 9/20/06 column in the New York Times on taxing ethanol imports highlights the political and structural obstacles to common sense. Friedman writes:

Last week the entire Seventh Generation staff headed to Trapp Family Lodge in a Stowe, Vermont, for our annual two day retreat. (The Trapp family is the same one of Sound of Music fame.) The Lodge is a frequent destination for Seventh Gen meetings. It sits high upon a wonderful hill, giving you the impression that the world is at your door. Hundreds of acres of forest provide trails for hiking, snow shoeing or cross country skiing that wind through some of Stowe’s most amazing wilderness. The theme of our retreat was a question: What does it mean to be an owner of our company?

My recent post about roadkill and global warming generated some thought-provoking comments, among them this note from fellow inspired protagonist Kevin: Jeffrey, if you eat meat despite the evidence that a meat-based diet is non-sustainable, how then can we have hope about the future of ethical consumerism? To shed light on the answer, Stanford's Center for Social Innovation recently came out with an interesting report. There may be a fundamental disconnect in the marketing of socially responsible products. It is the difference between what people say they want, and what they actually buy.

We at Seventh Generation celebrated our first Talk Like a Pirate Day today and here are some clips from the inside...WR

The battle to prevent International Paper from unnecessarily dirtying Vermont's air and irresponsibly poisoning her citizens continues. This afternoon, Vermont Public Radio aired a story on the latest tire burn developments featuring our very own Scienceman, Martin Wolf (a man who knows his way around paper mill contaminants), explaining just what we've been doing about it. Give it a listen...

Last week’s deadline for the EPA to object to the proposed International Paper Company test burn of tires and sewage sludge in the boiler at their Ticonderoga, NY plant passed without any comment from the EPA.

It’s no real surprise that scientists announced this week that America’s summer was the hottest since 1936 (can you say “Dust Bowl”?) and the second warmest since official records started being kept in 1895. It’s quite clear that the heat is on and that we humans are responsible. So what are we gonna do about it? Here are two things I found this week that will go a long way toward pulling our climate back from the brink…