7gen Bloc

It's Friday. What more reason do we need to take a break and dig some amazing trees?

Dog and cat food is in the news. Bad gluten. Dead pets. Too many tainted brands to count. No doubt you’ve seen at least the headlines. Pet people and animal lovers are up in arms, but here’s the thing (and the dirty secret)… Contaminated ingredients or not, most if not all commercial mass-market pet food is utter crap. Even on a good production day, I’m firmly convinced that it’s just about the worst thing for our animal co-conspirators. You don’t want to know what it’s made from. And you sure don’t want to be feeding it to Fido.

This is funny (unless you’re a tree)… A week ago, deforestating tissue-maker Kimberly Clark was in New York’s Times Square filming interviews with passing pedestrians for their new “Let It Out” Kleenex ad campaign. The idea is that people are supposed to tell Kleenex about something that upsets them, tear up over it, and reach for the tissues.

It’s crazy what you can find when you wander ‘round the internets. For example, just the other day we found this little piece of videography from Think Organic about our very own company and starring our very own Sue Holden. It was captured at the San Francisco Green Festival last November, and in it Sue gives a nice overview of our company and our stuff. Cool.

This week’s New Yorker magazine (4/2/07) features a long negative story about Wal-Mart’s effort to “co-opt liberals.” This is another in the series of good news/bad news stories that both helps and plagues the company. After nearly a year of this endless seesaw, one wonders when they will get the message that systemic change is the answer. As I have often said about many other companies, without a systemic approach that engages the whole culture, the good work done by the right hand is almost immediately undone by the left hand.