7th Gen Blog

As many of you already know, this summer Seventh Generation over 100 students to Washington, DC to be trained by Greenpeace to become activists in the growing movement towards social and environmental justice. This 10 minute Change It video showcases some of the highlights from that training.

This past Saturday I spoke at the Green Festival in Washington, DC. What I spoke about represented a significant departure from my usual focus on the business case for corporate responsibility or the growth of the natural products industry.

Here are some notes from my talk:

Love, I believe, is about relentlessly caring
That means not just caring when it’s comfortable or easy. Or when you feel like caring. But caring all the time. Especially when you don’t feel like caring. It means that you never stop.

Because the caring is not for you or even necessarily for another. But because it is the only way to be in the world. To love the whole of the world rather that the parts and pieces you choose.

To care relentlessly we must also see what lies within. The unexpressed potential. The wisdom in the most simple things. The essence rather than the outward manifestation. And to care relentlessly you need to be able to generate new patterns in your being because to care relentlessly is not what we are taught to do. Especially at work.

I just finished watching Bill Moyers’ amazing special, Is God Green? If you missed it, take some time to watch this documentary and and check out one of the most amazing and hopeful movements I’ve ever seen, one that’s bringing everyone concerned with sustainability and global warming together with the hugely powerful and rapidly growing segment of the population that identifies themselves as evangelical Christians.

Richard Cizik, of the National Association of Evangelicals, is deserving of special praise. He is a brave man willing to challenge the Republican Party and the old guard of the Christian Right. These conservative evangelicals are joining the fight to save our environment, arguing that man's stewardship of the planet is a biblical imperative and calling for action to stop global warming.

Today is International Ecological Debt Day. That is, today marks the day of the year when the world's annual demands for earth's natural resources outstrips the planet's annual ability to sustainably provide them and our annual impacts on the biosphere exceed the annual ability of the planet to absorb them. From this point in the year onward, according to data assembled by the Global Footprint Network, we're living on "natural credit" and borrowing against our future by using more than the earth can produce each year and leaving behind more than it can take back.

To illustrate just how quickly things are mushrooming, the date of the world's first ecological debt day in 1987 was December 19th. But economic growth around the world has seen the day fall earlier and earlier each year. The sustainability clock is ticking and apparently it's ticking faster all the time, all of which which strongly suggests that we not wait until its alarm goes off to start spinning its hands forward. If we hesitate, a metaphor may be the only thing we're left with...