7th Gen Blog

Father Edilberto Sena, who Gregor and I visited last month in Santarem, Brazil, Is taking his fight to preserve the Amazon to the world stage. Check out this great story from Britain's newspaper, the Independent, on how Cargill is trying to eat the Amazon and how Father Sena and the local community are fighting back!

Greenpeace is working hard on this issue as well. You can find out what they've found out here.

After you're done all your reading for the day, you can write or call Warren Staley, Cargill Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, and Gregory Page, President and Chief Operating Officer, to tell them what you think of what they're up to. Here's where you'll find them:

Cargill, Inc.
PO Box 9300
Minneapolis, MN 55440-9300

1-800-227-4455

This week I met with Ellen Fox and Heather Belcher at their place Sweet Clover Market, a start up local-organic-natural market in Essex, Vermont. Ellen sent us (Seventh Generation) a letter back in January inquiring about a loan to help get the market off the ground. The idea of working with a local start-up that is focusing on helping build a local economy is really exciting.

Over the past month, I’ve been reading Presence by Peter M. Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers. Those of you who have come to know me probably realize by now that I’m a pretty obsessive reader. Yet unlike most of what I read, Presence was more like a wonderful meditation than the acquisition of information. It is one of the most important and valuable books I’ve read over the past 5 to 10 years. Over the next few posts I make I’ll try to explain why.

One quote I will probably never forget is “the longest road is often from your mind to your heart.” It will (I hope) forever remind me that more value will always come from love than anything else. How can I do all that I do lovingly. As a serial entrepreneur, I am pretty good at action, criticism, analysis, and creativity. I still have a lot to learn about love. One can of course be lovingly critical or analytical, but somehow the depth of my analysis usually seems greater than the depth of my love.

I was also overwhelmed with the notion of how much of our lives fall with-in the preestablished patterns we seem to follow over and over. Whether it’s how we respond to each other, read the newspaper, participate in a meeting, or watch a sunset, most of what we do we do as we have done before. Somehow the idea of doing it differently doesn’t occur to us. Yet outside our patterns lies all possibility. Whether it’s figuring out how to stop global warming, be a better lover, or design a new product, 99% of what is possible but yet to be waits outside the pattern.

If we can slow down our thinking enough to actually watch how we think, become conscious of the generation of our thoughts, question whether there is another way to see what we are seeing, do what we are doing, and hold what we are holding, a whole new world opens up before us.

More to come…

Does this sound familiar: You read the papers. You watch the news. You surf the blogosphere. And with every new bit of eco-reporting, you just keep thinking… This is freakin’ nuts. There’s got to be a better way.

And of course there is. We don’t have to be chained to the toxics treadmill. With a little creativity, we can break the cycle and end our chemical addictions. A brand new study from the Toxics Use Reduction Institute (TURI) at the University of Massachusetts Lowell shows just how possible it is.

Researchers took five heavy toxicological hitters (lead, formaldehyde, perchloroethylene, hexavalent chromium, and DEHP) and tried to find realistic substitutes for them. They looked at about 100 alternative ideas spread across 16 different applications for which the toxins in question are currently used. For every application they examined, at least one alternative was found that could be employed today with lower impacts in the environment and human health.