The Inspired Protagonist

Chamber of Horrors

Inspired Protagonist — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:49:44 -0500

It's been a rough few weeks for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Once a leading business organization and lobbying force, the Chamber has been hit from all quarters over its opposition to climate crisis action and its aggressive work to undermine current efforts to create new consumer protections, and stronger business and financial regulations.

High-profile Chamber members like Apple, Pacific Gas and Electric, and Levi Strauss & Co. have resigned in well-deserved disgust over the group's climate policies. A feud with the White House over proposed business regulations has subjected the group to withering criticism. And last week, the Yes Men, a group of activist pranksters, punked the Chamber by holding a fake Chamber press conference to announce that the organization was dropping its opposition to global warming legislation.

You almost have to feel sorry for the Chamber. Almost, but not quite, all of this comes in response to official positions that are either absurd, hypocritical, or both.

The organization's stance on the climate crisis, for example, though recently revised to appear more reasonable, still staunchly opposes current federal efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and declares that America's "economic well-being will depend on the sustainability" of energy sources like coal and petroleum "for the foreseeable future."

When it comes to protecting long-suffering consumers from businesses running amuck and financial markets and firms wagering our collective future on dubious high-risk bets, the Chamber says that low corporate taxes, loose regulations, and unfettered free markets are all we need.

Such positions are so ridiculous they read like a Saturday Night Live sketch. (No wonder the Yes Men found the Chamber ripe for parody!) Years of research and overwhelming scientific consensus long ago declared global warming a serious threat. And the group's prescription for economic salvation consists of exactly what got us into the current mess in the first place. Even if it didn't, a group that supported unprecedented public bailouts of private companies and then turned right around to trumpet a hands-off approach to the marketplace is impossible to take seriously.

And that's the point. The Chamber is risking irrelevancy by spouting the same old lines we've all heard before and supporting outdated and largely discredited positions the world is quickly moving beyond. It's chosen to represent the obstructionist views of a handful of powerful industries notorious for keeping their heads in the sand, disputing the obvious, and placing their own narrow interests above everything else.

My advice to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is to wake up and smell the fair trade coffee. Stop denying and decrying, and start helping the rest of us get something done. By sticking to old school positions in a new school world, you're dismally failing to serve the ultimate needs and interests of the vast majority of your members who, at the end of the day, believe that we shouldn't compromise long term prosperity and sustainability for the short term profits of a small group of huge multi-national companies.

These things can't be achieved in a world with an unhinged climate or a mortally damaged environment. They won't be found in a society in which everything from wealth and health to justice and opportunity are distributed with alarming inequality. They won't happen in a ruined economy filled with bankrupt consumers. They'll only come when we solve the enormous game-changing challenges the country now faces. You can either get on that bus or get out of the way. Right now, you're just siding with the dinosaurs, and we all know what happened to them.

Will This Conference Make Business More Responsible?

Inspired Protagonist — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:35:27 -0400

At the registration desk, I got my goody bag. I peered inside and found a corporate responsibility report from ExxonMobil, a sponsor (believe it or not) of the Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) annual meeting that took place last week in San Francisco. For a moment, I thought I had checked into the wrong event.

Aron Cramer, President and CEO of BSR, began his address to the thousand people at the conference by saying, "Our work is not about creating a green economy but a strong economy."

I cringed. His statement both confuses and inverts the truth. The only way to create a "strong economy" is by evolving it into a "green economy." We haven't had a strong economy. What we've had is an economy that gives to the rich and takes from the poor, lacks a real regulatory system equipped with the resources and authority needed to police Wall Street, forces people from their homes, tolerates high levels of minority unemployment, and fails to promote wise investments in communities. This kind of unjust economy is neither strong nor sustainable.

"Economic recovery is starting to show itself," Aaron continued. Well that depends on where you live. If you've lost your job, your home, and your life savings, the only thing that you might be recovering is your sense of anger.

The address went on. "Enviro trends are clear, global climate change is happening faster than we expected. Copenhagen is the mother of all system redesign issues. Copenhagen is about doing something that has never been done before. Business must provide the leadership."

On that we agree! The question is, what will BSR do about the climate crisis? Has the time come for BSR to move beyond education, wade into the political process, and use their huge clout to counter the dangerous position taken by the US Chamber of Commerce?

Tom Friedman recently wrote, "The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, having sold its soul to the old coal and oil industries, uses its influence to prevent Congress from passing legislation to really spur renewables. All shareholders in America should ask their C.E.O.'s why they still belong to the chamber."

"If not now, when?" was the question I asked at a BSR panel on public policy. What could possibly present the organization with a more compelling reason to abandon their aversion to taking public policy positions than the chance to help avert the greatest peril facing the planet?

Here's the answer I received to my question from the discussion's moderator: "Take this panel as an indication of our concern and focus on the issue." If that's the official position, then I have to say I don't see adequate concern or focus. We need dramatically more from the world's leading organization on corporate responsibility.

The two speakers who joined Aaron on the stage of the opening plenary, Ernst Ligteringen, the CEO of the Global Reporting Initiative and Ricardo Young, the chairman of Brazil's Ethos Institute, both leading organizations that have taken more formal positions on global climate change. It's time for BSR to do the same and start leading by throwing its appreciable weight behind legislative and political efforts to end the climate crisis. Anything less, and we can only assume that they're letting companies like ExxonMobil clog up more than just their goody bag.

Owning Up to Responsibility

Inspired Protagonist — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

When a corporation gets it wrong and bad things happen, we've come to expect a fairly standard response. Public relations teams twist facts and logic. Blame is aggressively laid elsewhere. Innocence is strongly proclaimed, and not much changes. At best we get a fix or a settlement without any admission of wrongdoing, and business as usual is free to continue.

So it was refreshing to see the new president of Toyota offer not just one but a whole series of mea culpas in a recent speech to reporters at the Japan National Press Club.

Akio Toyoda offered a mournful apology for an August car crash that killed four Californians and triggered an enormous recall. Then he admitted the company was unprepared for the current global recession, had caused economic suffering by closing its first U.S. factory, and was making products the Japanese don't like, all of which required apologies as well.

In Japan's often rigid business culture, this was the equivalent of falling on your sword. While the Times article points out that big splashy expressions of regret like this are often nothing more than convenient cover for inaction, Mr. Toyoda, for the time being, deserves the benefit of the doubt. His courage should be acknowledged and the example he set should be encouraged in board rooms everywhere.

Accepting accountability for one's actions and for the actions and decisions of the company one leads, is the critical step to on the journey toward real corporate responsibility and the meaningful systemic change it will create. Without fully and honestly embracing our culpability for the negative outcomes our poor decisions and flawed judgments create, we can't become people capable of instituting legitimate change. Before we can alter our course, we need to understand how we strayed to begin with, and that means owning our mistakes.

There's no dishonor or embarrassment in this. Our fallibilities are what make us human, and though it's a bit counterintuitive, we should be grateful for them because they're the lens through which we can more easily see those things about ourselves and our companies most in need of correction. Mr. Toyoda seems to realize this. Now it's up to the rest of the corporate world to follow his lead.

Environmentalism's Dirty Secret

Inspired Protagonist — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

It's easy to think of pollution as a problem we all share. Bad air, dirty water, chemical contamination, and other challenges spread themselves out roughly equally. Or so we think. The truth is more complicated: Some places are more polluted than others, and the worst conditions tend to be in poor and minority communities.

For too long, this has been environmentalism's dirty secret. Well-intentioned activists work on environmental issues but many go home to the relative health and safety of clean neighborhoods, which have been kept that way by money and influence that force the sources of pollution -- whether it's a chemical factory or a rail yard or waste incinerator -- into areas whose citizens lack the resources and the power to stop them.

This not-in-my-backyard phenomenon is a big problem, and it's compounded by the fact that many of the environmental burdens it shifts to suffering communities are inadvertently supported by environmentalists everywhere. The factory makes the products we like. The railyard gets them to the store. The incinerator disposes of them when their usefulness ends. And most of us of never see any of this happen because we can afford to live where it doesn't.

This environmental racism occurs on all scales from local minority neighborhoods to poor third world nations, yet most organized environmental efforts and groups have focused their attention elsewhere. For whatever reason, they've failed to recruit meaningful numbers of minority participants and have too often ignored the unique problems these people face.

A recent L.A. Times article reports that this is changing. Fed up with the often horrifying conditions in their communities, poor and minority residents are pushing back. This is good news for all of us. For one thing, environmental racism is an ugly black mark on our efforts to create a truly just and sustainable nation. On a purely moral level, it demands to be addressed. Equally important is the fact that these courageous people are trying to clean up places whose pollution ultimately affects us all.

When they win, we all win. If the environmental justice movement can become pervasive, it can succeed and force one of two things to happen. Either the root causes of much of the country's environmental blight will be erased at the source or dirty facilities will get pushed into areas whose residents are better equipped to make sure these operations clean up their act. For these and other reasons, we should encourage and help those on the front lines as much as we can. It's perhaps the best way to get to make sure that many of our environmental challenges aren't in anyone's backyard.

photo: Brooke Anderson

Can We Buy Our Way To Salvation?

Inspired Protagonist — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:33:53 -0400

Anand Giridharadas, in a Sunday New York Times piece entitled "Boycotts Minus the Pain," poses some wonderfully important questions about the role and limitations of ethical consumption. As a lifelong salesman of bath tissue and laundry detergent that aspire to be both sustainable and responsible, it's not surprising that I have my own point of view.

Giridharadas asks which, "problems demand politics and which the mall. Child labor in Vietnam and unscrupulous intermediaries in the coffee trade lent themselves to buycotting. What can the market do about Darfur or health care in the United States...? Have we, with our ethical cars and condoms and carrots, found a way to make markets humane? Or have we rather found a way to make politics bearable to us by turning it into shopping?"

My answer? Neither.

Markets are not humane, and politics is unbearable.

Ethical consumption has an essential role to play in our journey toward a more just and equitable economy. Fair trade coffee and sustainable palm oil make a measurably significant difference in the lives of farmers and their families, in both the environment and economic justice. They will not, however, correct the underlying structural inequity of an economy that fails to charge the full true cost of the things we buy. Because business is able (some would say encouraged) to "externalize" many of these costs onto society, the real price that must be paid for all too many products and services is borne by each of us whether we ourselves consumed the item in question or not. When a international commodities firm, for example, burns down a prime stretch of virgin Indonesian rainforest to make way for a massive plantation of palm oil, it is we the people not the owners or backers of the project who pay the actual cost of the damage that results whether it's biodiversity loss, global climate change acceleration, air pollution, or some other ill caused by the land's conversion from a natural to a synthetic state.

Ethical consumption may lead to a lessening of these ills and to marketplaces that we can participate in with a clearer conscience, but it does not fundamentally address the systemic change the world needs even more. Nor does it ease our political responsibilities. We can buy as many organic bananas as we can eat, but we still need to vote, participate in the political process itself, and actively contribute to the communities to which we belong.

What is required more than better products is a more holistic approach to the challenges we face. This will require that we first achieve an understanding of the common root causes of the problems we're concerned about and then deploy a range of responses in order to identify those that will be most effective at addressing the many diverse problems these root causes create in one fell swoop.

If that sounds complicated, you're right. It is.

Ethical consumption marks the start, not the culmination, of that process. We all need to become informed purchasers of truly responsible products. But there's a critical difference between a "green" product and a "green" company. A few solar flashlights made by a company that burns coal to make energy will not solve global climate change. In fact, I would argue that we don't want to part with our hard-earned dollars to buy such products at all if the profits our purchases create are going to end up funding corporations that stand for values we consider irresponsible and unethical.

Finding and applying the information needed to make these kinds of decisions, however, is both difficult and time-consuming. It may be the only way we can really consume ethically, but getting there is problematic at best, especially when our jobs, families, and homes are already clamoring for attention we're hard-pressed to provide. (When it comes to my own purchasing, I leave it up to the GoodGuide, a wonderful rating organization that does the hard work for me by considering countless points of information and making recommendations about which product choices are the most responsible.)

That leaves us with politics and the job of fulfilling our civic responsibilities, a challenge so complex that I believe it is a primary driver behind the explosion in ethical consumption. Daunted by the task of becoming full and proactive participants in civic life, we seek instead a simpler substitute in the form of responsibly produced goods and services. But we cannot eat or otherwise purchase our way to a new President, health care reform, or badly needed changes in our tax code. For that we need something more.

We need to find a reasonable and effective way to promote the "politics" of a just and sustainable world. This is the task that I believe to be the most important and profound challenge in today's society. On this count, our friends on the "right" may have much to teach us. Through an intricately networked and systemic combination of religious institutions, think tanks, foundations, small town school boards, and local elections, they've successfully driven their values from individual communities onto the national stage.

This needs to be the destination for the ideals behind ethical consumption, which must grow from a product here and a product there into a national movement that ultimately manifests itself not just through more responsibly-produced goods but is reflected in all companies systematically working to exercise positive influences throughout their supply chains and in an economic system that no longer shifts its hidden costs onto the commonwealth.

This is how we need to grow and where we need to go. Having said that, I don't necessarily know how best to get there. I just know that rather than "What should I buy?;" "How can I make it so it doesn't matter" is the question we should all be asking.

Why I Speak To MBA Students

Inspired Protagonist — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:31:06 -0400

Last week I had the opportunity to speak to a group of Columbia University MBA students. The next day I received an interesting email, which asked:

"If you were given the power to decide how each of the MBAs in the room tonight spent the next 10 years of their careers, what would you have us do? What is the lever we should be pushing? Where can we have the most impact on the "system" right now? Many of us have a passion for change, but are still searching for "what to do with our lives," are unsure of where to push, and how to do it."

This is a great question and between its lines, we can find a lot of hope and promise. Here's what I would suggest...

First, given our goal of creating a just, equitable, and sustainable economy, I'd break you up into five teams and assign each team to work on one of the following questions:

What are the best models of large-scale cooperation, alignment, and movement building that might be most useful for us to learn from?
Because a large-scale values shift and increase in consciousness is fundamental to creating this change, how do we go about creating this foundation?
This work will require significant resources. How do we design a process to acquire these resources and in what places might we find them?
Because we are focused on systemic change, which specific changes represent the acupuncture points most likely to affect the largest shifts? Is there a natural sequence for which of these should come first?
How do we balance short term priorities like climate change with the need to focus on longer systemic changes?

Then, taking the findings of Group 3, which focused on the need to acquire significant resources, I'd go get that money and hire all of you to execute the findings of the other four teams.

OK. That admittedly doesn't actually answer the question, but it sure would be fun!

A more concrete answer about "what to do with your life," starts with clarity about your own personal passions. Clarity about what it is you will commit your heart and soul to, what you will refuse to fail at, and what is so exciting to you that nothing can stop your pursuit of it. This clarity is the most important first step in any successful journey.

Then you must determine the purpose and principles that will guide your journey as well as the specific effect you seek to have. Do not join a venture that is not aligned with your values, or whose purpose is antithetical to your own goals. Life is too short to hope that you can start a revolution inside a company that does more damage to the world in a few minutes then you will be able to undo in a decade.

If you ask me what it is that the world most needs, I'd ask for:

Fundraisers who can convince the world's wealthiest citizens to invest in long-term systemic change.
Coalition builders who can bring together disparate interests.
Leaders of multi-stakeholder coalitions.
Media mavens who can leverage social media into political change.
Business case builders who can help companies see why it's in their long-term best interest to invest in a just and sustainable world.
Strategic economists who can create a viable game plan for implementing full-cost accounting.
Politicians who can make politics a reputable profession.
New business innovators who can figure out how to take the caring professions (teaching, nursing, parenting, eldercare, etc.) and generate for the people in these fields income that is commensurate with the true value of these services.

photo: Les Chatfield

The Voice of Progressive Business Rocks the Capital

Inspired Protagonist — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:34:10 -0400

In an unprecedented blitz on Washington DC, progressive business leaders met with 51 senators and talked with senior White House officials this week about how to move cap and trade climate legislation, now called The American Clean Energy Leadership Act of 2009, through the Senate. The day started in the White House with Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, former EPA head and current Energy "czarina" Carol Browner, and Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor to the President. It was almost bizarre to be sitting inside the White House surrounded by brilliant people who are so passionate about the issues we care about most instead of demonstrating with them outside.

White House officials spoke about our need to, "lead the next industrial and energy revolution," and noted that, "the days of externalizing the costs of fossil fuels are over."

I was proud to represent a multitude of groups from Seventh Generation to CERES, BICEP, and the newly created American Sustainable Business Council that have come together under the banner "We Can Lead."

While many participants lobbied their respective senators, my own delegation, Vermont's Senators Leahy and Sanders, has led the charge in support of the bill, and so all I could offer them was our thanks. But we were able to discuss the business case for regulating CO2 emissions with many others who are still sitting on the fence.

Senators on both sides of the aisle have also have taken great notice of the many major businesses that have been defecting from the ranks of the Chamber of Commerce over that organization's irrational position on the cap and trade bill in particular and global climate change in general. Thomas Freidman recently noted that, "the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, having sold its soul to the old coal and oil industries, uses its influence to prevent Congress from passing legislation to really spur renewables. Hats off to the courageous chairman of Pacific Gas and Electric, Peter Darbee, who last week announced that his huge California power company was quitting the chamber because of its 'obstructionist tactics.' All shareholders in America should ask their C.E.O.'s why they still belong to the chamber."

Following that defection, Apple Computer, Chicago-based Exelon, and New Mexico-based PNM Resources Inc. all stated their intention to leave the chamber and NIKE resigned its position on the board of directors, all promising developments that give me hope that the change we seek may come to our salvation after all.

photo: Luigi Crespo

Can We Eat Our Way To a Cooler World?

Inspired Protagonist — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 11:06:43 -0400

It's a good question. Generally we hear about what not to eat -- beef that emits methane, palm oil that's grown on land that was a tropical rainforest, corn raised on petroleum-based fertilizers. But here's some good news for your diet: Terrestrial carbon sequestration (that's carbon that is stored in the soil) is the best way to buy time in a warming world. Cutting emissions will help, but not as quickly as sequestration. Making sequestration a priority matters, given the critical policy choices that must be made to make it happen as evidence of current, specific climate-change impacts to agriculture and wildlife mounts.

The Rodale Institute's recent call for land-based biological sequestration dovetails with a recently published Worldwatch Institute report on climate change: State of the World 2009: Into a Warming World. In a chapter entitled "Farming and Land Use to Cool the Planet," authors Sara J. Scherr and Sajal Sthapit examine ways to reverse the trend of environmentally destructive agriculture by using carbon sequestration to mitigate climate change.

They argue that food production must be fundamentally restructured to simultaneously preempt and react to the devastating effects of climate change. They confirm the Rodale Institute's contention that reexamining the role of carbon in agriculture is a vital first step in this restructuring process.

Organic agriculture presents an untapped solution, an underutilized carbon sink at the ready. Research indicates that, if the world's 3.5 billion tillable acres could be transitioned to organic agriculture now (and that's a big if), land could sequester almost 40 percent of our current carbon emissions. No other proposed carbon mitigation solution comes close to that potential impact, particularly using existing and readily available technology.

Scherr and Sthapit recommend multiple strategies for carbon sequestration, including organic farming, reduced tillage, use of biochar to aid in revegetation of degraded soils, retaining forests and grasslands as carbon sinks, agroforestry, and perennial cropping to retain more biomass, rotational grazing, and biogas digestion to convert manure into energy and organic fertilizer. They include several good suggestions in ramping up the quest for better perennials, such as looking at more tree crops for food production and finding suitable perennial biodiesel crops.

A Wonderful New Source of Solutions

Inspired Protagonist — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:36:28 -0400

Solutions Journal is an online and print publication dedicated to solving the mounting environmental, social, and economic problems of our time. Its aim is to encourage and promote integrative solutions to issues ranging from climate disruption and the loss of biodiversity to poverty, energy, overfishing, air and water pollution, soil preservation, and human population growth, just to name a few.

While there are already plenty of isolated discussions about these problems and an abundance of individual technical solutions, the new magazine and website will provide a much-needed forum devoted to systemic approaches that put all these pieces together and prompt intelligent conversation about what can and should be done.

What do we mean by systemic approaches? A system can be a community, a corporation, a government, or even the entire global environment. If you want to solve a problem, you need to look at these systems in their entirety and at several, nested scales, from local to global. Rather than focusing on a single link, look at the whole chain. When you start looking at the world this way, it becomes clear: everything is connected.

Business Pushes for Climate Action

Inspired Protagonist — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 10:19:16 -0400

I'm headed back to Washington DC this week to represent responsible businesses who support the passage of the American Clean Energy And Security Act (H.R. 2454). We are scheduled to eat dinner with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and hold a White House meeting with Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke on Wednesday morning.

I'll be part of a group representing two coalitions of U.S. corporations that are using this Washington visit and more than $1 million in advertising around the country and in places like Arkansas and North Dakota to prod the Senate and White House into accelerating work on an energy and climate bill. In a new open letter to President Barack Obama and the U.S. Senate, Seventh Generation and two dozen other major brands -- from eBay and Hewlett Packard to Levi Strauss and PG&E -- declare: "We are business leaders from companies of all sizes and many sectors calling for your leadership. We call on you to enact comprehensive legislation...Now it's time for the United States Senate to act."