Seth Godin blogged something that I’ve long said. We live in a world where privacy is not a given. If you have a credit card, your life is an open book (one example among many). What Seth pointed out is that the lack of privacy isn’t what bothers us—it’s the ability of companies to take the information and draw conclusions about our lives and how to market to us. He gives a fascinating example. I won’t spoil the surprise; go visit.
Now is President Obama’s chance: with the much-scorned Larry Summers stepping away from US financial policy, there’s room to appoint an economist with a deeper understanding of the causes and cures for our economic woes. If I were Obama, my second choice would be former Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich. My second choice would be Nobel Prize winner and New York times columnist Paul Krugman. And my third choice would be someone from completely outside government: the earth-centered economist Hazel Henderson, author of many influential books from the recent Ethical Markets to the long-ago Creating Alternative Futures.
Considering their enormous and deep understanding of marketing during the campaign, it’s hard to understand why the Obama administration is so bad at marketing itself as a governing force. Obama’s advisors need to take some lessons from George W. Bush. He was a terrible president, but he was extremely skilled at marketing himself and his accomplishments—and all my years observing politics, I’ve never before seen a team that was as good at staying on message. Better even than Reagan, if you ask me.
With just over a month left before the election, it’s time for the Democrats to go deep and hard on their marketing: to create a message that will resonate with the American people and cut the floor out from under the Republicans.
If I were running the national Democratic Senate and House campaign committees, I’d do it like this:
You voted for “Yes We Can”—But the Republicans Gave You “No We Won’t”
Two years ago, you, the American people, voted for change. You said it was long past time to focus the economy on Main Street…to get out of the illegal and unwinnable Iraq war…to begin once again to stop behaving like a “rogue state” and take our place among nations as the most powerful and inspirational democracy in the world…to once and for all rein in runaway corporate power and massive environmental devastation.
We’ve done a lot in the short time we’ve had to reverse the disastrous policies of the Bush administration. Here’s a list of 91 different things the Obama administration has accomplished.
But most of those 91 accomplishments didn’t require approval by Congress. The Republicans have decided, as a bloc, to vote against almost anything we propose—even if they proposed it first. If it comes from the Democrats, they vote no, end of story. How much more progress would we have made without their tantrumy-two-year-old behavior? How much better shape would the economy and our carbon footprint be in—if, for instance, the green Jobs package hadn’t been so watered down?
You didn’t vote for “No We Won’t” in 2008. You voted for “Yes We Can! Vote Democratic and get the change you wanted all along.
I tried to make this comment directly on the article, at https://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/thegreenguide/2010/09/urban-foragers-cropping-up-in.html. It wouldn’t take, and I’m not one to waste a good comment.
I’m a long-time forager. Just today, I was checking on the Russian olives in my neighborhood (an invasive that I find quite tasty). I’ve picked plenty of wild raspberries and blueberries, and have a fondness for lambs’ quarters.
As the primary author (with Jay Conrad Levinson) of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet, I follow sustainability issues closely. I see foraging is one part of the sustainability recipe, as we move, society-wide, toward locavore diets.
Recently, I suggested that Obama do a massive solar/sustainable stimulus package. And I wrote,
The really good news? Such a plan could be put into place with surprisingly little capital outlay, because creative financing structures already exist that can let private investment step to the plate. I’ll talk more about this in my next post.
OK, so I squeezed a couple of posts in between. But I’m getting back to it.
And I think the answer is the deep-energy work by people like Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, who looks holistically at problems and comes up with amazingly intelligent solutions. I profile him in my book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green; here’s a little excerpt:
Though he lives in the Colorado Rockies, where it often goes well below zero Fahrenheit (–18ºC) on winter nights, his house has no furnace (or air conditioner, for that matter). It stays so warm inside that he actually grows bananas. He uses about $5 per month in electricity for his home needs (not counting his home office). Whether your company is looking for a huge competitive advantage, a more responsible way to do business, or both, the Lovins approach may be the answer.
Lovins built his luxurious 4,000-square-foot home/office in 1983, to demonstrate that even then, when energy technology was much less evolved, a truly energy-efficient house is no more expensive to build than the traditional energy hog—and far cheaper and healthier to run.
The payback for energy efficiency designs in Lovins’s sprawling, superinsulated home was just 10 months. The sun provides 95 percent of the lighting and virtually all the heating and cooling, as part of an ecosystem of plants, water storage devices, and even the radiant heat of the workers in his office.
Noting that energy-efficiency improvements since 1975 are already meeting 40 percent of U.S. power needs, Lovins claims a well-designed office building can save 80 to 90 percent of a traditional office building’s energy consumption.Conventional building logic, says Lovins, says you insulate only enough to pay back the savings in heating costs. But Lovins points out that if you insulate so well that you don’t need a furnace or air conditioner, the payback is far greater, “because you also save their capital cost—which conventional engineering design calculations, oddly, don’t count.”
“Big savings can cost less than small savings,” Lovins says—if designers learn to think about the overall system, and how different pieces can work together to create something far greater than the sum of its parts. The trick is to look for technologies that provide multiple benefits, rather than merely solving one problem. For instance, a single arch in Lovins’s home serves 12 different structural, energy, and aesthetic functions.
The profile in the book goes on to talk about a house in the California desert that not only cost $1800 less to build, but saves $1600 a year in maintenance…and hydrogen cars that compare favorably on every criterion and use far less energy. Lovins’ company just completed a deep-energy retrofit on the Empire State Building that will save over $4 million every year. And Lovins is only one of the practical visionaries with real-world solutions you’ll encounter in the book.
In other words, we have the technology NOW. Combine this with such strategies as lease-to-own programs, or programs where the solar company fronts the cost of installation and pays it back to the homeowner out of energy savings, and we can easily get off the fossil-nuclear treadmill, or at least cut it back by 80% or so. Especially since a stimulus program would bring in economies of scale and lower the cost of the installations.
Last night, the local organizer for the Transition Towns movement finally got around to doing one in my town. We were a small group including several of the “usual suspects” (old friends from previous organizing campaigns) as well as a handful of others I didn’t know–with a lot of good ideas.
Transition towns organizing involves taking steps to get society off fossil and nuclear fuels, and building community in the process. It’s very much directed by the people who participate, so if a few people want to form a sewing circle to make cloth totes residents can bring to the market, or plant trees, or insulate houses, or work with local government to install traffic calming, or whatever—they do it. And it’s nice and small and manageable, town by town, neighborhood by neighborhood.
The movement started as an outgrowth of the permaculture movement in Kinsale, Ireland and Totnes, UK, and has spread widely.
Now, with a few years under its belt, it may be one of our best hopes for avoiding catastrophic climate change (on which the window is getting smaller) and the great hardship of massive price shocks on all the things based in fossil fuels—which is pretty much everything.
Resources:
Transition Towns organizing site for the US
The “get moving” page on the international website (which I found after getting distracted by some wonderful storytelling about live in past generations in a British village
The simple little WordPress site for Transition in my own community of Hadley, Massachusetts
There is definitely something to all this Law of Attraction stuff. Consider this: For the past few months, I’ve been putting out a lot of energy around four things:
1. Expanding the public speaking portion of my business
2. Pitching myself as a syndicated columnist writing on Green business (working a long-term plan)
3. Founding the International Association of Earth-Conscious Marketers
4. Working with unpublished writers to help them become well-published and well-marketed authors
Here’s some of what happened today:
It’s feeling like a pretty abundant day :-). I’ll even forgive the mice for chewing up the spout to our can of Chinese sesame oil, forcing me to change my dinner plans. (I went for Italian instead, and it was delicious. Guess the mice don’t like or haven’t discovered the olive oil.) I like it that I’m putting energy out on these four things, and permutations of those four are coming back to me.
Latest campaign from Bloggers Unite is to save the lives of the 4000 children per day who die for lack of clean drinking water. I just signed up to participate. Here’s the link if you’d like to add your blog to the chorus.
Water is going to be the resource issue in the coming decades.
The latest stimulus proposal, announced this week by Barack Obama, will put $50 billion into the hopper for improvements to “the nation’s roads, railways and runways,” as the Associated Press story alliteratively noted.
And certainly, those improvements are needed. Europeans and east Asians laugh openly at our rail system. Our roads and bridges need shoring up. And plane travel in general has become a chore.
But before we go off improving more roads (which seemed to be where the bulk of the first round of stimulus went), shouldn’t we be looking at energy? How about a program to deep-energy retrofit many existing buildings, become a world leader in nonpolluting renewable energy, and reinvent public transit in ways that encourage its use. A massive program to cut fossil fuel and nuclear dependence by, say, 75 percent would have these extra advantages:
And those are only a few among many.
The really good news? Such a plan could be put into place with surprisingly little capital outlay, because creative financing structures already exist that can let private investment step to the plate. I’ll talk more about this in my next post (after Rosh Hashana is over).
Stupid idea of the Week award to (drumroll, please)…Terry Jones, pastor of the Dove World Outreach Center, an evangelical church in Gainesville, Florida. Jones and his 50 members want to commemorate 9/11 by burning a Koran.
Here’s what General David Petraeus had to say about this idiotic idea:
It is precisely the kind of action the Taliban uses and could cause significant problems, not just here, but everywhere in the world we are engaged with the Islamic community…Images of the burning of a Koran would undoubtedly be used by extremists in Afghanistan – and around the world – to inflame public opinion and incite violence. Such images could, in fact, be used as were the photos from [Abu Ghraib]. And this would, again, put our troopers and civilians in jeopardy and undermine our efforts to accomplish the critical mission here in Afghanistan.
The same Washington Post article quotes a statement from the U.S. Embassy:
Americans from all religious and ethnic backgrounds reject the offensive initiative by this small group in Florida. A great number of American voices are protesting the hurtful statements made by this organization. Numerous interfaith and religious groups in America are actively working to counter this kind of ignorance and misinformation that is offensive to so many people in the U.S. and around the world.
To these 50 extremists who falsely call themselves Christian, I’ve got a few other things to say:
Advice to the better selves hiding behind that racist front: don’t do it. You want to do something constructive to commemorate 9/11? How about an interfaith Christian/Muslim/Jewish dialog group?