Month: April 2017

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, media-general, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,

April 30, 1977 was a date that changed history—and I was there.

I was 20 years old. My then-girlfriend Nancy Hodge and I were part of the Rhode Island Affinity Group of Clamshell Alliance, a New-Hampshire-based safe energy activist group.

Like all the other participating affinity groups (typically consisting of 10-20 people), we’d been trained in nonviolent resistance. And we’d studied up on some of the many issues about nuclear power, among them:

  • Risk of catastrophic accidents (including several that had already occurred and were not widely known)—and the subsidized limited-liability insurance that was no insurance at all for pretty much anyone other than the plant’s investors
  • Cancer risks in routine operations, and much greater health risks when things went wrong
  • Need to isolate the wastes from the environment for 220,000 years (and no known way to do this)
  • Insecurity of the facilities, requiring extreme protection against natural disasters, human-caused failures, AND terrorist attacks—and thus threatening the freedoms of our whole society
  • High capital cost and short lifespan, making this an extremely expensive way to generate electricity
  • Hazards of ground, water, and air contamination

And many others. We also knew at least the rudiments of what was even then a far better alternative: harnessing clean, renewable technologies such as sun, wind, and water, and using the energy we already had much more efficiently.

And we knew that just a few years earlier, then-President Richard Nixon had called for 1000 nuclear power plants around the US. That the industry’s 1950s claim that nuclear would be “too cheap to meter” was utterly false. That the second-generation nuclear plants of the 1970s that were supposed to be safer were already showing problems. And that movements across Europe demanding an end to this unsafe and uneconomical technology were gathering strength, organized into affinity groups and providing a model for us. As far as I know, Clamshell Alliance, then about a year old, was the first organized regional movement of resistance against nuclear power in the US, but the movement in Europe, often involving nascent Green Parties, was becoming a significant force.

Nancy had made this beautiful sign with not-usually-permanent felt-tip markers, which she carried. Somehow, I ended up with it when I moved from Providence to New York. I have moved to a new place 12 times since I became custodian of the sign, and still know exactly where to retrieve it. And miraculously, though it’s faded and the cardboard is crumbling, that proud defiant common-sense message still comes through.

Sign by Nancy Hodge Green, used at Seabrook, 1977. Photo by Shel Horowitz
Sign by Nancy Hodge Green, used at Seabrook, 1977. Photo by Shel Horowitz.

About two thousand of us marched into the construction site, armed with such “dangerous weapons” as tents, sleeping bags, and healthy snacks. I think a couple of people thought to bring small shovels to dig latrine pits. We camped out on the site that night and did various things to get centered in the morning. I chose to attend a deeply powerful Quaker Meeting in the parking lot that still stands out as one of the.most deeply spiritual encounters of my life.

1414 of us, including Nancy and me, formed our affinity groups into circles, linked arms, and refused to leave when the order to leave or be arrested was given the next day. We were taken one at a time from our circles and placed on school buses by State Police from all the New England states, and eventually driven to one of several National Guard armories. The Rhode Island Affinity Group was all together in the Manchester National Guard Armory, with about half of all the arrestees. If I remember correctly, we were able to take our possessions and we used those sleeping bags during our incarceration. Pretty sure the state did not supply cots.

What happened during our time “inside” was amazing, both inside the armories and out in the “real world.” Tomorrow, Part 2 will cover some of the outside-world shifts that we caused.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Green Business, Greenwashing, language, Marketing Trends/News, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Found this list of 25 “Greenest Brands in America“—but frankly, I’m skeptical.

It’s based on reader votes. In any kind of reader popularity contest, the votes go to companies the most people are familiar with—or those whose marketers actively campaign and tell their fans to go vote for them.

Certainly, all these corporations have major environmental achievements; by now, every major corporation does. In fact, I attended a conference last month that focused on the profitability case for green action. Several of these 25 had speakers. I even moderated a panel that included Coca-Cola.

But this kind of survey pushes away the small companies with smaller followings but very green practices (Interface, Timberland, Patagonia, etc.) Only two such companies made the list: Tom’s of Maine and Ben & Jerry’s, and both are owned by much larger companies.

Patagonia's fish/mountain range-shaped logo
Patagonia’s fish/mountain range-shaped logo

I was also struck by three absences I would have expected to be there: Walmart, which has done more to green the supply chain and its own operations than any other player, but whose demographic doesn’t typically participate in sustainability surveys (and which has serious issues on other parts of the social entrepreneurship spectrum, especially on labor and supplier policies), Starbucks, which talks a great line to the right demographic, but whose practices don’t always mirror its rhetoric, and Whole Foods, whose entire mission intersects so well with green practices. Also kind of surprised to see Apple included. Either they’ve cleaned up their act or people give them more kudos than justified because their products are so cool and their fan base is so strong. To go from the Foxconn scandal to being named on a Top 25 list for green practices in just over two years is quite remarkable.

Even in surveys based on research, what you measure influences your conclusions. For example, Monsanto often wins data-driven corporate responsibility awards (and loves to brag about them), yet to many food activists, its policies are anything but responsible; they would call this award greenwashing.

 

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Are big protests a waste of time unless they’re part of an overall strategic plan? Nonviolent social change theorist George Lakey and I have been discussing this.

After my February post about Lakey’s idea that DT is creating enormous opportunities for social change workers, I got an interesting response from George (which I only just saw, thanks to a quirk in the WordPress interface). Please go read the original post and his response.

I believe my settings close comments after two weeks, and I couldn’t find a way to turn that off temporarily for this one post). So just to make sure there’s a way to keep the dialogue going, I’m posting my response here, as a new post, starting just below:

Marching at the Women's March on Washington with my wife and children
Marching at the Women’s March on Washington with my wife and children (from left: son-in-law Bobby, daughter Alana, wife Dina, me, son Rafael)

I agree with most of what you’d laid out here, George and certainly the key kernel that mass action makes the most sense as part of a well-thought-out and multidimensional campaign. And yet, I’m more optimistic than you about the power of a one-off mass action to build momentum for change. It has to be sustained, of course—but it can play a key role.

  • My own involvement with the Movement began because I attended a mass rally about Vietnam, at age 12 (1969). One of the speakers said something that was life-changing for me. But it was not until I was in high school that I began to realize that the real work of social change happened in the meetings to plan those marches, more than the marches themselves—and to participate as other than a drone showing up to other people’s events.
  • The reason all those no-nuke Alliances sprang up was because of what we did at Seabrook, a mass action.We inspired many other groups around the country to borrow our strategy, process, tactics, and even nomenclature, to organize affinity groups as we did, to educate about the issues around nuclear power and the safe-energy alternatives, and to be trained in nonviolent civil disobedience. And the reason we heard about Three Mile Island in the news two years later when we hadn’t heard about the earlier accidents at Enrico Fermi, Browns Ferry, and elsewhere was because of this national/international mass movement that started at Seabrook. It was having thousands at the site and 1414 arrested that pushed the issue into America’s consciousness. The first two Seabrook occupations almost a year earlier, much tinier, had almost no impact outside the local area.
  • Occupy could have been much stronger with leadership and goals, I agree. But still the movement had a great deal of impact. Like Clam, some of its process innovations have become part of the Movement. You talk about those turned off by Occupy, but what I saw was a generation of young people who moved from inaction, maybe even apathy, to deep, personal, and highly inconvenient action. They made sacrifices for social change. And I think a lot of them moved into actual organizing after the camps closed.
  • The recent Women’s March had very little strategy behind it but sparked the immediate and clear message that resistance is mainstream, that DT does not represent normal, and that oh yes, there was something we could do. And of course, it provided yet another opportunity for DT to make a fool of himself saying ridiculous things about the protests. I don’t remember another time when nonviolent protests unscrewed the legs of legitimacy from a government less than one day old. And again, a lot of folks who had never done anything political went from the march to the meetings. The thousands of hives of the resistance were enormously strengthened by that unstrategic mass event.

I’m glad you brought up the business community. This is where I have very strategically placed most of my own organizing in recent years: showing that business can create meaningful social change, not out of guilt and shame but out of enlightened self-interest: the profit motive. This is the subject of my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, as well as my “Impossible is a Dare” talks. It’s the opposite of mass organizing: small groups and even one-to-one conversations.

So yes, let’s incorporate big protests into a wider strategic view, as the Civil Rights organizers did. Let’s read Alinsky and Gene Sharp, MLK and Gandhi, Barbara Deming and Dorothy Day, and of course, George Lakey. Let’s study the successes AND weaknesses of all these movements including Occupy, BLM, and the current resistance. And lets create strategies that keep the needle moving, both publicly and behind the scenes, toward the world we want. Outside of my social change work through my business, I’ve been focusing my own parts of the resistance on the amazing opportunity to get people who haven’t been talking to each other not just talking but supporting and acting in solidarity. I see this work—and especially the chances for Jews and Muslims to work together in solidarity—as deeply strategic based on seizing the moment where a conversation is much easier to have under the lens of both groups being under threat.

PS: George, I apologize for the late reply. WordPress only showed me your waiting comment last night. I approved it immediately but wanted to bring my much clearer early-morning thinking to my response. [end of my quoted response]

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Corporate Social Responsibility, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Green Business, Green Marketing, Innovation, Marketing Trends/News, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,
For the past 3-1/2 years, I’ve been not just thinking but taking steps to change the entire direction of my business from basic marketing consulting for green businesses to shaping profitable ventures that directly turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance. In other words, showing how social entrepreneurship is a business success strategy that increases revenues and decreases costs. Obviously, more revenue plus lower expenses = higher profits.
Yeah, thinking big. Big enough so it took some serious time to get ready (far more than I thought it would. Here are some of the steps I’ve taken:
  • Hired a remarkable business coach, Oshana Himot, who helped me see that I didn’t have to wait until certain metrics were in place before dong this work that’s been in my heart for decades—and that if I did wait, I’d never get there. She has also worked with me on role-playing sales conversations, etc., to the point where now I really am ready.
  • Launched several new talk topics, including “‘Impossible’ is a Dare”—which I first gave as a TEDx in 2014; I’ve done it several times since, in longer (and once, shorter) formats. You can get a nice taste of it in my 4-minute demo video, if you’re interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tooSVbHQ5Ik&feature=youtu.be
  • Wrote and found a publisher for my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, and went to press (a year ago) with about 50 endorsements, Chris among them—alongside Seth Godin, Jack Canfield, and guest essayists Cynthia Kersey (“Unstoppable”) and Frances Moore Lappé (Diet for a Small Planet). The book has won two small awards so far.

    Cover of Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World by Jay Conrad Levinson and Shel Horowitz
    Cover of Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World by Jay Conrad Levinson and Shel Horowitz
  • Organized a very ambitious telesummit (also in 2014) that flopped utterly and made me realize I was NOT ready to go after clients in this new niche—and began to do more work to get myself ready.
  • Put up several websites to help me figure out where to put my energy: I had to develop https://transformpreneur.com and https://impactwithprofit.com before I figured out what I really wanted to say and to whom. The result is https://goingbeyondsustainability.com
  • Determined that small businesses were probably my most likely clients, but that they were not likely to have the budget freedom. Thus, I chose to go after larger companies who might sponsor me to work with their clients, suppliers, NGO partners, etc. Bought a program on how to get sponsors and created a fabulous proposal, driven by benefits to the sponsoring company, that (hopefully) will get my hired to speak and consult.
  • Created a list of ~200 companies I mention favorably in the book and hired someone to research the contact info.
  • Hired a designer to develop a log.
And now I’m finally at the point where it makes sense to reach out to those companies and see if I can get traction. I only need about three to say yes to a medium-to-large project to have a full pipeline.
To me, this is true sustainability; business has to survive—and thrive—in order to make that difference. But the business world often defines sustainability much more narrowly: as simply going green. In positioning my services, I wanted to make a statement that “sustainability,” under that definition, is not enough. It’s keeping things from getting worse, where I think we can make things better. Thus, the name, “Going Beyond Sustainability. And this logo:

https://goingbeyondsustainability.com logo and tagline
Going Beyond Sustainability logo and tagline

This, I believe, is the future of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): fundamentally reinventing society to better serve the needs of its planet and its people, self-funding through profitable products and services.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, censorship, Corporate Social Responsibility, Democracy, Diversity, Ethics: General, language, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, media-general, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , ,

Have you seen the infamous Pepsi ad that’s been called “tone-deaf” by progressives, and which Pepsi pulled quickly? Before you read the rest of this post, please write your impression of it in the comments.

I watched the part of it shown on this segment of The View.

Protestor calls for unity
Protestor calls for unity

 

 

And I agree with Whoopi: the message is about inclusion.

Yes, it is co-opting the movement. Advertisements have always co-opted cultural memes. If you wear $60 torn jeans, you can thank the hippies and grunge-punks who wore their clothes to rattiness. For that matter, Bud commercials and Wheaties cereal boxes have been co-opting sports culture for decades (it feels like millennia).

I’m old enough to remember when hijab-wearing women and people of color and same-sex couples would not have been allowed anywhere near a commercial. What I see most of all is a message to DT that we are united in our diversity (and that includes the cops, who are actually our allies most of the time–and which the movement made a big mistake in automatically trashing in the 1960s).

I also agree with Whoopi that water is my preferred drink over any kind of soda.

That Pepsi was attacked to the point where they pulled the ad is much more shocking to me than the ad itself.

But I guess I shouldn’t be shocked. Here in the Blue Bubble, behind the “Tofu Curtain” (not a phrase I invented) in Massachusetts’ Hampshire/Franklin Counties—one of the bluest parts of a very liberal state—those accusations of “tone deaf” are all-too-familiar. Two among many examples:

  • A program in which cops in the schools did something sociable with the kids was kiboshed and the very progressive police chief (an out lesbian who was seen at Pride Day marches long before she became chief) was trashed as tone-deaf
  • Two towns over, several years ago, a production of “West Side Story” was canceled because some people thought the whole idea of the play was racist. I don’t know if they read the script or saw the movie, but to me, that movie makes a statement against racism, just like Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (which has also been criticized for racism, because it uses the N-word—even though it was written in the 19th century when that was the term used and the whole premise of the story is to show the absurdity and cruelty of racism)

It reminds me of the days when the left (my teenage self included) would practically canonize any extreme statement that happened to be made by a person of color or one who identified as any shade of LGBTQ, even if that statement incited violence against innocent people who happened to be white and straight. I should have spoken out against those outrages 45 years ago, but I was just as hoodwinked.

I’m not talk about any false unity of sweeping real grievances under the rug. But I am objecting to the shrill side of political correctness that demonizes the Other without even listening, even when the Other is mere steps away on the political spectrum, dividing instead of uniting and leaving us all at risk when the real forces of repression sweep in.

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