Author: Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert
A lifelong activist, profitability and marketing specialist Shel Horowitz’s mission is to fix crises like hunger, poverty, racism, war, and catastrophic climate change—by showing the business world how fixing them can make a profit. An author, international speaker, and TEDx Talker, his award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, lays out a blueprint for creating and MARKETING those profitable change-making products and services. He is happy to help you craft your messaging and develop profit strategies. Learn more (and download excerpts from the book) at http://goingbeyondsustainability.com
This push says that pension funds must not be allowed to even consider any factors pertaining to ESG–Environmental, Social, Governance. It doesn’t say they have to make sure that ESG investments perform as well as non-ESG investments (which, often, they do). That would be a reasonable law to protect retiree pensions. But this one would bar fund managers from even considering anything involving ESG.
For decades, smart fund managers have been shifting investment toward ESG, and their reasons are fiscally sound. From avoiding corrosive investments in “stranded assets” like fossil-fuel or nuclear processing infrastructure that’s been plagues, by leaks, spills, explosions, etc. to avoiding ethics scandals that destroyed once-respected companies like Enron and Arthur Andersen, ESG investing makes so much sense that, as no less an authoritative source than NSDAQ notes,
The article goes on to list six factors in ESG investment growth and notes that even during the pandemic, “funds with ESG strategies outperformed traditional funds.2″ (Click the link to see the footnote sources, too.) This updates and reinforces the research I did when writing my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, a few years ago. Every single one of the dozens of studies I checked at that time showed that ESG criteria lead to better financial results.
Net flows into ESG funds available to U.S. investors have skyrocketed, totalling $20.6 billion in 2019, nearly four times the previous annual record set in 2018, [1] while ESG funds in Europe also attracted record inflows of $132 billion in 2019. [2]More than 70% of funds focused on ESG investments outperformed their counterparts in the first four months of 2020, [3] and nearly 60% of ESG funds outperformed the wider market over the past decade. [4]
One unintended consequence I haven’t seen addressed anywhere is the possibility of widespread rebellion by private investors that could put the whole pension system at risk, as stakeholders demand that funds embrace sensible, profit-driven ESG corporations in their portfolio choices while an inane law makes that commitment illegal.
I value the metaphor but want to talk about actual cars for a moment:
A client once gave me a ride in his Maserati. The thing that shocked me was how utterly silent it was at 60 mph. At that speed, it was about luxury, not power and noise–a Fast and Secure in your matrix. I think it would have been a different experience at 100+ mph.
I’ve generally favored utilitarian car choices–cheap, reliable, boring. Mostly Toyota Corollas (including the Chevy Nova Corolla clone of 1988). But twice, I’ve been the accidental owner of sport sedans–high-performance cars disguised as boring. I bought a used 1975 Fiat 131 four-door sedan in 1981 when I moved from the city to Western Massachusetts, because I didn’t know any better–and only found out that Fiats of that era were notoriously unreliable when it was already our headache. We bought it for $1500 as economy transportation.
Fiat 131 sedan: Clark Kent on the outside, Supercar in handling. Photo by by Bene Riobo via Wikipedia (Creative Commons)
It was unbelievably fun to drive–when it worked. We got the car at 65,000 miles, which is the prime of life for a Corolla. In the ~9000 miles/nine months we drove it, we had failures of the entire exhaust system, the entire brake system, even the bleeping steering column–and if it was cold, rainy, or snowy, we often needed a tow. We were young and broke, used to public transportation, and not prepared to be owning a money pit. We sold it as a parts car for $500 and were lucky to get it. The second was a 2004 Mazda 3 hatchback that we bought new, thinking of it as an economy car that was a little peppier than most. Turned out it only got 30 mpg. It was also really fun to drive, and reasonably reliable. I guess it would be a Hot Rod but with zero visual indication of high performance. We gave it to our kid in Metro Boston in 2018 when my stepfather was killed and we got his ultra-low-odometer Honda Fit, six years old, 14,000 miles, not at all fun to drive (underpowered even compared to a Corolla) but incredibly well-engineered for storage. Definitely in the Boring quadrant. We’re still driving it, along with a 2005 Corolla. Oddly enough, Raf only got about a year out of the Mazda, which started needing expensive repairs. But at least it was 15 years old when it started to go.
Do I regret trading fun-driving cars for reliable ones? Not at all. The genuine pleasure of ultra-responsive steering, braking, and acceleration was fun, but ultimately, for me, the purpose of a car is to get me someplace. Appreciating the engineering that made at least the Mazda both safe and fun was like visiting a friend who spent ten grand on a really good stereo system. I could take joy in the moment but didn’t feel a need to own it. We live relatively simply and spend more on travel than on material things.
But I certainly have my own areas where I will spend more to get significantly higher value. It was true when I spent $3K on a Mac in 1984, recognizing that the much shorter learning curve compared to a pre-Windows IBM PC was going to pay big dividends in my career as owner of a writing business–especially in being able to produce resume while-you-wait and know exactly what they’d look like before hitting the print button. And while I’ve found ways to keep the costs down, I stock our kitchen primarily with organic and local items instead of chemiculture frankenfoods shipped from far away.
So let me ask you: what luxuries do you value enough to pay significantly extra for, and why? My own two areas, as noted above, are both experience-based.
Travel
I love travel because (at least the way we do it), it gives us chances to experience the world differently–to see different perspectives, different approaches to common problems–kind of like looking across from your chosen career to what the standard procedures are in some completely unrelated career (and what lessons can be found there).
Travel, for me, often involves staying with locals. But even if I’m not doing homestays, when I travel, I make a point of finding ways to connect with local people. I take public transportation, shop at independent local markets, wander through ethnic neighborhoods, strike up conversations, eat in places frequented by locals, take guided walks led by rangers, historians, and naturalists, visit artisan workshops…I don’t spend much time in the classic tourist areas.
And the insights I’ve come away with include noticing that…
Iceland’s non-vehicle power needs are met almost entirely by renewable hydro and geothermal (even as far back as my 2011 visit).
Quito has a public transit system (that I’ve since seen several other places) that combines the advantages of buses and trains, using dedicated rights-of-way and raised boarding platforms (aligned with the bottom of the bus door) that require turnstile-entry so when the bus comes, it can board much faster because all the passengers have already paid and no one has to climb stairs.
Peru and Guatemala figured out intensive high-altitude agriculture many centuries ago, and the Incan and Mayan agronomists were as sophisticated as any modern research team.
In much of the developing world, reuse and recycling are so integrated into daily life that nothing is thrown away if it has an iota of value remaining.
Judaism–and thus the Christianity and Islam that derived from it–has enough parallels with Hinduism (other than the schism between monotheism and polytheism) that it tells us there were active trade routes between South Asia and the Middle East thousands of years ago.
Two visits to Israel and Palestine, 28 years apart, gave me the chance to gain much greater knowledge on the conflict, and how it might be healed in ways that felt just all around. My wife and I met with the founder of an Orthodox Jewish peace movement, a Palestinian-American blogger who taken had moved to Ramallah and become a Palestinian citizen despite the restrictions on his movement this entailed, a man born in the 1930s who clearly remembered his entire village being evicted from the place they’d lived for generations, even right-wing Israeli settlers.
All of these observations find their way into my world view–and my consulting practice.
Food I’m willing to spend considerably more money for a fabulous food experience. I’d much rather pay $20 for a memorable meal in a restaurant featuring local specialties than $4 for fast food that’s indistinguishable and unmemorable. I shop local and organic because it offers both superior taste and superior health and nutrition. I buy fair-trade chocolate and farm eggs because I can enjoy their wonderful taste–and also I enjoy knowing that I am NOT propping up a system based on child slavery (non-fair-trade chocolate) or animal cruelty (industrial eggs).
But I will also find bargains! One of my favorite meals in my life cost 75 cents and fed two of us: we were in the Mexican heartland, walking to a national park. We inhaled the aroma of fresh tortillas and stopped into the tortillarilla to buy half a kilo of still-warm corn tortillas. At the little neighborhood market, we found a large, perfectly ripe avocado. We took our finds to that park, sat under a giant poinsettia tree, and enjoyed a feast that I still remember as divine. This was way back in 1985 and burned into my memory, happily, for ever–one of many wonderful food memories I keep there.
And What About You? So, once again, I’ll ask you: what luxuries do you value enough to pay significantly extra for, and why? Please share in the comments.
Sign by Nancy Hodge Green, used at Seabrook by Shel Horowitz, 1977. Photo by Shel Horowitz
An energy consultant I’ve known since high school raised a frustration he has in his work:
Sadly, the biggest problem is culture, Shel Horowitz. Building owners have a mentality in their culture, in their business dealings of loving the status quo. I can’t tell you how many times I have offered free energy audits, to give them information and tips to save money, and they turn it down. Free (no obligation). They just don’t want to know. I have been involved in many proposals for simple upgrades with numbers that show that this will help their bottomline ($$$), for solar panels or LED lights, and they say no. As long as money is flowing in, they don’t want to change. How do you get over that mindset?
And I responded,
You have to approach changing culture with the mentality of a marketer and organizer–this is what I do, and I’ve helped to change some cultures in my time. Think about what the world was like when you and I met in the early 1970s: Environmental consciousness was close to zero. Most families had never tried organic produce, or tofu, or even yogurt. War was still raging in Vietnam, and you could be drafted at 18 but had to be 21 to vote. South Africa and Rhodesia had rigid apartheid. Dictators were running things in places like Spain. All of these changed because organizers and marketers changed the culture. When I moved to my current town of Hadley, in 1998, the dominant paradigm was “You can’t change Town Hall.” 14 months later, our landscape was threatened and I launched Save the Mountain, and did so with mom-and-apple-pie messaging like “[developer’s name] has wildly underestimated the love the people of Hadley have for this mountain.” I knew we’d win, but I expected it to take five years. We did it in just 13 months!
It’s true that culture change is usually neither easy nor fast. But it DOES happen. Usually, it happens because people’s movements for change bubble up from the grassroots. Sometimes, technological shifts speed the process of change, turbocharge it. As one example, the widespread acceptance of clean energy had to do with technological shifts that made those choices economically as well as environmentally superior–but it was the widespread rejection of dangerous, polluting energy systems such as fossil and nuclear that created the momentum behind the technological growth and price drops/efficiency increases.
I would suggest to my old friend that his offers need to be phrased in terms of how they mitigate pain and add profit. Marketing to others’ self–interest in order to foster your own agenda of social and environmental progress is totally legitimate. And if the case is made properly, they will see that the cost of moving forward is lower, and the benefits higher, than the cost and benefits of keeping things as they are.
Check out this TEDx talk by nonviolence researcher Erica Chenoweth. Chenoweth was originally quite hostile to nonviolent social change movements–until her own statistical analyses showed them (and us) that nonviolent resistance was far more effective than violent insurrection. Those who used it were more likely to achieve their goals, even “impossible” goals like unseating a government. AND they were more likely to achieve lasting change that didn’t just swing back with the next change in government. In fact, successful nonviolent revolutions were 15 percent more likely to avoid relapsing into civil war.
This validates what people like Stephen Zunes, George Lakey, Barbara Deming, MLK, Gandhi (also not a pacifist in principle, but totally committed on the strategy, BTW), my late friends Dave Dellinger and Wally and Juanita Nelson, Harvey Wasserman, Anna Gyorgy, and many others have said for decades.
I think I can shed some light on why this is true:
1) You can’t outgun the state. They have tanks, WMDs, and lots of person-power. Engaging in violence is letting them choose the battlefield and the tools. You probably can’t outgun the Oath Keepers either, unless you ARE the state.
2) When the state attacks unarmed civilians, it has a jiu-jitsu effect of creating sympathy for those who are attacked (as is happening in Ukraine right now, and happened so dramatically in the US South in the 1950s and 60s). But when armed radicals attack the state, it creates support for the government, who can then marginalize and isolate the opposition as “terrorists”–and have an excuse to clamp down further on civil liberties.
3) When a government falls by force of arms, the conquerors want to make sure they aren’t taken out next. Thus, the pressure to become more dictatorial, which erodes popular support. I am old enough to remember when the Sandinistas, thugs like Zimbabwe’s Mugabe, and even the Iranian mullahs were welcomed as heroes by the local population, until they turned out to be just as vile as their predecessors, if not more. Some of my older mentors in my youth had watched the same pattern in the USSR, first under Lenin and then under the even crueler thumb of Stalin.
4) But when instead of fissioning society apart, a government seeks to actively unite people across the spectrum and build a better society for all, they can create new institutions that are nearly universally seen as working for the people, rather than the power structure. Such government initiatives typically draw their inspiration from long-term organizing by nonviolent people’s movements. I just returned from South Africa, and one of the people I met there had been a white soldier defending apartheid. Like everyone else I met, black or white, he had enormous respect and admiration for Nelson Mandela, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the healing/unifying process after nearly 50 years of official apartheid (1948-94) and ingrained racism that dated back decades earlier. If this man, who carried a gun to protect white privilege, can embrace unity oriented black-majority governments, there is hope for all of us.
Chenoweth points out one more thing: when open protest becomes too risky because of repression, concentration tactics like mass demonstrations may be augmented or replaced by dispersive tactics of quiet resistance (such as Ukrainians replacing road navigation signs with signage urging the Russian invaders to f themselves) that allow even elders, children, and people with disabilities to subvert the authoritarians.
And I personally have experienced the power of creative nonviolence over and over again, taking dozens of forms in movements or actions I participated in (and sometimes helped organize) and in moments of private personal action, including my mom castigating our landlord in front of 9-year-old me because she felt he was unwilling to rent to Blacks, my own one-person witness after the US bombed Libya. Some of these put me at personal risk, including standing with a small group of protestors in front of a much larger group that was hostile to us and probably included a number of people carrying firearms; in others, I took comfort in the strength of numbers. In all of them, I was convinced that nonviolence is more effective than violence in shaking up the power structure, and I’ve been part of winning campaigns (including, among others, the 1977 Seabrook Occupation and the 1999-2000 Save the Mountain campaign) often enough to see that truth validated.
One of the most fascinating talks I’ve ever heard happened this morning on a guided bush walk in Kruger National Park, South Africa, delivered from atop a huge termite mound.
Standing atop a giant termite mound, Ranger Nico explains why termites are critical in the South African ecosystem and how they make the giant predators possible. Photo by Shel Horowitz.
Termites are largely responsible for shaping and managing the ecosystem that allows the magnificent animals we see on safaris: the elephants, lions, giraffes, zebras, and more. They are master builders, creating mounds and underground caverns (two or three times as big as the visible parts of the mounds) that can stretch 50 meters into the earth.
Termites invented climate control millions of years ago. They move wet earth astonishing distances to plaster the walls, creating an ideal environment for the fungus their queen loves to eat, and they build chimneys—heat vents they can open and close—to maintain the ideal temperature for the queen’s comfort. They are such sophisticated engineers that some plaster casts of abandoned mounds have required pumping in ten tons of plaster.
That queen starts tiny but eventually reaches a length of five inches or so, loses her legs, and turns her attention to hive management and reproduction. But not just any kind of reproduction! She picks the type of worker the colony needs at that moment and produces farmers, soldiers, attendants staff who attend to her needs as commanded by pheromones, flying termites (including scouts, wood scavengers, and future kings and queens who go off to start new colonies), and other types as needed.
These different types have biological differences, each equipped for their own mission. And she will lay about 40,000 eggs every day, but most of the young’uns will only live for a few days. Still, a large mound can have hundreds of thousands of inhabitants.
The queen outlives thousands of generations of her offspring. At the end of her 30- to 40-year life, she clones herself and produces one new queen, genetically identical, who will manage the same mound—so some of these mounds are centuries old, with a ruler identical to the mound’s female co-founder. Her partner is a king who fertilizes the queen, and paired couples fly off to start the new mounds—a complex process where both of them find a soft digging spot they can manage without the tools of the construction-worker termites and begin digging and egg-laying exactly three days before a significant rainfall.
The eggs take three days to gestate and require lots of moisture. If a queen dies before cloning herself, the whole colony dies. Queens cannot be introduced from elsewhere, and the workers lose all interest in their tasks—or in living—without a queen.
And here’s why this is a problem: Not only do termites clear the dead wood around them by digesting it, the mounds and chambers provide enormous nutritional boost to the soil. Termites are what creates the richness that allows grasses, shrubs, and trees to flourish. Without all that, the herbivores like elephants, giraffes, rhinos, impalas, hippos, warthogs, etc. would have nothing to eat and would not exist. And without them, the apex predators including the big cats would not have their food.
So if you’ve gone on safari and seen these beautiful animals in the wild, you can thank the termites. And the best way to thank them is to recognize their role and not use pesticides against them. If you live in a termite-prone area, treat the wood of your house instead of fogging the air with poison that poisons you, your family, and the much-needed termites—and help your friends understand that when we treat nature as a teacher and ally, the results are far better than if we treat her as an enemy.
Other tidbits from this hike: • Elephants will destroy one marula tree at a time to get the fruit—but their digestive enzymes activate the seeds, so when they poop them back out and natural forces spread them, a thousand marula trees could germinate from the single sacrificed one.
• Elephant tracks look kind of like snowshoe tracks. You can tell females form males because if it’s a female, you’ll also find tracks from the babies.
• Spear grass seed will actually drill itself into a growing medium by spinning in one direction. Even though they can’t survive there, they will even drill into human skin and you can’t get them out with tweezers. Nico’s mentor used to always carry a medical scalpel to excise them. Nico prefers to avoid them in the first place.
Jacinda Ardern of NZ in mourner’s hijab, following the mass shooting at a New Zealand mosque.
It’s sad that New Zealand’s amazing Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, is stepping down. I’ve been an admirer since she first came across my radar during her campaign to lead that country–and I remain one. She has been a competent, non-bloviating voice of reason and compassion, as well as an excellent role model who proves that at not-yet-40–she took office at 37 and is now 42–a progressive woman can be an effective shepherd of government, even during a term that encompassed multiple global and at least two national crises.
She is my favorite of the current crop of world leaders, in fact.
When I went looking for the photo to accompany this blog, I found this text. Like the photo, it is attributed only to “Appaloosa,” who appears to be a photographer in French Canada and was unlikely to have taken the picture. It sums up my feelings perfectly:
In the aftermath the Christchurch, NZ mosque shootings, the world witnessed what a real leader looks like in New Zealand’s Prime Minister #jacindaardern.
72 hours after the tragedy occurred, Prime Minister Ardern mourned at a vigil in full hijab attire, and promised the nation would not only cover the costs of 51 funerals, but would look after the families and their expenses for as long as it took.
This, after announcing the New Zealand government would ban assault rifles.
It takes courage to lead a country at any time. When you also have to navigate a global pandemic, a world economic mess, a massacre and a natural disaster in your home country, and a rising tide of totalitarian, racist so-called populists, it’s no wonder she feels her “tank is empty.” It also takes courage to know when it’s time to stop. My hat is off to her and I wish her the best in her next phase.
When I wrote this article back in 2014, it was published in three places. But it’s long enough ago that I can’t find it online. The message is too important to let slip away, so I’m reprinting it here–unchanged except for adding one sentence. –Shel Horowitz
I laugh whenever I hear that famous phrase, “failure is not an option.” It shows not only enormous ignorance of the real world and the human brain, but also enormous hubris.Let’s get real. Failure is always an option—with sufficient bad luck or timing, loss of motivation, key player defections, or inadequate funding. This doesn’t mean the task is impossible; it’s just that currently, for whatever reason, it doesn’t seem worth marshaling the necessary resources to finish the task. And when the stakes are high (brain surgery or piloting a fully loaded commercial jet, for example), failure is a terrible option with horrible consequences—but even that doesn’t guarantee success.
Sometimes, we can minimize the impact of choosing failure. Almost always, we can embrace it as a learning opportunity.
The trick is to fail cheaply and early—and maybe often, make your mistakes, and move on. See what can be salvaged, what can be reinvented, and what should be thrown in the trash. Thomas Edison took 10,000 steps to invent the light bulb. Most people would say he failed 9999 times. He saw it not as a failure but as a 10,000-step process. In other words, our failures teach us enough to achieve our successes.
I’ve had my share of failures. This spring, for example, I set up a telesummit involving 17 speakers, plus eight bonus calls from my archives for those who purchased the recording package. I spent some money and a considerable amount of time.
And it failed.
The business model is proven. I just got a mailing from the organizer of another telesummit, and she reported 2500 signups and a 5% conversion to the paid recording package. If I’d had those numbers, I would have made a profit even after paying 50% commissions to the speakers who brought in those buyers. But I was not able to motivate people to visit, sign up, and buy.
What did she do differently? First, she had a much broader-based subject appeal. There are a lot more people who want to succeed as book authors than in running a green business. Second, she had more speakers. And third, she motivated all her participants with leaderboards and contests and a general sense that things were really moving and we all would want to get on the bandwagon.
While I was expecting a revenue stream instead of a cost center, I learned enormously from this failure. Among other things, I learned not to count on your speakers promoting your event in a meaningful way. Some of the largest list owners never mailed, and thus my traffic was far lower than expected. Low enough that the sales were basically invisible.
Here are some of my other takeaways: 1. Learn when to work with off-the-shelf products and when to go custom. I could have done 90 percent of what I wanted to with an off-the-shelf software package called Instant Teleseminar. But their model involves paying every month, forever—so instead, I just hired someone to build the functionality I was looking for. That decision led to some serious cost overruns, and I still didn’t achieve all the functionality I wanted. If the summit had succeeded and I did a new one every six or 12 months, developing the in-house solution still would have been the right decision, because it would probably pay for itself around the fourth summit. But since I doubt I’ll organize another series like this one—though I might very well reuse the content I created and rerun the series at some point—I should have just bought the product. 2. Keep it simple! The website is beautiful, but it’s too hard to use. I think it scared people off. I should have really improved the usability before I let it go live. 3. Identify an audience of buyers. The woman who achieved that big telesummit success could draw from tens of millions of people who want to be successful published authors. While there are hundreds of thousands who want to run successful green businesses, maybe that isn’t a critical mass, especially since I didn’t have a direct channel to reach them. 4. Keep the content focused. I think my series split its energy between being about marketing, generally, and being about green business success. This may not have been wise. Maybe I needed to push more of the marketing experts to speak specifically about applying their techniques in the green world.
You write, “focus on the main issue, health-focused cleaning; directing energy to one and not two main goals: health or sustainability, not both, or you compromise the program.”
We need a reframing here.
The question is not whether to choose health over green practices (of course we do!). The better question is how to achieve the health outcomes while also creating positive environmental impacts.
As one very easy example, how much packaging do we really need? Does it really increase safety to wrap every component of a kit individually, place the wrapped components on a foam tray, wrap the entire inner contents, box the wrapped set, and then add another layer of shrinkwrap around the box, stick the box in a case with 11 others, shrinkwrap the case, stack cases on a pallet, and then wrap the pallet?
For that matter, could some of the components in that kit be used again? Why do we design so many products to be used once and then thrown away?
My comment ended there–but that’s only the beginning of a much larger discussion. Some other questions to raise would include:
When can we use nontoxic natural cleansers and disinfectants such as baking soda and peroxide—and when do we actually need something stronger?
Can we get our cleaning agents in eco-friendly formats such as pellets to be dissolved in water, rather than harmful ones such as aerosol cans?
What are the most ergonomic ways to clean that protect our hands, shoulders, and backs from injury?
How do we most effectively train cleaning personnel to understand health, environmental, and safety issues?
Please feel welcome to add your own questions in the comments.
We’ve all heard toxic, disempowering, dream-stomping clichés like
“You can’t fight City Hall”
“We’ve always done it this other way”
“That’s impossible”
“You’ll always be a failure”
“We call B.S.!”
That’s the appropriate response, made famous by X Gonzales, at the time an 18-year-old survivor of the mass murder at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida just three days earlier. That same year, they co-organized (and spoke at) a huge national march on Washington and helped to shepherd through the first meaningful gun safety law in gun-loving Florida in this century.
And we all have to “call B.S.” when anyone tries to destroy our self-esteem, our calling, and our power.
18-year-old X Gonzales (center) gives the “Call B.S.” speech in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, February 17, 2018. Photo by Barry Stock, via Wikipedia.
Like Gonzales, we must embrace our ability to make change and join with others, nonviolently, to achieve that change.
For some, including me, becoming an activist is a way to do that. For others, the path takes different forms, such as being a parent or teacher or health care professional—or, for that matter, an accountant, manufacturer, or prison administrator—and carrying out those duties in ways that build up others, help them achieve those dreams, and help THEM build up others—to build a community, and a planet, based on the worth of every individual. Because to focus only on building yourself up is narcissism, even sociopathic.
This post was inspired by a private note admiring my activism but saying the writer got too depressed to do this kind of work. Here’s s my response, exactly as I wrote it, except I broke it up into more paragraphs and added more specific locations:
I’m sure you make the world better in other ways. Not everyone is cut out to be an activist–it’s a path where 90 percent or more of your efforts seem to be for naught (though often, change IS happening but not visible in the moment).
Because I focus on the positive, I’m able to find the strength to continue. I keep in mind that when I was born in December, 1956, half of the US was still officially segregated and racism still ruled most of the rest. Women and people of color had very few career opportunities. White women were mostly teachers and nurses while people of color were channeled into laborer, domestic, sanitation worker.
Male-on-female domestic violence and casual sexual harassment were considered normal and acceptable. People were still getting fired or even imprisoned for being in a same-sex or interracial relationship. There was close to zero awareness of pollution, climate change and making our ecosystems more resilient. Decent food was very difficult to find. And the last well-known nonviolent revolution had been in India almost a decade earlier.
Except that OFFICIAL segregation had ended, most of that was still true on October 15, 1969, when one casual comment within a speech at the first Vietnam peace demonstration I ever attended set me on a lifetime path of activism. Yet, in 53 years–a nanosecond in geologic time or even in human history–all of that has shifted. So things ARE getting better because of activism.
The other thing that keeps me going is the knowledge that MY OWN ACTIONS have made a difference several times.
Here are my top three: 1) I founded Save the Mountain, the group that kept a particularly offensive luxury housing development off the Mount Holyoke Range [Hadley and South Hadley, Massachusetts, USA] a mile and a half from my house. Even experts within the environmental movement locally had given up hope. I went in with the attitude that we would win–but even I thought it would take us five years. We did it in just 13 months–because all of us worked on different pieces where we had expertise, and because we had mass support from area residents.
2) I was one of the 1414 people arrested on the construction site of the Seabrook [New Hampshire, USA] nuclear power plant in 1977. By the time the last of us was released two weeks later, a national safe energy movement had been born, most of it adopting the nonviolent resistance techniques and consensus decision making that we used in Clamshell Alliance here in New England. Here’s a link to an article I wrote about the lasting shifts in the culture that movement created: https://greenandprofitable.com/40-years-ago-today-we-changed-the-world-part-4-shifts-in-the-culture/. And while we ultimately lost the battle to keep Seabrook from being built, we basically put a halt to the development of new nukes (unfortunately, we have to fight that battle again–but keeping these unsafe and unnecessary monsters off the drawing boards and out of the power grids for nearly 40 years is a pretty good outcome. And this time, I have great confidence that we will win.)
3) My work in local electoral politics [Hampshire County, Massachusetts] has helped to bring about a lasting progressive majority and a series of four progressive mayors in a row in Northampton, and this April took back the Hadley Select Board again after losing to a Trumpian majority in 2021 when we couldn’t find anyone willing to run. I think we’ve taken control of the board three times. Two for sure.
Again, I recognize that my path of activism isn’t for everyone. Neither is my parallel path of working within the business community to spread the message that solving our biggest problems, like hunger, poverty, racism, othering, and even catastrophic climate change and war, can be a profit path for business.
But each and every one of us can find our personal way to make a difference, to brighten the light for all of us, and to help bring into being the planet we want to pass on to subsequent generations.
If this post inspires you, please post a comment about what you’re already doing, or what you will start doing.
I just came across a query letter I wrote in 2020. It raises a lot of questions that are still very much worth asking—and attempting to answer.
How some people view the world—Opportunity for businesses that genuinely care
In many ways, these questions were easier to answer back then. Unfortunately, as a society, we missed the window to create those kinds of sweeping changes when the active threat of Covid made them easier—but we can still make the effort. We can still transform society, our relationship with other beings, and the planet in our own lifetime. It’ll just take more effort.
Here’s the relevant section of what I wrote back then (I’ve removed a long paragraph with my credentials, as well as my closing.)—and I’d love to get your comments:
Hi, there,
As an experienced journalist and award-winning, best-selling ten-book author with several books on social enterprise as a profit center, I propose an article, Leveraging the Great Pivot: How COVID-19 Creates Long-Term Post-Pandemic Opportunities for Racial Justice, Economic Advancement, and Environmental Healing. Probably in the 1500-2500 word range.
The premise: For decades, activists have been told we can’t fix the crushing problems of our time, like hunger, poverty, racism, war, catastrophic climate change, etc. Yet, starting in early 2020, the entire world pivoted and everything changed. As education, many types of business, and even cultural events shifted online or reinvented themselves, we learned how resilient, adaptable, and creative we are. And that process created opportunities that could never have happened in the pre-pandemic world.
These massive global, national, regional, and local shifts prove we can reinvent the world as the place we really want to live in–and we can replicate the shift in other areas. As a society, we have to do this pivot strategically, and it has to involve many sectors: government, nonprofits, activists, community organizations, academia—and the business community.
Just look at how the massive expansion of the racial justice movement since May has changed perceptions around the US and around the world. And that’s one small piece of a big multi-issue cauldron of solution-driven thinking and activism; a lot of good work is going into solving those big crises, as well as protecting our fragile democracy. The question is: pivot to what?
Could health care coverage be shifted away from employers so the next time an emergency shuts hundreds of thousands of businesses, their laid-off employees don’t lose their safety net? Could this be the US’s chance to adopt the single-payer model most of the rest of the world uses? And to shift from treating the sick’s symptoms to maintaining wellness across the population so fewer people get sick in the first place? Can this be the moment to finally get away from fossil and nuclear, to combine clean renewable energy with massive systemic conservation so we’re no longer squandering our children’s heritage polluting and carbonizing our planet while depleting scarce resources? Is it time for decent affordable housing to be seen as a right? What are the best ways to create more housing that also protect the environment, create pleasant yet affordable neighborhoods, and avoid negative consequences like urban sprawl?
We can ask similar questions in every sector: criminal justice, job creation, transportation and shipping (moving both people and things), replacing armed conflict with peaceful conflict resolution, ensuring a pluralistic society that honors both its majorities and minorities, etc.
After four years of Trump and a year of COVID, it won’t be enough to go back to the “normal” of 2019, or even of 2015. But with the pandemic comes the luxury and responsibility of critically examining every aspect of society. We need to figure out what the goal of every institution is–and how to achieve or surpass that goal as we rebuild. Just as many developing countries skipped landlines and clunky desktop computers and went straight to smartphones, we need to ask questions like:
What are we *really* trying to accomplish?
Is this the best way to meet that goal?
How could we improve it?
How could we make it more inclusive?
Then we brainstorm with these ends in mind, using a seven-step process that opens up new thinking and lets us implement new solutions. To make this concrete, think about spending millions of R&D dollars to create a pen that can write in zero-gravity. But the real goal isn’t to have a pen that can write in space—that’s a means to an end. The real goal is to be able to write in space. And suddenly, with that framing, the solution is obvious: use pencils—or computers! Maybe you create a pencil lead that can make a darker, easier to read impression, create a Velcro mount for your device so it doesn’t go flying across the cabin, or make other little tweaks—but you’ve accomplished the basic goal, with resources you already have. Business has a vested interest in reinventing itself, as dozens of industries were rendered obsolete, as supply chain issues showed up unexpectedly, and as those sectors that strengthened and grew had to adapt. Small businesses can survive and even thrive, but not as it was in 2019. Whether a manufacturer switches from making luxury goods to PPE or a retailer learns how to blend online and (protected) in-person approaches, pretty much everyone has to pivot. Why not seize the opportunity to have that reinvention foster racial, gender, and class equity…green the planet while creating jobs…match product introduction and production not to advertising-created materialism but to solving real needs and getting paid for it? In the activist world, meetings that might have had 10 local people in a room can now draw 500 from around the world—and provide digital tools to mobilize action, such as Spoke, a texting platform that can allow volunteers to send 1000 or more text messages an hour and respond individually and personally when someone replies. In my own professional development this year, from the comfort of my own home, I’ve attended dozens of far-away events. Some had hundreds or thousands of attendees from dozens of countries (among them a worldwide UN conference, multiple 50th-anniversary celebrations of Earth Day, and gatherings on more niched topics such as the special situation of Jews of color). I could not have afforded the time and money to go to so many conferences, and several times, they’ve overlapped. But I was able to participate in more than one at a time, or listen to what I’d missed on replay. I’ve also participated in some thinking and brainstorming calls from widely scattered groups of thinkers and researchers working on global solutions to these and other problems. As somewhat more exciting examples, local cultural performers with no previous broader following are finding global audiences—and the sound technicians who can replace awful-sounding Zoom calls with concert-quality production are keeping busy.
Even on the personal side, some of the restrictions can be reframed as empowerment—just as we can think of a wheelchair user not as “confined to a wheelchair,” but “liberated with a wheelchair,” because it allows that user to go places that would otherwise be off-limits. My wife and I hosted a Passover Seder with family and friends from three generations and 9 different states from Massachusetts to California–most of whom would never have come in person.
Check out this 
When I wrote this article back in 2014, it was published in three places. But it’s long enough ago that I can’t find it online. The message is too important to let slip away, so I’m reprinting it here–unchanged except for adding one sentence.
