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

By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Green Marketing Tagged with , , ,

One of the most exciting things about the green movement lately is the way it’s become so mainstream. After some 40 years in this movement, I am deeply gratified that every company I can think of is taking steps toward sustainability. Some, like Marks & Spencer in the UK and believe it or not, Walmart in the US (and worldwide)—a company not exactly swarming with treehuggers—have practically made it into a religion.

In my talks and interviews, I almost always mention Walmart, because that company is heavily driven by the profit motive—and has found it extremely profitable to lower expenses by paying attention to sustainability, and at the same time create new profit centers. For instance, Walmart is selling truckloads of organic food to people who would never set foot in a Whole Foods. While I still have many other issues with the company, ranging from labor practices and supplier policies to siting and closed-store-reuse, on sustainabiity, I have only praise.

And if  bottom-line-driven, NON-treehugger company like Walmart can build a green path to prosperity, what holds the rest of us back?

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By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life

Havent had time to blog much, because there’s just too much going on at the Horowitz/Friedman homestead:

  • 3 days in Boston because my son had, on successive days, an orchestra rehearsal, his final orchestra concert before they go on tour in Europe (190 high school kids!), and another rehearsal
  • A house concert and -pre-event featuring Swami Beyondananda that I organized and sold out on two weeks’ notice (fortunately, at someone else’s air-conditioned house, since it turned out to be the hottest day of the year), with the Swami sleeping over here
  • My son graduating high school one day after the concert, and the consequent arrival of my father, my wife’s parents (for a three-day visit), and my daughter (my mother and stepfather—a stunning visual artist, BTW—already live locally)
  • The failure of our refrigerator, discovered the morning of graduation (which was the morning after the concert)—and which cost $100 to find out it wasn’t fixable—at six years old! I am still of the opinion that appliances should last 20 years or so, but in the last decade, we’ve had a number of newish appliances fail (grrrr!)

So I think I have an excuse for not blogging over-much lately. Hopefully I’ll get back to normal next week.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Democracy, Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary, Green Business, Peace and War, Politics, poverty Tagged with , , , , ,

While the GOP lines up to see who can be more crazy and out-of-touch and unintelligent than their competitors, the Left is strangely quiet. Haven’t even heard rumblings of candidacy from Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who has set the bar for leftist challenges in the past two presidential elections.

And this is odd, because Obama has failed the Left, despite being elected on a platform—dare I say a mantra—of “change.”

Yes, he can claim a number of significant accomplishments—one blogger found Obama’s legislative accomplishment rate was an astonishing 96 percent—but on most of the issues that really matter, his record does not inspire:

WAR:

We’re still in Iraq, where five US soldiers lost their lives this week. And we’re way deeper in Afghanistan than we were, with about 100,000 troops on the ground. And we’ve deployed in Pakistan and Libya. The only real move toward peace was Obama’s recent speech on the Israel-Palestine conflict

HEALTHCARE:

All that energy into the pathetic and complicated Obamacare compromise! Not only was single-payer not “on the table,” but even the wimpy public option was taken off the table. What was left?  A gift to the insurance industry and not much else. I want a candidate who will propose a one-sentence health reform bill: “All US citizens and legal residents are eligible for Medicare from birth.” If we need to phase it in, start by moving eligibility to age 55, then 40, then 20, then zero over a period of years.

ENERGY/ECONOMY/ENVIRONMENT

I lump these three together because the solution integrates across the disciplines: A massive, Marshall-plan-style initiative to get OFF fossil and nuclear energy sources in ten to twenty years, replacing them with sources that are both clean and renewable (with special attention to deep conservation that reduces the need for energy by 50 percent or more). We’d use government loans to jumpstart the effort, bring the price of conversions down, and front the money for homeowners, tenants, farmers,  and business owners to get systems in place—with the loans repaid out of the energy savings. This would boost the economy, create hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of jobs, get people out of poverty, put them back to work, remove our biggest reason for starting wars—and drastically reduce our carbon footprint, all at once!

The candidate who can articulate this vision, who can claim the unfinished mandate that Obama promised and didn’t deliver, has a pretty good shot at galvanizing the American people—if they can be convinced that these changes are actually possible.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , ,

This is really exciting: Germany, already a leader in the safe energy space—in fact, my solar inverter, installed back in 2004, was built in Germany—has rejected nuclear power. Germany has pledged to permanently close the seven plants taken off-line following Fukushima, and shut all of its 17 n-plants by 2022.

Remember: Germany is a cloudy northern European country. If solar can work there, it can work just about anywhere—and Germany’s clean energy industry already employs an impressive 370,000 people.

Germany was also the birthplace of the modern safe-energy/anti-nuclear movement, back around 1975, and had a huge influence on the creation of Clamshell Alliance and the US safe energy movement in the next few years after that. And citizen action clearly played a role. As the AP story noted:

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets after Fukushima to urge the government to shut all reactors quickly.

Meanwhile, Switzerland’s cabinet is recommending to Parliament that the country phase out all its reactors by 2034. And Vermont, which is both defending itself against a lawsuit by Vermont Yankee nuclear plant owner Energy attacking its right to regulate the plant and suing the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission over an improper license extension, submitted legal documents pointing out that Entergy knew perfectly well in 2001 when it bought Vermont Yankee that the plant was scheduled to close in 2012, waited to the last minute to challenge it, and therefore has no right to a preliminary injunction forbidding the state from closing the plant at the end of the license period.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, censorship, Democracy, People Helping People, Protests and Crackdowns, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with ,

In this Web 2.0 Age of Transparency, being stupid about being criticized is, well, more stupid than it used to be. Word gets around. Fast.

A Seattle organization called Reel Grrls, which teaches teens how to become filmmakers, criticized the revolving-door hiring by Comcast of FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker. (Lots of other people raised a public eyebrow on this one.)

In a truly idiotic move, Comcast then announced it was yanking $18,000 it had planned to fund Real Grrls’ summer camp to teach filmmaking, editing and screenwriting. Then, when the media got hold of the story and the public squawked, Comcast recanted and said the fund withdrawal was unauthorized.

But then Real Grrls said it didn’t want the money if there were going to be issues about corporate censorship. They’re using Web 2.0 channels, including a fundraising blast from media watchdog FreePress.net, to raise the money from outside  the corporate world.

With 42,600 Google search results for “reel grrls” comcast as of Monday when I’m actually writing this, Comcast’s PR is clearly taking a hit.One it could have avoided completely by not doing something stupid.

Want to help? Here’s the link to donate.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

Even though I’ve been in favor of legalizing marijuana since the 1970s and have been in the environmental movement  just as long, it never occurred to me that the continuing prohibition on pot actually has negative consequences for the environment.

But this fascinating article shows a number of negative environmental effects from the prohibition, ranging from highly toxic pesticides used both by growers and by law enforcement authorities on down to greater energy usage because the plants are often grown indoors and therefore need artificial light. If I counted right, the article offers six environmental benefits of legalizing pot. Who would’ve thunk it?

What are the other arguments that convinced me decades ago that pot should be legal? Here are two different choices that list a few of the main reasons to legalize marijuana, in some depth (the first, and I think better-argued one, is from High Times, the second is from the advocacy group Norml. And here’s a brief list of 101 reasons to legalize pot, some a bit tongue-in-cheek.

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Uncategorized, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , ,

Last year, I set myself up with Cinchcast: a nifty free service that lets you record anything and post it. In the beginning, I was recording my blog posts.

But I’ve gotten lazy. I haven’t made a new Cinch since late November. Then, thanks to this page of tips on repurposing content (mine is #10, BTW), I discovered Odiogo.com, which automatically records every blog post (it even went back several weeks when I set it up). And then it feeds in to iTunes and other  good streams. Even offers a revenue share on ads.

Odiogo promises bloggers “’Near-human’ quality text-to-speech.” Well, maybe if your idea of human speech is some very nervous person reading a presentation in a near-monotone. It’s got a long way to go before it sounds human to me.

But then again, I know people who read books on their phones. So the quality isn’t great, but it’s there and I don’t have to do anything. I’ll still try to be better about Cinching, but at least those who prefer to consume my blog in audio don’t have to wait for me to remember to record.

I invite you to compare for yourself. Links to both my Cinchast page and my Odiogo page are in this blog post.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Publishing, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , ,

Where have I been all week? Researching and writing a new introduction for a book I originally wrote in 1979 (and which in turn was based on a book published by my co-authors in 1969.

Following the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear reactors in Japan, the Japanese publisher decided to bring my ancient book on why nuclear power makes no sense back into print. And the publisher contracted last Friday (one week ago) for a new introduction. My deadline wasn’t until the end of the month, but next week, I’m at a book-industry trade show.

So I shoved a lot of other stuff aside and got it done. It’s a piece of writing I can be proud of, that shows why nuclear makes even less sense today than it did back then (because alternative technologies have improved so much). It makes a strong case against nuclear not only on health and safety grounds, not only about the inability to safely store highly toxic waste for many millennia, but also on economic grounds (a case we hear far too little about).

The publisher gave me a maximum word length of 3500 words; I turned in 3499, not counting the 26 footnotes, many of which came from pro-nuclear sources.

I love coming in early with clean copy that meets the specifications, and I love that I was able to negotiate a much better arrangement than what was originally proposed. And I love letting the supporters of this inane technology demonstrate for me why it should be abandoned.

I’ll try to post an entry or two in the next couple of days before I go away again, and then be back on track the week of May 30.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Green Marketing, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , ,

It’s been a great discussion the past few days about whether and when it makes sense to work with companies that don’t share your values. I promised to add my own views after we’d gotten some comments, and thus, this post—which I wrote before receiving any of the comments, but chose to hold back on posting:

Here’s my take, as a long-time peace/environmental activist who also writes about how to leverage social change through business. You have these options:
1. Be a purist and refuse any tainted money or tainted partnerships, defining taint to mean that the company is in some way involved in things you disagree with.

2. “Separation of powers,” where you will work with a company that has dirty hands, but only work on the clean-hands aspects of that company.

3. Use the partnership to actively push the company toward more progressive stances, and eventually to abandon the actions that caused you to look askance in the first place.

I’ve evolved on this issue over time. In the 70s, I’m pretty sure I’d have been a #1. And been out in the streets with the protestors. But that was before I saw how the business world can not only change itself, but become a fulcrum for change in the wider society. These days, I’m at least a #2 and when possible, a #3. I’m even in dialogue with an outfit that does seminars for utility companies—and I told them I would not assist with anything that promoted nuclear (and if they hire me to present, I will definitely be using my bully pulpit to push the #3-style agenda to the utilities attending the conference).

But I do think there might be companies (or governments) whose philosophy is so opposed to mine that I would still be a number 1, still refuse to get my hands dirty.

I also recognize that sustainability is a path, and we are all somewhere on the path. I am not sure you could find a person who is living 100% sustainably. Even my very self-sufficient 90-year-old friend who lives in a mountaintop cabin she and her late husband built themselves, with no electricity or running water, grows most of her own food, and keeps her income below the taxable level—creates carbon emissions with her woodstove.

I think a great example is Walmart. I don’t choose to shop there, because I oppose its policies on labor issues, community development impact, predatory pricing, and a host of other areas. At the same time, I have publicly lauded Walmart, many times, for its groundbreaking, deep, systemic attention to sustainability. And I point out that Walmart is not a company of tree-huggers, but of executives looking to maximize profit. I’m willing to publicly praise Walmart’s ability make and save boatloads of money through enormous initiatives to use less energy and to introduce organic foods/green products to customers who would *never* set foot in a Whole Foods–even while choosing to put my own shopping dollars elsewhere.

I discuss this kind of conundrum a bit in my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, privacy, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , ,

Acording to no less a source than London’s well-respected Financial Times, Facebook has admitted hiring a PR agency to spread stories questioning Google’s privacy policies.

I’m no fan of Google’s approach to privacy, and one of the reasons I still keep Eudora, my “throwback” e-mail system where the e-mail resides on my own hard drive, is that I don’t particularly want Google to have access to my outbox (I do filter some incoming mail through GMail). However, I’ve never particularly trusted Facebook on that score either. I simply stick to a policy that assumes anything I post anywhere is public knowledge, and I try to not post anything, anywhere, that would come back to bite me. Fortunately, I live a pretty transparent and ethical life, and I don’t really have much to worry about. And I’ve never been afraid to be controversial, or to be “ahead of my time.”

I’m also willing to stand up for what’s right. If Facebook chooses to “get even” with me for expressing outrage over this action, and suspends my account, so be it. I managed to live my first 50 years without any help from Facebook. At 54, I could live another 50 years without it if I had to.

Nonetheless, I am deeply appalled. Don’t we have anything better to do than to take our opponents down? I’m much more a believer in cooperating with our competitors (something I discuss extensively in my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green). And if you are going to attack your competitors, at least have the decency to do it out in the open. This kind of smear campaign is what I expect from the lunatic fringe that has hijacked the US Republican Party, not from a company that has built its entire business model on cultivating surprisingly deep openness among its users.

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