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 censorship, Demographics/Psychographics, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with

It is now illegal in france to hide your face in a public place—a clear assault on very religious Muslims. Freedom of religion often involves particular manners of dress or hair, and prohibiting them is an act of bigotry. (There is one good thing in the law that I do support: it is now illegal to force someone else to veil herself).

The solution to religious fundamentalism is not religious bigotry. Would there be a protest about banning yarmulkas (the skullcaps Orthodox Jews wear) or crucifix necklaces?

I hope some non-Muslim French citizens organize massive solidarity actions with hundreds or thousands wearing a veil in public—kind of like the King of Denmark donning a yellow star during the Nazi occupation.

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

The world has got to get off coal and oil and gas and biofuels and nuclear, and onto forms of energy that are truly sustainable: they renew themselves, they don’t pollute, they don’t emit greenhouse gases, and they certainly don’t leave a legacy of poison. And the good news is we already have the know-how to do this; now we just need to find the will.

This is a crucial crossroads moment with huge implications for future generations. More specifically, for whether we actually still have a planet to pass on to future generations. We could tip toward sustainability…or continue on the path to desolation.

In just 50 years, carbon levels in the atmosphere have gone from 315.59 parts per million (PPM) in December 1959 to 387.27 as of December 2009 and 392.94 PPM just five months later—passing the danger threshold of 350 PPM in 1988, heading for 410 or higher by 2020, and perhaps as bad as 770 PPM by the end of the century. Much of that increase is directly attributable to human activity. And 2000-2009 was the warmest decade on record.

What does that mean? For starters, polar melting will raise sea levels up to 1.9 meters (6 feet, three inches) by2100, causing widespread inundation of coastal cities around the world. Some entire countries, especially those on islands, will simply disappear under the waves.

Increased heat in the tropics will increase desertification and have a severe impact on food production, leading to famines, which in turn will make wars and ethnic violence a whole lot more likely.

Polar melting will also change the salt ratio of the oceans, because the ice caps are freshwater. This in turn could interfere with the Gulf Stream, making Europe a lot less habitable.

I’m old enough to remember the early 1960s: There was a lot less plastic. Most households had a maximum of one car, one television, and one telephone. There was a whole lot less traffic, and therefore a lot fewer cars spewing greenhouse cases while idling in that traffic. Air conditioning was rare. Suburban sprawl was a relatively new phenomenon, and vast acreage remained as forest or farmland that has since turned into housing and shopping and office parks. Individuals did not own computers. An 800-square-foot apartment or a 1200-square-foot house could comfortably fit a family of four or five. With all these major lifestyle shifts, it’s not surprising that humans have an impact on our planet. And I’m not suggesting that we roll back the clock on “progress.” But I am suggesting that if we want this lifestyle, we need to consume fewer resources to maintain it.

Have you perhaps noticed that major earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, and even winter storms (allowed to move out of the polar regions because global warming breaks down the natural barriers that kept them polar before) have been much more severe in the last decade or so? Our Planet Earth is apparently beginning its rebellion.

We have to move forward, and we have to do it quickly.

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, General Commentary, language Tagged with , , , , ,

The other night, I went to Candidate Night for the upcoming town election. And what struck me most of all was how uncomfortable with public speaking most of the candidates and the debate moderator seemed to be. This was not a huge stadium filled with thousands of people; it was a high school cafeteria with maybe 150 or 200 town residents, and most of the candidates personally knew a good chunk of the audience.

And yet…nine out of nine speakers hid behind the podium…I think everyone except the moderator read their remarks…and all but one candidate seemed quite ill at ease. Their speeches mostly emphasized the wrong things, and the debate left little impression of what most of these people actually stood for. One candidate for Town Meeting Moderator–which mostly involves chairing a meeting twice a year that brings out as many as 1100 local voters–actually said he’d never addressed such a large group and wasn’t used to public speaking. If he’s so nervous with 150 people, how is he going to handle a large Town Meeting?

Communication, both oral and written, needs to be effective. A speaker or writer needs to get across point of view, plan of action, intent, and both emotional  and rational appeals. Most of this group flunked the test.

When my parents were students in the 1940s, effective speaking and writing were part of the school curriculum. I think they should be still. And I think a few other things should be part of the curriculum:

  • Critical thinking skills
  • Media literacy: the ability to evaluate news and advertisements for their content, their biases, and their spoken or unspoken agenda (my grandfather used to read all seven New York daily papers in order to extrapolate the truth; my son once had a media literacy class that involved looking at the same stories through the eyes of Fox on the right, Democracy Now on the left, and a mainstream newspaper; why don’t more schools require this?)
  • Learning at least one foreign language to the point where you can have at least a simple conversation
  • A health education program that includes Alexander Technique, yoga, and vision therapy, as well as the usual calisthenics and sports
  • Basic literacy in arts and culture

I think our democracy would be better for it.

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By Posted on Posted in Publishing Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

I posted this to a LinkedIn discussion group yesterday, and publishing consultant Carol White told me I should make it a blog, as a public service. So here we go:

 

It doesn’t sound like it would be a big deal, but the organization that assigns the ISBN to the book is the publisher. When your publisher is a subsidy house (such as Trafford, AuthorHouse, XLibris, iUniverse—all owned by the same company, incidentally—or Outskirts, Infinity and their hundreds of competitors), anyone in the industry can tell by the ISBN that you went with a publisher that does no vetting, that will take anyone who can pay the fee (other than hate speech or smut), that doesn’t give a flying f about whether the book has been proofread, let alone edited—and that in most cases will have a very generic cover and interior design. The industry, having seen vast quantities of junk coming out of these presses, assumes that anything with one of those labels is junk.

And the unfortunate reality is that 90 percent of the books coming out of these presses should never have been published. There’s certainly a lot of junk coming out of true self-publishing, too—but the percentage of good stuff is much, much higher.

Now there are a few reasons why in some cases it makes sense to go this route, as long as you know what you’re getting into and have good reasons. For example:

  • A client of mine whose book was good enough to publish traditionally told me he was in his late 80s and didn’t want to wait two years to find a publisher and have the book come out, and likewise he didn’t want the hassle of being his own publisher. He went with iUniverse, and probably sold a lot fewer books, but got it done very quickly at relatively low expense.
  • Infinity (my favorite of this ilk) got wind of my Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers and begged me to let them publish it. I let them do their own edition for the book trade. If a bookstore wants to order, I let them order Infinity’s edition. If an individual orders, I fill the order from the books I printed under my own ISBN (which cost me half as much per copy as Infinity’s). What I got out of it was outsourcing all the hassles of dealing with bookstores, as well as “street cred” with subsidy-published authors who might hire me for book consulting or marketing consulting/copywriting.
  • Professional speakers often use these companies because they don’t want the hassles, and because they have a built-in market that doesn’t care that their books are ugly and overpriced. In that market, they can pay the $9 per book to get them printed, because they sell them direct for maybe $25. In a bookstore, where comparable books might be $18 and the bookstore takes 40 percent, the numbers don’t work.
  • Finally, when I get a client with a crappy book that has a sharply limited life expectancy, I recommend these companies. If you’re going to sell 100 or fewer books during the life of a title, there’s no point setting up a publishing company, choosing printing and design vendors, etc., or paying someone like me or Carol or Judy to do it for you.

In true self-publishing, you buy your ISBN block and you choose your vendors for all the services you need (such as editing, design, indexing). And you set the price of the book. Some subsidy houses will allow you to supply your own cover and interior. Some will even let you set your own price. And some subsidy houses also offer on-demand printing services where they don’t assign an ISBN; in this case, you are buying short-run printing from a company that happens to also offer subsidy publishing services, but you are not subsidy publishing. Many people use companies like Lulu and the printing arm associated with Infinity to do Advance Reader Copies (ARCs). I used Lulu to do a relative’s vanity project in  run of 6 copies. I didn’t ask for ISBN and I didn’t use one of mine. I was simply using them as a printer.

But ultimately, there’s only one test that makes the determination whether a book is self- or subsidy published: who obtained the ISBN from the official ISBN agency (Bowker, in the US).

 

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, propaganda, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , ,

The latest news from Daichi makes it clear: Nothing these officials say can be trusted:

Highly toxic plutonium has seeped into the soil outside the troubled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power complex in northeastern Japan, officials say. The amounts detected in five different soil samples taken from the facility did not pose a risk to humans, safety officials say.

Yes, I am calling that last sentence an outright lie—a disgusting, damnable, and definitely dangerous dissembling.

Want to know the safe level of inhaled plutonium? Zero. The risks are lower if it’s eaten or drank. Breathing the stuff has a very high deadliness factor because it settles in the lungs.

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

The news from Japan remains very troubling:

Now…let’s remember that nuclear power is a really stupid way to boil water for electricity generation:

  • Over the entire fuel cycle, starting with mining uranium and ending with attempting to find a solution for safe storage of nuclear waste, the process requires enormous energy inputs, so the actual gain in usable power is very tiny, if it exists at all. One study I’ve seen, by John J. Berger, states that from 1960-76, the nuclear power “generation” industry actually consumed five times as much power as it generated. I cited this study in my first book, Nuclear Lessons, published waaaay back in 1980.
  • If a plant has a major problem, and has to be removed from service permanently, it causes disruption in the energy systems of the communities that depend on it, because a lot of power generation is taken off the grid at once. In the case of Daichi, most of those reactors can never be used again.
  • In the US, nuclear power is subsidized with the Price-Anderson Act, a low-premium accident insurance policy that sharply limits liability. Basically, if you don’t own the plant, you probably won’t collect damages in case of  an accident.
  • And don’t forget: there is no permanent solution to storage of radioactive waste, isolated from the environment for up to a quarter of a million years (I, for one, don’t believe this is actually possible).
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By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , ,

I have lived in a housing project of 55,000 people in New York City—so insignificant in the city’s eyes that we didn’t even have a subway stop; we had to bus or walk a mile to one of two different trains, one of which could have easily been extended a mile over Interstate 95. In all, I lived in New York City for about 20 years, including birth to 16. In my early 20s, I lived in four of the five boroughs: Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn.

At the other extreme, for the past 12+ years, I’ve lived on a working farm in a village of about 200 within Hadley, Massachusetts—a town of 4753 people—part of Hampshire County, whose 20 “cities” and towns within 545 square miles increased over the past decade to 152,251. (City, as Massachusetts defines it, refers to a municipality administered by a mayor and council rather than Selectboard and Town Meeting, and has nothing to do with population.) And I actually serve on an official town land-use committee, where we wrestle constantly with shaping the future of our town.

New York City’s five densely populated boroughs comprise just under 305 square miles, and hold 8,391,881 residents. You could move NYC to my county and still have almost half the land area left —maybe to grow enough food for all those residents. My county has 1/55 as many people as NYC, spread out over 1.78 times as much land.

Between the time I first lived outside of New York, in 1973, and settled in Hampshire County, in 1981, I lived in various cities and towns ranging from under 5000 to 1,688,210. All of these communities can offer sustainability wisdom from which other places can learn—either by doing it right, or by doing it wrong (so much so that I could write a book on this—maybe I will, some day). Here are a few of the insights:

  • Vibrant neighborhoods require mixed use. In every city I’ve ever lived in, the exciting neighborhoods are those where people live, work, play, and shop in close proximity. The best US examples I know are Northampton and Amherst, MA, New York’s Upper West Side and Park Slope, and the Fox Point area of Providence. Much of Europe uses this model, and European cities are highly livable.
  • Car-centered cultures adversely affect quality of life. Strong mass transit usually enhances it. In New York City (where a car is a liability), commuting time on public transit is productive. People read, write, get through their e-mail, walk a few blocks to their destination, and don’t feel like they’ve wasted the time. Sometimes they even build friendships with the people they see every day on their commute. In Hadley, the shopping district is suburban-style, with big malls and strip malls along a state highway. Almost no one lives on that road, and it’s not a place for cultural events, other than movies. While the largest food stores actually do provide chances to hang out a bit with neighbors (all arriving in separate cars), having a brief chat with an acquaintance you run into in the produce aisle is not the same kind of community building as you can get in a cafe or a bookstore.
  • A corollary: planning must take into account the existing transportation patterns. Mass-transit thinking can’t just be grafted onto a car-oriented culture, and car-oriented thinking won’t work in crowded urban areas. Those patterns can change over time, but it’s a slow process.
  • A real community transcends ethnic and cultural differences. My current neighborhood of Hockanum  Village has a number of families that have been on the same land for 200 years or more. Some of them trace their lineage to the Mayflower. The whole neighborhood gets together every year for a Christmas party that attracts former residents from as far as Florida, and sometimes a summer picnic along the river. A few neighbors gather at the local coffee shop for breakfast once a week. I could knock on any door in the neighborhood with a request, and people would try to help me.
  • Cities lend themselves well to centralized renewable energy collection—but this potential to make a big difference in climate change and oil dependency has barely been tapped. Instead, many centrally heated buildings in New York are overheated to the point where tenants need to open windows on cold winter days, and that’s crazy.
  • Cities could supply a significant portion of their own food, but again, this potential is not tapped much.
  • Farmers and gardeners understand the food cycle. They know what it’s like to grow food for themselves, their families, and their livestock. They’ve seen crop failure. They pay close attention to weather patterns. Localism is not a theoretical construct; it’s an everyday reality.
  • Homeowners and farmers notice details and patterns, so, for instance, they anticipate and address maintenance issues before they become failures. They don’t expect anyone else to do things for them, though they might ask for help on a big project. Tenants (especially in urban areas) are much less likely to have this attitude.
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By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,

In my last post, I described the demise of our radiator and engine while driving down the highway Wednesday. I had the car towed to our mechanic, who called this morning to tell us that the engine had indeed suffered a meltdown. Fortunately, the consequences are far less severe than in a nuclear power plant, but it meant we either had to spend $3000 to fix it or go car shopping in a hurry.

We’d gotten eight years out of the replacement engine we’d put in the last time this happened, and now the car was 14 years old. $3000 didn’t seem like a wise investment.

So off we went, car shopping. When we get into a riff like this, we’re like a couple of trucks. We go until we get the job done. When we bought our current house (in 1998), we viewed 16 houses in just eight days, and bought #15. And with three drivers, nowhere we can walk, and one working car, we needed to move fast. We had decided ahead that with a new teenage driver in the family, buying new didn’t make sense. The insurance would be huge, and so would the risk. So that made the decision simpler.

In two hours, we went to five different dealerships—four that only sold used vehicles, plus one local new/used .Oddly, we only saw one car that was worth test-driving: a 2005 Toyota Corolla stickshift with only 26,000 miles. (Corollas are typically good for 150,000 or more. Our current one has 165,000.) Considering that some of the other cars we saw included a $12,000 Prius with over 99,000 miles and a $17,000 Honda Civic hybrid with 36,000, we thought we’d found a pretty good deal.

Over the next three hours, we dropped the car off at our mechanic to check it out, stopped for lunch, went to the credit union and got financing through our home equity line of credit (that we had established earlier but never used), went to the library to make sure it wasn’t the kind with the runaway accelerator problem—and while we were there, we also googled the original owner, who had a distinctive name, to make sure there was no report of a major accident in the car (we discovered she’d purchased the car in April 2006, and died the following September of natural causes—and at some point later, the car was traded back to the same dealer that had sold it originally). Then back to the mechanic to pick up the car with a clean bill of health, and back to the dealer to go through the paperwork and specify the very minor repairs to be made.

Yup. In five hours flat, we chose a car, had it examined, and got it financed. That’s fast even by our standards, but we were under some time pressure, with the exchange student and some teenage friends of my son all descending on us in the coming days. By Saturday, the work will be done and we’ll have the car.

Know any Western Massachusetts takers for a 1997 Toyota that needs an engine and radiator?

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By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , ,

In 2003, we were driving down the Wilbur Cross Parkway in Connecticut, on our way to pick up a high school exchange student from France at JFK Airport. Suddenly, steam started pouring out of the hood, the temperature gauge hit the red zone, and the car lost power. Cooked radiator, and broken head gasket (cooked engine).

With only 71,000 miles on a six-year-old Toyota, one of the car dealers we visited advised us not to replace the car, just put in a new engine. We took his advice, especially since he actually arranged the whole thing for us.

Yesterday, I was driving that same car, now 14 years old and with 165,000 miles, on my way to a business meeting. Suddenly, steam started pouring out of the hood, the temperature gauge hit the red zone, and the car lost power. Cooked radiator, probable broken head gasket.

And the craziest thing of all? Next week, assuming she’s still coming after the earthquake and tsunami, we’re scheduled to host a high school exchange student from Japan.

Hmmm. Are exchange students too expensive to host if we have to spend a few thousand dollars on fixing or replacing a vehicle? (that’s a joke.)

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

My friend Christophe Poizat sent me invitation to try the new social-media-integrated browser, RockMelt.

I immediately liked the interface. It’s a little more elegant, and seemed faster, at least initially (like Firefox, it seems to slow down the more I use it). I also like the way it displays icons of social media friends, and if I hold the cursor over any of those icons, I got my friend’s latest status update—and also can see if they’re online now.

And I LOVE the way a Google search shows up as a right-hand column of the page I’m on, so I still have that page underneath.

I also really like the ability to set up multiple autofill profiles and quickly select which one to use on a particular form. Given that I’m often switching between the e-address I use for low-priority mail and the one I actually want to be contacted at, that’s really nice.

However, and it’s a BIG however, something about the way it actually processes a form’s submit button is very problematic. I failed to logon to Twitter, Yahoogroups, and Paypal (the last being particularly frustrating  because I was responding to a one-time offer that went away). Also some pages simply don’t load, and they work fine when I copy the URl to Firefox.

In sort, from my point of view, the jury is still out.

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