Looking at abundance as not necessarily monetary–how to get your needs met and desires fulfilled without necessarily needing money to do it.
Wow! Tell this to your skeptic friends. One of America’s top research think tanks, Brookings Institution, now says that the 2.7 million Americans employed in green industries has outpaced the number working in fossil fuels.
That is quite extraordinary!
For some good analysis on what this means and where we should go from here, read Green For All’s Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins’ excellent article on Treehugger.
The thing Obama and the Democrats don’t seem to understand is that the ublic would have their back if they knew the facts. And thus, the Democrats need to articulate the facts: clearly, concisely (a challenge, I know), and consistently.
They would not have to give in at all on issues like Medicare, matching debt reduction with spending reduction dollar-for-dollar, and refusing all new revenue if they would put it out to the American people the way Lou Dubose did in the little-read but much-respected Washington Spectator of July 15. You can read the article here, if you happen to subscribe to that wonderful little newsletter.
So let me summarize some of Dubose’s points:
Dubose quotes economist Chad’s Stone’ testimony at a Jont Economic Committee hearing June 21:
The economic downturn, tax cuts enacted under President Bush, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire federal budget deficit over the next 10 years.
The tax cuts alone, Stone concludes, represent 6 percent of GDP right now—but if they are not reversed, public debt will be an unimaginable 95 percent of GDP by 2019—not a legacy we want to saddle our children with.
So if I were Obama or Pelosi or Reid, or any Democrat who wants to win his or her next election, I’d be out there every day, telling the press and the public:
Etcetera.
In short, the Dems (and I’ve said this before) have to get much better at framing and messaging. They should study George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant. They need to understand that politics is about marketing, and the reason they lose so often is because they don’t have a clue about marketing. And they need to identify Republicans as the bad guys concerning why the American people have NOT gotten so much of the “Change” mantra that got Obama elected. Otherwise, he will deserve to lose next year.
If you’re thinking of solarizing your home, starting to compost, building with straw bales or other eco-friendly materials, collecting and reusing rainwater, or just learning about new green technologies you can easily make a part of your life, this weekend’s SolarFest in Tinmouth, Vermont may be very well worth the trip.
If past gatherings are any indication, this will be an informative, enjoyable festival, with lots of hands-on workshops, vendors offering a wide range of solutions for both do-it-yourselfers and have-it-dones (many at surprisingly low price points)—and some pretty good music, too. It’s a New England back-to-the-lander’s dream.
Tjhis years workshops are once again divided into these five tracks: Renewable Energy, Green Building, Sustainable Agriculture, Thriving Locally, and (for kids and teens) The Solar Generation.
Within these categories, choose from such options as The Ecological House New England and How to Design a Zero-Carbon, Net-Zero-Energy Home (both in the Green Building track), separate seminars on raising chickens, goats, worms, and mushrooms (Sustainable Agriculture), increasing local food production and repairing your own bike (Thriving Locally).
The festival is an easy drive from Western Massachusetts, Albany, and much of Vermont and New Hampshire—and not too outrageously far away from New York City and Boston. Camping on-site.
For the second year in a row, I’ll be presenting. My session, “Green And Profitable: Harnessing the Marketing Advantages of Going Green,” will be in the Thriving Locally tent, sunday at 12:30, with a book signing immediately following at Northshire Books’s booth. Please stop by and say hello.
Watching the fireworks from my lawn last night, I found myself thinking about a long-ago July 4th, and how it helped shape who I am today.
The year was 1976. I was a scrawny, long-haired, 19-year-old peace and human rights activist who had just finished my senior term at Antioch College.
I was broke and jobless. And, not having any better plan, I was going to hitchhike around the United States for the summer, shifting my itinerary depending on where the rides were going. Though I was pretty sure I wanted to see Denver and San Francisco, at least, I knew it was a big country with lots to explore, and I hadn’t seen very much of it so far. I didn’t know a thing about hitchhiking, and I hadn’t done any research about what to bring—though I did hook up briefly with a friend who was a very experienced hitchhiker, who showed me the basics of where to stand safely.
So off I went, with $200 in travelers checks in my pocket, and a bunch of inappropriate stuff packed in three inappropriate daypacks. I didn’t have a traveler’s frame pack, a sleeping bag, decent rain protection, a sun hat, or a lot of other things I should have thought about. Instead, I had an entire daypack filled with my creative output: poetry notebooks, my dream journal, and such. Plus a bare minimum of clothing and a bit of food.
I did, however, have a supply of thick markers for making hitchhiking signs that people could read at 60 miles per hour; even back then, I understood some basic marketing principles. 🙂
Setting off from my college town, Yellow Springs, Ohio, in late June, I stopped to visit family in New York before heading to Washington for the Bicentennial.
For weeks, I’d been growing more and more disgusted with the insane commercialism around the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—stuff like “Happy birthday, America, we’re having a sale on our new Fords because it’s your birthday,” accompanied by various patriotic songs.
I was, at that time, very alienated from mainstream American culture. The United States had finally pulled its last soldiers out of the Vietnam quagmire (which I’d been actively protesting since 1969), and Saigon had fallen only 14 months earlier. Examples of racism and sexism and homophobia and oppression of various minorities were easy to find. Police violence against progressives and racial minorities was a part of daily life, and we assumed we were being spied on.
I’d recently completed an internship at a socialist newspaper in Georgia, where the sense of “us against them” was palpable—and where the advertising base had largely abandoned the paper as soon as a safe, bourgeois counterculture paper started publishing, providing access to the lucrative hippie market around Atlanta without funding anti-government journalism. I saw business as the enemy of progress, and could not have named a single example of a business trying to do good, other than a couple of leftist bookstores and healthfood co-ops. I’d been a vegetarian for almost three years, and had discovered that this made me unwelcome in many restaurants.
In short, I was disenfranchised, cynical, militant, and even hostile. I had a pretty big chip on my shoulder.
There were a lot of events in Washington on July 4, 1976, including the grand opening of Union Station as a National Visitors Center, and of course, a huge birthday celebration. As I recall, there were several large public events around different parts of the Mall.
The one I was there to attend was a peace and take-back-the-government rally called by the People’s Bicentennial Commission—and organized, interestingly enough, under the “Don’t Tread on Me” rattlesnake banner that we’ve seen at a lot of Tea Party events in the past few years.
Aside: Columnist Ed Tant, who covered the event for the Athens, GA Observer, remembers the flag as quite integral to the demonstration:
The People’s Bicentennial rally 34 years ago still stands out in my memory for its hopeful patriotism and its message against the predations of plutocracy symbolized by the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag flying from the stage and from the crowd more than a generation before the same flag was appropriated by the tea party crew.
The Gadsden flag was named for Christopher Gadsden, a Revolutionary War hero from South Carolina. It was flown by American sailors and marines during the revolution, but the first political group to feature the rattlesnake flag at a Washington rally was the People’s Bicentennial Commission that flew the flag to warn against the growing power of multinational corporations…
During the People’s Bicentennial rally in 1976, activist Mary Murphy explained the symbolism of the rattlesnake flag, saying, “The rattlesnake has no eyelids, so it is ever-vigilant. Also, it never attacks without warning.”
I seem to remember seeing it at many rallies over the early 1970s, but it may be that the July 4, 1976 demonstration was the first to make it the rally’s official symbol. Somewhere, I might still have my copy of that button.[Aside ends]
Although some conservatives had worried publicly that this anniversary would be a magnet for terrorism and violence, what impressed me above all was the lack of that kind of drama. Only a few years after hard-hat construction workers had attacked war protestors in New York, after Chicago police had attacked protestors at the Democratic Convention, and after the country had been split into opposing camps on so many issues—multiple large gatherings, each representing a different segment of the political landscape from ultraprogressive to ultraconservative, and a huge apolitical middle that was just there to party out on the Bicentennial, all coexisting. All peacefully listening to their own sets of speakers and performers, sometimes coming into contact with each other at the edges, and even sharing food. As far as I could tell, there was no violence, no overt conflict at all, even as hippies in torn flag t-shirts encountered flag-waving conservatives.
And then, after all the rallies were over, we all left our separate public events and gathered around the Washington Monument—to peacefully watch one of the best fireworks displays I’ve ever seen. For one magical night, there seemed to be no great divide. Just a whole lot of people watching a grand fireworks display.
Hitching out of Washington on my way west the next morning, I encountered the generosity of people from both the protests and the parties. I made it back to Yellow Springs in three rides, with very little waiting time. It took only about a half-hour longer than driving would have taken.
And that was the beginning of my summer-long lesson that most Americans are good people who want to do the right thing…that the world is abundant and people will help others when they need it…and that the hostility I thought mainstream America had felt toward the counterculture was at least in large measure, confined to my own imagination.
I have taken the lessons of that day of unity and that summer of hope with me for 35 years now, and I trace a lot of who I am today and how I act in the world to the revelations of that time.
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?
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.
By Shel Horowitz, GreenAndProfitable.com
Michael Copps: There’s no larger question in the US right now than how do we get the media back?
We started out in 2002, 03, opposing Michael Powell’s plan to loosen media ownership rules. I said the people have a real interest in this, and thanks to FreePress and other groups, three million people contacted the FCC. We’ve conducted some good holding actions, but it’s time to win the battle.
The real question is, shouldn’t consumers be deciding where they want to go and what they want to do online, and that’s what Net Neutrality is about.
We’ve lost a lot of public interest territory over the years, and you don’t get that back an inch at a time.
How do we ensure that everyone has access to broadband? It’s the future of democracy. The facts are gone; the investigative journalism is gone. Thousands of journalists no longer walk the beat. How many facts are buried so deep that the few journalists left can’t find them? Let’s have the data. I have watched the evisceration of the public interest all of these years. I think it’s the most important issue facing the country. The resolution of all of those other issues rides on how they are depicted by the media—and if the facts are told to the American people so they can make a decision. You can’t get that from the starvation diet, the journalism lite that we get from the traditional newsrooms now.
We should bring back a licensing regimen where the public interest is actually included. Where the public interest controls. Where the localism, the news of our various communities, is actually covered. Where minorities are not caricatured but their real issues are covered. Where we can say, “if you’re not serving your community, we’ll take that license back and give it to someone who will.”
Citizen action can still work. Very few people hold outrageous amounts of power, and control what goes on in this country. But citizen action can still make a difference. Look at women’s rights, labor, minority rights, they all had uphill fight, but they all persevered. It never happens easily. We should rededicate and recommit ourselves, and we can make some real down payments on media democracy in the months ahead. And then we can get real progress in getting media that is of and by and for the people.
Mignon Clyburn (former South Carolina State Commissioner and activist)
You reaffirm to me how important it is to fight for parity when I put my head on the chopping block. Remember what people were doing 10 years ago while waiting for flights? Reading a book or staring at the ceiling? Now they’re playing a game with a friend in New Zealand, tweeting, texting, IMing. Count the number of wireless activities next time. I hear about the fast approaching mobile TV and mobile broadband. Wireless availability and ease of use is no longer a fun novelty. It’s an essential part of everyday routines. An overwhelming majority would say they couldn’t live without their cell phones. This is especially true in lower income communities. It may be far more economical to communicate in short text messages than taking up too many voice minutes. Wireless is becoming the choice for students, under 30, families with small discretionary incomes. They are relying on them to find bus arrival times and weather forecasts, and to mange smoother ways of living. But this ease that many of us take for granted is at risk, for others.
1 in 4 households rely solely on wireless. They’re cutting costs and cutting the cord. Data apps on wireless are far more common in Afro-American and Latino communities, and they take advantage of a much wider array of the data than their white counterparts.
And we must be mindful of the effects of this on the ecosystem. If the costs become prohibitive, we have failed.
Small businesses pay significantly more per user (than big) for wireless.
I am an unlikely candidate for this job. A non-lawyer from a small, poor, “interesting” state. But I am a person who saw the disconnects, the inequities from the day she was born that minimize the potential in her communities. I know that these technologies, the potential for unlocking the spirit and the hope and desires and the excellence in all of us—we have that potential as commissioners, and you have the potential to not let us get away with anything less than our best.
Response to government shutdown:
Copps: we’re wasting all this time on the high noon shootout when there are all these bigger issues.
Clyburn: A lessons we learned in our household that we can disagree without being disagreeable. We don’t see that in our public spaces and places, and because of that, we’re unable and unwilling to compromise.
Oversight of broadband
Clyburn: We are to ensure a robust telecommunications industry. People expect that when they sign up for a service, that they can access information. We established high-level rules to do just that. They’re not onerous rules. I am comfortable with that direction. At the end of the day, we talk about this consolidation. The majority of Americans have two or fewer Internet providers, and that does not stimulate competition. I’m a substitute for competition.
Copps: Internet users should be very worried, because the Net Neutrality we passed is a partial measure. It does not include wireless telecom and there’s the potential for companies to do mischief. Long-term, we should be more worried. Every new telecom technology starts out as the dawn of an era of openness and freedom, but control gets tighter and tighter. That’s the danger to the future of the Internet, probably the most liberating technology since the printing press, and it’s going down the same road as the rest. We’re talking about keeping this technology free, and not letting a few telecoms put up a toll booth. Of course we have authority to do this. The telecoms convinced previous FCCs to call it information services (not regulatable).
State regulators vs. municipal
Clyburn: There are significant donut holes in this nation. 95% has high-speed access, but that means 14-24 MILLION have no broadband access available. The companies say the economic case can’t be made. So cities and towns should have the flexibility to wire those communities.
Copps: We have a spectrum shortage, we need more for wireless. But that should not translate into taking it from broadcast. We have a democracy crisis in large pat due to the state of our media. Let’s look at how broadcasters are using the people’s spectrum. There’s room for both wireless and broadcast.
What would it take for ATT/TMobile merger to be in the public interest?
Copps: A hell of a lot more than I’ve seen before. We have to say, what about competition? What they’re looking for is deregulated monopoly and I hope that’s not the course of American history.
Clyburn: I look at broadband access as a human rights issue. This is the last opportunity—the TV airwaves are unaffordable and almost unreachable. Those traditional platforms are too expensive. If we let this go, what do we have left? It is the pathway forward.
Copps: I think you can justify access to broadband as a civil right very easily. You’re not going to be a young person who can’t get a job because you can’t apply online. You can’t monitor your kids’ learning, your health. We’re 15th or 20th in the world, and that means all these kids are growing up without that opportunity. You think we’ve got outsourcing now…
License renewals:
We used to have 14 guidelines. I don’t think we need to have that many, but you need an honest-to-god licensing system. I’d have the renewals every three years, and you make a judgment about whether the station is serving the public. And if not, you put them on probation for a year or two, and if not, plenty of other people would like to have access to bandwidth.
Diversity:
Copps: Diversity is one of our mandates, but station ownership doesn’t reflect that diversity. We’ve had a committee that has proposed 70-75 measures we could take. I’ve proposed that we take one of them up each month.
Free Expression:
Clyburn: We have to make space for viewpoints we disagree with. But if we diversify, people have more venues to get their voices across. They get drowned out and we cannot be satisfied with that. We have to push this agency and our lawmakers to be creative thinkers. And the advertisers will follow, and the voices we have problems with become less popular. Speak with your clickers and those voices will be gone.
Copps: I’d like to see the FCC require full disclosure on political advertisements. You hear, “brought to you by Citizens for Spacious Skies and Amber Waves of Grain,” and you don’t know it’s a chemical company.
The FCC is one of many agencies with a revolving door. We should say, for x number of years [former regulators can’t work as industry lobbyists]. It’s the crushing influence of money in Washington.
Clyburn: Reaffirmations that public-private partnerships are the way to go. I am not satisfied about our diversity initiatives. I don’t hear enough southern accents. [race, gender]. The revolving door works both ways. I’m the beneficiary of the expertise of my staffer on mergers, from the outside.
“Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the world.” —Archimedes, 230 BC.
All of a sudden, it seems like the universe is dropping a lot of opportunities in my lap. The last few weeks have brought me these and other possibilities (all tentative):
As you might gather, it’s been a pretty exciting few weeks.
So…if you believe in Law of Attraction (LOA) stuff, you might be asking what I’ve done to create this torrent of abundance. I’m not sure, but I have some thoughts.
I’ve made two big shifts in the last few months, and have another one pending.
First, I’ve launched my two columns, Green And Profitable and Green And Practical—and set a specific monetary goal and a timetable to achieve it that would convert these columns to the primary revenue stream in my business. It has been a dream since my teen years to be a syndicated columnist, and I’ve made a couple of rounds over the years pitching the big syndicates. I decided that the most likely way it would finally happen would be if, rather than waiting for a big syndicate to pick me up, I did it myself. And I’m doing it!
And second, I’ve set myself a time management regime and have been pretty good at sticking to it.
Thirdly, I am moving forward on a new way of structuring my business that will free up significant time for me to focus on the parts of my business I most want to build (writing and speaking).
And while I’m far from an LOA junkie, I do believe that the things we choose to focus on tend to dominate our lives. I’ve been focusing on these deep goals and I think the universe is responding by showing me enough opportunities to convince me I’m on the right track.
And I also have a Great Big Goal: making a lasting and significant impact on the world and helping to shift planetary consciousness to create a healthy, just, and peaceful planet. Yes, I’ve learned to think big. I have seen big ripples from the little things I’ve done, and I want the columns to provide me a big enough platform that I could, like Archimedes with his giant lever, move the world.
It’s going to be a wild ride…and I’m ready!
(This is Part 2 of my report on the Sustainable Foods Summit. If you missed Part 1, please click here.)
And some insights that I knew already, but appreciated the reminders—most of which were echoed by several presenters:
Although organized by Europeans—they also do one in Amsterdam—most attenders were American or Canadian, with a handful from Latin America (including one presenter who’s part of a large family-owned sustainable sugar plantation and mill in Brazil). It looked to me that about 180 people attended. The conference had only one track, which means everyone got to hear from all the presenters—a nice change.
Despite all the questions that have no consensus answer yet (see Part 1), there was a lot of agreement:
Shel Horowitz is the primary author of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green and writes the Green And Profitable/Green and Practical monthly columns.
1. To move forward on my goal of reaching critical mass for the two self-syndicated columns I’m launching, Green And Profitable, for business, and Green And Practical, for consumers. Both emphasize easy, low-cost, high-return approaches. Click here to see samples of the business column. (I’ve written text and sample columns for Green And Practical, and bought the domain, but this is so new that the site isn’t live yet.) My goal is to have 1000 paid subscribers and/or generate $10K/month from this by the end of 2012. It’s going to be really cheap for media, $10 per insertion—and I’m also offering private-label (PLR) e-mail/print rights to corporations and associations at 25 cents per name per year, which is where I suspect the money will mostly come from. If I’m successful, I will actually, for the first time, make my living as a writer of consumable content, rather than of marketing materials—this after publishing eight books and more than 1000 articles.
–>And by the way, I’d be very grateful for connections to people who might want to license PLR rights to one or both of the columns (people with a green product or service, for instance). I am willing to pay $200 commission for any column client who commits to $1200 per year or more. shel (at) principledprofit.com or twitter to ShelHorowitz.
2. To structure my work days to include two hours of billable/client work, 1 hour on my own writing or marketing (blog, columns, speeches, services), 2 hours maximum on e-mail, 15 to 30 minutes on social media, 1 hour of professional reading, half an hour each on office organization and bills/postal mail, and an hour of exercise. I have timekeeping software, and I’m going to use it.
PS–instead of an annual letter, we did a humorous quiz. If you want to learn more about my family and get a smile in the process, click over and have a look.