Category: Eco-friendly

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Child brushing teeth (FreeImages.com)
Child brushing teeth (FreeImages.com)

We always hear from conservatives that they don’t see how we can possibly afford universal health care, let alone the Green New Deal. Thus, as a public service, I’m listing five ways (among dozens if not hundreds) we can locate the funds. This is not even pretending to be comprehensive (or in any sort of order), and I’d love you to add your favorite in the comments.

  1. Eliminate the private for-profit insurance system, which jacks up the price. According to The New Republic (2015), this is costing us between $375 billion and $471 billion per year. The savings in getting rid of the middlemen would more than cover the increase in taxes.
  2. Cap doctors’ salaries at something reasonable and generous. I’ll pull a figure out of the air: 200K per year for generalists, 300K for specialists—but it could be higher or lower.
  3. Eliminate the crazy subsidies and price protections in so many industries, and particularly fossil and nuclear fuel, Big Pharma, highways and bridges to nowhere, and chemiculture-based Big Ag. We are subsidizing all sorts of things that should not be subsidized! Our policies should support the changes we want society to make (but right now, our policies interfere with those changes.
  4. Cut the military budget down to the expenditure of China (the country second on the list). Right now, the US is spending an obscene $649 billion per year (2016) to “defend” 329,345,285 people (more than the next seven countries combined). Yet China manages to protect 1,420,615,635 people, more than 4.3 times the US figure,  with military spending of just $146 billion (2016), or less than a quarter overall, less than a sixteenth per capita. So if the US slashed military spending by 75 percent to match China’s, it would still be spending more than four times per person than China does. Surely that would be enough to protect ourselves!
  5. Increase the tax rates for multimillionaires and for multinational megacorporations. Under Eisenhower, the top marginal tax rate was 91 percent; now it’s less than half, just 37 percent. Meanwhile some of the most successful corporations pay zero income tax even while decimating local economies built on mom-and-pop retailers; In 2018, Amazon managed to double its profits from $5.6 billion in 2017 to $11.2 billion, and paid zero income tax both years. Lets end socialism for the rich.
  6. Do a Marshall Plan-style investment program to convert the entire nation to safe, clean, renewable energy; the upfront cost will be quickly amortized by energy savings AND healthcare savings, since we’ll be eliminating major causes of asthma, emphysema, etc. Plus, the cost of converting to solar, wind, etc. will drop way down, as economies of scale kick in. Even without a big government investment in converting the whole economy, solar and wind prices are now often compatible with or even better than fossil or nuclear power sources.

So next time you meet someone who wonders how to pay for the world we want, this article gives part of the recipe. Readers, please add your own favorite ways to find the money for these improvements, and please include a source for your data.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Corporate Social Responsibility, Democracy, Diversity, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Peace and War, People Helping People, Politics, poverty, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Technology Tagged with , , , ,

Surely, we can build a better future with technology instead of focusing on autonomous drone delivery of a latte 9 blocks away in San Francisco.

—Seth Godin, December 31, 2018

On New Year’s Eve, Seth Godin riffed on an ambitious list of 23 problems we can focus on solving. A few of my favorites:

Seth Godin. Photo by Jill Greenberg. Courtesy of Seth Godin.
Seth Godin. Photo by Jill Greenberg. Courtesy of Seth Godin.

1. High efficiency, sustainable method for growing sufficient food, including market-shifting replacements for animals as food
2. High efficiency, renewable energy sources and useful batteries (cost, weight, efficiency)
8. Useful methods for enhancing, scaling or replacing primary education, particularly literacy
12. Gene therapies for obesity, cancer and chronic degenerative diseases
13. Dramatic leaps of AI interactions with humans
14. Alternatives to paid labor for most humans
15. Successful interactions with intelligent species off Earth
17. Cultural and nation-state conflict resolution and de-escalation
18. Dramatically new artistic methods for expression

Seth’s list fascinates me because it uses technology as a jumping-off point to solve social problems. Most of us don’t think of technology that way; too often, we think of technology only in terms of lifestyle issues (I don’t even want to label them as problems). Go back to the quote at the very top of this post to see what Seth says about that!

I’m one who does think of technology this way. I’ve written frequently about using technology to turn hunger and poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change into abundance, peace, and planetary balance.

And like Seth, I think we actually can solve these huge problems. As he writes,

[This list seems ridiculous until you realize that in the last few generations, we created vaccines, antibiotics, smartphones, GPS and the Furby].

Not to mention viable solar power, conflict resolution based on deep listening, the ability to access the world’s entire written or pictorial knowledge base from devices the size of a watch, a vast increase in the quantity and quality of organic food…

So I let Seth’s list percolate in the back of my brain for a week.

Here are a few I’d add:

  • Peace: no more armed conflict as a way to settle grievances, anywhere—and this means diplomats must be trained deeply in nonviolence theory and practice, using not just academic but also empirical hands-on problem-solving and creative thinking
  • Nonviolent, respectful conflict resolution taught from preschool through college as a required subject, and reinforced through adulthood in the media, the court system, and government—among other things, that means no longer glorifying actual or threatened violence or presenting it as a way to solve problems in film, TV, or literature
  • New tools for genuine democracy: governments at all levels from village to planet that work for the benefit of their entire population while minimizing any restrictions on personal freedom to act in any ways that don’t harm others, that are based not in who pays the candidates the most but in how each government unit can benefit its population (including the non-humans) and the ecosystem (macro and micro)—this also means ensuring that votes are free and fair, honestly and accurately counted, and allow all citizens to participate
  • Two-way or multiple-way communication with many plant as well as animal species—maybe even with bacteria—not just by a few outliers, but as other languages people could study
  • At least 50 percent urban community food self-sufficiency: even our most paved-over spaces, like New York City,  should be able to supply 50 percent or more of their own food, using rooftops, windowsills, traffic islands, public green spaces, etc. (This will require cleaning up pollution using plant-based filtration, first—and ending sources of ongoing pollution from fossil-fuel-powered vehicles, buildings, and powerplants)
  • Complete conversion to clean, renewable, non-fossil, non-nuclear power sources within five years for new construction or manufacture, and fifteen years to phase in the conversion of existing buildings and vehicles
  • Elimination of all forms of slavery, including not just sex trafficking (Seth’s #3), but also sweatshops, child slaves picking cocoa beans in Africa, prison labor at far below minimum wage…
  • Speaking of prison—isn’t it time we had more humane ways of dealing with criminals and sociopaths?
  • Exploration of space in ways that honor the ecosystems, not to rape and plunder their resources but to expand our knowledge, develop laboratories for alternative ways to design a society, and perhaps find other intelligent life forms we can communicate with and learn from, as Seth notes in his #15 and #23
  • And because not everything has to be so ambitious and grandiose, making email useful again. Figuring out a way to eliminate spam while letting legitimate messages through, even if people write about subjects like marketing or cancer of a the mammary system using the b-word, but keeping the real junk out. That’s actually pretty ambitious, because the only way it’s likely to get done is with a huge leap in artificial intelligence technology—in other words, this is one application of Seth’s #13.

Like Seth, I’ll ask, “What’s on your list?” Please leave a comment whether it’s your top few or a longer list. If comments are closed (which they do automatically after a certain time), write to me at my contact form, https://greenandprofitable.com/contact/, and use the subject, Blog Comment: Seth’s List. I’ll get them posted here.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Activism, Consumer Issues, Corporate Social Responsibility, Eco-friendly, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Green Business, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, People Helping People, poverty, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

Guest Post by Wayne Stevenson Thomas, in San Antonio, Texas

[Editor’s note: We stayed with Wayne on our first trip to San Antonio many years ago, and have stayed in contact. I am always looking for examples of for-profit businesses that serve a greater good. If you’ve got an example and would like to guest-blog, please write to me through this site.]

Thrift Shop Interior
Thrift Shop Interior

Cliff Morgan was an executive at the local St. Vincent de Paul. They had a big operation of recycling the items they couldn’t sell or give to the poor. But he and the St. Vincent board found that the not-for-profit model didn’t allow him the flexibility he needed to operate. (Something about how all contracts or agreements had to go to the board as well as any expenditures above a fairly low number.)

So St. Vincent decided to spin off the operation into a for-profit, which Cliff owns. SA3 Community Recycling serves three communities of interest: Nonprofits who receive donations they cannot use, nonprofits who need items, and citizens (as represented by our governmental organizations).

He collects unneeded items from providing nonprofits. He pays them for clothing, shoes and bundled cardboard, generating a small revenue stream for them while allowing them to concentrate on their mission, rather than on disposing or selling unwanted material.

He contacts receiver nonprofits to provide them exactly the items they need from the stream of items he receives from the provider nonprofits. He provides exactly what they need. For instance, Dress for Success might need 5 size 16 Women’s business suits. SA3 would pull exactly that out of their stream and no more.

For the citizens as a whole, he contracts with governmental organizations to keep items out of the landfill. For instance he accepts cathode ray tube TVs from the providing nonprofits and disassembles them. He does the same with other electronics (if he doesn’t have another nonprofit that can use them.)

He generates income (as I understand it) by selling the clothing and cardboard for a bit more than he pays for it, and by selling the metal and other material captured from the electronics. He pays his staff, who do the pick-ups and supervise the volunteers who help sort the items that come through the door.

Among the nonprofits he provides with items from his stream are: Habitat for Humanity (building material), the Diaper Bank (loose and packaged diapers), Dress for Success, Spare Parts (an arts nonprofit that provides used and repurposed items to local art educators) and Samministries (household items for families leaving shelters). He also provides items as needed to several St. Vincent operations in South Texas. I believe he sincerely wants to recycle as much as he can within the community (and have connected him with several other receiver organizations).

Wayne Stevenson Thomas is a former volunteer and assistant manager at Jefferson Thrift Store in San Antonio.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Eco-friendly, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Innovation, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I read Seth Godin’s daily blog almost daily but I missed this one from a couple of days ago. I think he’s absolutely right. Kids need time in nature, to daydream, to make friends, and do things that don’t involve a screen.

And they need to develop independence. It’s a myth that you can protect your kid from all bad or even uncomfortable things. And some discomfort is necessary to growth. Otherwise, when they do hit a challenge, they are completely unable to cope. I believe in parenting that presents gradual increases in challenges. That doesn’t mean forcing kids to do things where they have zero interest or skill, but helping them find the places where growth is exciting, and helping them get through the uncomfortable incidents in their lives–but not by attempting to seal them off in a vacuum tube somewhere.

Then there’s the effect on our biology. I know from paying careful attention to my own body that I’m most comfortable if my on-screen shifts are an hour or less. Research confirms that prolonged computer use creates health problems (one of 369,000,000 results for “health effects of computer use”, BTW).

Electronic babysitters are not really new, just intensified. In my day, many of my peers were shuttled off to the family television, nicknamed, for good reason, the “boob tube.” Mainstream TV in the 1960s, and especially kid programming in the pre-Sesame Street, pre-Mr. Rogers days, sabotaged intelligence and reinforced a culture of violence. Even the years-later and scrupulously politically correct Barney  worked really hard to dumb things down, and that was public TV–while Sesame Street, although a terrific show, changed our thought patterns and shortened our attention spans by chopping up several stories into little pieces and scattering them throughout the show.

Luckily, my mom believed in limiting TV. We were allowed two hours a day, after completing our homework, and nothing too violent. I am very grateful to her for this rule, and to my first grade teacher who recognized that Sally, Dick, and Jane bored me–I was reading at age three–and sat me down in the back of the room with a 4th-grade geography book. Under these two influences, I became an avid reader. From then on, any time I felt bored, I could escape into a book. I discovered a world of ideas (and their potential to create a more just, eco-friendly world) in biography, science, and “think” books…alternate worlds in science fiction…wonderful characters in literary fiction…deductive reasoning combining with intuitive leaps in detective novels. I always say I became a writer because I’m interested in everything–but being a reader created that interest. Oh, and I still find geography fascinating.

My interest in reading predates school. I still remember being frustrated because the New York Public Library wouldn’t let me get a library card until I could write my name, which only happened two or three years after I was reading. My mom had to use some of her precious allotment to keep me in reading material. Years later, when NYPL lifted the 6-books-at-a-time limit, my mom would take a shopping cart over to her branch, fill it up, read the books on her 3 hours of bus commuting per day, and trade them in two weeks later for another batch. I started tracking the number of books I’m reading a few years ago, and it’s ranged from 83 to 88 per year. This year, it will probably be more like 75, because an all-consuming family situation cut deeply into my reading time this fall. It’s at 71 as of today. And reading is eco-friendly and frugal (thank you, public libraries and friends with interesting books), too.

We read Charlotte’s Web to our daughter when she was four. At seven, it was the first full-length chapter book she read on her own. A few years later, she got to play Charlotte in a local theater production. In college, she did a long academic paper on  the deeper philosophical implications of

Thomas Edison took 10,000 steps to invent a lightbulb. Could your child be so patiently focused on a task?
Thomas Edison took 10,000 steps to invent a lightbulb. Could your child be so patiently focused on a task?

Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Now she’s about to get a master’s degree in teaching adult literacy.

Today, at least, screen time is much more interactive. Instead of sitting passively, kids create scenarios and alternative endings, share their discoveries on social media, etc. But they do it in nanobits.

But in today’s electronic world, I worry about attention span, focus, creativity–and empathy; I see a rapidly growing culture of intolerance (125,000,000 results on Google for “social media bullying”). In a world with no attention span, how can we make the next lightbulb discovery? Edison himself described inventing the lightbulb as a 10,000-step process. Nanobits don’t lead down that torturous path. Reading, meanwhile, reinforces attention span, focus, and creativity. Whether it narrows or widens your horizons depends on what you choose to read.

And reading can also be interactive, because you create your own storylines and then read further to see if you’re right.

What if your kid has learning disabilities or other issues that make reading difficult? Try audiobooks, or make the time to read aloud, or bring the books down a couple of grade levels until your child is ready for more. Or substitute other equally creative activities, from one-sentence-per-person storytelling to counting how many ideas you can get on a stroll through a forest. Even kids who love to read can benefit by broadening their creative repertoire.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Advertising, Branding, Consumer Issues, Copywriting, Demographics/Psychographics, Eco-friendly, Environment, Green Marketing, Innovation, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

As the primary author of two books in the Guerrilla Marketing series (Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World and Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green) and a speaker at the recent Guerrilla Marketing Summit, I was very interested in how the digital marketing pioneer Hubspot views the whole Guerrilla Marketing concept and brand.

In their seven examples, I was particularly thrilled that they included UNICEF’s super-successful Dirty Water campaign.

Screenshot of a still from the Unicef "Dirty Water" video
Screenshot of a still from the UNICEF “Dirty Water” video

After all, my two Guerrilla books are the ones that extend the Guerrilla Marketing concepts to the worlds of social change of environmentalism. This was a bit of a gamble for UNICEF; there were obviously significant costs in everything from developing the branding to shipping the filthy water. I hope they’re replicating the campaign in other cities, and creating strong follow-up messaging targeted specifically to those touched by this campaign, to keep them donating into the future.

My definition of Guerrilla Marketing is a lot broader than Hubspot’s. To me, Guerrilla Marketing has three main parts:

  1. Being nimble in our thinking and actions, seizing opportunities quickly, including news tie-ins
  2. Going outside and beyond conventional thinking patterns–disrupting the mental flow to get noticed, to move people to action, but in ways that don’t feel obnoxiously intrusive
  3. Focusing not on how great your brand is (the mistake I see so many marketers make. I call it “we, we, we all the way home) but on the results: the benefits, the problems solved, the pain relieved, the wants and needs met or exceeded–whether for the individual customer or for the planet and the species that live on it.

Hubspot’s choice of the Bounty sculpture is a beautiful example.

Ideally, Guerrilla Marketing will be done at little cost, too. But, as the UNICEF and Grammy examples show, there are plenty of Guerrilla Marketing opportunities that aren’t necessarily cheap.

Let’s look at those two more closely, because they offer us very different lessons. It will take you exactly three minutes and 40 seconds to watch the two videos. Go ahead; I’ll wait.

UNICEF

This elaborate campaign involved creating a brand, bottling filthy brown water, and offering it on the streets of New York. The goal: to increase awareness that the clean, drinkable water we take for granted in most of the US (and the developed world generally) is unimaginable luxury for people at the margins in developing countries. Many have to drink filthy, disease-causing water, and many get very sick. The campaign encouraged people to use the money they currently spend on bottled water to provide clean water for those who don’t have it. Each dollar could supply a thirsty child for 40 days. The video documents the whole campaign, in a fast-paced three minutes.

I found this very effective. I love the way they were able to not just raise awareness, but funds. The negative branding is definitely a Guerrilla tactic, and the results are clearly positive. Bravo!

Grammy Ad

This was an expensive missed opportunity. Maybe it’s a generational thing, but this one really didn’t work for me. Great concept, but terrible execution. I want the protagonist be moved and touched by what he’s seeing, but he strolls through the talking posters, blithe and indifferent. He’s not even glancing at the posters! What’s going on in HIS head? We don’t even get a hint. Have  the talking portraits of Harry Potter and the constant animations of things people didn’t animate in the past made a talking poster no-longer-special? And while my wife frequently accuses me of ADD, I found that I hadn’t even processed and recognized one song before it switched after a few seconds to something else. (And OK, I confess, this was not music I’m familiar with anyway). Some of the problem was that the songs all sounded so similar and all seemed to have the exact same beat.

I also think the choice of having multiple copies of each poster was unfortunate. Yes, I recognize that’s a common way to display posters in urban environments. It has NEVER worked for me. I’ve studied some of the advertising masters like David Ogilvy, and they taught me the importance of white space: of having one central object (or person, animal, tree…) able to stand out from what’s around it, because of that empty space around it. If I were buying billboards, instead of, say, 9 medium-sized repeated pictures, I’d use the space for one much larger version of the image. I’d use that white space and not add to the clutter.

Imagine walking down the street and seeing a 20-foot billboard suddenly start to sing with its one and only mouth! Imagine hearing snippets of three or four songs that each have a clear identity, in a true medley, each sung by one giant poster of an artist you recognize instantly. Would you be as blase as the protagonist? I doubt it!

So maybe the commercial would need a full minute instead of 39 seconds. That’s OK. In print copywriting, it’s perfectly OK to take as much time as you need to tell the story; I’ve seen emails with links to 40-page sales letters. Even in broadcast, even though airtime is expensive, we’ve seen many successful commercials that ran an hour (they’re called infomercials and they run on shopping channels). The UNICEF video was three entire minutes and I watched without multitasking, because I was interested both in their message and how they promoted it. If you can’t get it done in less than a minute, either buy more airtime, or script a commercial that CAN get it done in the time you bought.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business-general, Consumer Issues, Corporate Social Responsibility, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Green Business, Green Marketing, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Psychology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Social-good products like this solar-powered LED lamp make a difference AND a profit
Social-good products like this solar-powered LED lamp make a difference AND a profit

Too often, businesses think of sustainability as a “have to” instead of a “delighted to.” Let’s change that attitude! Here are three among many reasons why business leaders should be thrilled to embrace deep sustainability:

  1. The powerful business case. More and more stakeholders are demanding that the companies they patronize address wider environmental and social issues; those who fail to do this are starting to lose market share. Not only that, but going green the RIGHT way can substantially lower costs of energy, raw materials, and other goods while building in customer loyalty and tolerance for higher prices. To say it another way, greening your company can significantly up profitability! Companies in the Fortune 500 figured this out some years ago. Pretty much all of them have sustainability departments (under various names) and have made huge progress in the past decade. Of course, we still have a long way to go. But many smaller companies are resistant. Because they see expenses, not income streams, they dig in with their old, inefficient ways. But certainly, the low-hanging fruit–taking the steps with quick payback–increases profitability directly, by raising income and lowering costs.
  2. The ability to market sustainable goods, services, and processes to three different types of consumer: the Deep Green, who makes purchasing decisions contingent on social responsibility; the Lazy Green, who will do the right thing if it’s convenient; and the Nongreen, who is indifferent or even hostile to a sustainability agenda, but who will happily buy green products and services if they are positioned as superior (more comfortable, more durable, less toxic, etc.). Of course, these three kinds of customers need three different sets of marketing messages–something many green companies don’t understand, and thus leave a lot of money on the table.
  3. The power of business to go beyond sustainability—to regenerativity. To actually make things better: identify/create/market *profitable* offerings that turn hunger and poverty into abundance, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance. Lifting people out of poverty (and creating new markets), ending war, solving climate change as ways to make money: how cool is that?

I’ve spent the last several years studying this trend and have written an award-winning book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, that shows how in detail. It’s been endorsed by over 50 business and environmental leaders, including Seth Godin and Chicken Soup for the Soul’s Jack Canfield. You can learn more at the Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World page at GoingBeyondSustainability.com (I think it’s by far the best of my 10 books, several of which have won awards or been translated and republished in other countries).Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Customer Service as Marketing, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Innovation, People Helping People, privacy, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

I started answering this question on Quora but ran out of room.

First, it does make a difference. Little things add up.

For instance, where I live in the northeastern US, many people turn the water on full blast and leave it running the whole time they’re brushing their teeth. So in many of my speeches and interviews I talk about a way to brush your teeth that uses teaspoons instead of gallons: turn the water on a trickle, wet the toothbrush, then turn the water off until you’re ready to rinse with another trickle. Let’s say that this saves even just one gallon of water each time.

Child brushing teeth (FreeImages.com)
Child brushing teeth (FreeImages.com)

If someone hears my message and lives for another 40 years and brushes twice a day without squandering that huge amount of water each time, that one person has saved 29,200 gallons. Now, if I can influence just 50 people a month and I talk about this for the next 19 years until I’m 80, that means a total of 332,880,000 gallons saved. And if just one person in each of those 50 goes on to influence just ten of their friends, the total savings become astronomical.
More and more places around the world are discovering that water is extremely precious, so eventually this will become the common best practice for brushing teeth.
And this is only one of hundreds of easy lifestyle changes we can make. Click here to see how to get your hands on 111 of them.
Second, it changes the way you look at the world. You start looking holistically, seeing connections among things that appeared random and unconnected to you before. Who knows—maybe you’ll be the person to make the next big scientific breakthrough in sustainability because of that shift in your thinking ;-).
Third, it changes the way you feel. You see yourself as someone who can make a difference in some small ways that add up to big ways. Guess what: Ordinary people can change the world–but only with a mindset that their actions make a difference. What’s more ordinary than a seamstress? Think about a seamstress named Rosa Parks. How about a high school student? Just in the last few weeks, a group of them in Parkland, Florida sparked a new national movement and managed to get a few restrictions on guns passed into law in Florida after decades of failures on this issue, less than one month after 17 of their schoolmates were murdered in a school shooting. What about an electrician working in a shipyard? That would be Lech Walesa, who led the movement to kick the Russians out of Poland and became its president. I personally started a movement that saved a local mountain.
I’ve been speaking and writing about this for several years. If you’d like to know more, check out my award-winning book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (endorsed by Seth Godin, Jack Canfield, and many others) and my 15-minute TEDx talk, “Impossible is a Dare!” (click on “event videos”).

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Corporate Social Responsibility, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Green Business, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Innovation, People Helping People, Politics, Social and Economic Justice, Socially Responsible Investing, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Seize the opportunity!

Tragic as it is, the wipeout of Puerto Rico’s fossil-based infrastructure via Hurricane Maria creates a powerful opportunity to do it right the second time. With its vast solar and wind resources, why not make this sunny, breezy island the pilot project to develop 100% renewability in buildings for a populous island—using microgrids to build in resiliency, so if part of the system goes down, the rest still delivers power?

A storm-damaged pier. Courtesy freeimages.com
A storm-damaged pier. Courtesy freeimages.com

There’s already at least one island country we’ve all heard of that is near-100% renewable if you don’t count vehicles: Iceland (hydro and geothermal). Solar/electric entrepreneur Elon Musk has already converted several tiny, obscure islands, like Ta’u in American Samoa, and he says he can scale up to serve the 3,670,243 Puerto Ricans.

Of course, converting PR to renewables requires the re-invention of funding. We need mechanisms that allow a bankrupt country (technically part of the US) to front-load a huge infrastructure and then repay out of savings even when many pressing needs will be competing for those funds. The private sector won’t step up if they don’t have complete confidence that they’ll get paid back. Eco-economists, this is your moment!

But also, justice demands that a big chunk of financing come from outright grants, from the US government and various foundations and disaster relief agencies—just is occurred in storm recovery after other superstorms like Katrina, Rita, Sandy, and Irene. Even the heartless occupant of the White House, possibly the least compassionate and least competent man ever to hold that office, must not be allowed to marginalize Puerto Rico just because the population is Latina/Latino and the language is Spanish.

And wouldn’t it be cool if someone (Elon Musk perhaps?) stepped forward to fund a switch of the vehicle fleet to non-carbon-emitting sources? If the island had solar on every sunny room, it would be easy enough to supply the vehicles as well.

In some ways, converting the entire island to clean, renewable, resilient energy would actually make rebuilding cheaper and easier. Fossil fuel infrastructure is expensive, complex, and subject to environmental catastrophe. But if the money that would have gone to build tanker ports and refineries went to establishing on-island solar panel factories and training installers and to bringing in the raw materials to make millions of high-efficiency panels to deploy in every neighborhood in the Commonwealth, it’s doable.

I’m not the only and certainly not the first to say this. In addition to Musk, Time Magazine, Renewable Energy World, safe energy activist/author Harvey Wasserman, the deep-story news outlet Democracy Now, to name a few, have all said this is possible and desirable.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Branding, Copywriting, Demographics/Psychographics, Eco-friendly, Environment, Green Marketing, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Politics, propaganda, Psychology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

I received a fund appeal from a climate-change nonprofit asking for money to put this ad on the air. I was so appalled that I sent this letter:

[Subject] THIS AD WILL DO THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT WE WANT Re: Enough tiptoeing around it

[Body] No, and here’s why: This ad shows an astonishing ignorance of the deep triggers that change or reinforce behavior.  You pit an audio track that is 100% climate-denier against visuals that fail to make a connection between the catastrophes shown and climate change.

For climate skeptics, this will not only not change their mind, it will REINFORCE the idea that climate change is a hoax. They will focus on the audio. Those of us who understand that climate change is real will focus on the visuals, and will be able to make the connection that climate change worsened the storms—but we’re not the ones who need to be convinced.

As a marketer with over 40 years experience who believes strongly in the ability of marketing to create social change, I think this ad will do more harm than good and should not be released.

Please don’t run it!

We’ve known about the difference between how the brain processes the obvious and the subliminal  messaging in an ad for decades.  I think I learned about this when I started reading a lot of marketing books, back in the 1980s. We’ve also known about “social proof” (the idea that because other people are doing something, you should too) going back to early-20th-century advertising geniuses like John Caples and Edward Bernays.

Edward Bernays' secretary Bertha Hunt smokes in public at Bernays' 1927 "Torches of Freedom" march
Edward Bernays’ secretary Bertha Hunt smokes in public at Bernays’ 1927 “Torches of Freedom” march

And we’ve known about the negative impact of negative images about the environment since at least the Cialdini study of 2003 (which showed that people are more likely to litter after watching an anti-littering video showing lots of people littering) and probably much earlier. So why would any marketer script an ad like this?

By contrast, consider how the super-successful anti-littering campaign “Don’t Mess With Texas” rallied people around state pride. Cleverly, the ad agency didn’t even announce it as a clean-up-the-state program at first. Aiming at the demographics that were most likely to litter, they handed out bumper stickers with just the slogan, then later introduced commercials that tied it to the real purpose: stopping littering. And Texan litter rates went way down!

We’ve also known for many years that cultural and language differences have a lot to do with any marketing piece’s success. I’ve written often about the way companies sometimes market the same product differently to different nations or subcultures, or how a company can even change up its whole product line for different markets. Here are two examples from very different industries (breakfast cereal and luxury cars) in an article I published five years ago on an Australian website.

Don’t make the mistake that Chevrolet made when it tried to market the Nova in Latin America. In Spanish, “no va” means “it doesn’t go.” Oh, and look at every possible way to break up a website or product name into separate words. Unintended consequences of a badly-chosen name are still consequences, as that link demonstrates extremely well.

Have you examined your own marketing to make sure the subliminal message, the obvious message, and the goal are all aligned? Do this right away—or contact me. I’d be happy to do it for you, at very reasonable prices. I’ve written eight books on marketing including several that won awards, were translated and republished overseas, and/or made some best-seller lists—note that I’m using social proof here ;-)—and have studied marketing for more than 30 years.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Business Ethics, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Eco-friendly, Environment Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Recently, a reporter asked questions about diversity and the environmental movement. I spent a long time responding because I wanted to share it (with slight adaptations) with you, too. Here we go:

1. If possible, could you explain why diversity is so important
for the environmental movement?

  • Everyone loses when people of color or of lower income see the environmental movement as something for white people or rich people. To win the battle, all sectors of society need large majorities who will support the behavior changes and own the issue.
  • Many poor communities/communities of color are hit much harder by industrial pollution (e.g., coal plants and refineries in poor neighborhoods) or—both globally and in the US—are at higher risk for climate-change-related flooding, drought, etc.
  • In the time of a government that is openly hostile to poor people, people of color, and the planet, the rise of intersectionality—seeing multiple issues as linked—has been a major factor in the resistance. We are all stronger when we are all looking past our own immediate self-interest into building a movement.
  • A key piece in fighting climate catastrophe is increasing neighborhood food self-sufficiency. Many poor communities are food deserts, with wildly inadequate service from supermarkets, low quality overpriced food in convenience stores, and often, a junk food culture. Turning urban rooftops and empty lots into high-quality organic food production can create not only better health outcomes but also address climate change (removing the long distances food is transported, oxygenating polluted air, keeping water from contact with roofing materials, etc.) AND economic disenfranchisement (creating jobs, lowering food costs). I have even visited a successful urban farm on the roof of an eight-storey building in the heart of the South Bronx.

    Multicultural contingent at a climate march. Photo by Shel Horowitz.
    Multicultural contingent at a climate march. Photo by Shel Horowitz.

2. Climate change hurts all living things, but there are issues
that specifically hurt people who aren’t white, straight,
privileged. What are these issues, and what organizations
actually work to make these issues well-known, and matter?

From New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward (flooded by Katrina) to the Maldives Islands, people of color bear more of the risk. In many cases, they have the least to do with causing climate change, so there’s a huge justice issue.
It’s harder to make the connections between climate change and LGBT organizing, but here’s one: pressure to be in procreating hetero relationships may cause some people to have children (or have more children). This pressure to “be fruitful and multiply” was probably a huge factor in religious messages against nontraditional lifestyles (such as the wretched passages in Leviticus that have caused so much misery and suffering for thousands of years)—but at the time the Old Testament was written, small bands of humans needed aggressive population growth. Not anymore. Reducing population growth is an obvious way to lower the temperature. Thus, freedom to choose whether to have children becomes a climate issue.
A stronger connection comes back to intersectionality. No one is free when any group is oppressed. Lesbians and trans people especially have been heavily involved in justice issues generally (the push to find a cure for AIDS was largely lesbian-driven, even though they themselves had lower risk than either gay male or hetero folks), including the climate change movement. By working toward healing the planet, they help liberate themselves too.
[I also connected this journalist with Majora Carter in the Bronx and Van Jones in Oakland—two of the most effective activists doing environmental/climate change organizing within communities of color.]

3. In general, could you explain why an inclusive environmental
org staff is one of the most important assets an environmental
organization, and the movement, can have?

  • People respond best to those they see as like them. If an organization only has white, economically comfortable, straight staffers, it be a lot tougher to organize in the communities that need it most.
  • As a movement, we are much stronger in diversity. Working with people of different backgrounds and cultures lets issues surface and be addressed. A white person from the suburbs may not analyze a situation the same way as a person of color from an inner city neighborhood. By recognizing the value of many different perspectives, solutions arise that are more holistic and more likely to be implemented. As a child growing up in NYC, I never thought about community food self-sufficiency until my teens. People who grew up in the farm community where I live now have been living and breathing it their whole lives. But I knew a lot about mass transit, housing density, and other things that are out of the context of my rural neighbors where I live now.
  • We need to walk our talk around inclusiveness and intersectionality—and show up for other communities when they need us. Not just so they show up for us, but because it’s the way the world should work.
It’s from intersectionality that I really developed the work I do, moving business forward on climate change and on hunger, poverty, and peace by showing them how it is in their economic self-interest. As a profitability consultant for green and social entrepreneurship businesses–and author of 10 books, most recently Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (endorsed by Seth Godin, Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, and many others), I show businesses how they can go beyond mere “sustainability” (keeping things the same) to “regenerativity” (making things better). I work with them to develop and market profitable products and services that turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance.
And as an activist, my proudest campaigns include my (only) arrest at Seabrook in 1977 (the action that pretty much ended the drive toward nuclear power) and founding the movement that saved a local mountain here in Western Massachusetts. I was an early adopter of intersectionality and have been making connections between movements for more than 40 years, starting with connecting student liberation and the Vietnam peace movement as a high school student in NYC. I was raised in a low-income household and have worked for both social justice and environmental causes since 1969 (at age 12). Several years of my life were focused on LGB activism (T wasn’t really on the radar yet). I was on the organizing committee for our local Pride March for three years until they threw the bisexuals out, and my wife and I still march in this parade almost every year. In my 20s, I even had a VISTA job as an organizer for the Gray Panthers and immediately brought them into a Brooklyn-wide anti-racist, mixed-class coalition against nuclear power that I co-founded.

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