Category: Energy & Sustainability

By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Frugality/Frugal Fun, People Helping People, poverty, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , ,

This time of year, we spend an astonishing amount of time dealing with food: harvesting from our garden, making salads, cooking, preserving, giving or occasionally selling surplus…but it is SO worth it!

Long before we had a garden of our own, I’ve been an advocate of local community food self-sufficiency. Not that a neighborhood or village would grow all its own food, but even the most urban could grow some vegetables and herbs, some berries.

Food is a basic necessity, and as such should be a right (ditto for drinkable water and health care, among other things). But in many poor communities, there are few gardens and not even any supermarkets. Rooftops, vacant lots, and even windowsills could change this—and in the process, empower residents, break down barriers, form friendships, save people money…and introduce folks to the absolute joy of eating fresh organic produce grown right where you are.

Yesterday, I made a batch of pure tomato sauce: no oil, no water, no herbs, no onions or garlic, just fresh ripe garden tomatoes, cooked in their own juice for several hours, until the sauce was about a third of the original volume, and had a flavor so royally rich you’d think it was made of 24-karat gold. Today, it was Dina’s night to cook. Earlier today, she went and got a couple of pounds of green beans out of the garden (along with another 40 full-size and 125 cherry tomatoes, enough corn for our lunch, celery, eggplant, edemame, zucchini, and I forget what else). She cooked the beans lightly for a few minutes in my super-intense tomato sauce and served them over couscous. WOW! Served with a salad of our own cucumbers and tomatoes and lettuce from our local CSA farm, plus some Turkish olives and feta cheese, it was a fabulous dinner.

Today, I made another batch of that good sauce (most of which we’re freezing for the winter), a batch of zucchini pickles, and a batch of dried tomatoes. Dina processed the leeks for freezing. I confess, we’re putting in a couple of hours a day. It really helps that I work at home and that Dina doesn’t have to go teach at the university in the summer. Seems like every break I take from the computer I am dealing with food. But come January, when the produce you can buy is almost inedible, we will pull some of our bounty from the freezer or from the dried stash in the pantry, and we will enjoy locally grown meals almost as good as those we’re feasting on now.

It’s an experience that should be shared widely. I feel very sorry for those people who’ve never had a REAL fresh tomato. Comparing it to a supermarket tomato is like comparing a perfectly aged French triple-cream gourmet cheese with Velveeta.

And I feel grateful not only to live in a place where we can have a garden, but in a time when consciousness of local organic and fresh foods is high, and where food is helping people know their neighbors and boost their nutrition.

Yes, a tomato can change the world.

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By Posted on Posted in Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, International Association of Green Marketers Tagged with

I’m organizing an international trade association for Green marketers–with the hope of not only raising our own visibility but providing the media and speaking venues with a pre-vetted bunch of articulate experts who can make the case for sustainability –and actually foster changes in society by increasing our own influence.

Please take a couple of minutes to answer the quick survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/8WB8ZMG – if you might like to serve on the Steering Committee, your answer is time-sensitive, because I’ve suggested some possibilities for a conference call early next week. Even if you don’t want to be involved at that level, your input is very valuable right now.

If this is of interest, you’ll probably want to read the series of blog posts I did last month, pondering the structure and scope of the organization: https://principledprofit.com/good-business-blog/category/international-association-of-earth-conscious-marketers/ (This post will show up at the top of the list; just scroll past it.)

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

The Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico shows a number of lessons. Taking them to heart, as individuals, as business people, and as a country, will be crucial. First, four specific lessons from this disaster. Points five and six address our long-term energy future.

1. It is absolutely essential to have tested remedies in place in case of catastrophic failure. BP’s throw-a-bunch-of-stuff-and-see-what-sticks approach would have been laughable, except that it was sickening. It became clear very early on that the company had absolutely no clue how to contain a large oil rupture. You don’t make those experiments after the failure, but well in advance—before you ever deploy any potentially dangerous and highly disruptive technology—you’d darned well know how you’re going to deal with an emergency. And those solutions will have been tested and demonstrated to work. BP clearly had no clue that working a mile underwater was different than working on the surface, and should never have been allowed to operate.

2. Don’t give the fox the keys to the henhouse. Government oversight was spotty, at best, and that led to a situation where BP was allowed to override the good judgment of its own engineers. Enforce the rules we’ve enacted to protect our people and our planet. BP so obviously neglected its responsibility to public safety and environmental responsibility that I wrote a post back in May wondering whether there was a good case to bring criminal charges agaisnt the oil giant.

3. When you take massive shortcuts with safety, when you cut corners in the name of short-term profit, the financial consequences are often more severe than doing it right in the first place. BP will be spending tens of billions of dollars that it could have easily avoided, by spending a few hundred thousand dollars upfront on safety equipment, and by heeding the warnings of engineers who said before the accident that their path was unacceptably risky.

4. Even redundant safety devices can fail. We saw this with the Titanic, with Three Mile Island, and with Deepwater Horizon. Engineers are not always skilled at anticipating how different systems interact, and what happens to a system downline from a system failure.

And now, at the federal policy level…

5. Deepwater Horizon is a wake-up call to move away from centralized, polluting energy technologies. The risk of gathering so much energy in one place is significant, and when catastrophes happen, they happen BIG. There are a dozen reasons why oil (and fossil fuels generally) cannot be the long-term answer. And there are a dozen reasons why nuclear should never have been deployed in the first place, of which catastrophic accident is certainly one. A major nuclear accident would make Deepwater Horizon seem like a leaky neighborhood sewer pipe. There are still parts of the Ukraine left uninhabitable by Chernobyl, 24 years ago—and even that was not as severe as the worst-case accident. We MUST change our economy over to non-polluting, renewable, decentralized technologies such as solar, wind, small-scale hydro, geothermal, and of course, conservation/deep-energy-efficiency retrofits.

6. This should be obvious, but apparently it’s not. All deep-sea offshore drilling needs to be shut down until the appropriate safety measures are in place so that Deepwater Horizon is not repeated. It’s a lot harder to put the genie back in the bottle than to keep it in to begin with.
Long-time environmental activist and Green consultant’s latest book is Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Democracy, Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary, media-general, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice, Socially Responsible Investing Tagged with , , , ,

Rarely do I open up my morning paper and see even one positive story among the day’s major news. Today—though I already knew about two of them from other sources—there were three:

1. The Wall Street Reform Bill has passed both houses of Congress. Is it everything I want? Of course not. Is it more than I expected from this stalemated Congress? You betcha.

2. BP finally seems to have capped the torrent of oil from Deepwater Horizon. A lot of wait-and-see before claiming victory, but at least for the moment, no oil is pouring out.

3. Overwhelmingly Catholic Argentina passed same-sex marriage rights legislation, striking a major blow for equality and human rights. The bill, according to NPR’s All Things Considered last night, has the support of an astonishing 70 percent of the population. Major demonstrations helped sway the legislators.

A very good news day, all in all.

Footnote: My local paper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, ran all these stories in today’s first section. But its news pages are only open to paid subscribers, so I’ve linked to other sources.

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By Posted on Posted in Business-general, Energy & Sustainability, poverty, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Carmen, Costa Rica: A banana tree is a graceful thing, especially when it gets old and tall. Thousands of acres of bananas may look beautiful, but to me, the vast plantation was the most depressing place I saw in Costa Rica.

Carmen is a company town. Both Del Monte and Chiquita have facilities there, and the banana fields stretch for miles, broken only by thin strips of border plantings separating the fields from the roads and from each other, or by the drab company houses and the packaging facilities.

Most of our trip around Costa Rica has involved protected wilderness areas, and we’ve seen what bananas look like in nature; they grow a few here and there amidst the astounding biodiversity of the rainforest. Thousands of trees in orderly rows would not be found in nature.

A nearby organic farmer told us that this kind of monoculture requires enormous amounts of pesticides and herbicides. Not so good for the planet in this country that prides itself on its eco-consciousness.

That claim is somewhat at odds with what we observed and heard. Yes, the country has done a great job on land preservation, putting aside 25 percent of the country as protected areas. But we saw a lot of people applying pesticides (usually not wearing protective gear) on the fields along the roadsides. We saw almost no organic products in the stores. And a coffee merchant told us that hardly anyone rows organically because the yields are too small (something that’s even more true on a biodiverse farm, where farmers have to harvest different crops in small amounts and develop markets willing to take those small amounts). My guess is that in such a humid climate, it’s really hard to keep the pests down. Even the much smaller banana farms we saw protected the fruit from animals and insects with blue plastic bags (which then make it much easier to harvest the fruit, too.

And then there’s the matter of conditions for the workers. We met someone who had interviewed some of them, and she told us the spraying is done aerially and the workers are unprotected. They work 11-hour shifts with no break and get paid strictly on piecework.

I understand now why I once heard an interview with Barbara Kingsolver, promoting her wonderful locavore book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about eating locally. She said, “some of my friends gave up meat to make the world better. I gave up bananas.”

I’ve been buying only organic bananas for a few years; I think I need to find a source for bananas that are not only organic, but fair trade. The way they are grown commercially is not sustainable, and doesn’t make me feel very good.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Politics

This letter, except for the first paragraph (which I added), was just sent out by the Nuclear Information and Resource Center. You can also call your Rep at 202-224-3121. Note that this page is keyed to me. Scroll down about a half a screen and then click “if you are not Shel”–before you fill in the petition, especially if you’re modifying the text.

If you’re not familiar with the many problems with nuclear power, do a search in this blog on “nuclear”

Dear Representative,

Nuclear power is NOT Green, has serious environmental and security problems, and should not be supported. If we learn nothing else from the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico–we should know not to put our faith in dangerous technologies when people think they can figure out a fix AFTER something goes wrong.

I have learned that the House Appropriations Committee may take up the FY 2011 energy and water funding bill next week.

I understand the Department of Energy is seeking additional funding for new nuclear reactor loans in this bill: a whopping $36 Billion increase for construction of new reactors, That’s taxpayer money that would go to some of the wealthiest companies in the world, companies like Electricite de France, Areva, NRG Energy, Toshiba, General Electric, and the like.

As you may know, these loan “guarantees” are actually taxpayer loans from the Federal Financing Bank. This is not the time to shell out billions more taxpayer dollars for the benefit of one special interest industry.

Please act to ensure that NO new loan “guarantee” authority for nuclear reactors is provided in the FY 2011 energy funding bill. Please tell your colleagues on the Appropriations Committee that they should vote no on new nuclear power loans.

Thank you,

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, International Association of Green Marketers, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , ,

What would be the mission of an international trade association for Green marketers? In launching the International Association of Earth-Conscious Marketers, here’s what I hope we’ll be focused on:

1. To use our skills in marketing and our commitment to ethical approaches to create messages that encourage the use of earth-friendly products and services, and the rapid spread and adoption of earth-conscious ideas into the social mainstream.

2. To identify and oppose (both publicly and privately) messages and methods that claim to be Green but are actually harmful to the environment and/or misleading to stakeholders and/or the general public. (Need an example? Read more »

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By Posted on Posted in Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, International Association of Green Marketers Tagged with , ,

Yesterday’s post dealt with measuring accomplishment to qualify for membership in the International Association of Earth-Conscious Marketers; today’s is about behavior.

Negative Screens (WHAT AM I LEAVING OUT? Please leave your thoughts in the comments section)
 Read more »

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, International Association of Green Marketers, Uncategorized Tagged with , ,

Membership in the International Association of Earth-Conscious Marketers will not be open to anyone who claims to be Green. To provide value in the membership, members need to pass both accomplishment-based standards (employment, education/training, and/or volunteer work) and behavioral screens. We’ll talk about accomplishments today, and screens tomorrow

Here are some I’m thinking about:Read more »

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, International Association of Green Marketers, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , ,

As noted in yesterday’s #blog30 posts, I’m using my participation in the seven-day subset of Jeannette Cates’ 30-day blog challenge to flesh out (and get feedback on) ideas for the trade association I am going to start, serving environmentally oriented marketers around the world: International Association of Earth-Conscious Marketers.

Today, I’d like to ask you what roles would be most important for members.

I’ve thought of a few possibilities—and I’d love to hear from you which you think are most important, whether I’ve left out anything crucial, whether any of them are just dumb..whatever you’d like to tell me:Read more »

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