Mycelium mushrooms reclaiming oil spills, sequestering carbon, fighting disease, hunger, and pests, more. One of the most inspirational videos I’ve ever seen. A must-view.
He even makes a claim that the Internet is essentially humanized mushroom technology.
From December, so a few references to Obama’s Cabinet choices have shifted. Vital analysis, lightheartedly delivered out of her personal experience, looking not only at implications of squandering water, but also on our current system’s vulnerabilities, and how much it will really take to rebuild infrastructure.
My favorite quote:
Here in California, fish have much better lawyers now than they did back in the day. Sustainability and environmental concerns are not going away in California or anywhere else.
If you don’t know Rachel Maddow, she’s a host on MS-NBC TV and AirAmerica radio, very progressive, very smart. I’ve been following her since her first radio gig maybe 10 or 12 years ago, here in Western Massachusetts.
President Barack Obama’s inaugural address was deeply moving to me on many levels. And one of the most promising was his statements on energy.
First, he recognized both the environmental and national security disaster of our present policy:
Each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.
And second, the clean solution:
We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.
Not since Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House and wore sweaters instead of overheating the building have we had a U.S. President with this consciousness.
Not Reagan, who promptly took the solar system OFF the roof. Not George H.W. Bush. Not even Clinton. And even though George W. Bush’s Crawford ranch is one of the Greenest houses in the country, his presidency has been a disaster for the environment, and an eight-year lost opportunity to address climate change while it’s still possible.
Hooray!
Just back from a week aboard a cruise ship, with almost no Internet access (Yeah, I could have bought access at 75 cents a minute, but I saw no reason to grab my email at highway robbery prices. I did manage to use an Internet cafe on shore, twice, just to check if my Virtual Assistant forwarded anything urgent. But it wouldn’t be a vacation if I were still dealing with 300 incoming messages a day.
Anyway, some totally random thoughts from the trip:
Transportation Safety Administration has spiffy new bright blue uniforms (my last flight was several months ago). They look gorgeous–but aren’t we supposed to be in a budget crisis? There was nothing wrong with the old white ones.
Cruise ships completely distort not only the local economy but also visitors’ perceptions. The feel we got for Guatemala in our three-week trip last summer was almost completely different from the artificial world of a cruise port that waits only for boats to dock. It’s even different from the land-based tourist towns and attractions that deal with a continuous (but much smaller) flow of tourists but also have a vibrant non-tourist life, integrated into the fabric of the nation.
The cooperative movement and indigenous self-help organizations have even penetrated the restricted corridors of cruise terminals–Good!
If you turn off email and Internet, it’s not that hard to completely ignore the outside world.
Our flight to the boat was canceled, so we arranged with the boat to meet it at the next stop, arranged with the airlines to reroute us to the closest point, arranged for a one-way car rental, and drove four very scenic hours to meet the boat. This astounded many of our fellow passengers–but we’re used to making our own travel arrangements and it didn’t faze us at all. It didn’t even seem like one of our more difficult travel adventures, compared with some of what we’ve done over the last 30 years together, but cruises for the most part don’t attract intrepid travelers. Of course, it helped that we followed the Principled Profit philosophy and were so nice as we explained our situation that people went out of their way to bend the rules for us. And it also helped that we had access to a cell phone and a laptop.
Environmental consciousness has penetrated even to the cruise industry. I went to a lecture from the ship’s environmental officer and was pleasantly amazed at the sophistication of waste treatment, etc. Still a ways to go. But they’re even considering having one nonsmoking ship as an experiment.
Rainforests are very special places, and some of the landowners know this. In Belize, we visited a 3rd or 4th generation landholder, a young man in his mid-20s, who has organized his neighbors to provide many acres of unbroken habitat for howler monkeys, and has done quite a bit of research on them.
Weather can always impact a trip. In addition to having our flight canceled, we had to skip our call in Mexico, because it was too windy to dock the boat. Bummer!
It’s always better to have a reservation for car rentals. We didn’t when we docked in Tampa, and the cruise terminals had no cars. So we had to buy tickets to an airport shuttle, hunt around the airport for a car to rent, and then go off to see Tampa.
Your holiday spending can support sustainability goals. It’s not that hard. Here are a few ideas to get you started:
Plenty more eco-friendly gift and living ideas at https://www.frugalfun.com/ – look for the back issues of Monthly Frugal Fun Tips as well as Frugal & Fashionable Living magazine.
Shel Horowitz has been combining frugality and sustainability for over 20 years, including his e-book, The Penny-Pinching Hedonist: How to Live Like Royalty with a Peasant’s Pocketbook.
The company that so many of us love to hate has started addressing some of the reasons why I won’t do business with them. This short article by Mallen Baker shows progress on both labor standards and energy. Reprinted in full with Mallen’s generous permission.
This is big news, as my understanding is a major part of why so much of the US economy picked up and moved to Asia is Wal-Mart’s constant demand that suppliers reduce the price 10% every year. About time it started adding some social responsibility to its demands.
Wal-Mart has told a meeting of its Chinese suppliers that social and environmental standards will need to be raised to help the company meet its goals and to move forward in the wake of the milk poisoning scandal that has left many Chinese children still in hospital.
The company’s requirements will aim to improve energy efficiency, with a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency required of the top 200 suppliers, full disclosure of locations of factories including sub-contractors, and product improvements in terms of energy ratings.
Wal-Mart said that many of the measures would be good for suppliers, helping them to save money by reducing waste. But in any case, it made a direct link between the quality of products and whether or not a supplier cheated on overtime or used child labour, or dumped polluting waste.
In return, the company has said it will change the nature of its relationship with Asian suppliers, aiming to develop deeper long-term relationships to mutual benefit, rather than focusing simply on the price of each transaction.
Overall, I continue to be highly critical of Wal-Mart, but glad to see the company moving forward. I think this is only the third time I had anything good to say about Wal-Mart in this space. The first was after Katrina, when the company stepped in to do what the federal government should have done. And the second was almost two years ago, regarding one of the company’s other energy saving initiatives.
By Shel Horowitz
This post is in three parts:
7000 bloggers are joining together today to talk about one issue: poverty. I’m proud to be one of those 7000.
My Personal Poverty Story
Poverty is something I know something about, first-hand. In the 1970s and early 1980s, I was desperately poor, and for a portion of that time, on food stamps. I jokingly refer to those years as the “research phase” for my e-book, “The Penny-Pinching Hedonist.” But I didn’t just pinch those pennies. I squeezed them so hard it might have drawn blood, if pennies could bleed.
When I got a job as a VISTA Volunteer community organizer, with the princely salary of $82 per week (and they let me keep getting food stamps), it was a major step UP the economic ladder for me; before that, I’d been working a single day a week in a neighborhood fruit store. I seem to remember that I earned $15 for those shifts, but that would have been below minimum wage even then, so it must have been more like $26.
I do know that I thought long and hard about every discretionary purchase other than food; with the food stamps, I didn’t have to worry about that, at least. But if I could get around New York City by bike instead of subway, I did–all over Brooklyn, where I was living and where I was charged to build the local Gray Panther chapter, and lower Manhattan, where my community organizing office was. If I could find clothing at a thrift shop, I did–even if it didn’t fit quite right. I found entertainment like poetry readings, that didn’t cost anything. I read the books and listened to the records I already had, on a stereo I’d bought used while a college student.
Even then, I knew I was lucky. All around me, I saw people who were trying to support a family; I had no dependents. I saw people being forced out of rent-controlled apartments so that landlords could quadruple the price under vacancy decontrol; I had found a small apartment in a warehouse district that I shared with a friend; my half was only $150, which meant that once I got the organizing job, I was able to earn back the cost of housing in less than two weeks and have the other two weeks’ pay to live on for the month. Before that, I’d been paying the rent out of small and precariously dropping savings since losing the entry-level corporate job that had brought me to New York. And even during that time of unemployment, I scraped by enough that I didn’t have to deal with the intimidating and humiliating welfare bureaucracy; the food stamp office was far more humane, according to my friends who’d been through the welfare system.
Gradually, in the 1980s, I moved out of the city, started the business I still run, and eventually got to a living wage, and then out of poverty.
What’s Wrong Right Now
But I still get very angry when I hear politicians and toxic talk show hosts who have no first-hand knowledge of poverty ranting about welfare cheats while passing out massive subsidies to their friends and funders at the very top of the economic ladder.
And it shocks me that we’ve allowed the disparity between the poorest and the richest to go totally haywire, much like the Latin American dictatorships we always heard about in the 1970s and 80s. CEOs take home nine-figure compensation packages, while poor and middle-class people lose their homes. This is not fair or just, and I’m hoping the current world-wide financial crisis will lead us to change those percentages. What would life be like if no CEO got more than 25 times the wages of a full-time employee making minimum wage, or for that matter, 25 times as much as the check that a welfare mom is supposed to live on while she supports her kids?
Some companies manage to get by paying their CEOs much less than that! There are companies where the CEO makes only eight or ten times the lowest paid employee, and others, collectively owned, where every worker makes the same salary. Somehow, they survive and thrive and attract great talent. Because they have a mission they can believe in that’s not just about lining their own pockets.
Okay, so I’m the one ranting now.
Prescription to End Poverty
But this is Blog Action Day. I’d like to finish with some action steps that we can take as a society, steps that address some (by no means all) of the systemic causes of poverty, and whose adoption will lift up the bottom. Changing these could take whole communities from poverty to abundance.
So there you have at least part of my prescription to create jobs, reduce costs, lower pollution, and shift our country’s trade and overall deficits. What are your ideas? Please post them, and let’s get started!
While this post is copyright 2008 by Shel Horowitz of https://www.principledprofit.com, I hereby grant permission to reproduce the post in its entirety in any medium as long as attriubtion is included, and to link to the post without restriction.
Here’s another entry in the Alice-In-Wonderland contradictions of our world: An auto-industry trade group, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, launched a national campaign to cut fuel consumption and CO2 emissions, caled Eco-Driving.
All well and good–except that this is the same group that bitterly resisted attempts to achieve a fleet average of 52 miles per gallon by 2030.
Found both of these links in the How Online blog–found the juxtaposition quite telling:
First, an inspiring (and long-overdue) article on MarketWatch about how people are seeking MBAs not just to acquire personal wealth but to make a difference in the world. I could quote many parts of this terrific article, but I’ll pick just one:
“The New Green Focus for Future MBAs” headlines Greenbiz.com. And, it’s the most popular story on the site. At the same time, a new poll by Experience Inc. shows more students are hoping for a job with a green-minded company. The poll says 81% of students believe there is value in working for an environmentally aware company, while 79% would likely accept a job at an eco-friendly company over a conventional one.
“In a few short years, eco-friendly practices have gone from being new-fangled selling points to becoming essential requirements, with states vying with each other to offer incentives and legislation that promote green technology and business. While the corporate world is scrambling to devise strategies to address sustainability, business schools across the country have been incorporating it into their curriculum for the past several years, both in response to student demand and in line with industry trends,” Greenbiz says.
But the same page of the same blog links to another story (International Herald-Tribune) that shows, once again, the same-old-same-old of too many giant corporations just doesn’t work. and deceptive business practices have cost General Motors, and its auditor, Deloitte & Touche, over $300 million combined:
Under the settlement, GM would pay $277 million to investors, while its auditor, Deloitte & Touche LLP, would pay $26 million, pending approval from U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen in Detroit.
The two-year-old class-action lawsuit claimed that GM misstated and mischaracterized its revenue, earnings and cash flow, artificially inflating the company’s stock price and debt securities.
Let’s hope those green and ethical MBAs of tomorrow remember that they know better when they’re presented with opportunities for fraud.
Talk about head-in-the-sand behavior! Apparently June 12 was Carbon Belch Day:
Proud of their antisocial behavior, these ninnies wanted to be as environmentally destructive as possible that day, asking people to
oppose U.S. participation in the Kyoto treaty or any such successor agreement, mandatory domestic limits on CO2, and any federal or state carbon “tax” or “cap-and-trade” system — including the current Lieberman-Warner bill.
One could make a good case for opposing Lieberman-Warner on the gorunds that its cap-and-trade system is essentially a giveaway to polluters–but that’snot the argument being made here.
What’s next: Celebrate Racism Day with the KKK?