Do you notice anything unusual about the front page of yesterday’s Daily Hampshire Gazette (my local paper, covering Hampshire County, Massachusetts and neighboring areas)?
Take a moment to click on the picture (to enlarge it) and make your guess, then scroll down to discover what I saw.
Here it is” Of the four stories on the front page, 100% represent a positive report on a people’s struggle for a better world, either concerning environmental or social justice issues. Two of the stories are about a movement to ban plastic bags, one reports on local Juneteenth events held the previous day, and one chronicles an attempt to establish a state holiday honoring Indigenous people.
As a lifelong activist who got my start at age 12, and the parent of two people in their thirties who each took their first steps toward activism at age 6 (five years apart) and have remained active into adulthood, I’m proud of what’s happening one town away from me. I’ve said for many years that you are never too young or too old to be an activist. I had two friends, Rose “Arky” Markham and Frances Crowe, who were still activists on their 100th birthdays (three years apart). And proud of my local newspaper for giving oxygen to important movements, especially when kids take leadership. Too often, kid activists are pushed aside and told that their voices, their actions, don’t matter. Listen to the voices of both age and youth. they both have a lot to share.
A lot of people wonder how to get started with creating a social enterprise: a business that from the beginning is designed to improve lives.
Social-good products like this solar-powered LED lamp make a difference AND a profit
[This post was written a few years ago but left unpublished. I’ve decided it’s still worth sharing because it shows one possible model for starting a new social-benefit company from nothing. I’ve tweaked and updated a few things, but left the chronology and my corespondent’s writing as they were. While I got permission to quote the correspondence, I don’t feel comfortable identifying him or the company.]
Some time back, a Facebook friend in the Philippines asked me for advice on a set of amazing goals. I got his permission to share the relevant parts of our conversation. Since English is not his first language, please cut him some slack on the grammar issues:
I’ve been finished trying to change politics for about 5 years. Focused on poverty and the environment here since then. My company is focused on 3 things right now: 1. Disaster relief during calamities. We earmark 10% to that. 2. Trying to raise a new high school within 5 years. There are two towns nearby that have no high school. Those kids stop their education at grade six and enter poverty. We will need to increase our revenue stream in coming years to do that. 3. Making the entire town solar powered. Not only for the environment, but for the people. You see, the electric bill is actually higher than rent here. For instance, my office manager pays 900 pesos per month for rent and 1600 pesos for electricity. If we could convert much of the country to solar, we could change the entire economy, freeing up much more disposable income for the people. Those are my 3 main focuses. Any ideas to help or partner are always appreciated Shel.
I responded:
Wow, wonderfully ambitious and very people-centered.
First of all, the key to spreading solar is to eliminate the capital expense up front for those with limited resources. So, just as an example (your numbers might vary), you charge 75% of the customer’s current monthly electric bill, allocate 50% of that 75% toward paying off the solar system, and split the other 50% of the 75% into a school fund and a disaster relief fund, both administered by a trusted outside charity that is scrupulously honest and can’t be believably accused of corruption. Since the Philippines is very sunny, it should be easy to convince business people and homeowners to sign up.Renters might be harder, since they would be improving someone else’s building and they’d also need permission from the landlord, but if the economic incentive is sufficient, it should still work out ok. To cover the up-front capital costs, you could look to the utility company, private foundations (including those based outside the Philippines but working in-country), and possibly government funding. And remember that solar isn’t just electricity. Solar hot water has a much faster payback and canbe done really cheaply.
Don’t forget that building the buildings is not enough; you also have to fund teachers and staff, textbooks, and other operating costs. Of course, you’ll build green net-zero-energy buildings that are clean and energy self-sufficient—or better still, net-positive energy that feed surplus power back into the system).
Second, I would have better ideas for you if you tell me more about what your company does and give me the URL. If it’s in Tagalog, Google will probably translate, but an English-language page would be better as Google does a very poor job.
And received this reply:
Our company is called <name>. We did obtain our url at <address> but we just have a holding page now under construction. Our company manufactures products that I have designed here in the Philippines. I outsourced the factories…and they will sell mainly as exports to the US.
Im planning on funding the solar equip with company money and writing it all off, so no expenditure to the people. About the High School…yes it must be staffed etc. Luckily, my first cousin is a High School Principal already here. She is ready to take the reins on that project when we become ready.
We are launching our first products now Shel. Mostly through the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog company. Some are launching in October, and others in April 2018. We have some pretty unique, one of a kind products. Our first you can see is a one off, the Recreational Tube in the images. The second phase is a line of innovative wood products…and our 3rd phase comes in 2019. It is a line of coolers and food storage containers that will require capital generated in 2018 for injection molds.
What can you take away from this? Here are five lessons I see—and I bet you can spot a few others:
Think systemically. My friend understood the holistic connection between converting to solar and alleviating poverty–a very important connection when you’re marketing to people at the bottom of the pyramid, in economic terms.
It helps to be very specific when describing a dream. Make it tangible for yourself and others.
Know what key pieces you need to have in place before starting, and which you can fill in later.
Be clear on how to keep capital costs down, especially at first. If you would have to spend huge sums to set up in-house manufacturing, start by contracting it out and avoiding all those capital expenses. Even if you’re a one-person business, there are lots of ways to cut costs. I saw a lot of my competitors in my one-person service business spend lavishly on fancy offices and furniture. I started my business working from home in 1981, and I’m still working from home in 2023–which enabled me to start being profitable at a much lower revenue point.
Think like your target market—and if your market has little or no disposable income, think about ways to make it affordable to them.
Chris Brogan borrowed an idea from James Altucher: “Write a list of ten things every day. They can be 10 anythings. Ten terrible dates. Ten places to visit. Ten desserts I want to eat this year. Whatever.”
I won’t commit to making a list daily, but I was inspired to create these two after reading Chris’s post (which includes several samples of his own lists).
World Issues
Help figure out how the 30-40% of food that’s wasted can instead be rechanneled to feed those who are starving–and help that get implemented (perhaps this is a place I can target my speaking; see Personal Goal #2, below)
Help amplify the voices of those better qualified than I am to show countries how to solve disputes without going to war
Help build more bridges between/among Left and Right/”woke” and “non-woke”/Muslims and Jews and Christians, etc.
Corollary #1 to #3: Explore and amplify alternatives to counterproductive communication styles: calling-in instead of calling out, respect and listening while searching for common ground instead of shaming
Corollary #2 to #3: Help people to understand that they are not stuck–that just because they have been caught in bad patterns doesn’t mean they are trapped there forever
Continue to demonstrate that baking environmental and social justice directly into companies’ products, services, and mindsets can be highly profitable–find ways for this idea to gain much more traction in the mainstream business world (without having to join that world)
Expose more companies to principles such as biomimicry, multiple function, and circular economy so that they can better understand the financial benefits of deep reimagining, deep re-invention, and regenerativity
Show companies that solving these big problems while increasing profitability requires a mixture of Great Leaps and Kaizen, different in different situations–and that they can do both at once
Corollary to #5: Bring the holistic and systemic analysis that helps determine the right solutions in the right situations, and recommend implementation strategies
Help change mindsets from despair to active, participatory hope: helping everyone I meet understand that he/she/they have the power to effect meaningful change, in their own lives AND in the wider world. Show how ordinary people (usually working with others) have created movements that changed history.
Personal Issues
Probe, discover, and overcome whatever internal barriers are still preventing me from achieving at a higher level–both in terms of impact and revenue–made good progress on this but clearly still have work to do
Book more speaking gigs that pay a fee, whether virtual or live-stage or hybrid–especially international speaking that allows me to explore more parts of the world
Land two or three new long-term consulting clients in the profitable social/environmental justice part of my business
Find steady, decently-paying markets for articles or other types of content, as I had before
Create the right offer for more readers/viewers/listeners to engage with me and come into my orbit
Implement more of the enormous amount of good advice I’ve been given over the past few years
Pick one of the several projects I’ve been tossing around, start it and run it: launch the retreat, the course, the pay-to-participate mastermind/mentoring group OR (not and) the resume-method licensing program
Address issues of fatigue and focus, including lack of motivation, lack of follow-through, and more
Keep up with the torrent of email, LI and FB messages, etc. and figure out a way to spot and respond to the important ones
Continue to be a force in my grandson’s life, even if his parents move out of the area
And what are yours?
Please feel welcome to comment with some of your own goal lists. You don’t need ten things. Even one or two. And yes, you can share a whole list of ten if you want to. Just keep in mind that comments will be moderated and abusive or spammy ones will be removed.
I spend a fair bit of time meeting with “practical visionaries.” I think you’ll enjoy these excerpts from the conversation I had with one of them this week. Tom Nodine managed to leapfrog from a typical insurance consultant to someone who is always thinking about how to extend both the length and the quality of human life. Now, he works with life insurance companies, who of course have a vested interest in longevity.
Our conversation touched on a whole range of topics starting with how switching to renewable energy can increase lifespan (which he’d asked about on the networking call where we met earlier in the month).
How Green Energy Can Increase Life Expectancy
Shel: I realized you didn’t get a great answer when you posed, repeatedly, your question about energy issues and life expansion on the call with Bill.
So I figured I would give my take on it. I don’t see myself as exactly an expert in that, although I’m kind of an expert in basic wide-ranging, holistic sustainability and regenerative. I don’t usually get down in dirty with specifics very much.
Number one. When you move to green energy to eliminate, not all, but many of the toxic work environments in the industry, the energy industry, such as coal mining, such as working in an oil refinery. Of course, you still have the issues with solar and wind. They certainly have impact in their construction and in their use of mineral resources and that sort of thing. So mining is something that’s still very much an issue. If you dig out lithium from somewhere.
Tom: I saw Greta Thunberg got towed away this morning. She was demonstrating against a Wind farm. So to your point. Wind apparently has some anti green aspects to it, as well.
Shel: Oh, it does! The birds are not very happy with our shift to wind, and right rightly so, and we need to figure out some way of letting the birds know. You know, “Danger, Will Robinson!” Warning. Don’t cross into that lane, beep, beep. But we don’t speak Bird well enough to have made that happen, I think. and then, of course, there’s like, you know, 8,000 bird languages that you’d have to master. There’s a challenge for chat GPT, yeah, so that’s one piece. Another piece is that the life expectancy expansion of the user is going to be much higher.
I have a gas stove right now, and I’ve been thinking that it may be time to see if we can convert that to an induction cooktop or something, because now that I’m in my sixties, I seem to be much more sensitive to the fumes from that stove than I was 20 years ago.
Tom: So you say, life expectancy of the user is higher?
Shel: Yeah, because there’s no toxic fumes involved.
Tom: Oh, user of an induction stoves. That sort of thing.
Shel: Versus a gas stove. Yeah. Now, of course, you have to look holistically.
Tom: Yep.
Shel: And you have to see, okay, where is the electricity coming for that stove? If it’s coming from a nuclear power plant or a coal fired fire plant, you’ve not made any progress except that you personally aren’t exposed to the fumes. So that’s that’s maybe the beginning of the answer.
Tom: Oh, thank you, that’s helpful. And do you mind if I ask you an even more broad question, because I know you, you focus at the in the broad space at the top level? What do you think of the notion of tying corporate activities to human life expectancy?
Shel: I think it’s a great idea. It very much dovetails with the work I’ve been doing to tie them into green and social change, and—
Tom: That has been my hope. My reaction to it, or the reason I did it is, I realized, that this seems to be a very fundamental thing that no one seems to be looking at, and I would imagine that perhaps implicitly behind almost everything.The majority of green activities as well, what we’re trying to do is help ourselves and other species to live longer.
Shel: In a broad context, yes. And if the earth lives longer, then the creatures on it live longer.
Tom: Right, exactly. And again, whether or not there’s carbon in the atmosphere, as George Carlin basically called out, you know the earth doesn’t care. It’s the people that are alive on the earth that care.
Tom: Exactly. Okay, and do you in any way find it threatening to greens or competing with greens or dysfunctional? Because I don’t! Last thing I want to do is distract from what I think is very, very solid and appropriate green activities, which I strongly support.
Why You Can’t Lump All Greens Together—And A Style Difference with Greta Thunberg
Shel: Okay. Well, first of all, you have to look at the greens as a category the way you would look at, say, the Christians, what does a Unitarian have in common with a Bible-thumping Baptist fundamentalist, not much—
Tom: Oh, I would say they both want to live longer.
Shel: Maybe, maybe not. Some of those millennialists, they’re waiting for the Rapture.
Tom: Yeah, you’re right. But moment by moment, I promise you they want to live longer.
Shel: But you know you have Greta protesting against wind power on one extreme.She is not going to be a convert to your way of thinking, no matter what you do. She’s an absolutist, and absolutely won’t compromise and probably would be a pain to work with. I have enormous respect for which she’s done, but I also recognize that she has a very limited worldview. She was 16 when she started. She’s probably 21 now, so there’s a lot more wisdom that will likely work its way down at some point. I mean, I see it in my own kid. I had a very, very strident younger child, who is now, at age 30, considerably less strident.
Tom: The world has a way of teaching us all, doesn’t it?
Shel: Yeah. And I was when I was that age, I was totally strident.
Tom: Yeah. If you don’t mind my complimenting you…
Shel: Go ahead.
Tom: You’ve done a lot over the years, you know. I’ve loved I’ve looked at the books that you’ve written from your first book on smoking way back, when which, by the way, is something that early on, I felt strongly about as well—
Shel: Oh, you really have gone back! That was 1980.
Tom: To Principled Profit. And all that you’re doing now on Guerrilla Green Marketing and Grassroots Marketing, and all that sort of stuff. It does kind of seem like there’s a trajectory that you have gone on the same dimension.
Shel: Yeah, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World is my tenth book. And the fourth in a series that started in 2003 with Principled Profit on business ethics, environmentalism, and social justice as business success strategies—as profitable enterprises.
Tom: That’s great. I mean, I love that stuff, and I haven’t read the books yet, anyway. But I think I get the gist of it.
Shel: Yeah, well, this would be the one to read. Most of what’s in the three leading up to this one is are in Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. Grassroots Marketing and Marketing without Megabucks, and my way early self-published book on marketing, are all kind of Marketing 101 books. How to write a press release, how to use good triggers in your ad copy, and that sort of thing. And they’re also all pretty old at this point.
Should Tom Publish a Book or Focus on Youtube?
Tom: Yeah, yeah. Well, do you mind if I ask you? How have you found the publishing route for your overall impact for your consulting business? For your life? Are you happy you did it?
Shel: Okay, I’m definitely happy I did it. But as far as material success, stemming directly from publication? Doesn’t happen. There’ll be 5 books a year where the authors can really kind of live off what they’re making. Maybe 50, not anywhere near the millions of books that are seeing print all the time, and but what it does when you have even one book, and I have 10.
Tom: Yeah.
Shel: You are taken seriously when you invite yourself to speak at conferences, you are taken seriously when your clients look you up on Google or prospects, you have an easier time getting meetings with important people. So if you see it as a 300-page-long business card, it’s a great, and and I actually a lot of my work is in the area of taking would-be authors, and making them successfully published authors, which is a long and involved and many-step process, and which I definitely recommend people not to on their own, because it is a mine field if you don’t know what you do.
Tom: Yeah, I started out with a topic of basically looking at technology, and how they’ll impact human life expectancy. And at the result of kind of a 2 year effort of interviewing experts on all this, and working with actuaries. And all this came to the conclusion that we’re all going to be living 10 years longer within the next 20 years. The average global life expectancy will go up pretty dramatically and not be talking about this. And so I actually figured, I really want to understand it. And so I wrote a book called Dead Reckoning that’s all about this and that book turned out to be, oh, 900 pages that I then cut down to 300 pages, and even then I realized, no one’s going to read this these days.
Shel: Wow!
Tom: It would have taken me well over a year to get it through a publisher. And at the end of it all, only a few people would read it. And so instead, I decided to go with a series of Youtube videos. And I don’t know whether that was a good decision or a bad decision. I mean, so far, one of my videos, the one on genetic and epigenetic testing I’ve got, 3,000 or so views on it. It’s not nothing. But you know Edward Sheeran has nothing to fear from me, for sure, and so I’m thinking that although I could publish it in a book, are videos a better way to go.
Shel: Well, I want you to think of this as a both-and, and not an either-or. There’s absolutely nothing that prevents a video superstar on Youtube—let’s just say for the moment you become one—from doing a book. In fact, there’s synergy there, because you can tell the people who watch your Youtube channel, “hey, I’ve got a book coming out. It’s a great present for you to buy for other people.”
How Does Increasing Longevity Affect the Business World?
Shel: I find it really interesting that you come out of the insurance industry to this, because insurance will play longevity 2 ways. The life insurers are delighted because it delays the payout, but the health insurers the annuity people, the retirement people, are maybe not so happy because it lengthens the number of years they’re paying out.
Tom: Let let me refine that understanding. So you’re absolutely right on the life insurance side. The incentives are completely aligned. You know they want people to live longer, for sure, both financially and otherwise. And that is a huge opportunity, because insurers right now are challenged in their customer relationships, sometimes considered collectors of premiums? There’s such an opportunity to change what their company is about, by helping their customers to live longer. So that is one big thing on the health side, though kind of 2 points. Once again, you’re absolutely right that the annuity people are realizing that if people are going to be living longer, we’re going to be underwater really quickly.” On the health insurance side, though the economics, actually turned out to be the other way. If you can help people to live longer healthfully, it actually helps them reduce their claims. And also the technology offers the prospect for reducing medical costs over time, which has not happened over the past 75 years. Increasing technology has actually been one of the causes of increased health care costs.
Shel: Yeah, whenever a GP has to have a CAT scan [machine] in their office. That’s expensive.
Tom: Exactly. CAT scans alone involved brillions of dollars. It’s ridiculous. So completely agree that that’s been the past. But there’s reason to believe that that may not be the future. So, anyway, yes, and it is a little bit odd that I came from the insurance industry. I mean, I spent years in innovation, in insurance, and looked at all kinds of things from driverless cars to artificial intelligence And, worked for Allstate doing all that, and it was great. But when I realized there’s new technologies like genetics, epigenetic tests, and other things that are coming down the pike that can really impact life expectancy, it kind of seems irrelevant to me thinking about driverless cars when there was something so much more germane for humanity to focus on, and so decided to really go in that direction.
Can’t Humans Just Relocate to Other Planets?
Shel: Yeah, well, it’s a big leap for somebody with your background because insurance people tend to be very narrowly focused, not seeing so much the big picture. And here you’re not only seeing the global big picture you’re seeing kind of a universal big picture, and I’ll just put my foot in my mouth, maybe, and speculate that you have at least explored what it might be like to start colonizing other planets.
Tom: I’m sorry. Say that once again.
Shel: You have at least explored the idea of what it might be like to have human colonies on other planets, even if it’s just by reading science fiction.
Tom: Absolutely. I’ve explored that idea and while I’m in favor of the space program, I’m not a fan of the idea of moving to Mars.
Shel: Yeah. Well, better to fix the planet we have, I think. But.
Tom: How badly would we have to screw up this planet before Mars or the moon becomes a better place for us to live.
Shel: Yeah, a barren rock with no atmosphere is not exactly my ideal.
Tom: Exactly. And I actually agree with those who say that holding Mars out as an alternative is really quite dysfunctional if it causes people to think credibly, which they shouldn’t, that there is an alternative to here.
Shel: Yeah, what is interesting to me about the whole space endeavor—and I actually, when NASA thought they were going to send a journalist to space, I wanted to be that journalist—what interests me is the way space travel could expand our horizons about what’s out there. Perhaps break down, not just the human-to-human xenophobia, but human-to-whatever-is-out-there xenophobia. When I first started reading science fiction, most of the books I read were very dystopian about all the invaders are coming with their lasers and they’re going to wipe us out. And then there was one book that I came across as a very early teenager, I don’t know, 13, 12, something like that. I don’t remember the name.
Shel: I think the author’s first name was Jack, where the aliens were treated as a gift, almost as like here’s how we can improve our species. [NOTE FROM SHEL: As I was editing the transcript, I remembered that it was Jack Williamson. I still don’t remember the title, and he was a prolific author.] Here’s how we can improve our communication, people that we can learn from who don’t happen to look like human bodies. And that was really kind of a revelatory book for me. I wish I remembered the author and the title, so I could recommend it to people, but since then I’ve come across many others with that worldview.
Tom: Hmm, well, I agree with your thesis. I mean taking a galactic perspective can only enhance our understanding of who we are, and therefore what we should do.
Shel: Yeah, okay. Yeah. But that doesn’t give us the license to say, Okay, we can just destroy the earth and go someplace, else.
How This Conversation might Lead to Collaboration
Tom: Exactly, exactly, exactly… And more broadly, Shel, I’m pleased to meet you. I sense that we are kindred spirits in thinking broadly about how business can impact our world, impact our lives and would welcome your collaboration, as I mentioned in the call. I really would like to be able to build a bridge between what I’ll call green activities and life extend activities, because I think that we’re moving in in much the same direction.
Shel: Yeah, and I think that that synergy is there. For some of the reasons I talked about at the very beginning of this call…
The Marriage of Science and Spirit in the Study of Evolution
Shel: And I’m actually reading a book right now that I think might be germane to this conversation and it’s another Chicago guy named Perry Marshall, and he wrote a book called Evolution, 2.0. And he talks a lot about epigenetic. He’s from what he calls a Young Earth Creationist Christian background, which is to say, I think, literal interpretation of the 7 days of creation—so raised not to believe in evolution at all, but with a tech background. He was an electrical engineer working on audio systems before he became a marketer. He kind of invented Google Adwords marketing the way we know it today.
Shel: And then he wrote a really impressive book that I reviewed several years ago, called 80/20 Sales and Marketing and it was all about the Pareto Principle. And his basic insight on that book which was worth the other 200 pages to go through was that the 80/20 is fractal. So you take your well performing 20% and you rinse and repeat, and then you take 20% of that 20%. You iterate that 5 or 6 times, and you have a super power.
Tom: Yeah, got it. Thank you very much. I’ll give Perry Marshall a look.
Shel: So the evolution book, which I’m about halfway through, the first half, which is a part I’ve just finished, is basically proving that evolution is not random noise or accidents. And I totally agree with him that you do not fix the system by introducing things that don’t work into it. But now he’s got to convince me that the Creator that he sees at the beginning of this is real, and that’s going to be a harder self for me, because my question is always going to be to him: Okay. So if there is an intelligent designer who put this entity there, how did it come about? Because somewhere along the way there has to be a first point.
Tom: Well, Shel, should you be interested in knowing my thoughts on this topic—you might, you might not—but I have thought rather deeply about it in technology and biology. It has led me to a very interesting place.
Shel: Sure. Go ahead!
Tom: I think in my Youtube videos, there’s one called is Evolving. And it basically goes through how, in fact, evolution is evolving very quickly to be more and more what’s called volitional evolution, where we, as humans are choosing the course of our evolution and the evolution of other species.
Shel: That goes back at least to plant hybridization, 3,000 years ago.
Tom: Absolutely, and is only accentuated now that we’re gaining capabilities and genetic engineering. So it’s it’s really a very interesting thing. So anyway, I’d also be personally interested if you have any views regarding the video channel. And you know the look and feel of the the videos we’re putting out.
Shel: Okay, I haven’t watched yet, but I will start with that one.
Tom: That’s kind of you. Thank you. It’s it’s called the Human Life Expectancy Channel on Youtube. And we put something out every week, and we’ll do until at least June, because we’ve got them produced already. There’s also another one there on energy technologies and how energy technologies might well impact human life expectancy, there’s others I’ve created but not yet published on restructuring the food chain, which, of course, is a big part of both greenness and human life expectancy, getting clean water to people and new water technologies, new transportation technologies, and all the things all those are coming up soon.
How Virtual Meetings Help the Planet
Shel: To interface this with the huge acceleration in the last 3 years in non-person-to-person/face-to-face, contacts such as we’re doing right now [online meetings].
Tom: Absolutely. Let’s hope that it cuts down on senseless carbon emissions from business travel.
Shel: Hopefully. Yeah. And I think the senseless carbon emissions from computer networks are going to be a lot lower number.
Tom: I’m sure that they will.
Shel: It’s not an insignificant number.
Tom: No, it’s not nothing, but it’s better, definitely, better.
Shel: It’s way better. Yeah. So if it’s my guess is, it’s probably a savings of roughly 90, 95% of the energy involved in moving people to meetings.
Tom: Yeah, that’s great. Well, Shel, I mean, is there anything you can imagine that I might be able to do for you? Connect?
Shel: I’m sure there is. I don’t yet have a handle on what that might be, and well, one thing actually is, I’m always looking for clients who want to build more social equity, capital and environmental capital into the core of their businesses that can be made to see that—again, into both-and, that you can have a business that is both doing right by the world, and a profitable business, and that you can build it into the core of the business, into all its products and services. If you if you haven’t yet watched my TEDx talk, I would say that’s a good 15-minute summary of what I’m talking about…
And I’m thinking, in the work you do, you might very well find that when you’re talking to insurers, for example, insurers will know of people who really want to do this and insurers can lower their costs. Also by backing companies that are not destructive to the environment and that are actually advancing social justice. And I’m talking when I say social justice, I’m talking about things like hunger, poverty, racism, climate change, war—“little easy things to fix.”
[Tom chuckles]
Shel: But with the exception of the recognition of climate change as a big problem, which is quite recent, only 150 years or so, all of those things have been with us since there were humans.
Tom: Or minus 5 years, depending upon who you’re talking about.
Shel: Well, the scientific consensus is there. There are the people who feed on stupid, untrue quote, news, unquote. You know, they’ve also been with us since the beginning of time. I think there are examples of propaganda in the Old Testament, if I remember correctly. There’s also that wonderful argument that Abraham has with God about if there are 100 good people, 50 people, 10 people, one person, will you save the village? So that’s essentially public relations. Maybe the first recorded public relations writing.
Tom: Cool, although I’ll bet it was a problem way before that.
Shel: Oh, I’m sure it was. That’s just the first documentation we have.
Tom: It’s it’s a rather universal human thing. I think.
Shel: Yeah, but it’s interesting, because the Old Testament—and I’m not a particularly religious person, I see myself as spiritual, and I certainly believe there are entities out there that are bigger than humans, and in their capabilities—and communicate with them regularly. But the Old Testament also has the first instance I’m aware of documenting nonviolent civil disobedience, which is what I see as the primary level lever for social change. Not civil disobedience, but nonviolent resistance in general, it doesn’t necessarily have to be civil disobedience. You have this very interesting scene where Pharaoh was telling the midwives for the Hebrews go out and kill the male babies, and they come back and say, “we’re so sorry they have babies so fast we can’t get there in time.” That’s, as far as I know, the first time that anybody talked back to a Supreme Ruler and got away with it and and changed the outcome.
Tom: So are these early examples of guerrilla marketing?
Shel: Well, yeah, I would say, yeah, marketing of the social change movement.Both the cases. Yeah. Abraham was definitely being a guerrilla marketer in his argument about how many souls were viable to save a city. And the midwives Shifra and Puah were definitely using a guerrilla approach. I don’t know if you could call it marketing.
Tom: Okay. Fair enough. Well, Shel, thank you very much. I really appreciate getting to know you better, and I appreciate you taking the time to get to know me a little better, too. I will definitely do the things you recommend. I will order your Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World book and read it also look at Perry Marshall’s book and look at your TED Talk, which I haven’t yet done but would be happy to do.
Shel: Great. On the Going Beyond Sustainability site, you’ll find on the book page, there are links to a number of places to order it. One of them is me. In that way, you can get an autographed copy if you want one and another is IndyBound, which will hook you up with whatever independent bookstore you like to use.
Tom: So Amazon will not get me to Guerrilla Marketing?
Shel: Amazon will, but I prefer the people send their money to local bookstores, independents, rather than the one that’s trying to drive them all out of business.
Tom: Fine, I’m happy to do that, too. I don’t suppose you mentioned you as a possibility. Okay, is there any chance I can order one directly right now?
Shel: Sure. Let me get my cell phone, and I can take your credit card information.
[transaction details removed]
How to Find Shel’s and Tom’s Videos
Tom: In the meantime, I presume I can find your TED talk by just going to TED Talks and typing in your name?
Shel: It’s actually easier to go on my speaking page and find it there, because it is on the TED site but it’s really hard to find there. It’s not indexed, for some reason.
Tom: Okay. Can you send me a link to your speaking page?
Shel: Absolutely.
Tom: Please do. And in the meantime, yes, if you would kindly take a look at the human life expectancy channel, if you can, if if you’re so inclined, it would be great if you could subscribe to that, so you’ll get to see the new, videos as they come out and even more importantly, share whatever thoughts you might have. And, by the way, the negative thoughts are probably the more valuable.
Shel: Okay. I’ll open that up on my browser.
Tom: So if you could say, Hey, Tom, you are jumping off of a cliff here, don’t do this, or you know that sort of stuff. That’s the kind of feedback that I actually most need, and would appreciate at this point.
Shel: Yeah. And similarly, if you see any big holes to poke in my TEDx, please let me know.
Tom: Well, I gotta believe people have been poking if they’re going to poke since 2014. So I don’t know if I’m going to come up with anything new. But I’ll definitely look at it with interest.
Shel: Great. Cool and groovy. Well, this was fun, and you know there’s I think the ways that we might work together will evolve, using the word on purpose, over time.
Tom: Yeah, that’s great. That sounds great. Let’s do that and let’s just kinda be open to the opportunity.
Tom: But whatever case, real pleasure to meet you, Shel!
Tips on Booking a TEDx Talk
Shel: Likewise. And have you done a TEDx? You sound like you ought to have if you haven’t.
Tom: No, I have not I’d be wide open to it. But you know the opportunity hasn’t yet presented.
Shel: I don’t have any contacts for you. They’re all locally organized. But within Chicagoland, there’s probably at least 100 a year.
Tom: Yeah, I mean, that would be another great conversation if you’d be willing to have it. Which is how the heck do you get a TED Talk?
Shel: There are a couple of books out there [on getting a TED talk] that are not written by me that would be worth your while to read. I got mine by working with a local organizer and pitching her on various talks over a period of years. Right when I was starting to shift toward this work, she decided to organize an event, and I got in with a proposal. I already knew her. I’d been to a couple of the events she had produced. And I explained the overall concept and she said, “Yeah, let’s do that one.” So I don’t have any great secrets there except for persistence, and keep making—
Tom: The right person. Make the right pitch. If we’re modifying it. Right? Or finally finding out what pitch they’re looking for.
Shel: And TED talks don’t pay, by the way.
Tom: Oh, I had no expectation that they would, but they were—it’s possible that you could give me more advice on the find-the-right-person piece. Is all of that well-known? If I type in TEDx Chicago, am I going to find the contact and give her a call.
Shel: Probably, but you might have to play with your search query. I might do TEDx Illinois and TEDx Indiana, and just see what comes up. I mean, I imagine you’d be willing to drive 3, 4 hours to go give a TEDx and have that credential.
Tom: Of course.
Shel: So, yeah. Or TEDx near me. See what comes up. I don’t know how many are doing live events these days, and how many are doing virtual, or how many just folded their tents in the pandemic. But yeah, if this is sort of thing where you could get, you know, an intern or somebody in the Philippines to go do some research for you.
Tom: Yeah, thank you. I’ll look into that, too, because you’re right. I mean, I would love to do a TEDx, and I’ve certainly got a concept that’s broad enough and big enough to merit consideration.
Shel: And then the other thing I would say is, whenever one is convenient to you, go attend it, watch the sorts of things that work, and be also aware that if you get a gig that there’s significant time upfront because there’s coaching involved that is actually really helpful.
Tom: Yeah. Good.
Shel: Yeah, I mean, I’m a pretty experienced speaker, but I found that I benefited greatly from the coaching I got before my TEDx and before my Pecha Kucha, which is a different format where you have 20 slides in 6 minutes, 20 seconds each slide yeah, that’s one you—
Tom: Yikes. Yeah.
Shel: —don’t want to do without scripting. I normally speak off, not off-the-cuff, but I speak without a formal script, but for the TEDx and the Pecha Kucha, in order to fit the format, I scripted everything I was going to say.
Tom: Sounds great, thank you. Sure. I’ll look into that as well.
Shel: You’re welcome. All right!
Tom: Well, let’s keep in touch, and again look forward to hearing back from you. If you have any thoughts, and I suspect that, based on all I read, I may have a few things to come back to you with as well. Great, Shel.
Shel: Great.
Shel: All right! Thanks! Oh! And let me just grab the transcript before we exit, and I’ll send it to you.
Geothermal Borehole outside Reykjavik, Iceland (Public Domain photo by Yomangani)
This COULD be very exciting, a breakthrough in evening the highly variable load capacity of renewables (depending on how much sun is shining and how much wind is blowing).
BUT…
1) It essentially repurposes fracking technology, which has been linked to huge environmental problems from water contamination to accidentally induced earthquakes. The article does (eventually) touch on the earthquake risk, but makes it sound like that problem has been eliminated. As far as I know, both of these issues are still real.
2) The article does not address the consequences if the water pressure buildup gets out of control. What happens if there are explosions in the drill cavity, which can extend 8000 feet deep and 4000 feet (about 3/4 of a mile) long.
Still, I’m glad to see people exploring this, and potentially making geothermal economically viable in places it’s hasn’t been until now.
Sign by Nancy Hodge Green, used at Seabrook by Shel Horowitz, 1977. Photo by Shel Horowitz
An energy consultant I’ve known since high school raised a frustration he has in his work:
Sadly, the biggest problem is culture, Shel Horowitz. Building owners have a mentality in their culture, in their business dealings of loving the status quo. I can’t tell you how many times I have offered free energy audits, to give them information and tips to save money, and they turn it down. Free (no obligation). They just don’t want to know. I have been involved in many proposals for simple upgrades with numbers that show that this will help their bottomline ($$$), for solar panels or LED lights, and they say no. As long as money is flowing in, they don’t want to change. How do you get over that mindset?
And I responded,
You have to approach changing culture with the mentality of a marketer and organizer–this is what I do, and I’ve helped to change some cultures in my time. Think about what the world was like when you and I met in the early 1970s: Environmental consciousness was close to zero. Most families had never tried organic produce, or tofu, or even yogurt. War was still raging in Vietnam, and you could be drafted at 18 but had to be 21 to vote. South Africa and Rhodesia had rigid apartheid. Dictators were running things in places like Spain. All of these changed because organizers and marketers changed the culture. When I moved to my current town of Hadley, in 1998, the dominant paradigm was “You can’t change Town Hall.” 14 months later, our landscape was threatened and I launched Save the Mountain, and did so with mom-and-apple-pie messaging like “[developer’s name] has wildly underestimated the love the people of Hadley have for this mountain.” I knew we’d win, but I expected it to take five years. We did it in just 13 months!
It’s true that culture change is usually neither easy nor fast. But it DOES happen. Usually, it happens because people’s movements for change bubble up from the grassroots. Sometimes, technological shifts speed the process of change, turbocharge it. As one example, the widespread acceptance of clean energy had to do with technological shifts that made those choices economically as well as environmentally superior–but it was the widespread rejection of dangerous, polluting energy systems such as fossil and nuclear that created the momentum behind the technological growth and price drops/efficiency increases.
I would suggest to my old friend that his offers need to be phrased in terms of how they mitigate pain and add profit. Marketing to others’ self–interest in order to foster your own agenda of social and environmental progress is totally legitimate. And if the case is made properly, they will see that the cost of moving forward is lower, and the benefits higher, than the cost and benefits of keeping things as they are.
One of the most fascinating talks I’ve ever heard happened this morning on a guided bush walk in Kruger National Park, South Africa, delivered from atop a huge termite mound.
Standing atop a giant termite mound, Ranger Nico explains why termites are critical in the South African ecosystem and how they make the giant predators possible. Photo by Shel Horowitz.
Termites are largely responsible for shaping and managing the ecosystem that allows the magnificent animals we see on safaris: the elephants, lions, giraffes, zebras, and more. They are master builders, creating mounds and underground caverns (two or three times as big as the visible parts of the mounds) that can stretch 50 meters into the earth.
Termites invented climate control millions of years ago. They move wet earth astonishing distances to plaster the walls, creating an ideal environment for the fungus their queen loves to eat, and they build chimneys—heat vents they can open and close—to maintain the ideal temperature for the queen’s comfort. They are such sophisticated engineers that some plaster casts of abandoned mounds have required pumping in ten tons of plaster.
That queen starts tiny but eventually reaches a length of five inches or so, loses her legs, and turns her attention to hive management and reproduction. But not just any kind of reproduction! She picks the type of worker the colony needs at that moment and produces farmers, soldiers, attendants staff who attend to her needs as commanded by pheromones, flying termites (including scouts, wood scavengers, and future kings and queens who go off to start new colonies), and other types as needed.
These different types have biological differences, each equipped for their own mission. And she will lay about 40,000 eggs every day, but most of the young’uns will only live for a few days. Still, a large mound can have hundreds of thousands of inhabitants.
The queen outlives thousands of generations of her offspring. At the end of her 30- to 40-year life, she clones herself and produces one new queen, genetically identical, who will manage the same mound—so some of these mounds are centuries old, with a ruler identical to the mound’s female co-founder. Her partner is a king who fertilizes the queen, and paired couples fly off to start the new mounds—a complex process where both of them find a soft digging spot they can manage without the tools of the construction-worker termites and begin digging and egg-laying exactly three days before a significant rainfall.
The eggs take three days to gestate and require lots of moisture. If a queen dies before cloning herself, the whole colony dies. Queens cannot be introduced from elsewhere, and the workers lose all interest in their tasks—or in living—without a queen.
And here’s why this is a problem: Not only do termites clear the dead wood around them by digesting it, the mounds and chambers provide enormous nutritional boost to the soil. Termites are what creates the richness that allows grasses, shrubs, and trees to flourish. Without all that, the herbivores like elephants, giraffes, rhinos, impalas, hippos, warthogs, etc. would have nothing to eat and would not exist. And without them, the apex predators including the big cats would not have their food.
So if you’ve gone on safari and seen these beautiful animals in the wild, you can thank the termites. And the best way to thank them is to recognize their role and not use pesticides against them. If you live in a termite-prone area, treat the wood of your house instead of fogging the air with poison that poisons you, your family, and the much-needed termites—and help your friends understand that when we treat nature as a teacher and ally, the results are far better than if we treat her as an enemy.
Other tidbits from this hike: • Elephants will destroy one marula tree at a time to get the fruit—but their digestive enzymes activate the seeds, so when they poop them back out and natural forces spread them, a thousand marula trees could germinate from the single sacrificed one.
• Elephant tracks look kind of like snowshoe tracks. You can tell females form males because if it’s a female, you’ll also find tracks from the babies.
• Spear grass seed will actually drill itself into a growing medium by spinning in one direction. Even though they can’t survive there, they will even drill into human skin and you can’t get them out with tweezers. Nico’s mentor used to always carry a medical scalpel to excise them. Nico prefers to avoid them in the first place.
You write, “focus on the main issue, health-focused cleaning; directing energy to one and not two main goals: health or sustainability, not both, or you compromise the program.”
We need a reframing here.
The question is not whether to choose health over green practices (of course we do!). The better question is how to achieve the health outcomes while also creating positive environmental impacts.
As one very easy example, how much packaging do we really need? Does it really increase safety to wrap every component of a kit individually, place the wrapped components on a foam tray, wrap the entire inner contents, box the wrapped set, and then add another layer of shrinkwrap around the box, stick the box in a case with 11 others, shrinkwrap the case, stack cases on a pallet, and then wrap the pallet?
For that matter, could some of the components in that kit be used again? Why do we design so many products to be used once and then thrown away?
My comment ended there–but that’s only the beginning of a much larger discussion. Some other questions to raise would include:
When can we use nontoxic natural cleansers and disinfectants such as baking soda and peroxide—and when do we actually need something stronger?
Can we get our cleaning agents in eco-friendly formats such as pellets to be dissolved in water, rather than harmful ones such as aerosol cans?
What are the most ergonomic ways to clean that protect our hands, shoulders, and backs from injury?
How do we most effectively train cleaning personnel to understand health, environmental, and safety issues?
Please feel welcome to add your own questions in the comments.
We’ve all heard toxic, disempowering, dream-stomping clichés like
“You can’t fight City Hall”
“We’ve always done it this other way”
“That’s impossible”
“You’ll always be a failure”
“We call B.S.!”
That’s the appropriate response, made famous by X Gonzales, at the time an 18-year-old survivor of the mass murder at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida just three days earlier. That same year, they co-organized (and spoke at) a huge national march on Washington and helped to shepherd through the first meaningful gun safety law in gun-loving Florida in this century.
And we all have to “call B.S.” when anyone tries to destroy our self-esteem, our calling, and our power.
18-year-old X Gonzales (center) gives the “Call B.S.” speech in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, February 17, 2018. Photo by Barry Stock, via Wikipedia.
Like Gonzales, we must embrace our ability to make change and join with others, nonviolently, to achieve that change.
For some, including me, becoming an activist is a way to do that. For others, the path takes different forms, such as being a parent or teacher or health care professional—or, for that matter, an accountant, manufacturer, or prison administrator—and carrying out those duties in ways that build up others, help them achieve those dreams, and help THEM build up others—to build a community, and a planet, based on the worth of every individual. Because to focus only on building yourself up is narcissism, even sociopathic.
This post was inspired by a private note admiring my activism but saying the writer got too depressed to do this kind of work. Here’s s my response, exactly as I wrote it, except I broke it up into more paragraphs and added more specific locations:
I’m sure you make the world better in other ways. Not everyone is cut out to be an activist–it’s a path where 90 percent or more of your efforts seem to be for naught (though often, change IS happening but not visible in the moment).
Because I focus on the positive, I’m able to find the strength to continue. I keep in mind that when I was born in December, 1956, half of the US was still officially segregated and racism still ruled most of the rest. Women and people of color had very few career opportunities. White women were mostly teachers and nurses while people of color were channeled into laborer, domestic, sanitation worker.
Male-on-female domestic violence and casual sexual harassment were considered normal and acceptable. People were still getting fired or even imprisoned for being in a same-sex or interracial relationship. There was close to zero awareness of pollution, climate change and making our ecosystems more resilient. Decent food was very difficult to find. And the last well-known nonviolent revolution had been in India almost a decade earlier.
Except that OFFICIAL segregation had ended, most of that was still true on October 15, 1969, when one casual comment within a speech at the first Vietnam peace demonstration I ever attended set me on a lifetime path of activism. Yet, in 53 years–a nanosecond in geologic time or even in human history–all of that has shifted. So things ARE getting better because of activism.
The other thing that keeps me going is the knowledge that MY OWN ACTIONS have made a difference several times.
Here are my top three: 1) I founded Save the Mountain, the group that kept a particularly offensive luxury housing development off the Mount Holyoke Range [Hadley and South Hadley, Massachusetts, USA] a mile and a half from my house. Even experts within the environmental movement locally had given up hope. I went in with the attitude that we would win–but even I thought it would take us five years. We did it in just 13 months–because all of us worked on different pieces where we had expertise, and because we had mass support from area residents.
2) I was one of the 1414 people arrested on the construction site of the Seabrook [New Hampshire, USA] nuclear power plant in 1977. By the time the last of us was released two weeks later, a national safe energy movement had been born, most of it adopting the nonviolent resistance techniques and consensus decision making that we used in Clamshell Alliance here in New England. Here’s a link to an article I wrote about the lasting shifts in the culture that movement created: https://greenandprofitable.com/40-years-ago-today-we-changed-the-world-part-4-shifts-in-the-culture/. And while we ultimately lost the battle to keep Seabrook from being built, we basically put a halt to the development of new nukes (unfortunately, we have to fight that battle again–but keeping these unsafe and unnecessary monsters off the drawing boards and out of the power grids for nearly 40 years is a pretty good outcome. And this time, I have great confidence that we will win.)
3) My work in local electoral politics [Hampshire County, Massachusetts] has helped to bring about a lasting progressive majority and a series of four progressive mayors in a row in Northampton, and this April took back the Hadley Select Board again after losing to a Trumpian majority in 2021 when we couldn’t find anyone willing to run. I think we’ve taken control of the board three times. Two for sure.
Again, I recognize that my path of activism isn’t for everyone. Neither is my parallel path of working within the business community to spread the message that solving our biggest problems, like hunger, poverty, racism, othering, and even catastrophic climate change and war, can be a profit path for business.
But each and every one of us can find our personal way to make a difference, to brighten the light for all of us, and to help bring into being the planet we want to pass on to subsequent generations.
If this post inspires you, please post a comment about what you’re already doing, or what you will start doing.
I just came across a query letter I wrote in 2020. It raises a lot of questions that are still very much worth asking—and attempting to answer.
How some people view the world—Opportunity for businesses that genuinely care
In many ways, these questions were easier to answer back then. Unfortunately, as a society, we missed the window to create those kinds of sweeping changes when the active threat of Covid made them easier—but we can still make the effort. We can still transform society, our relationship with other beings, and the planet in our own lifetime. It’ll just take more effort.
Here’s the relevant section of what I wrote back then (I’ve removed a long paragraph with my credentials, as well as my closing.)—and I’d love to get your comments:
Hi, there,
As an experienced journalist and award-winning, best-selling ten-book author with several books on social enterprise as a profit center, I propose an article, Leveraging the Great Pivot: How COVID-19 Creates Long-Term Post-Pandemic Opportunities for Racial Justice, Economic Advancement, and Environmental Healing. Probably in the 1500-2500 word range.
The premise: For decades, activists have been told we can’t fix the crushing problems of our time, like hunger, poverty, racism, war, catastrophic climate change, etc. Yet, starting in early 2020, the entire world pivoted and everything changed. As education, many types of business, and even cultural events shifted online or reinvented themselves, we learned how resilient, adaptable, and creative we are. And that process created opportunities that could never have happened in the pre-pandemic world.
These massive global, national, regional, and local shifts prove we can reinvent the world as the place we really want to live in–and we can replicate the shift in other areas. As a society, we have to do this pivot strategically, and it has to involve many sectors: government, nonprofits, activists, community organizations, academia—and the business community.
Just look at how the massive expansion of the racial justice movement since May has changed perceptions around the US and around the world. And that’s one small piece of a big multi-issue cauldron of solution-driven thinking and activism; a lot of good work is going into solving those big crises, as well as protecting our fragile democracy. The question is: pivot to what?
Could health care coverage be shifted away from employers so the next time an emergency shuts hundreds of thousands of businesses, their laid-off employees don’t lose their safety net? Could this be the US’s chance to adopt the single-payer model most of the rest of the world uses? And to shift from treating the sick’s symptoms to maintaining wellness across the population so fewer people get sick in the first place? Can this be the moment to finally get away from fossil and nuclear, to combine clean renewable energy with massive systemic conservation so we’re no longer squandering our children’s heritage polluting and carbonizing our planet while depleting scarce resources? Is it time for decent affordable housing to be seen as a right? What are the best ways to create more housing that also protect the environment, create pleasant yet affordable neighborhoods, and avoid negative consequences like urban sprawl?
We can ask similar questions in every sector: criminal justice, job creation, transportation and shipping (moving both people and things), replacing armed conflict with peaceful conflict resolution, ensuring a pluralistic society that honors both its majorities and minorities, etc.
After four years of Trump and a year of COVID, it won’t be enough to go back to the “normal” of 2019, or even of 2015. But with the pandemic comes the luxury and responsibility of critically examining every aspect of society. We need to figure out what the goal of every institution is–and how to achieve or surpass that goal as we rebuild. Just as many developing countries skipped landlines and clunky desktop computers and went straight to smartphones, we need to ask questions like:
What are we *really* trying to accomplish?
Is this the best way to meet that goal?
How could we improve it?
How could we make it more inclusive?
Then we brainstorm with these ends in mind, using a seven-step process that opens up new thinking and lets us implement new solutions. To make this concrete, think about spending millions of R&D dollars to create a pen that can write in zero-gravity. But the real goal isn’t to have a pen that can write in space—that’s a means to an end. The real goal is to be able to write in space. And suddenly, with that framing, the solution is obvious: use pencils—or computers! Maybe you create a pencil lead that can make a darker, easier to read impression, create a Velcro mount for your device so it doesn’t go flying across the cabin, or make other little tweaks—but you’ve accomplished the basic goal, with resources you already have. Business has a vested interest in reinventing itself, as dozens of industries were rendered obsolete, as supply chain issues showed up unexpectedly, and as those sectors that strengthened and grew had to adapt. Small businesses can survive and even thrive, but not as it was in 2019. Whether a manufacturer switches from making luxury goods to PPE or a retailer learns how to blend online and (protected) in-person approaches, pretty much everyone has to pivot. Why not seize the opportunity to have that reinvention foster racial, gender, and class equity…green the planet while creating jobs…match product introduction and production not to advertising-created materialism but to solving real needs and getting paid for it? In the activist world, meetings that might have had 10 local people in a room can now draw 500 from around the world—and provide digital tools to mobilize action, such as Spoke, a texting platform that can allow volunteers to send 1000 or more text messages an hour and respond individually and personally when someone replies. In my own professional development this year, from the comfort of my own home, I’ve attended dozens of far-away events. Some had hundreds or thousands of attendees from dozens of countries (among them a worldwide UN conference, multiple 50th-anniversary celebrations of Earth Day, and gatherings on more niched topics such as the special situation of Jews of color). I could not have afforded the time and money to go to so many conferences, and several times, they’ve overlapped. But I was able to participate in more than one at a time, or listen to what I’d missed on replay. I’ve also participated in some thinking and brainstorming calls from widely scattered groups of thinkers and researchers working on global solutions to these and other problems. As somewhat more exciting examples, local cultural performers with no previous broader following are finding global audiences—and the sound technicians who can replace awful-sounding Zoom calls with concert-quality production are keeping busy.
Even on the personal side, some of the restrictions can be reframed as empowerment—just as we can think of a wheelchair user not as “confined to a wheelchair,” but “liberated with a wheelchair,” because it allows that user to go places that would otherwise be off-limits. My wife and I hosted a Passover Seder with family and friends from three generations and 9 different states from Massachusetts to California–most of whom would never have come in person.
