Category: Environment

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Branding, Copywriting, Environment, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Some marketers are engaged in a vigorous debate between people who identify as “thought leaders” and those whose skins crawl when they hear the term.

Whether you love or hate the term, “thought leader”, marketing by showing leadership through content and letting people meaningfully engage with those ideas is undeniably powerful. 

That type of marketing hooked me when I first tried it, as a 15-year-old 3rd-year high school student, and I’ve been using it ever since. First, I used it only to spread my ideas. Later, I also marketed products and services based on those ideas. And those ideas built me a decent following (and, eventually, a decent consulting practice)—sharing them through my books, articles, presentations, interviews, media coverage, etc.

This takes time and energy, and I know many people who do it better than me. But it certainly can be done. One of my book launches garnered over 1,000,000 short-term Google hits (for the book title, an exact-match four word string that wouldn’t show up in any other context). It’s the only time anything I’ve done got a million hits on Google.

I’ve even managed to help shift several mindsets at the international or national or local level.

My biggest success was changing the attitude about a proposed local mountaintop housing development from “this is terrible but there’s nothing we can do” to “of course we’ll win! The question is how.” This campaign took just over a year and used everything I knew in 1999-2000 about marketing AND community organizing (and the knowledge/labor of many others)—but the mindset shift took only four or five months. And that mindset shift created the conditions for our victory.

Lawn sign from the Save the Mountain campaign in Hadley, MA, in front of Mount Holyoke (a state park next to the mountain we saved)
Lawn sign from the Save the Mountain campaign in Hadley, MA, in front of Mount Holyoke (a state park next to the mountain we saved)

I also like to think I helped change the idea that business has to be evil. Of the five books I’ve published since 2003 (and the 10 since my first book came out in 1980), four show how business can profitably address issues ranging from business ethics to ending poverty—while reversing environmental destruction. I’ve given dozens of “Making Green Sexy”, “Impossible is a Dare,” and other talks on how business can be heroes.) And it’s been years since I’ve heard “business ethics? That’s an oxymoron!” When I first started talking about business ethics as a success strategy, I heard that false “wisdom” constantly.

I like to think my activity is part of WHY I no longer hear that horrible sentence.

Leading with ideas means finding others who will amplify those ideas. It’s not a coincidence that I actively seek out media coverage, endorsements, and more. 

My latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World has a blurb from Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield on the front cover, another from Seth Godin on the back, and some 50 endorsements on the front pages. It has 4 guest essays from best-selling authors. These are some of the ways I’ve built credibility and gotten people interested, even though the book no longer has a current-year copyright.

One review of that book didn’t appear until 17 months after publication—and I’ve gotten reviews on books that were up to eight years old at the time. When you write about issues and do so with substance, your book can attract interest for years.

Of course, events can shift the relevance. If you try to repurpose articles on how to survive the coming Y2K crisis or books on the presidencies of Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, or Al Gore, thought leadership is not the image you’ll project. 😉

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

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

Seize the opportunity!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Diversity, Environment, General Commentary, language, Politics, poverty, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , ,

This post was going to be about political correctness overreach and a children’s librarian calling Dr. Seuss racist.  That’s the story as a lot of right-wing bloggers and media outlets tell it.

But the real story is about something even bigger: the need to discover the truth. And sometimes that means we have to go to primary sources. Several pieces are in play here, and most of the news coverage is focusing on only one (different sources, different pieces). I thank my journalism training for preventing me from embarrassing myself

Yes, A Librarian Refused the Donation

Melania (the current US First Lady) donated books to one school in every state.

Melania's letter accompanying the book donation
Melania’s letter accompanying the book donation

Most of us will agree that’s a good thing. But as Newsweek reports,

Liz Phipps Soeiro, the school librarian for Cambridgeport [Massachusetts] Elementary School, announced in an open letter to [Melania] that she would not be accepting the gift because her school was not in need of the additional books, also telling the first lady that “Dr. Seuss is a bit of a cliché.” Dr. Seuss!

But Soeiro Had a Good Reason to Refuse the Donation

But here’s the part where I agree with Soeiro, and I had to go to the original Horn Book post to find it: Melania selected only one school in each state. Soeiro found the criteria on the White House website:

“working with the Department of Education to identify schools with programs that have achieved high standards of excellence, recognized by State and National awards and Blue Ribbon Awards…”

Soeiro quite appropriately criticized this process, noting that it transfers more resources to those who already have the most, while schools that would be desperate for books and thrilled to get this donation—schools that are educating their kids with a fraction of the resources wealthy Cambridge (home of Harvard University and MIT) can deploy—are left out because they don’t win awards for excellence. In my opinion, this is like so much else in the DT family agenda. The rich get richer and the poor have 30 or 40 kids in a class and low-quality instructional materials.

Soeiro says,

Are those kids any less deserving of books simply because of circumstances beyond their control? Why not go out of your way to gift books to underfunded and underprivileged communities that continue to be marginalized and maligned by policies put in place by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos? Why not reflect on those “high standards of excellence” beyond only what the numbers suggest? Secretary DeVos would do well to scaffold and lift schools instead of punishing them with closures and slashed budgets.

And she mailed back the books to the White House.

But wouldn’t it have been more effective to mail those books to one of those deserving schools that don’t win awards? Soeiro could have mailed them, just as publicly, to one of the districts she cites as suffering—Philadelphia, Chicago, or Detroit—or to an underserved community right in Massachusetts, like Holyoke, Springfield (whose mayor said publicly they’d be glad to have the books), or Lawrence. She could have been just as public and gotten just as much attention. Melania will just give them to the next rich runner-up.

Yes, Soeiro Claimed Seuss Promoted Racism

That Newsweek article doesn’t quote another part of Soeiro’s letter, published as a blog on the Horn Book children’s lit site (though this article attributed to Newsweek but published on Yahoo does)—but this is the part that has conservatives in a dither:

Another fact that many people are unaware of is that Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes. [emphasis mine]

OK, let’s talk about the difference between opinion and fact. A fact is something that can be proven (and there’s no such thing as “alternative facts”). A person may have a viewpoint about that fact, and that’s opinion.

Sometimes people discover that their “facts” aren’t actual facts. When my house was built in 1743, the accepted wisdom among colonists of British ancestry was that tomatoes can be lethal, and nobody can go faster than a horse. Anyone stating otherwise would have been called insane.

Of course, these turned out to be opinions. Wrong ones. We know now that tomatoes are not poisonous—and humans can fly around the earth (in the space station) at more than 17,000 miles per hour.

The fact: Seuss’s post-WWII illustrations demonstrate a wide diversity of races and cultures, including many “races” that he made up entirely. Taking his work as a body, humans are only a modest portion of his characters, even his main characters.

Soeiro says his books are based on stereotyping. That’s her opinion and that of the scholars she cites. My opinion is that his books were promoting cultural diversity, acceptance of differences, and a society based in cooperation. I base this on reading many of his works. I’ve read Dr. Seuss books that ridicule…

  • Racism (The Sneetches and Other Stories, published way back in 1953)
  • Dictatorships (Yertle the Turtle)
  • Conformism (Horton Hears a Who)
  • War (The Butter Battle Book)

I’ve also read a number of Seuss books that defend underdogs and the environment (The Lorax)—to name just four of his many books espousing a progressive agenda.

And just as Soeiro cites sources that bolster her opinion, I can cite sources that bolster mine. For example, this profile of Seuss in Tikkun highlights many of his progressive activities and works (although it acknowledges that during WWII, his drawings for adults had a distinctly racist cast when it came to the Japanese. I’m not excusing that but the evidence is strong that he grew out of this attitude, especially in his horror over the Hiroshima bombing).

One not-so-nice thing about our world is that things get all out of proportion because the Internet amplifies opinions better than it amplifies facts. But one very good thing is how easy it is to go to the primary sources. Even if Newsweek hadn’t included the link, it was easy to find Soeiro’s original piece in Horn Book (it came up in the same search results page as the Newsweek article, in fact). And it was just as easy to find the Tikkun piece that mostly supported my position.

So…in any controversy, before you jump up and down and wave banners, take a couple of minutes to determine the facts. Look for coverage in reputable mainstream media whose trained and experienced reporters are vetting stories. Use a fact-checking site like Snopes. And do your part to keep the society-wide conversation focused on the truth and not on wild accusations. Often, as in this case, things are much more nuanced than they seem.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please don’t run it!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, People Helping People, Politics, poverty, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

My heart goes out to all those impacted by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, the flooding in Bangladesh and other parts of Asia (not much in the US news but also very severe), or the out-of-control fires in the American West (a friend in Oregon told me, “the whole state is on fire. I can’t go out of my house because of the smoke.”

Every bit of research I’ve seen concludes that all these catastrophes are far worse than they would have been without human intervention. Humans have raised the temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico through our industry, agriculture, and architecture, and those warmer waters vastly increased the severity of the storms. And because of numerous social choices over decades if not centuries, disaster impacts tend to fall most heavily on those who can least afford it.

Storm Flooding. Photo by Gabriel Bulla, freeimages.com
Storm Flooding. Photo by Gabriel Bulla, freeimages.com

This pattern has been increasing dramatically since at least 2005, starting with the Asian typhoon and continuing through Katrina and Rita, Irene and Sandy, and now Harvey and Irma. Humans have built flood-vulnerable buildings in low-lying places where flooding, sooner or later, is inevitable. So not only are the storms more severe measuring just their force, but they impact the human-built landscape where that humanscape ignores nature’s principles.

To think of it another way, the planet is fighting back against the human assault. The planet doesn’t really care about humans as a species, or even individual ecosystems. The planet just wants to survive, and it acts to protect the “macro-ecosystem”: the planet as a whole. It has already survived extinctions of millions of species, including some that were the dominant lifeforms before earlier, non-human-caused catastrophic climate events. If humans are wiped out and cockroaches rule the earth, Earth won’t care.

But we care. We want a world whose treasured heritage and powerful promise we can pass on to many generations.

Please talk to your friends, colleagues, neighbors, and especially your legislators. Help them understand that human-caused catastrophic climate change is real, and that *there are things we can do to mitigate the impact and even reverse the terrible trends.*

We can take individual actions, from switching to organic foods and eating less meat to insulating our homes and workplaces and using LED lighting. And we can also take action as a society. With no help from the US federal government, individual cities and states can still participate in the Paris Accords (and many have). For bottom-line revenue-building and expense reducing reasons, companies can design buildings that create at least as much energy as they use, from clean renewable sources (and many have).

But still, government must have a role: in funding not just disaster relief but preventive measures such as dam inspections and humane ones such as fair labor practice enforcement (both stripped of much of their funding by the current administration). In encouraging clean energy. In understanding that foreign policy needs to factor in who uses what resources in which ways, and that domestic policy has to focus on creating jobs in industries that will remain relevant (unlike, for instance, coal and nuclear, neither of which are economically viable in the current world).

I could go on for much longer, but I’ll just say, thanks for listening, talk to your network, write letters to the editor, and contact your legislators.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Copywriting, Democracy, Diversity, Environment, Events, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Peace and War, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

There are hundreds more I could honor. These 10 are all people I knew personally. I chose them somewhat randomly, basically who came top of mind first. I am grateful to all of them even if the interaction was painful when it happened.

  1. My mom, whose commitment to racial justice extended to desegregating the apartment building we lived in. She was also a tester for the Urban League, making sure that when a black family was told an apartment was already rented that it was really rented—by applying to live there.

    Walking my mother, Gloria Yoshida, into her 65th-birthday surprise party, 1998
    Walking my mother, Gloria Yoshida, into her 65th-birthday surprise party, 1998
  2. The speaker I heard when I 12, at my first peace demonstration, who told me the Vietnam war was undeclared—and brought my false reality crashing down around me.
  3. The idiot who made me sit in the children’s section of a movie theater with my full-price adult ticket (also age 12) and gave me my first experience of discrimination-based injustice (for being part of a class of people). I started a boycott of that cinema that has now continued for 48 years, and thus had the first experience of recognizing that I had power to change things.
  4. Mrs. Ehrlich of the Bronx High School of Science English Department in the 1970s, who believed the lie I’d told that I had turned in an assignment. Horrified, she said she’d never lost a student paper before. I felt intense guilt and realized that my action had hurt someone innocent. I’ve done my best not to repeat that and to take responsibility for my actions even when I don’t like the consequences.
  5. My first grade teacher, Mrs. Gross of Westchester Day School in the 1960s, who recognized that I was already a good reader and sat me in the back of the room with a 4th grade geography text while she inflicted Sally-Dick-and-Jane on the rest of the class. I still love reading, still love maps, and that was probably the first time I recognized how fascinating the world is, how people lived so differently in different parts of it.
  6. The college classmate who yelled at me that I was extremely and consistently selfish. It hurt like hell at the time, but on reflection, I realized he was right. And I changed my behavior! (Years later, I went up to him at a reunion and thanked him. He didn’t even remember the incident.)
  7. Dr. Jeffrey Lant, who was the first person to help me discover you-centered, benefit-focused marketing.
  8. Dean Cycon, CEO of Dean’s Beans, who combined the strongest moral compass and the best sense of humor of any business owner I know. (I never got to meet the late Ray Anderson; he might have topped Dean in his commitment).
  9. Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers, who started a whole social movement after mandatory retirement forced her out of a quiet job within the Presbyterian Church.
  10. Pete Seeger, who was probably the first to show me that the arts could change people’s minds and create action for social and environmental justice.
Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Environment, People Helping People, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
In the run-up to the enormous Boston counter-rally against white racism, someone complained that nonviolence is ineffective and passive—and mentioned his desire to go out and slug a few Nazis. This provoked an extended discussion with several people participating. By the time I saw the thread, he had actually said he’d welcome the chance to get trained in nonviolent action.
That thread sparked a desire in me to do some education about the history and power of nonviolence (I wish it were taught in schools!):
First, I totally support this activist’s decision to get nonviolence training. Every person should have nonviolent conflict AND nonviolent de-escalation in their toolkit, and especially every activist.
 
Second, it’s important to understand the enormous difference between active nonviolent resistance and passivity. Nonviolent resistance has been a successful tactic for centuries, and even Forbes noted that it’s typically twice as effective as violent tactics. It’s been used to great effect by:
  • Gandhi and the struggle for Indian independence
  • Martin Luther King, Jr., and the American Civil Rights movement
  • Activists of the Arab Spring
  • The safe energy/no nukes movement in the United States, Britain, and Germany
  • The students who mass-rallied in Tiananmen Square, Beijing
  • A large majority of the South African freedom fighters who reclaimed their country, and the many Eastern European movements who reclaimed theirs

The first recorded example I’m aware of goes all the way back to the Old Testament Book of Exodus: the midwives Shifrah and Pu’ah refused to carry out the Pharaoh’s order to murder all the newborn Hebrew boys. Nothing passive about this! Those two women risked their lives to create resistance to a murderous dictator’s “ethnic cleansing” plan.

Yes, there are some who practice nonviolence in ways that do nothing more than mildly irritate the power structure. But Gene Sharp has documented something like 193 active nonviolence tactics that are actually effective in creating social change, and he was writing in the pre-Internet era. I recommend his From Dictatorship to Democracy as a very readable introduction. It talks about how to get rid of dictators, nonviolently.
 
Sharp and many others have documented effective nonviolent resistance to the most oppressive totalitarian governments, including the Nazis, Stalin’s Soviet Union, the extremely repressive British colonial government in India…
 
Third, I have personally participated (and sometimes organized) numerous effective nonviolent actions with a vast range of scope, tactics, and goals. In one case, I was the only person doing the action on Day 1, and I watched the tide turn by Day 3.
 
The single most effective of all the actions I’ve been part of was probably the Seabrook nuclear power plant construction site of 1977. The state was forced to feed and house 1414 incarcerated protestors, most of whom did “bail solidarity,” refusing to post bail and becoming an enormous financial burden on the state, which also had to pay the salaries of the National Guard reservists who guarded us in their armories. They finally released everyone after 13 days.
 
Not only did we bring both the NH government and the power company to their knees, but by the time we all got out, a national safe energy/no nukes movement had sprung up, copying our structure, tactics, and goals.
And this movement managed to essentially freeze out nuclear power as an option in the US. Richard Nixon had called for 1000 nukes in the US, but I don’t think the number ever got past 104, nearly all of which got their permits before the Seabrook occupation—and all before the Three Mile Island (TMI) accident two years later.
 
Directly and indirectly, that movement can take credit for:
1) media coverage of TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima accidents while earlier accidents had been ignored;
2) a national and global shift toward safe energy consciousness, leading to much wider development of solar, deep conservation, and other clean energy technologies;
3) numerous new methods of organizing that were used by other active nonviolent movements such as Occupy and Standing Rock (both of which managed to last for many months despite enormous pressure)
Nonviolent occupiers approach the construction site of the Seabrook nuclear plant, April 30, 1977. Unattributed photo found at https://josna.wordpress.com/tag/anti-nuclear-movement/
Nonviolent occupiers approach the construction site of the Seabrook nuclear plant, April 30, 1977. Unattributed photo found at https://josna.wordpress.com/tag/anti-nuclear-movement/
 
I write in more detail about some of this in part 4 of the four-part series I did this spring, reflecting on the 40th anniversary of the Seabrook action: https://greenandprofitable.com/40-years-ago-today-we-changed-the-world-part-4-shifts-in-the-culture/ (if you want to read the whole thing, Part 1 is at https://greenandprofitable.com/40-years-ago-today-we-changed-the-world-part-1/ , and each part has a link at the bottom to the next one)
 
And fourth, nonviolent resistance works better than violent resistance. If we engage in violence, we play to the strengths of the opposition. The government has highly trained military and police forces able to inflict extreme violence on us. The fascisti have less to lose in attacking a violent mob and of course the police will be far less interested in protecting us from violent attackers if we ourselves are violent. The public loses sympathy for us and supports the repression.
But if we maintain nonviolent discipline in the face of violent attacks, the public swings rapidly to our side, and some even start thinking about how they can help the resistance. They may not put their bodies on the line, but they can be powerful allies in 1000 ways, if not chased away by political purity hawks who want all or nothing and forget that they, too, evolved their commitments over time.
 
Change happens when we reach a tipping point, when these folks have enough voice that they cannot be silenced, and enough influence that mainstream populations start to support them. And as noted above, throughout history, history, far more struggles for justice have been won in this way than through physical violence.
Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Diversity, Environment, Events, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, People Helping People, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

This Facebook Live video by Brené Brown, “We need to keep talking about Charlottesville,” posted August 15, might be the best thing I’ve ever come across on how to combat oppressive language without heaping guilt and shame on the other person, building bridges instead. I’d known her name but not her work. This video made me a fan. Strongly recommended.

She has an unusual perspective: a white anti-racist raised in the South, often mistaken for black by people who hadn’t met her, on the basis of her full legal name.

Can we create a world where these girls will be judged "not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character"? Photo by Anissa Thompson, freeimages.com
Can we create a world where these girls will be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”? Photo by Anissa Thompson, freeimages.com

I’ve been saying for many years that guilt and shame are not effective in making change (and in my work to create social change in the business world, I do my best to harness other motives, like enlightened self-interest). The example she gives of the young man confronting his father shows exactly why they don’t work. Not to confront racism or other isms, and not to protect the planet.

Brené is a better communicator than I am. As I engage in dialogue with “the other side,” I will do my best to remember her communications lessons, and those of Van Jones, whose wonderful riff on how to talk to Tea Partiers I wrote about several years ago.

For more of Brené Brown, visit her website.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Green Business, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

Seth Godin’s post this morning listed “17 Ideas for the Modern World.” It’s a great list, and I recommend you click through to get the longer explanations of each one. And if you aren’t subscribed to his daily bulletin, you really should be. He’s always challenging us to find the deeper meaning, and I find that not only excites my brain but often creates action.

I engaged in dialogue with him on one of the items, and I wanted to share that with you:

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

 

On Sat, Jun 24, 2017 at 5:18 AM, Seth Godin wrote:

See the end before you begin the journey

I’ll add a Part 2: –but recognize that what looks like the end when you start may turn out to be a way station

That has been key for me, as projects and goals evolve the more I learn and take me to places I could not have imagined.
The work I’m doing now about connecting business with profit opportunities addressing hunger, poverty, war, climate change, etc. (and thank you once again for endorsing my book on this, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World) started as an insight in 2001 or 2002 that the frugal marketing strategies I’d been championing for years also created a path for business to succeed by being ethical. By 2003, I had a book out on that. If I had thought it this far out, I would have never gotten started. It would have felt much too big and unachievable.
Back then, when I described my work, I used to often hear “business ethics? That’s an oxymoron!” I rarely hear that now (maybe once or twice in the past five years) and I like to think I had something to do with that change.

These days, I find people start with “oh, you can’t fix hunger, poverty, war, or climate change, we’ve been struggling with them for thousands of years.” And then they listen for a bit. And then as I lay out a few examples of businesses profiting by changing the world, they see that it can actually work, changing one business at a time. Their skepticism turns into enthusiasm. I’d love to figure out a way to scale that up.

PS: I only count 16. Did you drop one at the last minute? I’d love to know what it was.

Warmly,

Shel Horowitz – “The Transformpreneur”(sm)
________________________________________________
Watch (and please share) my TEDx Talk,
“Impossible is a Dare: Business for a Better World”
Contact me to bake in profitability while addressing hunger,
poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change
Twitter: @shelhorowitz
* First business ever to be Green America Gold Certified
* Inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame
mailto:shel at greenandprofitable.com * 413-586-2388
Award-winning, best-selling author of 10 books. Latest:
Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson)
_________________________________________________
Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail