Some did, although I hadn’t heard. A suit by an organic farming association was dismissed because the court didn’t find any evidence of farmers being sued in this situation.
All this is prelude to a news story in yesterday’s Daily Hampshire Gazette (my local paper) describing a lawsuit by a local pot farmer over pesticide contamination from an adjoining chemiculture berry farm. Apparently, because Massachusetts state law prohibits any pesticide residue in pot, the farmer lost one year’s crop to contamination and at least two more years because their storage freezers were filled with the contaminated crop, which the state is requiring them to keep as evidence—leaving them no room for current crops.
First, the obvious question: if these pesticides shouldn’t be ingested by adults eating or smoking cannabis products, why are we allowing kids to eat them unwashed as they accompany their parents in the u-pick fields? Why should pesticides be allowed on fruits whose sprayed surfaces are directly consumed? While an especially thorny issue (pun intended) for berries, it’s also an issue for apples, pears, plums, cherries, etc. And frankly, even rind fruit is not necessarily uncontaminated.
Second, could this admittedly extreme case finally set legal precedent allowing farmers to sue successfully over threats to their organic status?
Welcome to 2025, a year that’s only two weeks old and already fraught. This is a
challenging time. Business leaders who believe business can make the world better for
the planet and its residents will face intense scrutiny and pressure to fold our tents. But
if we stand firm, if we continue to act on our sense of ethics, our decency, and our
knowledge that environmental and social responsibility is a business success strategy,
we will eventually prevail!
My heart goes out to readers and their loved ones who have been directly impacted by
the dozens of recent massive climate events such as the floods in the US Southeast,
Libya, and Uganda, earthquakes in China and Vanuatu, fires in California, cyclones in
Mozambique and Sri Lanka, volcanic eruption in the Philippines…and by human-caused
disasters, including the brutal wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the massive migrations from
areas that are no longer safe, and more.
Speaking of human-caused disasters—here in the US, starting on January 20, we face
an openly authoritarian, openly bigoted, and openly corrupt administration that brags
about how it will undo our progress on environmental and social issues and attacks
personal freedom. This new government plans to act not as a force for the greater good,
but to enrich kleptocrats and make life miserable for “enemies” within.
And many senior executives are pushing hard to enable that undercutting within their
own organizations. Companies are shredding DEI programs, universities are struggling
to come up with something equitable to replace welcoming admissions policies deemed
illegal by a partisan Supreme Court, and both social and mainstream media are
adopting policies that kowtow to authoritarians, from eliminating fact-checks and
enabling hate speech to suppressing criticism of the new regime. And alas, similar
governments already exist in Hungary, North Korea, Russia, and elsewhere.
Under-the-radar organizing by progressive grassroots organizations is massive.
And these groups are finally working together. I went to one national Zoom meeting that
had 140,000 registrants, 100,000 attenders, and the active participation of at least five
national grassroots groups. Individually and collectively, they’re crafting and launching
to best create nonviolent strategies to resist Trump policies and nominees.
These organizing efforts marked its first victory in November with the almost immediate collapse of Matt Gaetz’s nomination for Attorney General, which culminated in the release of the US House ethics report on his long list of transgressions.
So instead of drowning in doom and gloom, get active, get involved, get excited. Remember, as Nerissa Nields put it in her song, “Tyrants Always Fall” (written during the earlier Trump administration), “There are more of us than there are of them.” And become an even more effective agent of change!
Largely missing from the wailing and lamentation and finger-pointing over the US election result is the enormous non-electoral-politics based resistance. Yes, it’s true that Trump not only won but has at least temporary control over both Houses of Congress and a majority of the Supreme Court and several appellate courts. Yes, it’s true that the next few years will be very ugly and will cause a lot of pain. But there’s still hope.
I’ve been on many “what-do-we-do-now?” calls since the election. Organizing is going on at hundreds of organizations, mobilizing tens of thousands of people. I was on one call organized by 200 organizations (including major players like MoveOn and Public Citizen) that drew an astounding 140,000 registrants.
In the era before most people had Internet access or a cell phone, and long before COVID forced us to develop new ways of organizing, Gene Sharp listed 198 different nonviolent resistance tactics, grouped under three umbrella categories: nonviolent protest and persuasion, social/economic/political noncooperation, and nonviolent intervention. We can certainly add at least 100 that have been developed since. Here’s an example that I just saw this week:
A restaurant uses its receipts to point out three relevant ways immigrants make the country great.
And during the pandemic, I participated in various actions that were designed to create a visible public presence without exposing people to the germs of strangers. One that I especially remember was a parade of decorated cars, each with only one or two people but taking up more than half a mile of contiguous and mobile visibility as it snaked through town (accompanied by lots of horn honking and shouting, of course). As a USArian, I see the Left in this country as far better organized than we were in 2016-17. I also see Trump as physically and mentally diminished, unable to even stay awake during his own criminal trial. People mobilized in huge numbers back then and were able to curb some of the worst aspects of Trumpism. And, by withdrawing institutional and personal support from institutions that betray the populace, while at the same time building our own institutions to replace the flawed ones (think food co-ops as alternatives to agribiz-oriented huge national supermarket chains, credit unions, community banks, and local currencies instead of big national banks, homeschooling networks for kids who don’t fit in at public school…) we can continue our resistance.
Unfortunately, the Right is also better organized AND has a lot more sitting judges and Justices who have shown alarming willingness to make policy up out of old bandaids and spider webs–certainly not based on precedent. BUT the Right is in the unenviable position of pushing wildly unpopular policies, supporting a president who has no understanding of real policy impact, constantly changes his mind, and demands absolute loyalty—or putting their own power and positions at risk by opposing him—and at the same time attempting to keep government functional, bring government money back to their districts, etc.
Someone pointed out that Gaetz’s withdrawal (which also potentially lowers the House majority, as do Trump’s other nominations of sitting members of Congress) had a lot to do with citizen outrage AND Trump overreach in trying to bypass the confirmation process. To me, the important takeaway is that we still have power and we can still make a difference as long as we don’t preemptively abandon the effort. It will be a give-and-take. It will be very hard to live in the US for the next few years, but there will be active nonviolent response, resistance, and resilience. And yes, we will face many defeats, and real people will be hurt. But we already have victories to celebrate (not just Gaetz but the passage of reproductive rights in seven states—four of which voted for Trump—and election of progressive judges in several traditionally conservative states, plus several unexpected Congressional victories). And we will have many more victories down the line.
Ever since Biden withdrew, reporters have been kvetching that they have a hard time finding out Kamala Harris’s policy positions. This is a very dubious claim, considering she has a website, she gave a broad outline of several polices in a much-viewed speech at the Democratic Convention and regularly repeats those themes in many speeches around the country.
But I’m not here to chastise lazy journalists but to give them another great place to find her policy statements:
Kamala Harris gave a truly remarkable interview to three very tough questioners at the National Association of Black Journalists. It is so rare to see a forum of this type where the journos actually let the interviewee answer at length and with depth.
And Kamala was really impressive—not just because she gave smart and detailed answers, not just because she continues to make every appearance about uplifting everyday people—but because she takes a holistic view that has not been obvious to me in the sound-bite journalism that all-too-often passes for news. This interview makes it clear that she understands root causes, unintended consequences, and the interrelatedness of multiple issues (intersectionality, in other words).
In a campaign where one candidate makes a fetish of putting others down, vowing retribution against perceived enemies, lying his way through life, and never taking responsibility for his criminal actions or dangerous policies, where everything is only about how he personally will benefit, it’s refreshing to discover that his opponent is a deeply systemic thinker who has crafted action plans that will help ordinary people while she continues to undo the damage that Trump inflicted on this country. Biden has made good progress on undoing that damage, but we still have a long way to go. I am convinced that Harris will carry that water for us.
I was especially moved by her answers on Gaza, on the race-baiting of Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian community, and on making progress on the US’s massive problem of gun violence. But the whole thing is so worth watching that I posted it not just to my Facebook feed but also LinkedIn and several of my Facebook groups.
We are at the dawn of a new era in ESG (Environmental/Social/Governance, often rolled together as “sustainability). Following a long Model T Ford stage of kludged-together bandaid fixes, we are finally evolving into a much more holistic, much more regenerative approach. This incorporates several deeper methodologies like biomimicry, lifecycle costing, product take-backs, and multiple functions from single innovations, as well as massively scaled climate solutions that can actually reverse atmospheric carbon.
A lot of this progress is happening because the increasingly extreme weather of the last few years makes it obvious that we have no choice; we either learn how to be good neighbors to other species, ecosystems, and the planet—or the planet will drive us out. It’s going to be exciting.
We will see:
• Much deeper understanding of what the actual problem is. As one example: rather than focusing on building a better car, design ways to move people and freight across distances without requiring new roads, clogging existing ones, or pollution: something that would eventually make the private personal vehicle obsolete. It might look like modular mass transit bubbles that link together to move great distances at high speeds, then separate for last-mile door-to-door delivery—or it might look like “Beam me up, Scotty”—or, much more technologically and financially achievable, a group-conference immersion platform that simulates in-person contact through holography, smell receptors, and other techniques.
• Nature-based solutions that are far simpler, less expensive, and more effective than present approaches: emulating desert beetles for pure water supplies, bacterial fermentation to turn waste plastic into something useful, adhesives that replicate geckos, etc.
• Far more attention to the S in ESG, and integrating it with the E. For instance, green agriculture could create whole new industries that provide jobs and economic power to marginalized inner-city neighborhoods and depressed rural areas (or entire countries). And they could use open hiring procedures like the one that’s been so successful for Greyston Bakery to provide ladders out of poverty to ex-addicts, ex-felons, and ex-mental patients who have very little hope of finding a job through more standard approaches. Greyston is now consulting to other companies on how to implement a successful open hiring program.
Within a few years, these will be moving into the mainstream—providing significant competitive advantage over the companies that don’t embrace them: in energy and materials efficiency, reduced labor costs, and other direct operational benefits—and ALSO in marketing. These major steps forward will attract and retain customers, perhaps even turn customers into unpaid brand ambassadors.
We’ve been shown the path by visionaries like Amory Lovins, Janine Benyus, and Gunter Pauli for more than 20 years. We already know many of the solutions. Now we have to implement all these great ideas.
This could be quite the game-changer: a new technology that turns gas piping from a useless and expensive “stranded asset” to a powerful lever to green entire business and residential districts. And New York State just passed a law to encourage it.
On a quick look, I don’t see any obvious flaws. Do you? Please leave it in a comment. I’ll be taking a more in-depth look at this in my March newsletter. If you’re not a subscriber yet, please visit any page at my main website, https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/ You’ll get some nice gifts for subscribing, too.
Guest post from Bob Burg—may it inspire your success in 2024. I first discovered Bob through a newsletter he used to do called Winning Without Intimidation, some time in the 1990s–which was all about getting your desired outcome through kindness, compassion, and empathy. I still use many of those teachings.
Bob Burg, speaker and author on success through kindness and compassion
He published this in his current newsletter, Daily Impact, on December 29. I just love the frame that only one partner has to think of an interaction as a collaboration to achieve dramatic success, even if the other party sees an adversary. What a wonderful abundance frame—and so applicable to entrepreneurs! You can subscribe at Burg.com (scroll down to just above the footer). Used with Bob’s permission.
—Shel
Use This Concept, Which Is So Much More Productive Than Competition…
By Bob Burg
It ranks right up there with my all-time favorite quotes:
“I never saw the opposing pitcher as my adversary, but rather as my ‘partner’ in hitting home runs.” ~Sadaharu Oh (868 Home Runs)
This statement is perhaps the ultimate in collaboration.
And the Japanese professional baseball legend knows what he’s talking about. He remains the all-time leading home run hitter in the world…ever!
“But,” you might ask, “certainly the pitcher isn’t wanting to collaborate on this. The pitcher wants to strike the batter out, right?”
Indeed! Which leads to a very important truth…
Key Point: There are times when both parties don’t even need to be in on the collaboration in order for it to occur.
As long as at least one of the parties involved — whether we’re talking about an interpersonal conflict, a business negotiation, or a home run — has the proper attitude, they will approach the situation from a frame of collaboration, which is really nothing less than a frame of love.
And love conquers all.
You could even say that…it’s the ultimate home run.
Today’s Exercise: Recall a time when you witnessed collaboration, even though only one person *at first* seemed to be “in on it.” Based on the attitude of the first person, did the second person seem to naturally become more involved?
Now think about how *you* can set a frame of collaboration, even when the other person isn’t quite in on it…yet.
Multicultural contingent at a climate march. Photo by Shel Horowitz.
Once again, research proves it’s cheaper to do the right thing. An analysis by Bloomberg shows just how expensive the climate crisis is. “…The combined expenses from property damages, power outages, government spending and construction-surge inflation” come in around $7 trillion USD. And that doesn’t even include significant costs such as lost wages and higher insurance premiums.
Of course, that $7 trillion is helping some sectors. If you run, for instance, a flood-damage restoration company, you’re probably having a very good few years.
But for the rest of us, we have to add that into all the other costs of building an overly centralized economy relying on toxic, eco-destructive fossil and uranium power sources, massive inputs of unnatural chemicals, and massive waste. I just finished reading a book that talked about some of that waste. Did you know that the amount of waste to produce a semiconductor chip is 600 times the actual product weight? (The Sustainability Scorecard, p. 63)
This makes no sense and is totally unnecessary. In nature, there is no waste. I’ve been talking about biomimicry–engineering and design that borrows solutions from nature–for more than 20 years. This opens up many deeper, more holistic solutions that don’t just move the problem around or disguise it, but actually move us forward. It’s time to embrace not just our knowledge but our imagination, and move–as Transition town founder Rob Hopkins puts it in the book I’m reading now, “From What Is to What If.”
Drop me a note if you’d like to discuss how to put these principles to work in your own business. The first 15 minutes are on me, and that can make a very nice start.
NASA photo tracking 2011 Superstorm Sandy. Attribution: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from Greenbelt, MD, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Tracking_a_Superstorm_(8970258657).png
A friend posted her fears that the extreme weather we’ve pretty much all been experiencing is only going to get worse…that coastal cities (which includes most of the world’s great centers) are going to be hammered by storms that will make Hurricane Sandy—which wreaked havoc in NYC and elsewhere—feel like a gentle rain…wildfires that consume vast acreage, depleted aquifers that cannot regenerate and can no longer supply our farming needs…
I agree with her that the current path will lead to multiple calamities. But I remain optimistic that the rapidly closing window to fix it is still open for now; we can still reverse the destruction. We know how: innovation has reached astounding levels in the last 20 or 30 years, and we humans have developed and piloted hundreds of cool technologies and processes that accomplish multiple good outcomes with zero-to-minimal harm.
But we are 50 years late in making meaningful progress and we can’t be wasting time debating whether human-caused climate change is real. Nearly unanimously, scientists who are not funded by polluters agree that humans have accelerated climate change significantly. And even if the climate change is nothing more than the earth making course corrections, we still need to address/reverse/prevent the effects if human civilization is going to continue in anything like the way we know it.
With light editing for context and to mask the identities of others who posted in the thread, this is my response:
My Response to the Gloom-and-Doom Post
One thing we can all do—homeowners, tenants, farmers, business owners—is STOP SQUANDERING CLEAN WATER! We waste far more than we actually consume, and this has serious consequences as aquifers dry up. I just read this morning in a book called The Sustainabiity Scorecard that certain prescription drug manufacturing processes generate up to 7700x the product weight in waste, most of it water. I’ve said for more than 20 years that while our descendants might forgive us for squandering oil (which has substitutes), they will NOT forgive us for squandering water, which is essential to life.
Like most pieces of climate change, we’ve known how to fix the problems for decades—but we can’t find the political will. We should be living in a circular economy by now, where waste is transformed into input. We should be powering that economy with clean and renewable power sources including not only the common ones like solar and wind but more advanced, less well-known technologies like harnessing light and natural electrochemical reactions (see Gunter Pauli, The Blue Economy 3.0). We have known how to do this since at least 2001, and we’ve known we need to do it since at least 1970. This is our last chance to get it done before the scenarios [the original poster] is worried about become everyday reality—and lead to constant civil unrest, widespread famine, and various other calamities that dwarf anything we’ve experienced. Science fiction writers like John Brunner have been describing that awful world for generations, because they could see the logical consequences of hiding our heads in the sand and pretending everything can go on as it has.
BTW *I* am actually an optimist on this. I believe we can still fix it, but we damn well better hurry up and commit society to solving these interrelated problems just as we committed ourselves globally to de-fanging COVID (with amazing success in a very short time)—but the longer we wait, the harder the task. The window is closing while we squander the 50-60 years we’ve had to get it done.
And thus I AGREE with [another commenter]’s paragraph about mitigation. Yes, engineers and designers can fix a lot of stuff—especially if they come in not attached to particular solutions but look holistically at how integrated solutions can not only address multiple problems at once (e.g., climate, waste disposal, water and food insufficiency, human comfort) but provide lots of jobs and community revitalization at the same time. But too many engineers have been trained in the existing, failing ways of thinking. We need to think circular and lifecycle impacts (including end-of-product-life disposal or repurposing), with closed loops, zero waste, net energy consumption, or pollution, etc.—and not linear thinking that only acknowledges processes production cost. Engineering as usually practiced has a tendency to externalize things like disposal costs onto the backs of us taxpayers and our progeny.
I also agree that we need to look at pollution, waste disposal, etc. in other industries including chemicals and battery manufacturing, and I don’t see electric cars or solar panels as panaceas.
But I totally disagree with most of his other points. The overwhelming scientific consensus, at least of scientists not funded by fossil companies or others who would have to drastically alter their processes (and temporarily lower their profitability) to fix the mess they helped create, is that human-caused climate change is real, and extremely dangerous.
[Original poster] brings up fusion, as she often does. Fusion sounds great in theory, but I’ve been hearing for my whole life that it’s just around the corner, and yet we never turn that corner. We can’t sit around waiting for fusion. The most optimistic predictions still put it pretty far down the pipe as a mainstream energy source. Yes, let’s keep the research going, but meanwhile, dig ourselves out of this deep hole of our own making.
I know [the original poster] is also a fan of small-scale nuclear fission, but I am not. [In her response to my comment, she corrected me and said she is not either.] If you want to know why, visit https://clamshellalliance.com/statements/statement/ (disclosure: I provided some minor help in writing this, particularly the section on accidents). I have some expertise here: my first of ten books was on why nuclear fission is a big mistake. It was written in the aftermath of Three Mile Island (as a revision/update of a much older book by my co-authors) and I updated it again—for a Japanese publisher—after Fukushima.
Several years ago, I brainstormed a list of 111 things the average person can do to reduce carbon and water footprints. It’s not comprehensive, it’s not necessarily the most important—it’s just one person’s brainstorm from around 2009. It retails for $9.95 but I’m giving it away. Just visit https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/#Freebies and click “Painless Green” (yes, you will need to provide your email and subscribe to my monthly newsletter—but you can unsub if you don’t like it).
More than anything else, this is a piece about hope: about the power of each of us to have impact in our own lives, in the lives of those around us, in our communities, and to our ecosystem and the entire planet.
Sign by Nancy Hodge Green, used at Seabrook by Shel Horowitz, 1977. Photo by Shel Horowitz
Two case studies from my own life:
How a Single Demonstration Redirected US Energy Away from a Super-Toxic and Dangerous Future to a Much Saner Alternative
At age 20, I was one of 1414 protestors arrested as we occupied the construction site of the Seabrook nuclear power plant. At that time, the US government was envisioning 1000 nuclear power plants around the country. They never got past about a tenth of that, and I’m convinced that the ripples from that demonstration have a lot to do with why. On the 40th anniversary, I wrote a five-part blog series about what happened and my take on why. That link will take you to part one, with jumps to each succeeding part at the bottom. It’s really important reading for activists, authors, business innovators, educators, and others who want to change the world.
How Changing What I Eat Led Me to a Writing and Marketing Career I don’t know the exact date, but I think some time last week marked 50 years since I stopped eating meat. I know that I threw a party to mark my conversion and planned to stop eating meat as of that late August date, but I’d actually stopped several days earlier. I’m grateful for several things about that transition:
1) that after almost four years as an activist it was the first major step I consciously took toward living lighter on the earth, changing my lifestyle to match by beliefs;
2) that it was the first time I was really thinking long-term and strategically: I came home from a fishing trip at age 12 and announced I was turning vegetarian. My mom immediately responded that vegetarianism would stunt my growth. I was already a runty kid, small and weak for my age, and we didn’t have the Internet to check easily—so I promised her that I’d wait—and promised myself that I would remember and honor my promise to go off meat once I’d reached that milestone);
3) that I actually was capable of remembering and fulfilling a promise made four years earlier
4) that the whole world of food alternatives began to open up to me with this transition. Although Yoshi had been part of my life for about five years and thus I had some exposure to Japanese food, we had very little money and seldom ate out, and my mom’s cooking was tilted heavily toward kid-pleasing macaroni casseroles and meat loaves. She was into whole wheat and brown rice, so we were a step ahead. But I knew nothing about the flavor and nutrition and cooking techniques of Indian, Thai, Turkish, Mexican, Ethiopian, Vegamerican, Szechuan, Arabic… I’d never made bread, or yogurt, or sprouts, or pretty much anything from scratch other than salad dressing. The deeper my explorations, the more exciting eating became.
5) that I would arrive two months later for my first term at Antioch College with a new identity and lifestyle, and would not have to remake myself later in the eyes of my peers: something that deepened once I did arrive on campus and (with 600 miles between me and the stairwell where I was raped by a stranger several years earlier) almost immediately got in touch with my bisexuality and became active in the school’s flourishing LGBT community—which in turn led me to be involved in campus theater, campus radio, my first public speaking, my first time running an organization, an extended and public dialogue with the town’s mostly-progressive but homophobic newspaper that gave me a window into the power of the press (and thus my career as a writer and marketer), and more.
Lessons for Organizers, Change Agents, and Business Visionaries
In other words, there’s truth in the parable about a single butterfly’s wings changing the climate on a different continent. Our actions ripple out and ripple out and ripple out again, and we never know the full consequences of those actions when we undertake them. I had no idea when I stopped eating meat how far that would reverberate and how much it would shape me. I had no idea when I took the training ahead of the Seabrook occupation that we would leave a national movement in our wake whose effects are still felt almost 50 years later. Did Gandhi, Steve Jobs, Mary Kay, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Edison, Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web), Mother Teresa, or Nelson Mandela know at the beginning of their careers what impact they’d have? I very much doubt it.
