Category: People Helping People

By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Green Business, People Helping People, Technology Tagged with , , , , , ,

Since about 1980, I’ve felt that we could solve a lot of our urban problems by seeing flat city roofs (and for that matter, roofs in suburban shopping centers, etc.) as resources: places where we can harvest energy with solar collectors—but also harvest food.

But when I started talking about my brainstorm, people told me that the roofs were not designed to bear the weight of a dense garden, and the amount of reinforcement they needed would make the whole idea unworkable. I never quite believed this. It seemed to me that if you were to put one or two 200 square-foot gardens onto a 2000 square foot roof, the weight load could be distributed across the entire rooftop without much difficulty. But I’m not an engineer.

Still, I wasn’t surprised to see the “green roof” movement emerge over the past ten years or so—but I was disappointed at how few green roofs seem to grow edible crops.

I do think community food self-sufficiency—particularly in urban areas–is a big part of the answer to “how do we reclaim our economy—and our bodies?” and a great antidote to the very dangerous practices of “chemiculture” [a word I personally coined, BTW], GMO seed strains, and the attempt by Monsanto and similar companies to exercise a terrifying degree of control over (and damage to) our food supply.  So I was delighted when I found these folks in the Bronx, using 6000 square feet of the 10,000-square-foot roof of a city-owned apartment building, to commercially grow hydroponic greens. With hydroponics, there is no soil, and therefore the issue of weight and roof support is moot. In this short video, Farm Manager Kate Ahearn gives us some background about the project. (I did make one error. I referred to a supermarket rooftop farm in Lynn, Mass. It’s actually in LynnFIELD.)

This model, with hydroponic gardens and protection from the elements, offers a 12-month growing season and numerous harvests. Yes, it’s more expensive to set up than a basic soil-based garden, but the payback is much greater. And as a green marketing guy, I see profitable, sustainable, earth-friendly businesses like this as a big step forward not only in economic development but in human rights and the rights of other living things.

Note: there will be more on this story. My old buddy Ted Cartselos did another shoot, with a better camera, on Friday. (Thanks, Ted, for working with me on this.)

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Peace and War, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , ,

This is very personal to me; my son’s college is about a mile from Copley Square.

He was fine, but he and a group of friends decided to walk home (several miles) rather than take the train as usual.

9/11 was also very personal. I was one connection removed from at least two people who were killed, and it took me two frantic weeks to find out that my ex-housemate from my Brooklyn days, who was at that time living just two blocks from the WTC, was all right.

But what made me want to write tonight was not those deep personal connections. It was a question by my friend @PeterShankman, founder of HARO, about how he can talk about this sort of random violence to his daughter, due to be born in a few days.

My answer, I admit, talked around his question rather than going straight for the center. I wrote:

We explained to our young kids (now 20 and 25) why we were bringing them to protest various wars and injustices and environmental atrocities, and to talk of the importance of NOT accepting evil, that we could always do SOMETHING and whether it worked or not was less important than that we did not turn a blind eye.

Interestingly enough, they both have been involved in social justice work quite a bit. My daughter defended a nerdy male classmate against bullies when she was six, and my son was also six when he organized a children’s fundraiser for Save the Mountain, the environmental group my wife and I started that actually did save our local mountain. I was and still am very proud of them.

I do feel that one of the things we did right as parents is to inculcate our kids both with a sense of social justice and with the knowledge that they can actually have an impact. These were lessons I got from my own mother, the late Gloria Yoshida; as a young mom in New York City, she was one of the white volunteers civil rights groups could call upon to find out if that “already rented” apartment was REALLY rented, or if it was only off the market if a black family came to look at it.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Activism, Energy & Sustainability, Innovation, People Helping People, Technology Tagged with , , , ,

I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy. Especially when I see evidence all around me of brilliant minds hard at work solving “intractable” problems, I freely admit that I’m an optimist. The human capacity to destroy ourselves is eclipsed by the human capacity to creatively collaborate, and to dig ourselves out of the mess.

And since writing is what  do, I’ve wanted to do a big-picture book on this, for many years. Last month, I started writing an essay on this, and I think it will evolve into the proposal for my ninth book.

To give you a bit of inspiration on this snowy afternoon (here in Massachusetts, anyway), I want to share two sentences from a section of the essay entitled “Throw Away Assumptions”:

Assumption, 18th century: humans can travel no faster than the fastest horse. Reality: humans aboard the International Space Station have traveled at 17,247 miles per hour; future technologies such as warp-space drives and tesseracts, imagined by speculative fiction writers, could potentially take us orders of magnitude faster.

Shifting our attitudes from the impossibility of going more than 15 or 20 miles an hour to hurtling through space at more than 17,000 mph took a couple of centuries. With today’s future-think mindset, solving the problems of the world ought to be a whole lot quicker. Especially considering the consequences of failure.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Green Business, Innovation, People Helping People Tagged with , , , , ,

For more than three decades, I’ve been suggesting that we need to see flat roofs as resources: they can provide space not just for solar energy, but also for gardens.

And growing up in New York City, where far too many people think that food comes out of cans or mysteriously arrives in the supermarket, this is especially true. New York has an enormous supply of flat roofs, many of which have terrific sun exposure.

So it gladdens my heart to see a project like this: utilizing flat roof space for year-round greenhouses in a long-depressed South Bronx neighborhood. On the roof of a public housing project designed to be green, in fact. My Western Massachusetts neighbor Joe Swartz (@SwartzFarm on Twitter), who is involved with this project, shared the first picture on a list we both participate on.

(The first link has an excellent picture. The second link has a crummy picture but a short informative article about the whole project.)

This is by no means the only example. It’s simpler to build without greenhouses, of course, if you don’t mind closing down for the winter. Here’s a 6,000 square-foot no-greenhouse rooftop commercial organic farm in northern Brooklyn, on a warehouse right across the river from Manhattan.

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By Posted on Posted in Diversity, People Helping People, Politics, poverty Tagged with , , , ,

Not many politicians, even progressive ones with a strong sustainability commitment, would try to live on today’s food stamp budget. Hats off to Newark, New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker for this bold step–showing his colleagues what it’s actually like to be poor.

Of course, he can go back to his regular life any time he wants. An option not open to very many of those who live on SNAP assistance.

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By Posted on Posted in People Helping People Tagged with , ,

Here are six resources from major organizations like the National Association of School Psychologists and American Academy of Pediatrics to help children deal with grief. Thanks to Bob Korngold who posted these on a discussion list for self-publishers, and to the person in his Montessori community who compiled them. I personally have not vetted them.

The National Association of School Psychologists — Talking to Children About Violence: Tips for Parents and Teachers

American Psychological Association – Helping Your Children Manage Distress in the Aftermath of a Shooting

American Academy of Pediatrics – Resources to Help Parents, Children and Others Cope in the Aftermath of School Shootings

The National Association of School Psychologists — A National Tragedy: Helping Children Cope

American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry – Children and Grief

Massachusetts General Hospital for Children — Talking to Children About a Shooting

Child Mind Institute – Caring For Kids After A School Shooting

As for what I consider some of the deepest wisdom about the whole problem of violence–with sources ranging from President Obama to Rabbi Arthur Waskow, see my roundup post from earier today, “After Newtown: The Best Voices.“

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Peace and War, People Helping People, Politics, Social and Economic Justice

I am going to let others speak for me this time.

President Barack Obama, at the Sunday vigil:

“These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change. … Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?”

Former US Senator Gary Hart—”Real Minutemen, Rise Up,” on Huffington Post:

Let’s have a new, sober, serious, non-paranoid gun organization whose members are the sane, thoughtful, responsible sportsmen who share the belief of the vast majority of Americans that assault weapons have no place in U.S. society. These mature minutemen also share the belief that state licensing of weapons, checks for criminal and mental backgrounds, and elimination of unregulated gun shows are necessary for a secure society.

We continue to spend hundreds of billions, even trillions, of tax dollars to achieve the elusive goal of national security. The movie-goers of Aurora, the little children of Newtown, were not secure. Those children are just as dead as if al Qaeda had killed them. Killing children is not a political issue: it is a moral issue.

The militia of the Constitution, now the National Guard and Reserve forces, are composed of serious, responsible citizens. Many are hunters and fishermen. They do not require an organization with a central message of paranoia to represent them. They should now form their own organization to speak for them and the great majority of gun owners would join them.

Juan Cole—”Questions I ask myself about Connecticut School Shooting“, Informed Comment

Why doesn’t anyone blame George W. Bush for these mass shootings? He’s the one who led the charge to let the assault weapons ban expire. Why aren’t the politicians in Congress who take campaign money from assault weapons manufacturers ever held accountable by the public?…

What in the world does the 2nd amendment have to do with these incidents? Do they look like a “well-regulated militia” to you? Semi-automatic weapons are the 18th-century equivalent of artillery in terms of their ability to kill. Do you think people should be allowed to have artillery pieces in their back yards, too? Is this some sort of sick joke, that you are telling us our children have to die because the Founding Fathers wanted madmen to have high-powered weaponry?…

Why aren’t there more class-action lawsuits against the people responsible for the proliferation of high- powered weaponry in our society? Lax gun laws and inadequate security checks in Mississippi, West Virginia and Kentucky and 7 other states meant that they supplied nearly half the 43,000 guns traced to crime scenes in other states in one recent year. The guns aren’t randomly acquired, and they aren’t used or Saturday night specials. They come disproportionately from specific states…

Why doesn’t anyone on television news ever simply give this statistic: In one recent year, there were 39 murders by gun in the UK, but 9,000 in the United States? Why is it wrong to let Americans know how peculiar is the situation Americans have to live in?

Rabbi Arthur Waskow, The Shalom Center (from his 12/16/12 newsletter,not yet posted on his website):

The address and phone number of the NRA (National Rifle Association) are 11250 Waples Mill Rd, Fairfax, VA 22030;  (703) 267-1000. Please call…through the week. (In Jewish tradition, “sitting shiva” to mourn the dead takes seven days.). If you get a busy signal, Good! That means many people are calling; please keep calling for as long as you have the time.  When you get through, ask for Wayne LaPierre (NRA’s executive director) and when you reach his office begin reading the names of the Newtown Connecticut dead that are listed above. When you have read some of the names, say that you insist the NRA announce it supports a Federal law prohibiting assault weapons and semi-automatic weapons and supports a Universal Background Check. This should not take more than five minutes. When you have done this, please drop me a note at Office@theshalomcenter.org

George Lakoff, “The Price of Our Freedom,” Huffington Post:

Total registration, just like with cars. An end to automatic and semi-automatic weapons. And an end to blaming massacres on crazies. Gun massacres require guns that can massacre. Eliminate them.

Filmmaker/Activist Michael Moore, in a speech Friday night in NYC:

Other countries, I mean, they have their crazy people, and they have people that—there have been shootings and killings in Norway, in France and in Germany. But there haven’t been 61 mass killings like there have been in this country just since Columbine. Sixty-one mass shootings in this country… We invade countries. We send drones in to kill civilians. We’ve got five wars going on right now where our soldiers are killing people—I mean, five that we know of. We are on the short list of illustrious countries who have the death penalty. We believe it’s OK to kill you when you’ve committed a crime.

And then we have all the other forms of violence in this country that we don’t really call violence, but they are acts of violence. When you—when you make sure that 50 million people don’t have health insurance in your country and that, according to the congressional study that was done, 44,000 people a year die in America for the simple reason that they don’t have health insurance, that’s a form of murder. That murder is being committed by the insurance companies. When you evict millions of peoples—millions of people from their homes, that’s an act of violence. That’s called a home invasion.

Later today I’ll post some resources for helping children deal with grief.

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, People Helping People, Politics, poverty, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

Apparently, a lot of people who voted for Romney would like to secede from the United States.

OK–let’s put aside for now the clear absurdity of this…the condemnation of the idea by Republican governors…the enormous difficulty of getting a majority of any state’s citizens to go along with it…the likelihood that this is based in crude racism…and the zero percent success rate of state secession movements in the United States.

Let’s just say they really do secede.

Most Southern states extract more money from the federal treasury than they pay in. And many people in the region work at US military installations or government offices. Everyone in the region relies on federal funding to maintain their transportation infrastructure, civil defense/disaster response And then of course there are those getting by with the help of federal assistance programs such as food stamps and Social Security (the ones Romney derided as “the 47 percent”).

In other words, if the secession movement succeeds, the secessionist states are going to take a huge economic hit. Bob Cesca, in one of the links cited above, says the federal government could simply starve them out and have them rejoin without military action. He’s probably right.

But here’s something perhaps more important that I don’t hear anyone saying:

If the Red states secede, Democrats will have a whopping majority in Congress and could actually get a much more humane, people-centered society in place–which the Red states would have to accept as reality when they come crawling back in a few years, IF the US will have them back.

Wouldn’t it be grand to have a country with a European style single-payer health plan…a solar-powered economy with jobs for all…a military designed to actually defend our shores instead of pursue imperialist wars in countries where we have no justification for our invasion (can you say Iraq?)…an education system that values science and knowledge, and prepares the next generation to play a leadership role in advancing society through technological progress…and so on?

So I say…let ’em Secede!

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, People Helping People, Politics Tagged with , , , ,

This year’s Blog Action Day theme is “The Power of We” (hashtags #BAD12 and #powerofwe)—and I can think of no better example than the powerful story of Save the Mountain, a group I founded in 1999 to protect the threatened Mount Holyoke Range that runs behind my house in Hadley, Massachusetts.

Here’s how I tell the story in my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green (it’s in third-person because I have a co-author):

In November 1999, a developer announced a plan to desecrate ridgetop land abutting a state park by building 40 trophy homes two miles from Shel’s house. The original newspaper article interviewed several local conservationists who expressed variations on “Oh, this is terrible, but there’s nothing we can do.”

But Shel refused to accept that. Within four days, he had drawn up a petition, posted a Web page, called a meeting for two weeks later, and sent out press releases and fliers about the formation of Save the Mountain.

Note that all of these actions are marketing actions. He could have called a meeting and not told the public, and then a few friends would have shown up and realized that they couldn’t do very much. But by harnessing the power of the press, the Internet, and the photocopier, and crafting a message that would resonate with his neighbors–that not only was this terrible, but that there was something we could do–he was able to spark something that truly had an impact.

Shel and his wife, Dina Friedman, expected 20 or so people to come to the first meeting; they had over 70. From that day until December 2000, the group fought the project on every conceivable level: technical issues like hydrology, rare species, and slope of the road…organizing and marketing components including a petition drive (over 3000 signed), turnout of up to 450 at various public hearings, lawn signs, tabling, a big press campaign with over 70 articles…working with the state Department of Environmental Management to investigate options for saving the land…

Literally hundreds of people got involved with some degree of active participation. Many, many people brought widely varying expertise to the movement, far more than any of them could have had on their own.

By using his own skills in marketing and organizing, Shel was able to convert the outrage and despair and shock that were felt throughout a three-county area when this project was announced into a powerful–and highly visible–public force. As a group, STM had about 35 core activists, all working on many levels, both public and private. The persuasion in this case was not about the desirability of stopping the project; they had near-consensus on that, community-wide. Rather, it focused on the ability of a committed group of people to make a difference even when the experts said it was impossible.

Within two months, STM had established itself firmly in the public eye–and had actually shifted the discourse from “There’s nothing you can do” to “Which strategies will be most effective?” Collectively, the group used its powers of persuasion, and its skills at reaching the public with this message, to change the project from inevitable to impossible. The land was permanently preserved in just 13 months–four years ahead of Shel’s original five-year estimate for victory.

Excerpted, with permission, from Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet by Jay Conrad Levinson and Shel Horowitz (John Wiley & Sons). To get your own copy from your favorite bookseller or an autographed copy dfrectly form me, (including $2000 worth of bonuses), please visit https://www.guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com and scroll to the bottom.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Green Business, Green Marketing, Innovation, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, People Helping People, Socially Responsible Investing, Technology, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Heard of Carrotmobs yet? Consumers have used our buying power to avoid companies with the wrong values for decades. Now there’s a positive flip: actively making the effort to buy from companies that support your values. I only heard the term “Carrotmob”—so called because consumers use the carrot of positive business rather than the stick of withdrawing business to achieve social good.

I think I only heard the term a month or two ago; since then, I’ve run across it several times. This concept seems to be entering the language faster than anything I can remember since “Ms.” was invented as a gender-neutral alternative to Miss and Mrs., back in the1970s.

Here’s a particularly cool one with the odd twist that it was initiated by the company—and since I write about out-of-the-box people-centered marketing of green products and services, worth flagging here. I imagine this marketing strategy could get old fast if too many people do it, but the idea of having your customers pre-fund your sustainability venture is a good one. Think abou Kickstarter campaigns; this isn’t so different, after all.

A coffee company has decided that organic/fair trade coffee is not enough; the coffee should be transported on cargo ships powered by renewable energy. Specifically, using wind power.

Thanksgiving Coffee, a California-based artisan roaster, will arrange for wind-powered shipping if people buy $150,000 worth of coffee on Carrotmob. The goal is to prove demand for wind-transported coffee and research ways to make wind-powered shipping a reality in our own time.

It’s worth remembering that all cargo shipping from the dawn of history into the 19th century was either wind-powered or human-powered (by rowers). So there’s no need to prove that cargo shipping can be wind-powered. However, a transatlantic voyage by wind took many weeks, sometimes went way off course, was more susceptible to storms, etc. Steam and then diesel made shipping fast and reliable enough to create the modern global economy. So the real challenge is not to prove that they can use wind-powered ships, but that they can compete effectively using a modern wind-powered shipping fleet.

This of course could have a huge impact on the entire cargo shipping industry, if it can be done effectively and inexpensively enough to transport many different types of items. And certainly, it will inspire the shipping industry to add more sustainable practices even if using conventional diesel-powered cargo ships.

Meanwhile, if you’re a coffee drinker, you can help Thanksgiving Coffee test the waters for sustainable shipping. Go read the article on Ecopreneurist, or skip directly to the Thanksgiving Coffee Carrotmob page and buy a pound or two.

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