Good article on Triple Pundit about how to discuss environmental issues with people who either don’t care or are actively hostile to the Green perspective. Five talking points you can use to reach people via their own self-interest.

The list includes the sweeping headings of population, education, “natural capital,” and the economy.One particularly thought-provoking point in the natural capital category: the easiest and cheapest half of any natural resource is always extracted first, meaning the environmental and economic impact of continuing to extract starts climbing very steeply once the low-hanging fruit is gone. This is why gasoline was only 30 cents a gallon when I was a kid, and floats between $2 and $4 in my area currently (much more expensive in Europe, by the way).

But on the whole, this article doesn’t give a lot of ammunition to environmental advocates in the trenches. The next step is to take these categories and make them specific and actionable, and really appeal to the self-interest of those listening.

Examples?

• Whether or not you care about climate change, you should care about the huge inflationary spiral caused by soaring fuel prices. If we can reduce our fossil fuel consumption by 50 percent, that means your dollar will continue to go a lot farther than it would otherwise. Otherwise, it will continue to get worse because the oil that’s easy and cheap to get is already used up.
• Do you know I saved 40 percent of my paper costs in my business, just by switching to a two-sided printer and using the double-side feature? Do you think that could work in your business?

How to Talk Green with Anti-Environmentalists is a post from: Principled Profit

Today is another Blog Action Day for social justice, and today’s topic is water. My slant on this, as someone who writes about environmental issues, is that access to clean, safe water is both an environmental and a justice issue. And that the easiest way to promote safe, clean water around the world is for us resource hogs in the developed countries to be much more careful not to squander the good water we are privileged to have.

Here are some facts provided by Blog Action Day (emphasis added):

1.      Unsafe drinking water and lack of sanitation kills more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. Unclean drinking water can incubate some pretty scary diseases, like E. coli, salmonella, cholera and hepatitis A. Given that bouquet of bacteria, it’s no surprise that water, or rather lack thereof, causes 42,000 deaths each week.

2.      More people have access to a cell phone than to a toilet. Today, 2.5 billion people lack access to toilets. This means that sewage spills into rivers and streams, contaminating drinking water and causing disease.

3.      Every day, women and children in Africa walk a combined total of 109 million hours to get water. They do this while carrying cisterns weighing around 40 pounds when filled in order to gather water that, in many cases, is still polluted. Aside from putting a great deal of strain on their bodies, walking such long distances keeps children out of school and women away from other endeavors that can help improve the quality of life in their communities.

4.      It takes 6.3 gallons of water to produce just one hamburger. That 6.3 gallons covers everything from watering the wheat for the bun and providing water for the cow to cooking the patty and baking the bun. And that’s just one meal! It would take over 184 billion gallons of water to make just one hamburger for every person in the United States.

5.      The average American uses 159 gallons of water every day – more than 15 times the average person in the developing world. From showering and washing our hands to watering our lawns and washing our cars, Americans use a lot of water. To put things into perspective, the average five-minute shower will use about 10 gallons of water. Now imagine using that same amount to bathe, wash your clothes, cook your meals and quench your thirst.

So…not to leave you sunk, here are a few easy and cheap/free ways to use less water:

Don’t run the water unnecessarily! Whether washing dishes or brushing your teeth, think about low-water methods. For those dishes,  clean the insides with a
soapy sponge and then only turn on the water (at modest force) to
rinse. For tooth brushing, wet the toothbrush, turn off the faucet, brush, wet again to rinse–you’ll use teaspoons instead of gallons.

Unbottle yourself. Save bottled water for places where tap water is not safe to drink. Bottling water consumes vast amounts of water (several times what’s actually in the bottle), energy, and plastic (much of which ends up in landfills). And lots of bottled water is nothing more than expensive public water supply water anyway. In much of the developed world, filtered tap water tastes as good as many bottled brands and has a far lower environmental and financial footprint.

Eat less (or no) meat–see #4, above. As a 37-year vegetarian, I can tell you that the wonderful cuisines of the world opened up to me when I stopped eating meat. I eat healthy, tasty, nutritious food, and I don’t miss the stuff I used to eat.

Sign the Blog Action Day UN Water Rights Petition:

(For more water saving tips, please see my e-book Painless Green: 110 Tips to Help the Environment, Lower Your Carbon Footprint, Cut Your Budget, and Improve Your Quality of Life-With No Negative Impact on Your Lifestyle.)

Water is an Environmental Justice Issue #blogactionday is a post from: Principled Profit

Back to back, I saw two instances of organizations making a good step forward, but stopping half-way. Why do they stop there?

I’m in New York because I spoke at a conference today, at the Sheraton on 7th Avenue at 53rd. So of course, I took the E train from where I’m staying in Queens to the conference hotel. And since I was speaking, I had a handcart loaded with books to sell after my talk.

Getting off the train, I noticed an escalator up. Oh, good–it’s not much fun to carry 30 pounds of books and a cart up a crowded NYC public stair. And good, too, for anyone who pushes a stroller.

This is progress. When I was a kid growing up here, only a handful of stations had any kind of mechanized people lifter. A few escalators, a handful of elevators. Now, people with disabilities can navigate many parts of the system, but nowhere near the whole thing. The city is definitely making an effort.

However…the escalator only goes as far as the token arcade, and there’s still a flight of stairs from there to the street. And in the opposite direction, down to the platform, there is no option. It’s stairs–a loooong flight–or walk to another station. And no one in their right mind would take a wheelchair even on the part that has an escalator. Fail!

Inside the elegant hotel, I got to the conference room and was pleased to see, instead of the usual water bottles, the far Greener approach of carafes of filtered tap water and biodegradable (compostable, really) plastic cups. An excellent start–score one for Sheraton.

But to complete the circle, the hotel needs to collect those cups separately for composting. Instead, they’re going into the regular trash. Considering the premium price the hotel is likely paying for branded, custom printed compostable plastic, this is rather odd. Either the hotel should do glass, or collect the cups separately for proper, eco-friendly disposal.

Unlike the subway accessibility problem, which would be hugely difficult to re-do, this would be an easy fix, and would give the chain a lot more Green karma points.

Half-Measures on Green and Accessible is a post from: Principled Profit

I tried to make this comment directly on the article, at http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/thegreenguide/2010/09/urban-foragers-cropping-up-in.html. It wouldn’t take, and I’m not one to waste a good comment.

I’m a long-time forager. Just today, I was checking on the Russian olives in my neighborhood (an invasive that I find quite tasty). I’ve picked plenty of wild raspberries and blueberries, and have a fondness for lambs’ quarters.

As the primary author (with Jay Conrad Levinson) of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet, I follow sustainability issues closely. I see foraging is one part of the sustainability recipe, as we move, society-wide, toward locavore diets.

Interesting National Geographic Article on Food Foraging is a post from: Principled Profit

Recently, I suggested that Obama do a massive solar/sustainable stimulus package. And I wrote,

The really good news? Such a plan could be put into place with surprisingly little capital outlay, because creative financing structures already exist that can let private investment step to the plate. I’ll talk more about this in my next post.

OK, so I squeezed a couple of posts in between. But I’m getting back to it.

And I think the answer is the deep-energy work by people like Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, who looks holistically at problems and comes up with amazingly intelligent solutions. I profile him in my book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green; here’s a little excerpt:

Though he lives in the Colorado Rockies, where it often goes well below zero Fahrenheit (–18ºC) on winter nights, his house has no furnace (or air conditioner, for that matter). It stays so warm inside that he actually grows bananas. He uses about $5 per month in electricity for his home needs (not counting his home office). Whether your company is looking for a huge competitive advantage, a more responsible way to do business, or both, the Lovins approach may be the answer.

Lovins built his luxurious 4,000-square-foot home/office in 1983, to demonstrate that even then, when energy technology was much less evolved, a truly energy-efficient house is no more expensive to build than the traditional energy hog—and far cheaper and healthier to run.

The payback for energy efficiency designs in Lovins’s sprawling, superinsulated home was just 10 months. The sun provides 95 percent of the lighting and virtually all the heating and cooling, as part of an ecosystem of plants, water storage devices, and even the radiant heat of the workers in his office.
Noting that energy-efficiency improvements since 1975 are already meeting 40 percent of U.S. power needs, Lovins claims a well-designed office building can save 80 to 90 percent of a traditional office building’s energy consumption.

Conventional building logic, says Lovins, says you insulate only enough to pay back the savings in heating costs. But Lovins points out that if you insulate so well that you don’t need a furnace or air conditioner, the payback is far greater, “because you also save their capital cost—which conventional engineering design calculations, oddly, don’t count.”

“Big savings can cost less than small savings,” Lovins says—if designers learn to think about the overall system, and how different pieces can work together to create something far greater than the sum of its parts. The trick is to look for technologies that provide multiple benefits, rather than merely solving one problem. For instance, a single arch in Lovins’s home serves 12 different structural, energy, and aesthetic functions.

The profile in the book goes on to talk about a house in the California desert that not only cost $1800 less to build, but saves $1600 a year in maintenance…and hydrogen cars that compare favorably on every criterion and use far less energy. Lovins’ company just completed a deep-energy retrofit on the Empire State Building that will save over $4 million every year. And Lovins is only one of the practical visionaries with real-world solutions you’ll encounter in the book.

In other words, we have the technology NOW. Combine this with such strategies as lease-to-own programs, or programs where the solar company fronts the cost of installation and pays it back to the homeowner out of energy savings, and we can easily get off the fossil-nuclear treadmill, or at least cut it back by 80% or so. Especially since a stimulus program would bring in economies of scale and lower the cost of the installations.

How a Solar Stimulus Could Get Us OFF Fossil and Nuclear is a post from: Principled Profit

Last night, the local organizer for the Transition Towns movement finally got around to doing one in my town. We were a small group including several of the “usual suspects” (old friends from previous organizing campaigns) as well as a handful of others I didn’t know–with a lot of good ideas.

Transition towns organizing involves taking steps to get society off fossil and nuclear fuels, and building community in the process. It’s very much directed by the people who participate, so if a few people want to form a sewing circle to make cloth totes residents can bring to the market, or plant trees, or insulate houses, or work with local government to install traffic calming, or whatever—they do it. And it’s nice and small and manageable, town by town, neighborhood by neighborhood.

The movement started as an outgrowth of the permaculture movement in Kinsale, Ireland and Totnes, UK, and has spread widely.

Now, with a few years under its belt, it may be one of our best hopes for avoiding catastrophic climate change (on which the window is getting smaller) and the great hardship of massive price shocks on all the things based in fossil fuels—which is pretty much everything.

Resources:
Transition Towns organizing site for the US
The “get moving” page on the international website (which I found after getting distracted by some wonderful storytelling about live in past generations in a British village
The simple little WordPress site for Transition in my own community of Hadley, Massachusetts

Transition Towns is a post from: Principled Profit

The latest stimulus proposal, announced this week by Barack Obama, will put $50 billion into the hopper for improvements to “the nation’s roads, railways and runways,” as the Associated Press story alliteratively noted.

And certainly, those improvements are needed. Europeans and east Asians laugh openly at our rail system. Our roads and bridges need shoring up. And plane travel in general has become a chore.

But before we go off improving more roads (which seemed to be where the bulk of the first round of stimulus went), shouldn’t we be looking at energy? How about a program to deep-energy retrofit many existing buildings, become a world leader in nonpolluting renewable energy, and reinvent public transit in ways that encourage its use. A massive program to cut fossil fuel and nuclear dependence by, say, 75 percent would have these extra advantages:

And those are only a few among many.

The really good news? Such a plan could be put into place with surprisingly little capital outlay, because creative financing structures already exist that can let private investment step to the plate. I’ll talk more about this in my next post (after Rosh Hashana is over).

Hey, Barack, When Do We Get the SOLAR Stimulus? is a post from: Principled Profit

Would you use the same marketing strategy to sell a Lexus and a Smart car? I certainly hope not! Market segmentation, and then marketing differently to those different segments, is a pillar of marketing strategy and has been for more than 100 years. And in our technological era, it’s so easy to do, you’d be a fool to try any kind of one-size-fits-all marketing.

This is equally true in any sector of the Green market. Example: the affluent suburbanite who shops at Whole Foods is going to have different wants and needs than a just-getting-by urbanite who’s a member of a food co-op for economic reasons…or the rural farmstand shopper who values the freshness and health benefits of just-picked organic produce. And with each of those slices, you want to slice again: a parent of young children needs a different approach than an elder living alone. Market to them differently, or fail to market.

Just as in B2C (Business To Consumer) marketing, in the B2B world, you have to understand not only your own motivations, but those of your clients. Are they motivated by a desire to lower carbon footprint, a desire to reach the Green market themselves, an EPA mandate to clean up their act, or simply a desire to shave 30 percent off their energy bill?

There’s a good article on the Strategic Sustainability Consulting blog on this, which I found through Carolyn Parrs’ blog.

Slicing the Green Pie: How to Segment in the Green Market is a post from: Principled Profit

The latest research proves the need. In a wonderful article for Sustainable Life Media, “Measuring the Value of CSR Communications,” Perry Goldschein notes that “80% of consumers had no idea that sustainability leaders (e.g., HP, Intel, Cisco, Unilever) were participating in any sustainability practices at all.”

If the sustainability efforts of these leading companies are so under the general public’s radar, what does that say about the rest of us and our visibility?

This is why I wrote my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson), why I do Green marketing consulting and speaking, and why I’m starting an international trade association for Green marketers: to provide the tools businesses need to tell their Green story to the world, and to take full marketing advantage of the edge that gives them if told properly.

Why Do We Need Specifically GREEN Marketing? is a post from: Principled Profit

If you think we in the Green movement tend to take ourselves waaaay too seriously, here’s a bit of comic relief.

Dilbert creator Scott Adams describes with excruciating humor all the missteps in building a Green home.

I can relate. In my own Greener home adventures, we’ve discovered…

Dilbert’s Scott Adams Builds a Green Home #blogboost is a post from: Principled Profit