greenormal

Nice Informative Film from FSC in Canada

2011-11-14T02:04:00.000-08:00

Who cares about the Forest? from Franke James on Vimeo.

(via Doug Creighton)

Yeo Valley's farming boyband (can't wait)

2011-10-05T02:52:00.000-07:00

In a follow up to their brilliant rapping farmers last year, Yeo Valley are releasing a pop song/new boy band of farmers during the ad breaks of X Factor this year starting this Saturday (8th Oct). Here's the lyrics so you can sing along.

The Churned ‘Forever’ Song Lyrics

I could have gone astray

Not listened to my heart

But every time I’m tempted

I go back to the start

There’s no harm in our pure and natural farming

We are as one with the countryside

CHORUS:

Yeo Valley

Naturally

We won’t change, no never

We’ll farm this way forever and ever

Yeo Valley

Family farming

Has been the driving factor

Ploughing to the future

Aboard a shiny tractor

So listen up people, take after me

Be a little funky, choose the West Country

CHORUS:
Yeo Valley

Naturally

We won’t change, no never

We’ll farm this way forever and ever

Yeo Valley

We’re not a passing fad

We don’t change by the seasons

We always respect nature

Just ask our happy friesians

In your eyes, I see our fate

We’ll live here forever, just off the A368

CHORUS:
Yeo Valley

Naturally

We won’t change, no never

We’ll farm this way forever and ever

Yeo Valley

Naturally

We won’t change, no never

We’ll farm this way forever and ever

It’s only natural

Never gonna change

Stay this way forever

An invitation from Al Gore

2011-09-13T14:26:00.000-07:00

Dear John (and his blog readers)

Tomorrow, people from around the world will join hands to create 24 Hours of Reality. I hope you'll join us. Together, we're going to focus the world's attention on the scope, scale and impact of the climate crisis.

24 Hours of Reality begins at 7 p.m. Central Time on Wednesday, September 14. Over the course of the day, there will be 24 presentations across 24 time zones in 13 languages. I'll be presenting in the final hour at 7 p.m. Eastern Time.

Use our simple tool to set a reminder so you don't miss it.

climaterealityproject.org/reminder

Together, we're going to take a stand against the "new normal." We're going to remove any doubt stirred up by deniers.

Together, we're going to catalyze urgency around an issue that impacts every one of us.

Find a presentation in your language or your part of the world and use our tool to schedule a reminder email. You'll receive 15 minutes before the event.

Make sure you're a part of this event. Make time. Tell your friends and followers you're participating and encourage them to join you. At the bottom of this email, you'll find some easy links to help you spread the word.

I'm truly excited for tomorrow and I hope you are, too.

Sincerely,

Al Gore
Founder and Chairman
The Climate Reality Project

A Very Nice Ad

2011-09-05T09:40:00.000-07:00

(Via Jane Allen at yammer.com)

Ethics 2.0 - This Time It's Personal

2011-08-18T06:40:00.000-07:00

from their press release:
Ethical Consumer magazine's new website lets shoppers produce their own personalised ethical shopping list: ethicalconsumer.com
The interactive buyers' guides allow web-users to change company ethiscores on the Ethical Consumer brand tables to reflect their own personal ethics. On-screen sliders allow shoppers to turn up the volume on a range of key ethical issues that they feel passionate about. The result is that for the first time shoppers can easily identify and support those companies whose ethics they agree with and avoid the companies whose ethics they don't.
[For a live example visit: www.ethicalconsumer.org/BuyersGuides/Computing/Laptopsandnetbooks.aspx ]

greenormal's view:
absolutely brilliant, well done - this has been in development since the BBC green partnership, it's a long anticipated step forward in ecological intelligence: from dumb average ethics to fitting my vallues ethics

Digital Demo(cracy)

2011-08-18T05:45:00.000-07:00

The recent UK riots highlighted the role of social media and the networks. Key features being the use of BBM (Blackberry messaging) to coordinate among rioters. And the use of Twitter to coordinate @riotcleanup. We also saw examples of citizen journalism: eg Leon Piers, 21 year old in Bristol – who covered riots by cycle & twitter "A guy on a bike & a group of friends, dotted around Bristol, bringing you only CONFIRMED riot news & Keeping you updated so you can stay safe!" And the role in amplifying the story and tracking both it and the public reaction realtime: #londonriots was the trending topic on Twitter one day and #riotcleanup the next.

David Cameron was said to be considering shutting social networks down to prevent their use by rioters. He should be aware that precisely this action by the Egyptian government was what turned a 20,000 activist protest into a 2 million public one (what would you do if the government pulled the plug on internet and phone?)

Also from Arab Spring we learned (as if it needed to be learned) that brands should not try to take the credit for ‘enabling’ such processes: as one Egyptian blogger put it "Never mind the years of activism, the protests, the decades of cumulated grievances, the terrible economic situation, the trampled political freedoms, the police brutality, the torture, etc. Nah - we just watched a Vodafone ad, and thought: 'Hey! We're powerful! Let's topple the president!'" (Mohamed El-Dahshan).

More broadly there has been a stream of successful challenges to corporate and government power, particularly around the theme of information, secrecy and privacy. Wikileaks successfully opened government in the way that was often promised but never delivered. The Newscorp phone hacking scandal lifted the lid on journalistic ethics and celebrity. And more importantly on corporate governance as the debate about who knew (and hence who should go to prison) continues. The Murdoch campaign was partly coordinated by Avaaz, which is a growing force in galvanizing and coordinating public pressure.

What many are starting to recognize though is that the role of social media has been limited mostly so far to digital demos; attacks on the status quo from the fringes, or solutions for when society is under extreme stress – like Ushahidi for mapping election violence or in disaster relief - rather than citizens getting involved in the everyday running of society. I heard recently that there is a UN project underway working with some leading global innovators in technology to look at developing positive applications for everyday democracy.

True digital democracy is still cut short by the “leave it to us” model. 1 in 7 American voters took active part in the Obama campaign, but once he got in it seemed to be back to business as usual (meetings with lobbyists behind closed doors) and an administration quickly bogged down in climate backtracking and healthcare reform. In the UK you can now at least table a proposal to be debated in the House of Commons if 100,000 sign your petition. Stimulated by the UK riots, 2 million did visit this site in the first two weeks and the first petition has achieved its goal, with 208,000 signing a proposal that “Convicted London Rioters should lose (social security) benefits”. Meanwhile in America a new scheme called Americans Elect looks set to offer voters the ability to nominate their own presidential candidate; it is accredited so far in 4 states, has passed the crucial 1.6 million signature test in California and the organisers say they expect to be accredited in all states by 2012.

One criticism of direct digital democracy is that few people can actually be bothered to get involved. So that you will get rule passed to those with time on their hands (as is often seen in online forums) regardless of their actual merits. But the evidence is that with the right scheme you can actually get mass participation. There were 76 million votes cast in the $20m community cause giveaway scheme Pepsi Refresh.

Another is that the ill-educated public will always make kneejerk choices and proposals of the “take away the benefits of convicted rioters” or “bring back hanging” variety. It is true that a thriving democracy relies on educated citizens. But having spent the last fifteen years exploring digital lifelong learning models I would suggest that if you give people a meaningful, compelling and relevant decision to make then (and only then) they will inform themselves perfectly well using search; just as they would around issues like a child’s health symptoms or a legal problem. For instance working with an ethical coffee company last year, one of my suggestions was to allow consumers to set their own price buying online; but to do so by moving sliders to decide how much money should go to farmers, community, development projects and so on; taking Fairtrade to the next level. Of course if having deeply researched a subject people still want to make choices which are unfair or illiberal, it is their society: the principle which Socrates literally died for.

The questions posed by digital media to democracy, are in many ways the same ones which they pose to all old world institutions, including companies and brands. As Nicolas Negroponte wrote in Being Digital in 1995, the media are not just restructuring how messages are distributed, but actually who is in control; moving from a passive audience to active participant or agent. We have adjusted our style of marketing accordingly; for instance modeling strategy on (computer) gaming. But we have hardly changed the democratic access to real decisions a company makes. So that so far it is only protests – by eBay users over a new feature, by a passenger whose guitar was broken by United Airlines, by green leaning Apple fans – which have brought any real response.

But we are starting to see companies embrace a truly participative way of operating, for instance in open innovation. It is most obvious in the case of digital brands where the users create the value – for instance the 15 million user logged venues in Foursquare. And there is just the distant possibility that in future every brand will be more mutualized and democratic. The customer as citizen. Might this not be the key to the value most desired and most distant in all modern marketing – loyalty?

The Green Awards Is NOW OPEN FOR ENTRIES

2011-06-23T14:33:00.000-07:00

Am very proud to be on the advisory panel for the Green Awards and herewith our press release:

Date 23rd June 2011 – The INTERNATIONAL GREEN AWARDS™, a global programme that recognises innovative and creative approaches to sustainability, is now searching the globe for the true sustainability heroes after establishing its first online global sustainability community and entry platform! This online community will help to connect game changers and innovators globally to share ideas and best practice.

The awards, now in their sixth year are firmly fixed on the sustainable business calendar and will be judged by some of the most influential environmental and sustainability experts internationally including the former presidential candidate for Brazil, Marina Silva, David de Rothschild, Environmentalist & Explorer and Sir Crispin Tickell, the former President of the Royal Geographical Society .

This year, the yet undisclosed Lifetime Achievement Award nominee will need to meet the high benchmark set by Sir David Attenborough CBE, who picked up the inaugural award last year. The coming months will also see the announcement of a list of nominees for the new Best Green Celebrity category, which will be open to a public vote through the new web portal.

Sustainable innovation around technology will be an important focus this year as businesses embark on the journey to a green revolution. It’s clearly evident that there’s an increasing appetite from business and industry for case studies demonstrating excellence and best practice in sustainability issues. And so the race is on to search the globe to unearth this year’s shining examples that will inspire our generation. In fact, this year’s awards are expected to be the biggest and most inspiring yet, with even more entries expected based on the increasing interest in sustainability as ‘being sustainable’ becomes a prerequisite to ‘business as usual’.

Sir Paul Judge, President of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and Steering Group Chair commented, “These awards bring together and generate awareness of outstanding ideas and achievements that can help our world become more sustainable by spreading good practice and allowing other organisations to benchmark their own environmental policies and practices.”

According to Ahmed Djoghlaf – Executive Secretary, UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), one of this year’s judges, “In the wake of the adoption of the 2020 Aichi Biodiversity targets which calls for the engagement of all stakeholders including the business community, it is an honour and a privilege to participate in the 2011 INTERNATIONAL GREEN AWARDS™. I am impressed with the positive impact the Award has in promoting and rewarding creativity and dedication. Through example, the Awards is shaping future messages of sustainability and therefore creating the leaders of the green businesses of tomorrow.

To enter and for more details visit www.greenawards.com

ENDS

Editors’ Notes:

INTERNATIONAL GREEN AWARDS

We inspire innovation for sustainability by recognising people and organisations whose ideas are creating positive change.

International Green Awards 2010 brought together more than 500 leaders from all sizes of companies, each with a similar goal— to learn how companies are adapting and innovating for sustainability.

Take your place in history now!

www.greenawards.com

Example Judges

Sir Crispin Tickell, Former President Royal Geographical Society, UK

Ahmed Djoghlaf, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity under the United Nations Environment Programme(UNEP)

David de Rothschild, Environmentalist & Explorer & ‘Plastiki’ Expedition Leader

Professor Jacqueline McGlade, Executive Director, European Environment Agency

Jane Davidson, Minister of the Environment, Welsh Assembly

Michelle Laug, Communications Officer, Green Cross International

Liu Jianqiang, Editor, China Dialogue

Marina Silva, Environmental Activist and Politician

Tim Smit, Founder, The Eden Project

Brendan May, UK Chairman, Rainforest Alliance

Aniol Esteban, Head of Environmental Economics, New Economics Foundation

Peter Paul van de Wijs, Managing Director, World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD)

Malini Mehra FRSA, Centre For Social Markets, India

Prof. Dr. Claudia Kemfert, Head of the Department, Institute of Economic Research

Bonnie Nixon, Executive Director, Sustainability Consortium, USA

Baroness Barbara Young, Chancellor of Cranfield University.

Vicki Buck, Entrepreneur and former Mayor Christchurch

Lance Hosey, President & CEO, GreenBlue USA

Professor Malcolm McIntosh, Asia Pacific Centre for Sustainable Enterprise, Griffith University, Queensland, AUSTRALIA

Julia Marton-Lefevre, Director General, IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature)

2011 Categories

Best Green International Business Award (Large/Multi-national)

Best Green International Business Award (Medium)

Best Green Entrepreneur Award (Start-up)

Best Sustainable Investment Award ( BRONZE Partner Emerald Knight)

Best Green Energy Efficiency Initiative Award

Best Green 4R’s Award (Reduction, Reuse, Recycling, Recovery)

Best Green New Product Innovation

Best Green Service Innovation Award

Best Green Conservation and Biodiversity Award

Best Green Water Stewardship Award

Best Green Collaborative Initiative Award

Best Green Technology Award (BRONZE Partner Danwood)

Best Green Intelligent Buildings Award

Best Green Public Sector Award

Best Green Educational Awareness and Sustainability Award

Best Green Not for Profit Organisation Award

Best Green Employee Engagement Award

Best Green Cross Platform Digital Media Solution Award

Best Green Advertising & PR Award

Best Green Audio-Visual Award

International Green Awards Grand Prix

Lifetime Achievement Award

Best International Green Awards Celebrity

Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/greenawards

Visit our LinkedIn Profile: http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/global-green-awards-2010/24/832/490

Watch our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/Globalgreenawards

See our Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16852154577

Join our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/GreenAwards2010

Wood You Buy It?

2011-06-14T10:30:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago I read a very moving book about deforestation by an accidental activist (it started with his holiday in Cambodia) - My Journey With a Remarkable Tree by Ken Finn. About how these beautiful ancient spirit trees were via illegal logging and export finding their way into garden furniture sold in the UK.

I'd stored away the thought that I should do something to somehow pass the message on - and now I have the chance.

There's a new WWF campaign all about "putting more pressure on suppliers to show evidence of where their wood goods originate. As consumers, an easy first step is to demand that shops sell responsibly-sourced FSC-certified wood products. We need the government to push businesses in the right direction too." Here's the campaign video

And you can learn more about how to get involved at wwf.org.uk

A Nation of Green Shoppers?

2011-04-04T03:06:00.000-07:00

Interesting report published in March from the CBI on the role of green consumerism in delivering a low carbon society.

cbi website

The crux of it seems to be that energy efficiency is well established as a motivation, whereas green concerns remain marginal. The report suggests stronger links are made between the two.

Others (eg Tom Crompton) have argued that we need to tackle people's values - and that energy efficiency in particular leads to little or no real carbon saving, due to indirect rebound effects.

But there is no arguing with the basic lack of consideration of environment as a criteria in major purchases - as shown by this data:

It's also something of a relief to return to the "people don't care enough" lament - after those (2007-09) years when myself and many others would push the opposite view that 70-80% were very concerned about climate change and were taking action. When you recognise the problem - that it's marginal - you are bolder in thinking of ways to tackle it?

New article for Sublime magazine (draft - comments?)

2011-03-10T03:01:00.000-08:00

The Naked Truth

Imagine by some future quirk of human evolution, telepathy is a reality. But there is a twist. Rather than hearing others’ thoughts in proximity (as if they were auditory, and hence limited by the same physics), we would filter out very large parts of what everyone else was thinking, and only hear others’ thoughts (from anywhere in the world) if they were about us.

You’d think it would be the death of indiscretion? But quite the opposite. Because of course, if you think about it, I just described one of the many stubbornly strange features of social media. Let me explain or elaborate, through some typical examples:

- - yesterday I sent a Tweet, asking if anyone else had the experience of making an important business pitch from a train toilet (because it’s the only place where you can both be discreet, and hear the call)? At the time it struck me simply as an amusing new variant on the idea of the “elevator pitch”. But then today my business partner asked me about this. Because my Tweet was in the name of my start-up, and we have Google Alerts. Lucky I suppose at least that i didn't name the client!

- - a few weeks ago, I read a Tweet by a respected author, asking if anyone else thought the main idea of a (well known, current and successful) book by another respected author, was insubstantial and transient? Yes it’s very standard bitching. He probably didn’t even mean it as personally as it sounded. But my very first thought was – oh my god - that thanks to Alerts/Tweetdeck/PR monitoring she would have undoubtedly read his comment too.

- - some years ago, when blogging was at a similar stage, I wrote a light hearted post complaining about the demise of the seriously mad 1970s self-help scene (Est, rebirthing and similar) dwindling, in my view, to the half hearted, lifestyle pap that was “Psychologies” magazine. And of course the very first comment was from the editor of Psychologies, herself: wondering if I had read it, or was qualified to cast such aspersions? (Fair point).

It’s all a bit like the scene from the Woody Allen movie, “Annie Hall”: where Marshall McLuhan - playing himself - is brought into an argument between Allen and someone who had been pontificating loudly about McLuhan’s work (in the queue outside a cinema). “If only life were like this” comments Allen as McLuhan won the argument for him. Although the line from this scene that sticks with you more is probably “Oh, for a sock full of horse manure”.

Being confronted by who you detract is some kind of defining dilemma of social media. “On the internet no-one knows you are a dog.” They used to say. Whereas now, in web 2.0 it's more that: "anyone instantly knows if you call them a dog"?

I suppose it is a matter of habits catching up with a new quirk of social communication? Either we will be more honest, or more guarded, who knows?

But what about the generalised effects of sharing private thoughts so publically? Is it changing the nature of our discourse, our culture? Making us more emotionally explicit. There are theories that Facebook is making the English less reserved, and making men less prone to hiding their feelings. Research into social media like Facebook shows that being single will incline people to reveal significantly greater quantities of personal information. Other research into the phenomenon of couples who met online shows it is a media almost perfectly adapted to the process of falling in love (because it accentuates positive projections - like "we are so alike" - while providing fewer of the bubble bursting cues and clues we get on meeting in reality). Russell Davies complained about this to me once - that his global team meetings on (the then new) Second Life were always haunted by the suspicion of flirting. Is that it? Are we inadvertently using "love letters" as a medium for other purposes? Russell will no doubt pop up to comment!

It may be just me. But when I sat down to write “an article” some years ago, I’d never have dreamed of using the word “I”. Let alone revealing personal details. Now I write as I blog. As a form of thinking aloud. And I assume you - the reader - are used to being addressed in this way. So that our communications are more personal, one to one. Am I right? Is our discourse becoming more intimate? In the online edition, perhaps you too can comment and let me know?

Back at Marshall McLuhan, I rather doubt that the medium is the message. I tend to think that the media are only partly instrumental – expressing (rather than ever entirely causing) some broader trend, some pattern or reconfiguration. That the Romans made the roads more than the roads made the Romans. (The proposition that sticks in my mind from his famous book being that “the radio made Hitler” – as if economic depression, radical right politics, scapegoating mechanisms writ large and other factors played no role).

I would hazard a guess that we have been drawn to the precise modern forms of social media – including this "directed telepathy" and their general broadcasting of our inmost thoughts – by some cultural tide. It might the radical loneliness of competitive individualism (where everyone is a pseudo pop star and hence no one feels that they have any real friends)? It might be that we are evolving into Rifkin’s “Empathic Civilisation” (which I discussed in a previous column)? It might be something more enigmatic. A re-emerging small world consciousness that’s reviving something like a palpable sense of "Fate"?

I suspect that personally - cultural trends aside - it’s also simply good to blurt every now and then. Even if occasionally embarrassing, or humiliating, for ourselves, or others. There’s something healthy and wholesome and right about speaking the truth. Not the factual truth. Nor the kind of truth that is deployed in “feedback” to curb or manipulate another. But the sort of objective, emotional truth – often, a shock of self recognition – that you find occasionally in movies, and poetry and glances in the mirror.

I have no idea why I would tell you all this. I'm just thinking aloud. But then again, isn’t that my point?

Interview on Green Marketing

2011-02-11T04:41:00.000-08:00

To celebrate the launch of the CIM (Chartered Institute of Marketing) "The Marketing Century" book next friday (which I wrote the chapter on sustainability and marketing in) here is a video interview with yours truly from my friends at Wiley.

More on the Marketing Century book at the Cim site here

Green Book - a worthy winner

2011-01-25T04:54:00.000-08:00

(via my friends at Grayling)

Open Planet Ideas from Open Planet Ideas on Vimeo.

After three months of concepting, collaboration and evaluation, Sony and WWF have today announced that the GreenBook concept by Paul Frigout has been selected as the final concept to be taken through to realisation from the innovative community platform, Open Planet Ideas.

Reinventing community activism to attract the Facebook generation, ‘GreenBook’ is a cross platform software application. Geo-location and social gaming techniques are used to create a new method of informal, 'flash mob' volunteering, where friends locate each other and congregate to work together on short tasks. Individuals can post their needs and offer their services, as well as make donations, sign e-petitions, get information, win rewards for participation and share their stories.
The decision was made after the expert panel investigated the shortlisted three entries, consulting with the creators and considering technical feasibility and potential for impact. Other shortlisted concepts included The Identifying & Recording Wildlife concept by Juliet Wilson and the Network of Real-time Wireless Micro Weather Stations for Microclimate Monitoring by Regis Zimmer.

Paul Frigout, also known as ‘Siniuc’ in the digital world, will now have the once in a lifetime chance to realise his concept working with Sony Europe’s R&D and design teams, WWF experts and members of the IDEO creative team.

Morgan David, head of Sony’s Broadcast & Professional Research Labs and member of the Open Planet Ideas expert panel, said: “We chose this idea because of its huge potential to bring people together and motivate participation. We believe GreenBook will breathe new life into the age old concept of volunteering through the application of cutting edge social technology. “

Jean-Paul Jeanrenaud, Corporate Relations Director at WWF International said: “We feel this is an exciting concept that will enable people to come together to support and give their time and energy to their local area and address some of the key environmental challenges that we are facing today.”

The intention is to develop and pilot the software with third parties and release it as a ‘white label’ application for any organisation to use. Initial feedback from volunteering organisations has already been very positive. For example volunteering charity TimeBank, welcomed the ‘Greenbank’ concept.

CEO of TimeBank Helen Walker, said: “At TimeBank we are committed to exploring ways of engaging new audiences in volunteering. This concept takes advantage of the increasing use of smart phones and the techniques used in social gaming to engage with a new generation of volunteers. This use of cutting edge, social networking technology could be a powerful tool to enable volunteering to become part of the fabric of everyday life, anywhere in the world.”
Open Planet Ideas received over 400 innovative concepts from budding designers across the world, all hoping their idea would be selected by the project’s panel of experts, as ‘the most innovative new way to use existing technology to help preserve our planet’s natural resources’.

For further information, please visit openplanetideas.com

Yours truly at PSFK London

2010-11-15T13:04:00.000-08:00

... where I returned to a long running theme of mine (I used to call this "the campaign for real innovation")

Spread the Word - get your Green Awards entries in

2010-10-13T15:09:00.000-07:00

10/10/10 - the world's biggest party (350.org)

2010-10-05T03:54:00.000-07:00

This just through from our friends at 350.org

"The world is throwing a party this Sunday, and we wanted to make sure you got the invitation.

This summer, a series of unprecedented natural disasters including floods, fires, landslides, droughts and record heat showed the world that our global warming future is already a scary reality.

This weekend, on 10/10/10, hundreds of thousands of people from 176 nations will participate in a global work party to demonstrate an alternative path to their leaders. These people are tired of watching catastrophes unfold while politicians fail to act to curb rising carbon emissions. They also want to have some fun.

So instead of sitting on the sidelines waiting for politicians to do something, you can use this day to join with others to work on creative climate solutions in your own community.

In the U.S., friends in New Mexico will install a solar panel at a local homeless shelter, Atlanta parishioners will weatherize their church, and Californians will hold bike repair workshops. Internationally, Pakistanis will rally together in the flood-ravaged village of Booni, youth in Kabul will begin to replant their deforested nation, and the President of Maldives will install solar panels on his official residence.

All told, more than 5900 events are scheduled across the world, making it the largest day of practical climate action the planet has ever seen.

Grassroots organizers, led by 350.org, don't pretend they can save the world from global warming by planting trees for a day. Instead, 10/10/10 is about sending a powerful message that the world is ready to combat climate change, and that leaders need to get to work to make that happen.

It's not too late to sign-up for an event on Sunday or to organize one in your town. Get involved by signing 350.org's pledge to participate, check out some cool events and ideas, and leave a comment to tell us your plans for 10/10/10.

P&G Announces new sustainability vision

2010-09-28T03:25:00.000-07:00

In its new "sustainability vision," P&G has set a goal, to be achieved by 2020, including:
• Replacing 25 percent of petroleum-derived raw materials with sustainably sourced, renewable materials;
• Reducing packaging by 20 percent per consumer use;
• Powering company operations with 30 percent renewable energy; and
• Reducing waste from manufacturing to less than 0.5 percent

Read all about it at Greenbiz

NB Does anyone have the detailed data and/or expertise to compare this with Unilever's ten year sustainability vision which says they aim to double the size of the company while reducing its environmental impact compared to today's absolute level?

Sustain at the RCA - feed your mind with fresh ideas

2010-09-25T04:00:00.000-07:00

Stunning exhibition of degree show work with sustainability themes is on at the Royal College of Arts (I got a sneak peak this Thursday as I was one of the awards judges). This piece by Noemie Goudal is one of my personal favourites.

Reuse (not Refuse)

2010-07-16T03:48:00.000-07:00

Launch of a new scheme to encourage Reuse of perfectly good white goods and furniture in London yesterday outside City Hall by a famous dizzy blond and Joanna Lumley - looks like a great scheme anyway

details here

Mix Your Own Environmental Masters

2010-06-25T04:59:00.000-07:00

(via Naomi Martin...)

Bournemouth University have this year launched a range of innovative Masters Degree Short Courses in the Environmental Science field, allowing students to study part time, and choose their units of study. This new range of short courses has been developed to specifically target recent graduates or those working in Environmental or Ecological fields and looking for additional development within their industry. The courses, each specialising in a different field, offer students a contemporary style of learning, including fieldwork where appropriate, to allow students to develop or apply their knowledge in a real setting to provide a robust platform on which to build their skills. The course areas on offer, include; Aquatic Invasive Species, Field Skills, GIS for Environmental Managers, Introduction to Statistics in R, Marine Planning. Each short course requires the person to attend the university for 3-4 days, where there will be a mix of theory and practical sessions. There is pre and post course work and students can take an optional academic assessment to gain 20 academic credits at postgraduate level. Based on the completion of three short courses, the students would gain a recognised Postgraduate qualification. For more information on the short courses visit www.bournemouth.ac.uk/environmental

(For the sake of balance I have to point out that the Environmental Policy MSc at imperial and Bath MSc now moved to Ashridge are also of course excellent, as is the Forum for the Future programme :)

The Truth About Social Media (New Article for Mediacat)

2010-06-23T15:49:00.001-07:00

The Truth About Social Media

For the last 4 or 5 years I’ve been getting questions from clients about social media – how to get involved, whether to get involved?

Let me say at the outset that I am a big fan of brands engaging in social media (and all new media) in the right way for the right reasons. I’ve been involved in pioneering internet businesses and digital marketing campaigns and (like sustainability) I simply think it’s the way the world is going. So I am not one of those people telling their clients that Twitter is a fad (and that it's "much safer to stay with TV advertising" therefore). Did you know by the way that David Ogilvy once predicted that all the fuss about TV advertising would blow over and clients would return to print advertising, with all it’s evident strengths in putting a hard selling proposition to the audience? I digress – but anyway I just want to say I'm a fan - I am not being a ‘David Ogilvy’ here.

However I do tell clients that – if they are going to approach it in a conventional way – they have absolutely no place or role within social media. A ‘conventional’ approach would mean things like ‘how do we get messages about our brand out in social media’. If that’s your mindset then stick to your television commercials and your junk mail and (as the saying goes) ‘leave well alone’.

To explain why I say this; consider how misleading the word ‘media’ is within the term social media. It isn’t a broadcast channel, a stadium, a mass medium of any sort. It is a criss-crossing network of individuals chatting to each other, sharing photos from the weekend, interesting stuff they have found, their opinions on the World Cup… In other words social media are a lot like a telephone network. Would you as a brand interrupt my telephone conversation with a friend or relative? No, of course not. So why would it be okay for you to butt in when we chat online?

But it isn’t exactly one-to-one and private. That was just to dramatise my point. Others can overhear these conversations. It’s more like two of us chatting on the bus. And that makes for a good basic guide to how brands and companies (or factually their employees or agencies) should behave. If you would break into a conversation on a bus under the same circumstances, then it is okay to do so in social media too.

An example. One of your customers is complaining to a friend about the TERRIBLE service they got from your company. Should you interrupt? You will be tempted to as basically there could be a LOT more people listening than on a bus. But the answer is: only if you are willing to sort out the problem this person has. If you are personally shocked that they should have such a bad experience, and your motive is to put it right then sure – jump in, given them your business card and say so. I’ve seen that happen and it stops the conversation – because the customer is now happy.

But if you simply want to counteract or somehow “answer” the criticisms, forget it. You tell them that it’s not usually a problem, imply that it’s their fault and so on, you will make things ten times worse. And bystanders will conclude that you are a powerless corporate idiot, who is incapable of fixing this person’s problem, who instead will trot out any meaningless phrases to try to make it sound okay… I’ve seen that happen too. And when it happens repeatedly both the individual and the company develop a bad reputation – with others on the bus (or forum) chipping in that ‘this always happens’.

Another common situation is the whole question of talking to people about your brand. Once again it’s all about imagining the situation on the bus. You are sat there in your office worker clothes with a bunch of (let’s say) teenagers, or parents bringing their young children from school. How are you going to break into their conversation? Obviously you are going to make a complete fool of yourself so forget it. For instance very few digital agency “virals” ever take off in a big way, because they just aren’t as funny or relevant (to teens) as the ones made by teens themselves.

What if you get someone who does fit the profile to do the talking for you? There are successes of this sort. For instance LEGO reached out to Adult Fans of LEGO (AFOLs) to recruit “Ambassadors”, a hit programme. However you do need to tread carefully. Some “guerrilla” marketing outfits in the USA hire actors to go into social situations to talk about their new product or brand. Literally they will hire actors to stand in bars shouting orders for that new drink, and chatting to people around them – or hire (using incentives) teenagers to talk to friends about new products. P&G owns one of these buzz networks (Tremor) and has had some success they claim in getting teenage boys to talk dandruff as part of the sell for Head & Shoulders shampoo. My problem with this approach is it is unethical, even for marketing - and a CRISIS waiting to happen. If it’s authentic and not manipulative (like the LEGO example) then fine. But tread carefully.

The other thing that works ok in social media for old style marketers is called brand utility. This is the equivalent (on the bus) to handing out sweets or goodies. The movie “300” gave away big storage space for photos to users of MySpace (back in the days where storage was limited). It happened to come pre-loaded with images from the movie “300”. Lots of the grateful recipients thought the movie looked cool too. So they checked it out. And a hit was born. Nothing too wrong with that you could argue, and it has become one of the mainstays of digital agencies’ marketing strategy toolkit.

My own view? All of this is a tragedy. It’s like discovering a whole new continent, full of lush resources and possibilities… and building a McDonalds on the beach. The real potential of social media in my view is its plasticity – it’s potential for building whole new forms of media, which happen to be authored by a brand. Just as Disney make movies, cruises, theme parks… Disney can also make great social media experiences (for instance a family treasure hunt might be a nice idea – or a programme of free online piano lessons to celebrate a music themed movie?)

Ah yes you will say but we aren’t Disney we make furniture, or electronics, or jeans, or even headache tablets. But round any product there is always something humanly fascinating. Even headache tablets are part of a broader field of topics which magazines pour words about (exam stress, period pain, ageing…). Find the fascination in the market and engage people in a new way. Be a media owner, not a media buyer. That’s my advice. It’s not the easiest way – but I believe it’s the only way to really belong.

Save the Beach

2010-06-09T12:30:00.000-07:00

Corona have created a ‘Save the Beach’ campaign which aims to promote the preservation of European beaches. They’ve been working with German action artist HA Schult, and have created a pop-up hotel in the centre of Rome made entirely from rubbish collected from European beaches. The first guest at the hotel was Helena Christensen. HA Schult is world famous for his work ‘Trash Men’, in which thousands of life-sized human figures were made entirely of non-organic waste. These sculptures have “lined up” in emblematic places such as the Great Wall of China, the Egyptian Pyramids, and Moscow’s Red Square.

(another) Ethical Fast Food Joint

2010-04-16T07:13:00.001-07:00

I think Max in Sweden were actually the first to carbon footprint their menu AND they got 20% of their customers to switch to more climate friendly options. But Otarian looks lovely too (and great name/concept). Via (and full story at) ecorazzi

'Corporate Ethics' - Bananas!

2010-04-06T09:29:00.000-07:00

Film gets a first screening at the ICA this Friday
http://www.ica.org.uk/?lid=24240#booktickets

Well worth reminding ourselves from time to time how the other half of our supermarket convenient global supply chain live and what is done in the name of our demands for cheaper & cheaper produce?

Welcome to the Commons

2010-03-31T02:26:00.001-07:00

Please tweet, blog, embed and generally spread the word! :J

Thought for the day

2010-03-18T05:06:00.000-07:00

(via Martin at Eden project)

Interview on Planet Green

2010-02-14T16:30:00.000-08:00

With thanks to Leonora planetgreen link

Priceless (a great week for virals)

2010-02-11T14:28:00.000-08:00

Calling the Tobin Tax a Robin Hood Tax is pretty clever too.

New Frontiers

2010-02-11T12:43:00.000-08:00

The divine Melissa Sterry of Societas fame just sent me some info on her and Matt Prescott's new sustainable design project. It looks like a cracker to me. Do check it out...

(DETAILS BELOW FROM MELISSA)

Led from Manchester NEW FRONTIERS is a new initiative to stimulate and support the rapid development of exciting and truly sustainable design ideas, from architecture to urban design to materials engineering.

The brainchild of futurologist and design scientist Melissa Sterry and developed in partnership environmental scientist Matt Prescott, NEW FRONTIERS is working with partner organisations, including leading universities, professional bodies, NGOs, government agencies and pioneering global brands to help evolve and embed a strong understanding of sustainability issues; form new collaborations and networks; and promote the best ideas and innovations. Through these new partnerships, NEW FRONTIERS will provide the highest quality seminars, academic programmes, networks, information and resources.

NEW FRONTIERS is designed to catalyse action through interdisciplinary knowledge sharing, capacity building and public discourse. It is designed as a programme comprising seminars, scholarships, a participative digital platform and other planned elements, culminating in a prestigious biennial national prize.

Judged by leading experts, the NEW FRONTIERS Prize will support new economic goals, raise the profile of many crucial disciplines and ensure the progress of ideas and projects of true quality and value.

NEW FRONTIERS PANEL
Zac Goldsmith, Professor Lorna Walker, Michael Pawlyn, Dr. Rachel Armstrong, Professor Neil Spiller, Lynda Relph-Knight, Dr. Tim Fox, Professor Rachel Cooper, Professor Erik Bichard, Dr. Beth Perry, Dr. Richard Miller, Leonora Oppenheim, John Thackara, Dr. Tuba Kocaturk, Mike Reardon, Dr. Vicky Lofthouse, Dr. Mike Pitts, Angharad Thomas, Matt Prescott, Dr. Angela Lee, Melissa Sterry, Sophie Thomas.

NEW FRONTIERS PARTNERS
University of Salford – primary academic partner, Royal Society of Chemistry, Institution of Mechanical Engineers, University of Manchester, Loughborough University, Chemistry Innovation, Centre for Construction Innovation, Centre for the Built and Urban Environment, Eco Connect, Mickey & Mallory, CURB 100% natural media, Societás, What Women Make.

http://www.newfrontiers.uk.com

New Article for Mediacat

2010-02-11T04:14:00.000-08:00

The 4 I’s of New Marketing

I have a new book out. It's number five. And I find myself at a 'taking stock' moment, searching for consistencies and threads running through these publications, my scattered writings, my many projects. One thing I realise is that I have a different (and perhaps dissident) idea of what the 'pillars' are within marketing strategy, compared to what I was taught all those years ago as an ad agency graduate trainee.

Most readers will be familiar with the 4P’s of the classic marketing mix; product, place, price and promotion. It’s a practical framework that grew out of the systematic management of marketing in large corporations like Coke, Proctor & Gamble and IBM. The dominant metaphor is society being 'like a machine'. Brands would be engineered to fit optimally within factory-like supermarkets of consumption.

I wrote the New Marketing Manifesto in 1998 to reflect the growth of an alternative, creative and spirited movement in marketing – one that mirrored the growth of new media, the new economy, shifts in culture (postmodernism) and so on. It is a more creative, entrepreneurial mindset. This grew up with companies like Apple, Virgin and eBay who ‘broke all the rules’ (but had their own rulebook). The dominant metaphor here is society as cult; led by word of mouth movements of fascination, enthusiasm and cultural meaning.

New Marketing has perhaps become the norm or at least much more commonplace. It is normal for companies like Pepsi to launch initiatives like Refresh – a US microfunding engagement platform where consumers choose and vote on charities and causes to receive funding. In many ways this is an echo of the MyObama (election) campaign? Exciting stuff. But how to think about strategy in this context?

I was sitting yesterday with a cultural entrepreneur and sketching out a strategy for her as a brand and her projects. And the headings we used – the 4 I’s - are similar to those I might apply not just to a friend's life planning; but to innovation, policy initiatives, start-ups, writing books – and above all to marketing programmes. They allow schemes like Pepsi Refresh to be planned, researched, given a business case and structure (rather than just being a purely creative question of ‘thinking up something a bit different’):

INTENT

Anything fascinating in culture – a person, company, campaign – always has an interesting purpose. It wants to ‘change the world’. This is partly to do with the way our minds work. We are fundamentally inclined to look for human motivations – it's what makes the world seem alive to us and intelligible rather than soulless. IKEA’s founding intent was (and is) ‘to improve the everyday life of the majority of people’. The café I just had breakfast in (J+A) believes in replacing typical catering with ‘healthy and wholesome home cooking’. Lacking intent, we are left with alienating bureaucracies ‘just doing our job’, or communities with nothing in common but neighbour conflicts. Although it is questionable whether we ever receive a human artefact or institution as lacking intent – we will always impute motives like “all they care about is making money”.

IDEAS

Subjectively, creativity is (to misapply a quote from Winston Churchill) “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”. The experience of having a new idea is always as alien and shocking as suddenly thinking of the answer to a tricky crossword clue. Objectively though ideas are very simple. Something I explored in my second book After Image - picking up on findings from cognitive linguistics. They are a surprising but coherent combination of two previously unconnected domains. And their fascination comes from these domains 'sparking off each other'. Most fascinating brands, people, companies have this hybried quality of fusion. They live, like San Francisco, on a fault line. Apple is fashion + technology. IKEA is democracy + design. Finding new ways to release energy on this fault line is where all 'our' really good ideas come from – ie not from us, our craft skills or good taste - but a kind of archetypal rediscovery.

INNOVATION

My third book The Brand Innovation Manifesto put forward the idea that marketing and innovation today are so close as almost to be the same thing. What would Apple be without the iPod/iPhone/iPad...? That is different though from the mechanistic world of ‘NPD’ (new product development) in the old marketing mix. Resulting in tens of thousands of pointlessly tweaked product formulations per year, all just so the “New Improved” flash could be added to the pack! Real innovation is about developing radically new business concepts, with a breakthrough new resolution between the needs of people, planet and profit. It’s about expanding the space, developing new markets. Without true innovation marketing is reduced to rhetoric, it is basically a sham. This in sustainability is the truth about greenwash; claiming too much, doing too little. My fourth book the Green Marketing Manifesto countered this with a call for innovation and market development.

INTERACTION

We live in an age of social media which are fundamentally reconfiguring social relationships and which create a thrilling range of possibilities which many working in the internet field believe we have only just started to tap. It’s not just a new channel or medium. It creates new ways for organisations and people to create value together. I am generally suspicious of any marketing which seems premised on the old assumption that we need to show or tell people something to make them do something. People are too savvy, fickle and connected to be herded. And in media potential terms it's like making wooden toys in the age of the Nintendo Wii. And this is far from a digital-limited insight; new forms of retailing, event, participation and even ownership are rife. This new world of social innovation and possibility is the subject of my new book Co-opportunity.

The 4 I's could read like an ingredient list. But beware putting fluid categories in the old fixed processes. It’s certainly not quite a recipe. Most of what I have ever written is a challenge to the idea of ‘strategy’ as a separate department or discipline. It calls for a collaborative process of development; an extreme form of which is the popular ‘open innovation’ format where a company makes a public call for ideas. What the 4I's call for instead is imaginative chefs who are sensitive to the restraints (for instance of local, seasonal ingredients), delight in experimentation and who have a straightforward love of cooking. And for all of these endless writings, I suspect that the simple truth may be that I believe above all in creative conversations?

Early Valentines Message from Greenpeace

2010-02-10T13:34:00.000-08:00

And there's a whole spoof dating site Polluter Harmony
Via current green blog

Are You in Co-opportunity?

2010-02-09T16:32:00.001-08:00

Cross posted from http://www.coopp.net

What examples are drawn on is something I often check when I am choosing books in this sort of area.

I thought it might make an interesting although slightly nerdy thing to post anyway. I was going to use the Index but discovered that I needed to go through it manually as many had fallen through that net. If anyone from any of the specific projects, campaigns, or ventures below see this do mail me for a signed copy (Andy from MindApples and Luke from kept just got theirs today). Obviously I cant give free copies to every employee of eBay or everyone who ever bought Fairtrade, but I'd love to give something back to the examples I love and quote within reason - so lets say the first 30 genuine responses? :J

EXAMPLES IN CO-OPPORTUNITY:
826 Valencia, ActOnCO2, Actics/Ethical Economy, Adventure Ecology, Alpha Course, Amazon, Apple, Art of Living, Arup, Ashoka, BarCamp, Barter bank, Barter Card, BBC Green, B-Corporation, Big Lunch, Big Issue invest, BioChar/Craig Sams, BoGo, BT, Canvass Your MP, Cape Farewell, Carbon Disclosure Project, Carbon Trust, Carrot Mob, Causes.com, Christian Aid, Climate Camp, Coin, Community Choice Aggregation (CCA), Community Interest Company (CIC), Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), Co-operative Bank, Co-operative Societies, Couchsurfing, Craigslist, Creative Data, Dark Mountain Project, Demos, Design Council, Do Lectures, DoTheGreenThing, Earth Open Source, The Ecologist, Eden Project, Elio Studio, eBay, Energy Crossroads, Environmental Ambassadors (CpH), Etsy, Fairtrade Foundation, Fordhall Farm, Futerra, Freecycle, Good Guide, Grameen bank, Green Belt (Wangaari Matthai), Greenbiz, Greengaged, Green My Apple, GreenPeace, Guerrilla Gardening, GTO, Howies, The Hub, Hub Culture, Hughs Chicken Run, Hyperlocavore, The Idler, i-Genius, i-Team, Ipswich Town FC, Ivili, Kickstarter, KEPT, Kiva.org, Landless Rural Workers Movement, Landshare, LEED, Lemnis, LocalFoodShop.co.uk, London United, Long Now Foundation, M2M, Meetup, Mental Health Foundation, Method, Marks & Spencer/Oxfam, Mind Apples, MPesa, MyObama.com, MySociety.org, NESTA, Nokia, 'Not Bad', OneLaptopPerChild, Organic, Pestival, Pew, Plastiki, Pledgebank, Project Dirt, PSFK, Prosperity Without Growth, Reboot Britain, ReCaptcha, Responsible Travel, RateMyPrison, REIY, Resurgence, Riverford Farms, River Simple, Rural Community Shops, RUSZ, School of Life, Slow Movement, Smart Para Transit, Sahara Forest Project, Social Innovation Camp, SPIN Farming, TED, TEEB, The Nag, Tomorrow's Company, Timberland, Timebank, Tom's Shoes, Transition Towns, Tweehive, Tweet Congress, UNEP, Virgance, Wal-mart Index, We20, Whole Foods, Whuffie, Wikipedia, World Bank, WOOFF, World Changing, World Without Oil, Worn Again, WPP, WWF, ZOPA

A really lovely brand - Evolve Beauty

2010-02-09T04:13:00.001-08:00

Great to see Laura from Evolve last night at the Food Inc launch. (Evolve = Beautifully effective certified organic products, packaged in upcycled milk bottles). An interview with Laura is to follow, meanwhile here's a pic from last night's party and do go and check out this really beautifully thought through brand at http://www.evolvebeauty.co.uk/ or by buying some from John Lewis/Ocado!

FOOD INC: Watch this Movie!!!

2010-02-08T15:52:00.001-08:00

There's a whole section in my new book Co-opportunity on transparency, empathy and the galvanising effect of combining these (and lots on food specifically, inspired by Michael Pollan and others) anyway if you havent already watch this movie - it demonstrates those points so much better than dry prose and will change the way you eat, shop & think. Plus it's just a really good film, letting its subject matter and subjects shine through with a deft artistry that eschues hamming it up or getting in the way. In a word BRILLIANT - an absolute must see:

Beautiful, Lyrical Film Site

2010-02-04T13:53:00.000-08:00

Have been really enjoying browsing the archives at explore.org there's something just right about their 2-5 minute documentaries (far from the bustle of TV & really involved in their subjects whether it's wildlife, dance or spiritualities). I'd thoroughly recommend checking it out when you need a break from the bustle of Twitter, yet more blah about Avatar, tabloid scandals and whatever is tying up your work brain at the moment :J

Haiti Fundraiser in London

2010-01-25T12:23:00.000-08:00

(That my friend Aladin is involved with)

We've just announced early details of a fantastic fundraising Haiti benefit gig at the Roundhouse on February 25th - with a really strong line-up and some huge special-guest acts still to be revealed next week.First acts announced for Haiti Earthquake Fundraiser@The Roundhouse includes Seasick Steve; Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly, Magic Numbers; Mr Hudson, The Futureheads and Bombay Bicycle Club. DJ sets from The Maccabees, Zero 7, Mat Horne and Kate Nash. Presenters include Charlie Brooker, Edith Bowman, Harry Shearer (Spinal Tap/The Simpsons), Marcus Brigstocke, George Lamb and Rick Edwards.
Tickets went on sale an hour ago:
Web - http://www.haitiearthquakefundraiser.com/
F/bk - http://twitter.com/haitibenefitgig
Twtr - http://bit.ly/7C5GIF

POST GROWTH MARKETING?

2010-01-19T09:35:00.000-08:00

(A new article for Mediacat magazine)

How could business and marketing thrive in a post growth economy? It may sound like a weird question. Ever since Adam Smith economists have assumed that growth was the essential measure of an economy. Smith’s argument was that only in a growing economy would there be more jobs than workers, keeping wages high. Also he claimed economic growth (rather than absolute size) affected the general mood or morale of a nation.

Most modern economists also believe that GDP growth is essential. Negative growth (a recession) brings terror to the boardroom and panic to parliament; witness the events of the last few years. Prolonged negative growth such as in the Great Depression of 1930s America summons images of mass social dislocation and misery. Employment is still the crux; but it's a more subtle relationship since it is large companies protecting their profits and shareholder dividends that drive the rapid spikes in unemployment (not the long term supply and demand of Adam Smith's writings)?

But from a fringe idea associated - as the author of one UK report (Professor Tim Jackson) put it - with “Lunatics, Idealists and Revolutionaries”, growth has become a key debating point over the last few years in mainstream politics. Prominent figures such as Anthony Giddens (former president of the London School of Economics) and Nicholas Stern (World Bank Economist, author of The Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change) have argued that since all the evidence continues to show that GDP growth leads inexorably to rising carbon emissions, it is mistake to continue to pursue growth which was only ever justified because it seemed to match the broader goal of maximising wellbeing. This linkage has also been challenged by ‘happiness economics’ some of whose studies claim that past a certain threshold level, extra GDP doesn’t make people happier. A conclusion reinforced by the recent Stiglitz report, commissioned by French President Sarkozy and the EU, which concluded we need a wider range of better measures of the wellbeing of nations than GDP alone.

Post growth economics is such a hot topic it made last September’s issue of the Harvard Business Review, in an article by James Gustave Speth called “Doing Business in a Post Growth Society”. In this article Speth argues that believing in continued economic growth could be about as dumb as believing in endless population growth, and for similar environmental reasons. He concludes that this would mean a world of less consumerism and higher prices; but that quality of life could improve in 'neglected areas'.

Economy growth is not necessarily the same thing as company growth, of course. A forest can be a steady state system, but the young trees still grow. For many a large corporation though, post growth economics would spell death. Only large and growing returns will satisfy speculator shareholders. And without ambient economic growth, to ‘lift all the boats’ this would be difficult for a very large and diversified corporation. They are also running out of anywhere to go for cheaper labour (‘the race for the bottom’). So a post growth future may be a place of smaller companies, and also ones with employee, community or customer ownership – cooperatives of various sorts and also social ventures (making money being secondary to some social purpose). In these types of business making excess profits is literally a bonus, the main thing is to serve the needs of your communities.

There is an assumption there would be very little marketing in such a world. A lot of marketing today is tied up with the growth imperative, not just in hyped image markets (perfume, fashion etc.), but also in much less conspicuous consumption such as mobile phone operators, energy utilities and financial services. If companies were not geared for growth would you need to fight so hard for the last fraction of market share? Going back to the forest analogy of course there could be a phase of even greater competition. Like the retail price wars that broke out as we entered the current recession. But after this phase there would be just fewer brands and companies, and people would keep things longer, treasure them and generally get by with less.

It’s hard to tell overall. But my strong hunch is we should be focusing on different kinds of marketing. For instance imagine a world where collaboration, community and sharing were dominant (rather than individualism). A world where the ‘brands’ might actually emanate from groups of people doing stuff together – crowd funding, group buying, even telling companies what they want or co-creating it. The other watchwords would likely be loyalty and trust. Imagine buying your last ever computer – from now on you will just upgrade parts of it (hardware and software), but keep many of the guts and casing. If you were doing that you’d choose a company you believed in, that would still be here and innovative in 20 years. It could spell the death of Dell, or even Apple and the return of IBM?

Speaking of death, the main reasons for engaging in all of this should be as responsible human beings. We surely can’t drive the world over some precipice for the sake of a few more fashionable gadgets or exotic holidays? Or even for the sake of keeping lots of lovely jobs in creative agencies. Even Martin Sorrell of WPP has said as much – that it is time to question ‘superconsumption’ for that reason. The interesting part comes when you realise that we literally need to reinvent everything, from marketing up to macro economics, to unhook ourselves at every level from addiction to growth.

Another Year, Book, Blog

2010-01-08T03:36:00.000-08:00

www.coopp.net As promised in the intro to Co-opportunity, I've put up a new blog to specifically follow up on the issues, themes and cases in the new book, for interviews and content, as a place for readers to comment/critique and generally hang out. I'll keep greenormal focused on green marketing and innovation; while the new book is more concerned with social innovation (social networks, social movements, social ventures). It's a fuzzy line and when in doubt I will cross post. Please do link to the new blog and do comment there if you want to swap links and join the blogroll :J

Co-opportunity Cover Designs

2010-01-07T01:13:00.000-08:00

Can you judge a book by it's cover? Just over 3 weeks to go anyway (out Jan29)...

Draft Article for Sublime: THE CRAFT SOCIETY

2010-01-06T04:05:00.000-08:00

(image from nibsblog, 2008)

THE CRAFT SOCIETY

The word ‘Craft’ has dubious connotations – macramé plant hangers, table lamps festooned with sea shells, dolls made out of socks and buttons, home knit jumpers for Christmas… A 1970s that taste forgot looms in my mind, cluttered with knick-knacks and home hobbies. My father had taken up weaving lurid (tropical scene) tapestries as a therapeutic hobby - as well as brewing his own beer. My mother collected teapots. Hundreds of them. From auctions and craft fairs. Displayed on every spare tabletop, mantle piece and window sill. (Adding a frisson of added risk to playing indoors with balls and paper darts and disc shaped things that looked like they might fly like a Frisbee!) This wasn’t ironic or kitsch – it was all about adding a personal touch, cosiness, “turning a house into a home”.

For my generation crafts came to epitomise what (high) culture looks down on. Because they represented uneducated, unrefined, popular culture – as much so as seaside souvenirs, tabloid news and bingo. They could be employed subversively – as kitsch, as anti-cool, as DIY – in the same spirit as Punk. But not appreciated in a simple way.

The cultural tide has turned and now the handmade craft aesthetic is “back”. The trend seemed to start in the art world, a late 90s turn from bold designer art to neurotic neo-realism. Today’s baggy cardigan, acoustic live music, home grown veg, charity shop and camping holiday culture… are once again valuing the handmade and the folk-traditional. Artefacts that are not manufactured or mass produced, but rather are handmade by an individual. There is a growing interest in authentic, artisanal craft goods. Etsy for example is the specialist online marketplace for individual craft producers to sell handmade goods and buy craft supplies. Launched in 2005 it has attracted nearly 4 million members, 250,000 of which are sellers. Craft hobbies are booming too, from knitting to (I would argue) making your own website or blog.

These fashions come and go. The current mass popularity of crafts could be the regression that goes with recession – “a new mood of thrift”. It could also be some new inkling of sustainability – although you have to wonder if most handmade items are intrinsically less resource intensive? Most organic wool in the UK is sourced from New Zealand. Does it then make a huge difference where or how the jumper is made? And there are all sorts of dangers of self-deception in “eco chic” – styling yourself like a hippy but missing the implied values like sharing, peace and anti-materialism? There are pro-sustainability trends within design, for instance in using reclaimed or neglected materials. But the main factor is often the model or business system – whether or not you make throwaway ‘fashion’, for instance.

There’s another way of thinking about all this: Craft as in Craft Guild - ie what happens economically and socially when the main source of value is workers’ skills, not employers patents and contracts? In industrial production every worker is just an interchangeable ‘moving part’. Hence the employer can seek the cheapest workers and claim the maximum profit – today paying below the living wage in the poorest countries in the world. This is still (‘offshoring’, restrictive patents and labour productivity) according to some analysts the main source of growth in corporate profits (rather than innovation).

The introduction of unskilled, low-paid industrial factory work met with protests. The famous Luddites of 1811 were in fact the Guild of Stockingers, hit by food shortages and a virtual police state during the Napoleonic war, priced out of the workplace and denied the right to collective bargaining by the 1799 Combinations Act. According to Lord Byron the Stockingers were “meagre with famine, sullen with despair, careless of a life”. The history we were taught at school said “that’s progress”. But actually it’s more political than that. The question is who owns the skill? Is it the worker or the employer? Craft guilds – by holding fast to trade secrets and their transmission, as well as the license to operate - regulated prices, quality standards, employment, training and competition, and also provided welfare and community support for over 500 years. A typical medieval town could have over 200 guilds representing diverse trades like tanning, brewing, baking, filigree and weaving. They had strict moral and commercial codes, kept the merchant speculators out of the local economy, and provided some stability during paroxysms of civil war, plague, famine, debasement of currencies... After the guilds were smashed by Laissez Faire free marketeers (and working hours nearly doubled and standards of living plummeted), co-operative societies (often started by ex guild members) took on some of their role.

The question for tomorrow’s economy could be what is the best set of institutions for a resilient local economy and hence the common good? Our corporate-speculator-growth model will collapse at the first sign of crisis (dodgy sub prime mortages are likely to be the least of our worries when crises in climate, energy, water, food, city flooding and so on hit in the next decade or two). The current model is geared for growth, and not for taking the bad years with the good. The alternative model is mutual, where individuals own skills and networks transmit them. It’s the model that has sustained those services and professions (like academia, law and plumbing) that proved more immune to mechanisation or business process re-engineering. And it’s the craft guild model that was followed by the Open Source revolution in software (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP…) providing a viable alternative to the dominance of the Microsoft’s of this world.

Not only does this model have the potential to create a safer world, with more stability and less suffering. It also holds the prospect of more fulfilling careers – a move back to “your life’s work” and the self respect and development that comes from mastering a trade, whether it is bread making or database development.

It may also mean more macramé, teapots and folk music, but on balance we could probably live with that?

John Grant’s new book Co-opportunity (which includes a section on craft guilds and mutual economic models) is out 29th Jan 2010, from Wiley.

Video Interview: "Green Gurus"

2009-12-22T05:16:00.000-08:00

Conversations with Green Gurus (a great book and now also a series of video interviews and events) have now uploaded my video interview on their youtube channel. I've embedded it here but its do check out the other video interviews - there are some real crackers - via this handy link http://www.youtube.com/user/TheGreenGurus

Speaking of crackers I wish everyone a merry christmas/seasonal break and a hopeful new year :J

Copenhagen in Pictures

2009-12-08T08:08:00.001-08:00

Ole and the Bigger Picture team are helping bring discussions to life and hopefully a more successful conclusion by bringing their visualisation skills to bear inside the Cop15 process : check it out at www.cop15visualised.com - the site also features a daily WWF broadcast featuring them.

Another day, another talk

2009-12-08T07:11:00.001-08:00

This one is with a bunch of creative sustainability friends and friends of friends and is all about redesigning life. Do drop me an email (or leave your contacts in the comments) if you are in London thursday and want to pop along.

ps have stuck the detailed press release text into the comments.

Conversations with Green Gurus

2009-12-01T14:10:00.000-08:00

The film that goes with the book has just gone up on YouTube. And the individual lengthier film interviews will follow soon on the GreenGurus channel. It's a fantastic book anyway - I actually recommended it last week to a friend who said she wanted THE one book to read about green. It's stuffed with wisdom, quotable insights and personal stories from some of the most inspiring people in the field (and yours truly!)

Speaking of which myself, John Elkington and Paul Dickinson are speaking in a 'Faith and Climate Change' debate organised by the Green Guru authors at the liberal Jewish synagogue tomorrow night December 2nd, (28 St John’s Wood Road, London NW8 7HA • 6.45pm for 7pm - it's free to all comers if anyone local fancies a night of deep debate after work!)

I'm also rumoured to be interviewing another Green Guru contributor Hunter Lovins (fantastic lady, amazing hats too) at the Cineforum event Friday.

Finally do check out the Green gurus book itself here

Go #RED

2009-12-01T03:11:00.000-08:00

Today is world AIDS day. To help raise awareness twitter is turning every tweet that contains the hashtag #red red (ie it appears in dark/light red coloured type). This was sponsored by Nike who are kind of trailblazing in the cause related, quiet, supportive marketing domain this last year (see also TheGirlEffect). You can also turn your tweet red by using the Nike linked hashtag #laceupsaveslives I love it anyway & wish we'd thought of something similar for Tweehive.

New Article for Mediacat Magazine

2009-11-16T04:53:00.000-08:00

Through the Looking Glass

As we stare into another year and wonder what it will hold, I am encouraged to look further ahead and think about where brands and media are heading medium term. I know it’s tempting just to hope that it “wont be as bad as last year” but perhaps the forces that are tilting against the status quo are deeper than issues like banking confidence, consolidation and quarterly profits? So that leaving 'the future' to a quiet year could be a long wait! Anyway the medium term future is more interesting; calling on imagination, not just 'more of the same' realism?

It’s tempting to take a sustainability point of view on brands, media and change. Consumerism is to blame for some of our problems. We can ill afford the fantasy that the world exists to fulfil our wishes; nor even the sickness that has resulted from partial success in this (eg obesity). We do live in a world of cornucopian bounty; if only we could adapt to what it does offer, and abandon the idea that it could ever support 9 billion American consumer lifestyles. The way we have organised human societies, for instance the food system that traverses the earth in search of slightly more profit, is perverse. In future oil will not be cheap enough to support this and food security (along with water security, energy security) will be the pressing issue, not consumer choice.

The trouble I’ve found with future gazing from a sustainability point of view is it is all about restriction (or ‘mitigation’). Like a global health problem it shows that our lifestyles and cultures cannot but change. But it doesn’t in itself point to a positive alternative; and that may account for the failure of sustainability to achieve general recognition or popular support? We have nothing to look forward to on this view. Whereas individuals that successfully adapted to a restriction (illness, redundancy, divorce) often found it is in retrospect also an opportunity to flourish and develop in new ways; restriction and calamity can come to be seen as a blessing in disguise, an opportunity to rebalance, build new relationships, follow other passions.

If you look into history, you find that such limits and necessities do force change upon us. But perhaps they are less predictive of the direction of that change. Two things that are far more predictive of change are the amount of contact between cultures, and the form and function of media. We can maybe amalgamate the two and talk about the way in which we share ideas?

In case this feels like a remote concern for a marketing magazine, consider that what you describe as brands are actually fragments of media. At a functional level most advertising media mimic real media. Direct marketing appears to be a personal letter addressed to you. A TV commercial appears to be a little TV show or movie. A press ad has a headline, picture and copy – just like one of the more important newspaper and magazine stories. There is a slight nuisance factor in content that mimics what we are looking for to get our attention. But also like the bacteria in our gut, it repays the host; the direct marketers pay for our post service, the advertisers for our entertainment media, sports events and news. Among ‘old’ media the poster stands alone as a pure act of promotion; a descendent of the pamphlet. Although you could also argue that it masquerades as public graphic art?

What is new in media, in a fundamental society-restructuring way? I would argue that the deepest innovation is the invention of shared texts. Since the invention of writing humanity has been split between the objective, neutral, machine-like world as written, and the subjective, interweaving, alive, nuanced world of conversation. Writing may have made possible technology, empires, industry (they all resemble printing presses, replicating human ideas – making the world more ‘uniform’ in the process). This is also art imitating life – the very core living process being one of a similar replication of cells. Conversation is something other. It is a means to understand each other and through that process understand ourselves. It is not straightforward, it is subjective and a way for two minds to ‘boil the world together, so that it tastes less bitter’ as one writer (Theordore Zeldin) put it.

Shared texts have many uses. Some are literally conversations as in Twitter and chat forums. Others are co-written and edited in a very obvious ways; like Wikipedia. Others are less personal. For instance ecommerce is only possible because of a process by which one side writes a catalogue, but the other can write orders, reviews and in other ways make their mark in it (for instance Amazon’s ability to tell me what others who liked a book bought). It’s likely that we are at the early stages of discovering all of shared texts' uses. The printing press was originally used to make bibles (and TV was originally used to make radio programmes with pictures). Already though we have seen that the place of brands and media thinking is evolving; for instance inhabiting new key internet functions like searching for stuff.

When the media change, the brands change. Coca-Cola the defining brand of the mass media age is looking less dominant than ever. Other brands like Google, Apple, Amazon, Twitter are being born out of the markets for information. But what will true ‘shared text age’ brands look like? Of course some will be evolved from today's brands – companies like Proctor & Gamble have been deeply immersed in internet communities and other new media formats since the mid 1990s. But (of course) I think there is an alternative…

Imagine a future where brands were not owned and made by producers, but by consumers. The simplest way to explain this is imagine a consumer buying club being the most powerful brand in the world. There are early signs of this emerging; community choice aggregation (whereby whole American cities buy greener, cheaper electricity by buying in bulk – San Francisco being the latest); money supermarkets (comparison sites where people find the cheapest mortgage or credit card); community supported agriculture (where the consumers effectively buy a farm); microcredit (where the borrowers own the bank and pay themselves dividends in the form of free life insurance and so on). There have already been internet plays where ‘purchase power aggregation’ was the key model. But what would be needed is something with more solidarity. eBay might be a better guide to what these buying guilds could look like; self-governing, with a strong identity and shared resources, but freedom and diversity within this.

Of course I am stargazing. Who could really know what lies ahead? But the significance of shared texts as a human development can scarcely be overstated. In a broad historical sense it is a challenge to the ‘top down’ scheme of industrial society; for instance Linux was (another shared text and) a mighty challenge to Microsoft. And the ultimate shared text would be a new system of direct democracy. In the narrow sense I think it helps you to get your bearings in new media. To better get ahead of the curve. And now is a great time to be experimenting and finding new ways to connect. After all, with the current model in tatters the only way is forwards, right?

Recipe for a Successful Copenhagen

2009-11-12T02:17:00.000-08:00

I'm tempted to show this at the event I'm speaking at Danish Embassy tonight (I'm sure they make funny videos featuring our hilarious British accent too ;) Seriously though does a great job of combining quite dense info & the limitless infantile joy of playing with food.

Green Books Campaign: Slow Money by Woody Tasch

2009-11-10T11:00:00.000-08:00

This review is part of the Green Books campaign . Today 100 bloggers are reviewing 100 great books printed in an environmentally friendly way. Our goal is to encourage publishers to get greener and readers to take the environment into consideration when purchasing books. This campaign is organized by Eco-Libris, a a green company working to green up the book industry by promoting the adoption of green practices, balancing out books by planting trees, and supporting green books. A full list of participating blogs and links to their reviews is available on Eco-Libris website .
EcoLibris Link

As the official blurb above says... I'm taking part in a global campaign today whereby 100 green bloggers review 100 green books. The campaign was put together by Raz from ecolibris through which you can plant equivalent trees for every book you read. Ecolibris are great supporters of the whole sector and I came across them when
their blog was one of the first to review The Green Marketing Manifesto

The book which I chose was:

"Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered" by Woody Tasch (Chelsea Green US)

There's only one catch. Unfortunately the book which was posted to me nearly a month ago hasnt arrived. It has most likely got caught in Britain's slow post (we've had a series of strikes here and 30m items are said to be held up). 99 book reviews doesn't have quite the same ring and I really didnt want to let the campaign down. So I am writing instead a (p)review to say why I chose this book to review and really want to read it when it does eventually turn up!

Why I thought this was the most important book to read at this time:

1. I've been working on a food project called Earth Open Source. I'm a city living green and was until then fairly ignorant of the critical importance of food, farming and especially soil in climate change, global justice and so on. Although even a city green would have picked up for instance James Lovelock's claim that food & farming were responsible for 50% of all carbon emissions. That's due to transport, the energy that goes into agriculture (farm equipment and chemicals), change of land use (aka loss of grasslands and forests). But the really big issue is our treatment of soil. The IPCC have now agreed to include soil sequestration in their next round of assessments after this letter by prominent scientists (full text, refs and commentary here):

Grassland Carbon Working Group
Soil Organic Carbon is the Future Beneath Our Feet 26 January 2009
To: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
c/o Dr. R. K. Pachauri, Chairman

Civilizations rise and fall with the quality of their soils. Soil organic carbon is essential to soil health. We are given one more chance to learn the lesson of history. This time the stakes are higher – soil degradation is endemic to every continent and we have created a new, atmospheric, carbon crisis. The presence of soil organic carbon can be the difference between life and death. Soils store twice as much carbon as global vegetation and the atmosphere combined. Loss of historic soil organic carbon due to degradative land use has been dramatic, resulting in poor soil fertility, environmental pollution, food insecurity and poverty. Soil organic carbon can and must be restored. Excess carbon in the atmosphere is a pollutant; carbon in the soil is a valuable ecosystem commodity. Healthy plants are the agents of transformation, converting the former to the latter. We consider grasslands in order to illustrate the potential of soil carbon sequestration in all agricultural soils. Grasslands cover one third of the planet’s 149 million km2 of land surface. A small change in soil carbon across this vast sink will have an enormous effect on atmospheric carbon. A 1 percent absolute increase in organic matter of grassland soils would sequester 102 Pg of carbon, removing 375 Pg of CO2 from the atmosphere(i).

...An urgent and pragmatic assessment of the role of soil carbon sequestration is overdue. Grasslands and all forms of agricultural soil carbon sequestration must be recognized as an important source of mitigation at the next meeting of the international conference of parties in Copenhagen, and this important mitigation strategy accordingly linked to financing mechanisms. We call on the IPCC to hold immediate talks to develop strategies for the implementation of soil carbon sequestration at full potential. On the basis of these talks, we encourage the formation of a new working group to meet prior to the meeting in Copenhagen in December and its action plan be reported at that time. We extend our assistance to the IPCC in this important matter.
Convergent crises provide unprecedented opportunities. The multi-functional nature of soil organic carbon provides answers to problems, which paradoxically in isolation may appear insurmountable.
Like the crisis, the opportunity is unprecedented.
The solution is in our hands.

For those who would like to follow this up grain.org have a great article on this subject which claims:

"According to our calculations, if we could manage to put back into the world’s agricultural soils the organic matter that we
have been losing because of industrial agriculture, we would capture at least one third of the current excessive CO2 in the atmosphere. If, once we had done that, we were to continue rebuilding the soils, we would, after about 50 years, have captured about two thirds of the excess CO2 in the atmosphere."

And if you really want to get to grips with the subject head over to the Rodale Institute.

All of which explains why in the Earth Open Source team we have come to the view that FOOD IS THE NEW ENERGY. Not that it's an either or but the preceding facts on the pivotal role of farming do argue that if a fraction of the effort that went into multibillion investments in solar were diverted to farming, food and especially soil done right, then we would be on our way to a solution, not only to climate change but feeding the 9 billion, right?

Well yes and no. because it depends what kind of investment - leading to what kind of farming.

2. The problem is that food, farming and soil done right requires a different model for investment too. As Tasch's book argues (as far as I can tell from the publisher's information, his speeches online and so on :) there is a need for slow money ie an alternative model to lean and mean free market capitalism.

Fast capital applied to farms demands maximum financial returns on capital (and did I mention "fast"?). These are achieved by
i. growing cash crops, those suitable for export or sale as commodities
ii. and growing them in an intensive, large scale, industrial monocrop fashion
iii. which in return relies on heavy use of machinery and agrichemicals, also potentially seeds that are under patent
iv. partly because machines are cheaper (per acre) than workers - in fact agribusiness generally quotes yields per worker to underline this being a key profit indicator

This last point also deliberately (some believe) obscures a fundamental finding. Small polycrop farms (ie traditional farms) are far more productive OF FOOD PER ACRE than big farms. This doesn't translate into fast buck profits for big investors. But it does translate into better diets and more secure food for people. Monocrop harvests are exported (often in developing countries as encouraged by the IMF - foreign currency to pay off debts). But even when eaten at home it's a meagre diet - as Michael Pollan pointed out: the main thing you eat in almost every food in the USA is corn. So much corn syrup is used in fact that the average US citizen eats 1.1kg of sugar every week.

The finding that small farms are more productive (in every sense except return on investment capital) is well documented. As George Monbiot wrote in an article entitled small is bountiful:

"Though the rich world’s governments won’t hear it, the issue of whether or not the world will be fed is partly a function of ownership. This reflects an unexpected discovery. It was first made in 1962 by the Nobel economist Amartya Sen, and has since been confirmed by dozens of further studies. There is an inverse relationship between the size of farms and the amount of crops they produce per hectare. The smaller they are, the greater the yield. In some cases, the difference is enormous. A recent study of farming in Turkey, for example, found that farms of less than one hectare are twenty times as productive as farms of over ten hectares. Sen’s observation has been tested in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Malaysia, Thailand, Java, the Phillippines, Brazil, Colombia and Paraguay. It appears to hold almost everywhere."

Nonetheless fast capital and the so called 'industrial model is growing, in the face of all this evidence. Why? because investors love it. Especially now that there is a biofuels boom, global food prices spiked (in 2008) and according to the FT hedge fund and VC money has been rushing into investments in farming (following 30 years when the sector was less popular). For instance the FT reported that:

"Emergent Asset Management is even more ambitious, with the British hedge fund manager aiming to raise €1bn (£787m) over the next year to put into sub-Saharan African farmland. "The cost of land is very, very low," said Paul Christie, marketing director of Emergent. "We want to make the land more productive. It is industrial scale farming and it is going to make a big difference down there."

Taking these points together the crux of the issue is as follows:
BIG MONEY = INDUSTRIAL FARMING = INSECURE, UNHEALTHY FOOD SUPPLY & HIGH CARBON EMISSIONS
SLOW MONEY = SMALLER, OR MORE CAREFUL FARMING = SECURE FOOD & MASSIVE CARBON SEQUESTRATION

Not all the fast money is chasing planet suicide. For instance Craig Sams former Green & Blacks founder has started a (Silicon Valley VC backed) biochar company. As reported in the Independent. But it's a fair bet that slow money is the much more likely to help build a vibrant farming community, who nurture the soil and save us all.

All of which explains why I was very keen (out of a long list offered) to read and review Tasch's thoughts on the subject. Not just a pundit or bystander (like yours truly) Tasch is chairman of a circle of investors who have already put $130m in farming done right. And I believe from other genuine reviews he is a lyrical writer, especially on the subject of soil. Here's a quote I picked up from lavidalocavore

"You wouldn't use a 747 to go to the corner store for a quart of milk. You wouldn't use a backhoe to plant a garlic bulb. You wouldn't use a factory to raise a pig. You wouldn't spray poison on your food. You wouldn't trade fresh food from family farms down the road for irradiated or contaminated or chemical-laden or weeks-old food from industrial farms halfway around the world..."

Part of the problem is we urban types are so alienated from what we eat and what impact it has that we probably would (I see plenty of people in jet sized cars for a start). We have lapsed into what British food policy professor Tim Lang (in a recent talk at NEF's Bigger Picture) called "A 70 year fantasy that we can buy what we want, whenever we want, from wherever we want."

In summary I would LOVE to read this book and I urge everyone else who reads this post to do so. We need to get a critical mass of recognition behind the following key points:
1. industrial farming and poisoned soil (more than even coal and oil) are the KEY problem driving climate change
2. patient small scale mixed crop farming, done the organic &/or traditional way are the KEY climate change solution
3. the type of investment is critical to the transition from 1. to 2. - as the title says it takes slow (ie patient) money

I would add that community and cooperation are key. Much of the research behind this (p)review came from from my own forthcoming book "Coopportunity". Supermarkets are predicated on choice. Fine, let us choose good food from good local farms. If we choose it they will have no option but to sell it (or if they dont, their successors will). I know growing your own is tempting, but don't miss the chance to buy from community supported agriculture, or to demand healthy, seasonal, local organic food from the major retailers too. (Much organic food in the UK is imported which rather misses the point as far as climate solutions go). That's something we are focusing on with Earth Open Source. But we need to get the investment model right, otherwise there will be no local, small farm, healthy and soil respecting food left to demand!

So buy this book, plant a tree (via EcoLibris) and demand better food from better farms. And if you have cash and a conscience consider getting into farming done right. That's about it. A full review of the actual book to follow when slow post allows.

Cop15 Videos/Campaigns

2009-10-22T06:40:00.000-07:00

Would be interesting to discuss these - a mix of promo videos, personal testimonies & some which are both - to see what's working for people & why?

...and speaking of 350 dont forget the International day of (photographing a '350' in a public place) Climate Action this Saturday http://www.350.org/

Legal Disclaimer

2009-10-20T15:55:00.000-07:00

I've been contributing a few posts to the green awards blog. Checking in on the site I just happened upon their legal disclaimer - it's an absolute thing of beauty. Placed next to the possibly naive feeling of freedom in blogging (except in China where a contact tells me Greenormal is blocked by censors) it strikes me as something like the old Swedish comedy show which featured a couple of guys roaring around in a Volvo that happened to be encased in a jumbo mattress. A thing of beauty anyway. (I get it, but cant help smiling at the need for it). Here it is....

Blog Disclaimer

The opinions expressed here are the opinions of the writer and are not the official position of the Green Awards. The information contained in this Blog is for general guidance on matters of interest only. The application and impact of laws can vary widely based on the specific facts involved. Given the changing nature of laws, rules and regulations, and the inherent hazards of electronic communication, there may be delays, omissions or inaccuracies in information contained in this Blog. Accordingly, the information on this Blog is provided with the understanding that the authors and publishers are not herein engaged in rendering legal, accounting, tax, environmental or any other professional advice and services. As such, it should not be used as a substitute for consultation with professional accounting, tax, legal, environmental or other competent advisers. All information in this Blog is provided "as is", with no guarantee of completeness, accuracy, timeliness or of the results obtained from the use of this information, and without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including, but not limited to warranties of performance, merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. In no event will the Green Awards, its related partnerships, agents or employees thereof be liable to you or anyone else for any decision made or action taken in reliance on the information in this Site or for any consequential, special or similar damages, even if advised of the possibility of such damages.

New Article for Mediacat Magazine

2009-10-20T15:42:00.000-07:00

Climate Change – The Creative Brief

It is said that "the journey of a thousand miles begins with a step". Actually that isn't entirely true. As storytellers know the journey of a thousand miles begins with a need to be a thousand miles away. A murder. A loved one a continent away. Or a job transfer. But anyway a human necessity to get there.

The long awaited United Nations Climate Change Conference ‘COP15’ is approaching. The goal is to agree a framework to replace the Kyoto treaty so that nations can work together on averting man made global warming. This is a political matter. But after the targets are agreed (at Copenhagen or later) what then? I’ll argue actually that this then becomes a marketing issue - creating public and business movement to match the ambitious objectives. But as in any good brief let’s focus on the Why? before the How?

The COP15 coverage has focused upon the nation state politics. Can a deal be reached with India and China? Will America make real commitments? Is it fair for the developing nations to be asked to cut emissions? Should the richer nations who are responsible for the bulk of emissions bear the load? That is an inevitable consequence of staging a multi-nation event aimed at brokering a deal. But it’s also potentially the wrong frame. Climate change is not an issue (like trade) about the balance or deal struck. Climate change is like a dark wave rolling towards us – we need to link arms or all be swept away.

When people in my country imagine climate change (I know this because I’ve conducted focus groups on the subject) they see it was bringing hotter summers and milder winters, and at worst potentially some increased flooding. And they see these changes happening over 40-50 years. They know that the effects may be much more extreme for “poor farmers and polar bears”. But they are not exactly losing sleep over the issue.

What I think this picture misses is the extraordinary degree of volatility and interdependence in our globalised economic world order. It’s like looking at a human body and saying ‘what difference could just a few degrees higher make?'

In 2008 the price of oil, some poor harvests, demand for biofuels, a flight of investors into safe commodities… produced a global food crisis which according to the UN doubled the number of people going hungry, while halving their supply of food aid. Why? There was still enough food for everyone. But the price of food increased. In poor countries food can account for about 30% of household spending. Hence an alarming increase in the numbers who could no longer afford 3 meals a day.

Those are the kinds of emergent effects I think you need to imagine to ‘get’ the impact of climate change. Human societies are like the climate itself. I picture both systems having a ‘whip’ like effect. When the atmosphere gets a little more energy and humidity on average the knock on effects on storms, floods, droughts and so on are not gradual and linear, they are dramatic and destructive. And we know it's the same with economies don't we? The knock on effect of some dodgy American home loans being a near meltdown in the global economy, also in 2008.

Politicians understand this. This is why when the UK parliament was surveyed in 2006, all but one of the 315 MPs who answered said that climate change was THE single most important issue facing our generation. A position that has only been reinforced by the Stern Report which warned that a failure to invest 1-2% of GDP now could lead to a loss of up to 20% of global GDP later. We have lived through a profound global slump this year. But the GDP still rose (according to the IMF) by 0.5%. Imagine it fell 20%. So that in some countries it would fall 40, 60, 80%. The socioeconomic impacts would be unimaginable. A whole world out of work, public services at a standstill, a mass extinction in many business sectors (ironically except possibly oil?) Imagine the fall of Soviet communism then times it by ten.

When you see that this is how even relatively mild (2 degrees, IPCC) predictions of climate change would play out – pretty much like a 2 degree rise in our body temperature compared to normal functioning – you realise how hugely important it is that we find some solutions fast. The good news is that many such solutions already exist. But taken as a whole it’s a radical shift. It’s about more than changing energy sources. It’s about a total redesign of society. Especially when you consider the next most pressing issue after climate change is probably the end of the era of cheap oil. Then there is food, water, biodiversity... the list goes on. We are running out of world and running out of time.

This transition in business, government and throughout society cannot happen until there is (in Al Gore’s words) a climate for change. And this is the heart of the creative brief for climate change. Politicians may see the medium term risks. But the public absolutely do not. In a Pew poll in the USA in 2009 the US public ranked climate change 20th out of 20 priorities for their government to tackle. Why? Because it doesn’t really seem like such a big thing to worry about.

I am not advocating mass panic-inducing alarmism. It’s actually potentially an exciting phase in human history. One of people rising to a proper challenge and feeling part of an epic achievement. One where some of the other imbalances such as the global wealth gap may get addressed. We do have the solutions if we can change our worldview enough to seize them. And we also have human ingenuity, and enough necessity to fuel huge invention.

So the crux of the creative brief is this. How can we help people in very large numbers grasp the necessity of human change in response to climate change? How can we help people prioritise it?

People who ‘get’ that this is a priority don’t have to become eco saints. We will still have lives, loves, and all too human inconsistencies. But it is a straightforward thing to want a better life for our children, to have worked on things that matter in the longer term, to have each in our own little ways been a part of the history of our times. It is as one commentator said a ‘simple matter of self esteem’.

Ultimately this is a marketing challenge. And I hope you’ll feel inspired (if a little daunted) to know that post Cop15, or whenever the targets are set, the next challenge largely may be down to us!

Climate by Numbers

2009-10-15T01:51:00.000-07:00

Numbers are important in creating climates for change. Especially countdowns and the notion of approaching limits. For instance the Y2K bug meme persuaded governments and businesses to take urgent action because of a countdown to 00:00:00:2000. There was a common understanding that at this time, if urgent precautions were not taken, computer clocks resetting could trigger effects in critical applications such as hospitals, nuclear power stations, bank records.

350.org (as many readers will know) takes the view that the 'red line' of climate safety is 350ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. This is the number put forward by James Hansen, Director of the NASA Godard Institute (although he also says we really have no idea if anything above pre-industrial levels is 'safe'). Hansen's view is that we are in imminent danger of triggering runaway climate change due to positive feedback effects; where warming produces effects leading to further heating: ie tipping points - one study from the Potsdam Institute pointed to nine of these potentially being triggered in the next century.

Slightly worryingly we passed 350ppm in 1987 or so. Some runaway climate change effects, such as that associated with methane clathrate release (marsh gas released from Siberian permofrost due to warming), have been claimed (in a recent study published in Nature) to have resulted in shifts of tens of degrees within decades in past geological eras. And there are some worrying signs on that front too.

All of which should be cause for URGENCY - the factor in human organisations (according to John Kotter's recent book) which gets things done. And 24th October is one chance to spread the word (or in fact the number - 350) as it's International Climate day of Action. Basically place the number 350 somewhere public, take a pic, and upload it to their site. And perhaps also chat to people around you about why you are doing this - spread the word. More details at http://www.350.org/

All part of the countdown to Cop15. But more importantly part of starting a tide of public opinion and motivation that can carry us beyond target setting to some urgent action. If you are busy on the 24th, are one of those I keep meeting who shy away from the more alarmist views on climate change, and/or want to commit to a sensible and serious series of personal actions next year then 10-10 is for you.

We Are One

2009-10-14T01:32:00.000-07:00

I'm not usually a huge fan of coffee table books but this one looks almost worth buying a (second hand or otherwise responsibly sourced) coffee table for! Here's some details from Jo Ede who created and edited this book & has been working with and filming indigenous peoples:

'We are One', the book on tribal peoples I have created and edited, is being published in the UK and Holland this Friday 16th October. It will be available in most bookshops nationwide.

We are One is a collection of previously unpublished statements from the world's tribal peoples, from the Yanomami of the Brazilian Amazon, to the semi-nomadic Penan of Malaysia and the Innu of Canada's sub-arctic tundra. These are supported by powerful essays photographs from authors, campaigners, politicians, philosophers, poets, artists, journalists, academics, anthropologists, environmentalists and illustrated by beautiful images by international photojournalists. We Are One celebrates the lives, homelands, rituals, languages, ideas and values of tribal peoples and explores the relevance of their wisdom to the present time. It is both a portrait of the beauty and diversity of tribal peoples, and a call to arms that examines many of the contemporary humanitarian and environmental issues inherent in their fight for survival - such as climate change.

Every single article, literary extract and photograph has been generously donated, in recognition of the 40th Anniversary of Survival International, the human rights' organisation that campaigns for tribal peoples (www.survivalinternational.org). All royalties from the sales of the book go to Survival International. We are One includes contributions and extracts from: Richard Gere, Zac Goldsmith, Colin Firth, Bruce Parry, Jane Goodall, Joanna Lumley, Robin Hanbury-Tenison, Damien Hirst, Satish Kumar, Tony Juniper, Colin Samson, Jonathan Porritt, Vandana Shiva, Kari Herbert, Sydney Possuelo, Carlo Petrini, Wade Davis, Arundhati Roy, A.C. Grayling, Roy Sesana, Laurens van der Post, Doris Pilkington-Garimara, Eduardo Galeano, Robin Hanbury-Tenison and many others. Photographs by: Sebastiao Salgado, Mike Goldwater, Steve McCurry, Mirella Ricciardi, Carol Beckwith, Yann-Arthus Bertrand, Tim Allen, Claudia Andujar and others.

For further information, please either contact Jo Ede on (+44 (0) 7721 093067, (j.eede@virgin.net or je@survivalinternational.org) or Miriam Ross at Survival International on (+44) (0)20 7687 8734 ( mr@survival-international.org)

Draft Article for Sublime: Hope Issue

2009-10-10T01:03:00.000-07:00

Dystopia? Utopia? Myopia? (Wetopia?)

When you imagine life in the year 2030 what do you see?

A. Dystopia? Climate change, peak oil, biodiversity, food, water, ecosystems collapse, tipping points: “A perfect storm by 2030” according to the UK chief scientist, Sir John Beddington: Or “A global Somalia” according to James Lovelock: Hell and high water, either way.

B. Utopia? A low carbon society will mean flourishing, elegant, harmonious, low carbon cities – with wonderful air quality, green spaces, cycle ways and free electric transits, mixed use campus-style neighbourhoods. Children, cats and handcarts loaded with fresh produce chase each other up grassy streets, while adults stroll between work places, symposia and city farms.

C. Myopia? 2030 is only 20 years away. Things will change but life will go on. There will be cars (now electric), supermarkets, offices, homes. Many of them still using today’s buildings. Some things will look advanced and some retro – just as if we’d peered ahead from 1990 to today we’d have been struck both by the iPhone and the number of cyclists.

D. All of the above? (But strangely reconfigured).

Any of A, B or C on their own are imbalanced (which would you choose – depression, mania or neurosis?) I am going to argue for D. I call this more panoptic viewpoint Wetopia; as the important shift could be from excessive ‘everyone for themselves’ competition to more joined up co-operation.

I agree with A that there is no change until denial is overcome. I agree with the B that there is no motivation without hope. I agree with C that the extremist views (A or B) largely go over the heads of most people. But that’s why we need a mix of all three. And we need to take them as ingredients for a recipe that is wholly new and strangely reconfigured. Because we need to adjust well to a fast-changing set of realities.

The either/or arguments that break out when these positions hit policy makers are so draining:
A. We MUST help the public understand the chasm of risk.
B. We MUST sell the public the dream of a better quality of life.
C. We MUST reassure the public that it’s not the end of the world.
With the three views pressed vehemently in every meeting on climate change, it’s no wonder decision-making becomes paralysed?

These are the wrong MUSTS. They assume a ‘public’ rather than a global village of fellow human beings. They assume propaganda, mass psychology, manipulation and spin… where conversation could be. They assume passive consumers, voters, viewers (who need to be sold a problem, a solution or a status quo)... where citizens could be. A citizen being defined as one who takes responsibility for the common good.

What’s missing from public engagement with the risks we face is a lack of citizenship. It’s not that people haven’t seen the melting icecaps, forest fires, floods on TV. They just don’t have a way to take any of this in and respond. Society is figured as a malfunctioning machine and they don’t know how to tinker with it – or even know that they could. I can’t think of any way through this except a return to participative democracy. Something that seems underway already; the democracy 2.0 of #iranelections, myobama.org, moveon.org and we20.org; the transparent scrutiny applied to policing, corporate human rights and MPs’ expenses.

Where eco-techno utopian fantasies fall short is they portray only the ‘lifestyle’ surfaces of society. This is still nuclear age thinking; complete with futuristic gadgets, energy and cars. They are hence less utopias; more product catalogues. Great if you sell cycles, solar panels or electric cars. And lovely stuff - I’m all in favour of all of this. But arguably these artefacts are about as pivotal as the props in a Shakespeare play. To be optimistic about a better quality of life, shouldn’t we rather be looking at new human systems; looking forward for instance to a more co-operative economy? With short working weeks, mutual company ownership, communal facilities, radical re-localisation of food, manufacture… everything geared to maximise wellbeing? Most utopias were radical plans for social equity. Plans like the Diggers of 1649 (if enough people joined self-sufficient food-growing communities the aristocracy would follow suit for lack of anyone to grow their food). Plans like the Rochdale Pioneers of 1844 (co-operative shops as stepping stones towards new “colonies” based on co-operation).

It’s the same obsession with surface that limits the myopic view. Yes we will likely re-use current buildings. But that doesn’t mean we will use them in the same way. St Luke’s (a company I co-founded in the 1990s) was an employee owned co-operative. We moved into an office, which had already been fitted out by a conventional company. But we just used it differently – turning what would have been directors offices into project rooms, an open floor into a library. It’s the configuration of social relationships that is plastic and subject to rapid change. It might take 200 years to replace our housing stock. But we could see the molecular (communal) household replace the nuclear household in a few decades?

Wetopia isn’t that new an idea. A version of this shift from hierarchy to co-operation has been the core idea in most of the alternative visions put forward over the last 500 years. It’s what Ghandhi meant by Swaraj or ‘self rule’: Meaning not a top-down India Congress (as proposed by Nehru) to replace the British Raj: But rather government that welled up from villages, people and ultimately the Hindu concept of Self as seat of moral certainty.

Not a new idea then, but to quote Ghandi again – when asked what he thought of Western Civilisation – “I think would be a very good idea!”

John Grant’s new book Coopportunity (Wiley) is out in January 2010.

Sublime Magazine Article (Art & Philosophy Issue)

2009-10-10T00:58:00.000-07:00

The Original Copy

A security guard at the Tate Modern gallery came over to ask me politely but firmly to stop taking pictures. The irony being that I was photographing No Ghost Just a Shell initiated by Pierre Hyghe and Philippe Parreno, an artwork exploring the subject of replication and intellectual copyrights. They had purchased the copyright for the image of Annlee, a Japanese anime figure (from Ghost in the Shell) and invited artists to use the image free of charge in their own video creations.

All life is based upon reproduction. But life’s idea of copying is far from (only) mechanical. For a start there is a wisdom in the fact we descend from several parents rather than being cloned. And also in that every cell in your body may have the same dna, but they are fabulously diverse in both their specialized functioning and interrelationship. In living systems, copying is just one part of the broader webs of emergence, adaptation, growth, interdependence, self-repair and so on. The simplest thing to say about this is that life is not mechanical. It is something else than that.

Life’s copying began with our molecular progenitors in a primordial soup and has been rushing ever since onwards and upwards, asymptotically towards us - and also presumably past us to some destination unknown. But if it was only copying life would be static, always forever the same. Instead it is a living process of both replication and ramification; in constant conversation with the ecosystem. And it is always evolving, mutating, re-shaping. This works because of imperfection, variation and chance. Through this a dance of intricately connected life-forms emerges. A caterpillar ‘learns’ (through selection of those who evolve this behaviour) to hang by a thread to avoid predators on plant stems. A species of wasp ‘learns’ to climb down this thread to inject its eggs into the caterpillar. Another species of wasp observing this scene ‘learned’ to reel in the thread and add its own eggs – whence its larvae will feed on the other wasp’s larvae that feed on the caterpillar. It’s horrifying from one point of view, but a miracle of co-design from another.

Let’s call the alternative to this living, evolving form of copying: ‘dead copying’. Dead copying is mechanistic and dead to its surroundings. It is death as in statis – no further change being possible. It is dead as in plastic bags, just sitting almost immutable in landfill. Dead copying is monoculture wheat fields, loss of biodiversity, rows of identical plastic toys, genetic modification, nanotech, pesticides, learning by rote, sterile digital media recording… Dead copying is the perfect opposite and enemy of life. Most environmental problems have something to do with this: society as machine, people and nature as economic parts. Dead copying even strips time of its significance, each moment in a climate controlled mall being the same as the next (it’s always ‘Christmas’ – and hence never inwardly that festive?) Malls, car journeys and whole cityscapes rob us of the the rain on our faces and daily experiences that root us physically in the living world. A development the slow movement are encouraging us to turn back from. Still living in cities, but savouring life, local and seasonal foods, passing pleasures.

In psychological terms dead copying is the enemy of feeling alive. Subjectivity is lost as our experiences and thoughts become alien to us - as if mechanical parts. We do have a replicating culture of artifacts, manners, idioms, writings and styles. But this reproduction is part of a living system - kept alive through human identification and subjectivity. Stone Age people making successive daubs on cave walls would not simply be copying. But rather re-experiencing; identifying with both the other and also their subject – a deer or bison, perhaps. Their copying was ritual participation, through an animistic worldview - whereby your own subjectivity was constantly mingling with others’ – that of your ancestors, prey animals, even the stones. That’s our inheritance too, something the school of phenomenology attempted to recover. When we encounter another person – or indeed any sentient being – we imaginatively identify with them, through a process of inward and even muscular mimicry. What might it be like to be you? Psychoanalysts say that we discover our own identity through these identifications with the other. But to identify is not to become identical. Each such identification is subtly different. Two people watching someone riding a bicycle will not have the same subjective response. One for instance who had been involved in a past accident, might watch with unfolding horror as a car approached the bicycle at a junction. Another might be drawn into a reverie based on the big red bike they got as a 7th birthday present.

Postmodernism was the artistic and philosophical climax of a reaction to and against this mechanistic trend. It was fundamentally about recovering subjectivity, even within a world of mechanical reproduction. I say ‘was’ because it seems we may be moving past this. Towards something like a new folk culture. Partly through a dawning awareness of the damage done by our split with nature (and human nature and community). It’s not all about slow food and handiworks either. Folk culture is flourishing in web 2.0 where self made media and the ability to share good content bypass the old media pyramid schemes, that replicated content to make money. That is for me, as one subjective observer, the implication of No Ghost Just a Shell. It is actually about reanimation; a coming back to life.

New Article for Medicat Magazine

2009-09-23T16:38:00.000-07:00

LOYALTY

You’ve been inundated with ways that marketing can help sustainability, not least by your humble columnist here. But have you stopped to think about how sustainability could transform your marketing for the better too?

Most marketers I have ever come across think it is their job to be recruiting new customers. It may say in their targets that they need to increase brand share, profitability and so on. But what they have in their minds when they see these tasks is getting customers in through the door. What other reason would you use advertising media for after all? If you wanted only to reach your existing customer you could advertise on pack, in branch or through a beautifully designed newsletter or something like that.

For the customer the experience is rather like being married to someone who is out every night chatting up other women. Or seeing a friend at a party, but she keeps looking over your shoulder to see if there is somebody more important or interesting there? Anyway you get my point – it’s slightly annoying apart from anything else?

When you scratch the surface of most markets you find that, conversely most of the money is made through loyal customers.

UK banks have recently woken up to this fact and started charging cheaper rates to existing customers. They have said publicly that this is because known customers are a better credit risk. Even the ones who do get into credit problems tend to pay off their bank first and companies they have no other relationships with last. But that is not the whole story. I interviewed some bank marketing directors for a report a few years ago. One of them told me that they had calculated that 90% of their profit came from the 6% of their customers who bought 2 or more products from them. Firstly the 6% is incredibly low, it’s almost like the customer is ruling out existing providers because they sensed they would get ripped off if they didn’t shop around. Secondly it should put an incredibly high value on loyalty. Every 1% they could add to the "2+ products club" would create huge financial returns. Plus the benefits of more predictable, less price-war dependent income streams.

The bad news for the banks is that people think of them as ‘all the same’. You know why? Because they are in fact all the same. At the height of the housing boom there were mortgages available from over 8000 providers. And only a couple of these (like Virgin’s “Offset” mortage product) were anty different to any other, except on price.

There is one exception though; the Co-operative Bank. They are a past client of mine so I’m not in a perfect position to judge. But that goes for five other banks and it’s not like I buy lots of financial products from those too. But I buy two or three products off the Co-operative every year – travel insurance, car insurance, the sorts of things where I could shop around for the best price but instead I go to the Co-op. Why? As their advertising campaign says they are “Good with money”. Specifically they have really tough sustainability standards, which they apply to all their investments and other commercial relationships. They do lots inside their own company, for instance with renewable energy and staff volunteering. And they do lots for the ‘sector’ too – for instance as a writer I rely on their annual reports into the UK Ethical Consumer.

I’m not sure if they sent me a letter asking me to donate to their company I would. They are still a bank, still have shareholders and so on. But I am very happy to buy things off them at an okay price, rather than shop around for whoever is the absolute cheapest. It affects how I expect to be treated by them too – if I ever have an insurance claim to be settled. Anyway my experience so far is that their people are pretty nice on the phone. Working with them as a client I found quite a few people had gone to work for them for similar sorts of reasons – "okay it’s a job in a bank, but at least they are doing some good too". The Co-operative Bank has been doing really well commercially during the banking crises of the last year. They have stood out as one company people could trust, on all sorts of levels. And in classic brand terms they are simply differentiated. All the other banks are ‘blue’ and they are ‘green’.

There was a ton of other stuff I wanted to do with them as my client to make loyalty (not recruitment) their key marketing objective. Like customer-help-customer schemes. And promotions where you club together with others in your local community to do something good for the area. But once you’ve decided to be about sustainability you have lots of such options, and not just in the traditional ‘green consumer’ niche either.

The moral of this little story? When you look at sustainability through the old marketing lens of projecting an image to attract new customers it looks either weak, or like a recipe for greenwash. But the more you look at sustainability through a customer loyalty lens, the more sense it makes for your business. As well as saving some of what’s left of this fragile planet for our grandchildren, which is of course worth giving a thought to too!

UK Bookseller Marketing Award - Guess the Winner

2009-09-17T09:31:00.001-07:00

I'm presenting this award tonight and it's actually a fantastic shortlist - as you'll see from the shortlist below. I've no idea who has won. Tweet @greenormal with your guesses before around 9pm and I'll give someone who gets it right a collectors edition Green Marketing Manifesto (I've got one where the cover is upside down - a bit like a misprinted penny black?)

Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Vine

The Torbay Bookshop, Independent Booksellers Week

W H Smith,
Christmas Books Campaign 2008

Waterstone's,
The Waterstone's Card

Borders,
Where's Wally on Google Earth

Blackwell,
Espresso Book Machine Launch

Tweehive is Live Today

2009-09-05T01:29:00.000-07:00

Join us on twitter or down at Pestival at the Southbank

Co-opportunity: What's the best subtitle?

2009-08-24T02:14:00.001-07:00

We're stuck - having agreed the title six months ago my publisher & I cant quite decide which subtitle to go with. So here's a poll to help us decide. Please vote on your favourite subtitle or add a suggestion of your own. Of course it could help if you know what the book is about - samples for download and blogposts on this at PSFK who are hosting my draft for comments. But Wiley & I are interested in what grabs you - what would have a 'must read' factor - so feel free to vote on gut feel too :J

NB If poll doesnt display here go to polldaddy site

What's the best subtitle for John Grant's book: CO-OPPORTUNITY?(polls)

ps do note any 'other' suggestions and comments here on the blog too (the qualitative side of the poll)

Co-opportunity - coming soon on PSFK

2009-08-07T14:51:00.000-07:00

The lovely people at PSFK.com are hosting a serialised sharing of the draft of my new book Co-opportunity, from next week. Do check in regularly (as each section will only be available for download for a short while) read at your leisure and feed me comments at PSFK to make it better. It's all about co-operation for a better world, so we needed to work on this together! :J

ps if you do miss a section or two email me (the address is in 'about section' and I should be able to sort you out

Miriam Elia (Tweehive guest queen)'s bee day

2009-08-07T12:38:00.000-07:00

#Tweehive2

2009-08-04T12:53:00.001-07:00

It's that time of the month again. On friday (7th) a bunch of us are going to pretend to be bees again on twitter. Do come and check it out http://www.tweehive.com/ join the facebook group or simply follow @tweehive and the #tweehive stream on twitter

The U-bend Recession & Organic Green Shoots

2009-07-29T06:49:00.000-07:00

Recent news on UK economic indicators show that after a very brief flurry of back to growth as usual optimism, we are now settled on a long flat (steady state) type of curve. This means that those pundits pushing the W-curve, V-curve and L-curve alternatives missed another possibility now emerging; the u-bend recession!

On a much more positive note, after all the doom & gloom reporting on people abandoning ethical produce...
(via http://fruitnet.com)
The UK retail giant has reported an upsurge in sales of premium, organic and Fairtrade foods According to the latest sales data from Tesco, UK consumers are beginning to return to premium and ethical food ranges, which the retailer says is “one of the clearest signals yet that consumers are feeling more confident about their own household finances”. Tesco revealed that its Finest, organics and Fairtrade ranges were all returning to growth in the UK after it reviewed its range and introduced better offers. Fairtrade produce has since increased by 15 per cent in the last year, while organic produce is up 52 per cent since November, the retailer said. Senior marketing manager Stephanie Stewart commented: “While it’s too early to say that we are seeing the green shoots of recovery from the recession, rising demand for our ethical and premium food brands are offering optimistic signs.”

My own reading of this is that rumours of the demise of principled consumerism were grossly overstated (and mostly due to panic price promoting of 'budget' ie cheap crap alternatives). Organic certainly seemed to drop about 20% both in stores and also boxed veg delivery in last year or two. Fairtrade actually grew about 100% in the last two years and with Cadbury and Starbucks coming on board will probably double again in the next 12 months. Anyway with the oh-my-god-the-banks-are-collapsing Shock Doctrine economic hype over (always perhaps only to justify a bailout that exceeded the repayment burden of WWII) people are perhaps just getting back on with life? A steady state economy of course is a sustainability holy grail, although as Herman Daly says that's not the same thing as a failed (or stalled) growth economy.

Walmart Sustainability Index

2009-07-17T03:00:00.000-07:00

(via Huffington Post - announced yesterday)

The giant retailer ($406 billion in revenues in 2008) is developing an ambitious, comprehensive, and fiendishly complex plan to measure the sustainability of every product it sells. Wal-Mart has been working quietly on what it calls a "sustainability index" for more than a year, and it will take another year or two for labels to appear on products. But the company's grand plan-"audacious beyond words" is how one insider describes it-has the potential to transform retailing by requiring manufacturers of consumer products to dig deep into their supply chains, measure their environmental impact, and compete on those terms for favorable treatment from the world's most powerful retailer.

#TWEEHIVE - day 1: Tuesday 14th July 09

2009-07-13T10:35:00.000-07:00

Greetings fellow bees. Here is a very quick guide for those who want to get stuck into #TWEEHIVE

WHAT: let's all pretend to be bees on twitter for the day

WHY: raise awareness of the plight of the bees, we're doing this as part of http://pestival.org and also just to have some new media fun

HOW
full details at http://www.tweehive.com

But here's a quick guide... - please feel free to repost on your blog
1. change your profile pic to a bee for the day
If feeling lazy the pic at the top of this post is the right size & dimensions for twitterpic
2. check the #tweehive stream, interact with other bees & generally enjoy the buzz
if new to twitter that just means put "#tweehive" into the search box
3. follow @tweehive - there will be guest queen bees including Alison Benjamin
if new to twitter that just means put "tweehive" into the find people search box (top menu) & click "follow"
4. Get into character. what would your bee be doing through the day?
For inspiration http://www.tweehive.com/to-bee-or-what-to-bee
when tweeting remember to write #tweehive to appear in the stream
also remember you can message other specific bees by using @twittername in your tweet
5. Join in the treasure hunt for flowers hidden on bee friendly and tweehive related websites
HINT these are lusicious floating flower picture hidden placed at the bottom of the page
6. It's never too late to swarm - do tell all your likeminded friends
An easy way to do that of course now is simply taking part
7. If you have a relevant website/blog do register to host a flower for other bees to find
http://www.tweehive.com/potting-shed
8. Watch out for on the spot tasks and other Tweehive surprises...

See you in the #TWEEHIVE

must buzz

:J

More Thought Leadership from Tom Crompton

2009-07-07T02:08:00.000-07:00

http://www.identitycampaigning.org

Tom at WWF (many blog readers will have seen & hotly debated Weathercocks and Signposts) has a whole new thoughtpiece, direction, book and web forum all about the need to engage with identity campaigning. the blog features lots of my other favourite thinkers on transition culture including julespeck

----

HERE'S TOM'S OWN BLURB

Identitycampaigning.org aims to promote debate on whether it will be
possible to meet today’s global challenges without engaging the ways
in which human identity and social values are shaped. A large part of
the mainstream environment movement – and civil society more generally
– seems to have been persuaded that to engage aspects of identity or
social values is a futile effort, that these things are essentially
immutable, and that the best that can be hoped for is to achieve
incremental change by appealing to existing aspects of identity. This is
a self-reinforcing and defeatist perspective that should change. No
successful political programme would work under this self-imposed
constraint, and nor should civil society.

Identitycampaigning explores the ways in which identity and values can be engaged. These include:

(1) An understanding of the way in which people's EXPERIENCE of
government policy shapes values (afterall, Margaret Thatcher famously
said: "it isn’t that I set out on economic policies; it’s that I set
out really to change the approach, and changing the economics is the
means of changing that approach. If you change the approach you really
are after the heart and soul of the nation. Economics are the method;
the object is to change the heart and soul.").

(2) Closely related to this, the way in which certain policies have a
profound impact on our identities as a result of their 'material'
effects (for example, the way we decide, collectively, to regulate
commercial marketing (for example, Sweden has banned commercial
advertising to children under 12 and this may have an impact on the
prevalence of a set of materialistic values).

(3) Exploring routes to identity change amongst individuals (for
example, through the 'heart and soul' work that Transition does). This
doesn't represent a panacea (we need social and political structures
that legitimise and support changes in values at an individual level):
but it is important - perhaps necessary? - if we are to create space for
such contextual changes.

If these are issues that matter to you - either because you share the
frustration outlined above, or profoundly disagree, please visit
identitycampaigning.org and join the debate. Occasional visitors can
post their thoughts as comments - those who feel more committed to
engaging this debate might want to be listed as contributors (in which
case, please contact Tom Crompton, at tcrompton@wwf.org.uk).

Inspired on all counts

2009-07-06T13:35:00.000-07:00

I actually really love one of the comments made following Leonora's report on Treehugger so I'll just repeat it here

"Congratulations Michael, not so much for demolishing Lomborg's skeptical arguments so eloquently, but for focusing even more on the opportunities arising from the very threats we face. How much more satisfying to invest time and energy in seeking solutions, for people to live happy and healthy lives within the carrying capacity of the Earth, than to scavenge opportunistically in the market of media counter-point, looking for reasons to do nothing." (Paul King)

Supporting Green Independent Natural Thinking

2009-07-02T12:35:00.000-07:00

Met with Dr Nicola Thomas today aka The GIN Lady. (GIN = Green Independent Natural: a lovely ethical lifestyle magazine & blog if you dont know it do check it out). And I got a copy of her PhD to read (not the following sentence most often associated with encounters with the media) which is partly about the potential to communicate ecosystems science to change behaviour. Anyway I can already see that it's packed with really clever insights and models, but was also reminded of the power of a simple framing fact - as demonstrated by this cute ad for Save the Shark (via Treehugger).

Tweehive

2009-06-26T10:13:00.000-07:00

The 'let's all role play being a bee colony on Twitter for a day' project I've been working on with a whole bunch of fellow sustainability/new media/bee-interested folks went live today. Do come and join the fun http://www.tweehive.com and the tweehive FB group It's part of http://pestival.org an insect arts ecology event at London's South Bank

Shame on Boots

2009-06-20T03:27:00.001-07:00

A few years ago I was trying to get an event together about the ethical and environmental impact of private equity. On the positive side are groups like Generation who plan to use this mechanism to go further than any shareholder would allow in retrofitting major corporations for a low carbon economy. But on the negative side are the greedy bastards, pushing management to do anything to hype maximum short term growth so that their returns on equity (leveraged by bank debt) go sky high. The groups who I approached to host this event worried that since private equity firms are the dictatorships of business, no-one would dare speak out against them, certainly not as insider, but probably not in the media and consultancy realms either.

All of which is context for the announcement that Boots, a former quaker family business and always a benevolent presence on the high street, but now under private equity ownership has quit the Ethical Trading Initiative; a scheme set up after the wave of sweatshop and worker exploitation scandals in the 1990s, whereby most of the major UK retailers for instance guaranteed to only work with suppliers that pay at least the minimum wage.

Dan Rees, director of the ETI, said to The Guardian: "We are deeply disappointed that Boots have taken this decision, particularly at such a crucial time for the world's most vulnerable workers, who are bearing the brunt of the global downturn. The days when high-profile businesses could consider ethical trade as an optional extra are now gone. In our view, it is not the right time for major brands to be rolling back their commitments on labour standards, nor does it make good business sense."

Draft Article for Mediacat (Turkey)

2009-06-18T23:26:00.000-07:00

Nokia: The Power Of We

When recently researching what brands have been up to in the two years since I wrote The Green Marketing Manifesto, I was particularly impressed with Nokia.

Firstly, being green is not just a marketing matter. Either a company is committed to it and leading the way, or it is not. One of the reasons I chose to look into Nokia is I already knew about their “Power of We” programme that started with internal change, as a judge at last year’s Green Awards, where Nokia won the overall Grand Prix.

Here’s what their CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvio says on the subject of sustainability:
“Thousands of Nokia people have made sustainable, environmentally sensitive practices an integral part of our day to day business. With more than a billion people using Nokia phones globally, we feel we have a responsibility to make a difference. Even in these tough economic times, environmental sustainability is not just the right thing to do, it is the only thing to do and makes good business sense.”

If you look into what Nokia are doing as a company you will find all the usual good stuff; like dramatically reducing their energy and waste. The company set targets for CO2 emissions since 2006 and they report publicly how they are doing on reducing their footprint. Their phones are certified as free of conflict metals, such as tantalum from the Congo (whereas with some other phones you are basically paying to arm soldiers or rebels). Nokia has consistently been named the number one electronics brand in Greenpeace’s Greener Electronics Guide. And it has won the phone industry (GSMA) first CEO Award for Outstanding Environmental Contribution.

Given all of this it’s pretty impressive that Nokia have not been shouting about their green credentials in advertising. Rather than claiming green they have been doing green. For instance in basic initiatives like encouraging people to unplug their charger (in some popular models Nokia also fitted a ‘finished charging’ alert) and putting recycling collection points into retail, including a major new push in India this year.

Sustainability isn’t only about energy and carbon. Mobile phones have been playing a leading role in African development projects. And Nokia have been in there since 2005 working with Grameen, founded by Nobel Prize winner Mohammed Yunus, helping to ensure they can build an accessible mobile network in countries like Rwanda.

Mobile applications have been big news in the last few years and Nokia has been behind some nice green apps. Green Explorer hives you green travel tips and helps you locate local green services. Freecycle is a 6.5 million member web phenomenon whereby if you are about to through something away, you can give it to someone else instead. Nokia just helped them provide the same service on mobile. They have also introduced a home management system (currently being trialled) using the mobile to monitor and control your home energy along with a host of other smart home functions.

We also live in the age of the social network. Nokia have for some time operated a partnership with the WWF and IUCN in the connect2earth community site, on the web as well as mobile. Here you can learn about environmental issues, exchange ideas and content like video and ask experts about key themes and actions.

Like many of the smartest corporations, Nokia has been embracing open innovation where instead of assuming they have all the answers they brief ‘the world’ to come up with solutions too. They held a $150,000 prize challenge for phone apps which could ‘improve life on this planet’. Just one example of what came out of this was an Green Phone app to manage all the settings on your phone to minimize its power use.

As far as green phones go, the Nokia Evolve is one of the best around, in energy, materials and so on. But Nokia have also been experimenting with some more advanced concepts, which are also highly appealing if you are a bit of a tree hugger. Like the Remade concept (made out of old tin cans and all sorts of other waste material) Or another concept phone where the case is made from reclaimed wood.

Nokia recently gave a glimpse as well of some of the innovation programmes they are working on: ways to make chargers use zero power except when the phone needs it; and developing ways for people to upgrade phones digitally rather than buying new devices. The most fascinating and high tech was that their researchers may have found a way to do away with the phone charger already. Instead the phones can draw waste power from ambient electromagnetic radiation (like Wifi and TV signals) – a trickle but enough to keep a phone topped up. It’s a good example of a green benefit, which is also just a great consumer proposition; you will never need to remember to charge a phone again.

Why I like Nokia’s efforts is that firstly they have got the basics right. Despite being the biggest they are also by far the greenest. And they have got this good by helping every employee see this as a central part of their job, not an add on. Their focus externally is on innovation, education, community and great green utilities. And they are not too proud to partner, getting many of their best ideas from outside inventors, NGOs and consumers. Of course they are not perfect, they are still a big business with a huge impact and still a little too addicted to the business model where we treat phones as throwaway fashion. But given where we are starting from they are making big steps in the right direction.

(Declaration of Interest: I don’t currently work for Nokia – I think the last time they paid me for any advice was 2001 – I just think they are doing a pretty good job without me).

All the news that's fit to print

2009-06-18T15:21:00.001-07:00

A christmas future we'd all wish for, from the Yes Men and Greenpeace
Via 350.org

United We Serve (launched yesterday)

2009-06-18T15:14:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Obama for simply 'doing it again' and @planetheart for tweeting it on :J

History Repeats Itself?

2009-06-18T12:38:00.000-07:00

Rumours of an early economic rebound are everywhere. In several meetings with business leaders this week I have heard a consensus view along the lines of "recession - past tense" and "now that we are into the next phase". They could be right. But Martin Wolf at the FT points to the charts published by professor's Eichengreen (Berkeley) and O'Rourke (Trinity Dublin) comparing key economic indicators today with those following the 1929 crash on the Vox blog which are doing the rounds. Here are a few examples:

The recession is a real mixed blessing in sustainability terms. It has been welcomed as an opportunity to force a much deeper re-evaluation of the whole capitalist model and in particular find postgrowth economic policies which support wellbeing without planet destruction. World Changing just picked up the Kennedy line on this (cautiously touted around by Obama and his team) which is that GDP has little to do with real prosperity or wellbeing so why focus on it in the first place?

On the other hand it takes everyone's eyes (and potentially budgets) away from the REAL global crises. It's an excuse to put things off is one result of that. And also the moral foundation of sustainability (for instance; Stern's argument rested on intergenerational equity in the case of climate change) is ultimately a case of acting in a way that avoids inflicting avoidable suffering on other human beings, whether now or for future generations. Sustained recessions really hurt and they tend to hurt the most economically vulnerable first; for instance all of those relying on remittances from relatives working in the west and sending money home. Yes it could be a tough medicine which helps drive real change. And no we wouldnt wish it on any of our fellow human beings whose children are hungry tonight.

My suspicion looking at the graphs is that you could map any previous (eg early 90s recession) onto the 1929 curve and early in a recovery it would look exactly as shown. The illusion is that the graphs show that things might follow the same course. A picture of someone lying down and a dead person would look the same, it's what happens over the medium term that differs. Or we could really be into the so called "dead cat bounce' where fluctuations (due to rallies in an almost entirely speculative and/or confidence based market system) are being mistaken for real world economic change. What's really valuable in these charts though is putting all the 'rebound' claims in context. You couldnt honestly look at these graphs and say quite so confidently that we are out of the woods (whether or not as a treehugger you even quite like it in the woods).

It's been tricky writing about these issues through the last few months (in my new book) and I have ended up having to take a line which is current recession neutral. After all the credit crunch had nothing to do with climate change or resource crises. It was an internal matter and while it affects everything it's probably a little early to learn from it let alone plan around it?

I heard an FT journalist comment a few weeks ago that the recession was over for sure because Martin Wolf had written an unusually upbeat column, and - she argued - since he was at the most pessimistic end of the spectrum it surely meant things must be truning around. Very drole. But then surely on that basis (the Martin Wolf negativity index or MNWI), sorry but er... presumably the recession might be back on?

What will Climate Change Mean in My Local Area?

2009-06-18T01:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the US government released a comprehensive report on the predicted localised impacts of climate change within the USA. This afternoon the Guardian is publishing maps of the predicted impacts within the UK. There is quite a bit of merit in bringing it home to people; so for instance in the US report the prediction of flooding and disruption in parts of New York would certainly question the assumption many have that "it will never really affect life around here too much" (vs all the talk of polar bears and poor farmers). In economic terms, the notion of some of the more favoured spots in terms of climate change intensity of impact (the UK is one) might miss for instance the worst effects of drought and famine is rather a simplistic illusion; you can well imagine that quality of life in New York would be disrupted even sooner by the financial meltdown associated with significant global climate, energy and food disruption?

Meanwhile an engaging and educational grassroots approach to discussing local climate and sustainability has been taken recently by Loenora of Elio Studio (and Treehugger) who produced the first of a planned series of Creative Data events, in Norwich where (using data and mapping from the Tyndall Centre and working with social scientists from UEA) local people could interact with a massive map on the floor of the Norfolk Broads - a key question being where are your priorities for this area (between conservation, agriculture and tourism); something people had to indicate by placing stickers - so effectively interacting with other people's choices. For me this goes further than reports about the flood risk in your postcode, because it draws on a community engaged with planning their area; is more in the direction of Transition Towns than (the also much needed) top down cleantech master plans and transnational agreements. If we want to bring it home to people we need creative ways to get them to interact with the very real trade offs ahead.

Green Dam Girl

2009-06-17T16:22:00.000-07:00

The FT reports "outcry over the national government’s attempt to ensure that every new personal computer sold in China is equipped with web filtering software. The ministry of industry and information technology notified computer makers last month that they would be required from July 1 to include Green Dam/Youth Escort – a programme developed under commission by the government – with every new PC.... Bloggers have taken a creative approach in their mockery of the censors. They have created “Green Dam Girl”, a woman drawn in the style of Japanese porn manga, wearing a police cap emblazoned with a crab, a pun on the Chinese word for “harmonious”, the government’s euphemism for a society without unrest, controversy or opposition.|

World Climate Community

2009-06-16T16:06:00.000-07:00

It's here! http://www.worldclimatecommunity.com

I heard about this when I was over in Denmark last year and met with the city council. Basically it is their gift to the global community of concerned citizens who would like their voice to be heard for COP15 talks in december. Of course we all have to join up for that to be the case so roll up & sign up :J

Introducing YouGen

2009-06-16T14:44:00.000-07:00

Great looking resource, do check it out & blog/tweet it around :J

EcoAmerica Report: "Climate Energy Truths"

2009-06-15T16:32:00.000-07:00

(Note this is an old 2006 magazine cover - used with irony as reflecting what presumably the researchers would describe as 'how not to do it' - and not the actual EcoAmerica report in this post)

New report on how to communicate climate change, energy and related policies: download report here

I've just skimmed through it and my initial reactions are:
- it's very true that we need to explore with fresh thinking how to get through to people
- I agree the language, visual images and framing of concepts are critical
(I'd add that the key thing though is satisfying, coherent narratives that draw these together and make sense of it all)
- and it looks like a thought provoking discussion
but...
- "proposition testing" assumes that a different way of phrasing/framing things is sufficient
- vs what if we actually need to teach people what scientists and (most) politicians know: that our current economy and society is deeply unsustainable (in every sense including climate change), that we face an unimaginable global crisis if we dont change course; hence the game is up for keeping things as they are
- and evidence from studies in how people learn to change deeply held mental models points not to snappy top down messaging but democratic open forums for questioning, deliberation and discussion (and I've seen this in action doing research groups on the subject)

In other words - as this is a Washington report aimed largely at the Obama administration and their attempt to win the hearts and minds of America (vs the 'clean coal' and other dirty energy lobbies) - I'd stay stick to your guns, work with people the way you did with the election campaign and dont default to a political 'advertising sell' that attempts to put the radical changes we need to make into acceptable 'language' like (the recommended substitute for climate change) "deteriorating atmosphere". Cant we actually just give people clear information? Help them grasp the seriousness and urgency of the problem? Help them see for instance that 20% of all US emissions come from cars and driving - so it's not just about energy grid sized policies.

It's not the words that need to change, it's our worldview.

But well worth a read, I'm only reacting to a first pass and there looked to be some interesting insights and analysis in there too, and I'll be going through it in more detail.

Also I do agree with the problem they set out to solve and clearly we are on the same side arguing about 'how'. From their blog: "Now is the time for progress. We need to maximize the opportunity for climate and energy solutions, and this requires public support. The good news is that Americans support solutions, particularly when they can visualize them and when they are connected to benefits in their daily lives."

Some book recommendations

2009-06-15T01:15:00.000-07:00

Am 85% of the way through editing Co-opportunity (my new book). And busy on a couple of projects. So not much time to blog. But thought I would post some of the books I've been enjoying as sources of info/ideas/inspiration lately.

Also wanted to point to Conversations with Green Gurus. Declaration of interest, I am featured as one of the interviewees. But it's otherwise full of the people I admire chatting in an informal and often quite revelatory way about the thinking behind what they have been up to.

Ninjin: The New Green Thing

2009-06-06T01:22:00.000-07:00

Climate Progress/US Legislation

2009-05-23T00:48:00.001-07:00

Long detailed post at Climate Progress on the Clean Energy and Climate Bill. It's a landmark shift from the Bush years. However in the light of recent scientific reports there are substantial doubts that the US getting back to its 1990 levels by 2020 are enough (vs EU is aiming for -20%). A very positive step, and a vital one in the build up to COP15 eg to engage the Chinese. But also representative of America's still not being willing to change its cherished "lifestyle", of the across the board conservatism of American politics - a free market consensus with slight variations in shade - & a testament to the ongoing lobbying power of big energy. The Cap&Trade element has been subject to an attempt to show it is a tax on the poor middle American coal states & hence working class democrat voters. vs actually via the cap&refund format most individual working americans would be better off financially. Details of what's in the bill from New York Times

Swapping, the new Shopping

2009-05-21T02:24:00.000-07:00

Check out posh-swaps.com
Not an entirely new idea but a good one and well put together, could be the version that 'tips'? via Luke at MoreAssociates

HMS Paycheck

2009-05-21T02:03:00.000-07:00

I'm in the late stages of drafting a book so obviously I need frittering diversions. Like tidying the desk, or getting to the post office. Or writing stuff just to get some words moving onto the screen. The other day I had the idea of writing a Gilbert & Sullivan parody opera about the UK MP's expenses scandals.

Here's a sample of what I mean (based on the "I am the captain of the pinafore" song from HMS Pinafore). Do feel free to chip in if you need to fritter while getting down to something. Today's episode is based on the resignation of the speaker of the house of commons. Also involved will be mySociety who brilliantly brought all of this about through a freedom of information act request for details of expenses, something the speaker tried to block and then a campaign.

Orchestra, house lights....

Speaker.
I am the Speaker of the House of Commons

Chorus.
And a right good speaker, too!

Speaker.
You're very, very good,
And be it understood,
I command a motley crew.

Chorus.
We're very, very good,
And be it understood,
He commands a motley crew.

Speaker.
Though soon to be a peer,
I can spin and block, and steer,
And hold inquiries at bay;
Your secrets are safe with me
No matter how dirty
They will never see the light of day

Chorus.
What, never?

Speaker.
No, never!

Chorus.
What, never?

Speaker.
Oh... bother
(holds up email)

Article for Mediacat (June)

2009-05-21T00:01:00.000-07:00

TRUSTMARK™

As time goes on it becomes more and more apparent that the biggest trend in sustainable marketing is not brands going green, but brands getting other ‘brands’ (the Trustmarks™) to certify that they have really done so. The FairTrade mark grew 60% in 2007 according to the Co-op Bank survey of ethical consumerism. My guess is it will grow 200% in 2009 after its adoption by Cadbury, Starbucks, Tate&Lyle Sugar and others. Mars Confectionary (Masterfoods) have announced they will move to a completely sustainable certified range by 2020. Their first deal is with Rainforest Alliance, another big mover, also signing up brands from Nestle, Unilever, McDonalds, Kraft and others.

This isn’t an entirely new idea. 200 years ago you could buy sugar in the UK that was “guaranteed slave labour free”. That would still be a good label today, unfortunately, with some types of products like sugar and coffee. There are concerns for instance over children being sold to grow coffee as slaves in parts of Africa, something Nestle got accused over not policing. The labels are there as shields, to answer accusations such as these, to show you have a process in place to check that your goods are ethically untainted.

These Trustmarks are a sign of the times. We may like brands, identify with them, have what marketers call relationships with them. But we don’t trust them, or more accurately we don’t wholly trust the companies behind them. It is a collective failure of corporations who lost our trust over the last twenty years, through scandals and breaches of trust. In May Shell goes on trial in New York over its alleged role in the murder of an activist in Nigeria. Other ‘alien tort’ cases (where an American company is tried in America over breaches of human rights elsewhere in the world) are being brought against Coca-Cola, Exxon Mobil, Walmart.

We also don’t trust advertising claims. in the 1990s Faith Popcorn suggested that there should be a brand which certified advertising claims as 100% true and reliable. We have advertising authorities and we have regulation, but she meant something much more stringent, that would conform with what people would regard as truth. Like cereals which are 50% sugar not connecting themselves with health. Or cars which are lets face it not exactly Aston Martin being associated with sexual success and ‘cool’. Advertising is all exaggerated, everyone knows that and it can be part of the charm, but today people don’t trust it because it has become so devalued. A good way of doing this today might be to create a review system for viewers. They could judge (from 1 to 5 stars like on Amazon.com) how misleading or truthful an advert was. This could become a guide for other viewers. And also give advertisers feedback on their output, pointing out campaigns which as teachers put it when marking homework “could try harder”. If a TV company hosted this scheme, they could give cheaper rates for 5 Trustar (Trust Stars) commercials. In Belgium one TV company already gives a 30% discount to leading green (eco friendly) products.

Trustmark™ was a branding idea I had on a project for a new eco label (we aren’t using it, it was too broad and generic). Another idea I had on this project was to create a service called Brand Rehab. This would be used by a corporate as a crisis management tool for a brand had got found out on some issue. Like Nike in the 1990s when the picture appeared of a child stitching one of their footballs in Pakistan. Or Unilever last year when it was accused of buying palm oil in Indonesia grown on land where deforestation had been used. Brand rehab would act like the Betty Ford clinic is used by celebrity agents in Los Angeles. “Yes there clearly has been an issue. We are now in rehab, so you can be sure the issue is being dealt with.” This would damp the flames of further press investigation, you would just update them factually on progress and process, with nothing to hide the story would become a bore for them. It would also be an independent means for corporates to ensure that they actually were putting things right. Like the independent police complaint commissions that many have to investigate complaints over policing. Like all great brands, BrandRehab would have a human promise and also would create (or protect) brand and shareholder value.

You might want to have a meeting with someone like the WWF (who could provide the credible back end services) to explore all of this this. It’s a new market where people with skills in inventing brands can make value out of concepts. With the recession it’s nice to see a wide open new market, where ideas can so simply and effortlessly meet a need and create value, right?

Deindustrial Revolution?

2009-05-14T01:20:00.000-07:00

Thought provoking post over at thearchdruidreport about the implications for declining fossil fuel energy reserves on the viability of today's IT infrastructure. Below are a few samples, but well worth reading the whole thing. See also the climate group report I covered last year, confirming the collossal growth in the energy footprint and emissions of this sector: "The ICT sector’s own emissions are expected to increase, in a business as usual (BAU) scenario, from 0.53 billion tonnes (Gt) carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) in 2002 to 1.43 GtCO2e in 2020." Greer's book the long descent looks very well worth checking too. I've always found peak oil one of the most liberating of our looming problems (how 'looming' is a debate, but it's still an inbuilt mortality to our oil fuel technocratic society) because it forces you to think far beyond the status quo.

FROM ARCHDRUIDREPORT: END OF THE INFORMATION AGE
Very few people realize just how extravagant the intake of resources to maintain the information economy actually is. The energy cost to run a home computer is modest enough that it’s easy to forget, for example, that the two big server farms that keep Yahoo’s family of web services online use more electricity between them than all the televisions on Earth put together. Multiply that out by the tens of thousands of server farms that keep today’s online economy going, and the hundreds of other energy-intensive activities that go into the internet, and it may start to become clear how much energy goes into putting these words onto the screen where you’re reading them. It’s not an accident that the internet came into existence during the last hurrah of the age of cheap energy, the quarter century between 1980 and 2005 when the price of energy dropped to the lowest levels in human history. Only in a period where energy was quite literally too cheap to bother conserving could so energy-intensive an information network be constructed. The problem here, of course, is that the conditions that made the cheap abundant energy of that quarter century have already come to an end, and the economics of the internet take on a very different shape as energy becomes scarce and expensive again. Like the railroads of the future mentioned earlier in this post, the internet is subject to the laws of supply and demand. Once the cost of maintaining it in its current form outstrips the income that can be generated by it, it becomes a losing proposition, and cheaper modes of information storage and delivery will begin to replace it in its more marginal uses.

Governments will have very good reasons to maintain some form of internet as long as they can, even when it becomes an economic sink – it’s worth remembering that the internet we now have evolved out of a US government network meant to provide communication capacity in the event of nuclear war – but this does not mean that everyone in the industrial world will have the same access they do today. Instead, as energy costs move unsteadily upward and resource needs increasingly get met, or not, on the basis of urgency, expect access costs to rise, government regulation to increase, internet commerce to be subject to increasing taxation, and rural areas and poor neighborhoods to lose internet service altogether. There may well still be an internet a quarter century from now, but it will likely cost much more, reach far fewer people, and have only a limited resemblance to the free-for-all that exists today. Newspapers, radio, and television all moved from a growth phase of wild diversity and limited regulation to a mature phase of vast monopolies with tightly controlled content; even in the absence of energy limits, the internet would be likely to follow the same trajectory, and the rising costs imposed by the end of cheap energy bid fair to shift that process into overdrive.

Out Soon (29 May)

2009-05-13T00:25:00.000-07:00

Sample chapters and a general feel for where Gil is coming from http://www.natlogic.com/truth

"For the last few years I've been imagining what the essential one-volume green business handbook would look like. Now I don't need to imagine it, because Gil Friend has written it. The Truth About Green Business is, simply, the best green business book on the market." Alex Steffen, WorldChanging

Kick the Habit

2009-05-12T12:32:00.000-07:00

Free Unep eBook on personal carbon/change (NB big download 22MB) here

Now this is proper disclosure (info for the printed version):
"The production and transport of each copy of this book has released about 5 kilos of CO2 equivalent into the atmosphere. This value is comparable to the amount of CO2 generated when burning 2 litres of petrol. Factors that have been taken into consideration for this calculation are shipping (40 per cent), staff and editorial board travel (20 per cent), paper (20 per cent), printing (13 per cent) and energy consumption for office and computer use (7 per cent). The use of sustainably produced recycled paper and plant-based ink helped to lower the climate impact, whearas the transport of 500 copies to New Zealand for book launch is responsible for the biggest chunk of emissions."

One to Watch

2009-05-12T12:07:00.000-07:00

It's still one of the more shocking facts that came up in research for the new book that the average American (woman, man and child) is eating 1.1kg of sugar per week. 1.1kg

Buddhist Declaration on Climate Change

2009-05-08T10:22:00.000-07:00

(A statement as input to COP15 via ecobuddhism.org if you are a buddhist you can sign this declaration on that blog, the Dalai Lama was the first to do so. More on buddhism and deep ecology here)

The Time to Act is Now
A Buddhist Declaration on Climate Change

Today we live in a time of great crisis, confronted by the gravest challenge that humanity has ever faced: the ecological consequences of our own collective karma. The scientific consensus is overwhelming: human activity is triggering environmental breakdown on a planetary scale. Global warming, in particular, is happening much faster than previously predicted, most obviously at the North Pole. For hundreds of thousands of years, the Arctic Ocean has been covered by an area of sea-ice as large as Australia—but now this is melting rapidly. In 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast that the Arctic might be free of summer sea ice by 2100. It is now apparent that this could occur within a decade or two. Greenland’s vast ice-sheet is also melting more quickly than expected. The rise in sea-level this century will be at least one meter—enough to flood many coastal cities and vital rice-growing areas such as the Mekong Delta in Vietnam.

Glaciers all over the world are receding quickly. If current economic policies continue, the glaciers of the Tibetan Plateau, source of the great rivers that provide water for billions of people in Asia, will disappear within 30 years. Severe drought and crop failures are already affecting Australia and Northern China. Major reports—from the IPCC, United Nations, European Union, and International Union for Conservation of Nature—agree that, without a collective change of direction, dwindling supplies of water, food and other resources could create famine conditions, resource battles, and mass migration by mid-century—perhaps by 2030, according to the U.K.’s chief scientific advisor.

Global warming plays a major role in other ecological crises, including the loss of many plant and animal species that share this Earth with us. Oceanographers report that half the carbon released by burning fossil fuels has been absorbed by the oceans, increasing their acidity by about 30%. Acidification is disrupting calcification of shells and coral reefs, as well as threatening plankton growth, the source of the food chain for most life in the sea.

Eminent biologists and U.N. reports concur that “business-as-usual” will drive half of all species on Earth to extinction within this century. Collectively, we are violating the first precept—“do not harm living beings”—on the largest possible scale. And we cannot foresee the biological consequences for human life when so many species that invisibly contribute to our own well-being vanish from the planet.

Many scientists have concluded that the survival of human civilization is at stake. We have reached a critical juncture in our biological and social evolution. There has never been a more important time in history to bring the resources of Buddhism to bear on behalf of all living beings. The four noble truths provide a framework for diagnosing our current situation and formulating appropriate guidelines—because the threats and disasters we face ultimately stem from the human mind, and therefore require profound changes within our minds. If personal suffering stems from craving and ignorance—from the three poisons of greed, ill will, and delusion—the same applies to the suffering that afflicts us on a collective scale. Our ecological emergency is a larger version of the perennial human predicament. Both as individuals and as a species, we suffer from a sense of self that feels disconnected not only from other people but from the Earth itself. As Thich Nhat Hanh has said, “We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.” We need to wake up and realize that the Earth is our mother as well as our home—and in this case the umbilical cord binding us to her cannot be severed. When the Earth becomes sick, we become sick, because we are part of her.

Our present economic and technological relationships with the rest of the biosphere are unsustainable. To survive the rough transitions ahead, our lifestyles and expectations must change. This involves new habits as well as new values. The Buddhist teaching that the overall health of the individual and society depends upon inner well-being, and not merely upon economic indicators, helps us determine the personal and social changes we must make.

Individually, we must adopt behaviors that increase everyday ecological awareness and reduce our “carbon footprint”. Those of us in the advanced economies need to retrofit and insulate our homes and workplaces for energy efficiency; lower thermostats in winter and raise them in summer; use high efficiency light bulbs and appliances; turn off unused electrical appliances; drive the most fuel-efficient cars possible, and reduce meat consumption in favor of a healthy, environmentally-friendly plant-based diet.

These personal activities will not by themselves be sufficient to avert future calamity. We must also make institutional changes, both technological and economic. We must “de-carbonize” our energy systems as quickly as feasible by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy sources that are limitless, benign and harmonious with nature. We especially need to halt the construction of new coal plants, since coal is by far the most polluting and most dangerous source of atmospheric carbon. Wisely utilized, wind power, solar power, tidal power, and geothermal power can provide all the electricity that we require without damaging the biosphere. Since up to a quarter of world carbon emissions result from deforestation, we must reverse the destruction of forests, especially the vital rainforest belt where most species of plants and animals live.

It has recently become quite obvious that significant changes are also needed in the way our economic system is structured. Global warming is intimately related to the gargantuan quantities of energy that our industries devour to provide the levels of consumption that many of us have learned to expect. From a Buddhist perspective, a sane and sustainable economy would be governed by the principle of sufficiency: the key to happiness is contentment rather than an ever-increasing abundance of goods. The compulsion to consume more and more is an expression of craving, the very thing the Buddha pinpointed as the root cause of suffering.

Instead of an economy that emphasizes profit and requires perpetual growth to avoid collapse, we need to move together towards an economy that provides a satisfactory standard of living for everyone while allowing us to develop our full (including spiritual) potential in harmony with the biosphere that sustains and nurtures all beings, including future generations. If political leaders are unable to recognize the urgency of our global crisis, or unwilling to put the long-term good of humankind above the short-term benefit of fossil-fuel corporations, we may need to challenge them with sustained campaigns of citizen action.

Dr James Hansen of NASA and other climatologists have recently defined the precise targets needed to prevent global warming from reaching catastrophic “tipping points.” For human civilization to be sustainable, the safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is no more than 350 parts per million (ppm). This target has been endorsed by the Dalai Lama, along with other Nobel laureates and distinguished scientists. Our current situation is particularly worrisome in that the present level is already 387 ppm, and has been rising at 2 ppm per year. We are challenged not only to reduce carbon emissions, but also to remove large quantities of carbon gas already present in the atmosphere.

As signatories to this statement of Buddhist principles, we acknowledge the urgent challenge of climate change. We join with the Dalai Lama in endorsing the 350 ppm target. In accordance with Buddhist teachings, we accept our individual and collective responsibility to do whatever we can to meet this target, including (but not limited to) the personal and social responses outlined above.

We have a brief window of opportunity to take action, to preserve humanity from imminent disaster and to assist the survival of the many diverse and beautiful forms of life on Earth. Future generations, and the other species that share the biosphere with us, have no voice to ask for our compassion, wisdom, and leadership. We must listen to their silence. We must be their voice, too, and act on their behalf.

Update on New Futurama

2009-05-08T09:39:00.000-07:00

May 01, 2009, A new Futurama
(Referred to in post on Bill Becker TC talk, here's an update blogged by a participants at a meeting to discuss creating a 'new futurama')

In 1939, Robert Moses, Norman Bel Geddes and the General Motors Corporation put on an exhibit called Futurama, showcased at the World's Fair. Some 23,000 visitors a day settled into movable seats to be whisked through a dazzling vision of the future – of gleaming, tall towers set in open space, and serviced by multi-lane highways. Some of the same depiction of future conveniences appeared in the 1964 World's Fair, also directed by Moses, including General Electric's Tomorrowland.
Earlier this month, a group of engineers, architects, planners, museum directors, writers and others gathered at the Pocantico Conference Center at Tarrytown, N.Y. to consider the merits of putting on a new Futurama – a vision of what life might be like in 2050, when more sustainable arrangements are likely to be in place, including more transport options such as transit, energy-efficient buildings, and renewable power sources including solar and wind. A more positive portrayal of post-carbon life is needed to balance the apocoplyctic predictions of warming, says organizer Bill Becker, executive director of the Denver-based Presidents Climate Action Project Petra Todorovich from America 2050 demonstrated an interactive presentation on how people would make different journeys in the future, using intelligent transportation or high-speed rail. Gary Lawrence from Arup presented on the planned Chinese eco-city of Dongtan.
In a presentation based on research for the forthcoming book, Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City, I noted that Moses successfully used theatrical elements to capture public imagination and bolster support for his roadway-building agenda. A critical component was the theme of promise and possibility, rather than constraints or sacrifice.
The gathering was made possible by the Rockfeller Brothers Fund. Becker, who posted on the Climate Progress blog, said an initial exhbit on sustainability in the future might appear in museums such as the Chicago Field Museum and others around the country, with an accompanying interactive Web site feature.

Join Sustained Magazine's big carbon debate

2009-05-08T03:53:00.000-07:00

click here

I actually really quite like this

2009-05-07T14:12:00.000-07:00

...for its simplicity: Cisco's asking people just to register one green act they'll commit to. The REALLY impressive thing being that globally over a million acts have already been registered. And i like that it all feels quite humble and enabling. Much of its actually pointing on to stuff that others are doing like ecomaps in SFO. By humble I mean compared to some of the more show-offy (in my view, slightly put-offy) progenitors like Global Cool. I think the got the mood and tone about right for this year - ready to act, no longer stuck on the hype. Declaration of interest, I some work last year for Cisco on community & sustainability via Ogilvy. Nothing directly to do with this though.
One million acts of green

Al Gore at TED 2009 on Climate Change

2009-05-07T14:08:00.001-07:00

Dark Mountain Project

2009-05-06T16:34:00.000-07:00

An awesome new project, really struck a chord with me. Do check it out & if you feel inclined help them with the first milestone which is to raise a few more quid to enable them to fund their manifesto production by this friday.

- a brief excerpt below (the full story at dark-mountain.net)

The Dark Mountain project began with our feeling that, if you go deep enough, you’ll find the roots of this situation in the stories we have been telling ourselves: stories that go back beyond the latest episode of irrational exuberance, down through the history of industrial society and even further. Stories like the myth of human centrality, which tells of our destiny to separate ourselves from and subdue this thing called nature; which makes history a machine for the production of human progress, as measured in the production of ever more and better goods. What makes these stories more dangerous is that we have mistaken them for reality, insisting that we have put away such childish things as myth. As a society, we no longer acknowledge the role of stories in shaping what is real to us – and so our storytellers become entertainers, our poets harmless eccentrics, our artists cynical manipulators of the market, all taboos busted and everything for sale. This won’t do. The times we are living in demand something more.

You can contact them by emailing info@dark-mountain.net
* Paul is the author of 'One No, Many Yeses' and 'Real England: The Battle Against the Bland'. He was deputy editor of The Ecologist between 1999 and 2001. His first poetry collection, Kidland, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. His website is www.paulkingsnorth.net
* Dougald is co-founder of School of Everything (www.schoolofeverything.com) and writes the blog 'Changing the World (and other excuses for not getting a proper job)', at http://otherexcuses.blogspot.com. He is a former BBC journalist and has written for and edited various online and offline magazines.

Prince Charles Rainforest Appeal

2009-05-06T01:52:00.000-07:00

http://www.rainforestsos.org/

Climate Crunch (Nature Magazine)

2009-05-06T01:35:00.001-07:00

(To avoid 'interpreting' I am simply reposting the Potsdam Institute's own press release on the subject. In fact there is an excellent 16 page Q&A commentary on what the study says and what this means here. But in a nutshell it says we need to forget 2050 and focus on 2020).

Press Release from Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact research

April 30, 2009 - Less than a quarter of the proven fossil fuel reserves can be burnt and emitted between now and 2050, if global warming is to be limited to two degrees Celsius (2°C), says a new study published in the journal Nature today (1).

The study has, for the first time, calculated how much greenhouse gas emissions we can pump into the atmosphere between now and 2050, to have a reasonable chance of keeping warming lower than 2°C (above pre-industrial levels) – a goal supported by more than 100 countries (2). We can only emit 1000 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) between the years 2000 and 2050. The world has already emitted one third of that in just nine years.

“If we continue burning fossil fuels as we do, we will have exhausted the carbon budget in merely 20 years, and global warming will go well beyond two degrees,” says Malte Meinshausen, lead author of the study and climate researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. The three-year research project involved scientists from Germany, the United Kingdom and Switzerland (3).

The study concluded that greenhouse gas emissions must be cut by more than 50 percent by 2050 relative to 1990 levels, if the risk of exceeding 2°C is to be limited to 25 percent.

“Only a fast switch away from fossil fuels will give us a reasonable chance to avoid considerable warming. We shouldn’t forget that a 2°C global mean warming would take us far beyond the natural temperature variations that life on Earth has experienced since we humans have been around,” says Malte Meinshausen.

The study also compared the volume of CO2 emissions that could result from the burning of known economically recoverable fossil fuel reserves—oil, gas and coal—and found that these reserves are four times larger than the emission budget between now and 2050 (4). “To keep warming below 2°C, we cannot burn and emit the CO2 from more than a quarter of the economically recoverable fossil fuels up to 2050, and in the end only a small fraction of all known fossil fuel reserves,” concludes Bill Hare, co-author of the study.

The study used a single, efficient computer model which incorporated the effects of all greenhouse gases, aerosols and air pollutants, and the range of possible responses of the carbon cycle and earth’s climate system. This was combined with about a thousand emission pathways.

The study explicitly takes into account the uncertainties related to modelling climate change. Throughout the study, probability statements were used to summarize the current level of knowledge based on observational data. It also used a huge number of different simulation results from the latest assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (5). In taking this comprehensive approach the researchers went a step further than previous work.

The new results have direct relevance to the international negotiations now underway.

“Our study draws on a huge body of research reported in the numerous assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It clearly shows that the 2°C target which many countries have adopted will require quick action in order to follow the blue route rather than the red one in the figure,” says Sarah Raper, co-author from Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.

“With every year of delay, we consume a larger part of our emissions budget, losing room to manoeuvre and increasing the probabilities of dangerous consequences, “ adds Reto Knutti, co-author from the ETH Zurich.

Companion study

A companion study (6), also published in Nature today by Myles Allen and colleagues, show the necessity to limit the total amount of carbon that humankind ever emits.

“In principle, it is the sum of all CO2 emissions that matters. In practice, substantial reductions in global emissions have to begin soon, before 2020. If we wait any longer, the required phase-out of carbon emissions will involve tremendous economic costs and technological challenges - miles beyond what can be considered politically feasible today. The longer we wait, the more likely our path will lead us into dangerous territory,” concludes Malte Meinshausen.

Policy implications

The authors of both papers have collaborated on a Commentary article (7) focussing on their long-term policy implications, published today in Nature Reports Climate Change. See as well the News & Views piece in Nature today (8).

Two possible futures: One in which no climate policies are implemented (red), and one with strong action to mitigate emissions (blue). Shown are fossil CO2 emissions (top panel) and corresponding global warming (bottom panel). The shown mitigation pathway limits fossil and land-use related CO2 emissions to 1000 billion tonnes CO2 over the first half of the 21st century with near-zero net emissions thereafter. Greenhouse gas emissions of this pathway in year 2050 are ~70% below 1990 levels. Without climate policies, global warming will cross 2°C by the middle of the century. Strong mitigation actions according to the blue route would limit the risk of exceeding 2°C to 25%. For more details, see Figure 2 in Meinshausen et al. (2009). Credit: M. Meinshausen et al. (2009)

Notes:
(1) Meinshausen, M., Meinshausen, N., Hare, W., Raper, S. C. B., Frieler, K., Knutti, R., Frame, D. J. & Allen, M. Greenhouse gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2°C. Nature, doi: 10.1038/nature08017 (2009).

(2) Note to Editors: For dangerous climate change to be avoided, 109 of the 192 signing countries of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change are calling for warming to be limited to two degrees Celsius or lower relative to pre-industrial levels. Some of the most vulnerable countries as Small Island States and the least developed countries even consider 1.5 degrees Celsius as the maximally acceptable warming level.

(3) The study was led by the two brothers Malte and Nicolai Meinshausen from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Oxford University’s Statistics Department, respectively.

(4) More than 300 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide have been emitted since year 2000 due to burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. Thus, the emission budget of 1,000 billion tonnes (GtCO2) for the years 2000 up to 2050 is reduced to less than 700 billion tonnes for the remaining period since 2009. This remaining budget is hence less than a quarter of our estimate for known economically recoverable fossil fuel reserves (2800 GtCO2). See Meinshausen et al. (2009) for further details.

(5) IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/assessments-reports.htm

(6) Companion study: Allen, M. R., Frame, D. J., Huntingford, C., Jones, C. D., Lowe, J. A., Meinshausen, M. & Meinshausen, N. Warming caused by cumulative carbon emissions towards the trillionth tonne. Nature, doi:10.1038/nature08019 (2009).

(7) Associated Commentary: Allen, M. R., Frame, D. J., Frieler, K., Hare, W., Huntingford, C., Jones, C., Knutti, R., Lowe, J., Meinshausen, M., Meinshausen, N. & Raper, S. The exit strategy: Emission targets must be placed in the context of a cumulative carbon budget if we are to avoid dangerous climate change. Nature Reports Climate Change, doi:10.1038/climate.2009.38 (2009).

(8) News & Views piece in Nature by Schmidt, G. & Archer, D. Too much of a bad thing. Nature (2009).

Yard Sharing

2009-05-05T15:30:00.001-07:00

Rob and I were playing around with this idea as a potential part of our (in development) mobile phone based sharing platform. Anyway it's here now as hyperlocavore on ning and it looks really great. Even better for the 'yard sharing' tag (our British 'turn your garden into an allotment' doesnt really have the same ring?) Anyway I love this - do join if you are a stateside lovcavore in the making. Or start your own version if elsewhere. via @derekmarkham

UPDATE, yes sorry, ever on the ball I had forgotten our very own celebrity chef driven UK version, getting on for 30,000 members and pretty snappily titled too: landshare

Carbon Economics

2009-05-04T03:35:00.000-07:00

Did you know that the industry most responsible for high levels of carbon emissions, and also with the biggest potential role in mitigation is… banking?

There is a direct relationship between economic (GDP) activity and carbon emissions. The UK had claimed that since 1990 we had succeeded in reducing carbon emissions by 15% while the economy had grown. But this turned out to be false accounting since (under UN carbon guidelines) we did not count those emissions we had outsourced to overseas manufacture and shipping. When the footprint of all the flat screen TVs, cars, clothes and out of season vegetables we import is included then rigorous recent studies show the UK has grown its carbon emissions by 19-20% since the early 1990s (Helm, 2007, Stockholm Environment Institute, 2008).

When you measure your carbon footprint, using online calculators, you find that consumer goods – fashion, electronics, food and so on don’t count. What they measure is your direct energy consumption. It’s a good basis for measuring the relative value of leaving things on standby (low), your flying (medium to high) and your car and space heating (high). But it leaves a lot out. That’s because indirect emissions are hard to calculate. But they are known to account for a large proportion of emissions. For instance, in the case of a house the embodied energy in construction is equivalent to 10-20 years worth of energy use by the home (Cole, 1993). It’s a lot not to count.

A better way to measure your overall carbon emissions would actually be to look at what you spend money on. Very broadly (according to the Office of National Statistics) for every £1 you spend, you emit 0.82kg of carbon. The figure varies for different goods (electronic gadgets are more like 2kg per £1). Energy efficiency is taken into account by looking at how much money you spend on energy. For petrol in the average car, you are emitting around 1.3kg per £1. If you buy a more efficient car then the lower kg/km are taken into account by the decreased money you spend on fuel.

This direct relationship between energy, money and carbon explains why banking is the biggest source of carbon emissions. That’s because banking today is mostly about credit. And credit is spending tomorrow’s earnings on today’s carbon. Charity Credit Action estimated that by late 2006 the average UK household debt was £26,747, rising to £50,918 when you take mortgages into account. Based on the carbon to money equivalence, £26,747 equates to 22 tonnes of carbon – more than two years’ worth of emissions.

If we want to tackle carbon emissions we need to tackle consumer spending. That’s why the new mood of caution and thrift is a positive development. I’ve been arguing for several years that a savings account is the only proven method of carbon sequestration. Because it has the opposite effect of credit – by delaying spending you are reducing carbon emissions. It’s the only way to ensure that the money we save from lagging our loft doesn’t get spent on other equally energy intensive goods; the so-called indirect rebound effect. But that means we need to find a completely new way of managing our economy, our companies and our lives. One based upon value, not debt. I’ll look at these macroeconomic implications next time.

Shoe throwing & pot beating

2009-04-29T03:29:00.000-07:00

Funny how things catch on. Following shoe throwing political protests in India and also the famous one thrown at Bush in Iraq, yesterday shoes were thrown at the Fortis shareholder meeting, protesting at the sale of the bank to BNP Paribas.

Does anybody know if this is a traditional form of protest, like beating pans and pots (recently revived in Iceland outside their returning parliament)?

Soundtrack to Friday

2009-04-24T03:27:00.000-07:00