About Me 
Nicolas Parson, Montreal Canada.
I am a business strategist who is passionate about the environment and the economic possibilities of a greener future.
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 2010 is a remarkable year. There is a groundswell of initiatives underway to address the climate change crisis from advocates and grassroots movements, but also from companies, industry and government agencies that should be making you smile, at least just a little bit.
2009 was the year of doom and gloom. The recession created doubt in the stability of the global economy. The cause of the recession was after all the unchecked pursuit of profit of a few men of power working behind the scenes, aided by a system that put profits ahead of any other consideration. And while we all knew Obama’s arrival at the White House was the best thing to help put prestige back to the US on the world scene, we saw little commitment and support to the pressing environmental issues of the day. Witness Copenhagen’s failure.
But Copenhagen did not fail ultimately. There has been a subtle but permanent change in our society, worldwide. Green has become an operative word, one that lends direction to strategic planning. Companies are asking themselves where they fit in and taking action. Mayors are working with their constituents to offer local food, farming and composting programs. Industry is pondering its future and trying to green its image, through means other than green washing. The EPA is considering dumb-proof labels for fuel-efficient cars.
But most significantly, green has become mainstream. We want green products, we watch green shows, we read about green lifestyles, we take commitments to be greener, eat less meat… I’m not know for my optimism, but in this case, I’ll make an exception. It seems we have gone from little hope for global societal change in 2009 to a concerted movement for progressive, but far-reaching, green action.
It’s about time, given this year’s droughts, floods and fires. The question now is: Can we keep it up, and can we change fast enough?
 Companies are faced with a difficult dilemma. We the people are increasingly interested in dealing with companies that offer sustainable products. We want the products we purchase and the companies we purchase them from to come from ethical sources, to have a low impact on the environment. And we aren’t ready to pay a lot more for it.
So why aren’t companies using this to differentiate themselves, to become market leaders? Leading coffee providers Van Houtte, Starbucks and Second Cup offer fair trade coffee, but it only accounts for 2 to 3 % of their total sales. Why aren’t they moving to 100 % fair trade?
Sustainability is a decisively complex issue. Getting enough product on the shelf is a big challenge for anyone who sources from fair trade, and that large corporations can afford product shortages.
That is just one of the challenges we are facing when trying to move from large scale industrial processes to smaller scale cooperatives. But I feel the real problem lies in the natural resistance to change of corporations.
Guy Kawasaki explained it best with his curves concept. Imagine you are an ice distributor. Historically, ice was chipped off from glaciers, then carried at great expense to the consumer. That was until someone created a factory that could produce ice. That industry completely wiped out the other because it was a better, faster and cheaper way of doing business.
Then an appliance maker came up with the fridge, and all but wiped out the ice-making industry. The rest is history.
Guy Kawasaki contends that companies move up and down a curve, refining their processes over time until they reach maximum efficiency. But they are also victim of their own success, incapable of jumping to the next curve because of the company’s immune system. After all, the next curve requires a counterintuitive leap of logic that goes against every assumption made so far by the company.
Most companies will not be able to see the next curve, let alone become a part of it. Hence the resistance, the piecemeal green initiatives, the green front…
Things are starting to change though. For years, companies waited out the green movement. But certain leaders, like Wal-Mart, aren’t taking any changes and are trying to tackle this seriously. Will they succeed? More on the next post…
Photo credit: Flickr by Office Now
 Writing this blog has been an interesting experience for me. I started in January with few notions of how to write blogs and an emerging off-the-cuff knowledge of the green movement. I’ve invested hundreds of hours into research and writing, and have now posted my 100th post.
In the last year, I have read 7 books I highly recommend:
- Banker to the Poor, by Muhammad Yunus – the incredible story of the Grameen Bank and micro-lending to the poor in Bangladesh
- The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka – a somewhat heavy-handed read about natural agriculture
- Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea and Stones Into Schools – the 2-part story of one American’s mission to build schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan
- Toxic Waste Is Good for You - a scathing look at the PR industry that makes conspiracy theories look boring.
- Worldchanging, edited by Alex Steffen – an amazing compilation of forward-looking solutions for individuals, homes, communities and cities
- Plan B 4.0 by Lester Brown – adeep analysis of the major challenges we face on a crowded planet and how they are inter-related.
I read 200-400 blog posts every day, although you can imagine only a handful are read from beginning to end. I have moved my account from Bloglines to Google Reader, because of glitches and the fact I like the interface better. I’m still hooked after six months on the following sites:
- Treehugger
- Good
- Change
- Grist
- Good Planet
- Sustainable Business
- Triple Pundit
For local news I follow Gaiapresse and for lighter reading, I recommend Ecorazzi and Inhabitat.
I’ve watched several great documentaries like:
- Home
- Food Inc.
- Story of Stuff
- Le Monde Selon Monsanto
And I’m really looking forward to seeing The Cove, The Age of Stupid, King Corn, Capitalism, The Corporation and No Impact Man.
In this same period, I have reduced my meat eating habits, eat only organic fruits and vegetables, have replaced our incandescents with CFLs, am pushing forward a composting project in my condo building, have sworn off plastic, have started avoiding fast food restaurants (especially MacDonalds), and am buying local organic food for my dog, to name but a few.
And I’m still struggling with some obviously non-green aspects, like driving to work when I’m 10 minutes away by public transit. Old habits die hard… My perspective on this, and on sustainability is two-fold.
First, when individuals are making efforts to reduce their carbon footprint, they can do no wrong. If they do something with the right intention that turns out to be worse for the environment, as long as their intentions were good, there’s no real harm done. After all, it’s not as if a majority of people were willing to make these efforts. Besides which, the literature is less than comprehensive on what becoming green means. And if someone makes baby steps, just changes one or two aspects of their life to a greener alternative, that’s good too. I’ll take a billion people cutting 1% of their carbon emissions any day over 1 million cutting 50%.
Second, the real change makers are corporations. Until know, most big corporations have eyed the green movement with suspicion, not to say hostility. But they are the ones that are making and breaking the environment. When the industry is willing to change, the problem is resolved much faster. Take razor blades. Do you need to change razor blades every week? I’ve been using the same blade for a year. You can see why razor manufacturers aren’t eager to spread the word out. The green movement ultimately is a threat to business, until business can adapt.
I’ll throw out some ideas on how they can do this in my next post…
 The funny thing about acknowledging our current climate crisis is that we have to accept one damning fact: growth must be stopped. Immediately. And that means no more babies. I’ve been pondering this for the last 24 hours with much humor. There are thousands of green mom blogs and hundreds of green baby products ventures . Can we really put an axe on the whole “having babies” thing?
OK. First things first. Why can’t we have babies? A, do you really want to bring up a child in a world that’s such a mess? I asked myself that question before having my daughter, and decided that we’d find an answer by the time she grew up. That was in 1993. Today, that answer is still a ways off. It’s your life, you make the decision.
But even if you decide to have kids, consider that our population is growing rapidly, and that resources are limited, and in several cases running out already. So having babies, and the whole marketing/social message behind parenthood is on fact anti-green. It’s not the eco-conscious thing to do. You are vegan, you bike to work, but you want to have a child? Pleasseeee.
I heard a disturbing fact about dogs. I have a dog. Someone told me my dog produces the equivalent of two SUVs. What? I hope that’s not true. Any way, I have a dog, I’m not going to put it to sleep to be ecological. But you haven’t given birth to your baby yet, so think twice!!!
OK, confession time: I don’t believe a word I’ve written so far in this post. Having kids is a pleasure and a privilege. No one should take that away from you. Especially not me.
That’s why “being green” is so hard – so absolute. Everything I do cannot be planet friendly. Yes, the planet is increasingly crowded, but it’s the system that needs changing. The people will follow, when the system is in place.
If anything, this new generation of babies may grow up to become the generation of change, those willing and able to make the difficult decisions we have been unable to make so far.
Photo credit: Flickr, by allysafilmaker
Sarah Parsons, over at change.org, is one of my favorite bloggers. She’s all over Big Ag (large agricultural companies) like a bad rash. Today’s big news? Factory farms and Big Ag are causing acid rain.
Whereas we managed to cut down significantly on our emissions of sulfur dioxide, the compound that created heaps of acid rain in the eighties, we’ve done nothing about nitrous oxide. This gas is emitted by industrial fertilizers which accelerate soil depletion, causing it to lose essential minerals. The acid rain adds to the problem by causing aluminum to leech away and pollute nearby water sources.
The UN also estimates 65 % of nitrous oxide emissions come from Factory farms. Given that nitrous oxide is a potent greenhouse gas, we should all be concerned.
There must be a better way.
Photo credit: Flickr, by cod gabriel
We concerned citizens of the world are often discouraged by governments’ inability to make significant policy changes. Witness the Copenhagen debacle, or the tortured fate of the US Climate Act. The truth is that the governments that have the most influence on the world scene are also the most complex, influenced in no small part by commercial interests and lobbies.
The industries that contribute most to climate change are in no mood for compromise. It is natural that they resist any bill that may hurt their profits. And while it may be frustrating to the environmentalists who want climate action now, it is extremely comforting to those whose job security would otherwise be at stake. In fact, many state economies depend on this inflow of cash.
Change will be difficult. Many have argued that a clean energy economy is what is needed for the US to reassert its dominance on the world change, but politics are driven by local interests and there is no guarantee that this clean energy revolution will benefit the states that currently depend on the oil economy.
Business is by definition opportunity made real. Certain business leaders are making the most of it by seizing the day as it were, using their market share to make social change. We have all come to admire Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Bill Gates’ devotion to the cause, and the great work of their foundations, but Steve Jobs is the the man of the moment.
Few of us realize to what extent Apple, under his guidance, has changed our lives. Today, iPods are ubiquitous, and iTunes has 70% of the market for music. The iPhone has revolutionized the phone industry and paved the way for tons of apps that have social content. And the iPad will no doubt make computers redundant, already showing great promise in classrooms and hospitals.
But that’s not what caught my attention. Steve Jobs has announced that the iPhone and iPad would be porn free. One man has single-handedly dealt this shady industry a fatal blow. Because porn in the Internet age is nothing like the days of Playboy and Hustler. A good deal of the porn available online involves some degree of human trafficking. By taking such a stand, Jobs is telling Macheads all over the world that porn is evil.
No doubt, Jobs had good reasons, other than idealogical, to make this decision. The iPhone and iPad are family-focused, so people downloading and playing porn in public places on an Apple product is totally uncool. That fits with Apple’s image. But the point is business can stand for something, and still make profits.
That’s the role business leaders should give themselves. What do you think?
Photo credit: Flickr, by raneko
 When British Petroleum (BP) applied for a permit to build the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico and begin drilling, it claimed to have the technology and know-how to handle any oil spill.
But in the face of an actual spill, BP is much less confident. “This scares everybody: the fact that we can’t make this well stop flowing, the fact that we haven’t succeeded so far,” BP CEO Doug Suttles said. “Many of the things we’re trying have been done on the surface before, but have never been tried at 5,000 ft.”
They’ve never been tried at 5,000 feet. Drilling for oil this deeply under the ocean is a relatively new enterprise for our species. Oil has been drilled offshore in shallow water for more than a century. But deepwater drilling is much more expensive than shallow-water drilling. For a long time drilling in deep water wasn’t tried, because it would have cost more to extract a barrel of oil than a barrel of oil was worth on world markets. It took the spikes in oil prices in recent years to make deepwater drilling profitable.
Politicians and oil executives assured us that offshore oil drilling was safe. Those tree huggers who worry about environmental disasters are nuts, they said. Yes, there have been oil rig disasters in the past, but (big wink) we know what we’re doing now. Trust us.
The laws of physics work differently nearly a mile underwater than they do on land, or shallow water, however. By now, it is obvious BP is still trying to invent a procedure that might stop the oil leak, maybe, if we’re lucky. No one appears to have been ready for the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Really, this “trust us” business is getting old. How many times have we been told to “trust” some new thing, and then when the dangers surface we find out the “trusted” ones hadn’t told us the whole truth?
In the mid-20th century we humans went into overdrive digging asbestos out of the earth to use in countless structures and products. There is asbestos in navy ships, asbestos in our homes and schools, asbestos in old car parts, asbestos in landfills. And eventually, years after medical science had determined asbestos exposure causes terrible disease, industry executives and politicians reluctantly agreed to shut down asbestos production, or at least most of it. And now the cost of asbestos abatement and mesothelioma treatment is an ongoing problem for individuals, taxpayers, and businesses.
And do we want to talk about Vioxx? Tanning beds? And now there are questions being asked about Bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical found in just about every plastic bottle you’ve ever touched. It may be dangerous, it may not. Opinions vary. Just note that the same political and business leaders who deny BPA could be dangerous are the same ones who like to yell “drill, baby, drill.”
Guest post from Barbara O’Brien, at www.maacenter.org, a leading web resource for asbestos exposure and cancer information. In addition, Barbara blogs at The Mahablog, Crooks and Liars, and AlterNet, and was a panelist at the Yearly Kos Convention and a featured guest blogger at the Take Back America Conference in Washington, DC.
Photo credit: Flickr commons, by etiennecoutu
An apology for yet another post about the Gulf fiasco, but this is a blog about business ecology after all. So is BP to blame? In fact, are all big corporations evil? The truth in no one is to blame. Or rather, everyone is responsible.
In a company, the CEO seems to hold all the cards. If he decides for or against an action, his word is final. But who decides for the CEO? The CEO is balancing his vision with the need for profits and growth, generally dictated by the Board of Directors. And who controls the Board? Generally, the shareholders, aka the owners of the company, who want their stock to gain value.
No one is evil. You are in business to make money, and you buy into or start a business to make money. Is the pursuit of profits evil? There may have been a fleeting time in the sixties where we all thought we could get by on love, but money is the dominant system, like it or not.
The real problem with the BP oil spill lies in the fact that safety requirements for offshore oil are lax, especially in enforcing them. BP is not held accountable for upholding the kind of safety standards nuclear plants are required to. It’s more profitable to do less on the safety side than more, because the probability of an oil spill is always downplayed while the costs of cleaning one up are relatively small. BP is even assured of some leniency in the courts, as history shows.
So it’s the government’s fault, our favorite villain, for not having stricter standards, and not enforcing them. And it’s the people’s fault for voting these governors and senators in office, especially the corporate-leaning republicans in oil states like Louisiana, Texas and Alaska… Right?
Maybe, but you can’t blame people whose families make a living form the oil industry for voting politicians that protect that industry. And you can’t blame republicans, because democrats don’t do that much better.
The point is the blame game only gets you so far. If you ask BP, they’ll probably pin the blame on all those tree-hugging activists.
We need to elevate humanity, society, civilization. If we can’t do better with oil, then we need to move away form it. Black gold has brought its share of problems before the oil spill, such as the mess in the Middle East. We need to work on clean energy – and focus on ways of living without oil.
If we can do that, maybe the oil spill will have served some purpose after all.
Photo credit: Flickr, by jurvetson
 Monsanto comes to the rescue of starving haitians by donating seeds. A gift that has strings attached…? If you don’t know who Monsanto is yet, then I invite you to read my previous post. In short, Monsanto produces genetically modified seeds. As uneasy as you might feel about the possible health hazards of GM food, it’s nothing compared to how prevalent Monsanto’s food products are in our diet. Their seeds produce 95 percent of US soybean and 80 percent of US corn crops.
The key to Monsanto’s success is rarely discussed openly, for good reason. Many believe Monsanto has achieved its market dominance through tactics that are less than honorable: coercion, intimidation, and some say even worse. They have sued farmers for using their seeds without license, even when the seeds germinated on a neighboring field.
Monsanto is a powerful corporation who is currently under investigation by the US Department of Justice. Will anything come of it? Let us doubt, given the track record on Corporate America’s accountability – are we thinking of Shell, BP and Massey Energy (coal mines) anyone? These companies combined spend more than a small country on lobbying the government…
Then Monsanto announces it will donate its seeds to Haiti to help them jumpstart their agriculture program. No string attached. The entire web community blogged this to death, saying there was no way that could be the case. I agree. Any company owning more than 90 percent of all GM seed patents is clearly motivated by the pursuit of profits.
As it turns out, Haiti says thanks, but no thanks. The Peasant Movement’s political leader says he will burn the 60,000 corn and tomato seeds Monsanto is sending Haiti. Though Haitians will go hungry longer, this is no doubt the only way to ensure food security. What is Monsanto’s next move?
Photo credit: Flickr, by dmswart
A new study published by the National Research Council, part of the National Academy of Sciences is formal: climate change is real and undeniable (skeptics, look up the word un-de-nia-ble). Seriously, were we expecting the entire scientific community to say climate was a fib? Of course, it’s real. Should you sell your beach house right away?
Hold on. There may be a solution within our reach. After all, now that we have all replaced conventional lightbulbs with compact fluorescents, we are ready for the next step. What is the next step?
According to the NRC, it’s not business-as-usual. But I beg to differ. What does lightweight little-old-me know that hundreds of phDs do not? – not thei salaries, not their savant look, not their undeniable cool title (Doctor!), but a deep understanding of markets.
Markets will save us. If I am wrong, then we are doomed (please smile at this statement).
Here is a really dumbed down version of world markets. Consumers make money, then choose where to spend it. The government gets a chunk, then the bank (loans and mortgages) and utilities, insurance… Finally, what’s left is for savings or all-too-often impulse purchases.
When we say there is a market for something, it is because there are wallets willing to buy that something. And this whole end-of-the-world scenario is precisely something we are willing to buy into, to avoid it.
So why aren’t we seeing broader changes in the products offered? Why aren’t our politicians advancing the green jobs agenda further? Why are municipalities moving more aggressively on composting, bike lanes and better public transport?
Because it takes time for markets to organize. But they will. Because the only other option is market collapse.
Will it happen because companies will factor in the true cost to the communities they operate in and the true cost to the environment? That is anyone’s guess.
But change is inevitable. Business-as-usual may become business-as-required.
Photo credit: Nicolas Parson, all rights reserved
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2010 is a remarkable year. There is a groundswell of initiatives underway to address the climate change crisis from advocates and grassroots movements, but also from companies, industry and government agencies that should be making you smile, at least just a little bit.
