The Clean and Green Club

I’m as guilty as anyone else. One day recently I had work orders from both a first-time and a long-time client, and an inquiry from a likely prospect. As I was about to send my standard response to the prospect, I noticed that one of the landing pages had an obsolete bio and the letter itself had a link to a shopping cart I no longer use. It took only five minutes to fix the cart link in my template immediately, but then I had to tell myself, STOP. Fixing the bio can wait. Getting started on the two actual bird-in-hand client projects should come first. I jotted a few notes on what I needed to fix on which pages, and turned toward something more productive, knowing that when I did turn to the bio, it would likely lead to a cascade of other things that needed tweaking or updating.

But sometimes I get sucked into that trap. Hours go by, and I’ve fixed 10 things that were in need of repair on my websites and email templates, but didn’t get any of my real work done.

Sure, those things are important. Accurate, up-to-date, easy-to-use websites are part of the clean and efficient image we want to present to the world. But that sort of thing can wait a few hours, because it doesn’t require enormous brain power. In the morning, when my brain is fresh, I should be doing the creative profitability and marketing work that my clients happily pay for.

How does this play out in your life and your business?

And to me, that’s a good thing; bear with me while I rant for one paragraph. Even if their teachers have a broader perspective (and many do, including people I consider colleagues, like Jack Canfield and Marilyn Jenett)—far too many people see the Prosperity Consciousness world in a shallow, one-dimensional way—all about personal wealth and with only the lightest lip service paid to being of service, to improving the world. Also, too many people measure prosperity only by their bank account. For more than 20 years, I’ve been talking about other, nonmonetary, ways to create abundance. My ebook, The Penny-Pinching Hedonist: How to Live Like Royalty with a Peasant’s Pocketbook, came out all the way back in 1995.

This movie is about real prosperity: the kind where businesses and communities come together to enlist conscious capitalism to solve the world’s problems in ways that generate profit. It’s a visual representation of the principles I discuss in my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.

The founder of Well.org and author of The Urban Monk: Eastern Wisdom and Modern Hacks to Stop Time and Find Success, Happiness, and Peace (which has been on my read-it-one-day list for a while now) spent months talking to experts in conscious capitalism, from Whole Foods founder and Conscious Capitalism co-author John Mackey and Seventh Generation founding CEO and author of The Responsibility Revolution (which I reviewed several years ago) to Naomi Whittel of Reserveage™, a fair-trade entrepreneur and reforester who sells high-quality Panamanian organic cacao and coconut into the nutritionals and beauty markets, and Tom Szaky, founder of TerraCycle, the company long known for finding creative ways to recycle all kinds of trash (even cigarette butts).

Many of the people the interviews and stories he tells are familiar to me, but on screen, they come alive in a way you just can’t do in print. And for those who are new to this work, it’s a fabulous introduction.

The film makes a strong case for conscious capitalism: using business as a tool to both heal the world and make a very nice financial return. It takes us behind the scenes into the offices, the manufacturing plants, and the source communities in the developing world, where these businesses have direct impact on the local populace.

But this is no mere documentary. To me, by far the most exciting part was near the end, when Shojai, Whittel, Szaky, and the Guna elders in an island community in Panama join together with Procter & Gamble to harvest the solid waste washing up on the beautiful beaches in Guna territory—to sell them to P&G as raw material for shampoo bottles. This social entrepreneurship project, benefitting the locals, the environment, and the North American investors, was hatched directly out of the making of this movie. In other words, the film doesn’t merely document the emerging new business reality; it directly helps to bring it about.

Even though I was trained as a traditional journalist who takes the facts and writes them up. I’ve been a longtime fan of the power of advocacy journalism—of using the power of story to shed light on those who make the world better and offer alternatives to doing business with those who make it worse—and of participatory journalism—documenting an event where you are there as a participant. My very first published articles, as a 15-year-old high school student covering peace demonstrations in 1972, were participatory. This film is a fine example of going beyond even participatory journalism to what we might call activist journalism—not just participating, but organizing something new, and documenting it. Because the recycling/resale project actually arose from the filmmaking, this opens up an entirely new way of thinking about the intersection of journalism and social change. Let’s model it!

The film is available here. As of this writing, you’ll find a player right at the top of the page, but that looks like it might be temporary. If it’s no longer at the top, just scroll down to “Our Movies.”