The Clean and Green Club

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Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies by Nikos Mourkogiannis

About Shel & This Newsletter

I want to share with you some of the amazing people—I call them “practical visionaries—profiled in my award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. These folks are doing incredibly exciting work in bringing about a regenerative, thriving world. By the time this series is over, I can safely guarantee that you’ll be glad you’ve “met” a few of them. After each excerpt, you’ll find a brief comment from me, adding more context since you haven’t read the whole book yet.

Think about this: Whatever engineering challenge we face, nature has probably already solved it.

Imagine the fortunes awaiting companies that can roll out a construction material as strong and lightweight as spider silk…a desalination process as cheap and effective as the one that mangrove roots use…a water collection method as powerful as the one used by the Namib desert beetle. John Kremer talked about “biological marketing”—so why not biological engineering, also known as biomimicry? It’s just as miraculous—and just like biological marketing, the results can be outsized. Nature has figured out Zero Waste, and figured out how to do pretty much anything that humans feel a need to do: housing, transportation, flood resistance…

These technologies have been around for thousands, maybe millions, of years, and they outperform what we humans have come up with.

Meet Janine Benyus, TED speaker and author of several books on biomimicry. When she walks you through Lavasa, India, where native vegetation has not grown for 400 years, and tells you that the area gets 27 feet of rainfall during the three-month monsoon season and basically nothing the rest of the year, you know that maintaining a thriving city here will be challenging.

Yet, immediately abutting this city, she finds proof that nature knows quite well how to handle this environment: a hilly wilderness area that, despite the alternating torrents and droughts, experiences zero erosion. As she walks us through this wilderness, she shows us adaptations like an anthill built with curves and swales, so that it doesn’t get washed away in the flood. She walks us through a sacred grove there, cool and delightful even in the dry season, and lets us understand that our cities could be just as pleasurable to live in.

She shows us a 1500-year-old live oak tree in Louisiana that has designed itself to withstand hurricanes, and points out that only four of New Orleans’s hundreds of live oaks were killed in Hurricane Katrina.

And whether it’s in India, Louisiana, China, or New York City, she captures metrics like carbon sequestration, energy and water use from those neighboring wilderness areas—things no one has bothered to measure in the past—and then cheerfully announces, “Because this is happening in the wild land next door, no one can say it’s impossible. A city that does this, that’s generous in its ecosystem services, is going to be great to live in.” She describes ecosystems in terms like “generous” and “competent,” and reminds us that the human species, at 200,000 years old, is still a baby, and we can learn much from our “elders” in the plant, animal, insect, fungal, and bacterial realms.

Her approach combines human-built infrastructure and nature-built ecostructure together to provide “ecological services” that contribute to meeting per-acre and per-block metrics, carried in part by the buildings and in part by the landscapes.

Species adapt and evolve over time, growing more able to influence their environment while being influenced by it in turn—and most of these adaptations are positive both for the organism and the ecosystem. Maladaptations create room for better-adapted species to move in. Species that fail to provide these ecological services are maladapting, and will be replaced by those that do contribute, she says. She remains optimistic that humans will learn to positively adapt, and be welcomed by other species.

A lot of her work is based on the idea that because each place is unique, the technologies we use should be matched to each place, as they are in nature. In nature, organisms ensure the survival of the species by protecting the survival of their habitat; they can’t directly take care of offspring many generations in the future, but they can protect the place where those future generations will live.

How can biomimicry change our patterns of design and construction? Thousands of ways. Here are just a few projects Benyus and other biomimicry researchers are working on:

Order your copy of Shel’s newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World

Love Let Go: Radical Generosity for the Real World by Laura Sumner Truax and Amalya Campbell (Eerdmans, 2017)
You might remember that although I did recommend it, I was quite annoyed by my review choice last month, Doing Good Better (DGB).

DGB took a very clinical, engineer-like approach to deciding which charities to support and what activities to do—even what career to choose—for maximum impact but neglected many of the human factors. While I was still reading it, I went to an author talk by Amalya (“Ami”) Campbell and I thought her book Love Let Go would be the perfect antidote to my frustration.

Love Let Go, unlike DGB, is a very free-spirited approach to giving (DGB’s author would think it’s too free-spirited). It chronicles a church that had invested just USD $1000 into a mixed-income community affordable housing project in its Chicago neighborhood, back in the 1970s. All of a sudden, when that housing project was sold off, the church found itself with a $1.6 million windfall.

After long deliberation, the church leaders decided to tithe. They’d give 10 percent to their congregants, with only five words of direction: “Do good in the world.” This is introduced on page 8. Most of the rest of the book follows one of three strands:

• What the parishioners did with their individual checks (with a side story of how the media treated this story and what happened as a result)
• How the church—which had been struggling to get enough money for its own infrastructure— wrestled with what they’d do with the remaining $1.4 million (revealed, after teasing us all the way through, on pp. 183-184)
• Sharing the research and various philosophies on generosity that they sifted through during their long and very deliberative process

The impact from this one church and its congregants was quite impressive, but it’s only the beginning. Enabling a generosity mindset could be huge; in his Foreword, Richard Stearns of World Vision says that if every Christian gave an extra 60 cents per day (which works out to $219 per year), we could eliminate poverty in a single generation (p. xi). And yes, this is an overtly Christian book, probably the first I’ve ever reviewed. I don’t happen to be Christian, but I see no reason why this process couldn’t be replicated in non-Christian houses of worship and in non-religious organizations.

Generosity, say the authors, is our neglected superpower (pp. 3-4); using it involves the simple five-step process outlined on page 4. And we help ourselves when we get generous, opening ourselves up to all sorts of little miracles—and generosity begets more generosity (p. 95). People who give are as happy as those who double their income (p. 7). Even the bottom-income congregants, people whom no one would have criticized for using the $500 for themselves (including homeless Stephen Martin, pp. 106-107 and debt-ridden Kristen Metz, pp. 108-110, among others), found deep meaning in their giving. Of course, even a homeless man in the US is far wealthier than many people around the world; in 2015, a net worth of just $3210 was enough to put someone in the top 50 percent worldwide (p. 188).

All of this is based in something I’ve been teaching for years: an attitude of abundance. When you know the world will provide, it gives you the freedom to experiment. And while not every congregant’s $500 experiment was successful, most of them were—and several inspired even larger acts of generosity. The ones that failed were sometimes recast, for instance bringing in an established social service agency better suited to the mission (pp. 150-152). Another failure (according to the way most of us measure things) involved donating to the medical expenses of someone in need, who died nonetheless—but even this experience, which removed the money from circulation, offered many blessings.

Generosity has a twin, according to the authors: gratitude (pp. 153-166). Like generosity, gratitude improves with practice. When theologian Mary Daly says “you learn courage by couraging,” this church creates a corollary: we learn thankfulness by thanking (p. 161). And sometimes the most charitable thing you can do is to receive charity with grace, creating the freedom for others to feel the abundance of giving (p. 105, for instance). For the authors, this abundance mentality is embodied in the opening chapters of Genesis (pp. 43-44) and in the story of Jesus feeding the multitude with five loaves and two fish (pp. 143-144), as long as we don’t let fear get in the way—something even the usually abundant-thinking Abraham was not immune from (pp. 51-52).

And here, abundance is coupled with awe (pp. 132-134). That’s something most of us rarely experience, but the process of giving away money to individuals who in turn gave it to others, as well as the much longer process of deliberating over the remaining money, created numerous moments of awe.

The book ends with a chapter-by-chapter reading guide that opens discussion of larger issues and how this kind of giving program can make a difference. The very last page (p. 195) notes that individuals, not foundations or corporations, make an astounding 81 percent of charitable contributions. Then it asks three questions, and I particularly love this one: “What causes you to be optimistic about the ability of one individual to make a difference in the world? How can you increase your exposure to these sources of optimism?

About Shel & This Newsletter

In the worlds of marketing and entrepreneurship, we often hear the phrase, “Shiny Object Syndrome”: the temptation to get distracted by the next shiny new marketing technique.

I’ve just invented a term for its “evil twin”: “Rusty Object Syndrome”: getting distracted by all the little tweaks you can do to clean up the work you’ve already done, instead of doing the new work that should be higher priority.

Order your copy of Shel’s newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World

“Prosperity” by Dr. Pedram Shojai

Instead of a book this month, a brand new movie.

From the title, you might expect this would be a film about the “Prosperity Consciousness” trend embodied most famously in the movie, “The Secret” and Napoleon Hill’s book, Think and Grow Rich. You would be wrong.

Order your copy of Shel’s newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World

We Rise: The Earth Guardians’ Guide to Building a Movement that Restores the Planet by Xiuhtezcatl Martinez

Martinez has been an activist for 11 years—and he’s not even old enough to vote. Only 17, he became aware of the earth’s current distress at age six and has been organizing ever since. Not just organizing. Performing original rap music and traditional dance, speaking at major conferences and even becoming only the second non-diplomat, non-politician to address the UN General Assembly, being featured in a film on youth activism, receiving an award from President Obama, standing up as one of 21 youth activists who are suing the US government to enforce climate change, and now, releasing his first book (with a major publisher, too—health and organic gardening leader Rodale). He was at the 20th Anniversary Rio Conference, organized a youth presence at COP21 (where the Paris Climate Accord was hammered out), and performed for the Water Protectors at Standing Rock.

I was a child activist too, starting—not counting an action against smoking I took in my own home at age 3—at age 12 when I went to my first demonstration, opposing the Vietnam war. And I, too, have been an activist ever since. Now, as I turn 61 next month, I’m seen as an elder—but I’ve got a few decades before I catch up with some of my activist friends in their 90s and 100s, such as Arky Markham.

But I was 16 before I turned vegetarian, 17 when I started speaking on the issues of our time, 20 before I participated in an action that definitely made a difference in the world (the Seabrook occupation of 1977), and 23 when my first book (on why nuclear power is a terrible idea) was published. So I’m in awe of this kid. We can think of him as a Malala Yousafzai for the United States. By the time he’s my age, he could have credits like toppling the whole fossil-fuel power structure or maybe managing a successful campaign to create a world unity government. I don’t know the specifics, but I do know he’s destined for greatness.

Martinez comes naturally to a holistic, intersectional approach that sees the relationships among multiple issues. Whether it’s getting big money out of politics, raising climate awareness among youth, or supporting the intersectionality of opposing different “isms,” he’s on the job. Raised in Boulder, Colorado by indigenous activists (his parents founded Earth Guardians, where he works as Youth Director), Martinez is strongly rooted in his own Mexica/Aztec tradition and very knowledgeable about the traditions of many other indigenous cultures, around North America and the rest of the world. This culture, where every living thing is sacred, informs his activism and his lifelong vegetarianism. It also provides a solid frame of earth guardianship and water protection from which he reaches out on a host of other issues.

That ability to see others’ oppression no matter what shape it has taken leads to deep wisdom: “Rather than pointing fingers, let’s work with people to help make better food choices” like eating less meat rather than instantly going cold turkey to vegetarianism (p. 135, pun intentional). That philosophy extends beyond food, to other areas where we can build connection, change our habits, and come together stronger.

And shifting our internal compasses to accept victory is part of that. He quotes activist Mika Maiava of Samoa: “You need to win from within, so that even if people look at you like you’re losing, you’re not losing because you’ve already won in your heart.” (p. 71)

At the same time, in a world where 200 species go extinct every day (p. 85), he demands immediate progress on climate change. And he’s doing what he can to create an empowered intergenerational movement to get us off fossil fuels into renewables, to create a humane and nutritious and just food system, and to secure the rights of every ethnic and cultural group on the planet. He’s doing his part to build a coherent, focused movement that can actually generate this needed shift, using every nonviolent tactic from lobbying through nonviolent direct action. Direct activism, he reminds us, “doesn’t wait for permission from leaders to act.” (p. 102)

He’s also very media-savvy. He understands the power of Standing Rock pipeline opponents self-identifying not as protestors but as water protectors—“defined by what we love and seek to defend” (p. 180). And writing in the earliest days of the Trump administration, he recognizes how the 2016 US election changed things for climate activists.

The book is well-researched, with plenty of facts and figures to back up his assertions. Even I didn’t know that not only does the fossil fuel industry receive $548 billion a year in direct subsidies, but also leaves us holding the bag for $5.3 trillion in externalized costs, for example (p. 144). On the positive side, he cites a study of college and university campuses investing in “green revolving funds” to finance the campuses’ own energy improvements; they show an astonishing 32 percent return (p. 219). The advance copy I have was in need of another round of proofreading, but hopefully that was fixed in the final printing.

Martinez is also using the book to spread messages from many leaders in the fight for global and local climate justice; the book includes his interviews with such luminaries as India’s environmental economist Vandana Shiva, Paul Watson of the environmentalist direct action group Sea Shepherds, climate activism pioneer Bill McKibben (founder of 350.org), actor/activist Mark Ruffalo, Bernie Sanders’ campaign liaison to Millennials, Moumita Ahmed, and several others including his own grandfather.

It gives me lots of hope to find a book this comprehensive and also (in places) really fun to read, written by a teenager. People like Martinez are our future, our bright hope. His book is well worth your time.

Seven of my ten books, including two of my five self-published titles, have won at least one award and/or been translated and republished in foreign markets. My second award-winner was the self-published Principled Profit: Marketing that Puts People First, which I brought out back in 2003; it won the Apex Award for best book in the PR industry. Since so many of my readers are not part of large organizations, and since awards provide lots of credibility to independents who win them, it might be helpful to go over some tips on how to win awards. Next month, we’ll look at how to make the most of your award victories.

I am a big believer in third-party credibility. Awards are part of that package along with endorsements (Principled Profit was endorsed by Jack Canfield and more than 80 others), foreign rights sales (India and Mexico for this title, Italy and Turkey for the subsequent Wiley revision/expansion), press coverage (in addition to a Publishers Weekly review, this book was mentioned in dozens of articles), special sales (1000 copies sold to Southwest Airlines, making the book profitable the day it printed), etc. It shows that other people think you do a good job. In the ever-more-crowded publishing universe where there might be thousands of titles in your niche, this is critical.

Sales of this title were not stellar. But I think the overall package of credibility was a key factor in selling the rights to Wiley—which published an expanded and updated edition in 2010 as Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green—and again a few years later to Morgan James (Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, 2016). Because of these rights sales, I had to take the original self-published edition out of print, but that was fine.

Determining which awards to enter involves several factors: Whether it’s a fit, how many other entrants will be competing, overall quality of the product, the cost of entry… I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my first award-winner, published by Chelsea Green, had a very elegant design. That inspired me to hire a design team for Principled Profit after doing my own interiors on two previous self-published books. And that, I believe, is part of why my books started winning awards. I’ve always done very well-written, useful books, but my first two self-published books had poor design standards with covers done by people with no book experience and interiors I designed myself.

Does it matter that most people haven’t heard of the awards I’ve won? I don’t think so. There is a huge difference in top-tier vs. second-tier awards, e.g., Newberry, Caldicott, National Book Award, Booker Prize that absolutely everyone has heard of vs. Ben Franklin, Foreword BOTY (Book Of The Year), or Ippy, which are extremely respected in the indie publishing word but not beyond it. In terms of market effect, I don’t see much difference between the second tier and the third tier, where they are not widely known even in the industry. A skilled marketer can take good advantage of all of them. My Apex was a third-tier award, and I have fourth-tier awards on at least three other titles. Even those are just as good in getting prospective buyers to take another look, and that’s really why I do them.

My advice to you: Enter awards where your chances of winning are higher. If you’re producing a quality product, there may be opportunities in the industry vertical as well as the horizontal category (books in my case, perhaps green manufacturing or music or customer service or tasty food in yours). Apex Awards are given in many categories within the PR industry. I suspect that very few books were entered in the Best PR Book category that I won, so my chances were much better. If I found a book award in the green or social entrepreneurship space (as opposed to a green or social entrepreneurship category in a book contest), I’d enter my current Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World in a heartbeat.

Order your copy of Shel’s newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World

Our Earth, Our Species, Our Selves: How to Thrive While Creating a Sustainable World by Ellen Moyer

Rarely have I come across a book that so closely mirrors my own thinking. But our lenses are different. In my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World—and in three earlier related books—I look at the power of business to heal the world. Moyer looks at how consumer-citizens can do the same thing.

Also, I made a deliberate choice not to dwell on the gruesomeness of our situation and the urgency to change; I figure that information is widely available. Moyer spends several chapters on what’s wrong before moving to how we fix things.

If you’re in business, I recommend that you read both. They complement each other nicely.

On to the specifics: Before delving into the problems, she gives us a vaccine of optimism in the introduction—starting right on page 1 with a magnificent, empowering quote from Buckminster Fuller: “The best way to predict the future is to design it” and pointing out, correctly, that “changing course is not only doable but it is not so difficult as we may think—and it can be fulfilling.” (p. 3)

Fuller is only one of dozens of my favorite luminaries she quotes or cites. Her list includes environmentalists like Wangari Maathai, Wendell Berry, and Jane Goodall…human potential geniuses including Barbara Marx Hubbard, Deepak Chopra, and Jean Houston…activists from Gandhi and Martin Luther King to Mandela and Robert Reich…prosperity folks such as Marci Shimoff, Jack Canfield, and Napoleon Hill…deep thinkers like Einstein, Pope Francis, and Bruce Lipton—to name a few.

This list shows the breadth of her holistic approach. It’s not either/or but all, and. Instead of focusing on one necessary evolution at the expense of all the others, simultaneously pursuing world change and a healthy environment, exploring the 90 percent of our brains most of us don’t use, achieving financial comfort, expanding our compassion, and all the rest of it. Yes, we can have all this and more, and it’s actually easier to get there holistically.

Refreshingly, she doesn’t see a grumpy, hoarding billionaire as financially healthy (p. 105). Having money without happiness does not make you a success in her eyes (or mine).

That insight is part of a nice section on happiness. Quoting Gandhi: happiness is when our thoughts, speech, and actions align (p.99). Fun is transient; happiness is ongoing; both are important (p. 106). Quoting Shimoff: happiness is more likely to bring success than financial success is to bring happiness (p. 109).

She makes some connections that I didn’t know. I had no idea that we squander half our water to cool electric power plants (p. 30)—we wouldn’t need to do that if we’d switched to renewable energy—or the horrifying statistic that 1.8 million children per year die a thoroughly avoidable death from lack of water or lack of unpolluted water (p. 31). We waste water in many other ways, too, including far too great a share of irrigation water (p. 73). I’ve been saying for years that there’s no shortage of water or energy—but we deploy them poorly. So poorly that she sees climate change as a massive civil rights violation against the poor (p. 118).

I also didn’t know that the $5.3 trillion in global fossil fuel subsidies accounts for a full 6.5 percent of global GDP—more than we spend on health care! Eliminating those subsidies would reduce CO2 by 17 percent and eliminate 50 percent of pollution deaths—while hastening the transition to clean, renewable energy, which is already cost-competitive if you take away the fossil and nuclear subsidies.

And she points out that the lone wolf doesn’t usually create the sweeping change we need. Cooperation with each other and with other species, not ruthless social Darwinism, makes us fittest (pp. 43-46).

Speaking of wolves: I love her description of the many positive ripples resulting from wolves’ reintroduction into Yellowstone (pp. 62-63). So in pursuing any big goal, we need to factor in all the costs and all the benefits.

That means rethinking absolutely everything—and setting big goals that let us get out of either-or thinking and into all-and. We can switch to fully organic and leverage that to eliminate food scarcity; the UN says this would double our produce supply (p. 150). We can fund the space program and fund human and environmental needs, but not if we box ourselves in with small thinking and limiting stories (p. 141).

Combining “high-tech and high nature” (p. 148), Here’s her four-part formula for creating this kind of systemic change:

1. Exercise the Precautionary Principle to avoid unintended consequences
2. Work upstream to eliminate problems in the first place
3. Change from centralized to distributed systems (solar is a great example)
4. Use a holistic approach

A lot of this is about mindset. One great example: shift our thinking from “environmental protection” to “rights of ecosystems” (p. 177). But even as we build a new castle in our corner of the sandbox, we can’t ignore the soldiers at the moat. Reich notes that if we give up on politics because it’s too corrupt, we collapse the buffers protecting the planet and most of its people from corporate and government rapists who would plunder without limit (p. 185). But citizens, leading through creative nonviolence, can create leadership where governments eventually have to follow—and according to Paul Hawken, the environmental movement is the largest people’s movement in history (p. 191). When just 15 percent of us (p. 199) combine our vision of possibility (pp. 195-196) and our outrage at the status quo, (p. 198), change happens.

And then maybe the whole world will start to look like the remarkable success story of Bhutan (pp. 200-201). Years ago, Bhutan looked beyond Gross National Product to Gross National Happiness—and manifested massive improvements in sectors including democracy, health, environment, carbon, and energy.

This is only a tiny taste of the wisdom in Moyer’s book. Read it, buy it for friends, apply it to the business world by also reading Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, and put the lessons of both books into action.

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