The Clean and Green Club

One of the rules in pitching journalists through services that send queries from journalists seeking stories–such as HARO (helpareporter.com), ReporterConnection.com, and the others I discussed in the July, 2011 issue–is to stay closely in tune with what the journalist is looking for.

Still, it IS possible to answer a query where you’re a near-miss. I’ve gotten quite a bit of coverage over the years, writing to journalists where I didn’t have exactly what they were looking for. It happened I wrote two pitches on the same day last month.

In the first, the reporter wanted businesses actually using this strategy, and instead, I offered her expert commentary. In hindsight, I would list some case studies I could discuss. Instead, I focused only on my credentials.

The second one was particularly a long shot, which I knew going in: Newsmax is a Rupert Murdock property with an extremely right-wing slant, and I doubted the reporter would be interested in a counter-view. However, it was certainly worth 10 minutes of my time to try, especially since I really want to reach more conservative elements of the business world with the message of my book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, that good environmental practices are also very good for business.

FIRST QUERY:

19) Summary: Buy Something, Do Good

Name: Alison Miller Southwest Airlines Spirit Magazine

I’m looking for companies that are following the TOMS Shoes mold

by donating money, products, or services to organizations in

need each time a consumer buys their product. Any product

category is fair game, not just apparel.

Requirements:

Readers must be able to buy products via a website and have them

shipped to U.S. addresses.

MY RESPONSE:

Subject: HARO: Buy Something, Do Good (expert perspective)

Hi, Alison,

If you need an expert perspective to comment on why this is good for business, I’m happy to volunteer. I discuss cause-related marketing in every marketing book I’ve written back to 1985 (before the phrase existed, as far as I know), and go into some detail in my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet, as well as an earlier book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World (both books have won awards, BTW)

Note: Please keep “HARO” or “New Pitch” in the subject line so that my email program will mark it as Priority.

_________

[My lengthy signature for journalist query responses, including book credentials, contact information via e-mail, phone, and Twitter, some of the media that have interviewed me, and talking points, went here

__________________________

SECOND QUERY:

8) Summary: Sources needed for EPA-related feature

Name: Jeff Louderback Newsmax Magazine

Category: Energy and Green Tech

Query:

The EPA has made a series of aggressive moves that makes it

tougher for business.

Among these moves are:

– Its declaration that carbon dioxide is a gas emission covered

by the clean air act.

– Its crackdown on coal-fired power plants.

– Its opposition to fracking for oil and natural gas production.

For Newsmax, I am writing a feature about OTHER new ways the EPA

is lining up a major power grab to stack the deck against

business even further. What else don’t we know about aside from

the aforementioned concerns?

Requirements:

I am searching for sources anywhere in the United States, but I

am on a tight deadline and need to speak with them no later than

noon ET on Friday, Jan. 21.

MY RESPONSE:

Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 06:43:32 -0500

Subject: HARO: Sources needed for EPA-related feature  – counterpoint

Hi, Jeff,

If you want to throw in a little controversy, I’d be glad to make the case for why tough EPA regs can be GREAT for business. I’m the primary author of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet, write a monthly syndicated column, Green And Profitable, and run a marketing consulting company specializing in green business.

[My signature, as above]

__________________________

Notice the appeal I made to the second reporter to inject some controversy into the story. Reporters often love controversy. Also notice how I “volunteer” my expertise to the first journalist. I always try to come across as helpful, rather than self-aggrandizing. This is part of why I got quoted or cited in 143 print stories last year, 131 in 2010.

Another thing you can offer is a “sidebar”–a little sub-article that accompanies the main story, and may expose a different angle. But be prepared for the journalist to ask YOU to write the sidebar (for no pay). This has actually happened to me, and yes, I’ve written those articles when asked.

–>This article is already pretty long–but if you’d like more on this topic, I’ll send an 1174-word excerpt from my seventh book, Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers that includes two successful thin-match queries I sent (one of which resulted in a sidebar assignment, the other, in coverage) plus a story from publicity ninja Jill Lublin (co-author of Guerrilla Publicity) of how she stepped out of her niche to get coverage on NBC and elsewhere.

Drop me a note at shel AT principledprofit.com and use this exact subject line:

Please send thin-match journo query excerpt

– and then I’ll know exactly what to send you. 🙂

Brains on Fire: Igniting Powerful, Sustainable, Word of Mouth Movements, by Robbin Phillips, Greg Cordell, Geno Church, and Spike Jones (Wiley, 2010)

Is there a more authentic marketing strategy than turning your fans into brand ambassadors? I’ve long been an advocate of this approach, but even so, Brains On Fire opened my eyes to possibilities I’d never thought about.

In the Brains on Fire approach, professional marketers play an important role—not as controllers or planners, but as nurturers and facilitators.

This book is about not just identifying your deep loyalists, but empowering them, supporting them, and then getting out of the way while the magic happens. It’s a refreshing change from most other books I’ve seen about word-of-mouth/word-of-mouse marketing, because these folks understand that the real marketing arises spontaneously out of the members of a community (often unpaid), and not by faking your way through tactics like recruiting pretty young women to talk up a particular product to which they have no actual loyalty.

The book focuses on several case studies, all clients of the Brains on Fire marketing agency, which we follow through every “lesson” (chapter). Examples range from a 300-year-old Swedish scissors manufacturer to the state agency charged with reducing teen smoking in a tobacco-producing state.

Along with the focus on fan-initiated, empowered marketing comes a strong commitment to ethics—and to taking the marketing vocabulary away from the war-oriented “campaign” language of crushing your opponent or defeating your customers into purchasing, and into the more sustainable world of community, inclusiveness, and mutual benefit. Scientific marketing becomes less important. Your strategy evolves toward unlocking and channeling the passion of your fans, their desire to make a difference, and their need to be valued. Ask yourself how your product or service makes it easier for your fans to do what they love. Your goal is not just participation; it’s active engagement.

Your fans will be a mix of personalities, some of whom already have a fan base, and quiet, shy others who would not traditionally be seen as influencers—yet may have a tremendous impact. And the way you interact—even something as mundane as the way you handle incoming fan mail—can have either a big positive or big negative impact, depending on how you make that person feel.

Among the many wise points in this book:

• When allowed to lead themselves, genuine movements tend to exceed the expectations of the marketers who assist them
• A brand promise is sacred; failing to keep it will have negative consequences
• Big ideas start as small, intimate conversations—and even a single person can start a movement (this is absolutely true; I’ve done it in my local community)
• At the start of a movement or community, ask the people you’ve identified as influencers to discuss their passions; if you treat them as valued experts, they will not only give you insight, they’ll also start talking you up
• You don’t get to choose your fans; they choose you
• Smart brands become fans of their fans
• Strive to put as many employees as possible in customer contact; companies with 25-50 percent of their workforce in customer contact wildly outperform those with 5-10 percent
• Strong movements fight injustice

Yes, but does all this cool and groovy stuff actually work? Yes—big time. Two among many examples:

South Carolina’s 16.9 percent smoking reduction was the largest in the nation (in the state with the cheapest cigarettes and among the lowest budget for smoking prevention programs); Brains on Fire client Rage Against the Haze (a teen anti-smoking group) had a lot to do with this

Fiskars, makers of the famous orange-handled scissors, puts the ROI for its Fiskateers community of brand evangelists at 500 percent. Fiskateers not only tracked with a 6-fold increase of online mentions, but sales doubled in the four target markets where the effort was rolled out—while the company R&D department receives an average of 13 new product ideas every month, gratis. This doesn’t even count the impact of 7000 volunteers who can defuse PR problems before the company even knows they exist.

Read this book as an excellent companion to Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green. And be sure to read the introduction, which has enormous value.

If you’ve been reading my newsletter for several years, you know I’ve been marketing through social media all the way back to 1995. These days, a lot of my social media goes into Twitter.

People either love Twitter or hate it. My wife can’t stand it; I think it’s great.

Why?

• You can have a big impact while investing almost no time
• It’s easy to gain very targeted followers—and influential “followees” (people you follow)
• Very short learning curve
• Interface stays reasonably constant, and the changes are improvements that make sense (unlike Facebook, where you have to keep relearning how to do it, or frequently discover that the expensive tools and processes you invested in before the latest redesign are now them obsolete)
• Third-party tools like TweetDeck (now owned by Twitter), MarketMeSuite, and HootSuite add enormous functionality: scanning the most important contacts quickly, searching topics, scheduling ahead, adding users to groups quickly
• Trends, posts, and connections can easily go viral through the power of retweets and other devices—and as they do, you can easily expand your circles of influence
• You can build real relationships with people by responding personally to their tweets
• While there are lots of ways around the 140-character limit, it does force you to sharpen your brain and be concise
• Oh yeah, and it’s fun!

I find Twitter a terrific research tool: I get a lot of my information on new trends in the green, business, and  political worlds by following links. I also find it a great way to get into conversations with people I haven’t met before, some of whom are very well-connected. Often, I’ll start a conversation on Twitter and then move it to 1-to-1 e-mail.

Twitter is also a great way to get noticed by speakers: if you tweet highlights of their talks or Twitter chat presentations—and either include a designated hashtag for the event (e.g., #sustainchat ) and/or mention them by their Twitter handle (e.g., @ShelHorowitz), you’ll get on their radar. I can tell you that when someone puts @ShelHorowitz in a tweet, I go visit their profile unless it’s obvious spam, and usually follow back. And when someone at a networking event tells me he or she follows me on Twitter, I pay closer attention.

And yes, I’ve sold books, started conversations about my consulting, copywriting or speaking, and attended networking events that I learned about on Twitter.

This is the first of a three-part series. Next month, what you can tweet, and in May, what Twitter is NOT

Become an Award Winning Company: 7 Steps to Unlock The Million Dollar Secret Every Entrepreneur Needs to Know, by Matt Shoup (Shoup Consulting, 2012)

It sounds like a thin premise for a marketing book: go out and win some awards. After all, I cover the subject in just a few pages in some of my own books on marketing. In one of my books, winning awards shares a chapter on credibility building with getting endorsements and reviews.

But breaking a process down step by step is often a worthy endeavor, and in this case Shoup provides good food for thought.

The bulk of the book is devoted to the good things that can happen to an award-winning company that understands how to leverage and market those awards (including a bunch of interviews with CEOs of award-winning companies about the specific ways their achievement helped their business). A smallish section at the end goes through the how-to of actually winning awards. I might have reversed both placement and proportion, but maybe that’s because I do have a very clear understanding of the benefits already (and have won quite a few awards over the years).

Shoup himself sums up the case for winning awards nicely and succinctly on page 171: “As an award-winning company, you are going to be able to go out and attain massive success, exposure, credibility, free PR, and more business.” And a lot of the book shows how he and the CEOs he profiles have done just that.

More than the specifics, where this book really shines is in three consistent approaches to the success mindset:

1. To win awards, you must achieve excellence: base your company in high integrity, wow your customers, and establish a culture that drives the best people to join your staff and succeed with you.
2. This excellence allows you to thrive in economic downturns (he has a great rant on this) and to set and achieve goals a lot more easily.
3. Success doesn’t just happen to you; you go out and make it happen, and that means when you do win awards, it’s up to you to extract the maximum possible benefit from them in your marketing.

That last is important. Used properly, awards let you de-commoditize your business, get away from the tire-kickers and bargain hunters, and establish the value of working with an excellent company and being wiling to pay for it.

One thing that puzzles me: Shoup apparently gave no thought to becoming an award-winning *author.* The cover and interior design are amateurish, and the book would have benefited from one more edit (with someone who understands when a phrase like “award winning” should or should not take a hyphen). It would have been easy enough to spend a few hundred bucks more on a better production and then enter some good awards for the book, especially if he wants to build up the coaching and speaking parts of his own business (his primary line of work is running a house painting company).

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter, April 2012
Twitter, Part 2: What to Tweet

A key principle: Twitter is about building relationships over time.

That means if all you do is shout sales messages, you’re wasting most of Twitter’s potential. Yes, if you have a popular brand or retail store, your customers do want information about bargains. But they also want to feel like a human being is talking–and listening.

Personally, I strive for a ratio that is no more than 10 percent blatant self-promotion. The other 90% is a mix of passing on links to interesting information (often by retweeting someone else, with acknowledgment), responding to requests for–or asking for–advice, commenting on news or trends, engaging directly with people (responding or passing on a tweet, saying thank-you to people who have retweeted me, mentioned me as someone to follow, or mentioned my latest book (Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green), or just bringing a smile with a quote or a cool picture.

However, if other people say nice things about me or my offerings, I will retweet and/or thank them, and I don’t count that toward the 10 percent.

I guess it must be working, as I get 20 to 50 new followers in a typical week, all of them earned organically, without any game-the-system crap.

Last month’s Twitter, Part 1 newsletter brought this comment from Sherry Lowry in Austin, TX (@sherrylowry on Twitter):

“I really love Twitter (or actually the Twittter-related tools) and was expecting when reading your March news to either:

– see clips from your Twitter stream
– a chance to click right into or follow you

Ask and ye shall receive, at least this time. To follow me on Twitter, visit @ShelHorowitz or https://www.twitter.com/shelhorowitz

And here are five of my Tweets (all posted April 1). You’ll notice they illustrate several of the types above.

RT @TalkAboutIssues
Fact: President Ronald Reagan, an icon to most conservatives, supported increases in the debt limit 12 times over his two terms.#Obama2012 [Retweet]

Blog: How Southwest Airlines is Greening Their Planes
https://greenandprofitable.com/how-southwest-airlines-is-greening-their-planes/ [passing on interesting links–in this case, an automatic post to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn from my blog]

Fabulous! Beethoven’s 9 10,000 in the chorus, Japan https://www.youtube.com/embed/paH0V6JLxSI[passing on an interesting link that I found elsewhere]

@maddow I’m hoping for 39 x 3 more years of your speaking truth to power. Very happy birthday. [engaging directly, in this case with TV commentator Rachel maddow]

RT @SW_Coalition: Denise Hamler of @GreenAmerica will be hosting@ShelHorowitz for a talk on green business at (cont) https://tl.gd/goltff [Retweet of someone else’s tweet that promotes me]

I’m a pretty active Tweeter, so you can see lots more at https://twitter.com/shelhorowitz

Wrapping up our three-part series on Twitter. First, we looked at the advantages of Twitter for marketers, then last month, how to tweet for maximum benefit. We’ll finish out by discussing how not to be a jerk on Twitter.

My title is a little bit pushy, in that for some people, Twitter is exactly these things—but they have few human followers (robots don’t count) and no influence; it would have been more accurate to say, How Not to Use Twitter. But I didn’t think about that when I lined out the topic titles in March.

Remember the key principle: Twitter is only worth doing if you create a tweet stream that people want to read. Otherwise, there’s no point. Every person who follows you makes a decision whether to follow you. If they’re using a tool like TweetDeck or HootSuite, they also decide whether to place you in a most-favored column of people they pay close attention to you. In my case, I am following 5823 people as of May 12, when I’m writing this. But really, I’m paying attention to about 100 in my “must follow” column. So here are some pointers on what not to tweet:

1. An endless barrage of self-promotion. If more than 50 percent of your tweets are promoting your products and services, you’ll lose followers fast. I strive for a ratio of one self-promotional tweet to 10 other tweets.

2. Continuous Amazon (or other) affiliate links. I don’t understand these people at all. Their entire stream is nothing but affiliate links, and the products usually have nothing to do with each other. I see a lot of these pages because my Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green book is a popular product to feature, and I do click through to the profile every time someone mentions my book or me. The most recent person to list my book this way has made 22,288 tweets (probably all automated), has 421 followers, and is following 486 people. Of those 421, I’ll guess that 400 are from people who automatically follow back. In short, no one is reading, the account is not operated by a human, and affiliate commissions are probably near zero. Why bother?

3. Daily minutiae. If you tweet about what you had for breakfast, or that you’ve just brushed your teeth, you’d better do it in a way that’s funny or interesting. and keep it to maybe one post in 50. This is one of several reasons I don’t do Foresquare, which tweets your location with alarming frequency. (Not inviting burglars to my house is another reason.) Don’t bore people into shutting you out.

4. Lists and lists of people to follow. Again, boring! I do one Follow Friday (hashtag #ff) and one #ecomonday a week, and I publicly thank people who list me as someone to follow. It’s a very small part of my stream.

5. Spam. Duh! It doesn’t work in social media any better than it works with e-mail. Sending the same URL to a lot of people you don’t know, or direct-messaging a URL labeled as a picture of me when it’s not is just plain stupid. In TweetDeck, I can block and report a spammer in exactly two clicks, and I will do so unless I think the sender was hacked.Sometimes I’ll publicly shame them first. (And because I don’t automatically follow back, I am not plagued with direct-message spam. I get one or two a month, usually when someone was hacked.)

Two final bits of advice: Get five or ten juicy, high-quality tweets up on your profile page, along with a picture and something useful in the bio box, before you start looking for followers. And stay away from all the robot game-the-system approaches to building a followers list. You want real people who influence others to be following you because they love your content, not a bunch of robots following back in.

If you’d like me to consider following you, I might or might not if you have an interesting screen name. But I will definitely visit your profile (maybe not right away—be patient) if you engage with me. So send me an @shelhorowitz message that tells me something you found useful or helpful about this series (hint: if the @shelhorowitz is not the very beginning of the tweet, more people will see it). If I like what I see on your profile, I will follow back.

If you’re marketing a green product or service, it’s up to you to demonstrate why your offering is superior to the conventional alternatives. That means drilling down and drilling down to identify and brag about the core reasons, and to do so in a way that resonates with your audience.

Let’s say, for instance, that you’re a building manager and you offer the feature I mention in this month’s book review: graywater recycling. How can you turn that feature into benefits, and then drill deeper to get at the core benefits?

Good green marketing usually involves showing the benefits both to the customers themselves and to the world as a whole. In this case, the feature is a system to capture waste water from relatively clean uses like sinks and showers, and use it again to water lawns, flush toilets, etc.

The primary benefits are reduced water use and less water contamination. On the personal benefit side, that means lower water bills. Municipal water is artificially cheap in many developed countries, just as oil used to be, so thats a relatively weak benefit. Can we find any deeper personal benefits? How about this: by recycling the water, there is less need to draw down the water supply, which in turn keeps it available for other uses. OK, so if the aquifer is drawn down more slowly, it can recharge properly—and that keeps the water clean and pure.

Ah ha! Now there are both health and aesthetic benefits! The feature of clean and pure water turns into the benefit of staying healthy, not getting sick—and also the benefit of water that is not only good for you, but tastes good, too. This in turn means the customer doesn’t have to go out and spend money on bottled water, because the tap water is good enough to drink. So now we have two economic benefits (tap water lasts longer and therefore costs less, and eliminating the need to buy water bottles) as well as a health benefit because the water stays pure.

Let’s turn to the social goods. More water is available for other uses—and fewer oil-based plastic bottles are needed. If we accept Bill Roth’s statement (see book review) that 5000 kids die every day from lack of good water, we now see a clear benefit to conserving through recycling the graywater: we stop kids from dying. Add that to the benefit of protecting the water supply for our own kids and grandkids in the generations to come, and not squandering that resource the way we’ve squandered oil for so many years, and it should be pretty easy to write some powerful marketing copy.

Another Recommended Book: The Underdog Edge: How Ordinary People Change the Minds of the Powerful…and Live to Tell About It, by Amy Showalter

A Theory of Social Change to Make Sense of this Book

One of my long-held theories of social change is that it’s easier to influence the power structure, and accomplish change within it, if you’re seen as the rational and reasonable negotiating partner. And in order to be perceived as a good negotiating partner, there has to be someone more extreme, who can be dismissed as the lunatic fringe, but who actually makes space for your demands to seem like a compromise.

Examples:
• Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement were able to make more progress because Malcolm X and the Black Panthers existed (very publicly).
• George W. Bush was forced to endorse same-sex civil unions even though the idea was anathema to his Fundamentalist “base”—because the alternative was same-sex marriage (this example also shows how society can evolve very quickly sometimes—we’ve moved way past civil unions now).
• Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, a radical restructuring of capitalism, was more palatable to the business/financial world because massive unrest made Communism (the destruction of capitalism) somewhat likely.
• My own outsider candidacy for my local City Council, many years ago, gave space for a more moderate progressive to win in a four-way race, and then go on to serve four terms as Mayor.

A Book for More Moderate Activists

Through this lens, I view Amy Showalter’s book, The Underdog Edge: How Ordinary People Change the Minds of the Powerful…and Live to Tell About It. Showalter targets those who want to be seen as the reasonable and rational alternative. Those who want to meet with powerful politicians and heads of corporations, and get them to change their actions.

And thus, her message about dialing down the passion makes sense. Big dogs try not to negotiate with (or concede points to) those they find threatening. But I believe that seeing the threat out there in the distance makes them more willing to come to the table with those who are more persistent than passionate, those who’ve done their homework, and those who can articulate a change program that leaves the top dog feeling he or she did the right thing.

Without that lens, the book would leave me confused, because I can point to hundreds of examples throughout history where loud, passionate, angry people made big, sweeping changes. But in many of those cases, it was a symbiosis between the loud and angry in public view and the quiet, warm and friendly, but very persistent negotiators in the background; each needed the other to succeed.

However, reasonable doesn’t mean passive. The more vivid you make your case, the more likely you are to succeed, Showalter says. And this is true whether your cause is liberal, conservative, or nonideological.

While charisma makes the struggle easier, Showalter says a much more essential quality is grit: determination, doggedness—not going away. Proximity, which she sees as the key element of vividness, is a big part of winning, because you’re much harder to ignore if you’re right there.

From “Underdog” to “Sled Dog”

But it’s not enough if you’re so ego-involved that you make it all about you. Showalter has examples that take the “dog” metaphor from underdog to sled dog. Success, she says, depends on the pack leader being collaborative and encouraging of the entire group.

Not surprisingly, those underdogs who succeed in persuading their big dogs have often built relationships with them years before they ever tried to sway them or gain a favor. Not that it’s impossible to do it cold, but it’s much, much easier if you have an existing relationship based in mutual respect.

And it is helped, as she points out, if you can win over sincere and influential converts who can be seen by your opponents as one of their own, and pave the way for a change of heart by documenting their own impetus to change.

Social change theory also says that if you start to experience heavy repression, it means the power structure is scared of you and thinks you need to be crushed. If you can hang on through the crackdown, you succeed…eventually. As Gandhi said, “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Can Social Media Spark Social Change

Gandhi, like most successful revolutionaries throughout history, did not have access to Twitter and Facebook. Showalter is highly skeptical of the role of social media in fostering change, pointing out that even Egypt’s much-celebrated revolution was primarily offline—in the streets. She notes that only a quarter of Egypt’s population even has Internet access.

I believe social media—like TV during the civil rights and Vietnam struggles, and like printed publications of an earlier era—is crucial for bringing awareness of the struggle into the public eye.

The election protests in Iran are an obvious case, even though they failed to bring about regime change. Revolution is not always quick; Gandhi’s revolution in India took decades, Ireland’s, centuries.

However, as she points out, that awareness must be accompanied by action—and action is a lot more than signing a petition or posting a status update.

And where am I on the continuum? I’ve been all over it. I’ve risked arrest several times for what I believe in, and was actually arrested once. I’ve been the militant marcher shaking my fist into the TV camera—but I’ve also negotiated privately with a developer to create a compromise that allowed him to build after failing to gain a yes vote three times, once he agreed to protect a bunch of farmland and granted other concessions to the activist community. Both approaches are effective, in their time.

During my trip last month to Ireland and Northern Ireland, I was pleasantly shocked to see evidence that this was a culture that cared about working conditions for both humans and animals.

Yes, of course, I could find fairly traded products in the health food stores and even in supermarkets. But it was astounding to me that every roadside convenience store had them as well. Little places in the middle of nowhere, just bathroom stops on the motorways, uniformly offered a pretty good selection of fair-trade chocolate and coffee, among other products. Such items are much harder to find in those types of stores in the United States, where I live.

Furthermore, the Insomnia coffee chain, which seems to be Ireland’s largest, has also gone fair-trade over there. When I encountered that brand in Canada about seven months ago, I saw no fair-trade markings.

Supermarket shopping was actually fun. I got a fantastic house-brand fair-trade chocolate bar at Sainsbury’s, which is comparable to Giant Food or A&P. If I remember right, the cocoa content was around 82 percent, and the quality was terrific. I also noticed that Hellman’s mayonaise is made with free-range eggs over there; if that’s true in the US, it hasn’t said so on the label, last time I checked.

As a percentage, the number of “conscious” products in these stores is still quite small. But if roadside convenience stores are carrying fair-trade products, that means enough people who shop in those stores have requested those products that the store chains have decided to carry them. And I find that remarkable, especially considering that as a culture (and particularly outside of Cork, Galway, and Dublin, which all seem to have higher food awareness), Ireland is not particularly focused on eating well. It’s very meat-centric, vegetables are routinely overcooked, and the food generally is bland and heavy. Dairy is very good, however.

Those three cities seem to have a well-established local/organic culture. We found vegetarian restaurants in Dublin and Cork, a terrific Saturday farmers market including not only organic produce but also artisan foods and crafts in Galway, just outside an amazing artisan cheese shop. A health food store in Dublin offered an amazing selection of raw chocolates, and one raw chocolatier had a booth at the Galway market.

One other trend that surprised me: the infiltration of ethnic restaurants (particularly South Asian and Far Asian) into just about every corner of the island. So if you’d rather not have beef and cabbage stew with potatoes, you’ll find options like Afghani kebab shops, Chinese or Korean restaurants, or Pakistani takeaways in even relatively small towns.

This is a slice of globalization that actually leads toward greater sustainability—not only because it’s easier to find healthy food choices, but also because I believe monocultures are not sustainable, whether you’re talking about growing a single crop or a single human culture. Cultural diversity allows for cross-pollinating the best practices that other societies have come up with, recognizing that some may not be appropriate for a different climate.

Here are a few other random observations from my trip:

• Wind power plays a significant role. It’s common to see large wind turbines (as in much of the rest of Europe), though for the most part in small clusters of one to five, rather than in the vast wind farms of say, Spain—and also to see older, smaller  private installations on individual farms, of the sort that were common on US farms in the late 1970s.
• Solar’s role is minimal. I have seen only a handful of rooftop solar hot water installations, and most of the  photovoltaic have been on self-powered electronic highway signs. Of course, it’s not the sunniest place in the world; an Italian immigrant told us, “in Ireland, they call this a beautiful day. In Italy, we would call it a disaster.”  But there must be more than is obvious, because we passed quite a number of solar businesses, even in some pretty rural areas.
• Big cities have some limited public recycling in the major commercial and tourist areas. I imagine there are recycling programs for households, too.
• On the campus of the technical college we visited, environmental awareness was quite high. This school is also about to launch a degree program in sustainability and one in agriculture, yet they haven’t explored the obvious linkages between those two program offerings—in part because they’re slotted for different campus, 50 miles apart.

• Since it’s part of Europe, I wasn’t surprised that attention to conservation is more prevalent. Toilets with low/high settings, tiny cars, and composting projects all seem fairly common.Yet. to my shock, the small conference center we stayed at in rural Donegal was still using energy-hogging incandescent light bulbs.