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| Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, July 2019 |
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| NOTE: If you went to the blog post on the immigrant justice action listed in last month’s issue, I neglected to include the link to our affinity group’s blog where we posted reports as we were on the ground, including my wife Dina Friedman’s post outlining actions you can take. It’s https://jewishactivistsforimmigrationjustice.blog/ |
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| This Month’s Tip: Sometimes, We Learn Much Later that What We Did Really Mattered |
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I write this on July 1, after reading news coverage of the huge Pride Marches in NYC commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.
The gay, lesbian, and trans people who fought back against another unjust police raid had no idea they were igniting a quiet-until-then international movement, and that by 2014 it would be legal to marry a same-sex partner in every US state—something unthinkable as recently as 2000. Even by the time I came out as a 16-year-old college first-year in 1973, the energy had already shifted. We were a long way from equality, but we were recognized as existing and becoming much more public. I give them my thanks and congratulations.
(Of course, I’ve been to hundreds of actions that didn’t have long-term impact—but that’s ok.) Here are four among many actions I’ve participated in that turned out to make a difference:
- The Seabrook occupation of 1977 birthed the US safe energy/no nukes movement and brought the massive US nuclear power program to a grinding—and fully deserved—halt (link goes to a 4-part retrospective I wrote for the 40th anniversary)
- The movement my wife and I started that saved a local mountain—and inspired me a few years later to braid my activism and my marketing together into the consulting, speaking, and writing I now do about the intersections of profitability and regenerativity (making things better in areas like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change)
- The massive Women’s March on Washington the day after the current president’s inauguration, letting him know that we would resist his promised agenda based on hatred, environmental destruction, and further enriching himself, his family, and his corporate cronies—and the smaller demonstrations around the country about a week later, keeping that promise and demonstrating that the Muslim ban was racist and unacceptable (and putting that despicable project on hold for several months until he could get a toned-down version through the courts)
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But here’s the thing: not all significant actions are mass rallies. Even one person can make a difference. My mom was justifiably proud of attending the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, and thrilled that she got to hear Martin Luther King deliver his “I Have A Dream” speech in person. That was a day that changed the world. But perhaps the actions she took as an individual, as a tester for the Urban League who would find out if that “already rented” apartment was really no longer vacant, or as a friend of a black family, yelling at our own landlord and accusing him of not wanting to rent to them because of their color, or as someone whose second husband was neither white nor Jewish (he was Japanese), made even more difference.
In my life, too, some of the actions I took by myself turned out to be very important. In 1984, I went to my city councilor with a concern about the need for restaurants in our town to accommodate nonsmokers. It was not a big public organizing effort. But within a few months, every restaurant was required to have a nonsmoking section. Two years later, when the US bombed Libya, I called up our most prominent local peace activist and asked where the demonstration was. She said she didn’t know of one. I said “noon at the courthouse.” I did a vigil there at noon for three days. The first day, I was out there by myself, and most passers-by were hostile. By the third day, I had a few people with me, and the mood had turned sympathetic. I like to think I had something to do with shifting public opinion in my community, and I think that’s every bit as important as being arrested at Seabrook. |
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| New on the Blog & New Website Content |
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Hear & Meet Shel
Reports from the Homestead (FL) Detention Center holding 2000+ migrant teens: In June, Shel and his wife Dina Friedman were among eight people who went from Massachusetts to Florida to see for ourselves what the government was doing in our name. They are giving public reportbacks in Western Massachusetts TONIGHT July 15 at the monthly Sanctuary Potluck at First Congregational Church of Amherst (Main and Churchill Streets, around the corner from the Black Sheep), 5:30 p.m. (probably talking around 6) and again on July 30, Edwards Church, Main and State Streets, Northampton, 6:30 p.m. You can also read the group blog about this multiday visit, including action steps, at http://jewishactivistsforimmigrationjustice.blog
View highlights from (and listen to) more than 30 podcasts ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links. |
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YES, AMERICANS CAN STILL GO TO CUBA
As of July, 2019, 11 of the 12 ways Americans can visit Cuba still work; only people to people travel was eliminated in June. You can’t get there by cruise ship anymore, but both Southwest and JetBlue fly direct from Fort Lauderdale. Shel and his wife Dina Friedman spent a week in two Cuban cities in June, and recommend it highly. Read about their trip at
https://frugalfun.com/a-gringo-in-cuba-after-the-travel-ban.html |
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| Friends Who Want to Help
My friend Carma Spence put together a terrific bunch of expert advice called Speaking Palooza 2019. As one of the contributors, I share 14 tips on how to grow your business while finding joy with the right public speaking: https://publicspeakingsuperpowers.com/joyfully-grow-business
And be sure to enter the sharing contest so that you can be in the running to win some fabulous prizes. You can learn more about them at https://publicspeakingsuperpowers.com/palooza |
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Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available. |
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Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing!
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| Another Recommended Book: The Great Pivot |
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The Great Pivot: Creating Meaningful Work to Build a Sustainable Future, by Justine Burt
Right in the middle of this remarkable and very factual book (p. 134), Burt quotes Robin Wall Kimmerer: “…But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms…into a sacred bond.”
That sacred bond informs Burt’s well-researched, fact-driven, carefully-thought-out ideas to change how we think about the environment, the economy, and their interconnection.
And yes, as I’ve been saying for years, we know how to solve these problems.
Burt describes her solutions in 30 “pivots”: shifts from how we’ve done things before toward something new. Some have been gaining popularity for years—Zero Net Energy retrofits, designing for walkability and bikability, more effective mass transit. Some are less common but can easily build resilience and reduce waste simultaneously: finding uses for dead and diseased trees, creating wildlife bypass corridors to safely get past busy roads, setting up tool libraries so people can have access to ways of doing more with what they already have. Other pivots include:
- Deconstruction of old buildings so their components can be removed—rather than demolishing, which leaves a huge, unsorted, contaminated pile of junk (this is now required for pre-1916 buildings in Portland, Oregon)
- Using phone apps to enable new solutions such as mobility-as-a-service
- Self-funding new sustainability jobs out of savings and revenues (as an example, a thrift shop hired a full-time fashion designer who was able to triple revenues through creative merchandising and repurposing)
Each pivot cites the types of jobs it will create; six additional pivots in Chapter 10 (pp. 223-232) focus on how to fund these initiatives. And the book is full of charts and data points that provide a graphical representation of how we can transform the negative changes we’re experiencing into positives.
Here are some random highlights from my six pages of notes:
- Meaningful work combines what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what someone will pay you for (p. 15)
- Employing “unemployables” such as ex-felons offers multiple benefits (p. 25)
- We can easily reduce/recapture waste heat: 47 percent of world energy consumption (p. 41)
- Greening systems, buildings, jobs, etc. can add significant value: a commercial building in Silicon Valley is worth $100.29 more per square foot following a $49 per square foot green renovation (p. 62); eliminating excess shrinkwrap on trucked produce saved $46,000 per year, had a two-year payback, and reduced worker injury (p. 117); divesting the New York state retirement fund of fossil fuels in 2008 would have increased the fund’s $207 billion worth by $22 billion a decade later (pp. 194-195)
- Even the former Vice-Chair of General Motors predicts the end of fossil-fueled private cars, replaced by communal on-call electrics with 1/100 of the moving parts, three times the lifespan, and 1/3 the per-mile operating cost (pp. 74-75)
- Greening the economy is not just about reclaiming stuff that would have been thrown away (or using less in the first place), but about reclaiming communities that have been “thrown away” (p. 94)
- Opportunities often arise out of disruptions; the Chinese ban on importing many materials could rebirth a strong domestic recycling industry (p. 99)
- Something as simple as state-wide tool libraries could create 1000 jobs in California alone (p. 104)
- It’s insane to waste 40 percent of harvested food, discarding 52.4 million tons in 2016 at a cost of $218 billion per year and emitting 70.53 gigatons of greenhouse gas pollutants while 49 million Americans were food-insecure—and again, we know how to fix this (pp. 121-131)
- Let’s recognize the at least 25 economic contributions the planet makes—and do our part by using the 13 farming techniques that restore soil and/or sequester carbon, 9 of which we can do right now (pp. 134-137), and the 9 principles of harvesting in harmony with nature (p. 171)
- It’s time to decouple economic growth from the flawed GDP measurement, using the seven points to a “new social contract” on pp. 182-183
- Thomas Friedman’s “four zeros” for the Green New Deal (p. 240)
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Accurate Writing & More
14 Barstow Lane
Hadley, MA 01035 USA
http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/contact/
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About Shel
How can you profit by putting the VALUE in your VALUES? Shel Horowitz shows how to MONETIZE your organization’s commitment to fixing problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. Shel consults individually and in groups, gives presentations, and writes books and articles including Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (endorsed by Jack Canfield, Seth Godin and others).
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