The Clean and Green Club

In downtown Burlington and South Burlington, Vermont, you’ll find a very unusual industrial park: a place where brewery wastes turn into a growing environment for mushrooms—and in the process create an enjoyable biopark, a green and vibrant ecosystem in the middle of the business district, where downtown workers can enjoy a unique natural setting.

Welcome to the Intervale, 700 acres of sustainable enterprises and ecofriendly public spaces.

This project is one of many lasting gifts to the earth—and to the business world—from John Todd. Todd defines ecological design as “the intelligence of nature applied to human needs”: a new partnership between the ecological needs of the planet and the physical and commercial needs of human beings that can “reduce negative human impact by 90 percent.”

Todd described a project on Cape Cod to save a pond that was receiving 30 million gallons of toxic landfill waste a year. His staff remineralized the pond by adding a rock floor and brought the dead bottom water up to get light with floating windmills. They installed restorers: solar and wind-powered biosystems that process the contaminated water through a series of cells, each with different ecologies—integrated networks of microorganisms, higher plants, snails, and fish. Each of these mini-ecosystems removes specific toxins from the water. Designed to work as a system, the restorers—nine cells in this case—digested 25 inches of sediment within two years—and the water is clean enough to drink now. “This pond was constipated; we uncorked it,” says Todd.

In Maryland, Todd worked on a project to clean up waste from a large chicken-processing plant. The highly concentrated waste was being dumped into a lagoon that flowed directly into Chesapeake Bay. “We planted restorers with 28,000 different species of higher plants and animals. It grew very quickly. Each was designed to break down or sequester different compounds. We reduced the electrical power to convert the waste by 80 percent and cut capital costs in half.” This kind of system is “very effective in agriculture, because it’s cost-effective enough for farm use.”

One of the underlying principles in this work is sharing resources among different pieces of the system and changing the paradigm about what’s left over. Instead of disposing of a waste stream, Todd encourages people to think about how to use that material as an input. The goal is zero emissions: no waste generation at all. If wastes are considered as inputs, they can lead to new commercial enterprises—for instance, a mushroom farm. All of a sudden, the cost of waste disposal turns into capital for a new revenue stream.

This is how the natural world works, at least when undisturbed by human pollution. When these systems are integrated together, they not only eliminate waste, but also provide shared synergy, reduce costs, spread technical and legal expertise, and create both economic and environmental improvements—as occurred at the Intervale, where biowastes feed a commercial fish farm that also cleans the water, and the waste heat from a wood-fired power plant is recaptured to heat the complex. “I begin to see a model for college and urban food production. We can begin to think of strengthening our own food security in these troubled times. We’re creating a new culture based on earth stewardship.”

These concepts can also work easily in developing countries. Todd designed a water treatment sustainability project for a refugee camp, using a long transparent pipe to expand and contract gases. The range of temperatures and conditions is so great that it kills viruses.

Todd notes, “The biotech industry looks for magic bullets—single solutions to complex problems. Nature is a symphony”; it doesn’t work that way.

For more information about this award-winning, life-changing book (Shel’s favorite by far among the 10 he’s written) and to get your very own copy—visit https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/ Find out why over 20 world-class entrepreneurs and green business experts including futurist/blogger Seth Godin, Chicken Soup for the Soul co-creator Jack Canfield, pioneering green business author Jacquelyn Ottman, GreenBiz.com Executive Director Joel Makower, and many others. If you buy a paper copy directly from Shel, he will happily personally inscribe and autograph it for you or the person of your choice.

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

Customer Experiences with Soul: A New Era in Design, by Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson (Holonomics Publishing, 2017)

Let’s get something out of the way right at the start: despite the subtitle, this isn’t a book about product design; it’s about designing magnificent customer experiences based in core values. I’ve covered several books on that theme over the years, and I consider it part of the core knowledge base for all social entrepreneurs and marketers.

And yes, customer experience is absolutely part of marketing. Maybe the most important part. The authors point this out consistently, starting right on page 4: “’customer experience’ refers…to every single interaction inside the business between colleagues, employees, suppliers, shareholders and contractors…and every person who comes into contact with the business.” The Robinsons set a goal of congruence: what a business says, means, and does should all align (p. 6). And on page 11, they set out five hard-nosed MBA-type statistics demonstrating why businesses should embrace this thinking.

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

(a shortened excerpt from my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World) 

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

Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible: Seven Radical Principles That Will Transform Your Business by Daniel Burrus with John David Mann

As you might guess, my work requires big departures from traditional business thinking. Helping business identify and market profitable ways to turn hunger and poverty into abundance, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance requires overcoming a whole lot of skepticism and rigid thinking.

Read Burrus and you’ll be well on your way to making those big shifts. How much farther along might have the business world be by now if I’d plucked it off my shelf in 2014, when I started thinking big enough to imagine actually creating that kind of shift?