The Clean and Green Club, May 2022

<!doctype html>

 

Having trouble reading this as an email? Please visit thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: May 2022

Test Drive This Powerful Green Business Certification—No Cost

I’ve been telling you about the Green Business Bureau and the many benefits they offer, including the GBB EcoAssessment™, a very spiffy self-guided software-driven certification process that is very easy to use and much more friendly to small businesses than other certifications I’ve looked at.

GBB will be happy to let you play with that assessment tool. You don’t have to be a member to see how it works. All you have to do is fill out this 1-minute form with your name, company or organization, email and phone. Your request will be forwarded to a member of the Green Business Bureau staff.

You do have to be a member to actually go through the assessment and obtain certification. Membership is quite affordable, starting at just $212.50 (10 employees or less) once you factor in the 15 percent off I’ve arranged for you no matter how big your business is. To claim the lower price, just visit https://greenbusinessbureau.com/membership-purchase-options/ , choose the number of employees that describes your business, and enter the code Shel15 (no space between the lower-case L and the number 1).

Yes, I will get a commission if you join—and YOU get 15 percent off.

If HE Can Make the Transition, Anyone Can!

Schematic of a Passive House. Licensed under Creative Commons

I had a half-hour phone call recently with a very interesting man, a former oil and nuclear control systems engineer who had gone green not only in his engineering work but in his personal life, even designing and helping to build his own Passive House on a challenging, steeply sloped parcel here in Massachusetts. Like all Passive House buildings, his home puts more electricity into the grid than it uses. And because much of the land is forested, it stores more carbon than his family releases in all their activities. He has a much lower carbon footprint than I do, and mine—heating our house and hot water with recaptured heat from a methane digester, lighting mostly with super-efficient LEDs and a few CFLs (no energy-hogging, carbon-emitting incandescents), returning nutrients to the soil with our organic garden, reusing, recycling or composting everything practical, etc.—is better than most.

Listening to him, I had an insight: I realized that many people see the use of fossil and nuclear as ends, rather than means. With that mindset, many people in the business world are asking “how do we possibly keep our high standard of living (and our profits) if we don’t burn fossil fuels or process uranium?” But when we recognize that those power sources are means to a larger end, those turn out to be the wrong questions.

I’ve talked for years about money not as an end in itself, but as a means to other ends: the things it can be traded for: goods, services, social impact, environmental mitigation…why not view our fuel sources through that lens?

In other words, let’s look at those polluting technologies as merely one route among many to powering our buildings, vehicles, and machines and building/maintaining our infrastructure projects. Once we do, we open ourselves up to a much better question: “What’s the best way to meet the power needs of our society, with both the most bang for the buck and the most positive impacts on job creation, poverty elimination, achievement of equity, and protecting the environment and our health?”

The strengths of coal, oil, and gas derive from energy density: these compact, energy-dense fuels are easy to store, transport, and use. And through a lens of short-term corporate profit, they have the added advantage of being consumable: people, companies, and organizations have to keep buying them over and over again—just as Gillette made its real profits not on the razors themselves, but on the disposable blades. But these come with enormous social and environmental cost, leading to pollution- and workplace-safety related health crises, growing economic disparity, and of course, global catastrophic climate change.

Nuclear does not share the fossil-fuel advantages of compactness and ease of deployment in small quantities; while atoms are tiny, the facilities needed to harness them are not. Its apparent main advantages are elimination of dependence on foreign petroleum reserves and ability to produce large quantities of stable electricity without adding to the carbon footprint—but these turn out to be chimeras when we look closely at the entire fuel cycle, with its eco-destructive mining, milling, refining, fuel rod assembly, and plant construction; its inability to safely store waste; thermal pollution and radioactive discharges from operating plants; and many other issues—including the all-to-real experience of more than 100 catastrophic (Chernobyl, Fukushima) and near-catastrophic (Three Mile Island, Enrico Fermi, Browns Ferry, at least one earlier Fukushima incident, and many more) accidents (Note that this article lists 99 through 2009—before the 2011 disasters in Japan).

By phrasing the question like that, we see clearly that fossil and nuclear are not good answers—but that there’s quite a bit of work to do before green energy technologies can address those needs of storage, transportation, and compact, energy-dense deployment.

But when we take this holistic deep-dive, we also discover the BEST thing we can do to address our dependence on fossil and nuclear: doing more with what we have! Efficiency and conservation, reimagined holistically, can probably save at least 60 and maybe 90 percent of our energy, just by wasting a whole lot less. As one example, consider the Deep Energy Retrofit that saved the Empire State Building $3.4 MM per year with a three-year payback–and that was when fossil energy prices were much lower. It’s probably at least $5 MM per year right now.

Side Note: He called me because I’d left a voicemail inquiring about his upcoming conference, where I thought I might be a fit as a speaker. That turns out not to be a fit, but we’re talking about at least doing a webinar, and possibly even collaborating on some new directions in consulting that could combine our skills. Which proves another of my truisms: new challenges and opportunities can arise from unexpected places.

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.

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.

Paradise Lot

Paradise Lot: Two Plant Geeks, One-Tenth of an Acre and the Making of an Edible Garden Oasis in the City by Eric Toensmeier (with a few sections written by Jonathan Bates)

This month’s featured reading is not a business book, though it has a small amount of business content. It’s a back-to-the-land book that takes place on a lot most people would think is too small, in a densely populated and economically depressed area of Holyoke, Massachusetts that always reminds me of a smaller version of my native Bronx, NY.

I’m reviewing it here because you and I, as active or would-be green and socially conscious business leaders, have to spend some of our time on highlighting ways to develop and market attractive alternatives to the carbon-intensive, chemical-laden, soul-killing business and living practices that have become the norm. And leading by example, as Toensmeier has done, is a great way to present those alternatives.

In 2004, Toensmeier and his semi-co-author Bates bought a two-family house on a nearly lifeless 1/10-acre lot about a mile from the downtown of the first planned industrial city in the US (and two towns away from our house in a much more rural area), a city where poverty is rampant and the infrastructure has seen hard times. While most permaculture farms have considerably more space and many are located in more temperate areas, Toensmeier and Bates spent 18 years creating a mini-permaculture farm that could survive the harsh winters of the northeast, on a lot where every square inch had to count—starting with rebuilding the badly abused soil, moving on to annual vegetables, and then beginning to build long-term viability with perennials, including many kinds of berry bushes and fruit trees.

Because their goals were not only to achieve a measure of food self-sufficiency but also to create replicable models for small-scale urban permaculture projects in the US northeast (p. 203) and to eventually minimize the work of caring for it, they kept careful notes: what they planted, what they pulled out when they planted something different, how and when it bore, whether they liked eating it, which parts were edible, and more.

One aspect directly relevant to my own work is the way they paid attention to social justice and neighborliness—something that more people are talking about now than when they started, and something that’s particularly important for two white males from the suburbs moving into an urban community of color where many people are under economic stress. They found many ways to involve the community, and particularly the neighborhood children. For example, they would have kids over to talk about what they were doing and experience it hands-on, and gave out berry starters and other plants for their neighbors to have some fresh food of their own (p. 61). Eric eventually took a day job managing a local community farm where the predominantly Puerto Rican or Puerto Rican-heritage farmers in the area had a place to raise their crops.

They called the project (and the book) Paradise Lot. I first found out about it this past October 9 (which happens to be Dina’s and my official wedding anniversary), when we were invited to an event there. Eric gave us a tour that included lots of tastes. I was blown away. I took some pictures that day and posted them at https://www.facebook.com/shel.horowitz/posts/10159709970249919 . Then Dina gave me his book for Chanukah.

Eric is also the author or co-author of several other food self-sufficiency and permaculture books including Edible Forest Gardens, and is a scholar of permaculture’s history in the US and elsewhere. And he has come to respect the positive impact that well-thought-out human intervention can have on the landscape. He was awed to realize that the pre-Columbus Native civilizations in the Americas constituted “the largest example of permaculture the world has ever seen” (p.178). And bringing this movement back into the mainstream has major implications as a hedge against fossil-fuel price chaos (pp. 201-202).

The book is a decade old, and Eric has just purchased a much larger farm. I hope his little urban dreamstead continues to flourish, I’m sure that the new farm will once again be a meticulously documented laboratory of agronomic innovation, and I wish him and his wife Marikler much happiness.

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing!  http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.

If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription for, too.

————–

Links in this newsletter may earn commissions. Please click here for our privacy and endorsement policy.

 

Powered by:

GetResponse

 

Leave a Comment

Name: (Required)

E-mail: (Required)

Website:

Comment: