The Clean and Green Club

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Last month, I spent a week in central Ecuador, and came back with lots of observations to share, in no particular order:

• The oil industry is a major player in Ecuador’s economy, and particularly noticeable way up in the mountains. However, most (but not all) of the installations we passed were surprisingly unobtrusive—actually less noticeable than in the American Southwest.
• Tourism is another major industry, but Ecuador’s tourist infrastructure is not nearly as developed as, say, Costa Rica’s. To me, it felt more authentic and not particularly difficult to navigate.
• Roses have also become a significant industry, exporting enormous quantities to the US and Europe—because in Ecuador, greenhouses can be built of cheap plastic tarps instead of expensive glass.
• It only costs 25 cents to ride public transit in Quito, and the bus goes pretty much everywhere (Ecuador uses US money); not surprisingly, public transit is heavily used.
• A few major transit lines in Quito are a cross between buses and trains. They run in their own roadbed, coupled together, with raised-platform stations with turnstiles—but on rubber tires, and probably a lot cheaper to build than rail.
• US fast-food chains are present but fairly minimal in Quito—and we didn’t see them at all in the dozens of smaller cities and remote villages we went through.
• Many of the various Quichua communities still retain strong cultural identity. Lots of people speak at least one Quichua dialect, many people wear traditional dress, and traditions such as making fermented drinks out of yucca, hunting with blow-gun and darts, or living in grass huts are still common. While not entirely self-contained, many of the rural Quichua villages are fairly self-sufficient—but some market towns attract people from many different communities. And the cultures are very different in the high Andes versus the low-lying rainforests. We heard they were different again in the coastal areas, but we didn’t visit those sections.
• Historic preservation is huge in Quito, with much of the Old Town dating from the 16th through 18th centuries, and those buildings still in active use (many belonging either to the government or to the church). Nearby, the national museum has incredible treasures from the precolonial period. However, urban sprawl is also huge, complete with traffic issues.
• Many villages have a specialty. We visited a textile town, a leather town, a rose-growing valley in the mountains, a town known for “vegetable ivory” (crafts made of from palm-hearts), etc.
• At least in the resort hotels our tour visited in out-of-the-way places, there’s surprisingly strong environmental awareness. Locally sourced food, organic gardens, and recycling programs were common, and some of the places we stayed in used very unobtrusive solar hot water—even though we were really in the middle of nowhere (in one place, accessible only by boat).

A lull in my speaking calendar at the moment (you can help with that and earn a very generous commission, by the way).

Malaprop’s Books, Asheville, NC, March 5 (I believe at 7). If the technology works out, I will be a remote panelist (the other panelists live in the store) at a program on Conscious Capitalism. Contact the store for details.

I plan to exhibit at the 4th annual Amherst (MA) Sustainability Festival, Saturday, April 27, 2013, on the Amherst Common.

Of course, I expect to be at Book Expo America, June 4-6, 2013, NYC. I’ve gone every year since 1997.

My Name’s On the Cover of This One

This fall, I completely rewrote a book for my delightful client Ana Weber-Haber, one of the happiest and most optimistic people I’ve ever met. The book, The Money Flow, just published by Morgan James, extracts lessons for you from her own dramatic climb out of deep poverty, moving from Romania to Israel as a child to start over, and then again to the US. In both cases, she went from penniless immigrant to wildly successful, making tons of money for herself and her various employers along the way. Since English is Ana’s fourth language, I made it into a strong piece of writing as well as a bunch of great ideas and lessons—while keeping the exuberant personality that makes her work so much fun to read (and her such a joy to work with). And I’m on the cover as “with Shel Horowitz.” The book is available for the deep-discounted price of $11.41 (bn.com) or $11.53 (amazon) on February 26. Expect a special mailing from me around February 24, telling you more about the book and reminding you to buy it on her day.

You might remember the name Marilyn Jenett—I’ve mentioned her in these pages before. She’s the renowned prosperity teacher I’ve been studying with and in that time, I’ve manifested some amazing things—including the single most lucrative project I’ve ever worked on. Marilyn has agreed to share one of her powerful teaching calls with you that has been changing lives around the world. This is worth more attention than just a blurb in my newsletter—so keep your eyes open for all the details in a special e-mail around March 10.

Up close and personal with my celebrated co-author, Jay Conrad Levinson, Father of Guerrilla Marketing

Jay is offering his famous intimate 21-hour intensive at his lovely Florida home, March 18-20. Only 10 people will be allowed in. https://3bl.me/ysqdva . Jay describes it as “a three-day face-to-face training personally conducted by me in our home here on a lake just northeast of Orlando, Florida. It’s intense because it’s from noon till 7 pm three days in a row-21 hours with lots of hands-on, devoted to making you a true guerrilla marketer.” If you’re a student, you can get a discount!

Rebuild the Dream, by Van Jones (Nation Books, 2012)

The 99% can embrace a deeper patriotism…in Dr. King’s words, “to make real the promises of democracy.” In essence, we are standing up for the supreme patriotic principle: “liberty and justice for all.”

And many of us take that “for all” part pretty seriously. We don’t mean “liberty and justice for all,” except for those lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people. We don’t mean “for all,” except for those immigrants or those Muslims. We don’t mean “for all,” except for those Asian Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, or Latinos. We don’t mean “for all,” except for those women. We don’t mean “for all,” except for the Appalachians and rural poor. We don’t mean “for all,” except for the elderly or the disabled. We don’t mean “for all,” except for the afflicted, addicted, or convicted. When we say “liberty and justice for all,” we really mean it. That kind of principled stand is evidence of a deep patriotism.

Deep patriots don’t just sing the song, “America the Beautiful,” and then go home. We actually stick around to defend America’s beauty—from the oil spillers, the clear-cutters, and the mountaintop removers. Deep patriots…defend the principles upon which [the Statue of Liberty] was founded—“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses who year to breathe free.”

…Deep patriots don’t want Tea Party members to live in neighborhoods in which, when they smell smoke, they can’t find a firehouse for twenty miles—because of the budget cuts they fought for. Deep patriots don’t want Tea Party members to see their grandchildren going to schools with forty kids in a classroom, six books, and no chalk—because of the budget cuts they fought for. Deep patriots don’t want Tea Party members to have to wait seven minutes—or fifteen minutes—for someone to pick up the phone when they call 911…Deep patriots don’t just fight against our opponents. We fight for them, too. (pp. 228-230, emphasis in original)

Van Jones has been one of my heroes for about ten years now. He’s one of the very few able to bridge the gap between liberal white suburban environmentalists and inner-city low-income people of color, and he’s also an amazingly effective organizer who has started four effective and successful national progressive/environmental organizations: the Ella Baker Center, Color of Change, Green for All, and his current baby, Rebuild the Dream. He’s also an excellent speaker; I’ve heard him several times. And he’s one of the best among progressives at framing an issue—creating the memes, the rhetoric, and the sound bites that break through the clutter and get us to pay attention, which has not been a strength of progressives in this country for many years (despite the best efforts of George Lakoff, who is mentioned three times in the index).

And even a law degree from Yale couldn’t drum the people’s touch out of Jones. Here is a man who can talk to labor unionists, or even Tea Partiers, in language they can relate to. President Obama made a terrible mistake when he let the right-wing crackpots drive Jones out of his position as green jobs guy in the White House.

Jones’ earlier (bestselling) book, The Green Collar Economy, focused on the contribution green jobs can make to both our economy and our ecology (both words stemming from the same Greek root, by the way).

This newer book looks at that, but as part of a much larger picture. Jones analyzes four movements of the past five years—two from the center, one from the right, one from the left: the 2008 Obama campaign, the early years of the Obama administration, the Tea Party, and Occupy—and a fifth: the “99% 2.0” movement he’d like to help create. In each, he looks at who is cast as hero and villain, what the movement sees as a threat, and what kind of vision it can claim.

The 2.0 organizing will be based on a crowdsourced 10-point “Contract for the American Dream,” three core principles of the “next American economy,” and five constituencies that have been marginalized but (Jones believes) could be mobilized:

Contract for the American Dream:
1. Invest in America’s infrastructure (including broadband)
2. Create “21st Century” (green) jobs
3. Invest in public education
4. Provide Medicare for everyone
5. Pay living wages
6. Keep Social Security secure
7. Return to a fairer tax structure (higher taxes for the super-wealthy, ending offshore tax havens, etc.)
8. Stop the wars and invest the $3 billion per week we’re spending on them in the domestic economy
9. Tax stock trades to reduce speculation and bring banker bonuses back in balance
10. Strengthen democracy with clean, fair elections and a political structure that doesn’t keep lawmakers beholden to corporate lobbyists

Economic Principles:
1. Focus on local production instead of global consumption
2. Base the economy on thrift and conservation, instead of credit and waste
3. Achieve environmental restoration, not destruction (ending subsidies to fossil fuels and other “dirty economy” sectors, among other steps)

Five Constituencies to Organize:
1. Millennials
2. Veterans
3. Homeowners
4. Long-term Unemployed
5. Workers in the Public Sector

It’s great to find a book that not only has the analysis (including a lot of great statistics on the hugely positive impact of switching to a green economy, and some concrete steps to get there very affordably) but also articulates a positive progressive vision so clearly, and tells great stories along the way. Strongly recommended.