The Right Way to Flourish

TerraChoice, a green marketing firm, has gotten a lot of press through their 6, now [7 Sins of Greenwashing report](http://sinsofgreenwashing.org/?dl_id=4). They find that 98% of some 2000 products found on the shelves of big box stores have committed at least one of the [7 sins](http://sinsofgreenwashing.org/findings/the-seven-sins/). Here are their categories. You can find descriptions of each at their website, above. – Sin of the Hidden Trade-off – Sin of No Proof – Sin of Vagueness – Sin of Worshiping False Labels – Sin of Irrelevance – Sin of Lesser of Two Evils – Sin of Fibbing Some or all of these… Read More

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If you haven’t seen this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=518XP8prwZo) of Kseniya Simonova’s winning sand animation performance, you must go there. It says much more about the world than I ever could, and calls out the absence of sustainability in the world. . .

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One of the inescapable conclusions I took home from the sustainable consumption conference I spoke about is very simple. The Planet cannot and will not support the material consumption levels of today and certainly not those levels projected as affluence becomes global. Bill Rees, one of the keynoters and developer of the ecological footprint concept, claims our rates of resource utilization are already equal to more than one and a half Earths and we are on the way to three or four. Technology cannot change this. The Nobelist economist, Robert Solow, who once thought that resources was a meaningless term… Read More

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Having just posted an entry about toilet tissue couture, my attention lit on a story about potential perverse effects of green shopping. The [story in Greenbiz.com](http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2009/10/13/green-products-unethical-shoppers) began with this lede: > We see more than our fair share of green consumer studies around these parts; it’s become one of our favorite bugaboos: This study or the next one finds that customers say they’re 100 percent likely to buy green products 100 percent of the time. > > And yet, when you walk the aisles of your local office supply company, there’s nary a ream of 100 percent post-consumer recycled content… Read More

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A little bit of fun before I return to the serious stuff. The conference on sustainable consumption (even though I don’t like to use sustainable as an adjective) that ran the last few days was very exciting and provocative. The organizers had brought together academics from many disciplines together with a group of NGO representatives. We certainly didn’t get to a single understanding of the roots of the problem of hyper-consumption, but found ways to converse across big gaps in disciplinary language and concepts. I will be writing about what I learned as I reflect a bit more. In the… Read More

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I am off to attend a conference on sustainable consumption. It is an important event in spite of the oxymoronic sense of the term “sustainable consumption.” It’s the first gathering of academics of all sorts, largely coming from the social sciences, seasoned with some NGO representatives to keep the conversation on point. I’ll be involved until next Monday. I am quite optimistic that we will dwell more on the consumption half of the phrase, seeking to explore why consumption has become such a central feature of our society. For me that is more important than trying to measure our impact… Read More

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I have just returned from a weekend participating in the[ Marlboro College MBA in Managing for Sustainability](http://gradschool.marlboro.edu/academics/mba/) program. It was a rich and rewarding experience, reminding me of my past experience at The [Bainbridge Graduate Institute](www.bgiedu.org/) which offers a similar program. These two programs and a handful of others carry the mission to transform business as the creator, not destroyer of sustainability. An ambitious goal, but a critical one. The students at Marlboro and now at many other schools of business are joining hands within [Net Impact](http://www.netimpact.org/) which calls itself “a global network of leaders who are changing the world… Read More

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No, this is not a new government program to get us out of the recession. It’s the Walmart plan to create a Sustainability Index. Greenbiz ran an [article](http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2009/09/24/walmart-sustainability-index-means-big-business) discussing the need that this program will create for most of the Walmart suppliers that have yet to carefully assess their footprint and social beneficence. That amounts to some 90,000 firms world-wide. The article estimates that only about 10% of the impacted firms have already done some of the work or have the resources to comply. Consultants are already jumping to get business from these firms. > Walmart’s sustainability assessment offers both… Read More

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This time of year in New England is full of contrasts. One day the leaves are green and the next bright red. We are up in Maine for the last time until next May. Yesterday when I put my boat to bed for the winter, the ocean simply glittered and the air was crisp as a Macintosh apple (A real one). It was one of those days that makes leaving so hard. Today it has been pouring without a constant stream. The dampness permeates everything. Our cottage can’t hold its own against a combination of late autumn cold and downpours.… Read More

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Since I posted the last entry, I have had an interchange with Newsweek that has cleared up some of the mystery. The order of the rankings in the Green Corporations table is determined by something called a z-score, not the raw impact data. The z-score is a measure of the distance a score is from the mean, normalized by the standard deviation.* It’s just something like this that may have triggered Lord Disraeli’s initial outburst about statistics. It is more work that I am willing to do to calculate these scores for the whole set, so I will just have… Read More

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