No Impact Man

One way to demonstrate your company's marketing department doesn't care much about sustainability

If you want to give people a hint that you don't much care about whether your company harms the habitat that we depend upon for our health, happiness and security:

1. Take a sample of your product that you'd like to give away for free, say a single piece of gum.
2. Wrap it in packaging made from plastic, which doesn't break down in the landfill and remains on the planet for a few hundred years.
3. Wrap the result in another layer of the same plastic packaging.
4. Take that double-wrapped sample and wrap it in yet another layer of packaging so that the sample is now triple-wrapped in a container that is around 100 times the size of the sample you are giving away.
5. If you have a good sense of irony, while you're wasting all these packaging materials and demonstrating your lack of interest in the health of the planet, include in the package some sort of marketing blurb that goes on and on about how health-promoting your product is so that the hypocrisy is palpable.
6. Finally, if you really want to make sure that your scheme is both bad for your image and bad for the planet, give your little package away to people in such huge handfuls that they don't even want it and it ends up in a place where everyone who walks by can get a good look:

Strangely, a way to enhance both technology and environmental activism

A study of the Structures of Participation (STROPs) in Museums from xDesign Project on Vimeo.

Start by remembering these words: "structures of participation." Now let's go...

I've argued before that, when it comes to using resources effectively, it is not only that we should make sure that our designs and production processes are energy- and material-efficient, but that we should also ensure that even efficiently-used resources enhance rather than reduce quality of life.

One way to express this is with an equation for environmental effectiveness (E):

E = life enhancement / ecological resource use.

The more life enhancement (pleasure, health, contentment, security, community, connectedness) delivered per unit of resource, the higher the environmental effectiveness of the product.

In other words, even a conventionally-grown apple has a higher environmental effectiveness than organically-grown tobacco. And a coal station bringing reading lights to illiterate children is more environmentally effective than one which brings more air conditioning to New Yorkers.

For a while, as my thinking went, I thought that consumer technology could not have a high environmental effectiveness. Much of our technology--video games, TV and computer screens--has the effect of isolating us from each other and so may not enhance our lives in the long run.

And I've argued about this with Natalie Jeremijenko, the NYU professor whom we've met on this blog before and whom I'm helping to teach a course. She always said that technology in itself was not bad for life enhancement, but that it depended on how it "structured participation."

Her point was that tech could be built to bring people together and promote community and relationship depending how the "participation was structured" (remember I told you to remember that phrase?). In other words, tech could, in fact, have a high life enhancement and therefore a high, by my definition above, environmental effectiveness.

Now watch the video above. It is this wonderful animation, put together by Natalie, that finally convinced me of her argument. It is based on her studies of how people interact in an art gallery, depending on whether the gallery provides information about the art using text, private ear phones, or a push button loudspeaker.

The video shows three cases. As Natalie writes (slightly adapted by me) on her Vimeo page:

The first case demonstrates the traditional public display of text on museum wall, which, because of the social convention of quiet-while-some-one-is-reading, you can be standing next to someone, but not talk to them and never hear anything of what they are thinking.

In the second case, we see the curatorial information is presented as an audio tour via a privatized audio environment via headset (or similar). This has the effect of synchronizing people temporally, but precludes local discussion--you can't hear what anyone nearby is saying.

In the third case the curatorial information is presented via a deliberately triggered loudspeaker. This creates a shared audio context for a small group, momentarily synchronizing people spatially and temporally, and providing an opportunity for local comments and discussion.

In the Video Interaction study from which this animation is drawn, the amount of convivial interaction surrounding the speakers was remarkable. If there were other people at an exhibition you were vey unlikely not to talk to them (3 in 400 cases); you stayed longer at a works with speakers than the same work without, but the length of time you allocated varied with the number of people who were also there. That is, you stayed longer if there were 4 people other people than if there were 1, as if they were valuable sources of information.

There are two important points here.

One is that the technology--and indeed many of our cultural systems--can be used to pull people apart or draw them together. In other words, we can use resources effectively to enhance life or we can simply use them to make a profit on selling gadgets, regardless of their social effects.

And it seems to me that, using the equation above as a guide to effectiveness, the responsible product designer, with an interest in sustainability, would ensure that his/her designs have the effect of at least delivering high life quality in return for the resources used.

But there is one more point to be made from Natalie's study--what we talk about nonstop here on this blog. It's a question, as she puts it, of how we "structure participation" in responses to the environmental emergency.

How do we structure our communication, our organizations, and our efforts in such a way that they don't act like the private headsets that set our efforts apart but like the shared speakers that bring them together.

How do we find ways that get people talking and inspiring further efforts? How do we get people to take part in our democracy?

That, as Natalie might put it, all depends on how we "structure participation."

Business People: Forget the fallacy of the zero sum game

Zero sum game: A situation or interaction in which one participant's gains result only from another's equivalent losses.

Sometimes, we imagine business works that way. But what a sad, sorry way to look at the world. And if we do look at the world that way, does it make us happy?

Let me explain:

The other day, Seth Godin wrote a post on his blog titled "Destroying happiness."

"Most people," he wrote, "have a better standard of living today than Louis XIV did in his day. So why are so many people unhappy?"

He said that what makes people unhappy is not what they have but what they want. And that the job of companies is to create want for their products.

Therefore, Seth wrote, "Marketers trying to grow market share will always work to make their non-customers unhappy."

As this story goes, for me and my company to be happy, you must be unhappy. My happiness depends on your unhappiness. Zero sum game.

What a sad, sorry way to operate in the world. And if a company operates this way--when you think of employees, shareholders and customers--does it make them happy?

We're stuck in an economic model where we pull precious resources out of the ground, fashion them into some often-unnecessary product, convince people that they need it, get them to buy it, start convincing them that it is no good anymore so they buy the next version, and then take the old version and bury it back in the ground.

In the process, we pump the atmosphere full of carbon, use up dwindling resources, and fill our precious land and water with toxins.

It wouldn't be so bad, maybe, if we did it for products people really want and need. But if they really wanted and needed them, why would marketers have to work at making them unhappy in order to force them to buy?

Zero sum game. What a business model!

So here's the challenge, and it's not about the end of commerce. It's about finding a different model of commerce.

What makes people happy, Arthur Brooks, author of Gross National Happiness, reminded me the other day, is a sense of transcendent meaning, success in living our lives in accord with our values, and a sense of control of our destinies.

Marketing often depends on convincing people they don't have these things and then tricking them into thinking that the product on offer will somehow provide them. Then the whole pull-things-out-of-the-ground-only-to-bury-them-back-there model of commerce kicks in.

But what if, instead, business actually tried to provide the meaning, success and control to people instead of selling them material proxies. What if business actually tried improve life on this planet and make a profit doing it.

Last I heard, there is an infinite supply of meaning, success and control available, so providing them wouldn't waste our precious resources.

You get the--admittedly long-winded--point? Find a way to make money giving people what they really need--a good life. Do that, and it's good for your company, good for your customers and good for the planet.

In other words, don't see green, sell happy, and if you do it right, it will be green.

That's not zero sum game. That's win win. Isn't that the world we'd rather create?

PS Any ideas for how to do it are very welcome in the comments.

Economics, human motivations and solutions to climate change

One definition of economics is the study of the choices of individual and groups of humans make when faced with the fact of limited resources but unlimited needs and wants.

At the heart of neoclassical economics is the "rational actor" model of human behavior. That is, according to the model, individuals, groups and nations will consider the available options and then pick the one that maximizes benefit to them.

It's kind of a sad, uninspired model, if you think about it, because it assumes that people are more selfish than compassionate and more self-interested than creative. It is also the model around which the entire mainstream political debate for climate change solutions is based (I'm not including, here, the do-nothing or do-little antagonists like Senator James Inhofe).

To wit, in case you haven't been following, both sides of the mainstream climate change solutions debate predicate their arguments on the assumption that people and institutions will not moderate their use of fossil fuels unless efficiency measures and renewable energy become cheaper. In other words, according to the rational actor model, unless the change in behavior maximizes the benefit to them.

One side of the debate believes, in simplistic terms, in making efficiency and renewables attractive by raising the cost of fossil fuels (these are the cap-and-traders, the Joe Romm types). On the other side of the debate are those who think we should do it by lowering the cost of renewables (the invest in energy tech advocates, like Shellenberger and Nordhaus).

Because both of these approaches are based on "rational actor"-based economic theory, neither allows for the possibility that people might, say, be inspired to do the right thing for the sake of themselves and posterity or, say, because a less energy-intense lifestyle might have the potential for better quality of life.

Based on the neoclassical economic theory, in other words, the prevailing political solutions hold that if it's easier on people's pocketbooks to save the planet, they'll save it. If it turns out to be more expensive, we're doomed. Few other considerations apply.

Now, I'm not saying that there isn't some truth to the pocketbook theory. There is, but it's not the whole truth. This is why I go on about how a happier planet will make for happier people. There are more than dollars-and-cents motivations for changing. While planetary well-being may not mean we'll all be richer, it may mean that we can find a way to be happier and have better quality of life overall (look here and here, for example).

The problem is that such subtle motivations are hard to contain in neoclassical economic theory. That, in turn, may mean that our leaders, who depend on economists, don't have all the policy tools they need to enact climate change solutions.

Which leads me after a long-winded introduction to the nascent field of behavioral economics, which seeks to answer the same questions of how humans will act in the face of limited resources and unlimited needs, but does not hold to heart the rational actor model.

Instead, behavioral economics seeks to study empirically how people and their institutions actually behave and to apply this knowledge to predictions. In other words, it seeks to provide our officials with more robust policy tools (you can read New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert's excellent review of a behavioral economics book here).

Anyway, a behavioral economist out of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, Professor John M. Gowdy, has turned the lens of his science to climate change policy (see here). Below are some of his conclusions:

• "The current crisis of sustainability cannot be resolved within the confines of the system that generated it. For economic analysis this means stepping outside the Walrasian system with its emphasis on one part of human nature (greed and egoism) to the neglect of other the facets of human nature (cooperation, altruism)."
• "Increasing consumption does not translate into increasing social well-being... The drastic reduction in fossil fuel use required to stabilize the climate will certainly mean a reduction in the production of consumer goods... A number of economists call for a re-orientation of welfare policy goals from “income” to “well-being.""
• "Absolute income may not be correlated with well-being but relative income is... Relative losers in consumption reduction should be compensated in some way to minimize the relative income loss. The wealthy for example, could be rewarded with some sort of public recognition of their sacrifice for the common good. People are more inclined to give to public goods when they can be observed to do so and this should be incorporated into climate change policy."
• "“Development” in the third world need not follow the path of the industrialized nation during the twentieth century... Nussbaum (2000, chapter 4 and website of Human Development and Capabilities Association) has gone even further in calling for “distributive justice” creating the conditions for the realization of a set of central human capabilities... With a focus on individual happiness and self-actualization, the developing world could improve its position relative to the North without emulating the consumption frenzy that drove past economic growth."
  
  

Innovating business greenly

Meet Trevor Paque. He's landscape gardener meets local food farmer. He rents himself to homeowners, but instead of planting and growing pretty flowers for them--and using the requisite water and chemicals--he grows them organic produce and leaves it in a box on their back porch.

This apropos, partly, of yesterday's post about innovation vs conservation.

It seems to me--and I get that this service is rarefied and elite--that is this the kind of innovative thinking we need from business in general? A way to improve people's lives while helping the planet? A way to make helping the planet seem cool and trendy? A way to make money doing it?

The point is there are opportunities and jobs to be had that assist the healing of the planetary habitat we depend upon for our health, happiness and security. Pitting economic well-being against the environment is just plain wrong.

PS I know, we shouldn't have to make helping the planet it cool and trendy, but it's all hands on deck, no? Besides, isn't this the quintessence of "green business?"

PPS Meanwhile, while Trevor helps the rich to grow local food, the excellent NYC organization Just Food helps neighborhoods grow good fresh, produce to which they might not otherwise have access. Check them out!

Photo courtesy of the New York Times.

Gore's call for 100% renewable electricity by 2018

Al Gore Thursday made an important speech in which he called upon the United States to generate 100% of its electricity by renewable means by 2018. This is exactly the approach we need to achieve what is scientifically necessary.

I haven't spoken to them yet, but I believe it is entirely in line with the calls of 1Sky.org and 350.org, the climate change organizations whose policies I support.

How do we get it done both politically and pragmatically? Hmm...next speech. But meanwhile this is a great clarion call. Watch the video below or read the full text here. These are some of the points I most liked:

• "Our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges -- the economic, environmental and national security crises."
• "Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years."
• "The sharp cost reductions now beginning to take place in solar, wind, and geothermal power -- coupled with the recent dramatic price increases for oil and coal -- have radically changed the economics of energy."
• "To those who say the costs are still too high: I ask them to consider whether the costs of oil and coal will ever stop increasing if we keep relying on quickly depleting energy sources to feed a rapidly growing demand all around the world. When demand for oil and coal increases, their price goes up. When demand for solar cells increases, the price often comes down."
• "America's transition to renewable energy sources must also include adequate provisions to assist those Americans who would unfairly face hardship. For example, we must recognize those who have toiled in dangerous conditions to bring us our present energy supply. We should guarantee good jobs in the fresh air and sunshine for any coal miner displaced by impacts on the coal industry. Every single one of them."
• "Of course, we could and should speed up this transition by insisting that the price of carbon-based energy include the costs of the environmental damage it causes. I have long supported a sharp reduction in payroll taxes with the difference made up in CO2 taxes. We should tax what we burn, not what we earn."
• "In order to foster international cooperation, it is also essential that the United States rejoin the global community and lead efforts to secure an international treaty at Copenhagen in December of next year that includes a cap on CO2 emissions and a global partnership that recognizes the necessity of addressing the threats of extreme poverty and disease as part of the world's agenda for solving the climate crisis."
• "There actually is one extremely effective way to bring the costs of driving a car way down within a few short years. The way to bring gas prices down is to end our dependence on oil and use the renewable sources that can give us the equivalent of $1 per gallon gasoline [by converting to electric cars]."
• "Our families cannot stand 10 more years of gas price increases. Our workers cannot stand 10 more years of job losses and outsourcing of factories. Our economy cannot stand 10 more years of sending $2 billion every 24 hours to foreign countries for oil. And our soldiers and their families cannot take another 10 years of repeated troop deployments to dangerous regions that just happen to have large oil supplies."

What's good for the planet is good for your baby's butt

Remembering back about Bella in diapers and thinking how, if you bring up cloth diapers, people always want to talk about the study that show that the environmental impact of manufacturing plastic diapers is no worse than blah blah blah.

Even if I trusted the objectivity of a study funded by Procter & Gamble, who make--you guessed it--disposable diapers, I still wouldn't for one minute believe it. Say six diapers a day for a least two years. That makes for 4,380 plastic diapers. On the other hand, you could have 24 cotton diapers washed every four days or 183 times over the same period.

Can anyone believe those impacts equal each other? Wisdom, I always say, trumps suspect science.

Plus anecdotally, and certainly it was true for us, cloth-diapered kids get potty-trained sooner because they can feel when they're wet. Isabella actually asked to start using the potty. That means fewer diapers. Less impact.

But my point here, besides the baloney science the diaper companies try throwing at us, is this: a short time after we got Bella's cloth diapers, for some reason, I decided to put one of the few plastic diapers on her that we had left.

Isabella threw a fit. "I want Bella's new diapers," she screamed. "Bella's new diapers!" Never again would she wear a plastic diaper. For all the scientific studies, the one and half year old told us the truth of the situation.

And by the way, that episode is what finally got my wife on board with the cloth, hassle of having to wash them notwithstanding.

If you wondering why Isabella objected so vociferously, wrap your butt up in some plastic--Saran Wrap, say--and see if you might be leaning towards cloth when the day is over.

Because at least when it comes to my family, I discovered that what is good for the planet is also what's good and comfortable on my baby's butt.

PS Plus cloth diapers are much cheaper. Read some facts about cloth diapering here.

PPS Suppose you're a business. Wouldn't it make more sense to offer to wash your customers' diapers, form a long term, two-way relationship with them, and then sell them everything else child-related, too?

PPPS Read an article on the diaper issue quoting a real expert on the subject otherwise known as, well, me.

Saving resources, improving lives, securing your corporation's future

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote:

"If the need for a product has to be created by the manufacturer, if aggressive marketing is required to convince people to buy the product, can the product, no matter how renewable its materials, really be called sustainable? Because isn't using resources to make things we don't even need the definition of waste?"

If you're in the business of convincing people to use resources they wouldn't otherwise use, in other words, you could be doing better on your eco-credentials. The New York Times, this Sunday, provided two excellent examples to show the difference between servicing real need and filling created need.

As the Times story goes, many companies have perfected the art of instilling habits among consumers.

“For most of our history, we’ve sold newer and better products for habits that already existed,” said Dr. Berning [a now-retired Procter & Gamble] psychologist. “But about a decade ago, we realized we needed to create new products. So we began thinking about how to create habits for products that had never existed before.”

As an example of creating need, in 1996, Procter & Gamble launched a product called Febreze, essentially perfumed water. P&G developed Febreze to spray on clothes that smelled, for example, of cigarette smoke. Febreze flopped.

The reason, P&G discovered, was that bad smells didn't occur often enough in consumers' lives for them to develop a product-use habit. Even if they bought the product, they'd forget they still had it by the time their clothes smelled of smoke again.

In other words, to my way of thinking, the product served no real need.

But instead of canceling it, P&G decided to manufacture a need--to convince people to use planetary resources to service a need that did not exist until P&G created it.

They began looking for "cues" that would cause consumers to use the product more frequently than the smell of smoke--and, so, form a habit. The cue they eventually settled on was the act of cleaning a room, something studies showed the target audience did almost daily.

“We learned from consumer interviews that there was an opportunity to cue the clean smell of Febreze to a clean room,” Dr. Berning said. “We positioned it as the finishing touch to a mundane chore. It’s the icing that shows you did a good job.”

The result is $650 million a year for P&G in the United States alone. And what does the world get in return?

On the other hand, let's take an example of filling a real need:

A FEW years ago, a self-described “militant liberal” named Val Curtis [pictured above] decided that it was time to save millions of children from death and disease. So Dr. Curtis, an anthropologist then living in the African nation of Burkina Faso, contacted some of the largest multinational corporations and asked them, in effect, to teach her how to manipulate consumer habits worldwide.

In other words, Curtis wanted to use the same techniques that got Febreze flying off the shelves to fill a real rather than a manufactured need. She convinced P&G, Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever--all of whom "had invested hundreds of millions of dollars finding the subtle cues in consumers’ lives that corporations could use to introduce new routines"--to sign onto the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing with Soap.

The result is a reported upsurge in handwashing with soap before eating by 41 percent in Ghana. Why is this important? Because "diseases and disorders caused by dirty hands — like diarrhea — kill a child somewhere in the world about every 15 seconds, and about half those deaths could be prevented with the regular use of soap, studies indicate."

So there we have them: two organizations pushing personal/home care products, one serving a real need and one serving a manufactured need. One causing the use of resources for no real reason; the other causing the use of resources to save children's lives.

The question is, simply, as our culture becomes more and more concerned with green issues, which organization would you rather be? Would you rather be the kind of organization that is seen to manufacture needs and unnecessarily cause resource use?

Or would would you rather be the type that is seen to use our dwindling precious resources in the service of humankind?

In short, would you rather do business and be involved with an organization that saves children's lives by convincing people to use soap or one that makes people feel they haven't quite finished the hard work of cleaning a house unless they spray chemicals all over it?

Photo courtesy of The New York Times.

Spin, counter-spin, counter-counter-spin and on and on

Watch the short video above (you can watch two more like it here and here).

At first, you think, that proves it. If cell phones can make popcorn kernels pop, the claims that cell phones cause brain tumors must be true (read here for nonspin background on this possibility). The industry denials, the video seems to confirm, are just spin.

But then you go to Snopes, the site that debunks urban legends, and you read that, instead of this video being a debunk of cell phone industry spin, it is actually more spin layered on top of spin, but this time by the cell phone headset industry. Specifically, according to Snopes, this video was made by Cardo Systems, Inc, who make bluetooth headsets.

Indeed, though the cell phone industry does not want us to think that keeping a cell phone near our heads is dangerous, the cell phone headset industry does. They want to convince you to keep your phone away from your head by purchasing their products.

(You can watch a CNN report of how the video was made by dropping popped corn into the shot and then photoshopping out the unpopped kernels here.)

Now listen, I'm not keeping a cellphone near my head for hours and I don't let Isabella put one near her head at all. Spin or not, my brain was not made to be microwaved. But that's not the point.

The point is, with all the lies and counter-lies, how is anyone supposed to make informed consumer choices about so-called "green products?" This is one reason why my first-order strategy, when it comes to environmental living, is not consume differently.

Unless, a company has gone the extra mile and I am quite convinced I can trust it (Dr. Bronners is an example), my strategy is just plain consume less.

Meet real needs, make sustainable products

Here's a question: if the need for a product has to be created by the manufacturer, if aggressive marketing is required to convince people to buy the product, can the product, no matter how renewable its materials, really be called sustainable?

Because isn't using resources to make things we don't even need the definition of waste?

I know I'm being an idealist here, but if we don't establish ideals, if we don't paint a target on the moon, we'll never even reach the treetops.

And I'm not wagging my finger at designers or business people, either. I'm just saying that turning business towards meeting real human needs will, almost by definition, make it less wasteful, even if the same resources are used.

That's what designers want to do anyway, right? Improve lives?

Consider this, from an LA Times OpEd by Ben Barber, author of Consumed:

... Capitalism’s core virtue is that it marries altruism and self-interest. In producing goods and services that answer real consumer needs, it secures a profit for producers. Doing good for others turns out to entail doing well for yourself.

   Capitalism’s success, however, has meant that core wants in the developed world are now mostly met and that too many goods are now chasing too few needs. Yet capitalism requires us to “need” all that it produces in order to survive. So it busies itself manufacturing needs for the wealthy while ignoring the wants of the truly needy...

... Can we redirect capitalism to its proper end: the satisfaction of real human needs? Well, why not?   The world teems with elemental wants and is peopled by billions who are needy. They do not need iPods, but they do need potable water, not colas but inexpensive medicines, not MTV but their ABCs...

...Pharmaceutical companies ought to be thinking about how to sell inexpensive retro-virals to Africans with HIV instead of pushing Botox to the “forever young” customers they are trying to manufacture here...

Oh I know, I know. Talking like this is all pie in the sky.

But what if business saw its job as, not creating need for existing products, but creating products for existing need? Couldn't a real entrepreneur return to capitalism's altruistic roots and find a way to serve self interest while maybe filling a few empty bellies or moistening a few parched throats?