jonathan.halperin's blog

The mega-cities of the nearest future are either hubs of innovation and creativity, as outlined by Richard Florida at the Aspen Ideas Festival, or overrun slums without electricity, transit access to center city, running water and the most basic urban services. Or maybe they are both?

Wow. A fabulous new documentary, Finding North, is a masterpiece of video storytelling.

I have spent a significant portion of my career managing research projects, publishing materials, devising marketing and communications strategies and consulting to bring needed information and perspectives to corporate and nonprofit decision-makers. So I would never argue against communications and education as indispensable tools in the battle to address pressing global challenges.

Discussions of US foreign aid are often divorced from discussions of the US Farm Bill. At the Aspen Ideas Festival today I asked Tom Daschle, Dan Glickman, Lauren Bush and Beth Sauerhaft to connect the two.

As an approach to resolving some of the world’s most intractable problems, embracing the “Rational Middle” sounds like a terrific concept. Who could object to bringing together people of diverse views on energy and climate policy to discuss reasonable solutions in a respectful manner?

As our civilization struggles to understand both the meaning and making of Stonehenge or Easter Island, others may some day look back and try to give meaning to the immense pie charts that seem to be scattered over the American Midwest.

Markets may well be the most finely tuned mechanism we have for allocating resources efficiently around short-term costs and prices. But absent a robust framework of social and cultural values and priorities to channel market operations these efficient markets will lead to vast inequity and depletion of critical resources.

Jeremy Rifkin stole the show at this week’s CERES 2012 Conference,” Igniting Innovation, Scaling Sustainability.”

A conversation with Achim Steiner, head of the United Nations Environment Programme.

There is so much to do to “repair the world.” But we had best be sure we are asking the right questions before we put too much faith and resources in the answers.

I participated in the James Beard Foundation's Food Conference in New York on October 12 and 13, 2011. Video of my presentations is available online.

A sense of change is in the air – and not just the crispness of the Fall air in the bucolic hills of Vermont, where I presented at the Dana Meadows Sustainability Institute.

In Vermont at the Dana Meadows Sustainability Institute; looking forward to the James Beard Foundation Food Conference in New York.

In my closing remarks at the Sustainable Food Laboratory Summit I explained that I did not think sustainability was a goal, a metric, or even an approach to doing business. Rather, it is a principle. And it has at its core a fundamental rethinking of space and time.

It became clear in talking with farmers, ranchers, businesspeople, chefs and public advocates during the Sustainable Food Laboratory summit that there is a ‘goodness’ premium associated with these three linked terms. It was equally clear that few people have a clear sense of what these terms mean, beyond an evocation of being different and somehow better than conventional produce.

At meeting after meeting, the conversation almost always turns to metrics and data. And while we need better data and better metrics - knowing of course that we do what we measure - we also need to remember for what reasons we are collecting data. Measurement alone is not the goal.

While I was out-West last week at the Sustainable Food Laboratory Summit and Aspen Ideas Festival back East in Washington, DC, a project I have been supporting for some years marked an important milestone. GreenSpace marked the opening of its new headquarters and turnkey knowledge center at Nationals Ballpark.

Power generated from the sun streaming down on the earth today is what we have come to call solar power. But what we forget at our peril is the fossil part of fossil fuels. Oil, gas and coal are also forms of solar power; the sun just created them a very long time ago.

Amidst a host of rich and deep discussions at the Sustainable Food Laboratory summit this week in Oregon, we kept coming back again and again to a few underlying themes. The complex relationships among commodities, organic produce, price, and brand value was one of these touchstone issues.

Having heard President Clinton speak a few times while he was President, it was inspiring to have a conversation with him on Saturday (July 2) after his unscheduled presentation at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

Hannah Jones, VP of Sustainable Business and Innovation at Nike, had the most memorable lines among dozens of speakers at two recent conferences, the “Ceres Conference 2011: Igniting Innovation, Scaling Sustainability” and The Conference Board’s “Corporate Citizenship and Sustainability” gathering in Washington, DC

Leaders today can little afford to be mere experts.

Corporate responsibility is to the management of a company what patient safety is to the administration of a hospital. If you are not doing it, what are you doing?

The issue of our time is framed for failure.

Difficult to manage, impossible to avoid, and the endless driver of opportunity, driving and managing change has been at the core of my work going on three decades.