Regulating the Playing Field

As Hurricane Sandy shifted the national conversation in the closing days of the U.S. 2012 presidential campaign, so too has the rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School interrupted the partisan machinations over government spending and taxation. As we look forward to 2013 and beyond we thus have a rare moment to reflect and observe that these issues share a common root: the respective roles of government and business to shape our future as people and as a national community.

In violation of the investing maxim that past results are no indication of future returns, many business leaders cling to the shibboleths of the past to secure their future. They argue vehemently against regulations, and against government spending more generally, insisting that industry can best police itself and that regulation stifles growth, innovation, and job-creation. And in the same breath these lobbyists for the past ride in elevators, work in offices, eat food, drive on roads, and use communications bandwidths regulated for the public good by none other than the government.

Businesses large and small also regularly evoke the notion of a level playing field – and insist that the only role for government in the market is to level that field. But level for one party can be decidedly sloped for another. So this is generally nothing more than a cover for seeking or maintaining competitive advantage from government support – from tax breaks in the energy sector to federal support for medical research.

From fabrics to firearms, the question of how to allocate responsibility across the value chain is central to the success both of private enterprise and governments not only in the US but also around the world. See especially “From Triangle to Tazreen: A Century of Lessons,” by Francesca Rheannon in CSRwire on the recent plant fire that killed 112 in Bangladesh, and Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times on the carnage in Connecticut (“Do We Have the Courage to Stop This?”).

Beyond these two issues, here are four more crying out for resolution – and resolution that would benefit business, people, and the national and global community.

Nanotechnology, long out of the barn, is now being chased by various regulatory agencies. Like GMOs before it, nanotechnology holds great promise but is fraught with risk, both known and unknown. Although late to the table, government can help businesses drive down that risk with a smart regulatory framework that directly addresses both short-term needs and potential long-term consequences.

Fracking, hydraulic fracturing of the earth’s deep rock formations, holds out the potential to drive down American energy costs and thus boost production and on-shore manufacturing while creating jobs and billions of dollars of revenue for private companies as well as debt-ridden governments. But the risks associated with the vast quantities of water used to crack the rock, the chemicals used in the fracking, and the global consequences of an energy independent America are poorly understood. While state governments are awakening to this opportunity/challenge, the federal government needs to engage and drive a robust discussion about what level means in the field of fracking.

The search for climate stability, of course, continues to cry out for U.S. and global leadership. As politicians dither, the ice caps melt opening new shipping routes across the Arctic, storms increase in intensity, coral reefs bleach, dustbowl conditions return to the U.S. Midwest, sea-levels inch upwards, scientific panels affirm and re-affirm that the changes are real and man-made, and yet many business leaders continue to act as if this greatest risk to their ongoing operations can be handled by committees and pronouncements. (More soon in another dispatch on the “up the middle, up the middle, up the middle” approach to climate stability.) But there are some companies (see the signatories to the Prince of Wales’ Climate Communiqués) looking forward and as leaders they also are calling on governments to step in and … level yet another playing field.

And last, it is time to again eliminate hunger in America. More than 50,000,000 people in this nation of plenty do not know from where they will get their next meal; fully 49,000,000 receive government assistance through the prodigiously named Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). While this national outrage persists, elected officials in Washington vote against the hungry and even now have begun to seek to balance the budget on the backs of these least fortunate Americans. See the Food Policy Action report card to see who voted how on key food legislation in the 112th Congress.

Hungry Americans, many of whom vote and have real reason to vote, are not even on the traditional playing field and thus have no interest in whether or not it is level. But for some of those who tend the fields on which we play, the pure pursuit of self-interest seems to be all that matters. While enlightened self-interest can be a huge and beneficial incentive, self-interest as the singular guiding principle makes for a dog-eat-dog world. It also makes predicting the future much easier; as Garrett Hardin explained in 1968, it leads with grinding certainty to the destruction of the global commons upon which we all depend.

We have some important choices to make in 2013.

Of Language, Geography and Mosaics

If Americans and Brits are “separated by a common language,” then Israelis and Palestinians are surely divided by a shared geography. Here in London, small daily protests outside the Israeli embassy brought British riot police into the streets adjacent to the new Whole Foods market in the tony Kensington region aglow with pre-Christmas displays.

In the region of Christ’s birth, the whine of Hamas rockets was for the first time heard by residents of Jerusalem itself. Not in Israeli land adjacent to Gaza, where more than 100 rockets were launched on November 11, three days before the Israeli attack on November 14 that killed Ahemed Jabari, second in command of the military wing of Hamas. Not in Tel Aviv where the wail of air raid sirens is neither commonplace nor unusual. But in Jerusalem, a sacred target, a place of birth and death; a city with ancient meaning and a target today because of its symbolic import for the future.

The media reporting on this latest eruption in the Middle East struggles to fit more than two thousand years of historical context into sound bites and headlines. And even the proximate cause of the conflagration, the missiles raining down on Israel from Gaza, slips out of most coverage – blown away by the images of people and houses torn apart by Israeli counter-attacks.

Some wonder why Netanyahu is poised to send troops, again, into Gaza in a powerful display of Israeli military superiority that will do nothing to resolve the problem or shift the downward spiral of hatred and animosity, nor bring the world community to any greater understanding or interest in the problems of the Jewish people or the Palestinian people.

It is an all too familiar war dance, but even riskier in the newly aligned Middle East, with the civil war in Syria, and the nuclear ambitions of Iran temporarily stymied yet defiant. What are not new are the mindsets, the fixed images we carry around, the icons of our beliefs, the self-reinforcing notions and biases and prejudices. We see the world as if looking at a mosaic, ordering all the pieces into patterns that makes sense and provide some assurance that the world makes some sense and that we can somehow fit into the picture.

We fear the moments when tired and worn bits of the mosaic fall away, when things become unstuck and our sense of clarity and purpose and place is jostled. We thought things made sense: now we are not so sure. The pieces don’t fit together as well as we thought.

While few of us are etch-a-sketch artists, and none of us can live entirely new existences devoid of our pasts and history, leaning into the uncertainty of change and risk is how we make possible what seemed impossible -- until it wasn’t.

Authenticity and Empathy in the American Food System

Authenticity is the touchstone of trust, the defining characteristic mentioned repeatedly at this week’s James Beard Foundation conference. From Genetic modification of food to mother’s milk, from food service providers to artisan foragers, from Nashville to Portland the exploration of trust and distrust was both deep and wide in this live-streamed conference. Farmers, businesspeople, advocates, researchers, food processors, produce distributors, chefs of global repute and journalists grappled with a system of linked but distinct problems.

"Leadership and Trust in the Public Sector"
Panel with Sam Kass, NYC Dept of Education's Eric Goldstein
and Designing Sustainability's Jonathan Halperin

Sam Kass, Assistant White House Chef and Senior Policy Advisor, was right to observe that while change is happening within this system and its trajectory is shifting there is still no single place where one can intervene to shift the path of a food system as complex as we now have in America. And Eric Goldstein, Chief Executive of the NYC Office of School Service, was also right that these issues go way beyond ingredients to the core of how we live our lives in American today. 

But first principles, simple and enduring and profound, still obtain. James Beard articulated one many years ago when we wrote that “food is our common ground.”

James Beard

We all eat, we all must eat, we all make choices about what we eat and these choices have consequences both personal and societal. Yet, for the 50,000,000 citizens in America who go hungry that common ground seems tenuous at best, choice severely constrained and a future deeply compromised.

To draw attention to this appalling problem, hunger amidst plenty, film directors Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush have made a stunning and powerful movie: A Place at the Table. And the Marcus Foundation, of which I am a trustee, honored the film and the people whose story it tells so eloquently with a table at the James Beard Foundation awards dinner.

With the film backed by Participant Media, and in tandem with many others working to end hunger in America, the Marcus Foundation hopes to use the movie as a platform to jump-start a renewed discussion of hunger in America that will lead to policy change to once again eliminate hunger in a nation abundant with food. (For more information, including a trailer of the film, see my dispatch: A Place at The Table.)

With authenticity in mind, it was not lost on any of us that honoring hungry people while dining on a gourmet meal is at best ironic and at worst obscene. Tables at awards dinners in New York City are not free; money spent on a table could feed many people. Was it right, just, appropriate? Are we walking the walk or just talking the talk? Time will tell whether our efforts to address hunger indirectly though story-telling, advocacy, and communications bear fruit and reduce hunger, or on reflection our funds would have been better spent feeding hungry people directly.

Another irony of the conference, this one sweet and poignant for me, was Wendell Berry reading out a web site address so that everyone could have access to his proposed 50-year Farm Bill: www.landinstitute.org. The bill is important reading, contains much wisdom, and is much shorter than the current draft farm bill still sitting in Congress. The irony is, as Wendell Berry acknowledged, that he has no computer. (Full disclosure: I was once a happy member myself of the now defunct Lead Pencil Society – with the motto, ‘not so fast’.)

If it is possible to have numerous first principles, then Wendell Berry has penned more than might reasonably be expected of any one man. He spoke eloquently at the conference and emphasized one of nature’s first principles that our species violates repeatedly in its rush to produce more, now, faster. “Keep the ground covered” is his admonition to all of us who want to continue eating not just today but also tomorrow. And for those who from ignorance or arrogance think of themselves as disconnected to the world of soil and sun and erosion and agriculture, he reminds us “eating is an agricultural act.”

If “food is our common ground” and “eating is an agricultural act,” then we are both literally and figuratively bound together by the soil that nourishes us, our food and our spirit. “Food deserts” are thus aptly named for the multi-level deprivation they occasion. And they are now well mapped online (see the USDA's Economic Research Service 'Food Desert Locator').

How can one have faith and trust in a nation so riddled with systemic and enduring injustice; so racked by inequality across so many levels? Simran Sethi, an award-winning journalist delivered a beautiful presentation in which she identified four building blocks of trust: predictability, reciprocity, vulnerability, and value exchange. Mapping these values across the stakeholders that struggle still with the deepest wounds that still exist in America would be an honorable undertaking. How can we develop these values such that people of means feel for and act such that they are trusted by people struggling in food deserts?

Applying these to the issue of GMO’s, discussed during Day I, it is no wonder that Monsanto remains an easy target – and that the target is easy does not mean it is any less deserving. If the figure cited by Daniel Ravicher from the Public Patent Foundation is correct, Monsanto spends $3,000,000 per day on legal fees. And one can reasonably surmise that much of this is related to their efforts around GMO crops to deny responsibility, display invulnerability; control value exchange, and hide beyond a mountain of secrecy.

Malik Yakini, Executive Director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network and a 2012 James Beard award winner, was thus a breath of fresh air in speaking the truth about the enduring and debilitating presence of racism in America. He was right to observe that the conference room was almost all white. Yet, as a white, privileged, man I wonder if the room should be a demographic reflection of the country as Malik Yakini implied.  Or, should it be an accurate reflection of the intended audience of thought leaders in the food sector? It is another, and very important question, whether the organizers (and I am on the James Beard Foundation conference steering committee) did a good enough job finding people of color who are thought leaders in this space.

Struck by his comment that no major grocery chains have stores in Detroit, something so gripping that I repeated it to a few people within hours, I decided I better research this a bit. While he is technically correct, the core of his solid position that we all need to hear and respect and act on seems to be undercut by this assertion. It seems Detroit is not in its entirety a food desert and has sizeable grocery stores – even if not owned by the national chains. While I am sure the situation is evolving, see James Griffioen's 2011 article "Yes, There are Grocery Stores in Detroit" in Urbanophile.  Around a set of issues where great weight is given to the value of everything local, it is ironic that in depicting the great work that has been done in Detroit, locally owned supermarkets are not also considered part of the solution.

Another presenter, and one of the few celebrity chefs of color, Marcus Samuelsson spoke intensely about the work he is doing in Harlem that is an effort to “honor the past, be in the present and hint at the future.” James Beard and Wendell Berry, alongside the work of many others, can help us bridge the gap between farm and table. But looking into the future, who is going to help us answer the powerful question Marcus posed: “How do you train a server who has never dined?”

Far beyond the confines of a fine-dining restaurant, this question resonates from the devastated communities of Detroit to the glimmering office towers around Columbus Circle in New York City. How can we understand an experience we have never had? How can we cultivate empathy?

What are the Ingredients of Trust?

Trust and the American Food System is the theme of this week’s annual James Beard Foundation conference in New York: A Crisis in Confidence: Creating a Better, More Sustainable Food World We Can Trust. I moderate a panel Thursday morning with Sam Kass from The White House and Eric Goldstein, Chief Executive of the New York City Office of School Support Services. While our focus will be trust and leadership in the public sector, other panels will look at GMOs, milk, and transparency.

Download a PDF of the complete agenda for the two days of the conference. Visit the James Beard Foundation’s website on October 17 and 18 to watch live streaming video of the Conference. (For video of my presentations from last year's conference, see How Money and Media Influence the Way America Eats.)

Threaded through all these diverse discussions (with active participation from an audience of leading chefs, businesspeople, and thought leaders in the food sector) are fundamental issues of how to maintain or build trust in a system that spans the globe.

If you know your farmer and eat locally is that the recipe for trust? Perhaps, unless you are the farmer raising your own chickens in Brooklyn and finds high amounts of lead in the eggs. Is organic the answer? Perhaps unless you believe the Stanford University study recently released (and more recently roundly criticized for methodological flaws).

Can we produce food sustainably for a global market that weaves together hundreds of thousands of small farmers, vast transportation networks, and consumers increasingly out of touch with the natural rhythms of both the growing seasons and critical soil nutrients?

Wendell Berry (farmer, poet, writer), Tensie Whelan (Rainforest Alliance), Marcus Samuelsson (Red Rooster), Jenifer Phalen (Edelmen) and others will tussle with these questions.

What is the Modern Corporation?

Howard Schultz, founder and CEO of Starbucks, shared his thoughts this morning at Aspen in discussion with Joe Nocera of the New York Times. His was an impassioned, articulate, unwavering championing of the view that long-term business value is created and protected only by having a focus beyond profits. Not excluding profits – but surely not only profit.

It was a tour de force presentation mixing values and passion with hard-nosed investment and business strategy. Responding to a comment from Joe Nocera about Howard’s unique background, both as the company founder and a kid from Brooklyn who grew up in public housing, I reframed the question back to the link between organizational and leadership values – and perceptions of time.

Cities of the Future

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? 

Check out the forthcoming The Misfit Economy: Innovation on the Fringe by Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips (www.misfiteconomy.com)

Capetown photo by Kyra Maya Phillips, co-author with Alexa Clay of the forthcoming
The Misfit Economy: Innovation on the Fringe

Florida has a fascinating project that seeks to assess economic development not through conventional surveys and data collection that lead to traditional computations of GDP, but rather through satellite imagery and calculations of energy use as derived from light emissions seen from space at night.

While intriguing, Florida acknowledges key shortcomings in his innovative approach. I asked him about these yesterday.

Time and Money

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.

But as I articulated the dilemma at the session "Population Challenge" led by Dennis Dimick and Helen Gayle at the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival, I don’t think the fundamental obstacle to devising solutions to climate change, for example, is a lack of knowledge. We don’t know everything; but we know enough to act. Rather, the core obstacle is our inability to effectively debate and make policy decisions around money.

Unlike the search for the cure for cancer, we actually know what is needed to slow the inexorable path toward climatic catastrophe. We need to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. And that will result in a profound shift in our energy and economic world.

While there is money to be made in new energy sectors, so too are there vast trillions to be lost in embedded infrastructure and traditional business models if we mismanage the transition.

The other fundamental impediment to embarking aggressively on this transition is that we don’t have the mental perspective or institutional tools to readily grasp the time scale of what is involved in this effort. Even as we search for new technology for carbon sequestration, we are releasing greenhouse gases in mere years and decades that have been naturally sequestered over hundreds of millions of years through photosynthesis. How do we get our heads around a time scale that spans not just a human life, not even just the existence of our species for 250,000 years but the creating of fossil fuels over hundreds of millions of years?

Rational Middle and Social Ballast

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?

This was the touchstone notion at one of the opening plenary sessions at the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival: “U.S. Energy Future: 'Rational Middle' Will Find Solutions." (The Gregory Kallenberg-directed and Shell Oil Company-sponsored film debuted at the Ideas Festival and is linked below.) But as the distinguished panelists made clear over and over again, we are at a pivotal moment, an historic turning point, a critical stage in managing the energy and climate future or our species. The magnitude of the challenge suddenly seemed far beyond what one might reasonably expect some “rational middle” to resolve.

Confusing the stabilizing middle with the wisdom of balance and harmony was creating an intellectually muddled discussion. The “rational middle” more often than not acts like social ballast, preventing too much rocking of the ship of state. When that ship is sailing well in open ocean, to a clear and worthy destination, then ballast is critical. When we are headed toward an iceberg (released from a glacier melting at unprecedented rates), then ballast will limit our ability to move with needed agility and speed.

As I wondered aloud (see video below), during the Q & A session, when has real innovation ever emerged from the middle rather than from the edge? In another age, “the rational middle” was utterly convinced that the sun rotated around the earth. In another age, it was held as an incontrovertible truth that the earth was flat. In our age “the rational middle” was quite content to deprive millions of Americans of fundamental civil rights simply because they did not have white skin. It seems highly unlikely that Galileo, Copernicus or Martin Luther King, Jr. would ever have been within what we might consider “the rational middle."

We can embrace the rational middle or we can innovate new approaches and solutions. I doubt we can have both.

(For more information on the film series, see the links below and visit www.rationalmiddle.com)

For video of the entire panel discussion and Q & A session,
visit the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival channel on FORA.tv.
(The exchange above appears at 1:22:10-1:22:49 and 1:26:00-1:27:22.)

Beyond Pie Charts

As our civilization struggles to understand both the meaning and making of Stonehenge or Easter Island, others may someday look back and try to give meaning to the immense pie charts that seem to be scattered over the American Midwest. From the air, perfect circles appear on the landscape amidst the sharp, angular lines of highways and roads.

These immense pies lack legends, but their coloration is clear and crisp as if the Midwest had become a surreal testing range for super-sized PowerPoint creations.

Hydrologists of the future may be able to discern that the pies and slices are the result or massive center pivot irrigation systems not the legacy of a monopolistic software giant seeking to expand into new markets. The designs of nature and of humans are so clearly distinguishable from the air that legends are not needed.

Finney County, southwest Kansas
(To read more and for photo credits, see the Daily Mail UK article:
Nature's bounty: Amazing satellite images show how man has moulded Earth's geography into geometric art)

Green trees twist and curve along the edges of waterways, evidence of the slow-motion evolution of meandering waterways. Straight lines dissect the land, homage to the efficiency of getting from point A to point B. These are not the trails of animal powered locomotion, which wind and bend with the contour of the land and its slope, but testament rather to the capacity of fuel engines to flatten the curves of the landscape as we journey over rather than through it.

In a world of efficiency and PowerPoint – not that they are interchangeable – we risk losing perspective. PowerPoint and most other widely used software products, as Edward Tufte emphasizes in his seminars and books, represent a break with past means of visual communication. While it was once natural to tell stories with a combination of words, images, pictures, and drawings all mixed together, today the way much of the software industry operates we are forced to segregate our communications by means of production. Rich text and rich pictures, much less images or drawings are hard to integrate. We draw with one tool, write with another, and struggle to make them collaborate.

Nature, on the other hand, appears to have an internal law that operates at all levels and across all fields of scientific understanding. So argue Adrian Bejan and J. Peder Zane in their fascinating book, Design in Nature: How the Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology, and Social Organization. When we adopt new perspectives and step outside current conventions it is amazing what we can discern – beyond pie charts.

Saving Souls or Changing Systems?

Change is such a complex issue: constant and inevitable, deep and rich but yet sometimes seeming like a black hole – guided by the interplay of forces we barely understand or see. Theories of social change struggle to identify patterns, to single out critically important factors, to draw discrete lessons learned. Systems thinking, mind-mapping, root-cause analysis are approaches that help us grapple with not only understanding change, but also with how to effect change – to guide it, channel it, manage it rather than merely adjust to it.

Change is such a complex issue: constant and inevitable, deep and rich but yet sometimes seeming like a black hole – guided by the interplay of forces we barely understand or see. Theories of social change struggle to identify patterns, to single out critically important factors, to draw discrete lessons learned. Systems thinking, mind-mapping, root-cause analysis are approaches that help us grapple with not only understanding change, but also with how to effect change – to guide it, channel it, manage it rather than merely adjust to it. From Peter Senge’s work on theories of change and organizational behavior (which he presented at Sustainable Food Lab last summer), to discussions this week among foundation executives at the opening of the Council on Foundations CEO retreat meeting, theories of change are front and center for many civil society and corporate leaders. While the search continues for the holy grail, the magic wand, to drive change, the complexity of our world cuts against finding a singular method or approach.

But the interconnectedness of our world also creates leverage- and choke-points, in both the concrete and digital spaces we inhabit. While the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators plot next steps after their recent physical eviction from Zuccotti Park, the leaders of the Susan G. Komen Fund are still licking their wounds from an amazing stumble. That the Komen leadership thought a fine-print change in grant-making policy, a politically engineered sleight of hand designed to prohibit continued funding of Planned Parenthood, would go unnoticed is a stunning lesson in misunderstanding the dynamics of engaged stakeholders. This is all the more remarkable because the Komen fund is all about engagement of stakeholders who literally walk the talk!

The Komen debacle also brings to mind other efforts to engineer change via ‘invisible’ or back-door channels. Robert Moses, who changed the face of New York City over decades as the city’s controversial “master designer” engineered the bridges over the Long Island Expressway to Jones Beach to be too low for buses. If you wanted to get to the ‘public’ beach, you needed private wheels.

While change can be engineered this way, as I discussed recently with Carol Larson from the Packard Foundation, there is today a crying need for civil discourse.  Amidst presentations on strategic philanthropy across generations, call for urgent action, and counsel to plan grantmaking carefully for maximum effectiveness, there was recognition that we need space where champions of the public good can design compromises that are high on delivery of needed services and low on ideological bombast.

Even among like-minded people, however, what type of change should be the priority? How can we meet today’s urgent needs while also driving systemic change? People need clean drinking water today. A hungry person needs food now, not ten years after some policy change takes hold. Domestic violence needs to stop before one more woman or child is beaten. But if one imagines the story of the Good Samaritan being played out day after day after day--the beaten soul, ignored by pious leaders, is comforted by a common person—at one point do we move beyond praising the humanity of the common person and ask who is doing the beating and what do we do to put a stop to it?

As we race for the cure – a vital effort – should we not also be charging ahead with determining how we stop the scourge of cancer? While greater detection obviously accounts for some of the rise in cancer rates, it is equally obvious that these specific changes (at global and cellular levels) are neither inevitable nor natural. What does root-cause analysis tell us about cancer? How is it related to the world we have made for ourselves – related to actions taken and resultant consequences, even if unintended?

Bill Drayton, the visionary founder of Ashoka, sees social entrepreneurs as the key to devising solutions to embedded, systemic problems. Spinning the traditional development metaphor about giving either a fish, a fishing rod, or teaching someone to fish, he describes a social entrepreneur as someone who won’t stop until the fishing industry is revolutionized. And while he is, of course, right, while that revolution is happening over some years, what do we do about that family on the edge of starvation that was really hoping for a fish to make it through the day?

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.

How Money and Media Influence the Way America Eats

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 below.

To read my pre-conference blog post, see Forests and Food. For more information on the conference, see:

• The preview in the Huffington Post--James Beard Foundation Food Conference: How Money and Media Influence the Way America Eats

• The Full Conference Agenda

Panel DIY: Cooking Up A Better Food System -- Perspectives on How We Can Affect Change

• Ricardo Salvador, Moderator; Program Officer, W.K. Kellogg Foundation

• What We Can Do With Culinary Education - Greg Drescher, Vice President of Strategic Initiatives and Industry Leadership, The Culinary Institute of America at Greystone

• What We Can Do with Messaging - Jonathan J. Halperin, President, Designing Sustainability
  

• What We Can Do Politically - Wendy R. Gellman, Senior Policy Advisory, Office of Senator Kirsten E. Gillebrand

• What We Can Do with Money - Michel Nischan, Co-Founder, Wholesome Wave; Chef, The Dressing Room

Cooking Up A Better Food System -- Perspectives on How We Can Affect Change from Jonathan J. Halperin  on Vimeo.

Narrative Interlude: The Power of Effective Leadership -- Jonathan J. Halperin

The Power of Effective Leadership  from Jonathan J. Halperin on Vimeo.

Seeds of Change

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. But also in New York City, where the urban vista of Central Park and Columbus Circle spread out below us during James Beard Foundation Conference taking place in the LEED-certified, Gold, Hearst Tower.  (For more on the conference, including video of my presentations, see my previous dispatch: How Money and Media Influence the Way America Eats.)

I have a sense that brewing beneath the headlines, but gaining momentum steadily are the seeds of major change. From Wall Street to Main Street, from agriculture to energy, it seems very likely that five years hence we will look back at this period and see it as one of major transition.

In the short-term, ice melt around the North Pole may create some major mid-term opportunities for Exxon/Mobil and its partners in Vladimir Putin’s crime-riddled Russia. And some restaurants may continue, as Frank Bruni put it heatedly in the October 17 New York Times, a trend that is less about food and more “a florid demonstration of just how much culinary vanity we’ve encouraged and pretension we’ve unleashed.”

But while wind energy and organic agriculture firms today contribute very small percentages to their respective industries, they are the disruptive players – the newcomers who threaten to upend the business model and to drive change beyond what market share alone might predict. One fascinating player in this transitional moment is what many may remember--mistakenly--as a tired magazine from the doctor’s office; today Good Housekeeping is anything but that. A co-sponsor of the James Beard Foundation conference “How Money and Media Influence the Way America Eats,” Good Housekeeping prints 25,000,000 copies monthly and is read by one out of five women in America. One out of four mothers in America read it.

At the other end of the spectrum from this powerhouse, mass circulation Hearst magazine, the Dana Meadows Sustainability Institute fellows this year were 15 fascinating women from the United States, Pakistan, Germany, Indonesia, and South Africa. And all driving change in myriad ways: social, personal, cultural and political. For a third perspective, have a look too at the ‘heroes’ from HRH The Prince of Wales’ movie and initiative, Harmony. Also mostly women as agents of change. Are woman perhaps the vanguard of a new age where the intergenerational equity promise at the core of sustainability begins to take root? More on this soon.

Time and Language

As children, many of us were encouraged to persevere and be somehow comforted by the strange adage that “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never harm me.” Not exactly. Language does matter.

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.

When I mentioned this last week at the Aspen Ideas Festival to Marvin Odum, President of Shell Oil, he seemed bemused.

• Coal was formed some 300 – 400 million years ago as giant ferns and other plants died and were buried and then baked in swamps.

• Also fossilized remains from hundreds of millions of years ago--likely of plankton, diatoms and other microscopic sea organisms--oil too begins with the capacity of these organisms to convert solar rays into energy.

• And according to the Natural Gas Supply Association, “natural gas is a fossil fuel. Like oil and coal, this means that it is, essentially, the remains of plants and animals and microorganisms that lived millions and millions of years ago.”

As we go about the business of quickly releasing the carbon dioxide and methane that mother nature took hundreds of millions of years to carefully sequester, we would do well to remember that time, like geology, is a very powerful force. How we come to understand time and its many meanings has huge impact on how we see the world and the challenges we face. (And more on that in upcoming dispatches.)

For example, the Co-Founder of Wired Magazine, Kevin Kelly, recast the seeming universality and permanence of today’s social media technologies at a fascinating session with Sherry Turkle (Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self) last week at the Aspen Ideas Festival. His calm observation that the web is about 8,000 days old reframed the entire discussion.

What seems fixed today, is sure to change tomorrow. Unless of course we are talking about rocks or the deep underlying natural processes that support life on planet earth.