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.

Markets, Governments and People

The notion that “what’s good for General Motors is good for the country” is actually a misquote of more complex 1953 testimony from Charles Erwin Wilson; “ …for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa…" At the time, Wilson was president of General Motors and President Eisenhower’s nominee for Secretary of Defense. Fifty-nine years later, 25% of General Motors’ stock is held by the US Government as a result of the financial crisis. But even absent crises, the neat dividing lines between governments and free markets is more dotted than it is bold. And it is likely to become even more squiggly in coming years. That shift, though needed, is fraught with risk and there are very diverse ways of re-blending responsibilities, markets and government.

At the just concluded Global Philanthropy Forum in Washington, DC, there was much talk of the need to harness the power of markets to improve the world (see the full agenda and video of the proceedings).

A terrific panel on impact investing (see "A Different Kind of ROI: The Role for Private Capital" to the right) championed this as a mechanism for blending and integrating charitable missions and investment strategies. The question being posed, rightly, is why focus so much on grants (generally 5% of foundation assets in the US) but not on the assets themselves as a means of driving change?

The lure of the market, with all its attendant risks, is strong. And as articulated by Jed Emerson, Executive Vice President of ImpactAssets, to have impact foundations need to stop “acting like trout,” mostly hovering motionless in swirling water and only occasionally jumping to catch a bug as one passes overhead. Impact investing is needed, is a good idea, and is sure to expand in coming years.

From another vantage point, markets can undermine governments and cripple their ability to serve citizens. Privatization of government assets in the former Soviet Union was largely a massive transfer of wealth from the public trust into private hands. As a businessman in The Soviet Union throughout the 1980s and 1990’s it is clear to me that (despite some very serious efforts at fairness) the give-away of state assets was wholly corrupt, took place in a modern economy and resource rich country on a scale never before imagined, and will continue for generations to undermine public trust in state institutions while enriching a small elite. So while communism was vanquished, the structure of political and economic power in Russia today is perhaps more akin to what it was in Tsarist times than to that of a European or North American modern state.

Beyond the Russian experience, devolving public goods such as water into the hands of private firms, with the positive intention of attaching prices to increasingly scarce resources as a means of protecting them, have also run into major problems in countries around the world.

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. That markets alone will protect and allocate scare resources such as water in a manner that is equitable and socially acceptable is a pernicious fantasy. When we dislike the role of government we refer to it disparagingly as the regulatory morass, command and control, and bureaucracy. When we favor it, we champion the level playing field.

But as we reorganize the social contract – changing the dynamic relationships between governments, markets and societies – the need for sound policy and effective government intervention is central to effective strategies for change. We live in a time where it is fashionable to trash government (bureaucrats, all), mock politicians (idiots, all), and demand that leaders be entertainers.

Through their terrific work with social entrepreneurs, organizations like Ashoka, The Skoll Foundation, Acumen and many others are empowering individuals to harness markets to meet pressing social needs. The winners of the Vodafone Wireless Innovation awards  presented at the Global Philanthropy Forum were inspiring to all of us. Who would imagine mobile phones as a key imaging tool in diagnosing cancer? But to empower entrepreneurs and harness market forces is not to delegitimize government from its still central role in ensuring opportunity, freedom, and dignity for everyone -- regardless of the extent to which anyone can or cannot participate in the marketplace.

The Photosynthesis Economy

Jeremy Rifkin stole the show at this week’s CERES 2012 Conference,” Igniting Innovation, Scaling Sustainability” Amidst a line-up that included EPA Administrator, Lisa Jackson, Jack Ehnes, CEO of the California State Teachers Retirement System (managing $145 billion) and Carl Pope, sage of the environmental community and long-time head of the Sierra Club, Rifkin’s closing presentation was superior not for lack of competitors but rather for its range and scope. One could feel a ripple spread out across the 600-plus gathering of business and environmental leaders in Boston as we absorbed his opening assertion; the largest economy on earth is photosynthesis. In a TED-worthy presentation (and no slides) he then ran through a catalogue of facts and examples – from peak oil and species extinction rates, to economic cycles and renewable energy opportunities. (For more on Jeremy Rifkin's presentations, see his TED talk on "empathic civilization" and his collections on Vimeo and YouTube)

Asserting that the Fall 2008 financial collapse was in fact an after-shock to the real economic earthquake that occurred July 2008 when oil reached $147 per barrel and the global economy began its downward spiral. Given the near ubiquitous presence of petroleum derived products in everything from fertilizer to pharmaceutical products, he makes a strong case that we have now entered a period where 5-6 year cycles of growth and retreat will repeatedly be triggered by oil prices surging into the range of $130-$140 per barrel. Despite the severe and systemic crisis he sees and a palpable sense of urgency – 40 years by his estimate before the window of opportunity closes – Rifkin also outlined six pillars (and more on each of these in future blogs) for an economic and environmental renaissance that are startlingly ambitious and quite logical.

1. Acceleration in the production and use of distributed energy;

2. Retrofitting of existing building stock to turn buildings into mini power plants;

3. Utilization of hydrogen for batteries to store energy;

4. Expansion of the smart grid as a transmission mechanism for energy; and

5. Introduction of electric vehicle fleets replacing the internal combustion engine.

And Rifkin’s sixth pillar, a change in consciousness, is based on a provocative and compelling link he draws between how societies are organized and how the human brain evolves. In brief, he postulates that with each fundamental shift – from foragers to hunters and gathers, from rural agricultural societies to urban cultures – so too does the human brain evolve to account for closer, tighter, and more complex social interactions. And empathy, he asserts, not aggression or greed or competition, is at the core of evolving human consciousness. (For more on this see Rifkin’s fascinating tome, The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World)

The need for a change in consciousness ran like an invisible thread through much of the conference in calls for more robust theories of change, the use of new tools such as the CERES AquaGauge and WRI’s Aquaduct, and Carl Pope’s quip to a smaller group that “natural gas is a potentially useful fuel afflicted with an abysmal industry.” And in many side discussions I exhorted people to marry facts with compelling narratives, to reframe the climate debate as a positive need for “climate stability,” and to refocus our thinking, planning and processes to embrace timetables that run well past the typical quarterly myopia that afflicts American industry.

As Pope, Jackson, Rifkin and many others observed there is increasingly no difference between environmental protection and economic prosperity. Future economic success, in Rifkin’s terms the “third industrial revolution,” (which interestingly is also the title of this week’s Special Report in The Economist), will be an environmental and energy revolution as well. Climate change is thus rightly seen not as an environmental challenge but rather as an economic issue – rife with risk and opportunity.

Mining the Planet

I’ve had occasion to have some in-depth conversation with Achim Steiner, head of the United Nations Environment Programme. In the following clip below we discuss the unique role of humans play in both degrading and repairing the natural environment. And as part of that we review the conundrum of humans both as a species within that natural environment, and as the only species that can act on that environment in potentially catastrophic ways.

As I suggest to him, we are at a unique moment of species responsibility as we have a triad of technical capacity unknown to earlier generations:

• geographic information systems that let us see and analyze data in place;

• knowledge management tools and techniques that enable us to handle massive quantities of data; and

• a deepening understanding of resource and environmental economics that help us see market failure and the richer value of fully functioning ecosystems.

As Achim explains, we can and must do so much better than “simply mining the planet.”

(For more video of Jonathan Halperin presenting and interviewing on the theme of ecosystem restoration, see Hope in a Changing Climate.)

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.

Forests and Food

As the elderly and aggravated Chinese gentleman said in Hope in a Changing Climate, “my grandchildren can’t eat trees!”

Reading the long piece in the New York Times (With Deaths of Forests, a Loss of Key Climate Protectors) this week it appears that across the world trees are being eaten not by children but by beetles and other insects at such an increasing rate that the role of forests in sequestering carbon need to be recalculated.

Here in Vermont, at the Dana Meadows Sustainability Institute, amidst the intentional community she inspired the maples and oaks and sycamores are beginning to shift colors; the smell of fall is in the air, and the grass has a sheen of just frozen water atop it so that it crunches when compressed under a boot.

In Aspen, at the Ideas Festiva l over the summer, trees were a focus as well – emblazoned with environmental information about their important and varied roles – as the life support systems of the planet.

When I present next at the James Beard’s Foundation annual conference in New York City, on the theme of money and media in the food sector, yet again trees will not be on the menu. But they will be on the agenda – as they should and must be.

(On the first day of the conference [Oct. 12] I will be showing an excerpt from Hope in a Changing Climate in a session entitled "The Power of Effective Leadership." On the second day [Oct. 13] I will be part of the panel "DIY: Cooking up a Better Food System -- Perspectives on How We Can Affect Change" leading a session entiteld "What We Can Do with Messaging". The conference will be broadcast live and video will be available at the conclusion of the conference. 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 and the Full Conference Agenda

The Sustainability Principle

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.

Intergenerational equity – using resources today such that we don’t impair the rights of future generations to also meet their needs – is deeply in conflict with what we have come to see as the normal behavior of short-term profit maximizing corporations. That conflict is real and should not be smoothed-over or avoided.

However, for companies seeking to generate long-term value for investors, employees and the communities in which they operate sustainability is absolutely essential to success. It is in recognition of this, as I have noted elsewhere, that Unilever recently announced it was no longer issuing the seemingly sacrosanct quarterly financial report.

Over the longer term, it also becomes essential for business to manage, protect, and restore critical assets without which business will most assuredly collapse. Ecosystem assets are vital to long-term profitability.

And we now possess the tools needed to exercise this responsibility in ways that were unimaginable a few short years ago. First, the fields of resource and environmental economics have come into mainstream thinking. We understand that there is a price associated with using the carbon sequestration capabilities of the natural world. We recognize that it makes sense to pay more for the room with the ocean view than for the one overlooking the dumpster.

Second, knowledge management tools enable us to collect, analyze, understand, and share vast amounts of information about what is happening in our world – from the depths of the ocean, to ice caps, to soil moisture.

And third, we can now place this knowledge in concrete physical space, using geographic information systems.

With vast knowledge comes commensurate responsibility. As Prince Charles states at the opening of Harmony, "I don’t want my grandchildren, or yours, to come along and say to me ‘Why the Hell didn’t you do something about this?  You knew what the problem was.”

(Visit TheHarmonyMovie.comfor more information on the film -- and view the Harmony Movie Trailer from Balcony Films -- courtesy of Vimeo)

Local, Sustainable and Organic

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.

While there are standards that must be met before labeling food as “organic” in the United States, the range of practices that exist between conventional and organic farming is enormous and growing. No-till farming, for example, preserves soil nutrients but is widely practiced with the use of pesticides and fertilizer. Organic produce, on the other hand, can be flash-frozen and shipped around the world at enormous environmental cost. So called, “food miles” may not be the right measure of what to consume or avoid, but it surely evokes visceral concerns about what is really ‘better’ in a holistic sense.

And this search for the truly better product – something that in the United States evokes that “Mom and apple pie” feeling – has spawned an alternate universe of certification schemes. From the Rainforest Alliance, Forest Stewardship Council and UTZ Certified Good Inside; to the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oilcertification and hundreds of other certification mechanisms the race is well underway to meet a wary public’s desire for greater assurance that products are not only safe to consume, but also produced with minimal impact.

Some of this growth in certification is driven by distance. Few people today can practice what has for most of human existence been the most common method of certification.

Ben Stenn, however, an impassioned and talented chef at Celilo, in Hood River, Oregon, uses the tried and true method of assessing the quality of his ingredients; he visits the farmers who grow it. (Video courtesy of WinePressNW.

Since most of us cannot personally assess how farmers grow what we eat, intermediaries do it on our behalf and then crystallize what they have learned by affixing labels to what we then purchase. Witness Organic Valley’s marketing built around the core question: “Who’s Your Farmer?”

I suspect that at root (sorry!), whether searching for local, sustainable, or organic, what people are seeking is trust. As distant as we have become from the sources of our sustenance, we all still crave reassurance that we can trust the people who are selling us what we eat.

Data, Data, Everywhere

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.

And too often it seems to be data collection is for reporting rather than decision-making. Through sophisticated accounting systems we track cash flow, ROI, P/E ratios and a host of core financial information. And business leaders use this data to inform both operational and strategic decisions.

But if the data we have on, for example, water usage, carbon emissions, and packaging waste are only rolled-up quarterly or annually for the purpose of sustainability reporting, then how useful can they be to decision-makers? To truly imbed sustainability into corporate culture, not only do we need the metrics and data, but we need to render this information in ways that are accessible and timely for making business decisions – not just reporting them.

GreenSpace Knowledge Center Goes to Nationals Ballpark

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.

More than an office, more than a conference facility, more than a learning center, and more than a product demonstration venue, GreenSpace is a microcosm of the kind of community it supports throughout the national capital region. Designed without walls but with sustainable materials throughout, the space is designed, by Gensler, to be reused and redesigned without waste. It takes LEED one step further and redefines the notion of modular office space to encompass a truly mixed-use operation that is connected to and a driving force within the community.

GreenSpace founder and director, Patty Rose, embodies a new style of leadership where breaking down barriers replaces protecting ideas; where building win-win collaborations trumps competition; and were process mimics content. As the press release explains:

“Our green learning and resource center at the Nationals Park will be the place to go to build the skills, knowledge and capacity of professionals, policymakers and the public to create and retrofit ground breaking green buildings, sites and communities across the region."

For more on how GreenSpace has been driving change, in a town often criticized for being at the heart of the problem rather than the solution, see www.greenspacencr.org and its statement of goals Growing Green Communities Together (pdf).

Among the policy and sustainability leaders celebrating the launch of GreenSpace’s new facility at Nationals Ballpark last week were:

Eric Grant Vice President, Corporate Relations Washington Gas

David Robertson Executive Director MWCOG, Metropolitan Washington

Harriet Tregoning Director DC Office of Planning

Christopher Tulou Director DDOE, District Department of the Environment

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.

To Aggregate or Segregate – Is That The Question?

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.

Given the current structure of food and agriculture markets, organic costs more – across the entire supply chain from farm to table. Depending on the type of food, some of this added cost comes from the need to certify, track, and move products through distribution networks that are parallel with but not quite the same as the networks for conventionally grown products. In this regard, organic is segregated from mainstream produce.

Some consumers accustomed to paying lower prices for conventional food are increasingly willing to pay a premium for the value of ensuring that what they eat is closer to pure and unadulterated food. And businesses are eager to build brand equity, trust, loyalty, and gain access to this still small but rapidly growing market.

But if organic agriculture aims to ‘go mainstream,’ when does a segregated and ‘special’ product itself become a commodity? And if it does, does it thus transform and redefine the commodity market? “Mainstream,” implying a majority of consumers, may be less the issue than knowing what it takes to shift standard industry practice to a new level. And more on that shortly.

Dave Brewer, Emerson Dell Farm, explains his use of new seeding techniques to an international delegation of business and NGO leaders participating in the Sustainable Food Laboratory summit outside Portland, Oregon.

A Conversation with Bill Clinton about Climate

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

A handful of us were talking after listening to his view of the 2012 election: Obama Administration success stories, observations on the Republican field, and calculations regarding Hispanic votes. I then solicited his thoughts on climate. He had just explained the critical importance of generating and managing uncertainty as a tool for political power.

I asked if he thought this ‘uncertainty principle’ could also be applied to generate support for successful climate and energy policy. After a brief pause, as his famous piercing blue eyes narrowed slightly, he said, “yes, I do.” He talked quickly and intensely about the importance of a single line in the stimulus legislation that Republican leaders have targeted. The fight is over $2 billion that has helped jump-start electric-vehicle battery manufacturing in the United States. (According to DOE, the 26 plants now operating will have capacity to meet 20 percent of global market demand in 2012).

A passionate advocate for aligning economic growth, “green jobs” and reducing carbon, Clinton then looked around, lowered his voice and leaned in to speak with the four of us in a huddle (perhaps because Chris Matthews and Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi might otherwise have overheard his next point). Pointing again to the new jobs created in the automobile battery sector with federal support over the last 18 months, he said “and they are worried that we really will generate the jobs with these investments…and that’s why they killed it.” He then raised his eyebrows evocatively, “Got it?”

We then shook hands with the 42nd President of the United States, as he thanked us for coming and for the questions we posed.  With nothing to gain and no votes to solicit, Bill Clinton still left us all feeling that we had had a few moments with one of the truly commanding leaders of our age.

Geology and The Bottom-Line

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. Hundreds of senior executives from America’s leading corporations exploring urgent questions of climate stability, water resources, sustainable agriculture, and innovation and entrepreneurship. But Jones stole the show with two powerful remarks. Knitting together transparency, a key metric for responsible corporate reporting, with core business performance, she quipped that “if you’re going to be naked you better be buff!”

At a more granular level, we learned why SAP, in a small but significant shift, now releases financial results with its sustainability report, forcing a common language across the NGO and financial communities. If you want to see SAP’s carbon footprint you cannot escape their profit and loss statement; and if you are looking for their operating margin you also come face to face with “total energy consumed.”

We also reengaged what I see as an increasingly tired question -- is there “a business case for sustainability?” Do companies ‘do sustainability’ to make money, to reduce costs, or to enhance license to operate, brand equity, and to retain new and younger employees who want to feel good about their work every day? We heard powerful examples of business growth, market opportunities created, and profits generated from embedding sustainability in corporate DNA and also using it as a lens to drive innovation.

But – and it is a big but – it seems to me that the way we have framed this debate diverts us from the core sustainability challenge. And that is how we think about time. There is a disconnect between the incentivized behaviors of short-term profit-maximizing corporations and the increasingly bold proclamations by corporate leaders that their organizations will increasingly act with the interests of intergenerational equity at the forefront of strategy, planning and business operations.

Whether the fossil fuels we use to generate electricity, water to make myriad food products, or trees for desks and paper; all of the natural resources (including atmospheric gases) that we use to make products (or hold industrial “wastes,” like carbon) exist across a geologic time-scale measured in hundreds of millions of years. Three-year ROIs and quarterly earnings reports are but microscopic specks of dust across, for example, the 350,000,000 million years during which coal was formed from giant plants that died long before the dinosaurs.

When we ask (and ask and ask!) that sustainability justify itself on the altar of modern-day market capitalism, is this not a bit like arguing with a lump of coal over its own formation? We, rather than the coal, are the newcomers; who says it needs to explain itself to us? Coal is surely not going to adjust to our short-term needs. The core question is thus not about the business case for sustainability but rather the lack of a sustainability case for short-term profit maximizing behavior.

Done right, over a time-scale that accommodates both geology and the bottom-line, human ingenuity and nature’s incredible diversity and robustness can likely find a harmonious synergy. But this will take real leadership.

Who among the leaders of the Fortune 500 wants to tackle this issue of time and link his or her compensation equally to sustainability performance and profits by insisting that compensation be reviewed on a three-year basis across an integrated bottom line? Who at the SEC wants to lead the charge to bring corporate oversight out of the 19th century and into the 21st century by moving beyond limited reporting of climate risk to helping figure out how to bring trillions of dollars of environmental externalities onto the books of our nation’s corporations?

Hannah Jones also noted that at Nike, “we are measured against our potential.” Who among our corporate leaders today has the courage to just ….?

Leaders Today

Leaders today can little afford to be mere experts. Effective decision-making demands of leaders that we move fluidly and confidently across issues rather than be constrained by what we know. Making decisions with access to all the information required is easy. But leadership is about making the right decision in the face of limited or conflicting information.

• How can we see over the horizon to plan for emerging issues before they impact the bottom line?

• When traditional research approaches aren’t helping clarify a decision, what outside-the-box approaches will help?

• If we do what we measure, but we are not fundamentally in the business of sustainability, how de we embed metrics that make sense?

• How do we drive change, and preserve our organizational identify?

• What’s the effective way to asses an NGO/Corporate partnership to see if it really makes sense?

Whether we term it marketing or outreach, how do we effectively engage citizens (or consumers) beyond those that already know us and support us?

Call it sales, call it advocacy; we are all in the business of communications. And reaching across traditional divides is critical to addressing the great challenges of our age.

There is no such thing as climate policy without energy policy. Without addressing poverty, sustainable agriculture will never reach its promise of feeding not only this but also the next generation. Water issues are central to political, financial, health, and geographic realities and possibilities.

A Hospital without Patient Safety?

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?

But as the concept of corporate responsibility has expanded beyond it initial construct of corporate social responsibility, so too the early focus on transparency, reporting, metrics and monitoring leaves much of this work outside the core business of business. Who would go into a hospital for surgery if we knew in advance that there were only, say, seven people working on patient safety while the rest worked on… what?

So for all the good that CR has done and is doing, in too many organizations the issues remain peripheral – small teams of dedicated people, sometimes with the ear of the CEO, pushing nudging the core business into incremental changes. Like tugboats working with a tanker, we often remain far from the engine room of power, profit, decision-making, and prestige.

Whether an executive, a stakeholder, a shareholder, or a CR professional we must confront the reality of popular fiction. Corporate structure is a figment of our legal and cultural imagination. Phenomenally effective at generating economic growth and the stuff that we all use and discard, and this engine has been one of prosperity for many millions of people, so too has this imaginative structure enshrined a set of incentives that all too often set people against one another. Short-term profit maximizing behavior clearly has denuded forests and stripped mountaintops bare. Long-term social development and cultural unity has often frayed as corporate institutions excel. Incumbents use market power to stifle innovation, even though they were yesterday’s innovators.

We know what CR looks like today, but tomorrow?

Are you Handling or Mishandling the Climate Challenge?

The issue of our time is framed for failure. Climate change is the norm and everyone experiences it daily; the weather changes. Climate stability, however, is the goal – for people, business, and global ecosystems. We need predictable climatic conditions to make good decisions – whether to make major capital investments or whether to carry an umbrella.

And the climate is not an environmental issue but rather the connective tissue that ties energy together with business, development and poverty with agriculture, and health with the environment. No mere question of semantics, the fundamental definition of the challenge has immense impact on how we work to develop solutions.

The challenge is not fundamentally science, finance, or even policy. Rather, we lack the thinking and the institutions capable of effectively responding to an issue that cuts across so many traditionally distinct areas of expertise – especially when compounded by issues of risk allocation and intergenerational financial equity.

Are you handling or mishandling the climate challenge?