There's No Business Like Green Business

A snapshot of what's on my plate this week may be instructive. I'm working with my GreenBiz team to launch a new environmental printing service we're creating in partnership with Tulip Graphics, New Leaf Paper, and the Climate Neutral Network. We think it will be of high interest to the nearly 10,000 daily visitors to GreenBiz.com. We also have a contract with the U.S. EPA's Energy Star program to educate companies on the shareholder value of energy efficiency and energy management systems. And we've just forged a partnership with Net Impact and the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia to create a national Sustainability Casewriting Competition (we're looking for sponsors, by the way).

At ClimateBiz, we're preparing to roll out the first in a series of sector-specific mini-sites that focus on climate management for targeted industries. My Clean Edge colleagues and I are getting ready to publish a report commissioned by the city of San Francisco on what it needs to do to become a magnet for clean-technology companies, and are working on another commissioned report that envisions a Manhattan Project-like effort to grow the U.S. solar industry.

I'm an adviser to a forthcoming clean-tech venture capital fund that should launch this fall to the tune of around $250 million. I'm developing a paper with Cultural Creatives guru Paul Ray on why green marketing has largely failed, and how to make it work, and finishing a book review on sustainable-consumption titles for the Journal of Industrial Ecology. I try to regularly post some of the more interesting trends and developments I encounter on my personal blog.

There's more, but you get the idea.

I also spend a fair amount of time fielding queries from reporters, business students, market researchers, entrepreneurs, and others who all seem to want some magic-bullet piece of data that usually doesn't exist -- like, "How many green businesses are there (and can you send me a list)?" If I had a list, I could make a fortune!

But -- if I can digress for a moment -- the reality is that there's a reason there's no such list, and probably shouldn't be: No one really defines "green business" the same way. I usually ask these callers, Are you talking about a small, Mom-and-Pop shop that's passionately living its values, or a division of a large multinational that's learning how to shift its products, processes, or business model in a way that dramatically reduces its environmental footprint?" Usually, they mean the former, though I'd suggest that the latter may be having a more profound positive impact in terms of reducing waste, emissions, and resource consumption, including that of its suppliers and customers. So, who's "greener"? You make the call.

Along the way, one magazine piece I wrote got me interested in writing a book -- about the health effects of office environments: the synergistic impacts of putting an office worker in a bad chair in a noisy, stuffy office, and having her do computer tasks on a poorly designed terminal, the screen's readability obscured by the glare from the fluorescent lights. Then throw in some psychological stressors, like toxic bosses or personal issues, add it all up, and the research was suggesting that this was the stuff from which headaches and heart attacks are made. At the time, this was radical thinking; most people still were thinking in terms of the "cushy office job." Keep in mind that this was 1980: the open office environment -- those big cavernous spaces that did away with walls and doors -- had just come into fashion, the energy crisis a few years earlier was leading builders to better insulate buildings and cut down on ventilation to save energy, and computers were just being introduced, revolutionizing work styles. It was a rich topic. Unable to find a publisher, I launched Tilden Press to publish the book, titled Office Hazards: How Your Job Can Make You Sick, in 1981. It got a lot of good press and sold reasonably well.

I spent the 1980s writing and publishing other books, and eventually began "packaging" books for other publishers, a fancy term that involves creating books from idea through writing, editing, typesetting, design, and publication for the likes of Doubleday, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Random House, and others. The books ranged widely in topic. Among my favorites was an oral history of the Woodstock music festival of 1969, which I produced in both book (Doubleday) and audio (Bantam Audio) formats for publication in 1989 during Woodstock's 20th anniversary. There was a whirlwind publicity campaign, during which I found myself appearing on Oprah with Richie Havens and Country Joe McDonald, and the Today show with Arlo Guthrie and Joe Cocker.

About that same time, Penguin Books asked if I would "Americanize" a British book to which they had just acquired the U.S. rights. The book, The Green Consumer Guide, had been a leading bestseller in the U.K. and was largely credited with jump-starting the green consumer movement over there. I agreed to take on the U.S. version. Initially, I wasn't even going to be listed as an author, but Penguin wanted someone to promote it, so I became a coauthor, along with John Elkington and Julia Hailes, who wrote the original U.K. version.

The Green Consumer was published around the media extravaganza of Earth Day 1990 and hit some bestseller lists. I soon had a weekly syndicated column on green consumer topics in about 100 newspapers and was being asked by companies to speak to top management about the green marketplace.

Along the way, I came to realize that consumers weren't all that willing to change their buying or living habits, and that many of the so-called environmental products coming into the marketplace weren't really all that green. The anticipated marketing gold rush of green consumerism wasn't happening. On the other hand, companies seemed to be more serious about addressing their own environmental challenges, either because they wanted to, or more typically because they were being pressured to -- by activists, customers, shareholders, community groups, or sometimes just the CEO's kids. For whatever reason, I recognized that there was a need for a balanced voice on the topic that understood and could address both the business realities and the environmental challenges.

So I jumped in, and it's been an exciting ride. I sometimes step back and recall that in 1990, a major multinational could announce that it was starting a modest paper recycling program at headquarters -- and make The Wall Street Journal. That was news! Today, the state of the art has grown exponentially, though the pace of implementation inside companies remains painfully slow.

Our organizational partners at GreenBiz include Business for Social Responsibility (with whom we produced ClimateBiz.com), the U.S. Green Building Council (our partners on GreenerBuildings.com), and the U.S. EPA (our partners on GreenBizLeaders.com). I'm in regular contact with a group of allied NGOs, including the Alliance for Environmental Innovation, The Natural Step, Metafore, the Center for a New American Dream, Business Ethics Network, the Center for Environmental Leadership in Business, CERES, and others. And I regularly talk with leadership companies -- the folks on the front lines who are doing innovative things.

People regularly ask, "What's it like living in your old house? Isn't it weird?" Indeed, it was odd, but only for about five minutes. It's a wonderful house at the end of a cul-de-sac, with a panoramic view and great neighbors. We've transformed the house through two (eco-friendly) renovations, so it no longer feels like my "old" house. And, best of all, in the backyard are three Monterey pine trees -- about 30 feet tall, taller than the house -- which I planted as saplings when I was a kid! My office view looks out at them and they offer a constant reminder of my roots, as it were.

My colleague, Kevin Coyle, president of the National Environmental Education & Training Foundation (GreenBiz's parent organization), has conducted research showing that the average adult American -- regardless of age, income, or education level -- "mostly fails to grasp essential aspects of environmental science, important cause/effect relationships, or even basic but multistep concepts such as runoff pollution, power generation and fuel use, water flow patterns, or ecosystem dynamics." Perhaps most distressing, Coyle notes, "There is little difference in knowledge levels between the average American and those who sit on governing bodies, town councils, and in corporate boardrooms." This is a huge problem -- for the environmental movement, for green businesses, and for the planet.

It infuriates me that our educational institutions, our media, and companies' massive marketing machinery not only have failed to help people understand such basic but critical information about their world, but have instilled destructive myths and misunderstandings about our environmental and social problems.

That's a disservice to these companies, and to the environmental movement. When companies don't get support for their efforts, they get frustrated -- and it becomes increasingly harder for them to take on the next, more-ambitious innovation or change.

I'm not suggesting that activists should be satisfied when companies tinker at the margins, or that they should call off the dogs when a company addresses only one part of their environmental problems. But there needs to be a way for activists to acknowledge when companies are moving in the right direction -- giving them support and recognition while letting them know that they're not yet off the hook.

These issues are not high on environmentalists' agendas, at least not the national groups. Protecting the poor, it seems, isn't as sexy as saving endangered species or slaying corporate dragons or thwarting the Bush administration's latest environmental rollbacks. But the problems of the poor are arguably far more pressing in terms of human impacts, and precious few groups are addressing them in any meaningful way.

I played both rock 'n' roll keyboards and jazz piano in bands during high school and college, so I had, and have, somewhat divergent tastes. Then, it included a lot of the San Francisco scene -- the Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, Janis Joplin, etc. -- as well as bebop -- Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker. Now, it includes all of those, plus everything from Talking Heads to Diana Krall to Moby.