Blog Action Day: Why I take action

There's lots of great bloggers out there that will write about the political, scientific, and cultural aspects of climate change for Blog Action Day. So instead, I thought that I would write about something more personal - why I am taking action today and everyday to fight climate change.

A couple years ago I drove across country to move from the East Coast to the West Coast (okay, not the most green thing I could do). For those who've done it before, they know that the trip from the East Coast to the Midwest is pretty uneventful....a lot of cities, suburbs, and strip malls.

When you start the trip from the middle of the country to the West Coast, you start to understand what the country must have looked like to the first people seeing the country. Obviously you are still on highway. But, in certain areas, looking to your right and to your left, you don't see any human footprint...no buildings, no roads, no farmer's fields.

Instead, there are fields full of natural grasses bending in the breeze and untouched hills of rock plus the fascinating unique features of the West like the moonscapes of the Badlands and the interruption of the sky by Devil's Tower.

It was these views that reminded me of the impact we've had on nature. It's amazing to realize how much we've changed it and how we can never fully get back what we've lost. Sitting in my apartment in the middle of city, I still have snapshots of of those views in my head and wonder what the hill I live on looked like before me.

Looking at what we've done to our country, it's not hard for me to believe in what we are doing to the polar ice caps, the oceans, and the rest of our environment. And knowing we have these few natural places left, makes me want to save them even that much more.

So, that is why I personally take action today and everyday....What's your inspiration?

Getting back to the heart of things

Recently I attend an EcoTuesday event at which Marianne Williamson spoke about the connection between spirituality and sustainability. It might seem a slightly strange conversation for a group that bills itself as "a forum for sustainable business leaders". But in fact, after listening to Marianne, I realize that it was just what the doctor ordered.

So often when working in sustainability in business or just getting caught up in your green pursuits, it's easy to feel stressed and anxious. Often you aren't even thinking about the end goal. Marianne reminded everyone at her speech that it is just as important to do what you do with love as to the final product/result of what you are doing.

For me this means, that I need to make sure I take the time to connect back with my passion and beliefs - why I got involved in green in the beginning.... Because I want everyone single person, business and organization to take into account how they are affecting the earth in every decision they make.... Because I was awestruck looking at glaciers in Alaska last year and I want them to always be there....Because I loved volunteering to help save Leatherback sea turtle babies on a beach in the Carribean and I want them to come back every year even when I'm not there...

So why is it important to connect back to this passion? It helps me keep going. Working for green causes is not always easy and there is a lot of discouragement along the way. And, it would be so easy to give up. After hearing Marianne, I pledged that I would find one way every month to re-connect with this passion - whether it is volunteering, hearing a talk like this, going for a hike, etc.

If you are interested getting involved with EcoTuesday across the country, check out https://www.ecotuesday.com/.

Sustainability as a Strategy

I've just finished reading "Strategy for Sustainability" by Adam Werbach. Werbach's book left me feeling optimistic - I greatly identified with his ideas. Sustainabilty isn't just a community relations or employee engagement tactic - and Werbach lays out how sustainability actually ensures your company grows and thrives in the future.

Use a more traditional definition of sustainability, Werbach says, "It's about survival." He describes how companies should think about how your company's actions are impacted by everything from the environment to local communities to societal trends. When a company doesn't take all these factors into account, it is potentially missing something that will seriously inhibit the company's growth or survival in the future.

He gave the example of Nike being called out for using sweatshops to fabricate its shoes in the 90s. When it had made the decision to move its factories to Asia, it had neglected to realize that the world was becoming more aware of the impact of globalization on local communities. And, it meant they had to deal with a PR disaster that threatened the company's success.

And so, Werbach's book left me questioning what sustainability can bring to our business? The short-term often rules in our business - making the numbers for the street. In that environment, what is our blind spot? What are we missing that could come back to haunt us later? What could we do that would make our business all-around more sustainable?

Collaboration Creates Carbon?

Recently my company has been trying to promote more collaboration - small teams working on focused projects. I'm definitely supportive of the philosophy. The problem is that it seems to be coming in conflict with our sustainability efforts.

Living in the Bay Area, most of our employees' commutes are relatively long (either in distance or time stuck in traffic). In addition to supporting a number of public transportation options, the company has allowed working from home - for a day or two a week - both to reduce the number of commuters on the roads and to help reduce employees stress.

Unfortunately, in trying to promote more collaboration, one of the tactics has been enforcing a "no work from home" policy. The thought is that if you are in the office you'll have no barriers to collaboration.

The result of this policy may be more collaboration but it sets us back on our carbon footprint reduction goals- commuting is a major contributor to our company's footprint. And it will probably have secondary impacts - increasing employee absenteeism, for instance.

As with most organizational problems, I don't think there is an easy answer to encourage collaboration - and so I wonder if there is a more innovative way to make collaboration happen while not increasing the days we commute.

Could we restructure our days in the office so that we have more quality dedicated collaboration time? E-mail, presentation creation, and other individual work could be done on the work from home days.

Could make better use of the technology to collaborate more effectively? Maybe we could require everyone to be on instant messenger and engage on our brainstorming website regularly.

I'd love to hear from other organizations that have struggled with these same issues and found creative solutions....

I'm back...musings on sustainability...

Many things have kept me away from my blog for awhile, but I'm back writing about my experiences trying to make everything a little more green at work and at home.

To start out, I wanted to talk about how sustainability has fared during this recession. I've seen a lot written on all sides. I attended the Corporate Eco Forum a few months ago and it seemed that many big companies were continuing to invest as they had before in sustainability. And, more generally, it seems to make sense (or at least I hope) that the recession will encourage people to consume less and adopt more green behaviors (recycling and reusing).

My company has continued to support our sustainability department which - in the face of multiple rounds of layoffs - I definitely see as a positive sign. But, I have seen a different type of negative impact on our green efforts.

As many are concerned the debate over health care will overshadow the ability to get any meaningful legislation on climate change on the books, the recession has also distracted many people in our company. Participation in our Green Team events has dropped off dramatically. Even the random suggestions we often get e-mailed to our Green Team e-mail address are few and far between.

Why? We don't have a lot of data but we've come up with some theories. Maybe people are keeping their heads down. They might think that participating in Green Team events will give their manager the impression that they are neglecting their work and give them a reason to lay them off. Or, maybe they just have a lot more work now and any green activities have just fallen by the wayside.

These are all understandable feelings but I believe that participatin in green is an opportunity for the company and for employees to be more innovative and relieve stress. So, how can reinvigorate our Green Teams?

Should we create some very easy, low impact way for people to be engaged in the Green Team to start getting employees engage in some small way? Should we re-focus our efforts mainly on product innovation related to green so that it is part of everyone's job? Or both?

We'll talk more about this....

Reflections on Reducing

As I mentioned in my last blog, I planned to write about “reducing”. This is apropos because, for the month of March, one of our employee sustainability teams is planning a variety of activities around reducing waste. They are sponsoring a paper cup reduction contest between the buildings on the Mountain View campus. And as you might remember from a prior blog, paper is 1/3 of waste going into municipal waste stream.

According to Metaefficient:
“In 2005, Americans used and discarded 14.4 billion disposable paper cups for hot beverages. If put end-to-end, those cups would circle the earth 55 times. Based on anticipated growth of specialty coffees, that number will grow to 23 billion by 2010—enough to circle the globe 88 times. Based on hot cup usage in 2005, the petrochemicals used in the manufacture of those cups could have heated 8,300 homes for one year.”

Check out the impact of your own coffee habit here

Clearly, we have an opportunity to reduce our use of paper cups to both save money and reduce the amount of waste going into landfills.

In addition, I’ve been thinking about reducing quite a bit since I’ve also been reading “Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic” by John De Graaf, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor. Basically the premise of the book is that the more stuff we consume, we are not necessarily happier and better off.

Stemming from a PBS documentary, the authors describe how Americans feel the need to constantly consume and it is having detrimental affects on our environment, families, and communities. The authors describe “affluenza” as “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.” (p.2) And they track its symptoms, causes, and then describe what we can do about it – personally and society wide.

First let me state that I’m reading this book NOT because I want to tell others how they should live their lives, but because I want to take a harsh look @ how I live my life. In fact, I would agree with the statement that I am potentially one of the worst offenders. I live by myself in my own apartment 35 miles from work so that I can have the life outside of work that I want.

That being said, the stats that were very compelling to me were:

• The average size of new homes is now more than double what it was in the 1950s, while families are smaller. (24-25)
• Americans total yearly waste would fill enough garbage trucks to wrap around the Earth six times and reach half way to the moon.
• “Since the 1950s, the percentage of land in our communities devoted to public uses – parks, civic buildings, schools, churches, and so on – decreased by a fifth while the percentage of income we spend for house mortgages and rental payments increased from a fifth to a full half.” (66)

BUT,

• The number of people Americans who describe themselves as “very happy” has remained stable or decreased since 1957 while we consume two times as many things.

I understand that many may disagree with what these authors say. For instance, re:my last post on “re-using”, a friend commented that “if we all did what you said and reused, our economy would collapse.” I agree that the extreme is not necessarily desirable or even achievable. And I know that some aspects of consuming are unavoidable – we have to provide for our families and ending consumption altogether is not necessarily fair to them.

Nevertheless, I find it compelling to think about the information and theories in the book “Affluenza”. Putting aside the impact on the environment and the impact on society for a moment, what truly makes me happy? And will reducing consumption in certain areas of my life make me happier?

If you’d like to know more about the book and the information, feel free to visit their pages on the PBS site:
http://www.pbs.org/kcts/affluenza/show/show.html

What's Even Better Than Recycling?

My group's month of the three R activities (Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle) came to a close Friday with our Book, CD, DVD, and Video Swap in our cafeteria. Employees brought in material they didn't want anymore and others came buy and picked up new books, movies, and music. It was a big hit - one person's garbage is definitely someone else's treasure! Many people asked us to do this again – hopefully we will be able to. With all this enthusiasm around the swap, I thought that I would talk a little about reusing.

While recycling is awesome and a great step, reducing and re-using are even more powerful actions. Why?

Even if you recycle what you’ve used, you still contributed to environmental degradation through the original creation of the product. And unless we buy significantly more recycled products, we won’t use all the material we recycle, making the recycling effort wasted. Reducing and reusing avoids these two potential pitfalls.

A few stats to prove my point:

• The industry that makes all these new things we buy creates almost 20% of the CO2, a key greenhouse gas, that we humans create.
  

• Bought any new t-shirts lately? It's estimated that over 2600 gallons of water are used to grow the cotton for just that one new t-shirt.
• In 2006, Random House estimated that it used 120,000 tons of paper for its book business. If instead we used recycled paper for that 120,000 tons, we could save over 2 mm trees. And that's just Random House...
  

Okay, so you get my point. A lot of basic resources we need to live (including our atmosphere) are significantly affected by the stuff we buy.

Recycling is a great way to start, but reducing and reusing are a way of taking your “greenness” to the next level. As described by Treehugger, a good principle to live your life by is:

Reducing the amount that we consume, and shifting our consumption to well-designed products and services, is the first step. Finding constructive uses for “waste” materials is next. And tossing it in the blue bin is last. (The garbage can is not on the list, for good reason.) Through a balance of these three principals you can easily see your landfill-destined waste dwindle fast. A good example of recycling is setting your empty water bottles in the bin on the curb. But by using a water filter and reusable container you can reduce or completely eliminate your need for disposable plastic bottles.

I’ll address “reducing” in a future blog. But since our swap was such a great example of “reusing,” I’ll give you all some more ideas about how to reuse in your life.

SOME EASY WAYS TO REUSE

The most environmentally friendly way to reuse is direct person-to-person transfer like swaps. Giving products and material directly to someone else you know will use it virtually eliminates any additional environmental impacts, like pollution from shipping, etc. that might be incurred by doing something like EBay. (EBay is good though too)

• Sign up with Freecycle in your area. When you need something new or have something that you no longer need, post it in your Freecycle group and find someone who needs it near you.
• Use the Craigslist Free Section. Created after popular demand from Craigslist users, it’s the easiest way to get rid of things and give it to people who really need it. It took 30 minutes to get rid of a bookshelf I no longer needed and all I had to do was post one e-mail and carry the bookshelf downstairs.
• Donate used books to local library or find your local used bookstore. Get your reading material there too! (call the library first to find out if they can take the material).
  San Francisco
  San Mateo County
  Santa Clara
• Create a community of “Re-Users” among your friends and colleagues. Whenever you can something that you don’t want anymore, e-mail all your local friends and ask them if they could use it. When you have a party, ask everyone to bring a book to swap. When you are done with your children’s toys, clothes, or other accessories, search out the pregnant women at work and ask them if they need it.