Interesting Solutions Ahead

Earth2Tech profiles a neat module for Facebook that facilitates carpooling.
Through it ...
"you can do a bit of research into your carpool mate’s history before jumping into a moving vehicle with him or her. Users can also post their offered or requested rides, and include how much they are willing to pay (or how much money they want) in exchange for a ride."

Sometimes, Social Media and Green fit like peas in a pod.
Interesting solutions ahead.

Mind the gap

Some comments from the London Conference
on the marketing gap in Green.

- from Ben Rowe's blog

Edgy green marketing

New reduction-of-consumption campaign gets attention, drawing in a generation of people who have most to gain from better stewardship of resources - the young.
But is it polite enough.

Posted on Canuckflack

Green categories, embracing usage

In Green marketing it is typical to 'sell the category.' But the category isn't limited by product type ( eg fuel efficient cars) - the category embraces type of usage. And manufacturers need to find ways of communicating a marrying of their superior product with superior usage.

Pursuant to the USFDA's Organic Foods Production Act of 1990, “organic” food products may contain 5% of non-organic minor ingredients. So, what, 95% green. Now there is a proposal to add 38 ingredients to the National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances. Imperfect world, made more confusing.

Dancing About Architecture

Greg Verdino pulls out a quote that may be unattributable: "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."

Greg adds:
"Or like presenting PowerPoints about social media. None of these things make any sense and, at the end of the day, are pointless exercises. "

Sometimes it seems that Green Marketing is a malapropism.

Wikipedia: "The Green movement is a political movement which advocates goals common to Green parties, including environmentalism, sustainability, nonviolence, and social justice concerns."

In a consumer-driven/consuming-obsessed society, "green" is a consumer niche. Only. By this limited definition, Whole Foods engages in green marketing, without a doubt. But maybe there are good reasons to expand our notion of the term "green" - at least, to reclaim its original, unabridged, meaning.

- image from lamujerconstruye.org/

Enviro Deluxe

Here on the Canadian west coast we have seen a dramatic, recent rise in conspicuous wealth. A luxury car from the 1970s seems quaint today. Any contemporary new car is superior in almost every respect. The days of growing up in a small house, almost identical to the one next door, and having a Dad who makes pretty much what all the other Dads in school make - these days are gone. A lot of money can be made, and this has to do with globalization, the accumulated sophistication of our economy and our relationship to cheap products made in places with low environmental and human welfare regulations.


As we get used to this wealth, we assume a kind of baseline lifestyle which is environmentally unsupportable. So our economic well being is both cause and context of our environmentalism. Next step is difficult, because no-one wants to be characterized as taking a step back. One transitional step might be to compete to belong to a new, compelling cachet - eco-chic. But ultimately we have to stare down our love of consumption, our love of luxury. Sometimes just stating this makes one feel out of step with the times. We are a consumer society, get used to it, etc. But there are incentives to stripping away consumerism, because a life of true consideration for others is a life of sanity. And sanity, and the wish to avoid its opposite, may be the deepest reptilian dimension of all.

The need to feel what we believe

Back in March, copyright law professor Lawrence Lessig praised the campaign of US democratic candidate John Edwards. He said that Edwards had the ability to make people feel what they believe.

Ideas, like science, take a back seat to conviction in politics, love and relationships. As Stephen Colbert points out, it is all about "the gut." The failure of liberalism is real: people talk about the impending environmental crisis, there is ink spilt, and then what?

It's not that people don't think environmental issues are important. It's just that thoughts alone aren't felt deeply enough. And right wing governments can ignore humanistic values because reptilian feelings like self-defense, fear, greed and hatred can break up ideas about the environment. Pulling strings on these feelings has been a successful strategy since the Reagan revolution, and neither liberalism nor environmentalism has yet to mount a compelling counter-strike.

What's an environmental group to do? Deepen the feeling people have for the environment. Deepen values that support environmentalism. And spread the virus like a warrior.

There are many ways to do this. Easily the most self evident, contagious bit of environmental communications in the past five years is Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. You watch it, you get it. Feelings of middle class entitlement fade and environmentalism is felt. But Joel Makower's latest article, The Mushiness Index, points to a study that states that 82% of Americans have neither read Gore's book nor have seen the movie. Tipping Point? What tipping point?

Gore's movie is not enough. Until people are immersed in alternative stories, stories that have comparable or greater, compelling content as Gore's movie, our base feelings, ignorance, and self-centered fears are where our attention - and convictions - will lie. And the Stephen Harpers and George Bushes of this world can ride out ice storms, can ride out the floods, can ride out the melting of the polar icecap. Some Westerners will get richer, and the complex ecological system that is our home will fall around us.

Environmentalists have to support the feeling of wholeness, the feeling of love, the feeling of justice. And they can win: anyone who has had a heart, who has had a deep love for another person, or who has encountered a Desmond Tutu or Dalai Lama, anyone will say that love conquers. Love is conviction, love changes everything. But it takes warriorship to win. We should be distributing Gore's movie, and making similar ones. That is what we do best. The science will bear this out.

Giving, useful

Free information isn't quite free. The fee is embedded in the work to decode the message, the work to hand-hold, or the payment upfront. I maintain that the best messages are predicated by giving ; that is not to say that we float above the finances.

What I've done in sites like aboutglasstile , bc mortgage connection and others is provide a wealth of information, to provide relevance. With this approach you have to be transparent about sponsorship, or the space gets creepy. The idea is to earn the right to be an authority.

People don't want to pay for information or electronic tools any more. Microsoft is finding this out. After years of both charging high rates and branding eyeballs, the user wants out. Pass me the Mac, pass me linux/ubuntu.

Does embedded advertising signal the decline of information? Well, maybe. But I'd like to know when and how work was given away for free.

Green is enthused

About a month ago I spoke to Chris Munford, founder of Bedrock Industries
I was researching background on an article that would become AGT article Futureproofing: Building environmental policy into the bottom line.

Bedrock makes recycled glass tiles and other glass items. When I called I wasn't expecting just another conversation about n% recycled inputs, re-used packaging, responsible stewardship etc. Because I knew a bit about them both from Treehugger and from Bedrock's very un-fancy website.

Some manufacturers recycle to save money. Fair enough, but don't expect me to get excited about your greenness. Like Marketing, Recycling isn't the be-all end-all. A lack of recycling is one thing, but greed and ignorance and a lack of real interest are arguably up there as major reasons why the environment is imperiled.

What makes Bedrock authentic is their intent: relationship to their environment is not so much 'policy' as a fundamental value. As a result, they dont have to worry about "marketing" so much. There is a market-as-conversation trail that follows them. What I like about this is that it is sincere and non toxic. Although some conversation can be "gamed" by clever talkers, conversation as /word of mouth marketing - leaves very little non-biodegradable mental residue that conventional branding leaves behind.

The company has always used 100% recycled materials, but they are not defined by recycling: you could say that they are defined by enthusiasm. Which makes marketing relatively easy. Bedrock has a store in Seattle, Chris explained, and this store is where they sell most.

Bedrock organizes bottle drives and give people more-than-market rates for the bottles they collect. Because Bedrock has its own, busy store, they can do small runs and not worry to much about transportation of warehousing costs. They can design what they have in front of them, taking unique materials as starting point of designs. So if a local wrecking company has, as happened last year, 100 glass panel lamps to get rid of, Bedrock can make something unique out of them, a limited edition run of tiles, in this case. As word has spread, the company's creativity is what has brought people in. People want to see neat things in their yard, see used resources differently. And people find that Bedrock's products, and their processes, are spectacles.

As the phonecall went on, Chris and I shared where we both liked, what we had done, what we both did. I got off the phone and began to think about how activity can inspire people and take them to a new place. Bedrock's open-to-the-public store is on a tour bus circuit; tourists converge on it on weekends and summer weekdays. Bedrock sells products all right, and some just pick up one of a kind souvenirs. But people come for something else as well. The company, and its 12 employees, sells citizenship and responsible, energized enterprise.

If my interest in this company seems contrived, it doesn't do Bedrock justice. Enthusiasm can and does occur spontaneously around decent things - hype is something else entirely. Real enthusiasm is the result of remarkable work and simple conversations - which in some cases is all the marketing that a brand requires.

Clay Shirky, environmentalism and freedom

Environmentalism is usually associated with a restriction on freedom. We need to re-frame the conversation. Because anti- environmentalism can take away basic freedoms ( freedom to breathe, etc).

Freedom has been characterized as a pseudo-religious justification in North Americ; the widespread adoption of Internet as a communication tool is one contemporary result. On a side note - Clay Shirky writes about the Internet and freedom:

"The best way to design a network is to allow the sender and receiver to decide what the data means, without asking the intervening network to interpret the data.” ...

What the internet is for, in other words, what made it worth adopting in a world already well provisioned with other networks, was that the sender and receiver didn’t have to ask for either help or permission before inventing a new kind of message. The core virtue of the internet was a huge increase in the technical freedom of all of its participating nodes, a freedom that has been translated into productive and intellectual freedoms for its users. As Scott Bradner put it, the Internet means you don’t have to convince anyone else that something is a good idea before trying it. The upshot is that the internet’s output is data, but its product is freedom."

The desire to protect the environment is not "just data" - the motive it not value-free. Which makes it uncomfortable for some people. So how do we get over the dip of discomfort.

Entering the small green world

Today, opposition leader Dion promises to bank on arts and culture , saying "The way to be strong economically is to be creative."

You could say this is part of a consistent, green platform.

Once you decide you want to /have to 'go green' - the next step is "how." There is the big scale - a necessary world of power politics, legislation, coaxing and coercion. And then there is the smaller scale. Both are necessary, and they are self-supporting.

The small green world is entered into the moment I stop myself from putting the hammer down to accelerate past the asshole/car in front of me; it comes when I go outside and notice the day. The closest I can come to describing this is - it is a poetic world.

Is Dion's call no more than a piece of political pandering, or fatuous generosity? Who knows his motives. Either way, there is a need to support things that are sustainable, good; the arts can help.
Teapot by Nicholas Bernard