What does a change agent look like?

I love the title: "Change Agent" it sounds so official.  That some government department has a force of agents who are hired to make change.  The even better part is the reality that ANYONE can be a change agent.  Change agents are those who have taken it upon themselves to change their own behaviors, actions, or thoughts and are inspiration to help guide others.

I have to write about two change agents who recently inspired my life.  The first is an old colleague of mine from a past company.  I saw her after 18 months of not being in touch while I was skiing in Salt Lake City last weekend.  We were talking about plastics and she told me of her commitment to no longer using disposable plastic in her life.  I thought about it for a minute, looked around the lunch table, and responded - HOW on earth are you able to do this?  He answer was thoughtful and motivating.  She just chooses to live her life differently and go that extra step to not rely on the quick fixes of plastic.  She brings her own bamboo utensils with her for eating out.  She brings her own water bottle, she opts out of what is available if it is only plastic.  And she has become resourceful - finding a refillable store for her shampoos, detergents, and soaps.  I was so impressed, I thought how can I take this passion for change and implement it in my life?  I definitely think twice about my purchases and options in a different way now, trying to reduce my dependency on plastic.

My second change agent is a colleague at work who went for a run at lunch the other day.  While this might not be a big deal, it was the motivation I needed to say - exercise is that important and I should take the time to go out for that run despite what I might have on my plate at work. The best part was that when I came back from my run the next day, someone else commented on how inspired they were to see my running, that they went running later that week.

These random acts of sustainability from change agents everywhere are those motivating pieces of inspiration that influence others to tap into that part of them that wants to make the change, but for some reason is not pulling the trigger on the action.  This is why each of us must live our values in a public and passionate way.  This is the strength of human connection and the desire of being and doing more with our lives.

I wonder what I will select to commit to?  Thoughts?

Article on Fair Trade Certified apparel

Check out this article I wrote about our experience at prAna bringing on Fair Trade apparel

Good Article

What happens when you hear insightful things for a source that you wouldn't necessarily go to.  Skimming through Fast Company I found a great article on Sustainability by British Petroleum. Not the source you would go to, but despite what happened in the Gulf, BP had been investing in a new future for their company.
Steve Percy has six lessons for sustainability - check out the article Greening Black Gold: Lessons in Sustainability.

There is a lot of fear about the changes that Percy is proposing when you are inside a company.  But it is true, to make sustainability truly a shift in the way humans and business impact the world we need to take these risks.

Eating our way to sustainability

I just finished Jonathan Safran Soer's book Eating Animals - I have been a vegetarian for the past 16 years and it was not a book for the faint of heart.  I admit I skipped a few pages, as I am a vegetarian for a reason.  I grew up on a farm in Northern British Columbia and saw how animals were killed, so that part doesn't both me as much as the factory farm piece, the way animals live and our responsibility for that.
Factory Farms were at the core of this book, not only the way animals are treated, but the health risk these farms pose to consumers, neighbors and the planet at large.  Interestingly he noted that these farms are not about creating food, but about creating money.  And when you have animals as your commodity it becomes an even more tense situation.
Our relationship to food is so varied and so that means our strategy towards sustainability will be the same.
For instance there are millions of people in this world who live in poverty and do not have access to food.  And then there are another group of millions who have access to so much food that there are societies with obesity issues. Is the issue about redistribution of this food?  Or could it be looked slightly differently about sustainability of food, food systems, human health and balance with local ecosystems to provide the sustainable amount of food.
In many ways this is what we should be advocating - but doing so in the USA means that millions of food calories do not need to even be produced.  Concern then grows for the livelihoods of the people growing this food.  What if systems were slowed down so the output was lower, more people had jobs and the food that we ate was contributing to a sustainable ecosystem instead of taking away from it.
There are some amazing models of sustainable food systems all of the world that need more voice and need to be supported.  All the way from local farming practices in places like Africa to urban agriculture in Washington DC.

Reconnecting with our food is something we all must take on as a personal challenge - this is the daily relationship with sustainability that we can live.

Sustainability from a different angle

I am half way through an amazing book called Design Futuring: Sustainability, ethics and new practice by Tony Fry. Although I had painful moments of being back in grad school and reading academic literature that I know I am not smart enough to truly decipher, I was inspired by this book. He presents many themes, but the one I wanted to write about today was one that has been floating around inside my head and Mr.Fry was able to articulate it in a way that helped me gain clarity on it.

He frames sustainability in the form of anthropocentric. Previously as an environmentalist I would frame my argument as saving the environment... why?  because it is the right thing to do, because people are destroying the planet, because there is something innately wrong about economic growth at the expense of the environment and humanity.

Fry frames it this way - "Sustain-ability'... is an acceptance of anthropocentric desire - it is about 'saving humanity' by saving what we collectively depend upon (thus it refuses the deception of 'saving the planet') and it implies changing the processes by which our lives are sustained."pg 44

Hopefully you also see the shift - we still need to save all the trees, bugs, animals and people, but we do it from the way that people are designed anyway.  This slight shift all of a sudden makes every person in the world a player in this process for change.  As people on this planet we have a primal nature for sustaining ourselves, our families and our communities.  Now in order to truly do this on a sustain ability path, this means that our behaviors and practices at every level have to ask themselves am I sustaining by doing XY or Z?

If you were to look around to see if this is the way we live?  Not on a massive scale - so there is a need for a shift.  That shift will be huge at some point when we reflect on the way we used to live, but in the mean time that shift will occur when new ideas and designs present themselves informed by past ideas and designs, until we are eventually moving us into a world that truly is sustainable.

Time for Reflection

I was having a glass of wine with a dear friend the other night and we started talking about New Year's resolutions, she said that her new year really started in September - must be left over from the life of school.  I had to agree - there is always a sense of something new around labor day, pushing restart.  But I also feel the same way today on January 1.  And if you are a Buddhist, you relish in the restart with everything.  Regardless of when one takes the time to stop and reflect, the desire for this action is significant. For we are told constantly that we live in such a busy world, where do we find the time to do anything, but somewhere deep within our being is this desire to reflect.

This morning I spent a bit of time in my garden (sorry everyone outside of southern California) turning over my compost and thought about what do I want this year to be about?  I think a lot about my values and how I do or don't live them. I know better when I am not living my values, but I justify the convience of not doing so. For instance, driving my car to the gym, buying the non organic bananas, tossing out instead of rinsing the way old moldy yogurt container in the back of the fridge, those kinds of things.  But what about the values around the way I get to live my life?  I like many of you earn an income from a company that needs to sell more things in order to remain in business.  What this world doesn't need is more things.  This will be my challenge for this year, it requires me to dig deeper into the principles of sustainability and see how to execute them in my work.  It is very easy to not push myself, my company, my peers because the work we do is hard enough, but if my values are going to align on a deeper level then this is now my new years resolution.

Here is to a fabulous year to all of you!