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!

Defending the business case for sustainability

I had another report come across my desk that made the arguments for why it benefits the bottom line to invest in environmental and social responsibility. There are two main pieces to this. One you can reduce risk, or costs by investing in better business practices, better sourcing of products, inputs or suppliers, and/or reducing waste, energy, water. The second is that you attract and retain business by being authentic to values of social and environmental responsibility.

It is the latter that I think is really interesting and wanted to dive into a little bit. Living your values is incredibly powerful. It is that thing deep within all of us that guides our actions. When you feel frustrated or upset at something, often times it is because the situation conflicts with your values. Or when you feel inspired and excited, your values are being put to good action.

Values can be really difficult to define and know unless you spend the time thinking about them and we aren't conditioned to call them out very often.
Companies however do call out their values, either overtly or intrinsically. And this is what connects the consumer want to build a relationship with your brand.
So when there is an opportunity to "live" ones values through purchases or partnerships people trend towards this. Yes I understand that many people need to see the hard numbers around the business case, but let's not under estimate the strength of values. Are we formulating business cases so we can live our values or are our values driving us to find the business case.
This brings me back to my theme that we are so constrained in a market economy. We try and make things fit within these borders and well making money at any cost and values are often at conflict with each other. So what I love to see if how creative people are getting with executing their values of environmental and social welfare in a system that has not been open to them in the past. Go forth and continue which every way that we can to change the system to finally align the world we live in on the outside with the values we believe on the inside!

Changing mid-stream

When I left University I focused straight away on finding a company to work for that already "got it" when it came in implementing sustainability practices. I did not want to waste my time working for a company where all the time and effort was spent convincing other people why considering people and the planet was important for the business. That was about changing mindsets and most of you know changing the way someone thinks and acts is an incredibly difficult act.
I was extremely fortunate and worked for two separate companies with strong values in social and environmental responsibility, so they type of work that I got to engage in was leading the field. However, in both situations either company did not start out this way.
If you look across the large organizations in the world, they didn't start out with a mandate to be socially or environmentally responsible. They started out in various ways, but mainly to see a dream fulfilled - to create a great product or service, to make money, to fill a need in the market. So when a company starts out with one direction, to change courses and start doing business differently is incredibly difficult.
It really does start with mind-sets because now the leadership of the business is being asked to think and behave differently than they ever have before. It is much easier when the incentive line up - like the company will be fined, or punished in some way if the change is not made. Like environmental regulations on water pollution. But when it is the "right thing to do" or will reduce future risk, it become s a lot trickier for leaders to make the changes. This is in large part because it is a unknown, we don't have a crystal ball on what the future has in store for us. So often companies take tiny steps, safe steps, in the direction but ignore their elephants in the room. What I mean by this, is that if your business relies on fossil fuels and unfair labor conditions to make your products, the office recycling center is not going to save your company in the long haul. Especially when the company structure and leadership in place is designed on making money in your existing system.

So even though I did get to work for amazing values based companies, they themselves where in legal/corporate structures that prevented a lot of decisions from being made because of fear of working outside the market economic system. So what are other companies to do even when the values based companies are challenged? Invite your leaders to be leaders to try staying in the sustainability solutions for a day - see what comes up and out of those ideas, take it step by step, but in the end make significant changes.