I don't tend to read many "green" books these days - not because I think I know it all, but because I'm topping up my knowledge everyday simply by doing my job, so sitting down in the evening and opening a weighty tome at p1 is less than appealing. However, I had heard a lot about these two titles so I read them back to back. On the face of it the two cover similar ground - charting the scale of the environmental challenge and what we need to do to fix it, but they go about their jobs in quite different ways.
Hot, Flat & Crowded by Thomas Friedman is a few years old now (I picked up my copy in a second hand book stall at my son's school), but I had somehow managed to avoid the works of this pillar of US green thinking. The book is very well researched and covers a huge amount of ground including some concepts I was unfamiliar with such as "Dutch Disease" - the negative impact of sudden discoveries of natural resources - and the link between human rights in OPEC countries and the price of oil. Friedman's main thesis is that while the US is addicted to oil it will never free itself from the threat from militant Islam and will end up getting crushed by the Chinese economic juggernaut. Maybe it was Friedman's assumption of a US readership, or the reliance on lengthy quotes from the good and the great from around the world, but frankly I found reading Hot, Flat & Crowded a bit of a trudge.
You can't say the same about Mark Lynas' zippy new book The God Species. The thesis here is that as we are wreaking biblical levels of destruction on the planet, we'd better use our 'god-like' technologies, such as genetic engineering and nuclear power, to stop the damage before it is too late. Lynas uses the Planetary Boundaries Group's set of 10 9 global environmental pressures to assess the threat from everything from climate change to loss of freshwater before proposing the most effective way of dealing with each problem. While doing so he lays into right-wing anti-environmental libertarians and left-wing greenies with equal abandon, arguing that the former ignore the science on the problems, but the latter similarly ignore the evidence on the most promising solutions. Not content with lauding the green bogeymen nuclear and GM, he delights in proposing water privatisation, carbon offsetting and geoengineering techniques - all anathema to the green movement.
Overall I found The God Species refreshing, entertaining and informative - certainly enhancing my knowledge of the nitrogen cycle and ocean acidification to name but two. Lynas (and indeed Friedman) is one of an emerging breed of what I call 'rational environmentalists' who say "forget the politics and the sacred cows, look at the facts, find the solutions that work". I too have long believed that while the political green movement may have done great work flagging up problems, they are hamstrung by their own dogma when it comes to solutions - nothing is ever good enough for them. That's not to say I'm swallowing Lynas' conclusions wholesale just yet - there is a faint whiff of wilful contrarianism about the book that makes me want to seek out second opinions - but he has certainly made me challenge some of my own shibboleths, and that's never a bad thing.
Verdicts:
The God Species: a must read.
Hot, Flat & Crowded: ideal for American students of geopolitics.
We will be holding two Green Academy on-line sessions on 7 December 2011. Each session lasts for one hour. You need access to a computer with sound or a computer and a telephone. You will receive a workbook to apply the learning to your organisation prior to the start of the session.
Despite the fact I've been working "in the environment" for over a decade, I still get surprised at how fearful people are of sustainable solutions.
To take an example, I subscribe to a mailing list of professional engineering consultants. A debate sprung up about wind power and intermittency - a valid and serious concern. I posted that we needed smart grids to balance supply and demand. The immediate response from one poster was that he'd never let an electricity company cut his house off from the grid. I had to quickly respond that no-one to my knowledge had ever considered this, but I was very surprised that an educated person would jump to the conclusion that this kind of intrusion would be the result.
There is a human tendency to fear change. And our media has a terrible tendency to play on those fears - witness the repeated exaggeration of the cost of Chris Huhne's energy reforms: free market "think tank" says £500 per house per year, regulator Ofgem says £90 - which figure do you think gets repeated again and again? Is it a surprise that people fear the worst?
I think this fear is simply a desire to stick with what we know. And while it is a good idea to keep promoting the positives of tackling, say, climate change - energy security, cleaner local air, cheaper bills (in time) - experience suggests that a significant chunk of the public will still find something to fear.
Instead I think we have to look at societal revolutions that have happened - for example the internet. No-one ever argued for the internet becoming so prevalent in our lives. It happened because people liked it. They liked having all that information at their fingertips, they liked being able to download books and music, they liked being able to keep in touch with their relatives around the world without the dreaded Xmas letter.
So how do we do this with sustainability? The internet is providing some - music, movies and books shifted by electrons rather than atoms - people like the convenience. Feed In Tariffs make householders want to install renewables to generate some cash - people like that. The congestion charge and differentiated road tax encourage people to buy low emission vehicles - people like the access and the lower costs.
It is solutions like these where we offer people options, which are not obligatory but desirable, that will tip the balance in the sustainability direction. People have to want to do it - if you bear that in mind then much more effective solutions will follow.
Traditionally we have worried about what comes out of our economy - solid wastes, persistent toxins, greenhouse gases, acid rain, ozone and so on. But increasingly focus is shifting to the sustainability of inputs - energy, water and raw materials - as these factors have a much bigger and immediate impact on business viability. Let's face it, no water = no business, no energy = no business, no raw materials = no business.
You may not have noticed as there was a wedding on TV that weekend, but back in June, Fatih Birol, Chief Economist of the International Energy Agency - the go to guy for the lowdown on energy for Governments - said that oil production may have peaked back in 2006. If you have filled up your car recently, the resulting bill was probably bad for your health - and energy prices are impacting on food and clothing prices - not good news in the current financial turmoil. Then we have China buying up rare earth metal supplies and various NGOs flagging up water stresses across the world.
So what's the answer? Well, in nature, if a leaf falls off a tree it is recycled by worms, fungi and/or bacteria into nutrients for that tree or another plant, creating a cycle of nutrients. Same with water, carbon, nitrogen and other key materials - they all move in cycles. This is how nature's processes have evolved over billions of years to be sustainable in a world of finite resources.
Carpet tile giants and green business pioneers InterfaceFLOR realised this some time ago. To become sustainable - their goal is zero impact on the environment - they obviously have to source sustainable raw materials. While they are using some natural materials to replace the traditional oil-based fibres, this would not cover all inputs. So they decided to use waste carpet as a raw material. While their 'Evergreen' carpet leasing service has failed to set the market alight (apparently accountants can't handle carpet as a revenue cost rather than a capital cost - photocopiers and vehicles yes, but carpets no...), their 'Re-entry 2.0' carpet recycling facility has been a roaring success.
There are countless other opportunities for this kind of thinking. I am reliably informed that road sweepings have a higher concentration of platinum than that in naturally occuring ores due to all those catalytic converters in our cars releasing lots of tiny amounts. So people are working on the technology to 'mine' those materials from our streets and return them to the economy. Likewise there is great interest in 'mining' obsolete mobile phones for the precious metals within.
This requires a big shift in thinking away from outputs and towards inputs. Recovery and recycling are traditionally seen as waste management options rather than as sources of high quality raw materials - so quality suffers. The current prevalence of virgin raw materials means that such 'secondary' materials also tend to suffer from low volumes, high prices and lack of competition. Forward-thinking companies like Marks & Spencer are actively working to strengthen these new supply chains by increasing volumes, demanding higher quality of materials and encouraging a diversity of suppliers. The recycled polyester brolly pictured is a result of these efforts.
When stuff we rely on starts running out, we'll thank these pioneers for their foresight.
A recurring theme from our clients is that great opportunities have been missed because sustainability wasn't considered early enough in a particular project. By the time anyone with environmental responsibilities gets to see the plans, momentum has already started and the best that can be done is a slight deflection in a greener direction rather than the radical rethink required.
The obvious solution is to make sure that sustainability is considered at the very earliest stage - right back when the need for any project is being debated, and certainly before any solutions are proposed. The bigger the project and the longer its impact (eg construction), the more important this becomes.
But fundamentally this is a symptom of a wider malaise - sustainability is still in a silo and not integrated into the DNA of the organisation. In good organisations, safety is seen as everyone's responsibility, and in TQM, quality is seen as everyone's responsibility. To be a true green business everyone must take responsibility for sustainability, rather than calling in the 'Green Team' towards the end of planning get a project rubber stamped or tweaked at the end. Then sustainability will never be an afterthought.
At the minute I am spending the bulk of my project time engaging clients' staff members in sustainability with the aim of changing their attitudes and behaviour. I've talked about some of the techniques I use elsewhere, but one issue that keeps coming up is non-green behaviour is often easier than green. It stands to reason that if you expect your staff to act green, you've got to make it easy for them - if you want someone to use a recycling bin, then don't stick it at the end of the corridor, put it by their desk.
A great recent example was a session where someone complained that no-one was using the company's teleconferencing system. When we explored why not, we discovered that in order to calculate the financial benefits of the system the company made it a condition of booking that a calculation of avoided staff travel time and travel costs had to be included. So you'd have to sit down and work out where everyone was coming from, how they were travelling, how long it would take them, what each person's hourly cost was and what fares/hire car charges/mileage they would incur. And then add it all up and then you could use the system.
Most people are unfamiliar with teleconferencing, so by putting this extra burden on "good" behaviour, staff were just sticking to the same old "bad" behaviour they were used to - booking a conference room and letting everyone make their own travel arrangements. You can hardly blame them.
This is known in the trade as a "perverse incentive". If you want your staff to act in a certain way, you have to make sure that the architecture of choices (to borrow from the book Nudge which is all about this type of thinking) always makes it easy to take the green choice and harder to take the non-green choice.
A positive example of this I came across recently with another client was they had changed their travel booking so that booking a train fare was done in house for you, but if you wanted a short haul flight, you had to book and pay for it yourself and claim back the cost. So while you still had the choice, it was much more of a hassle to fly.
One option I always offer to my clients is to capture these issues because they are often below the radar issues that only emerge when I challenge attendees to think of solutions. Not only does the client get an extremely useful "to fix" list, the attendees feel empowered and much more likely to engage properly both inside the session and afterwards.
When I first got started in this business I used to get patronised a lot. "It would be nice to [be greener]," these grey haired pillars of business used to tell me, "but we've got to live in the real world..." I don't get this so much - maybe those greyhairs have moved on, maybe my own emerging crop of grey gives me a bit more gravitas, or maybe attitudes have changed, but I still find it incredible how many people are stuck in the Milton Friedman/Chicago School of Economics mindset that the only purpose of a business is to make profit.
Look at some of big business/economic stories of recent years:
2011 News International and the News of the World hacking scandal: serious ethical/legal failings have led to a 168 year old paper closing, share prices falling and a huge business deal put on the back burner indefinitely. [Oh, and literally as I type this, the Chief Executive Rebekah Brooks has stepped down].
2010 BP oil spill: causing a huge environmental disaster then failing to appreciate the scale of the impact either on the ecology or local communities. What were they doing drilling so deep? Is oil getting harder to find?
2007/8 Banking crisis: unethical lending and dubious unregulated "financial products" lead to a bubble which, as bubbles do, burst, causing huge economic and societal hardship. Governments have had to bail out the banks as the societal impact of letting them fail would have been devastating.
What's in common? The one-eyed pursuit of profit with no cognisance of societal or environmental realities leading to crises for the businesses themselves, never mind everyone else.
Let's wake up and smell the coffee. Business is a function of the economy which is a function of society which exists in the ecological world. And that, my friends, is the real world.
My eldest, Harry, is four and a bit years old and like most kids of his age, he's the king of the cheeky killer question, the hardest ever being:
Do the neurons in your head speak in proper language?
How do you answer that without getting metaphysical on his ass? But the classic pre-schooler question is the most powerful - "why?". Other parents will know the score:
Daddy what are you doing?
Pruning the tree.
Why are you pruning the tree?
Because it grew too big.
Why did it grow too big?
And so on...
At this age kids are trying to sort out fundamental principles in their heads so they are never afraid to challenge what they see, hear or feel, whereas we adults make most of our decisions based on experience, habit, social pressures and gut instinct and we rarely sit back and question why we do things.
Given the scale of the sustainability challenge we need to radically rethink why we do things and why we do them in a particular way. Inside organisations sustainability efforts often come up against "That's the way we do it here" - a blind assumption that the status quo is the status quo for good reason. Using the toddler test - asking "why?" until you can't any more - is a powerful weapon in your armoury as a change agent. "Why?" makes people stop and think, and it can get the conversation back to to fundamentals which can lead to greater innovation.
But the power of why? should also be brought to bear on the field of sustainability itself where many myths prevail over common sense. People assume the waste hierarchy is carved in stone, biofuels and offsetting are dismissed offhand as evil and many just follow the well-trodden path without asking what they are trying to achieve.
So, sometimes it pays to think like a child - after all it was a kid who saw through the Emporer's New Clothes.
Regular readers will know I'm a big, big fan of TED talks - I thrive on the optimism, insight and eloquence of the speakers. This one, by Johan Rockstrom, is another gem. I spend so much time reading, writing and discussing sustainability, it really takes something to grab my attention, but Rockstrom manages it. He quantifies all the major environmental pressures, shows how they almost all accelerated in the mid-50s, and demonstrates how many can simply be solved. I love his pronouncement that we are living in the most exciting decade in human existence as we try and 'bend the curve' back towards sustainability. Highly recommended.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) is fast becoming the scariest organisation in the world - almost every press release contains extraordinarily bad news - that peak oil probably occurred back in 2006, that the price of oil is going to undermine any global economic recovery and, now, that 2010 saw record carbon emissions making hitting the 2°C target almost impossible. While there's a strong temptation to hide our head in the sand in the face of such a stark warning, the only sane response is to up our game.
Here's a mini-manifesto for progress:
1. Stop finger pointing: sustainability is everybody's responsibility - Governments, business, the media, civil society and individual citizens. Playing the blame game just slows us down, waiting for others to act will get us nowhere, sitting on a high horse is for pompous fools;
2. Be practical: let's bin the political ideology, sacred cows and conspiracy theories that clog both sides of the environmental debate and do what works;
3. Be ambitious: for all the posturing, most environmental improvements are merely incremental. Let's stretch ourselves and use ingenuity, determination and vision to get us out of the hole we're digging for ourselves;
4. Be prepared to pull the plug. Face up to the fact we're going to have to stop doing some stuff - sustainability is not just about starting to do good stuff, but phasing out bad stuff;
5. Relish the challenge and enjoy the ride. If others see you enjoying making your household, your neighbourhood, your organisation or the whole world a better place, they're far more likely to join in.
This isn't going to be easy, but as the great philosopher Billy Ocean once sang, when the going gets tough, the tough get going.
The Green Executive Webcasts went really well on Friday with lots of excellent questions. My favourite, partly because I had a response ready, was:
"What is the biggest barrier to corporate sustainability?"
To which my reply is:
"The biggest barrier is only six inches wide - it's the space between our ears."
This might sound a bit trite, but it doesn't make it less true. Much of the reason why we pursue unsustainable practice is attitude - lack of priority, busy-ness, ignorance, habit, shortsightedness, despondence, fear, laziness or combinations of the above. Of the 18 Green Executive interviewees, to my mind Martin Blake of Royal Mail puts it best:
“Don’t take no for an answer and don’t ever give up. People will often tell you that things are not possible when they actually are."
This is why staff engagement and culture change are so critical to delivering sustainability. You've got to understand how people think, what motivates them and how to tap into that. It's much more important than shiny new technology.
The third of our Green Business Webinars will be held on 13 April at 14:00 GMT. The hour long session will cover the critical issues of staff engagement and culture change. It aims to give you the tools you need to transform your the culture of your organisation - we'll be looking at why 'switch it off' campaigns fail, how to emotionally engage with people, and how to deal with environmental cynics and other difficult people.
The webinar costs £45.00 + VAT per person - use the button below to pay by card or Paypal. Contact us to make a BACS payment.
"Gareth's webinars are smart, punchy and thought provoking. His approach shows how sustainability is about achieving commercial advantage and not simply an altruistic gesture. Highly recommended." Graeme Mills, GPM Network Ltd.
"[The webinars] are great value and I would recommend them to both CSR professionals and SME owners." Louise Bateman, GreenWise
"I consider this a must for organisations looking for practical help in improving their sustainability performance." Ted Shann, Wipro
I'm producing a series of podcasts called The Green Business Confidential. These will complement the series of YouTube videos on the Terra Infirma channel. The videos are intended to be more detailed, the podcasts more opinionated.
Here's the first podcast in the series, entitled "Go Green Save Money Is For Amateurs":
In military parlance, a "blue on blue" is when units on the same side mistake each other for the enemy and open fire. The same thing happens with irritatingly high frequency in the environmental sector, the most recent case being the attacks on the proposals for a green motorway service station in the Cotswolds. The credentials of the facility are impressive - green buildings, alternative fuels and local foods, the problem seems to be the 'motorway' bit - a green motorway service station is seen as an oxymoron.
Poppycock. That's the only phrase I can use without breaching my own no swearing rule here on the virtual Terra Infirma Towers (the air in the real Towers is often blue). Nowhere in any scenario of a sustainable future will people not travel or eat, meaning they will want to refuel themselves and their vehicles (public or private) while they are travelling. So its not an oxymoron to provide those services on a low carbon basis, on the contrary, it is essential.
But this is just one example of 'commentators' who paint themselves so fundamentally green that no progress will ever be good enough (as it would mean they would have nothing to moan about). Criticising others is the easiest thing in the word and, while often necessary, has minimal virtue compared to actually doing something positive. As Ross Perot once said 'the activist doesn't say "the river is dirty", the activist cleans up the river.'
So should businesses like the developer of this motorway services just give up if nothing they do is good enough? In a word, no. In The Three Secrets of Green Business, I identified a number of "green hyenas" who look for weaknesses in green efforts to feed on - one of which was the fundamentalist green who will never approve of anything done by business. While hyenas are generally unpleasant animals (I've seen one take a wildebeest down by the, ahem, family jewels), they perform a very important role in the eco-system by weeding out the weak and clearing up waste. Same in business and sustainability - we do need the self-righteous critics to sniff out the greenwash even if they sometimes/frequently miss the target. Use them to spur you to greater efforts, greater transparency and greater honesty. The best way to beat them is to be impeccable.
If you missed my interview with Penny Pullan on sustainability and virtual working (teleconferencing & telecommuting) on 6 July, you can download an MP3 by clicking here.
If you want to experience half a day of me teaching you the fundamentals of green business, you have two opportunities next week, both in the North East if England. Click here for more.
The content of the sessions is roughly based on my first book, The Three Secrets of Green Business, with some added spice from the as yet unpublished sequel, The Green Executive.
Hot, Flat & Crowded by Thomas Friedman is a few years old now (I picked up my copy in a second hand book stall at my son's school), but I had somehow managed to avoid the works of this pillar of US green thinking. The book is very well researched and covers a huge amount of ground including some concepts I was unfamiliar with such as "Dutch Disease" - the negative impact of sudden discoveries of natural resources - and the link between human rights in OPEC countries and the price of oil. Friedman's main thesis is that while the US is addicted to oil it will never free itself from the threat from militant Islam and will end up getting crushed by the Chinese economic juggernaut. Maybe it was Friedman's assumption of a US readership, or the reliance on lengthy quotes from the good and the great from around the world, but frankly I found reading Hot, Flat & Crowded a bit of a trudge.
You can't say the same about Mark Lynas' zippy new book The God Species. The thesis here is that as we are wreaking biblical levels of destruction on the planet, we'd better use our 'god-like' technologies, such as genetic engineering and nuclear power, to stop the damage before it is too late. Lynas uses the Planetary Boundaries Group's set of 
