Eco Paradox, Boulder Style
During our recent partnership retreat with Innovation Network for Communities (INC), we had many rich side conversations, ranging from discussions about climate change adaptation, urban transportation design and location intelligence.
We took a hike in Boulder’s ever-present flatirons, and got to talking about the unique evolutions of the mindset around ‘green’ and ‘eco’ culture that seem to be emerging. This discussion continued when my Business Catapult partners and I co-hosted last week’s Sustainability Salon, where 25 dynamic thought leaders in our community came together for the first what hopes to be a series of social gatherings of people living in a more evolved world where sustainable business is the baseline, not the goal. It turns out that our friends at eConscious Market (where I blog), share a taste for steamed paradox, and we dug in with our chopsticks.
While it’s becoming more and more hip and culturally relevant to be seen as having a concern for the planet, sustainability and consciousness, the movement is naturally splitting into two factions, the eco-luxury movement, and the simplicity movement.
The eco-luxury movement is all about replacing unsustainable goods with sustainable ones. This allows people to maintain their consumptive patterns, shifting the brand-conscious values from gray to green. Bamboo dress shirts, Priuses, eco-conscious tourism and new “green” homes have become the new status symbols. New media, retail and experience-based businesses abound that feed this culture, are defining the new elite.
The simplicity movement is about living with less. Buying less. Traveling less. Opting out of a status-based culture in favor of growing food in a backyard garden, riding bikes and buses to work and reconnecting with the natural rhythms that we have been separated from by the past two hundred years of Northern culture. By its very nature, this movement does not attract commercial enterprise, or media attention, for it’s the very antithesis of those institutions. It’s more in tune with the realization that American (and to a less extent, Western) consumption rates have got to fall if we hope to last on the planet another hundred years.
So for all the green magazine covers in 2007, for all the angst over African aid missions, and for all the new goods made from sustainable materials, there is an invisible evolution that may just be evading the Heisenberg uncertainty principle; unobserved, for the most part, by anyone not participating.
And although you may be able to discern our preference for one mode over another, it’s not about judging. We’re each going to need to find our own path through this shift to a world view centered on the acute awareness of finite natural resources. Everyone it at a different stage of their own relation with this shift, and each of us are hypocrites in one way or another. Hopefully, this discussion will be prominent at the upcoming LOHAS forum, hosted here at one of Boulder’s paragons of eco-luxury, the St. Julien Hotel.
Our foot-powered flatirons discussion focused on how the young people, those in their late teens and early 20s, are growing up and becoming adults. How they are entirely skeptical of the media; nearly immune to it in many traditional ways.
We recognize Boulder is an interesting pitri dish for this change. The Whole Foods parking lots are as clogged as ever with BMW M3 convertibles and Porshe Cayennes, which were driven from 5,000 square foot homes half a mile away by suburban moms wearing the latest eco-fashion. That’s what’s visible. But what the untrained observer doesn’t see is the community of eight people living in a small nondescript house near the middle of town, growing veggies in the back yard, sharing a 1993 Subaru wagon and riding their bikes whenever possible.
It’s easy to get busy judging, and maybe we don’t want Heisenberg invading the simplicity movement, bringing all its change and exploding zeppelins (wait, that’s Hindenburg). It’s harder to get busy changing, in any direction, but that’s what needs to happen.
A related dilemma for social change agents is the fact that we tend to be the “eco-terrorists” of the labor market because of our propensity to travel as a natural part of our work. Ironically, these “convening” and “networking” events are often focused on protecting the environment or improving the environmental performance of human systems — yet we produce massive amounts of greenhouse gases in the process — destroying the world while trying to save it, so to speak.
We did a quick analysis of just the CO2 travel emissions for a meeting that the Innovation Network for Communities held for our partners in Chicago. Thirty five people attended (many from the Chicago region). Total travel-related GHGs amounted to 40.5 tons — the equivalent of average annual emissions for two in the US, and 20 times what our “fair share” of global emissions for one year should be.
We did a follow-up analysis of the overall GHG emissions of INC, and it summed to 130 tons per year. 90% of this was air travel. So for us to acheive the 80% reduction below baseline that is required to stabilize at 350ppm, it means we have to achieve a dramatic reduction in travel. We suspect this analysis would be similar for many other NGOs and professional individuals.
We are coming to believe that there need to be some professional standards in place to govern when we do and do not go to meetings – a “climate protection agreement” for individuals, so to speak. This would help us say “no” to meetings when in-person presence is not critical. We have been checking with environmental and climate change organizations to find out if they have anything like this in place to control when they do and do not travel, and so far we have found nothing.
We’d love to hear from others who are grappling with this issue and have ideas for solutions.
June 12th, 2008 at 8:36 amThanks, John. You’re right on target with that. We’ll be sure to point it out to people attending LOHAS in Boulder next week.
My natural reply is to suggest improved teleconferencing. But based on an EPA study I’m reviewing now, the CO2 costs of data centers (which are the backbone of the modern internet) will surpass that of the airline industry within 15 years. Of course, that cost is spread out over a much larger group of people.
I agree on professional standards of conduct. It would be interesting to propose this issue to the people at BCorp, and see how they think air travel should be measured for companies trying to qualify as “sustainable.”
June 12th, 2008 at 8:52 amI was having a discussion with a friend today about consumerism, and the current paradigm of it being the driver of our economy, whether we like it or not. Many of us (at least us Boulderites) are aware by now that we are on the cusp of a huge paradigm shift, and it will take the conscious consumer movement to spearhead this shift, gracefully.
Americans’ comfort zone revolves around consumption. Buying “things” is what is most familiar to them. So, how can we take what is familiar and safe, and tweak it? How can we convert the masses in such a way that they don’t even know they’re being converted?
I believe that we can start by providing ecologically and socially responsible alternatives to conventional products. I believe that through conscious consumerism – whether it be eco-luxe or simple products that everyone needs to survive – we have a unique opportunity to change the system by working within the system. I equate it to Gorbachev in the 1980’s. He worked his way into the Politburo by ‘walking the Communist Party talk’, by gaining their trust, by speaking a language familiar to them. Once he worked his way into the system, he changed it. Radically. Perestroika was the name he called it, meaning “openness”, and with that the USSR transformed into the democratic, market economy we know today. (And Reagan thought he could take all the credit…!). That’s the silent revolution we are all working towards. Gracefully working within our system to change the system.
As “They” say, “may you live in interesting times.”
June 12th, 2008 at 11:57 am[...] with “green”consumerism. In fact, I believe — as I began writing about Boulder’s Eco-Paradox this summer — that we’ve got to stop buying stuff, and not just because we’re out [...]
October 31st, 2008 at 3:48 pm