Green Options

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Both for profit and non-profit businesses are led by ecopreneurs who are making the world a better place through their creative, innovative and ground-breaking enterprises. Lisa’s and my book, ECOpreneuring, features numerous “Ecopreneur Profiles” — including David Anderson, the founder and CEO of GreenOptions.com — along with many other brief summaries.

But there are millions of ecopreneurial enterprises prospering throughout the U.S. and around the world. Perhaps you’re one, too.

So, we have formed a partnership with EcoSector.com, an on-line portal serving as a unique conduit for growing the green economy, offering opportunities to share video clips, feature photographs of products or services, and display blogs.

May 1: May Day.

For the average American working for a paycheck, May Day — a pagan spring ritual where you dance around a Maypole — marks yet another, less festive occasion.

From the first of January until around the first of May, all the money many of us will earn goes to pay our share of income tax to the US government.

Kiss those months — that money — goodbye (the present tax stimulus package is really just a refund).

We followed the advice of our parents, as most children do: get a good education, go to college and get a job — a nice, secure, well-paying one, with great fringe benefits, stock options or profit-sharing. But the bimonthly paychecks — after the government gets its share for income, Social Security and Medicare taxes — aren’t enough to keep up with the bills. Even with raises and promotions, many of us feel that we keep getting further in the hole, since the more we earn in earned income, the more it’s taxed. The reality is that the system is largely devised this way, not to tax the very rich but to exact a fee on the middle class and poor to keep these wage earners on the treadmaster of a job — or “promising career.”

The more income-producing and complementary projects my wife and I have in our ecopreneurial business, the more stable and secure we feel, careful to not let work override quality of life considerations.

After all, we, like many ecopreneurs we’ve interviewed or met, don’t live to work. Instead, we find our livelihood and the businesses we navigate deeply satisfying as we make the world a better place through the green businesses — for profit and non-profit alike — that we own or direct.

The key to our approach to ecopreneurship is looking to nature for inspiration. Our green business is both diversified in enterprises as well as the products and services we offer, filling economic niches in much the same way as plants, animals and fungi fill ecological niches that create sustainable, interdependent and healthy ecological systems. For example, there are thousands of bed & breakfasts in the U.S., but only a few that specialize in serving vegetarian (or vegan) organic breakfasts with ingredients mostly harvested a hundred feet from their back door, like we do. That the Inn is completely powered by the wind and sun and welcomes children as guests, serves as additional niche experiences we offer our guests who we generally refer to in our ECOpreneuring book as “conserving customers,” not consumers — but more on this in a future blog.

A nation of 9-5-ers is giving way to a spirited movement of innovators, searching for ways to make a life filled with purpose and meaning, instead of simply earning a living. And they’re thriving in the place-based “honey bee economy” that restores, preserves and conserves the planet.

From an enterprising individual operating a small retail business to an inventor who comes up with a better way to fuel our vehicles, from the founder of a non-profit organization to the organic grower who feeds our local community, just about anyone can be an ecopreneur and run a green business.

Are you one? See how many questions you answer affirmatively below.

Are you more interested in what you do and with whom you work than how much you make?

Does community, environmental and social issues drive what you focus on with respect to your livelihood or volunteer time?

Do you view your experiences, growing and diverse knowledge base and unique skills sets as the primary value you can offer clients, customers or workplace?

Do you think the late Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman ate too many Big Macs after he argued — much to the chagrin of the massive multinational corporations and millionaire politicians — that “the only social responsibility of business is to make profits”?

I, for one, don’t remember the stagflation of the 1970s.

It was a time when prices were increasing at the gas pump and grocery store, and when the economy sputtered along with little or no growth. Some neighbors saw their wages flatten — or their jobs disappear altogether. Gold, often seen as a barometer of economic confidence, was at an all time high (adjusted for inflation). I was pre-teen in a comfty Detroit suburb with a father who worked at then stalwart, GM, so a roof over my head and food on the table was never a concern.

But here we are today, with Priuses outselling Suburbans. Oil and gold are at all time highs. Things seem far more perplexing, interconnected, global. First, there’s the perception of a housing crunch, even though fretting over a 15 percent decline in home values over the last year or two seems rather odd given the incredible run-up of many homes over the past decade, sometimes by over 100 percent.

Second, the sub-prime mortgage mess has snared many who agreed with greedy lenders that living beyond our means was okay. That more jobs are being outsourced overseas or replaced by fancy machines in this increasingly global marketplace isn’t helping either.

Even if the Federal Reserve or Congress and the Bush Administration do manage to convince the American people that they should keep on spending by splurging with windfall tax refund checks — thus avoiding a recession — the printing presses rolling off fresh greenbacks and mounting debt on a national level could result in the onset of stagflation. Oil, while swinging up and down with the speculator’s bets and value of the dollar, will continue on its upward trajectory reflecting the reality of “peak oil,” the period by which its extraction and refinement will get ever more expensive and difficult. Our economy, and those linked around the world, are based on this fuel and this fuel is largely denominated in US dollars. When the dollar falls in value, the price of a barrel of oil must increase.

So why will ecopreneurial businesses fare any different than all the rest if, in

Effortlessly perched along the spectacular coastline of Big Sur, California, along the winding Highway 1, rests the Esalen Institute. While waves crash upon the rocky cliffs, up to 250 people per day participate in enriching workshops or research activities, often followed by a soak in the hot mineral baths tucked in a cliffside crevice. Since 1962, the nonprofit educational institute has provided transformational workshops for people eager to explore and realize human potential through experience, education and research.

My journeys along Highway 1, in search for leading ecopreneurial enterprises, brought me to this healing place and, as I discovered, a thriving residential community that draws energy and sustenance from their surrounding biological richness. It’s this residential community of researchers, staff, and educators, along with the enrichment programs and remarkable natural setting, that have drawn over 300,000 visitors from around the world seeking a greater connection to community and the land.

In their Solarium, a building attached to the main lodge where all the meals are taken in the community, I talked with Juliet Johnson, a former water engineer turned sustainability guide for the Esalen Institute as its Sustainability Coordinator.

All businesses have “variable expenses” related to energy, right?

Not always. There’s nothing in the IRS tax code preventing businesses from investing in renewable energy systems (and energy conservation/efficiency) that allow these businesses to operate more efficiently, sustainably, and green. In fact, often there are tax credits and other incentives to encourage these kinds of investments. Some businesses, like ours, generate a surplus of energy, essentially wiping out energy costs not to mention cutting carbon emissions (more on this another day). Taking such an approach to business, boosts our bottom line profitability.

Around the Summer Solstice every year (this June 20 - 22 in 2008), the Midwest Renewable Energy Association, or MREA, hosts the world’s largest and longest-running “Renewable Energy and Sustainable Living Fair” in Custer, Wisconsin, a fifteen minute drive from Stevens Point in the central part of the state. It’s one of the places where we learned the basics to transform our business, Inn Serendipity, into an independent power producer by harvesting the wind and solar energy with a 10 kW Bergey wind turbine and .7 kW photovoltaic system, respectively.

After the mighty industrial military complex (the companies behind the missiles and the satellites to guide them), tourism is the world’s largest industry, according to the World Tourism Organization.

While tourism is big business, much of the industry can be just as destructive as the other extractive industries (mining, lumber, agriculture), sometimes operating in the same places around the world, places like the spectacular Alaskan Wilderness or rainforests of Indonesia. Oceans containing fish or oil hidden deep below the surface in certain parts of the world, provide the setting for the popular love affair by many people, of living on floating cities called cruise ships, turning port stops into Mall of America-type shopping sprees.

Not all tourism, however, thrives on the consumptive value of mass tourism that burns through resources or exploits people for the benefit of pleasure seekers. A small, but rapidly growing segment of the tourism industry, “ecotourism” has emerged which now accounts for as much as 4 to 7 percent of the industry, depending on definitional terms. While the academics debate these definitions ad nauseum, the industry and number of ecotravelers are growing at double digit rates according to The International Ecotourism Society.

Don’t be fooled one minute by the politicians in Washington DC.

The economic stimulus package hailed by Congress and seemingly supported by the President is to provide as many as 116 million tax filers with a check for $600 to $1,200 (perhaps more if you have children). But all they’re doing is basically returning money we’ve already paid into the U.S. Treasury. And to do what?

Spend it, according to Democrats and Republicans alike.

These policians and their team of experts believe that what we need to avoid a recession is more consumption. They want us to spend our way out of a recession. Forget that “free markets” go through economic cycles of bulls and bears. Forget about our spiralling federal deficit. Forget about the mounting cost of numerous wars being waged on several fronts to fight terrorism — a bill the next generations will be picking up the tab for. Forget about global warming, collapsing bridges, our addiction to oil. Forget about the highly questionable fiscal shape of Social Security and Medicare in the coming years when about 78 million Americans are fully “retired” and need some money to live on and pay for the doctor bills.

Just take your token windfall and blow it on a new plasma TV, or something else you’ve always wanted.

I’m a business school failure — in a positive sort of way.

Rather than spend most of my life in a carpeted cubicle, earning-and-spending and, in my case, pimping for the culture of consumption at a large advertising agency in Chicago, my wife, Lisa Kivirist, and I exited corporate America. We resettled on a 5.5 acre small farm in southwestern Wisconsin, endeavoring to learn how to grow our own food, generate our own electricity and in various other ways reclaim the ability to meet our own needs without depending on Corporate America to provide all that we need, for a price. That goes for providing a job as well. The business school I attended as an undergrad primed me for a “successful career” earning income from a Corporation, paying taxes to the government and owing much to the banks that would one day own my home, car and credit worthiness.

By exiting the fast track overflowing with Lattes and legions of consumables (remember, you have the look the part of an Advertising Executive), I’ve settled into my own skin, weeding our bountiful gardens, harvesting more solar and wind energy than Lisa and I can use on our farm, and raising our son with the Earth in mind. Our business, Inn Serendipity Bed & Breakfast, when paired with our other enterprises like writing, speaking and “green marketing consulting”, provides a lifestyle and workstyle that’s sustaining to us and the ecological community in which we’re inexorably linked.