Green Options

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On Friday, 27 June 2008, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, also known as Comrade by his camaraderie of marauding thugs roaming about the breadth of Zimbabwe, will preside over his own election, uh again, as president of Zimbabwe.

Declared a sham, even a mock of an election, by the common voice of the international community and his neighbors in southern Africa alike, that has not stopped Mugabe’s men, or freedom fighters as he calls them, from baying for the blood of whomever Zimbabwean cannot correctly pronounce “Zanu-PF”, his machine to run roughshod over his hapless countrymen.

His perennial rival, Morgan Tsvangirai, having backed out of the presidential run-off, the 84 year old despot kicked a soccer ball high up into the air at a sports stadium this week as a show of virility to those who still doubt his undying resolve to cling on to power no matter what - and “only God can remove me from the presidency of Zimbabwe”.

Now that formally leaves Mugabe only at the mercy of zealous cartoonists who love to caricature him as a gorilla. And for good reasons. If looks alone was the reason for this, one could say they have been overdoing themselves but the man’s intimidating appearance, extreme strength, and chest-beating displays mimic the hairy animal to a great detail, and he loves it that way.

One hurdle that many companies selling green goods face is convincing consumers to pay the difference between conventional and green or organic products. Recent health scares and increased interest in saving the planet aside, a recent article quoting a LOHAS survey states:

…many consumers’ purchasing patterns are affected by the phenomenon of trading up: a willingness to pay more for a product that is emotionally satisfying in terms of the perceived quality, performance, brand image, and the stature it provides.

Things could change.

As prices for a wide variety of commodities hit levels not seen before, the cost of everyday items from food to furniture and gasoline to gadgets is rising also. This is, of course, putting a bit of a strain on consumer’s pocketbooks.

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