Green Options

After more than seven hundred hours of filming and editing, largely underwritten both by himself and those organizations supporting his visionary film-making endeavor, Chris Bedford has offered an inspiring documentary, Coming Home: E.F. Schumacher and the Reinvention of the Local Economy, where people are, once again, people, not reduced to “consumers” or “tax payers” (recently on the hook for billions of dollars of bailout money).

As an award-winning film maker for such films as What will we eat? and The Organic Opportunity, Bedford has honed his craft to capture both the pivotal work of the late E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful and subsequent endeavors of the E.F. Schumacher Society and the creation of a local economy in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

While viewing the film Coming Home, officially released at the MOSES Organic Farming Conference in La Crosse, Wisconsin, I realized that this was no ordinary 37 minute documentary. It could very well be the start of a revolutionary way to view the local economy, starting with sustainable agricultural systems and the organic foods these farms provided to community residents and ending with BerkShares, a local currency. According to Coming Home, about 2 million BerkShares are now in circulation throughout Berkshire County. As of February 11, 2009, 100 BerkShares equal 95 U.S. dollars.

From provocative interviews, timely quotes and excerpts from E.F. Schumacher or from those in the community, Coming Home weaves a story of hope, empowerment and some practical ingenuity at just the right time when We the People are searching for solutions, turning not to Congress, but to our communities, and to Main Street, not Wall Street. Carefully selected footage and fine editing work makes for an engaging review, even for the most skeptical of viewers who may not see the power in communities that have their own farmers, radio station, interdependent retail district and currency.

While the U.S. Congress and President Obama attempt to jump-start the economy (the destructive “growth” one, not the nature-based, restoration ECOnomy) by spending hundreds of billions of dollars they don’t even have, many ecopreneurs and the green businesses they manage continue to prosper in the restoration ECOnomy.

True, some of the proposed Federal spending will be devoted to the “green economy,” providing a boost to renewable energy production, energy efficient construction and more fuel efficient transportation.  But the ecopreneurs my wife and I interviewed for our ECOpreneuring book have discovered that the “triple bottom line” approach to running an enterprise is more resilient to economic (or ecological) shocks — like the ones occurring around the world at an accelerating pace.

For example, take Small Potatoes Urban Delivery, or SPUD for short, founded by ecopreneur David Van Seters.  Already North America’s largest online organic home grocer, SPUD merged with Organic Express and Westside Organics in 2008. With the amalgamation, SPUD now serves four major U.S. west coast markets: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Portland.

In these times of change and challenges, we need success stories.  Here’s the story of SPUD founder David Van Seters, adapted from ECOpreneuring:

Small Potatoes Urban Delivery, or SPUD, is no ordinary delivery service. First, they promote organic food with free home delivery. Second, they sell food grown or produced by local or regional farmers, whenever possible. Their business model intersects the double-digit growth in organic food and the buy-local movement, while reducing carbon emissions and urban congestion through their resource-efficient delivery service. Topping it off, SPUD harnesses the Internet to offer customers the opportunity to customize their orders with a guarantee of satisfaction.

Have you ever wondered about Mother Nature’s counterpart, Father Nature?

Look no further than ecologist and artist of nature, Steven Apfelbaum. You could even call him Father Nature. His book, Nature’s Second Chance: Restoring the Ecology of Stone Prairie Farm (Beacon, 2009), offers an engaging and refreshingly personal narrative of how, as humans, we can reconnect with the land, our community, and our true selves through restoration work on the land. (The book is also available as an eBook.)

“Dirty hands and sweat welded my relationship with Stone Prairie Farm … where I have worked to give nature a second chance,” writes Apfelbaum in the book’s Introduction. “My years of planting, of nurturing the resurgence of prairie, wetland, and forest cover where eroded fields once lay exposed, have created a deep, direct connection to nature.” The land became his home, love, passion, and peace — even the humble beginnings for his livelihood after launching the ecological consulting firm, Applied Ecological Services, Inc., and Taylor Creek Restoration Nurseries — both exemplary triple bottom businesses.

Apfelbaum’s inspiration, like many in his field, was renowned conservationist Aldo Leopold who so clearly enunciated a vision for a land ethic to guide our human relationship with all of nature: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it does otherwise.”

While there are some who say we will (or should) travel less in the coming years — and perhaps some of us will — let’s not forget that the travel industry is the second largest industry on this planet after the industrial-military complex. It’s vitally important to many communities, businesses and organizations, ours included. We operate Inn Serendipity Bed & Breakfast, completely powered by the wind and sun.

My first post on ecotourism presented an approach to travel that sustains, enhances or restores diverse ecological systems, preserves the economic and social well-being of the local and global community, and fosters a greater understanding on the part of the traveler of nature, culture or the community visited. It’s the “triple bottom line of profits, planet and people” I write about in ECOpreneuring, applied to the travel industry.

This type of travel usually provides the ecotravelers with authentic experiences (read: not merely heads on beds) and the travelers themselves participate in the renewal, restoration or revitalization process underway by the community, business or organization. Ecotourism is a departure from the consumption and luxury focus of the mainstream tourism industry that touts all-inclusive resorts and 4-star amenities with little or no thought given to paying livable wages to employees or producing some of their own energy on site.

Since piloting a green travel program in 2007, the State of Wisconsin’s Department of Tourism, through their Travel Green Wisconsin program, has provided a framework by which already green tourism related businesses can be more easily found while those enterprises that recognize that there’s more green in going green can follow detailed certification requirements to embark on their journey to evolve, as all organizations will need to do sooner, or later, as a restorative enterprise that follows not just the laws of supply and demand, but also the laws of nature.

Are you fed up with the Fed (Federal Reserve System) and Treasury Secretary, or growing weary working at a job for someone else’s dream and financial benefit?

I was, before I launched by own dream green business and starting making time to smell the flowers and eat the strawberry.

Here are 5 tips to start a green business based on my experiences and book, ECOpreneuring: Putting Purpose and the Planet before Profits:

(1) Follow your Earth Mission.
Wealth without purpose is poverty. Who wants to be the richest person in the cemetery? Turn your passions and sense of purpose into an enterprise. Ecopreneurs craft an “Earth Mission” to use their business as a catalyst make the world a better place, often defining success qualitatively, not quantitatively.

(2) Operate your green business with a triple bottom line: people, planet and (some) profits.
Rather than the purpose of business to simply generate profits, sustainable businesses thrive in a restoration ECOnomy based on restoring or enhancing the planet, providing fair and equitable relationships amongst all stakeholders, and generate profits to sustain the business and its mission (in various ways, to make the world a better place).

As some people in sustainability circles know, Philadelphia is not just the birthplace of America, but also a vanguard city of what is often referred the Living Economy movement, or the local ECOnomy.

Under the direction of Philly’s White Dog Cafe, its proprietor Judy Wicks, and other local pioneers, a sustainable business network has served as a prototype for a local Living Economy that advances the triple bottom line (”People, Places, Profit”).  This group has proven that business owners and entrepreneurs can be green and socially conscious and still be prosperous.

Wicks founded the White Dog Cafe in 1983. It subsequently grew from a coffee-and-muffin shop to a full-service restaurant serving organic and locally produced food. Committed to supporting humane farming practices, Wicks continued to search out the right food vendors until she could say for sure that the White Dog featured a cruelty-free menu. Her restaurant continued to reap profits, but she wasn’t content with simply staking out a market niche. She also wanted to share the knowledge she had acquired with other businesses, even if that meant helping out the competition.

We need to start using the R-words more and D-words less.

More restoration, revitalization, renovation, and remediation, and much less development, depletion, or degradation — those directives of the 20th Century that have wrought incredible damage on both the planet and its inhabitants.

That’s the message delivered by author and international speaker, Storm Cunningham, in his latest book, reWealth! It’s his follow-up to the acclaimed Restoration Economy, the first book to document the eight giant, fast-growing industries in the “restoration economy” that are renewing our natural and built environments.

Given the widespread destruction of healthy ecosystems and therefore, healthy integrated communities, we need to move beyond the status quo of simply conservation or “sustainability” to establish both the process and program of building reWealth in the restoration economy, advises Cunningham.

Are you surviving the financial crisis?

While the mainstream media seem more interested in spinning stories of foreclosures, bankruptcies and the like, millions of Americans who have gone green in either their homes, lifestyles or businesses have discovered a degree of sustained prosperity, security and stability, despite the tough times both nationally and globally. That’s not to say they’re living high on the land. But that’s the whole point for many who have chosen to live lean, green, and with the health of their community in mind, focusing on what they value, not on what they can consume next.

There’s Tazza D’oro, the fair trade and community-focused coffee house I just visited in Pittsburgh, where sales are up by double digits; this, despite the restaurant industry as a whole seeing sales plummet by about 43 percent last I checked with the National Restaurant Association. New Society Publishers, the publisher of my latest books ECOpreneuring and Rural Renaissance, both printed on 100 percent post consumer waste recycled paper, continues to prosper, perhaps even more so with books that provide positive solutions for people hungry to make a difference. For people who took their early summer 2008 Economic Stimulus Package check and invested it in energy efficiency and conservation, paid off a credit card balance, or like my wife and I, added a photovoltaic system to power our all-electric CitiCar, we realized both a return on our investment and return on environment while needing less money to pay the bankers or utility companies.

Here’s what I’ve learned from both personal experience over the past twelve years and in talking with many others about how to survive a financial crisis:

(1) Invest in the future and in your community

In a time when 401ks are quickly turning into 101ks, many Americans are exiting the debt-based economy, paying off credit cards, canceling car loans, paying down mortgages. Suddenly, when we don’t need to earn money to pay the banks, we rediscover what freedom means. We don’t save for the future, we invest in the one we want to live in, filled with green building materials, fairly traded products, and crafted as a part of the restoration and reuse, place-based economy, sometimes costing us only pennies on the dollar. From an old building turned we into a strawbale greenhouse heated by solar thermal system and biodiesel (we make with a neighbor) to various renewable energy systems, we are pleased — happy — that what we invest in does, in fact, make the world just a little better.

It’s time to join tens of millions of Americans who are rediscovering commerce in a local ECOnomy where customers are not treated like “consumers,” but rather as friends, fellow citizens, or neighbors.

While visiting a good friend in Baltimore, Maryland, my family and I wandered the narrow streets of Fell’s Point, the eclectic and artistic enclave and community that offers a more laid back vibe than the festive and equally bustling Baltimore Inner Harbor, peppered with national franchised restaurants and retail chain stores. As travelers, we recognized how the “buy local” movement echoes the growing ecotravel movement, allowing us to experience an authentic sense of place, supporting the restoration and redevelopment of neighborhoods and preserve one-of-a-kind businesses that create one-of-a-kind communities.

We ended up spending most of our day in Fell’s Point where the somewhat Bohemian community seemed to soak up its reputation not just for its retail district and overall attractiveness to hang out or go jogging, biking, or strolling. It’s one of the places where buying local thrives as Buy Local Baltimore, a project of the Chesapeake Sustainable Business Association. Buy Local Baltimore is an educational and marketing campaign designed to encourage area residents to patronize local independent businesses in an effort to improve the quality of life in Baltimore neighborhoods and enhance the economic vitality of the greater Baltimore region. Baltimore’s take on building a more vibrant local economy with small business entrepreneurship reflects the larger movement afoot nationally which often emerges from such organizations as the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE).

We ducked into artisanal shops, learned about the history of the area at the Fell’s Point Maritime Museum and sipped a cafe mocha at the Daily Grind, featuring coffee roasted right in town and served up with a smile and a discount for bringing in my own mug. For dinner we savored locally harvested steamed mussels at Bertha’s — even my young son enjoyed one.

We picked up a card from the Buy Local Baltimore which nicely summarizes some of the many reasons why we could do a little more commerce in our communities (instead of shopping at big box stores where most of the money, especially those profits, leaves our community):

1. Keeping money in the neighborhood.

On average, for every $100 spent at a locally owned business, $45 stays in the community according to Buy Local Baltimore. For a chain store, less than $14 stays in the community.