Green Options

It can be challenging going paperless at home or work, right?

One Jackson Hole, Wyoming business, WordenGroup Strategic Public Relations, has announced a “Go Paperless” initiative for Arbor Day, April 24, 2009.

The company wants to reduce office paper flow and save trees in honor of the national tree planting holiday.

President-elect Barack Obama is asking every person in the United States to help transform Martin Luther King Day, January 19th, into a national day of community service. Obama is encouraging everyone to act locally to improve your own neighborhood and make an ongoing commitment to help those in need.

Editor’s note: John Ivanko and Lisa Kivirist, the authors of Ecopreneuring: Putting Purpose and the Planet Before Profits, are both contributors to sustainablog and other GO Media network blogs. Despite our relationship, I was excited about their new book, and agreed to write a review. I’ll try not to let me relationship with John and Lisa get in the way of a fair and impartial assessment.

Ditch high-paying (and high-stress) corporate careers for a Wisconsin farm house, a more sustainable lifestyle, a portfolio of small businesses, and much less money. Sound idyllic to some… and crazy to others. As I noted in my review of their earlier book, Rural Renaissance: Renewing the Quest for the Good Life, John Ivanko and Lisa Kivirist made the jump from Chicago ad executives to rural bed and breakfast owners… and have never looked back. Their newest book, ECOpreneuring, focuses on how they continue to bring in income while creating a life centered on home, family, and environmental restoration, and provides guidance for others that want to recenter their careers and lifestyles around their environmental values.

Already, you should be able to tell that this is no ordinary business book — in fact, I’m not even sure I’d call it a “business book.” ECOpreneuring contains plenty of advice on starting a small, eco-conscious business, but the authors focus primarily on how entrepreneurial efforts can incorporate values and priorities beyond the bottom line. Lifestyle choices trump profit motives, but neither have to be sacrificed in order to create meaning and income.

Last week I wrote about how much of my hard work when I toiled away for a large advertising agency (definitely NOT sustainability-minded) ended up contributing to the problems facing humanity. It didn’t get me much further ahead financially, either.

When I think about sustainability, I’ve come to the conclusion it needs to be something that’s holistic and inclusive of both my life AND my career, livelihood, or, if you must, “job.” It doesn’t make much sustainability sense [...]

“Simple living” continues to garner much pop culture hype, sparking books, magazines and a slew of self-help opportunities to assist you to declutter, scale back and slow down. Environmentally conscious and sustainable living fall under the simple living radar, but where does ecopreneuring or running a green business fit in?

My wife and I incorporated numerous “simple living” strategies into our business and life over the years. While our lifestyle may exude quintessential simple living elements — from canning applesauce to crafting holiday gifts — there remains an inherently complex element to our ecopreneuring workstyle. Our calendar looks like a treasure hunt map of lines of travel, Bed & Breakfast guests arriving and departing, writing deadlines, family gatherings, and our son’s home-school group projects. We always juggle multiple, sometimes unrelated, projects.

A better word than “simple” to describe our ecopreneuring approach is “focus.” By consciously choosing to do certain things, we inherently simplify by prioritizing. We open more time to focus on what we really want to do by eliminating (or at least seriously reducing) time drains, including the following:

(1) Daily commute.
With the average daily commute in the US now nearly a half-hour, by working from home, we save over seven days per year driving to someplace, not to mention the fossil fuel emissions of daily driving.

“Simple living” continues to garner much pop culture hype, sparking books, magazines and a slew of self-help opportunities to assist you to declutter, scale back and slow down. Environmentally conscious and sustainable living fall under the simple living radar, but where does ecopreneuring or running a green business fit in?

My wife and I incorporated numerous “simple living” strategies into our business over the years. While our lifestyle may exude quintessential simple living elements — from canning applesauce to crafting holiday gifts — there remains an inherently complex element to our ecopreneuring workstyle. Our calendar looks like a treasure hunt map of lines of travel, Bed & Breakfast guests arriving and departing, writing deadlines, family gatherings, and our son’s home-school group projects. We always juggle multiple unrelated projects.

A better word than “simple” to describe our ecopreneuring approach is “focus.” By consciously choosing to do certain things, we inherently simplify by prioritizing. We open more time to focus on what we really want to do by eliminating (or at least seriously reducing) time drains, including the following:

(1) Daily commute.
With the average daily commute in the US now nearly a half-hour, by working from home, we save over seven days per year driving to someplace, not to mention the fossil fuel emissions of daily driving.

This is a guest post by Ruth Haag, President and CEO of Haag Environmental Company, a hazardous waste consulting firm.

One of the reasons that we, as a society, create so much waste is that it is easier to have something that is disposable, than to have something that must be maintained. Turning an office environment “green” will take some work, but worth it.

It is a bit harder to encourage an office staff to think about a healthy environment, because of the number of personalities involved. As with any new venture, it works best if there is support from the top management.

Following are some very simple ideas that you can use to start to turn your office into a “green” office.

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.

If I told you that I was going to give you a magic device that would save you money, save the planet, and, oh yeah, firm up that flab you have been carrying around with you for the last couple of year (all for three easy payments of $19.95!), what would you say? Most people would be pretty stoked, but when I tell people that this magic device is a bicycle, the thrill [...]