Codes, Standards, and Frameworks

Synopsis: A compilation of codes, standards, and frameworks directly and indirectly related to sustainable business practices including:
Global Compact
UN Human Rights Norms for Business
OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises
GRI Sustainability Reporting Guidelines
AA1000 Assurance Standard
SA8000
IS014001
Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes
Sarbanes-Oxley Act

Reflction: Like my post on Environmental Management Systems, this isn’t really a document for the layperson, and since I cleverly avoided both scathing criticism and deep reflection of that document by escaping into a daydream (albeit a daydream that stayed on point), and since I’m assuming that post used up my Get Out of Jail Free card re: posts lacking deep criticism or reflection, this post will be both harshly critical and deeply reflective. As such, it’s going to be boring.

OK then, for those stalwart readers sticking around, this is how it’s gonna go down. My first plan was to go through the list of codes, standards, and frameworks in the order in which they appear in the synopsis. For each, I would highlight issues and questions I found most important. After finishing the document, I’ve come up with a different plan. Each of these standards, codes, and/or frameworks is a tool, and as with any tool, there is an appropriate one for the job at hand. Without knowing the job at hand, it’s impossible to say which tool is the right one. As I read, I could envision application of some and not of others. Part of this is that this resource doesn’t contain details on the highlighted documents e.g. for ISO14001, it doesn’t explain how a business would create and implement an EMS in compliance with ISO14001, but explains why the ISO14001 was created, how it is operationalized, examples of who is in compliance, etc. Another reason is that many of these affect behavior and policy at a level I don’t understand, like legal requirements.

So, what am I taking from this resource? There were several things that stood out to me, including the Dow Jones Sustainable Indexes (DJSI). What I like about the DJSI is that it is a stepping stone from Big Business-as-usual to sustainable business practices. The fact is, if sustainable business practices or businesses using sustainable practices cannot be proven profitable to stakeholders, we’re sunk. As the resource states, the DJSI is an attempt at “mainstreaming sustainability concepts into investor decision making.”

The ISO14001 was interesting if for no other reason that it has been widely adopted and is well-recognized. Even I had heard of it before this resource (although it turns out I knew little about it). Like it or not, that kind of recognition makes it a powerful tool for marketing to the masses. If your company is ISO14001 certified and you don’t make that a selling point for your products or services, you’re doing yourself a disservice. For that matter, compliance with and/or membership to any of these should be viewed as a marketable business trait.

I see the GRI Guidelines as a powerful tool for businesses, especially in light of the global economy. Accountability, reporting, and transparency are all important parts of the movement toward sustainable business, and having a set of standards recognized worldwide makes direct comparisons that much easier.

Conclusion: This document will best be used as a starting point, since as I mentioned earlier, the actual content of these documents isn’t discussed in detail. In that respect, it will be useful. As my brother, who is an engineer once said, education isn’t so much about knowing stuff, as it is knowing where to look stuff up. I see myself working with other staff members of an organization to determine which of these guidelines we’re already following, which fit with our current mission, and which are particularly pertinent in whatever field we find ourselves. Once we’ve figured that out, we can go to those documents to work out the details.

Dollars for Dishwashers

I saw on the news this evening that, in the spirit of the Cash for Clunkers auto program, the state of Minnesota will be offering a rebate to replace old, inefficient appliances with new Energy Star units. (Dollars for Dishwashers) Sounds great, but, like the auto program, it’s representative of an unsustainable way of thinking. It’s wasteful and shortsighted. Here’s my justification of that statement.

First, it falls prey to the dangers of consumption due to planned obsolescence. I know, the new appliances are better. I get that, but how are they better and at what cost? Let’s consider refrigerators, the hungriest appliance in the home. Of course, they’re more efficient. Their marketing says as much. What does that mean? Better insulation? Better motors? Great, we throw out an old appliance that literally leaks energy and replace it with one that does so at a slower rate. Superficially, this sounds good. How much energy was required to manufacture the new appliance? Did anybody attempt that calculation? Is there any way of upgrading the insulation and mechanicals on an old appliance to make it more efficient? What if, rather than subsidizing the disposal of hundreds of functional appliances, we subsidized the upgrade of old appliances? Pay an amount to appliance repair services (do those even exist anymore?) to learn the upgrade procedure, offer the parts at a reduced price to the consumer, and figure out a way of splitting the labor to the repair company. Money in the pockets of hundreds of service professionals and an appliance NOT in a landfill. That sounds like a better option to me.

The Happy Planet Index

Source: The Happy Planet Index

By Abdallah, Saamah et. al. of the New Economics Foundation, 2009

Synopsis: The Happy Planet Index (HPI) is an attempt to measure our well-being in terms of long, happy and meaningful lives relative to our rate of resource consumption.

Reflection:

What a noble thought. In fact, the thought that we can measure our well-being in terms of happy life years (life satisfaction x life expectancy) relative to resource consumption was so noble as to be laughable. The authors even used one of my hated terms, “good.” At least, that was my first impression.

The reality is, this document is more social science than it is Kumbaya-around-the-campfire, and at its heart is representative of what I view as the greatest change in mindset necessary for sustainable development (at least here in the developed world): debunking the myth that life satisfaction is dependent on material wealth.

And…that’s where I hit some kind of conceptual wall. I feel like I get that, although I’m haunted by the knowledge that my way of life is probably not sustainable either, meaning that, even if everybody on earth consumed exactly as much as I do, we would still exceed the carrying capacity of the planet, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The social science.

The NEF actually based this paper on sound research, based on survey data taken from 143 countries representing 99% of the world’s population (I know, which 1% got left out?). The question is simple: “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?” Despite its simplicity, it has been shown to be both valid and reliable and has been correlated to other measures. Life expectancy was taken from the Human Development Index report, which contains data from 2005. The resource consumption variable was taken from the WWF’s Living Planet Report from 2008. Potential PhD thesis: tear this entire equation apart. For the sake of this blog, we’re going to accept their findings as accurate.

I left this document with two enduring understandings. One, non-material aspirations and social relations are at the heart of sustainable living, and two, I’m not convinced that any solutions which rely on altruism are feasible.

I’ll start with the former, and it’s very, very simple. Our culture of consumption is not sustainable. What’s underneath that culture is not so simple (which is just fine with somebody in possession of such a deep understanding of socioanthropology). Considering this just left me with Big Questions. How and why did our culture of consumption arise? What does it indicate about our culture? How do we adequately deal with that issue, i.e. how do we change people?

No matter the answers to these questions, this is another resource citing a lack of correlation between material wealth and life satisfaction. Note: life satisfaction is correlated to material wealth below a certain point. That point is far lower than Americans would be comfortable acknowledging. I don’t doubt most Americans would sacrifice some material wealth in exchange for greater life satisfaction, but how much? Would we go without our TVs? Cars? Our 8,000 square foot homes? This source makes reference to our educational system as an avenue of change. Fat chance. Our educators have no hope of leading their students to lead more sustainable lives when all of our students’ idols are, literally, the poster-children for excessive lifestyles. I cite the HBO series Entourage. What we really need is a celebrity who vaunts his/her sustainable lifestyle. How about a multi-millionaire who lives in a small but comfortable home with, dare I say it, only one automobile? Wow. That came out a little snarkier than intended, but I won’t retract it.

Regarding my latter understanding about solutions based on altruism. Allow me to explain. This resource states, “This [decoupling of development from environmental impact and well-being] requires technical solutions, but also requires tough leadership from government and a fundamental shift in the aspirations of normal people.” Of these statements, the latter is more important, but governments cannot mandate this. From The Story of B, by the every-quotable Daniel Quinn, “If the world is saved, it will not be by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all.” Governments CANNOT mandate this, and if we sit around waiting for these changes via government programs, we do so at our own peril. Maybe this is the Ayn Rand influence at work, or maybe it’s the aforementioned conceptual wall, being raised in this culture of consumption, but I do not see those with the financial wealth necessary to take care of the sick and starving doing so because they recognize it as the right thing to do. How many millionaires, most of whom worked hard for their money, would sacrifice enough of that to take care of the needy?

It is this train of thinking that has lead me into a kind of dark place. I don’t believe in the power of mandates to bring us to sustainability. I can’t conceive of a way to change enough minds to bring us to sustainability. Oh, we’ll get it, eventually, but with what quality of life will we be left?

Belief and Climate Change

I stumbled across this article on NPR. It's timing in my life is uncanny, as I am in the throes of a good discussion with my father about anthropogenic climate change. This doesn't really shed any light on our discussion, but it confirms exactly what I have long suspected. I will try to come back to this, because it gets to the heart of the issue of sustainability. Sustainability is all in our heads.

Belief in Climate Change Hinges on Worldview

Environmental Management Systems

Source: Environmental Management Systems: An Implementation Guide for Small and Medium-Sized Organizations (2nd Ed.)

By Philip J. Stapleton et. al.

Synopsis: As the titles suggest, this lays out the foundation for an EMS, including why an organization should have one, i.e. benefits; the key concepts or components; and the planning that goes into it to increase odds of success.

Reflection: This is where the sustainably-harvested, organically-grown latex becomes acquainted with the durable yet permeable recycled road surface. It’s the nuts and bolts of moving an organization towards sustainability. It’s also a big document, 200 pages, so I thought critically about what would be relevant to you, my loyal readers. It has become clear that all our resources are excellent. Maybe it’s because our professor diligently combed the collective of human knowledge to pick out, from the mountains of chaff, only the choicest grains of wheat, or maybe it’s that we’ve got so far to go, even the simplest documents pertaining to the lowest of the low hanging fruit seem like revelations. Ah, I’m sure it’s a little bit of both.

In any case, I have yet to read anything for this class that wasn’t accompanied by at least one Aha Moment and several minutes of daydreaming about how I would wow the CEO and board with a simple yet sophisticated PowerPoint presentation that explained how leveraging our influence over vendors could simultaneously pad our bottom line, halt the swing of the club mere inches from the brow of the adorable baby seal, and convince McDonalds to become the most powerful advocate for local and sustainable food, thus launching me, personally, onto the cover of this month’s “Savior Magazine.” A guy’s gotta dream, right? But again, I digress…

My point in all that self-aggrandizing rambling is that I thought I would give you the highlights from all our materials, so that you might experience some of those same Aha Moments for yourselves. This has turned out to be difficult because, more often than not, the whole document we’re reading is a highlight. Accepting that, I then thought I would offer astute, sometimes scathing criticism of our documents, demonstrating both my deep processing of the material and an intellect superior to that of the authors. Well, it turns out the people writing this stuff are pretty smart, with considerably more knowledge of and experience with sustainable business practices than I. My magazine cover is fading… Again with the digressing.

So I’m still left staring at my keyboard, wondering what to tell you about 200 pages of pretty thorough, often dry, how-to on implementing an EMS. I guess the first is to acknowledge that sustainability is not just about environmental impact, although you could make the argument that it’s never more than a few degrees of separation from it. The second is to recognize how daunting a task this is. There are no less than seventeen sections identified as key elements of an EMS, from taking stock of where you are to goal setting to legal obligations to documentation to management review. Somehow my daydream isn’t as thorough. That thought lead me to the following idea: I’m going to take you into my daydream, so I can share with you how I see this, or something like this, being implemented. You’re happy about this because, let’s face it, you don’t really want to know the details of all those 17 sections. You want to know what a company does with something like this, and how it ultimately benefits you or your family. It’s good for me because talking out my thought processes often reveals questions and inconsistencies that need some more work.

My dream in life, career-wise, is to work for a company in the bicycle industry as a sustainability manager. There are several that are already on the right track and many stops ahead of other businesses on that path to sustainability. One of them is a large parts distributor. I won’t use their name, because they’re considering an application from me at this very moment, and I would rather they discovered my writing talents some time after I’ve signed a contract. This company is fabulous. A few years ago, they expanded and their new building is LEED Gold certified. They used as many recycled and repurposed materials as possible. Their landscaping is sustainable. They have a great bike-to-work incentive program. They pay a livable wage and offer competitive benefits, and they’re making enough money that, in these economic times, they’re expanding again. They get it.

Our resource provides us with a handy flowchart, outlining important elements and the logical order in which they might be addressed. We start with legal requirements, because let’s face it, a young idealist, straight out of grad school, isn’t going to start by changing the laws, and those laws are the rules by which we need to play. In our hypothetical company, there is a lawyer or a team of lawyers. I go to them with this, because as I’ve stated before, my knowledge of the law is exactly as deep as my knowledge of socioanthropology. I find out that, low and behold, we’re already playing by the rules. We just need to keep playing and hope the rules don’t change.

The next step is assessing how our company interacts with the environment. Easy, right? This is one of those intimidating steps if taken as a whole. In reality, we’d break it down and start with the low-hanging fruit. Pick out a product or service that’s pretty close to being where we want it, something that wouldn’t cost a lot of money or require a lot of training to get it to where we want it, and we concentrate on that. Maybe we decide to investigate changing to a soy-based cutting oil in our machine tools.

Our next step is to consider the views of interested stakeholders. We ask the machinists what they think. We talk to the supplier to determine the cost and then we talk to our accountants to find out how that cost will affect our bottom line. This won’t be straightforward. The machinists tell us they’re fine with soy cutting oil, except it doesn’t cool and lubricate as well, which will increase wear on tooling, which again is fine, as long as we promise to sharpen their tools more often so quality doesn’t suffer. Another cost, so it’s back to the accountants, and so on.

At this point, my analogy breaks down, because we wouldn’t just be looking at such a specific issue as cutting oil. Consider that one issue as representative of all the issues you might be considering. Considering all the views, of all the stakeholders, we proceed to the next step, which is the construction of a new environmental policy, or the amendment of an existing one. This is a somewhat vague step, and will be different for every organization, but it will result in a document that is relevant to the organization, the issues it faces, and how both of those things relate to its interactions with the environment.

The next step is to define key roles and responsibilities. Our resources says to start at the top, with senior management and such, but it would again depend on the organization and is closely linked to the next step, which is establishing objectives and targets. How do we measure the impact of switching to soy-based cutting fluid? Do we account for it by calculating its effect on our carbon footprint, on our financial bottom line, some other measure, or a combination of all measures? The process in which we’re engaged will not be effective if we don’t know where we’re headed or how to judge our progress toward that destination, which is a nice segue into the next step, which is to develop a system to take care of the documentation we’re now generating, and to establish some kind of system of corrective actions. As we’ve mentioned previously, this process is not necessarily straightforward, we’re going to make mistakes or unsatisfactory progress, and we need to know how we’re going to react to those outcomes.

Next, we establish operational controls and monitoring processes. In our example, this is pretty straightforward: we’re going to be buying and using different cutting fluid. All we need to do to control that is ensure our buyers are buying it and our machinists are using it, which again leads us to the next steps, define job-specific roles, plan and conduct initial employee awareness, and establish other system-level procedures. All of these are pretty self-explanatory. Make sure the cutting fluid is being used, make sure employees understand why we’ve made the change, and try to figure out other ways the change will affect the business and what action on our part that might require.

The last steps are to train employees, conduct EMS audits, and conduct management reviews. Our example makes employee training something we’ve already dealt with, but in a larger organization, or with more extensive changes, it may need to be something more formalized and structured. Processes and progress are less effective if you’re not trying to measure them, and that’s what the audits and management review are about.

That’s it! We’re saving the world one 55 gallon drum of soy-based cutting fluid at a time! Who knew salvation would be so simple and straightforward? I realized toward the end of my example that it was a very simplistic choice, which didn’t lend itself well to explaining all of the steps. It’s important I point out that in my example, the switch to soy-based cutting fluid is not the EMS, but a part of it. Obviously, the real scenario would be much more complicated, making some of the steps that I glossed over much more important and involved, but the enduring understandings from this document are actually pretty straightforward: involve everybody who matters, establish goals and ways of measuring progress toward them, and recognize that some areas will have to be revisited.

New Accounting and The Sweet Spot

Sources: Environmental Accounting
By U.S. EPA, Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics, 1995
The Sustainability Sweet Spot
By Andrew Savitz and Karl Weber

Synopsis (Environmental Accounting): The central purpose of this primer is twofold: (1) to orient readers to key concepts often referred to as environmental accounting, and (2) to explain how the terms that refer to environmental accounting are currently being used, so that confusion about the terms does not impede progress in understanding and applying the core concepts.

EPA prepared this document to be a starting point for readers who have questions about environmental accounting. The intended audience includes business managers and other professionals who wish to understand environmental accounting. In addition, people involved with activity-based costing, total quality management, business re-engineering, or design for the environment should find environmental accounting to be compatible with and potentially helpful to their programs.

EPA’s Environmental Accounting Project has produced this primer at the behest of stakeholders who have suggested that an important step in promoting environmental accounting is to clarify key concepts and terms to facilitate more widespread adoption of environmental accounting practices. 1

This primer focuses on environmental accounting as a management tool for a variety of purposes, such as improving environmental performance, controlling costs, investing in "cleaner" technologies, developing "greener" processes and products, and informing decisions related to product mix, product retention, and product pricing. The primer does not cover all of these potential applications but does summarize how environmental accounting can be applied to cost allocation, capital budgeting, and process/product design. Specific applications of environmental accounting are illustrated in case studies that EPA has prepared documenting companies' programs to implement environmental accounting. For more information on EPA's activities in this area or for copies of the case studies, please contact the EPA's Pollution Prevention Information Clearinghouse at (202) 260-1023. (Verbatim from document)

Synopsis (Sustainability Sweet Spot): Businesses are recognizing that sustainable business practices are not antithetical to good business practices. Evidence for this includes better-than-average market performance by businesses embracing the so-called triple bottom line. Given this evidence, businesses seeking this sweet spot are maximizing profit and positive social impact.

Reflection: I decided I’ve had it with book learning. See, I’ve got this idea for a new widget that’s going to revolutionize the cycling industry. Best of all, producing it is cheap. It doesn’t take a lot of room – I’m going to rent a garage outside town. Overhead is low, since the raw materials and tooling are cheap and I’m going to be a one-man operation. All of the waste produced is completely compostable, and there’s enough room on-site to set up the composting operation. In fact, it’s not so much an operation as it is me dumping a couple wheelbarrow’s full at the end of the week.

So, I go into business, and my widgets are everything I hoped them to be. I start with regional distribution, but pretty soon the coasts are demanding my widgets. I easily expand – it’s a two-car garage and I’d only been using one stall. Twice as many widgets mean twice as much waste, however. I’m not worried though, because the compost operation can still handle it.

Well, my widgets are a hit on the coasts, and Europe catches on and wants them. I double again. I can now afford to build an additional two stalls for production, along with a couple employees to run things therein. Problem is, my composting operation can’t keep up with four times the waste. The piles are getting too large for my lot.

So, I hop the fence and talk to the guy on the next lot over. His property butts right up against my compost piles. He agrees I’ve got a problem and is amenable to some compost on his land, but he wants to charge me for the space. That’s OK, I can afford it, although it eats a couple points from my profit margin.

Well, Asia and South America have been paying attention, so I double operations again. Raw materials, labor, and production space are no problem. The problem is, I’m now producing waste faster than it can be composted. I read in a trade journal about another young entrepreneur who’s devised a biomechanical digester that could take care of my waste for me, so I give her a call. Sure, she’s got the capacity to take care of me, and it’ll only cost me this much… Hmmm…paying for waste disposal changes a lot of things.

OK, it’s not a terribly sophisticated analogy, but I’m hoping it makes clear my point that to not consider the potential cost of waste disposal was shortsighted. It was easily overlooked because I could take it for granted. Furthermore, the issue was compounded when my operation outstripped the capacity of the natural systems I’d been taking for granted. And of course, my analogy assumes unlimited and cheap raw materials…

Well, we’re finding ourselves in a similar situation now, except our waste is not so easily quantified as are piles of compost. But why should waste that we can’t see or feel be any different? Why is it so ridiculous to hold industry accountable for waste products like greenhouse gases? Because it will cripple our economy? It seems we’ve just been spoiled and we’re now trying to come to terms with evidence that the way we’ve been doing things was destined to be unsustainable because we didn’t/couldn’t/refused to accurately account for ALL costs.

In my analogy, natural systems were taking care of waste disposal for me. This is true for the world economy as well, but the processes aren’t as visible and tangible as watching a pile of garbage turn to humus. Furthermore, we aren’t relying on a single or even multiple natural systems, but all of them. We’re relying on systems we don’t understand and systems we haven’t yet discovered. Then, as if things weren’t complicated enough, it’s those same systems that supply us with raw materials.

Now, let’s take a step backward and say I did have some foresight. From the very beginning, I paid closer attention to how quickly my waste was converted to compost than I did to units of production, recognizing that the two are inextricably linked and that waste disposal, not production capacity, was my limiting factor. So I found out that I could process X units of waste every year which corresponded to Y units of production, and that became my benchmark. Well, I’m still producing outstanding widgets subject to the law of supply and demand. I’m holding true to my benchmark, so demand is outstripping supply, prices are rising, and my profit margin’s growing. I give all my employees raises and better benefits. Morale is high and production increases slightly. Furthermore, I funnel the increased profits into R&D and find a more efficient way of making my widgets that produces less waste per unit of production. Production increases again, and we’re still maximizing profit, and my employees are still happy. I take the padding from my profit margin and install some renewable energy sources. Sure, it’ll take a few years before they’re paid off, but I plan on being here longer than a few years. Plus, remember my neighbor over the fence? Turns out his passion is gardening. I’ve been giving him compost in exchange for food. There, we’re in the sweet spot. We’re making money, living comfortable lives, and we fall asleep at night content in the knowledge that our business will be viable beyond the next quarter.

I know, this is all a childishly simplistic rendering of some complicated processes. But it comes down to some very simple rules. Don’t use raw materials faster than they can be replenished. If you do, you’ll run out. Don’t make waste faster than it can be processed. If you do, you’ll be sitting in it. Take care of the people upon whom your business depends. If you don’t, they’ll stop taking care of you. Turns out it’s pretty simple after all.

Sustainability Through Marketing Communication

Source: Talk the Walk

By United Nations Environment Programme; UN Global Compact; Utopies; 2005

Synopsis: Green products right now only command 1 – 4% of market share. Market demographics break down along relatively predictable lines. The task of sustainable companies is to communicate effectively the alleged superiority of their products.

Reflection:

Two semesters ago, I took my first marketing class through the MBA program. Hate is too strong a word, but dislike not strong enough. It just seemed so utterly unimportant in the face of the problems I was learning about in other classes. I wrote off marketing as a necessary evil in my education.

Imagine my surprise then, when I was reading this document and getting excited about marketing. Every page, I was thinking of a cycling related product and how I would sell it, and then I had a minor epiphany. Despite the possibility its powers can be used for the wrong reasons (I’m thinking the booming SUV market of yore), marketing is just another form of education. At least, it can be. This becomes more important when we consider the value/behavior gap, the 5 to 70% of people (depending on location) who say they’re ready to purchase products for ethical reasons, the reality that sustainable products now command between 1 and 4% market share, and the proportion of buyers who identify lack of knowledge of sustainable products as a factor in choosing conventional products (I know I’ve seen numbers put to this, but I couldn’t find them despite my exhaustive 30 second search).

Example: Bike shops the world over stock little blinky LED lights so that motorists will know when they’ve run over a cyclist. The cheapest ones (both in price and quality) start at under 10 bucks. Last year, Blackburn came out with a new system dubbed the Flea. These are tiny lights, smaller than a book of matches and almost as light, but brighter than any lights of comparable size. On top of that, they are rechargeable via an ingenious magnetic charger that attaches to any 1.5 volt battery (think AAA, AA, C, D). The Flea taillight goes for around 25 bucks. I was having a hard time selling them, despite their performance advantages, until I saw an ad from Blackburn. It showed a pile of batteries, the batteries you would run through a conventional light over its projected lifetime, along with the price of those batteries, and compared it directly to the lifetime cost of the Flea, which was significantly less. Well, armed with this knowledge and my remarkable charm, I renovated my sales strategy and had customers challenging each other to fistfights for the last light on the shelf. Sure, and that’s why the bike shop closed…

The truth is, sales did go up, but not as much as you might think, and it corroborates perfectly what this source shows. People may be willing to pay a price premium for sustainable products, but only if it is framed properly. I think that frame should be monetary for two reasons. One, it’s not subjective, and two, Americans understand money far better than life cycle analyses and ethical arguments. Once sustainable products have been proven on terms we’re used to, they’ll have a much better chance of taking over market share from conventional products, and consumers will be open to claims based on other criteria.

Today's Big Question:

Can we rely on free market capitalism to push people toward sustainable behavior?

Sustainable Consumption

Source: Sustainable Consumption: Facts and Trends

By: World Business Council for Sustainable Development

Synopsis: It is the conclusion of the WBCSD that current patterns of consumption are not sustainable. In order to move toward sustainable consumption, they look at several dimensions of consumption including: global drivers of consumption, consumption patterns and impacts, the role of the consumer, the role of business, challenges and options for change.

Reflection:

First, this is an important piece of literature for somebody with my professional goals. I found something on every page that I knew could be used to make a business more sustainable. Because I can’t touch on everything, I’m going to touch on the items I thought were most important.

With respect to drivers of consumption, I thought an important point was that, as societies become more affluent, the proportion of income that goes toward food and housing tends to stay the same, while spending on transportation and telecommunications tend to rise the most. This is probably over-interpreting the data, but it seems as affluence rises, we lose sight of necessities. I commonly hear this in reference to organic food prices. A gallon of organic milk can cost more than twice what a standard gallon costs, and people write it off as too expensive. In reality, food had never been so inexpensive. As we’ve gotten richer, and food is increasingly being taken for granted, we’ve forgotten that high quality food is a necessity and probably should cost more than our cell phone plan.

Falling into the Engagement Via Guilt category, I nonetheless found the statistic that it would take five Earths to sustain the world’s population at U.S. levels of consumption to be interesting, considering that this is the direction China and India are heading.

In the section on Consumption Patterns and Impacts, there were several good points, the first being reference to services provided by our ecosystems. Because those ecosystems have always been there, we’ve taken them, and their function, for granted. Somewhere out there is a person who would argue that we can perform those services with technology, but at what cost, and how effectively? Recognizing that the services provided by natural systems have value that can be quantified monetarily is the first step in framing the issue in terms we pay attention to.

Next, I appreciated that they recognize the power of market forces. Like it or not, capitalism is what we’re dealing with, and people are willing to consider sustainable products, if not demanding them outright. Where there is an opportunity to make money, a business will supply that demand.

Possibly the most exciting section concerned innovation. Several things are clear: controlling population is a daunting task, so population is going to continue to grow (for now). At the same time, the world as a whole is becoming more affluent, and that means greater overall consumption. Resources are finite, so what do we do? We need to innovate to de-couple production from resource consumption. Mmmmm…innovation. We like innovation. We’re good at innovation. We put men on the moon and made robots that fit in our blood vessels for crying out loud! I’m picturing something like the scene in Apollo 13, when Houston finds out the CO2 scrubbers are busted. They dump out a box of parts and a mandate: make it work. Except in my vision, it’s not Houston, but Ford or Nike, and it’s not a box of parts, but a dumptruck full of “garbage.” Sure! We can me a car out of old computers and bicycle innertubes! You need shoes? Well, whattya got? Oh, those tubes from the center of the toilet paper roll and plastic shopping bags! We’ll have a pair for you next week! This is a challenge to which we can rise.

Finally, they take a look at the role of the consumer and the role of business. Perhaps most importantly is what I’m going to call the “Talk the Talk Phenomenon.” Many surveys show there is a disconnect between what people say about their sustainable habits and what they do, which is no surprise. Talk is cheap, and I would be amazed if that disconnect didn’t exist, but talk is not what’s going to lead to sustainability. We need to identify what’s keeping people from walking the walk, and they’ve begun that in this document. What is clear is that people will purchase sustainable products only if all other variables are equal, which presents further opportunities for innovation. And of course, all this will be pretty close to moot without education. As a society, we’ve been spoiled, and it’s time we got used to the idea that it can’t last. Being spoiled, we’ve had the luxury of blind consumption. Well, it’s time we started paying attention to what we’re buying, and education and marketing are part of that process.

From the perspective of the business, our greatest tool will be the life cycle analysis of the product. Now, I don’t know exactly what that means, other than it’s an attempt to account for ALL of the costs that go into a product and what happens to it after it’s used.

The last thing I’m going to do before calling it a night is introduce the first of many Big Questions. Like those mentioned in the introduction, these are questions that don’t have answers but get at the heart of the matter. Most of the time, the answer isn’t what’s important; the asking is, and I'm going to try to ask one in every post. Without further ado:

At what point would we rather knowingly face the demise of our culture rather than further sacrifice our conveniences?

The World Trade Organization

Source: Invisible Government
By Debbie Barker and Jerry Mander, International Forum on Globalization

Synopsis: Economic globalization hasn’t been scrutinized by any institutions without an interest in portraying the consequences as anything but positive. One of the goals of the WTO is a removal of legislation to benefit free trade, possibly at the cost of human rights, workers’ rights, environmental protection, etc. For a variety of reasons, the WTO has become a global governing body, allowing issues of trade to dominate all others. The source then goes on to look at the effects of the WTO on the environment, agriculture, food, public health, culture, intellectual property rights, finance and investment.

Reflection:

At the risk of over-sharing, I’d like to tell you a short story. Several years ago, I briefly dated a woman who met most of the benchmarks of my dream woman. I was falling for her, she did not feel the same, and it ended. At that time, I had a close relationship with God, and I prayed daily for Him (sorry women, God to me was a male) to ease my heartbreak. I’m an avid reader, and often escape into books, so I went to an author I love, Daniel Quinn, and picked up one of his books I hadn’t read, The Story of B. Daily, I read that book and it found every chink in my Christian fait, and nightly I prayed to a god that was becoming increasingly hard to believe in. Finally, one night, I tried to pray, but it no longer felt like anybody was listening.

Not since that life-altering moment have I felt so conflicted. I was raised by hardworking people who believe that hard work begets rewards, and that governments, while not necessarily evil, are huge, ponderous, inefficient entities whose regulation results in disastrous unintended consequences. My parents are Republicans in the traditional sense of the word. I’m reading Atlas Shrugged because my mother told me it was one of the most important books she’d ever read.

Now, I’m reading resources like this one, which present some pretty good arguments that, without some kind of regulation, free market capitalism is going to bring about the end of the world. And now, like some double agent in the room of smoke and mirrors, I find myself wondering what and whom to believe. I read about the potential environmental effects under the influence of the WTO, and I hear my father, whispering over my shoulder to find out who signed the paychecks of the authors. I read about the evil agribusiness giants patenting plants and animals, and I wonder what Ayn Rand would think. Without launching into a diatribe about epistemology and the evils of monetary influence on research, and in an effort to not just lay in the corner in the fetal position, sucking my thumb, I’m going to take it on faith that what we’re reading has been scrutinized, that those doing the scrutinizing were considering interests beyond the bottom line of their personal savings accounts, and that the scrutinizing was based on more than the ideals of some tree-hugging neohippies. Whew, glad to get that off my chest.

In any case, the WTO as depicted in this document is the quintessence of why Business As Usual is not sustainable. For decades, the purpose of our economy was to maximize profit at any cost, and it seems that’s the aim of the WTO. We’re now learning that dollars and cents cannot be the only bottom line considered, although it may be possible to quantify, albeit incompletely, the bottom lines of ecological integrity and social justice using dollars and cents. While only tangentially related to this resource, criticism of capitalism is part of sustainable business management, and as such, relevant. I'll come back to this frequently throughout the semester, I'm sure.

The Work/Spend Phenomenon

Sources:
Take Back Your Time: Fighting Overwork and Time Poverty in America
Edited by John De Graaf
The (Even More) Overworked American
By Juliet Schor
An Issue For Everybody
By Barbara Brandt
The Incredible Shrinking Vacation
By Joe Robinson
Forced Overtime in The Land of the Free
By Lonnie Golden
The Speed Trap
By Robert Bernstein
On Time, Happiness, and Ecological Footprint
By Tim Kasser and Kirk Warren Brown

Synopsis: The trend in rising number of hours worked per year published 10 years ago has been born out with time. Technological advances predicted to put an end to work have been concurrent with this trend. Vacation time is shrinking, and Americans routinely work with fewer days of vacation than any other developed nation. In addition to the intuitive connections between hours worked and personal fulfillment or lack thereof, there is also a connection between overwork and non-sustainable behavior. Material wealth does not seem to be closely connected to life satisfaction.

Reflection: Once again, I feel I enjoy a unique perspective on this issue. I took my first job when I was 15, stocking shelves in the hardware store in my hometown. As an undergrad, I routinely worked 30-hour weeks in addition to being a full time student. I’ve been a bike mechanic, a preschool teacher, an orderly, the guy who runs the weed-eater at a state park, a nature interpreter, and since I was 15, I have never gone without a job. Until now.


Bikes are a seasonal industry, and most shops cut back as much as possible in order to stanch the hemorrhage of money during the winter. Turns out we needed to cut WAY back, so I was laid off in November and two months later it became apparent the shop was closing and my welcome, paid vacation on Uncle Sam’s dime became full-on, oh crap, what am I gonna do now? Until unemployment, I fully believed I needed a job to give my life a sense of purpose. I really like to work, and I love being productive, and I really love making money (for the security reasons mentioned in “Planned Obsolescence”). To compound the issue, my family has a tradition of being hard workers. My dad, not many years from retirement from owning his business, regularly works 50 or 60 hours a week, but feels good about it because he’s not working anywhere close to as many hours as he used to. So I went into unemployment not without trepidation.

Well, with free time, I decided to build a bed. Then I brewed a batch of beer (because the natural thing to do when unemployed is to make alcohol, right?). I read a couple of books that had been sitting on my nightstand. I rode my bike and I got back into running. And some days, I brewed some coffee and watched movies in my pajamas. Two months later, I still don’t have a job. I am looking, but I’m pretty sure I could go on like this forever. (As an indicator of the work ethic in my family, I deleted and retyped this paragraph three times because my dad might read it and I’m afraid of what he’ll think of his deadbeat kid) So yeah, I’ve got a few thoughts on the amount we work.

This is not such an easy topic, because it gets at what is arguably the Ultimate Question: what is the meaning of life? Why are we here? Most would agree we were not meant to work from when we were first able until we die, and most would agree to lead a life that in no way contributes to society (another potential PhD thesis; what do we mean by “contribute” and “society”?) is equally bad, but in between those extremes lies every shade of gray, and we are notoriously, horribly, ridiculously bad at interpreting gray with any sort of consensus.

How did we get into this race? Well, we studied that a bit in “Planned Obsolescence.” The alleged sense of security afforded by “stuff,” and the instinctual desire for more. Maybe further research by people smarter than me will bear that out; maybe it won’t. More to the point, how do we get out of this race?

It seems to me that, as a society, we want our cake and we want to eat it too. Studies cited in our resources show we don’t want to work as much, but we want more more more more more. Our culture of conspicuous consumption is at odds with our desire to work less. If everybody were willing to walk away from such excessively consumptive lifestyles, we wouldn’t be compelled to work as much. Our culture of consumption may be evidence that we value our material possessions more than free time.

I have nothing to back up this assertion other than my personal experience. Bike wrenches don’t make a lot of money. I’ve lived below the poverty line my entire life, and I love my life (I’ll grant you that I’m young, single, and without a mortgage). I own my car. I have more bikes than I know what to do with. I dress as well as I want to. I eat well. Even when employed, I’ve made time to indulge my passions. I don’t own a lot, but everything I do own was bought with hard work, a lot of research, and patience. I am walking evidence that income and material wealth are not connected to life satisfaction. One conclusion I’ve reached while embracing my existential crisis is that it would be great to have a career I love, but it is essential to have a life I love. We’ll see how much a wife, kids, and mortgage change this.

Planned Obsolescence

Source: Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America
by Gene Slade, 2006

Synopsis: Made to Break takes on a phenomenon so intertwined in our patterns of consumption that we take it completely for granted: planned obsolescence. For a variety of reasons, but spurred mostly by comptetition between Ford and GM in the ‘20s, and fueled by overproduction allowed by increasingly sophisticated manufacturing techniques, competition in the U.S. means that products go through regular changes that may or may not actually make for a better product, with the purpose of convincing people they need to buy newer and better on a regular basis.

Reflection: I very much looked forward to this source. My day job is assembling and fixing bicycles. Like any technology-driven industry, bikes are subject to planned obsolescence. Every time a component manufacturer adds another speed, ensuring customers need to buy a new drivetrain for their bikes, we hear about it. It’s obvious that our patterns of consumption aren’t sustainable, yet my standard response to customers complaining about needing to buy more “stuff,” is that bikes are undeniably “better” than they’ve ever been before, and they will continue to get better. While reading this piece, I came up with the following questions:

1. What does better mean?
2. How much better do we need our things to be?
3. Better at what cost?
4. Accepting an analogy between biological and technological evolution, how has our world changed to act as a driving force of technological evolution?
5. Agreeing that biological evolution is inevitable, is technological evolution inevitable?
6. What is it about humans that makes us susceptible to pressure (dare I say manipulation?) from ads?

Starting from the top, here are some of the things I cite as being better with modern bicycles: due to a better understanding of ergonomics, bikes are safer and more comfortable than ever before. With increasingly better materials and manufacturing, bikes are more efficient than ever before. Due to the trickle down effect inherent in a tech-driven industry, bikes are cheaper than ever before. Clearly, with minimal change to wording, these arguments could be made about cars, computers, and sewing machines. I think we might agree that better in most cases means safer, more comfortable, more efficient, in some way decreasing the amount of work we must do, or decreasing our perception of the amount of work we must do. We’ll explore the latter in greater depth later.

This puts us in a vulnerable position. Can anything be too safe? Too comfortable? Too inexpensive? Accepting the above definitions of better, there is no limit to how far planned obsolescence can take us. Only a fool would buy a car designed and manufactured to be less safe. Note that durability is not featured above. I struggle with this. “They don’t make ‘em like they used to” is a common comment in bike shops, and I’ve always concurred, because they make them better now. After reading this source, it occurs to me that an unintended consequence of planned obsolescence is the belief that widgets today must be inferior, because if they weren’t, we wouldn’t need a new one every year. This is the realm of psychological obsolescence mentioned in the book, and again, it illustrates that this issue lies in our perception of reality.

Tackling the biological/technological evolution analogy, and what has changed in the world to act as a driving force in technological evolution: first, and maybe most obviously, there can be no evolution without overproduction. If a need exists, but the market is not saturated, there is no competition. You can churn out an adequate product, one that offers no advantage whatsoever over other, similar products, and consumers have no choice but to accept it. With the Industrial Revolution (I think. My knowledge of socioanthropology is only slightly deeper than my knowledge of law) and increases in production, consumers were for the first time faced with choices, and it then became important to offer a superior product. This doesn’t, however, address the question of when more durable ceased to be a competitive advantage, and the source does a good job of tackling this issue.

Businessmen and women have never been stupid, and recognized immediately that, if their widget lasted for 50 years, repeat purchases would be infrequent. Thus, durability ceased to be a competitive advantage, and became a competitive weakness. The accompanying ad campaigns convincing us that old was synonymous with inferior were the final ingredient establishing our culture of disposability and habitual consumption. At the time, this made perfect sense. I’m sure some long-sighted individuals recognized that resources were finite, but I think it would have been much easier to believe, at that time, that we could maintain habits of conspicuous consumption forever, and it would only make our lives better. It is the perfect example of Einstein’s quote: “The problems we are faced with cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that created them.” (That may not be verbatim, but you get the gist.)

The game’s changed. We have more people on Earth than ever before, we have sophisticated measures that allow us to watch our stocks of natural capital dwindling, and it’s become clear to some that our culture of conspicuous, repetitive consumption is not sustainable.

But I’ve gotten a little ahead of myself; going back to the bio/tech evolution. Superficially, it would seem that our busier lives and increasing levels of production would be the perfect selection pressure to spur technological evolution, but I think this is a chicken-and-egg question. As we’ll see with our next source, “The (Even More) Overworked American,” there is a correlation between technological advances and hours worked per year, but causation is not clear. We’re caught in an interesting positive feedback loop, in which the ability to produce more with less effort per unit of production has simply pushed us to produce more and more and more and more, rather that producing the same amount and enjoying that free time promised to us by the advertisements. Stay tuned; we’re going to revisit this next time.

Finally, it seems I’ve been avoiding what may be the ultimate question: what is it about us that makes us susceptible to ad pressure? First, I don’t have the answer (it seems I say that a lot). I do have some ideas, based again on my impressively shallow grasp of socioanthropology. Historically, and I mean going way back, when survival was by no means a foregone conclusion, and food, some animal hides, and maybe some attractively shaped sticks and rocks were the extent of our possessions, those items were security. If you had food, you were one step closer to survival. Those sticks and rocks were one step closer too food. Those items were necessities in a sense we are incapable of grasping.

Fast forward a couple hundred thousand years, and those items get a little more sophisticated, but they still represent security. They are still a physical manifestation of survival. I think we still have this instinct. The Industrial Revolution, rise in production, and accompanying rise in consumption moved so much faster than evolution, so that instinctual part of our brains, nurtured to keep us alive through millions of years of evolution, had no chance of catching up. So today we buy our 10,000 square foot McMansions, with our six car garages full of every manner of motorized toy, and we eat our 5,000 calories a day, and we look at all of it, and we want more, because what if the fire goes out and the giant sloths move south and our beloved pounding rock breaks? We’ll die. And where would we be then?

Indigenous Impacts

Source: Inequity In the Global Village: Recycled Rhetoric and Disposable People, by Jan Knippers Black, 1999

Synopsis: Indigenous people the world over have been marginalized since…well, kind of since forever. They typically represent the poorest people on earth (as measured by GDP) and have either been ignored when considering questions of global importance, or recognized as an obstacle to progress. At risk is loss of cultural heritage, and because they have such close ties to their ancestral lands, the unique ecosystems in which they live.

Reflection:

Several years ago, when my existential crisis and I were in full embrace, I took a job presenting educational programs at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument (ORPI). My interests are varied, so I developed programs on geology, astronomy, and the philosophy of conservation. My program “To Save a Species” was about the latter.

Within the boundaries of ORPI lies Quitobaquito, which is a microecosystem consisting of a spring-fed pond of around an acre, some wetlands, and the normal riparian zone you’d expect around water, all plunked down right in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. In the water you can find the Sonoran Desert Pupfish, which can be found nowhere else on Earth. The pupfish is as indigenous a species as you can find, occupying that little pond and nowhere else, and like indigenous peoples, it has developed a host of adaptations that allow it to survive in the singular conditions of Quitobaquito.

There is a sort-of critical mass, population-wise, when talking about a species. Below a certain number of individuals, there is not enough genetic diversity to keep the species viable and hearty. 10,000 years ago, cheetahs dipped below this critical mass so that today, all cheetahs are very similar genetically. You can take skin from any cheetah, graft it on to any other, and it will not be rejected. It’s called a genetic bottleneck, and it makes a species more vulnerable. Biological staff at ORPI feared, at best, a genetic bottleneck, and at worst, extinction, of the pupfish, so serious conservation efforts were under way, including the construction of an artificial pond in which another population of pupfish could be cultivated. At this point in the program, I opened it to questions, hoping that some skeptic out there would ask the ultimate one: why? Why go to such great lengths to save such a small and insignificant organism?

Indulge me for just a moment. Let’s pretend we’re detectives, and we’re investigating a crime of such a despicable nature that failure is out of the question. If solving the case depends on knowing every nook and cranny of the house in which the crime was committed, to whom do we talk? We’d probably want talk to the person who’d lived there longest, maybe the boy who was born and raised there, spent his Saturday afternoons playing hide and seek in the attic. What if we want to know every alley and alcove in the neighborhood? We talk to the woman who’s owned the corner drugstore for the last 40 years, who’s been a fixture in the neighborhood for longer than anybody else can remember. What if we need to know the city in which the crime was committed? We talk to the beat cop who’s been watching those streets longer than any other officer. This isn’t rocket science or brain surgery. Who has more knowledge about an environment than the people who’ve been there the longest?

There is not a species on earth better adapted to the conditions at Qitobaquito than the Sonoran Desert Pupfish. In fact, it is so well adapted that to think of it as an entity apart from Quitobaquito is to view that environment superficially. The pupfish is as much Quitobaquito as the water, trees, and cattails. Such is the nature of indigenous species, human or otherwise.

We understand very well the value of organisms as they relate to us. We value things that are beautiful, or delicious, or that yield some material that is warm, comfortable or beautiful. Don’t misunderstand me. I cannot and will not pass judgment on our behavior. It is a system that has worked so well in our past that you might say it was essential for our survival. But consider for a moment the number of variables in an environment like Quitobaquito.

We can’t do it.

The known unknowns are too numerous to count, and by definition, we cannot begin to understand the unknown unknowns. Again, indulge me, because this analogy isn’t perfect, but in “A Leader’s Framework For Decision Making,” by David Snowden and Mary Boone, the authors identified four contexts in which leaders are asked to make decisions, from simple to chaotic, depending on things like patterns, knowns and unknowns, and cause and effect relationships. Any environment must fall into the complex context, in which there is flux and unpredictability, unknown unknowns, and no right answers. In such a context, a leader’s priorities are to keep the problems from getting worse, and manage in such a way that patterns can emerge.

Respecting indigenous people, protecting indigenous species and their environments is important because we just don’t know. We cannot predict the effect of losing them. Never mind moral and ethical considerations, even from the most selfish of perspectives, we don’t know if the knowledge of indigenous people or the information written in the genetic code of the pupfish, that most intimate knowledge of an environment, will be useful to us someday. But once it’s gone, there’s no getting it back, and we’ve already lost a lot.

OK, if you’ve made it this far, stick with me for just one more paragraph. You’ll note that nowhere above have I used the terms “right” or “wrong” in reference to a behavior. If possible, you won’t find those terms used in this blog. The problem with using labels such as “right” and “wrong” is that somebody, somewhere, inevitably, will disagree with you. Right and wrong have no non-subjective basis. So, what happens when the person who is “wrong” is smarter than you? What if she is stronger than you? What if he has an army and more powerful weapons? I believe there are systems that work, and systems that do not. Time may show that a behavior we labeled “wrong” is part of a system that isn’t sustainable, and that behavior goes away. It is plausible that a repugnant behavior, like eating oysters on the half-shell, is part of a system that works. But, what if you’re smarter, stronger, and control an army, and it’s you who turns out to be part of a system that is not sustainable? How do we know which systems work and which don’t? The best we can hope for right now is to keep the problems from getting worse, and wait for patterns to emerge. Thanks for stopping by.

Blue Gold

Source: Blue Gold, by Maude Barlow, International Forum on Globalization

Synopsis: Available freshwater, meaning available for use and/or consumption, is arguably the most critical resource upon which depend. It amounts to less than one half of one percent of all water on Earth. If current trends continue, water shortage will become the most pressing issue with which we’re faced, if it is not already. The world economy of the near future, in which water will be bought, sold, and traded, has the capacity to exacerbate the problem, widening the gap between the haves and have-nots, and ensuring conservation efforts will not succeed. The source concludes with a series of principles upon which we might base future efforts to deal with this crisis.

Reflection: I’m going to start with criticism. My father, whom I love dearly, is a climate change skeptic. It is a battle that must be fought on three fronts: first, he does not accept that global climatic patterns are changing. Second, he does not accept that, if they are changing, the cause is anthropogenic. Finally, he does not accept that, if the first two points were true, there is anything we could do about it. (Note the use of the term “accept.” Issues of global climate change, peak oil, and overpopulation are phenomena that do not require belief to exist. We don’t “believe” in gravity.)

He is honest about how he arrived at his view. The politization (somebody let me know if that’s not a real word) of the issue and the accompanying “bleeding heart” messages have completely and totally turned him off. The most compelling evidence means nothing because he can’t tolerate the way it’s communicated. I can’t entirely blame him. The included statistics about how much water western civilization uses for luxuries like cosmetics and ice cream compared to how much developing nations use for necessities wears thin very quickly. I even found myself wanting to play devil’s advocate, and I’m almost as bleeding heart as they come. Engagement is as much a part of sustainability as conserving water and protecting biodiversity, and making people feel guilty is not an effective tool for engagement. That being said, I don’t know the purpose for which this paper was written and part of my task is to look beyond issues like this anyway, so I won’t dwell on it.

Other than the above, what struck me first was the critical state of freshwater. Water consumption is growing at twice the rate of population growth. Wow. It’s obvious and intuitive that we need it for cooking, cleaning, and sanitation, but I hadn’t made the connection between water usage and manufacturing, especially in the high-tech sector. It’s another example of blissful ignorance, but my reaction to this knowledge is hopeful. We’ve become so distanced from the items we consume that considering something like how much water was used to manufacture our computer is no longer intuitive, but it doesn’t mean that it’s meaningless. Even now, we’re seeing product branding that points out sustainable practices used in creating the product. It’s not the end of the problem, but a step in the right direction. Of course, as the article points out, 65% of our water is used as irrigation for crops. To the best of my knowledge, there is no classification for food that’s produced using less water-intensive methods.

Much was said about the commoditization of water, the buying, selling, and trading of water and water rights. This brought an interesting realization. The idea of water as a commodity seems absurd to me, but I wasn’t sure why. The article explores this reaction further. Is water a right or a need? If it’s a right, it cannot be bought and sold. If it’s a need, it can be. Food is as necessary as water, and we buy, sell, and trade food as a matter of course. Why is water different? Because historically, it hasn’t required the same amount of effort to procure it? Possibly, but I’m no anthropologist and I know people have gone to great lengths to procure water (I cite the Roman aquaducts). Taken a step further, we could try the mental exercise of considering the air we breathe as a commodity. Ridiculous. (I cite the movie “Spaceballs,” a fascinating documentary about the commoditization of air) What’s different about water? I don’t have an answer.

Disregarding the moral and philosophical considerations of water and water rights, we arrive at reality, which is that, right or wrong, water is becoming a commodity, subject to market forces. Is the bulk exportation of water financially feasible? Is this an issue the free market is capable of handling? Maybe, considering what could happen to the cost of all those products that depend on cheap or free water for production. Do we want to wait to find out? In fact, the article gets at this, pointing out that if industry was paying the true cost of water, we wouldn’t be so cavalier about its use. As far as business is concerned, success may lie in viewing this as a marketing opportunity. Pay attention to how much water is used in your company, work to reduce that amount, and don’t be shy about telling people.

I’ll wrap this up with a couple of facts.

Fact: There is no solution to the global water crisis (or any of these issue) if global population growth is not addressed.

Fact: Wars are fought for resources. Water is arguably the most critical resource. When people must choose between peace and survival, peace will lose. Every time.