Category Archives: sustainability

Sustainability: Challenges and Risks

“Ideally, however, no institutions in modern society are better situated and none more obliged to facilitate the transition to a sustainable future than colleges and universities…”

This quote is from David Orr’s book, The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention. He is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College and is also a James Marsh Professor at large at the University of Vermont. What caught my attention in this book was Dr. Orr’s question that followed the above statement :

“What would it mean for educational institutions to meet this challenge?”

Sustainability advocates working throughout the system might find his observations in terms of higher education applicable to other institutions. Here is his summary of the needs and risks with a few of my off-side comments in parenthesis.

– Dialogue
For one thing it would mean fostering in every possible way a broad and ongoing dialogue about concentrated economic power and the changes that will be necessary to build a sustainable economy.

(Nearly everyone I talk with cites “silos” as a major barrier to dialogue, collaboration, and the cross fertilization of ideas. In Universities they are called departments. Non-profits can be special interest silos. In business silos are formed around functions e.g. marketing or business units or even geographies.

Risk
I know of no safe way to conduct that conversation that would not threaten the comfortable or risk losing some of the institution’s financial support, a sensitive topic when the average cost of college education is becoming prohibitively expensive.

(This should sound familiar to folks in non-profits, organizations relying on advertisers, politicians, political parties…)

– Systemic Thinking
Furthermore, colleges and universities ought to equip students, by every means possible, to think systematically, rationally, and, yes, emotionally about long term technological choices and how such decisions should be made.

(Here “students” can be expanded to include customers, employees, shareholders, partners.)

Risk

That discussion, too, would raise contentious issues having to do with the meaning of progress and economic growth. And it would implicitly challenge the unbrideled freedom of inquiry, if the extreme exercise of that freedom undermines biological order, democratic institutions, and social sustainability that give rise to it in the first place. Issues of “who gains and who loses” from unrestricted inquiry will press heavily on the university and cannot be dodged much longer.

(I haven’t heard any one discuss the unbrideled freedom of inquiry and extreme exercise of that freedom which undermines biological order, but my guess is that GMO and the patenting of seeds might fall into this category.)

Greed
Finally the cynical view, pawned off as “objective” social science, that humans are only self-maximizers must be revealed for what it is: half-truth in service to the economy of greed. Increasingly the young know that their inheritance is being spent carelessly and sometimes fraudulently…

(Think economics and the free market then read Raj Patel’s book, The Value of Nothing and give a listen to Raj on EarthSayers.tv, the voices of sustainability.

-Communication
What they may not know is where we, their teachers, mentors, and role models stand or what we stand for.

(This is where we have focused our efforts by creating EarthSayers.tv, the voices of sustainability: the unfiltered voices. It’s time for leaders to step up to the plate and give voice to their views.)

Marketing Sustainability Events

EarthSayers.tv recently published to our Ecotourism special collection a selection from the presentations given at ESTC 2010, the EcoTourism and Sustainable Tourism Conference held here in Portland, September 8-10. Also published were interviews conducted at the conference by myself and filmmakers, Barry Heidt of SustainableTV and Erich Lyttle. Post production work was provided by Tom Hopkins of Sustainable Today TV. The sponsor of this event, The International EcoTourism Society (TIES), like others we have covered in the past, including the Seattle Green Festival held in June, was financed out of our own pockets. Why? Because most organizations sponsoring green events invest in “pre” conference marketing with the backend or post conference a dead zone with no budget. We think this is seriously inhibiting awareness and adoption of sustainability principles and practices which is the mission of EarthSayers.tv.

Viewing events, especially annual events, in a linear fashion in the age of Web marketing is inhibiting the growth of the sustainability audience and, ultimately, has a negative impact on attendance objectives for organizations sponsoring sustainability conferences and events.

Dead Zones

The Web is a timeless environment and needs to be seeded with content frequently. Relevant and quality content remains king. However, accelerating the growth of an audience does requires the marketing process be viewed and acted upon as a continuum. Peppering the Web with content from one event to build interest in the next one should be understood as a requirement.

No Pre or Post

We bring to the sponsors of sustainable and green events not only the ability to produce content at an event in a more personal way – interviews as opposed to the pre-web practice of video taping presentations from the back of the room. We now are able to demonstrate the efficacy of our work as we not only produce content but provide the network, EarthSayers.tv, for distribution which along with our channel on YouTube. This positions the conference organizers and presenters as part of the sustainability movement and seeds the Web increasing page rankings for all involved and making the people and information easier to find. As we all know, searching is one thing, finding is another.

Sustainability Curriculum

An apology to my readers for the delay in writing more about what has consumed a good amount of my time over the last few weeks and in hours of Wednesday meetings over the summer months. Last year I attended the Friday lecture series sponsored by the social sustainability folks at Portland State University (PSU). When summer came along and most of the University folks decamped and the University was quiet, Marion Sharp who leads the Social Sustainability Colloquium on the PSU campus, suggested that if anyone was interested we ought to meet during the summer and explore how we could make the Colloquium more action oriented. A small group, less than ten people, met at that first meeting in June. Today we are having what may be our last meeting, certainly our last summer meeting as we move into fall. One of our actions was to respond in the last few weeks to a “Request for Proposal” from the AASHE – the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. Parts of that proposal including an overview of the three programs we outlined as needing the development of a plan and design for action are described at our Website, sustainabilityadoption.com. Here’s a quick look:

This is a whopping big topic, sustainability curriculum, and for many of us the RFP presented the opportunity to take a step in the right direction. The RFP covers the development of business plans for these ideas, not the implementation of them: not yet anyway.

What started out as an informal group of concerned people meeting together during a summer break has turned into a Wisdom Council of twenty people and one action step in the right direction.

Twittering Sustainability: @earthsayer

We use Twitter primarily as a way to connect with other sustainability-minded environmental, social, cultural, and economic individuals and organizations (241 at this writing) and bring to their attention the voices of sustainability in our collection. We add videos daily to EarthSayers and use Twitter to call out at least four or five a week. Here are two examples:

We are “pushing” out EarthSayers content to an audience who has expressed an interest in our cause. We experiment with the day and time of day we post and offer a wide range of experts, leaders, and citizens from all walks of life. It does seem to generate traffic to our site, meaning people do click through, but not in droves. What we are going to do next is emphasize the subject matter of the video, rather than the person presenting the information and see if it we increase click through numbers.

A social science research paper, “Twitter in Congress: Outreach vs Transparency” by Feng Chi and Nathan Yank, both of the University of Toronto raises an interesting distinction which was referenced by the authors from Felten (2009): “outreach means government telling us what it wants us to hear; transparency means giving us the information that we, the citizens, want to get.” Ultimately, outreach can be used in conjunction with Twitter to push some agendas, while transparency can be used to portray honesty and openness regarding day-to-day operations; both of which involve connecting with the public, and more specifically, constituents via the Internet.”

I suspect this distinction also applies to other profit and non-profit organizations as well, but there is not with reason not to use Twitter for both outreach and transparency.

The authors then make an important point:

“Because both outreach and transparency are important for democracy, we attempt to tease out these two motives using a simple cost-benefit trade-off that underlies the adoption decisions of those in the 111th House of Representatives in order to ascertain each motivei?s value.” We feel very strongly about EarthSayers, as the only media outlet focused on the sustainability movement and highlighting the voices of sustainability, that the the new media and related social media outlets be used in the service of democracy. And in that regard, the findings of the study suggested “that Democrats and Republicans benefit from Twitter in different ways.

A bolder claim from our study says that Democrats care about transparency, while Republicans care about outreach.

The Sustainability Language Barrier

FIRST and foremost, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about the democratic use of language. This is extremely important when it comes to educating our citizens about sustainability.

YOU
What matters is not how the advertiser (you or academic or activist or advocate or consultant) likes to talk about its products (services, ideas, concepts, processes, mission, cause, objective), but how customers (citizens, students, clients, users) actually talk about them.”

THEM

One example of search on the term, sustainable development and the associated keywords and phrases:
The yellow indicates terms that present an opportunity to develop what is called, search directed content, and create webpages with appropriate titles and links.

US
Feedback on what is being used in search has become all the more important because search engines are also contributing to the poverty of attention that advertisers, educators, well, nearly everybody is complaining about.

Adapted from a blog post Why SEO Doesn’t Translate by Guy Gilpin , Monday, August 9, 2010

The Non Profits of Profits

In ignoring the spirit of the recent ban against earmarks, which excluded corporations, but allows non-profits to apply, Corporations have been establishing non-profit organizations at a fast clip.

The New York Times notes “companies have shown remarkable ingenuity in skirting the rule or veiling their requests through nonprofit organizations.” They reported by way of example on four such schemes that are all the more egregious given the number of educational and social services organizations being starved out of existence by the lack of public funding and having little earmark acumen and zero funds to grease the pump.

Here are the examples provided in the New York Times article of July 5, 2010.

¶The Virtual Reality Medical Center, a California-based company that sells visual simulation headgear as an experimental form of medical therapy, had sought nearly $6 million in earmarks before the ban. Soon after, company officials instead proposed that the money go to the Interactive Media Institute, a nonprofit group controlled by the center’s top executives, which had been set up to sponsor educational conferences.

¶In Pennsylvania, General Electric is likely to get as much as 80 percent of a $2 million earmark proposed by Pennsylvania State University for research on clean-burning GE locomotives. At the suggestion of the company and the university’s lobbyist, according to a Penn State professor, the university is listed as the lead player in the collaboration instead of GE, as was done previously. GE executives made a series of political contributions to Representative Kathy Dahlkemper, Democrat of Pennsylvania, days after she submitted the earmark request.

¶In New York, the Copper Development Association, a nonprofit group controlled by copper manufacturers, is pursuing a $4.1 million earmark to hire suppliers to install its members’ copper products in New York City subway cars, asserting that the metal has qualities that inhibit the spread of infectious diseases.

¶And a group called the Solar Energy Consortium in Kingston, N.Y., is pursuing nearly $30 million in earmarks, with the help of Representative Maurice D. Hinchey, Democrat of New York. The group, working out of a tiny office above a machine shop, does not perform its own research. Instead, it plans to pass on most of the earmark money to local businesses, some of which directly collected federal earmarks for solar projects this year but would no longer qualify.

All legal, but is it ethical?

Sustainability and Web Search: Low Interest

This post is not about low interest on the part of our citizens searching on the Web for information about global warming, climate change, and sustainability, but low interest on the part of content producers towards Web search and how it is related to citizens searching, but not finding vital information on these and other sustainability-related issues.

Today’s New York Times article on Yahoo’s efforts to use search data to create search-generated content calls out a little known growth industry around the Web and highlights what every educator needs to know.

“Search-generated content has been growing on the Internet, as evidenced by the success of companies like Associated Content, which Yahoo recently bought, and Demand Media, which has used freelance writers to create an online library of more than a million instructional articles.”

Compare this to the old school educators and social activists who blanch at the phrase, content generation, and hold steady to the practices of print, and you will begin to understand why our citizens don’t get answers to their basic questions about global warming, climate change, sustainability or even about our oceans and water pollution.

It starts and ends with interest.

Yahoo and advertisers have a big interest in being in the top organic search results on key search terms because supplying relevant information when a person is in the buying cycle is a basic tenet of marketing success. Indeed, a recent article in DM News suggests Search Engine Optimization (part of what we are talking about) was once overlooked, but have realized it “doesn’t strain their budgets” and improved analytics make it “easy to understand the relationship between natural search rankings and revenue.”

Those in the business of education or those who would benefit the most from an informed public have shown very little interest.

The power of the Web has been highly commercialized largely because it is a buying machine. But it is also a learning and training machine, yet it just may be that to meet searchers needs is just too crass of a reason to create content that explains important concepts and issues and may interfere with the editorial and research freedom to publish what is important and what is not and to use language such as “eco-economics” and avoid prosperity in favor of ROI. Yahoo points out (you really need to read the NYTimes article) to its journalistic detractors: “The information is valuable because editors can integrate it into their decision making. It’s an asset. It’s a totally amazing and useful tool that we have at Yahoo. But it does not lead Yahoo editorial content.” A tool.

In other words, how can it not be crucial to understand that although there are 28M webpages out there on the subject of “global warming” less than 170,000 of them are titled to appear in top rankings (and thus be seen) to a search on the term, global warming, and even less on the question what is global warming? Yet there is significant search on this term, more on this term than on sustainability or climate change.

This chart (1) from Google Insights gives you a general idea of the popularity, if you will, of the three terms in relationship to each other. You can use the chart below to get some feel for search traffic on these terms which come from a snapshot (1%) of the search traffic over a years period of time using software called, WordTracker. For nearly every sustainability-related topic that I looked at, the search on “what is” or “definition of” was relatively high and the number of Web pages with a title that grabs was low. This is a great opportunity for organizations with a cause to gain traction with searchers out there who are entering or are in the learning cycle. In the hundreds of video programs we have reviewed for inclusion in our sustainability collection on EarthSayers.tv, the voices of sustainability, the titles reflect a general disconnect from what the video actually covers, choosing in some cases to emphasize the name of the person answering the question, what is sustainability, or the event at which the person attended and was recorded. These are just two examples of hundreds.

But first to change things, the educators and proponents of sustainability have to know and understand the capability of SEO and search engine marketing. Indeed, from my own experience, a greater interest in the Web would be a starting point for many of our leaders addressing environmental, social, cultural or economic sustainability, followed by increasing their (1) personal, (2) professional, (3) organizational, and (4) cause presence (brand) on the Web in all four categories, and take a crash course on SEO so they can better align their language and messaging with their objectives and audience. SEO by the way is complicated and is a learning experience for even the most seasoned of marketing professionals.

This is my agenda.

If you invite me to participate in a meeting around sustainability, this is what I am going to talk about; if you want me to increase your revenue for a sustainable product or service, this is what I am going to talk about and help you achieve; and if you ask me how to increase your membership, this is what I am going to talk about and make suggestions around. If you ask me about sustainability, I’ll probably refer you to one of the hundreds voices of sustainability found at EarthSayers.tv.

P.S. I included Walmart in the following chart to give an idea of corporate-related efforts to be in the top rankings, mostly using paid search, but increasingly using organic search more effectively.

Note: (1)

The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. They don’t represent absolute search volume numbers, because the data is normalized and presented on a scale from 0-100

Sustainability: Searching and Not Finding

Over the last twelve months the phrases “environmental sustainability” and the “definition of sustainability” are in number 1 and 2 positions on the top Google searches for sustainability. What do searchers find and who influences their thinking? Most of our citizens are getting information on these terms from Wikipedia or the EPA or, in some cases, the more mainstream press such as MSNBC. Our site, EarthSayers.tv, is focused on being in the top results along with Wikipedia bringing the unfiltered voices of sustainability, a videopedia, if you will, calling out the people defining the emerging landscape of sustainability. We are not in the top rankings YET, but because we pay such close attention to search, we see a trend of major corporations moving into the top rankings as they come to understand how they can influence public perceptions of their “greenness” through paid and organic search strategies. Eventually the big Corporations will dominate the highest rankings.

But getting the attention of progressives and their organizations on the importance of search and high rankings is difficult, largely because they lack any experience on the commercial side of the Web, resulting in much of the information and news produced around sustainability being buried in the back water of Google and Blinkx search results. A couple of years ago when we first started EarthSayers a search on Blinkx, a video search engine, netted 21,000 sustainability videos. Today it’s over 250,000!

So as the information chests GROW of the well meaning organizations and leaders, ranging from environmentalists to triple bottom line advocates, and the bloggers and twitterers, including our own @earthsayer, seed the Web organically, we aren’t really impacting the rankings on sustainability or on any of the related categories such as global warming and climate change. This is a failure contributing to the decline in awareness tracked in polls and surveys.

A recent Gallup poll cited in the Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, April 12, 2010, reports “forty-eight per cent of the respondents believe the threat of global warming to be generally exaggerated. This figure was up from thirty-five percent a year ago. According to the same poll, only fifty-two per cent of Americans believe that “most scientist believe that global warming is occurring – down from sixty-five per cent in 2008. The dark green line below represent the per cent of people (32%) who believe global warming is going to affect their lives, down from a high of 40 per cent.

Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker article also makes note of “a quarter of the TV weather-casters AGREE with the statement ‘global warming is a scam,’ and nearly two-thirds believe that, if warming is occurring, it is caused mostly by natural change.” This is painful to consider.

The Web as new media can play a critical role in educating our citizens about sustainability and the related issues, especially if we use it to bring to the fore with high page rankings the unfiltered voices of business and civic leaders, experts, consultants, and citizens from all walks of life. There is way too much processed information, particularly in the form of unsubstantiated marketing claims and green lists, and too little authentic voices of sustainability that can be found by searching the Web. Research shows that children rarely go beyond the first page of rankings and it is not a stretch to assume adults are not much different. We are working to fix the problem as soon as possible by educating leaders, aggregating sustainability videos, and using a sustainability taxonomy we created for our site to seed the Web methodically, but we can’t do it alone. We need help drawing attention to the problem that is, at the same time, a great opportunity to increase sustainability awareness and educate our citizens.

Note:

According to PEJ New Media Index “Global warming emerged as the second-largest story in the blogosphere (at 16%). It, too, has proven a favorite over the past year. Last week marked the 10th time that the subject has been among the top five stories on blogs since PEJ New Media Index began monitoring the blogosphere in January 2009.

Lloyds of London Weighs in On Unsustainability

Lloyds of London, the global insurance giant, issued something of a warning to businesses on its Web site just last Friday. “Pressure is building on businesses to address the environmental impact of their operations,” the firm wrote. “Moves by intergovernmental bodies and investors suggest that they could soon be made more financially accountable for the pollution they cause… some experts are even predicting that many of the world’s biggest companies could see their profits cut by one third as a result of more stringent regulation, the abolition of subsidies and increased taxes.”

Excerpt from the New York Times article: Can Business Do the Job All by Itself?

By TOM ZELLER Jr.

Published: March 28, 2010

Process Matters

McKinsey released a report this month, The Case for Behavioral Strategy, which pulls out the fly in the ointment by doing the analysis on the question: “how much of the variance in decision outcomes was explained by the quality of the process and how much by the quantity and detail of the analysis.”

The answer: process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six. The fly being poor processes of which any one who has spent any time in large companies knows out trumps the numbers, but, well numbers are king. Or were. They are important, of course, but “superb analysis is useless unless the decision process gives it a fair hearing.” And, as you will find out reading the report, superior processes improve ROI.

Sustainability initiatives present an excellent opportunity to address unsustainable processes.

While in this post I called out the process message from the study, the story begins with the profound “cultural change” it’s going to take to “debais” strategic decisions. Well worth a read and for the C-level executives a chance to look at how they might be converting process or work problems to people problems. This is how social sustainability can begin to play a bigger role in “greening” our institutions and cities.

My mentor, Dr. Herbert Heaton, then Comptroller of the Rockefeller Foundation and a numbers guy, warned me of the inclination for decision makers to convert work problems to people problems, resulting in firings and lay-offs, and an inordinate amount of time spent accepting and rejecting people. My boss and mentor, Dr. Randy Hamilton, then of the Institute for Local Self Government, weighed in with the observation that “people hire in their image and likeness.” As I said, this study addresses the role bias plays in our decision-making. Here’s the hard part: “..in strategic decision making leaders need to recognize their own biases.” Now let me link all this talk about process and bias to employment.

The workforce of a company is its most strategic asset and addressing the bias inherent in the process of acquiring and managing this asset is what I move to the top of the list. The report doesn’t really talk about people-related decisions favoring instead to reference decisions around mergers, strategic plans that often ignore competitive responses, and investment projects. Social sustainability and prosperity go together, you can’t have one without the other and prosperity is our economic foundation.

Sustainability Advocate

Ruth Ann Barrett of EarthSayers.tv, Voices of Sustainability