Sustainability: Not Any One Issue

This is a quick look at the results of the 2011 CONE/ECHO Global CR Opportunity Study that is available here at the Cone site and looked at through a sustainability lens. The takeaway cited by the authors is that “consumers globally believe companies have an explicit responsibility to help change the world.”

Can there be but one issue anymore?

Or put all the wood behind one arrow.

This same information, with a shift in the lens to a sustainability perspective rather than pieces and parts, unifies and integrates moving us toward the requirement of an interconnected holistic approach, using the integrated elements of sustainability strategically.

The lens we use to ask for opinions and present information about those opinions can’t be the same one we’ve been using for the last thirty years . How we use information to motivate and inspire citizens and organizations of all stripes to change their consumption habits is the challenge for all of us who accept “explicit responsibility to help change the world” and who are marketers and communicators.

Can we agree on this?

Here’s some examples of messages that educate, motivate and inspire while addressing the whole, not pieces and parts:

Rethinking the Economy by Ellen MacArthur Foundation,

disConnected Consciousness by environmentalist Julia Butterfly Hill,

and John Marshall Roberts on the Science of Inspiration.

By: Ruth Ann Barrett, Sustainability Advocate, Earthsayers.tv, February 8, 2012, Portland, Oregon.

Wine to Water by Doc Hendley

Video of Hero Doc Hendley’s premier on the TEDx Stage at Asheville, NC on August 29, 2010. Doc is founder of Wine to Water, a non-profit promoting clean water resources in poverty stricken countries worldwide. This video compliments the interview of Doc Hendley by Dick Gordan of The Story as reported in this blog post.

He ends this presentation with “Here’s to being a nobody.” Find out why.

View video on EarthSayers.tv, special collection on One Water.

Sustainability Advocate, Ruth Ann Barrett, February 5, 2011, Portland, Oregon.

Wine Into Water works for us all

This morning I woke up early, opened one eye, grabbed my iPhone, and chose the podcast, American Public Media (APM) The Story with Dick Gordan, the one titled, Fix a Well and Change the World.

It woke me up.

It’s an interview with Doc Hendley of the group Wine to Water. He talks about his transition from bartending in Raleigh to working to bring clean water to people in Darfur. Despite the violence there, Doc says that bad water kills more people than the conflict.

Winetowater on Twitter.

Advancing Science, Serving Society in a Hostile Environment

In Friday’s post about climate change I referenced four videos, one of which features Prince Charles denouncing the climate change deniers. What I didn’t refer to is the public Statement of the Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Regarding Personal Attacks on Climate Scientists. “We are deeply concerned by the extent and nature of personal attacks on climate scientists. Reports of harassment, death threats, and legal challenges have created a hostile environment that inhibits the free exchange of scientific findings and ideas and makes it difficult for factual information and scientific analyses to reach policymakers and the public.”

Prince Charles notes, so clearly and directly it takes your breath away, “the corrosive effect on public opinion of those climate change skeptics who denounce the vast body of scientific evidence that shows beyond a any reasonable doubt that global warming has been exasperated by human industrial activities” and then asks, “Will such people be held accountable at the end of the day for their absolute refusal to continence a precautionary approach? For this plays, I would suggest, a most reckless game of roulette with the future inheritance for those that come after us…”

The role of associations, like the AAAS, in educating the public and alerting citizens to issues not covered in the mainstream press (they express it as “advancing science, serving society”) needs to be increased if we are to hear the unfiltered voices of sustainability above the din of ignorance, self interest, and disinformation, information intended to mislead. Here’s a popular video, How It All Ends, on thinking it through for yourself; using risk management to end the debate; and how YOU can help make things happen.

Sustainability Advocate, Ruth Ann Barrett, February 5, 2011, Portland, Oregon.

Changing Climate Patterns

Climate change is on the surface a hot potato. There are all sorts of folks from Prince Charles to Prof Naomi Oreskes pointing out the folly of ignoring the scientific consensus on the warming of our earth and its cause – us. One thing YOU can do is look at the evidence and come to your own conclusions.

Today’s issue of the Sustainability Information Diet (SID*) features two videos using visualization. Exploring how climate works and getting an Earth perspective enables us to see what’s going on thanks to software that turns data into a visual representation.

I selected these two from the over 900 videos we’ve curated on the subject of sustainability, keeping them organized using a database that displays them for public access on our site, EarthSayers.tv in the special collection on climate change.

NASA Finds 2011 Ninth-Warmest Year on Record

In this animation of temperature data from 1880-2011, reds indicate temperatures higher than the average during a baseline period of 1951-1980, while blues indicate lower temperatures than the baseline average. Visit Union of Concerned Scientists for more information.

Uncovering Winter’s Mystery

A brief recap of the satellite news media tour on February 1, 2012 that looked at the science of falling snow, how NASA observes snow from space, and the factors that lead to the 2010 “Snowmageddon.” For more on the story, check out http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/know-snow.html

*The SID series by Ruth Ann Barrett of EarthSayers.tv is designed to increase sustainability awareness and address the information overload problem of our readers through portion control – selecting out the best – and emphasizing online video, especially the unfiltered voices of business and civic leaders, teachers, experts, and citizens from all walks of life. It’s a series that is part of her blog, Sustainability Advocate.

The Water Canary by Sonaar Luthra

Just added from the TED collection this video presentation by Sonaar Luthra. After a crisis, how can we tell if water is safe to drink? Current tests are slow and complex, and the delay can be deadly, as in the cholera outbreak after Haiti’s earthquake in 2010. TED Fellow Sonaar Luthra previews his design for a simple tool that quickly tests water for safety — the Water Canary.

Announcing the Sustainability Information Diet (SID)

Introducing the Sustainability Information Diet (SID)
SID is all about increasing sustainability awareness on the Web which is awash in information resulting in search results running to thousands of possibilities and our eyes seeing but the first three or four listings. Here’s a heat map of the results page, Google search. A listing of a YouTube video on page one of the results catches attention as shown in other heat maps.

Low Awareness What search does tell us is that sustainability awareness is low. And very low in the United States. The U.S. ranks in the bottom of the top ten on sustainability search estimated at 1.2M per month globally. This is about the same number for those searching on corporate social responsibility and those wanting to know the price of an iPhone. This relates to the majority of search traffic that uses English, but does not exclude search traffic being highest on sustainability from countries such as Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, Singapore and Hong Kong who along with Australia (#1), New Zealand, United Kingdom, U.S., and Canada make up the top ten regions.

Low awareness adversely affects those selling green products as awareness is the first step in the consumer buying cycle. It makes educating, inspiring, and motivating our citizens to make changes at home and work less effective as well as it’s also the first step in the learning cycle. Awareness is very important. Many talk about it in terms of consciousness such as Julia Butterfly Hill who talks about disconnected consciousness.

Tagging and Linking The more the term is used in the news, the more people use the term, the more people search, wanting to know more, the higher awareness. Equally important is connecting, through tagging and linking as sustainability, to other more popular search terms such as human rights (2.7M), climate change (2.2M), and global warming (2.7M). This is the stuff of search engine marketing a topic guaranteed to put most people to sleep yet key to increasing sustainability awareness. I’ve just touched on it here.

Yet the very thing that increases awareness (more stuff) contributes to the problem of information overload as first introduced in 1970 by Alvin Toffler in his book, Future Shock, and now best expressed in numbers. When you search on sustainability there are 31M results. Blinkx the video search engine produces 354,000 videos, up from 121,000 since we first did this query four years ago, video still a small percentage of the content out there, but growing in leaps and bounds.

A Diet for Excess The stuff we are buried in is a sea of text – reports, opinions, programs, organizations, initiatives, campaigns, projects, news, debates, speeches, panels, events, and PR releases. Not so when it comes to online video. This diet isn’t about less, but more targeted, linked, tagged video to meet the information needs of those already searching and increase awareness.

Portion Control For our SID readers we will use portion control based on our collection of over nine hundred videos, aggregated then curated for relevancy and quality, to bring to your attention to how corporations, non-profits, educational institutions, and individuals are using video to help answer some basic questions, what is sustainability, a supply chain, sourcing, a for benefit organization, or concepts such as natural capitalism through speeches, panels, documentaries, art, animation, and interviews.

What’s Next? February 16, 2012
The primary question to be addressed in Month One, February 16, 2012 of our diet plan of mostly video is What is sustainability?

Videos will feature Prof. Julian Agyeman, Tufts University (38:10); Christoph Lueneburger, Egon Zehnder (3:01); Larry Merculieff (Aleut 4:52); Prof.Stuart Hart, Cornell University (1:37); Allison interviews her father Bud McGrath, CORE (audio only 10:09); Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt, Natural Step (5:56); and animated personalities from People 4 Earth (2:50), RealEyes (2:02), and Dassault Systems (2:50).

Tune in.

Worth a Million Words About Global Warming

“Worth a million words via Seth’s Blog – We all know how much a picture is worth. What about a good short video…” His blog offers a click through to this NASA animation of temperature data from 1880-2011 reflecting that the global average surface temperature in 2011 was the ninth warmest since 1880, according to NASA scientists. The finding continues a trend in which nine of the 10 warmest years in the modern meteorological record have occurred since the year 2000. Reds indicate temperatures higher than the average during a baseline period of 1951-1980, while blues indicate lower temperatures than the baseline average. (Data source: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Visualization credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio)

Creating the Internet of Energy by Dr. Ryan Wartena

Just added Dr. Ryan Wartena, CEO, President, and Founder of Growing Energy Labs, Inc (GELI) to the Renewable Energy and Smart Grid special collection on EarthSayers.tv, voices of sustainability.

In this video he asks, why haven’t we used solar all these years and how the Internet of Energy addresses the major roadblock – storage. Much as Google’s founders foresaw the potential of the web to deliver relevant information to the masses, GELI sees that the Internet — together with renewable energy generation and storage — as the ultimate solution enabling clean, affordable energy for anyone, anywhere.

Increasingly the Smart Grid is a concept that will become more prominent in the sustainability landscape and Dr. Wartena is the leader behind the company’s sustainability vision of the Internet — together with renewable energy generation and storage — as being the ultimate solution enabling clean, affordable energy for anyone, anywhere.

Reach Out and Educate with Your Voice

And make sure you are on YouTube.

Why?

In October 2011, 201.4 billion videos were viewed online, with the global viewing audience reaching 1.2 billion unique viewers age 15 and older. Google Sites led as the top global video property with nearly 88.3 billion videos viewed on the property during the month, accounting for 43.8% of all videos viewed globally. YouTube.com was the key driver of video viewing on Google Sites, accounting for more than 99% of videos viewed on the property. Source is comScore Video Metrix as reported in MediaPost’s Research Brief, Media Research Center, Tuesday, January 3, 2012.

Of course putting content out on the Web regardless whether it is text or video requires seeding the Web to increase page rankings and the probability of your content being found, viewed, and judged as relevant and of quality.

Lots of work ahead of us in 2012 to get the voices of sustainability out there and heard. We will exceed the 1,000 voices mark this month and look to 2,000 in 2012.