Think2100

If you are marketing green, consider this.  In a July/August, 2009 Atlantic article entitled “Greening with Envy:  How Knowing Your Neighbor’s Electric Bill Can Help You to Cut Yours,” Bonnie Tsui explains that “Keeping up with the Joneses” is a marketing strategy that can successfully motivate people to take action to create a cleaner environment. 

Twenty years ago, “green” merchandise filled a small niche market.  In the U.S. economy, environmentalists were comparatively minor players, a group that mainstream American shoppers associated with hyper-socially-responsible activists and nostalgic throwbacks from the hippie movement.  The recent shift toward green becoming mainstream creates new opportunity, but also poses a new challenge, for the small-niche, eco friendly merchant.

By WeBuyItGreen: promoting green living and fair trade

In her recent book, Wrestling with Starbucks:  Conscience, Capital, Cappuccino, Kim Fellner compares Starbucks to Bill Clinton.  She likes the good things they do, but doesn’t know whether they can be trusted to do the right thing when times get tough, suggesting that, “When Starbucks’ ship encounters a really bad sea, someone may be tossed overboard, and it’s not likely to be the shareholders.” 

The Seattle Times reported today that the American Chemistry Council has spent a half million dollars on a PR campaign against a Seattle referendum that would charge a 20 cent fee on disposable shopping bags.  The ACC’s contribution is the single largest to a local ballot-measure in recent Seattle history.

Going or sending someone to college this fall?  We've got a few suggestions for choices that you can justify in Ethics 101.

I don’t usually get angry enough to write my Congressmen and try to get friends and family involved on a political issue, but the version of “Cash for Clunkers” that made it through the House infuriates me.

 By WeBuyItGreen: promoting green living and fair trade

In case you haven’t heard, Nestle has come out with an “Eco-Shaped” bottle for water.  They are telling us it’s good for the environment because it uses less plastic than it used to and has a smaller label.  But before you run out and buy a bunch of these things to save the environment, you should recognize that your local water utility provides the same product minus the environmental costs associated with creating and disposing of plastic containers, which makes the Nestle ad a case of greenwashing.

By WeBuyItGreen: promoting green living and fair trade

The factual information below about Pachacuti was provided by the company.  Pachacuti is a member of Coop America and the Fair Trade Federation.

Carol Stengel is the owner of Pachacuti, a business that sells fair trade jewelry and textiles.  She buys products from artisans who live in the small coastal towns and highland villages of Mexico.  Juan Quezada, one of these artisans, imitates the 1000-year-old pottery techniques of the Paquime Natives.  His work so closely resembles the ancient shards they left behind that upon discovering his pieces in a secondhand store in 1976, anthropologist Spencer MacCallum mistook them for originals.

By WeBuyItGreen: promoting green living and fair trade

The factual information below about Little Works was provided by the company itself, a member of Coop America that has been approved by the Fair Trade Federation.

On an April day in Namibia, Sarah Paine, a Volunteer Service Overseas products designer, awoke to music.  A group of artists-in-training from the small San settlement of Ekoka were singing and ready to begin their workshop.  Sarah would be helping the group with oil painting and lithocuts in Etosha, Namibia’s largest game park.

The following entry originally appeared in the Portland Oregonian on June 30, 2008.

By WeBuyItGreen: promoting green living and fair trade

For many on both the right and the left, the effects of the truth about climate change are more than inconvenient.  They have been personally confusing.

This is not difficult to understand with respect to conservative ideology.  Members of the right believe in independent enterprise.  Their hero is Ronald Reagan, the great communicator on behalf of smaller government, lower taxes, and less regulation.  They identify “green” with CAFE standards, EPA regulation, and those crazy Europeans, who, due to gas taxes, were paying five dollars a gallon during the good old days when a gallon cost two dollars in the U.S.  No, the inconvenience of Mr. Gore’s truth is not difficult to understand for this group.  But conservatives support business, and “green” is now becoming big business.  The prospects for cashing in on this potential may have more impact than any scientific evidence in shattering conservative resistance to the climate change message.  Conservatives are trying on a new “greener” set of clothing.

By WeBuyItGreen: promoting green living and fair trade 

Juana Cholotio sits on the floor of her living room beading a twelve-stranded bracelet as blue and beautiful as any Caribbean lagoon.  Her twenty-one year old daughter, Melchora Isabel, works at the table with four other women.  The table only seats five, so the remaining three women in this group of nine have joined Juana on the floor.  Tomorrow, the group will be different.  The eighteen women doing bead work in this cooperative choose their own hours, and most work part-time because they have children to manage at home.  For Juana, the work does become tiresome--she chooses to work ten to twelve hour days.  But she takes pride in her skill and explains that the conversation in the co-op helps you to “clear your mind.”  Like Juana, many of the other women have had husbands who became abusive, drank too much, or simply left them.  They talk about these things as they work--husbands, children, and financial worries.

 By WeBuyItGreen: promoting green living and fair trade

Deflated Mylar balloons sag above the third tier of the schoolyard bleachers marking a memorial for three young victims murdered last summer in Newark, New Jersey. The news photo reinforces a common image of the city, a place where the crime rate was double that of the average U.S. city from 1999-2001, where unemployment rose to 12.5% in 2002-2003. So when Mayor Cory Booker of Newark recently appeared on a Bill Moyers special and articulately made a case for optimism about his city, I listened. This man had left the suburbs to live in a housing project for eight years and fight for better living conditions for the tenants. Moyers reported that after the three young people were killed last summer, Booker made changes in the police department that led to the longest murder-free period the city had experience since 1967. You may have noticed that my favorite quote on this page is by Mayor Booker and is taken from the Moyers program: “And if everybody stopped talking and started focusing on doing something more than I did yesterday in order to change tomorrow, then we're gonna have the America of our dreams.”