Are foundations REALLY helping deal with the environmental crisis? I think not!

I posted this item today on www.xigi.net - a group blog for socially responsible capital market formation.

Charles Conn wrote an article recently in Standford Social Innovation Review entitled "Robbing the Grandchildren: Foundations' shortsightedness is jeopardizing the planet's future."

He points out the fact that "...only 5 percent of U.S. foundation spending goes to the environment, and a paltry 2.9 percent goes to science and technology. Of the top 50 foundation grantees in 2004, only three were environmental organizations. Even those foundations that do work on ecosystems spend much of their resources on small-scale land conservation. Government priorities are also skewed to the here and now. As the Oct. 30, 2006, New York Times reports, U.S. federal spending on energy research has fallen to $3 billion – less than half of its level in 1980 – while spending on medical research has quadrupled to $28 billion over the same period."

Please read the entire article, as Conn covers the issue very well.

Bottom line: If foundations aren't stepping up with major dollars to help bring about the ecological u-turn, who is left to do it?

Naturally, I'd like to see responses from our fellow xigi readers who are in the foundation world to hear how they are channeling more dollars toward sustainability and environmental regeneration.

Slowing down in a world built for speed

We're so "marinated" in the "roadrunner" way of living that we have overlooked the toll that hyperspeed way of living takes on well being and simple life.

In his new book "In Praise of the Slow" author Carl Honore speaks to expressions of the dis-ease of our rush-a-holic society: speed dating, speed reading, fast food.

Carl spoke about slowness at a recent conference (Technology, Environment, Design) where some of the most innovative thinkers share their latest ideas with eachother. It is an important reminder, and you can watch it - (you can slow down for a minute to watch it, right?)

Click the following link to watch the short video of his thought provoking talk:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/73

This talk points to the grand opportunity we have to redefine our concept of time.

Thankfully, the popularity of books like The Power of Now and the growth of what is becoming known as the "international slow movement" reveals how slowness can transform the experience of living on the planet.

By slowing down at the right moments, we can vastly improve the quality of experience in our lives.

Think about these ideas: "slow food" and "slow sex." Aren't the the simple pleasures of food and lovemaking where we really want to slow down and "savour the moment?" Doesn't it sound wonderful?

Naturally, slowness is a way of life. And relaxation, too!

My spiritual teacher Amma emphasizes the importance of relaxation in all things.

The quote is framed on the wall of the travel office in her ashram temple in Kerala, India. Here's the quote:

"Children, learn to be relaxeed in all circumstances.

Whatever you do and wherever you are,
relax and you will see how powerful it is.

The art of relaxation brings out the power that exists within you;
through relaxation you can experience your infinite capacities.

It is the art of making your mind still , and focusing all your energy on the work you are doing, whatever it may be.

Thus you will be able to bring out all of your potential.

Once you learn this art, everything happens spontaneously and effortlessly."

All of us can benefit from slowing down.

Take a moment, slow down, relax.

And experience the benefit.

20 Year Anniversary of the Commision who developed the phrase "sustainable development"

"Sustainable"

It is certainly the buzzword of the day. Everyone wants to be "sustainable." Yet not many people know what it really means.

Simply put, it is like any other buzzword, it is overused and misunderstood. For example I was told that a woman's jewelry line is "sustainable" simply because the jewelry hangs down the front of the body and gemstones are placed at each of the different chakras. Give me a break.

So what does it mean?

The Native Americans embraced a philosophy called Gayaneshakgowa or "Law of Peace" of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy: "In our every deliberation we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations."

20 years ago the United Nations coined the term "sustainable development" in a report which is the source of much of the use today. The Chairperson of the effort called "World Commission on Environment and Development" was Gro Harlem Bruntland, former head of Norway - thus the name of the report was the "Brundtland Report"

The Commission defined the term sustainability to be "meeting the needs of the present without comprimising the needs of the future."

She wrote in the beginning of the report.

"A global agenda for change" - this was what the World Commission on Environment and Development was asked to formulate. It was an urgent call by the General Assembly of the United Nations:

- to propose long-term environmental strategies for achieving sustainable development by the year 2000 and beyond;

- to recommend ways concern for the environment may be translated into greater co-operation among countries of the global South and between countries at different stages of economical and social development and lead to the achievement of common and mutually supportive objectives that take account of the interrelationships between people, resources, environment, and development;

- to consider ways and means by which the international community can deal more effectively with environment concerns;"

- to help define shared perceptions of long-term environmental issues and the appropriate efforts needed to deal successfully with the problems of protecting and enhancing the environment, a long term agenda for action during the coming decades, and aspirational goals for the world community."

The entire report is available to read here.

Unfortunately, the last 20 years we have not shown much progress to achieve the goals with coutries like China and India going full steam ahead with not-so-sustainable development paths.

Every one of us would benefit by reflecting on the true meaning of the term "sustainable" as we steer our civilization toward sustainability.

Smart mobs shut down toxic plant in China with text messaging

This blog and photo from worldchanging.com discusses a real milestone event.

It simply speaks for itself

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/006896.html

Sky Farm - Growing Food in a Skyscraper

Treehugger.com just reported that a group in Toronto is proposing a sky farm.

Read the entire article here.

Here's another item from Gliving.tv

I think that this is particularly interesting, especially in light of my last post on peak oil.

Managing the Collapse - The End of Oil - weaning ourselves off of oil.

I attended the Global Green Millenium Awards last night and met Richard Heinberg who is a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and author of the book "The Party's Over: Oil War and the Fate of Industrial Societies" and his most recent book "The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism and Economic Collapse".

As a resident of Los Angeles, I am overly aware of the addiction that we have to oil. Just look around us. Cars everywhere, no reasonable public transportation...

Our overly paved city populated by cars with human operators is perhaps the most ugly face of the fact that we in the US consume 25% of the world's energy and have only about 4.5% of the World's population.

So, what do we do?

In our brief conversation Richard shared with me that he estimates that we as a civilization need to prepare for 3% less oil every year.

This is certainly a manageable prospect, yet we have to get on it right away.Although it appears to be a small amount, that means roughly 10% in three years, etc.

We certainly have the technology, the money and power to downshift our use of Oil. And the goal of simply reducing by a measurable amount every gives us a pathway to deal with this situation.

Serendipitously my friend and long time environmentalist Paula Daniels, who is on the Board of LA's Department of Public Works, was close by and I introduced Richard to her. We discussed the urgency of the situation and how she is helping manage the city's massive infrastructure to use less oil, energy and water. She was happy to meet him, and they intend to get together for lunch. This made my day!

Well, in the meantime the rest of us have to begin visioning the pathway to how we as a civilization use less and less oil.

Another author by James Howard Kuntsler who wrote "The Long Emergency" outlined ten ways we must kick the oil habit in an article from
Alternet

I cut and pasted excerpts from the article to highlight the main points:

" 1. Expand your view beyond the question of how we will run all the cars by means other than gasoline. The bottom line of this is: start thinking beyond the car.

2. We have to produce food differently.

3. We have to inhabit the terrain differently. Virtually every place in our nation organized for car dependency is going to fail to some degree. Quite a few places (Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami ...) will support only a fraction of their current populations. We'll have to return to traditional human ecologies at a smaller scale: villages, towns, and cities (along with a productive rural landscape).

4. We have to move things and people differently. This is the sunset of Happy Motoring (including the entire US trucking system). Get used to it. Don't waste your society's remaining resources trying to prop up car-and-truck dependency.

5. We have to transform retail trade. The national chains that have used the high tide of fossil fuels to contrive predatory economies-of-scale (and kill local economies) -- they are going down.

6. We will have to make things again in America. However, we are going to make less stuff. We will have fewer things to buy, fewer choices of things.

7. The age of canned entertainment is coming to and end. It was fun for a while. We liked "Citizen Kane" and the Beatles. But we're going to have to make our own music and our own drama down the road. We're going to need playhouses and live performance halls. [ yeah, whatever, I will always have my canned music solar powered or not...]

8. We'll have to reorganize the education system. The centralized secondary school systems based on the yellow school bus fleets will not survive the coming decades.

9. We have to reorganize the medical system. The current skein of intertwined rackets based on endless Ponzi buck passing scams will not survive the discontinuities to come.

10. Life in the USA will have to become much more local, and virtually all the activities of everyday life will have to be re-scaled."

Heinberg's suggestion that we manage to live on 3% less per year, and Kuntslers' ten points provide a navigable roadmap to a post carbon future. They underscore that it is actually possible to manage ourselves off of oil.

First we must simply ALLOW THAT IT IS POSSIBLE to live in a different way. From there we can actually get down to work of visioning and creating the new way.

IS BIG BUSINESS BUYING OUT THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT?

A recent article from
Corporate Research E-Letter No. 65, May-June 2007. speaks of the current surge of Environmental Enthusiasm in corporate America.

The article reminds me of feelings I had in the the early 90's when we saw environmental fervor in every media publication and many corporate advertisements. I recall one highlight was the 1990 issue of TIME Magazine which made "Earth" the Person of the year.

At that time the world was all about ‘green’ with the 20th anniversary of Earthday raising awareness of the environmental issues and the Earth Summit in 1992. This flash media hyper-attention fizzled rapidly from a green hue to a light brown as the public channel-surfed to other "issues".

This time, I am a bit more optimistic that many of the current green efforts of corporate America will stick, mainly due to the fact that the environmental crisis is on full fire alarm status and it appears that people are afraid - to lose profits.

Yet there are many corporate giants are who simply capturing the wave of environmental concern to continue a trend of green-washing as a means to obscure the business-as-usual mentality.

I recently visited a friend's home where he had a poster created by DOW Chemical highlighting all the spots on the planet where there are areas of concern on a particular green topic. I frankly wasn't inspired enough to read more.

Furthermore, the more corporations are willing to spend to advertise hollow, or shallow efforts, the greater the danger to environmental groups who would align with these shenanigans in order to receive much needed funding.

"Moreover, there is a risk that the heightened level of collaboration will undermine the justification for an independent environmental movement. Why pay dues to a green group if its agenda is virtually identical to that of GE and DuPont? Already there are hints that business views itself, not activist groups, as the real green vanguard. Chevron, for instance, has been running a series of environmental ads with the tagline “Will you join us?”

Join them? Wasn’t it Chevron and the other oil giants that played a major role in creating global warming? Wasn’t it Chevron that used the repressive regime in Nigeria to protect its environmentally destructive operations in the Niger Delta? Wasn’t it Chevron’s Texaco unit that dumped more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste in Ecuador? And wasn’t it Chevron that was accused of systematically underpaying royalties to the federal government for natural gas extracted from the Gulf of Mexico? That is not the kind of track record that confers the mantle of environmental leadership.

In fact, we shouldn’t be joining any company’s environmental initiative. Human activists should be leading the effort to clean up the planet, and corporations should be made to follow our lead."

Read the entire article here

I agree with the skepticism in the article since many companies like GE, Union Carbide, Texaco, Exxon and Oxy have not paid a dime to clean up the messes they have made in the past. In fact they continue to fight tooth and nail in legal battles in order to avoid paying anything!

The Ecology of Work - how do us 'worker bees' evolve our role?

Most of us do not recognize the impact of how the system of work, consumption and money itself is fundamentally challenging to ecosystems around us. In order to restore the balance between our business based civilization and the other inhabitants on planet earth, we would be best served to observe the mechanisms at work.

The first question is how do each of us play a role in the larger economy? Each of us work in this system, and assume that the mechanism of employment is not to be questioned... yet a large percentage of adults assume we will work at some point in our lives.

An Excerpt from a two part series article in Orion Magazine, Curtis White writes:

"We are not the creators of our own world; we merely perform functions in a system into which we were born. The most destructive aspect of our jobs is that in them we are mere “functionaries,” to borrow Josef Pieper’s term. Just as important, we have a function outside of work: consumption. Money in hand, we go into the market to buy the goods we no longer know how to make (we don’t even know how to grow and preserve our own food) and services we no longer know how to perform (frame a house? might as well ask us to design a spaceship)."

The mere prospect that each individual is somehow responsible transforming the entire system is often too much, even for the broadest thinkers in the progressive movement. Yet I think that every one of us would benefit from seeing the big picture, and our role in shaping it.

He continues:

"Challenging our place in this system as mere isolated functions (whether as workers or consumers) is a daunting task, especially for environmentalists, who tend to think that human problems are the concern of somebody else (labor unions, the ACLU, Amnesty International, Habitat for Humanity, etc.). We’re about the 'Earth first.' My argument is simply that the threats to humans and the threats to the environment are not even two parts of the same problem. They are the same problem."

Bioneers bumper sticker on my car says "It's all connected...."

Dharma Marketing sprouting in Portugal

Dharma Marketing

From the site:

"Developed by a Portuguese investigator, this new concept aims to reach the deepest level of the human psyche, finding in the oriental example of enterprising spirit – which has a strong resource to spiritual values – the path to a new internal proximity Marketing.

For Dharma Marketing, the commitment between organisations and everyone they’re connected to is an effect of their actual proximity. Through more spiritualised human resources, the objective of Dharma Marketing is to have a significant impact on business, or at least to give the organisation’s relational competencies wider meaning as regards to empathy with oneself and with others.

This change is the distinctive element in the construction of a new way of looking at the organisations of the third millennium.
Dharma Marketing

• Transparency: the art of being associated with Competence
• Confidence: coherent relations and natural calmness
• Spirit of Mission: to live institutional values intensely
• Holistic Dimension: relations’ spiritual management
• Proximity: self-knowledge and meditation"

I am encouraged by such efforts because it is evidence emerging trend of spirituality applied in the field of business.