JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good. We’re honored to have with us today Doctor Kevin Danaher. He’s the co-founder of Global Exchange and the Green Festivals. Welcome to Green is Good, Kevin.
KEVIN DANAHER: Thanks for having me on, John. I really appreciate it.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, it’s so great that you’re taking the time with us today, Kevin. You’re doing so much important stuff. Before we get talking about all the great work you’re doing at The Global Exchange and The Green Festivals, can you share a little bit about your backstory, your journey even leading up to what you’re doing today professionally? How did you even get to this position?
KEVIN DANAHER: Well, actually, I started out in northern New Jersey, a little town called Oakland, Irish Catholic family, pretty low income. I had my first job when I was 6 years old selling newspapers out on the street, came up a little bit rough. The government tried to send me to Vietnam when I was 18 and I luckily had a high enough IQ to realize that was a bad war and I ended up not going to that through devices of my own development. We’ll leave that as a footnote and then I went to California when I was 21 and started college back when you could- My first two years of college, I paid $21 a year for tuition back when it was affordable out here and started with journalism, did psychology, ended up getting a Ph.D. in sociology, wrote about 10 books about the global economy, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, the big monkey mucks that run the global economy, and then I realized through the last two books about the last 10 or 15 years that I was focused on what’s wrong, a critique of the existing system, and realized no, just focus on the next system and building the next system so my last two books were green economy books because the environment’s being destroyed so the value of all our natural resources, water and everything pretty much, is going to go up in value. We just recently last week had two studies showing that the west Antarctic ice sheet is melting irreversibly. We can’t stop this now. That’s going to raise ocean levels between 6 and 10 feet. That means Miami Beach and Boca Raton, the San Francisco airport, the Oakland airport, Long Beach, California, all sorts of coastal property is going to go under water so now we know that and people say, ‘Oh, but that’s off in the future. Well, we’re talking about our grandchildren,’ so we’re either going to say, ‘Screw our grandchildren,’ or we’re going to do something about this environmental crisis we’re confronting.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: First of all, for our listeners that want to follow along on all the great work you’re doing, Kevin, please go to www.globalexchange.org. I’m on the website now. There is so much information here and of course Kevin, you’re a very humble guy. You’ve written so many books and I just want to share a couple of them with our readers, our listeners here: The Green Festival Reader; Fresh Ideas for Agents of Change, and Building the Green Economy; Success Stories from the Grassroots, important reads and thank you again for all the great work you do, Kevin. Talk a little bit about what you just said though. We love talking about solutions here and these are bad, bad problems and they are here and they are now and no one really wants to say, ‘Screw our grandchildren’. What can we start doing? What can our listeners in the United States and around the world, because we’ve got listeners around the world, Kevin, what can they start doing to take action and become part of the solution?
KEVIN DANAHER: Well, I think a good way to look at this is to think of the different roles you play in their life, if you’re a son, a daughter, a parent, you’re a student or a teacher, you’re a worker, you got your workplace and you’re also a citizen. Hopefully, you research who your candidates are on environmental and social inequality issues so I think in your personal life, little things like don’t run the water when you’re brushing your teeth or when you’re shaving. When you leave a room, turn the lights out and people say, ‘Oh, it takes energy to turn lights on,’ but if you’re leaving the room for more than one second, it makes sense to turn the lights out. There are a lot of places now like in San Francisco where you can sign up to have your electricity be from renewable energy sources. The kind of light bulbs you’ve got , now the thing to do, we went through a whole phase of compact fluorescents. Now the thing to go for is the LEDs. You can get LED lights. They cost a little bit more initially but they last way longer and they sip energy. They’re very, very energy efficient. Caulking your windows and doors, the easiest savings you can make is in an old leaky building plugging the cracks, especially in places like New York and up north when it gets cold. We’re lucky here in California we don’t have to deal with that too much. People should go through their life and think of all the different roles you play. If you have children, are you educating those children, not to scare them, but about the environmental crisis and what can be done about it? Because those kids of today- I do a volunteer teaching of a high school class on urban agriculture and my attitude is if we don’t train these kids up to deal with the environmental crisis that’s looming, shame on us so this is not just about us. It’s about us being good ancestors and thinking many generations down the road, are we going to leave our grandchildren a burnt cinder of a planet with all the coastal cities underwater? The National Geographic of September, the cover story was on ocean levels. If all the ice on the planet melts, which it appears to be doing, it raises ocean levels over 200 feet so you’re talking about most of Manhattan, most of our major cities, Houston. Houston already has problems when it rains hard. The water backs up because it’s so near sea level. I live in San Francisco. Our whole financial district is right on the water so this is going to cost trillions of dollars of investment in ways to cope with this. I’m pushing the idea of eco levies and eco levis would be large mounds of rammed earth with salt water topped with salt water tolerant plants or the oceanside, bike trails, park benches, fruit trees on top and the terraced urban agriculture on the inland side. In permaculture, we talk about stacking of functions so you’d be protecting coastal property, providing recreational space, growing food, et cetera.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I mentioned your book, Building the Green Economy; Success Stories from the Grassroots. Everybody’s definition is different about things. Obviously, our show is called Green is Good. What is your definition and what do you mean by the green economy and where are we going with that? What’s the direction of the green economy as we know it today, Kevin?
KEVIN DANAHER: Well, it’s exploding. If you look at all the statistics, solar energy, wind energy, in one year we added more wind energy than was added in the previous five years from coal, fire, and power, which is the main source of electricity in this country. The Obama Administration, the EPA is just going to come out this week with new guidelines around Co2 and energy production pollution and it’s going to put a knife through the heart of the coal industry so maybe your investors listening should short the stock of coal companies if they’re heavily invested in coal. The book that I recommend to people, actually it’s not one of my books. It’s called Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough, the green architect, and in Cradle to Cradle, he and his co-author point out that we have a linear economy. We pull stuff out of the earth, we manufacture it into products, we use it, and then we throw it in the landfill so we’re using up our resources and they say we have to grow from cradle to grave to cradle to cradle. Everything we produce, when we’re done using it, has to either go back into the industrial process as raw material or into the ground as compost and if you look at places like San Francisco, we are now at 80% resource recovery. Eighty percent of our city garbage either goes to recycling or into compost and the city sells that stuff. The compost is sold to wineries and vegetable gardens and golf courses so we’re learning how to eliminate the notion of waste. Waste is a human concept. Nature does not do waste. Everything is somebody else’s lunch.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, eventually, there’ll be no landfills? Waste will become waste to energy or some other type of function but we won’t go back to the legacy of waste to landfills anymore now that this green economy ship is in motion, huh?
KEVIN DANAHER: Sure, and you can even take it to (some people would say) the extreme. When we go to the bathroom, we are taking clean water that’s been purified, we’re mixing it with waste, and then sending it away where it has to be purified, spending a lot of money, and then it gets dumped into the ocean semi-purified. That stuff has value. Human urine has more nitrogen than cow manure, pig manure, or horse manure and we’re throwing it away instead of using it in our soil, granted you have to dilute it with water. Our whole concept of waste needs of change and all of these resources, if you look at the data, they’re all running out. In the United States each year, we lose between two billion tons and eight billion tons of topsoil because we do this heavy industrial agriculture, digging deep, pulling the soil up so it blows away, monoculture, where it’s wheat, wheat, wheat for miles and then corn for miles. Nature doesn’t do monoculture. We’re killing off our pollinators. When bees come to a plant to fertilize it in a sense, to do the sex of plants, they pick up little bits of the fungicides and the pesticides, the nicotinoids that are being sprayed on the crops and it messes with their navigation system. They can’t find their way back to their hive and they die out in the middle of nowhere. This is just crazy. We’re messing with nature’s basic DNA but now we’re learning that you’ve got a whole field of biomimetics. Biomimicry is looking at how nature does it and then imitating nature. We’re learning that bees and ants and wolves, social animals, have important lessons to teach us about how to collaborate.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there that just joined us, we’ve got Doctor Kevin Danoher with us today. He’s the co-founder of Global Exchange and The Green Festivals, which we’re going to get to in a moment, but to follow along and learn more about Kevin’s great work and important work, please go to www.globalexchange.org. Kevin, talk a little bit about The Green Festivals. They’re the rage now in the United States. They’ve become very successful. How did you start with those and what is the true importance of The Green Festivals today and beyond?
KEVIN DANAHER: Well, to tell you the truth, when I came up with the idea about 14 years ago, I was actually trying to devise a real estate model that would be an eco-mall, green mart, not Walmart, where all the products would be super clean, no greenwashing, no sweatshop production, all Fair Trade Certified, all organic certified by the USDA but I realized that I was writing these books about The World Bank and the IMF and The World Trade Organization. I didn’t really know the green economy that well so I figured if we did an event, I would get to know which companies were the good ones and which ones didn’t pay their bills so we started The Green Festivals in San Francisco. It was a huge success. It exploded. We took it to Washington and Chicago and New York and Los Angeles and Seattle and Austin and Denver and we realized there’s a green economy movement out there and the customers who want these products, we’re happy to show you exactly what the ingredients are, where they came from. What was the process? How do the workers get treated? Very, very strict criteria for companies being able to exhibit their goods and services in the show and what you realize is it’s exploding because the more well educated people in the population are the ones who want to know the background of these products they’re using so they’re all involved but also for future generations and it turns out that those well educated people are also higher income people. Education level and income go together so it’s a great market segment. It’s people that can afford to pay a little bit more for a better product. People say, ‘Oh, organic food, yeah, but it costs more.’ Yeah, well a Rolex costs more than a Timex because it’s a better watch. You pay more for things that are better. If you’re driving a Mercedes, that’s going to cost you a lot more than a VW bug so people are starting to wake up and realizing we have a responsibility to the future generations to get this right and make this transition and I might add changes are not going to come from on high. I voted for Obama but he’s not going to fix these problems. The big national and international leaders, they’re responsible to big companies and investors and people with lots of money to throw at them but changes are coming from the grassroots. That’s what we do at The Green Festival and the website is GreenFestivals.org. This coming weekend, we have our show in Washington, DC, at the Washington Convention Center. It’s going to be huge. It’s our frontier in Washington, DC, so there’s an awakening going on and I would argue we’re in the beginning of the first ever Green Revolution. Every revolution up until now was a national revolution where the revolutionaries sought to gain control of the capital city and run that country differently. Now we’re in a global values revolution that’s saying instead of having money values rule over the life cycle, we need to have life values rule over the money cycle. We have to subordinate the economy to society and nature instead of subordinating society and nature to the economy.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it. You know, you’ve coined some great terms and I want to share these with our listeners and I want you then to define some of these great terms you’ve coined so solutionaries: What are solutionaries as we stand today in 2014 and what does that mean to you?
KEVIN DANAHER: Solutionaries, this is a term I use teaching my high school urban ag class in San Francisco. I tell the kids, “Look, a solutionary has a totally positive attitude. We recognize all the dangers. We take in all the information about the polar ice caps melting and the glaciers melting and we say, ‘Oh okay, this creates an opportunity for green enterprise.’” The shift to biofuels away from fossil fuels. The U.S. military is throwing tons of money at the biofuels. The air force flew an A 10 Attack aircraft on 100% biofuel from camelina. It’s a weed. They didn’t have to re-engineer the engines. Green building has taken off like a rocket, recycling, composting, permaculture, urban agriculture, all of these things, when you chart their progress it’s like ski slope. They’re taking off like crazy and they’re actually now starting to beat the old models on market terms, just on the financial terms . There’s places in the United States now where it’s cheaper and more profitable to do solar energy or wind energy than to do a coal, fire, and power plant, which is a great thing. Google has a motto, ‘RE less than C,’ renewable energy less than coal. They’re investing hundreds of millions of dollars in renewable energy to make it more profitable to invest that way than to invest in fossil fuel energy production so all of these changes that are taking places, at the Green Festivals we bring it all together. We’ve got more than 300 exhibits of all these goods and services, lots of community action groups, about 150 speakers, a big food court with organic vegetarian food locally sourced, a kid zone, films, just all sorts of stuff that expose people to the next economy, the green sustainable economy, which is where we’re going to end up.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it and what a great term you’ve created. To me, that should be in every school across America. Become a solutionary. That is beautiful.
KEVIN DANAHER: Let me give you one other term and that’s matriotism. Matriotism, as opposed to patriotism, patriotism is loving one little part of the earth and God knows I love this country. I’ve traveled all over the world and I always come back here. I love my country but we have to now start loving the planet, Mother Earth. We all came out of a mother. We call it Mother Earth. We call it Mother Nature so we have to develop the concept of matriotism, loving the entire planet.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love that term and one last one. We’re down to about a minute-and-a-half, Kevin. Green guardians, what do you mean when you talk about green guardians? What do you mean by that term?
KEVIN DANAHER: Well, I’m trying to create a model that we can share out to the rest of the world and I’m doing it here with a high school in San Francisco. It’s explaining to young people, particularly teenagers, they’re at that point where they’re starting to think about college, their career, their profession, what kind of job they’re going to do, and we’re focused on things like urban agriculture, recycling, composting, renewable energy, small wind, small solar, soil science, taking up sidewalks to get rainwater into the ground and plant crops. People come buy our sidewalk gardens at Mission High School and they all say, ‘This is beautiful. This is great you’re doing this.’ Some of these kids have never used a shovel. Some of them don’t know what a pickaxe is. They don’t know how the soil functions chemically, biologically, and they get turned on to it and they realize hey, you can make money doing this. I had one kid come up to me the other day when I was working in the garden. He says, ‘Hey, can you make money doing this?’ I said, ‘Yeah, you can make money doing this. You want to find out how?’ and he’s one of my best recruits now.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it. Kevin, thank you for joining us today, You really are amazing. For our listeners out there, go to The Green Festivals. Support the Green Festivals. It’s really important or go to Kevin’s website at www.globalexchange.org to learn more about his great work. Become a solutionary. Listen to Kevin and become a solutionary and let’s all also become matriots. Kevin, thank you for being an inspirational visionary sustainable leader. You are truly living proof that green is good.
Building a Green Economy with Global Exchange’s Dr. Kevin Danaher
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good. We’re honored to have with us today Doctor Kevin Danaher. He’s the co-founder of Global Exchange and the Green Festivals. Welcome to Green is Good, Kevin.
KEVIN DANAHER: Thanks for having me on, John. I really appreciate it.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, it’s so great that you’re taking the time with us today, Kevin. You’re doing so much important stuff. Before we get talking about all the great work you’re doing at The Global Exchange and The Green Festivals, can you share a little bit about your backstory, your journey even leading up to what you’re doing today professionally? How did you even get to this position?
KEVIN DANAHER: Well, actually, I started out in northern New Jersey, a little town called Oakland, Irish Catholic family, pretty low income. I had my first job when I was 6 years old selling newspapers out on the street, came up a little bit rough. The government tried to send me to Vietnam when I was 18 and I luckily had a high enough IQ to realize that was a bad war and I ended up not going to that through devices of my own development. We’ll leave that as a footnote and then I went to California when I was 21 and started college back when you could- My first two years of college, I paid $21 a year for tuition back when it was affordable out here and started with journalism, did psychology, ended up getting a Ph.D. in sociology, wrote about 10 books about the global economy, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, the big monkey mucks that run the global economy, and then I realized through the last two books about the last 10 or 15 years that I was focused on what’s wrong, a critique of the existing system, and realized no, just focus on the next system and building the next system so my last two books were green economy books because the environment’s being destroyed so the value of all our natural resources, water and everything pretty much, is going to go up in value. We just recently last week had two studies showing that the west Antarctic ice sheet is melting irreversibly. We can’t stop this now. That’s going to raise ocean levels between 6 and 10 feet. That means Miami Beach and Boca Raton, the San Francisco airport, the Oakland airport, Long Beach, California, all sorts of coastal property is going to go under water so now we know that and people say, ‘Oh, but that’s off in the future. Well, we’re talking about our grandchildren,’ so we’re either going to say, ‘Screw our grandchildren,’ or we’re going to do something about this environmental crisis we’re confronting.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: First of all, for our listeners that want to follow along on all the great work you’re doing, Kevin, please go to www.globalexchange.org. I’m on the website now. There is so much information here and of course Kevin, you’re a very humble guy. You’ve written so many books and I just want to share a couple of them with our readers, our listeners here: The Green Festival Reader; Fresh Ideas for Agents of Change, and Building the Green Economy; Success Stories from the Grassroots, important reads and thank you again for all the great work you do, Kevin. Talk a little bit about what you just said though. We love talking about solutions here and these are bad, bad problems and they are here and they are now and no one really wants to say, ‘Screw our grandchildren’. What can we start doing? What can our listeners in the United States and around the world, because we’ve got listeners around the world, Kevin, what can they start doing to take action and become part of the solution?
KEVIN DANAHER: Well, I think a good way to look at this is to think of the different roles you play in their life, if you’re a son, a daughter, a parent, you’re a student or a teacher, you’re a worker, you got your workplace and you’re also a citizen. Hopefully, you research who your candidates are on environmental and social inequality issues so I think in your personal life, little things like don’t run the water when you’re brushing your teeth or when you’re shaving. When you leave a room, turn the lights out and people say, ‘Oh, it takes energy to turn lights on,’ but if you’re leaving the room for more than one second, it makes sense to turn the lights out. There are a lot of places now like in San Francisco where you can sign up to have your electricity be from renewable energy sources. The kind of light bulbs you’ve got , now the thing to do, we went through a whole phase of compact fluorescents. Now the thing to go for is the LEDs. You can get LED lights. They cost a little bit more initially but they last way longer and they sip energy. They’re very, very energy efficient. Caulking your windows and doors, the easiest savings you can make is in an old leaky building plugging the cracks, especially in places like New York and up north when it gets cold. We’re lucky here in California we don’t have to deal with that too much. People should go through their life and think of all the different roles you play. If you have children, are you educating those children, not to scare them, but about the environmental crisis and what can be done about it? Because those kids of today- I do a volunteer teaching of a high school class on urban agriculture and my attitude is if we don’t train these kids up to deal with the environmental crisis that’s looming, shame on us so this is not just about us. It’s about us being good ancestors and thinking many generations down the road, are we going to leave our grandchildren a burnt cinder of a planet with all the coastal cities underwater? The National Geographic of September, the cover story was on ocean levels. If all the ice on the planet melts, which it appears to be doing, it raises ocean levels over 200 feet so you’re talking about most of Manhattan, most of our major cities, Houston. Houston already has problems when it rains hard. The water backs up because it’s so near sea level. I live in San Francisco. Our whole financial district is right on the water so this is going to cost trillions of dollars of investment in ways to cope with this. I’m pushing the idea of eco levies and eco levis would be large mounds of rammed earth with salt water topped with salt water tolerant plants or the oceanside, bike trails, park benches, fruit trees on top and the terraced urban agriculture on the inland side. In permaculture, we talk about stacking of functions so you’d be protecting coastal property, providing recreational space, growing food, et cetera.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I mentioned your book, Building the Green Economy; Success Stories from the Grassroots. Everybody’s definition is different about things. Obviously, our show is called Green is Good. What is your definition and what do you mean by the green economy and where are we going with that? What’s the direction of the green economy as we know it today, Kevin?
KEVIN DANAHER: Well, it’s exploding. If you look at all the statistics, solar energy, wind energy, in one year we added more wind energy than was added in the previous five years from coal, fire, and power, which is the main source of electricity in this country. The Obama Administration, the EPA is just going to come out this week with new guidelines around Co2 and energy production pollution and it’s going to put a knife through the heart of the coal industry so maybe your investors listening should short the stock of coal companies if they’re heavily invested in coal. The book that I recommend to people, actually it’s not one of my books. It’s called Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough, the green architect, and in Cradle to Cradle, he and his co-author point out that we have a linear economy. We pull stuff out of the earth, we manufacture it into products, we use it, and then we throw it in the landfill so we’re using up our resources and they say we have to grow from cradle to grave to cradle to cradle. Everything we produce, when we’re done using it, has to either go back into the industrial process as raw material or into the ground as compost and if you look at places like San Francisco, we are now at 80% resource recovery. Eighty percent of our city garbage either goes to recycling or into compost and the city sells that stuff. The compost is sold to wineries and vegetable gardens and golf courses so we’re learning how to eliminate the notion of waste. Waste is a human concept. Nature does not do waste. Everything is somebody else’s lunch.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, eventually, there’ll be no landfills? Waste will become waste to energy or some other type of function but we won’t go back to the legacy of waste to landfills anymore now that this green economy ship is in motion, huh?
KEVIN DANAHER: Sure, and you can even take it to (some people would say) the extreme. When we go to the bathroom, we are taking clean water that’s been purified, we’re mixing it with waste, and then sending it away where it has to be purified, spending a lot of money, and then it gets dumped into the ocean semi-purified. That stuff has value. Human urine has more nitrogen than cow manure, pig manure, or horse manure and we’re throwing it away instead of using it in our soil, granted you have to dilute it with water. Our whole concept of waste needs of change and all of these resources, if you look at the data, they’re all running out. In the United States each year, we lose between two billion tons and eight billion tons of topsoil because we do this heavy industrial agriculture, digging deep, pulling the soil up so it blows away, monoculture, where it’s wheat, wheat, wheat for miles and then corn for miles. Nature doesn’t do monoculture. We’re killing off our pollinators. When bees come to a plant to fertilize it in a sense, to do the sex of plants, they pick up little bits of the fungicides and the pesticides, the nicotinoids that are being sprayed on the crops and it messes with their navigation system. They can’t find their way back to their hive and they die out in the middle of nowhere. This is just crazy. We’re messing with nature’s basic DNA but now we’re learning that you’ve got a whole field of biomimetics. Biomimicry is looking at how nature does it and then imitating nature. We’re learning that bees and ants and wolves, social animals, have important lessons to teach us about how to collaborate.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there that just joined us, we’ve got Doctor Kevin Danoher with us today. He’s the co-founder of Global Exchange and The Green Festivals, which we’re going to get to in a moment, but to follow along and learn more about Kevin’s great work and important work, please go to www.globalexchange.org. Kevin, talk a little bit about The Green Festivals. They’re the rage now in the United States. They’ve become very successful. How did you start with those and what is the true importance of The Green Festivals today and beyond?
KEVIN DANAHER: Well, to tell you the truth, when I came up with the idea about 14 years ago, I was actually trying to devise a real estate model that would be an eco-mall, green mart, not Walmart, where all the products would be super clean, no greenwashing, no sweatshop production, all Fair Trade Certified, all organic certified by the USDA but I realized that I was writing these books about The World Bank and the IMF and The World Trade Organization. I didn’t really know the green economy that well so I figured if we did an event, I would get to know which companies were the good ones and which ones didn’t pay their bills so we started The Green Festivals in San Francisco. It was a huge success. It exploded. We took it to Washington and Chicago and New York and Los Angeles and Seattle and Austin and Denver and we realized there’s a green economy movement out there and the customers who want these products, we’re happy to show you exactly what the ingredients are, where they came from. What was the process? How do the workers get treated? Very, very strict criteria for companies being able to exhibit their goods and services in the show and what you realize is it’s exploding because the more well educated people in the population are the ones who want to know the background of these products they’re using so they’re all involved but also for future generations and it turns out that those well educated people are also higher income people. Education level and income go together so it’s a great market segment. It’s people that can afford to pay a little bit more for a better product. People say, ‘Oh, organic food, yeah, but it costs more.’ Yeah, well a Rolex costs more than a Timex because it’s a better watch. You pay more for things that are better. If you’re driving a Mercedes, that’s going to cost you a lot more than a VW bug so people are starting to wake up and realizing we have a responsibility to the future generations to get this right and make this transition and I might add changes are not going to come from on high. I voted for Obama but he’s not going to fix these problems. The big national and international leaders, they’re responsible to big companies and investors and people with lots of money to throw at them but changes are coming from the grassroots. That’s what we do at The Green Festival and the website is GreenFestivals.org. This coming weekend, we have our show in Washington, DC, at the Washington Convention Center. It’s going to be huge. It’s our frontier in Washington, DC, so there’s an awakening going on and I would argue we’re in the beginning of the first ever Green Revolution. Every revolution up until now was a national revolution where the revolutionaries sought to gain control of the capital city and run that country differently. Now we’re in a global values revolution that’s saying instead of having money values rule over the life cycle, we need to have life values rule over the money cycle. We have to subordinate the economy to society and nature instead of subordinating society and nature to the economy.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it. You know, you’ve coined some great terms and I want to share these with our listeners and I want you then to define some of these great terms you’ve coined so solutionaries: What are solutionaries as we stand today in 2014 and what does that mean to you?
KEVIN DANAHER: Solutionaries, this is a term I use teaching my high school urban ag class in San Francisco. I tell the kids, “Look, a solutionary has a totally positive attitude. We recognize all the dangers. We take in all the information about the polar ice caps melting and the glaciers melting and we say, ‘Oh okay, this creates an opportunity for green enterprise.’” The shift to biofuels away from fossil fuels. The U.S. military is throwing tons of money at the biofuels. The air force flew an A 10 Attack aircraft on 100% biofuel from camelina. It’s a weed. They didn’t have to re-engineer the engines. Green building has taken off like a rocket, recycling, composting, permaculture, urban agriculture, all of these things, when you chart their progress it’s like ski slope. They’re taking off like crazy and they’re actually now starting to beat the old models on market terms, just on the financial terms . There’s places in the United States now where it’s cheaper and more profitable to do solar energy or wind energy than to do a coal, fire, and power plant, which is a great thing. Google has a motto, ‘RE less than C,’ renewable energy less than coal. They’re investing hundreds of millions of dollars in renewable energy to make it more profitable to invest that way than to invest in fossil fuel energy production so all of these changes that are taking places, at the Green Festivals we bring it all together. We’ve got more than 300 exhibits of all these goods and services, lots of community action groups, about 150 speakers, a big food court with organic vegetarian food locally sourced, a kid zone, films, just all sorts of stuff that expose people to the next economy, the green sustainable economy, which is where we’re going to end up.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it and what a great term you’ve created. To me, that should be in every school across America. Become a solutionary. That is beautiful.
KEVIN DANAHER: Let me give you one other term and that’s matriotism. Matriotism, as opposed to patriotism, patriotism is loving one little part of the earth and God knows I love this country. I’ve traveled all over the world and I always come back here. I love my country but we have to now start loving the planet, Mother Earth. We all came out of a mother. We call it Mother Earth. We call it Mother Nature so we have to develop the concept of matriotism, loving the entire planet.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love that term and one last one. We’re down to about a minute-and-a-half, Kevin. Green guardians, what do you mean when you talk about green guardians? What do you mean by that term?
KEVIN DANAHER: Well, I’m trying to create a model that we can share out to the rest of the world and I’m doing it here with a high school in San Francisco. It’s explaining to young people, particularly teenagers, they’re at that point where they’re starting to think about college, their career, their profession, what kind of job they’re going to do, and we’re focused on things like urban agriculture, recycling, composting, renewable energy, small wind, small solar, soil science, taking up sidewalks to get rainwater into the ground and plant crops. People come buy our sidewalk gardens at Mission High School and they all say, ‘This is beautiful. This is great you’re doing this.’ Some of these kids have never used a shovel. Some of them don’t know what a pickaxe is. They don’t know how the soil functions chemically, biologically, and they get turned on to it and they realize hey, you can make money doing this. I had one kid come up to me the other day when I was working in the garden. He says, ‘Hey, can you make money doing this?’ I said, ‘Yeah, you can make money doing this. You want to find out how?’ and he’s one of my best recruits now.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it. Kevin, thank you for joining us today, You really are amazing. For our listeners out there, go to The Green Festivals. Support the Green Festivals. It’s really important or go to Kevin’s website at www.globalexchange.org to learn more about his great work. Become a solutionary. Listen to Kevin and become a solutionary and let’s all also become matriots. Kevin, thank you for being an inspirational visionary sustainable leader. You are truly living proof that green is good.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, Erin, before we get talking about what you’re doing there and all the important work, I want you to share the Erin Bosch story. We’ve got so many young people from around the world that listen to Green is Good and our guests are the inspirational leaders of today and there’s a lot of young people that want to follow in your footsteps so can you share your journey leading up to being the President and CEO of Mozi-Q?
ERIN BOSCH: Absolutely. I’m kind of a chronic entrepreneur. I actually tried to open up my first business when I was 15 years old with a coffee shop. It didn’t quite work out that way but later on, when I was 20 years old, I got the idea to open up a health food store because all throughout high school I had worked in health food stores so I went to my mom and was like, ‘Mom, I want to open up a health food store,’ and she said, ‘Write a business plan,’ and so I went and I wrote a business plan and a few months later, I had opened up a little health food store in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. At that point, I had gotten myself to day one and I remember sitting in my office and I used a label maker. It was our biggest expense of the entire build and I typed out, ‘It is real,’ and that thing sat on my computer actually for years afterwards and so I started working in my little health food store and gained quite a little following and then year five I actually decided to change the concept of my business. Part of my store was still a little store and the other part of it was a clinic and the reason I did that was because I love natural medicine and I love green medicine but I really believed that we had to have professionals talking about the medicine and so I did a renovation. I did it all myself because I’m a good entrepreneur and then we reopened as a clinic and at that point, we started to get a great following because we had so many professionals working for us and then fast forward another year. We were researching again and obsessed with natural medicine and came across a remedy in an old textbook that if you took it, mosquitos wouldn’t bite you. I didn’t actually think a lot about it because I’m not a particularly yummy person. Bugs don’t bite me but I started selling it in the clinic and every year, I had this 100% increase in sales and one day, we had sold a lot of it and I was talking to my sister. I’m like, ‘Okay, when I die, I want this on my tombstone because it’s like it’s a real product,’ and then she gave me a funny look and the light bulb went off and I started working to bring this product to market. It took me actually a year and a half to get approval in Canada. Canada actually has very strict guidelines for natural medicine and then finally, when I got my approval, I brought it to market and I’ve been chasing after Mozi-Q ever since and this year marks the year that we’re actually launching it to the U.S. I’m really excited about it because Mozi-Q is the first ever oral insect repellent. It’s completely safe. There’s no contra-indication. It’s all natural and I really believe this is a remedy that can help change the world.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: This is so cool; so wait a second now. I want to step back. There’s so many questions that come out of that and that’s such a fascinating journey so you’re still in Canada I take it, Erin?
ERIN BOSCH: Yes.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, you still have the health center or what’s it look? What’s your retail store look like or center look like?
ERIN BOSCH: Oh, it’s still there and I have somebody who’s running it for me. I’ve kind of branched off a bit because you know, it sounds weird but I actually thought launching a product would be a hobby and lo and behold, two years later, it’s not a hobby and so we just expanded into this brand new space in a gorgeous part of our city and I’ve got an office with a bunch of people working for me and I just have a really good time with it now.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Okay, but still, people can go to your health food store, homeopathic center that runs as a retail center and this is now going to be your wholesale enterprise, selling Mozi-Q to the world?
ERIN BOSCH: Exactly, yeah. As far as sales of Mozi-Q, I launched it two seasons ago so we’re entering into our third season here in Canada and we’re now in about 2,500 stores across Canada. We’ve got a huge following. I was recently featured on Dragon’s Den, which is Canada’s equivalent of Shark Tank.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: No.
ERIN BOSCH: Yeah, yeah, and guess what: Kevin loved me.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wait a second. Kevin’s on both shows?
ERIN BOSCH: He’s on both shows. Kevin’s Canadian.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Oh, so he’s on both shows. Which show started first?
ERIN BOSCH: I think it was Dragon’s Den. Dragon’s Den has been around for eight years now.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: No kidding. So, wait a second. Did you get the funding you wanted or did you not?
ERIN BOSCH: I ended up having four out of the five dragons fight over me, which was kind of interesting.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s fun. Good for you!
ERIN BOSCH: I didn’t end up going with Kevin, but I went with two other dragons for a deal. Eventually, it actually fell through just because my sales exploded and I didn’t need the funding anymore.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Good for you; and I’m sure that was great publicity for you.
ERIN BOSCH: It was a fascinating night. It took down our website five times and we trended on Twitter and I didn’t know I ever wanted to trend on Twitter until I trended on Twitter.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Good for you. That’s awesome. Alright, so wait a second now. Let’s step back so now let’s go back and talk a little bit about the interrelationship and really part of our journey. Homeopathy and green, explain why that was so important to you and why that should be important to our listeners out there across not only Canada and the United States, but across the world.
ERIN BOSCH: Socrates said, “Let your food be your medicine,” and one of the things that’s always really concerned me is that in our society, we have this preconceived notion that our medicine is poison and to me, that’s not right. Our medicine should not be poison, right? We shouldn’t be scared of overdosing on something that’s supposed to actually heal us and so in my veins back at the health food store, I knew that there had to be an alternative. It just didn’t make sense to me that there wasn’t an alternative for a poisonous medicine until we came across homeopathy. In my first days at that health food store, I couldn’t really afford to hire anybody and so my mom was working for me and when she started working for me, she also started going to school for homeopathic medicine and that’s when we just fell in love with the medicine and we realized it can do so much. In our clinic we have such fantastic results, especially with children, and kind of my goal is to bring a safe and effective and natural and green medicine to the world so that people no longer have this idea that medicine is poison.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is so great and for our listeners out there that want to follow along, first of all, Erin’s website is just beautiful. I’m on it right now. If you want to pull it up on your iPad or on your laptop or whatever you’re on, your cell phone, it’s www.mozi-q.com. It’s with a dash in there though, Mozi-Q.com, so wait a second now. You sell at the store all sorts of homeopathic medicines but now your new business, your add-on business, is this natural repellent for bugs.
ERIN BOSCH: Yeah well, I wanted to find a way to bring natural medicine to the world. I’m only one person. I can’t talk to the entire world from my little clinic but when Mozi-Q, this idea, came to me, I realized this is a safe natural medicine that had mass appeal. People want to take a pill and not get bitten and bugs are a chronic problem all across the world and so the reason I launched Mozi-Q was to introduce people to a different alternative for something that is potentially dangerous for us.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wait a second. This is fascinating. In Canada, you’ve been selling this now for two years?
ERIN BOSCH: Yes.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Talk a little bit about your sales by packages. How many sales the first month? How many sales last month or how many sales the first year? How’s it going and what are you expecting to happen within the United States when it starts taking off?
ERIN BOSCH: Yeah, well, I’m up in Canada and despite what people think, we don’t have snow all year round, but at the same time, it’s very hard to sell a mosquito product in the dead of winter in Canada so we have a very short season here. In my first season on the market, I got into about 250 stores and that was just me putting pedal to the metal and going in and talking to individual retailers and getting it out there and then the second season that we launched was this last year. We got into 900 stores because the word spread how awesome this product was and then this year going in, we’re in about 2,500 stores across Canada so I’m really expecting the U.S. We’ve always had requests from the U.S. to come into the market. We’ve always had a presence on our website. We’re available on Amazon.com but I’m really expecting to see a huge influx because you’ve got areas of the country that first of all, there’s insect borne illness but also, mosquitos are prevalent all year round.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Let’s be honest here. You’re going to save people’s lives and also save people from all these insect borne illnesses so I’m on your website. Again, for our listeners out there, this is really important stuff, www.mozi-q.com. It says it works within 30 minutes of taking it. I want you to walk us through this. There are no side effects. It works on other bugs aside from mosquitos like ticks and head lice. I’m reading here. Is it also bed bugs, too?
ERIN BOSCH: Basically, any blood biting insect, so things like chiggers. It does work on scabies, but we tend not to talk about that because it makes people itchy.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, it’s nontoxic.
ERIN BOSCH: Nontoxic, and it’s safe for babies and it’s also safe for pets.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wait, wait. Why wouldn’t every household in America want this?
ERIN BOSCH: Well, that’s definitely the goal.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Erin, come one now! We can do this! You can do this now. This is amazing. Good for you.
ERIN BOSCH: Like I said, I’ve been running after it ever since I launched it going, ‘Wait for me! Oh my God!’ It’s been quite an adventure since then. The one thing to point out is that I can’t guarantee that you’re never going to get bitten by a bug ever again. Nobody can do that but what I did that was really important to me is I turned it into a formula and so I made sure that if you do happen to get a bite, it won’t be as itchy and it’ll heal in about half the time.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow. So many of our listeners suffer from bites of so many types, like you said, and we’re not going to go back through the list again but this is a great thing for our pets, for ourselves, for our children, for our loved ones, our friends. How often do you have to take then a dose of your Mozi-Q?
ERIN BOSCH: You take one tablet every two to three hours depending on exposure. If you’re in a swamp, you might have to take it more often and one of the things, talking about being green, is we have a bunch of tree planters in northern Canada and they love this stuff because they’re out in the middle of the woods making sure that we have more trees but they’re getting eaten alive so we’ve been sending up with them since the get-go.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: This is amazing and for our listeners out there that have to travel or want to travel to areas where dengue fever and other things are very serious in terms of illnesses that can be contracted from mosquito bites, I assume the Mozi-Q would work very well for people who have to travel to more dangerous areas of the world where dengue fever and other type of airborne illnesses through mosquitos can be even more dangerous to us.
ERIN BOSCH: It’s also important to note that Mozi-Q can be used in conjunction with anything else because you do have to be safe in those areas but I can tell you we had one woman. She took it. She went on a mission in Kenya. She built houses and she took enough. She didn’t know if anybody else would be interested in it so she took enough just for her to be able to use for the entire time. Well, everybody else was getting eaten alive. She wasn’t getting eaten alive and the next thing you know, she didn’t have enough Mozi-Q because everybody was using it.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: This is great. This is really, really, really great. In terms of environment and other things, where do you manufacture it? Are you a green manufacturer as well? Are you manufacturing it just in Canada or are you contract manufacturing in other parts of the world?
ERIN BOSCH: We are a Canadian based manufacturing company and we do practice green manufacturing as well as I’m actually a certified B Corporation and so I don’t know if you’re familiar with the B Corporations but that is a way for me to be audited, not only on my manufacturing practices, but also on my environmental initiatives, on community initiatives, and what I do for the stakeholders in my company.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow, that’s awesome and will you be able to manufacture enough for other parts of the world right out of Canada or will you open up other facilities? What’s your vision there?
ERIN BOSCH: Well, my vision is to keep it in Canada. One of the things I stay clear about is making sure that I have a close watch over the process and I don’t feel like I could do that halfway across the world unless I wanted to go on a trip.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Do you manufacture your other homeopathic medicines there too as well, besides the Mozi-Q, or do you purchase those and just sell them as a wholesaler?
ERIN BOSCH: I purchase those and sell them through the store but I am actually launching a children’s line here in Canada and that’s going to be available just in Canada very shortly.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there who just joined us, we’ve got Erin Bosch. She’s the President and CEO of a very important breakthrough homeopathic medicine called Mozi-Q. It’s www.mozi-q.com. We have about four minutes left, Erin. I want you to share with our listeners your experience with The Green Festival and what you’re doing with them and how you’re continuing to get the word out, besides being on television and having a beautiful website and all the other great things you’re doing. How is The Green Festival helping you get this very important and new homeopathic medicine, Mozi-Q, out to the world?
ERIN BOSCH: Well, we introduced the product to the U.S. at The Green Festival in New York and you know what, I was so welcomed and I was so lovingly received. I just felt like I was amongst the right people, the people who really do believe in change and want to change the world. It was a great experience, everything from the different products that were there to the people who were coming going, ‘Oh my God! This is an awesome product. We want to get more.’ That to me was really nice to see, not to mention they had some great speakers there. It felt like the right community to be able to talk about something like this.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, what’s your vision in the United States, Erin? You’re going to make this huge. I know it. What’s the vision? How many stores do you want to get into? When is Whole Foods and other great retailers going to start carrying this? This is really important stuff. What’s your thought on all that?
ERIN BOSCH: Well, we’re on Madison Avenue in Clyde’s and that just blows my mind that my product is on Madison Avenue. The idea of the U.S. is kind of — keep in mind I’m a Canadian. Our population is equivalent to one of your states so even the idea almost blows my mind at the moment but you know, Whole Foods has seen the product and we’ve got a lot of buzz going on and we’re getting it out to stores and just really having that communication because the one thing that’s really nice about this product is when you use it and it works, your mind is blown and you tell 10 other people, right? And so I really think that’s going to end up being more than even I can conceive.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: What’s your vision after the United States? Is this a product that you’re then going to take around the world, Erin?
ERIN BOSCH: Well, the whole goal originally was to have the golfers that we know that don’t want to get bit fund the idea that we could take this around the world. Malaria is the number one killer of children in the world and I want to see this product go to places that really need it, that really need that leg up, and so kind of it’s one step at a time as I go. I’m still just an entrepreneur and I don’t know. My shiny happy future is kind of out there because once again, going back, I really thought this would be a hobby and now I’m working 12 hour days trying to keep up with it.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, when people from The Gates Foundation are listening to this show, we’re going to put them in contact with you so you can help them vanquish malaria around the world. Doesn’t that make sense?
ERIN BOSCH: That would be awesome.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, Erin, we’re down to the last minute or so. What’s next for you? What’s your goals in the immediate near future and long term? You’re really young. You have a big future. You’re probably going to be a billionaire on the cover of Forbes in years to come. What’s on your mind today and where are you going with all of this?
ERIN BOSCH: Well, it might seem kind of small but I’ll tell you yesterday was one of my staff members’ birthdays and so we stopped halfway through the day and we got some pizza and we sat in the boardroom and we just chatted and I was talking about the fact that I was really happy to be able to create an environment where people loved going to work and I love going to work because we spend so much time at work and why should it be terrible? And so my goal is kind of to create the environment that I’d like to be in. I want to have great retail partners. I want to have great customers. I want to make sure that everybody knows that we’re doing this, not just for huge gain. We’re doing it to try to change the world and have a great team moving forward.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Erin, we want you to come back and help continue to change the world. For our listeners out there, please go and check out Erin’s great product, www.mozi-q.com. Buy it, use it, help make the world a better place. Thank you, Erin, for being a visionary entrepreneur and making the world a better place for everyone, all of our listeners out there. You are truly living proof that green is good.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, it’s so great to have you and we’re going to be talking about your great organization and all the wonderful things you’re doing at USAgain but before we get to talking about your brand, share a little bit about the Mattias Wallander story. How did you get here? What was your youth like and what led you to running this great organization since the year 2000?
MATTIAS WALLANDER: Well, I grew in Sweden in northern Europe and when I was, I think, 19, 20 years old, I traveled through Africa and got exposed to how people live in Africa and actually, I was working with development projects in southern Africa and the way we were funding the projects was by collecting and selling used clothing. That was my first exposure to the industry that I’m now in and after working for a while there, I came over here to the U.S. and was offered a job at a school that trained people to go to Africa, Latin America to do development work so I had many years of working in the nonprofit sector before joining USAgain. I worked in Central America building schools, water systems, latrines in rural communities and then I was approached by a friend in 2000. She had started the company a year earlier and she asked if I wanted to join USAgain and she told about how much clothing is going to waste in the U.S., something I wasn’t aware of. Eighty-five percent of clothing being thrown in landfills every year and it sounded like a great opportunity so I jumped on it.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Did you take over this organization in 2000, or were you one of the Founders of USAgain? And for our listeners out there again, I’m on your website. It’s a beautiful website. It’s www.usagain.com. It’s pronounced “use again,” but it’s really USAgain.com, but it’s pronounced “use again” so explain that. Did you found this or did you take it over in 2000, Mattias?
MATTIAS WALLANDER: No, Janice Vostick founded the company in ’99 and she started the company and she started the company in Seattle and when she asked me to join a year later, I started up in Chicago in the Midwest and then very quickly after that we made Chicago our base and set off on a big expansion.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, in 14 years, explain how you started with this great idea that Janice started in ’99, you came in a year later, and now really you were there from the beginning, obviously, so explain those 14 years, how you started it and how has it evolved over the last 14 years? Because you were really being green before it was cool to be green so explain how that’s worked.
MATTIAS WALLANDER: Yeah, I think the first many years we were just trying to figure out how do you bring a recycling solution to a community and make it convenient for people to drop off clothing anytime they want, close to where they live, close to where they work, close to where they go to school, and do that in a profitable way and that was not easy in the beginning. There was a lot of logistics involved. You have to figure out how to route efficiently and in this period of course, fuel prices have gone up a lot so it’s certainly been challenging but I think the way it’s evolved is that when we started out, we thought, ‘Hey, this is a great idea. It’s basically taking something that would going to landfills and it’s bringing it to places where it still has value’. It’s still perfectly good clothing. Someone can wear it. If it’s not wearable, it can be turned into wiping rags and if it’s not good enough for wiping rags, it can be turned into installation material so it makes sense for the environment and keeps a lot of stuff out of landfills and then as time went on, we started to realize that actually there is a bigger picture asterisk to this and that’s the greenhouse gas impact of clothing and we learned, as everyone has by now, about climate change and how it’s already impacting us and will impact us in coming years and then we learned that the textile industry is responsible for 10% of the global carbon impact and that’s because the growing of cotton, the manufacturing of synthetics, it’s a very energy intensive process so this has added a whole new aspect to what we do because now it’s not just about keeping stuff out of landfills but it’s actually about reducing our carbon footprint so that we can manage climate change to a level where we don’t get completely wiped out.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Mattias, now wait a second. You’re a very humble guy and for our listeners who just joined us, we’ve got Mattias Wallander on. He’s the CEO of USAgain. For our listeners who want to follow along online, he’s got a beautiful website and a very important mission here. It’s www.usagain.com. Mattias, wait a second. You started this thing in 2000. Obviously, Janice started it in 1999 and then you joined soon there after. I want you to share with our listeners though, you’ve grown it from zero to 14,000 clothing recycling sites across the United States. Explain that. How do two very committed people, you and Janice, have a great idea and now get 14,000 recycling sites in and how much material do you keep out of landfills? This sounds like a big venture now.
MATTIAS WALLANDER: We’ve been very fortunate to assemble an excellent and highly committed team that has learned the business along with us and that are committed to keeping clothes out of landfills and getting it reused and that’s how we’ve been able to do it and it’s everything from finding the best locations for recycling bins in a community where people are going to have the easiest access and all the way to collecting the material to handling the material to make sure it doesn’t get wet or dirty or torn and then shipping it to where it’s going to get used and then all the administration. Before we went on the air, we talked briefly about our databases. It’s extremely important to have good data in any business and with 14,000 locations, each location is bar coded. Our drivers have handheld scanners. All the data goes into our database and then we have forecasting tools that tell us when the bin is going to be not full, but two thirds full, so that we can service it before we have unsightly overflows. Of course, it’s a forecast, right? So it doesn’t always get it right but these are essential tools for doing business in the 21st century.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: First of all, this is fascinating. As an ecopreneur that you are, how many people run USAgain? How many people do you have and how did you then decide to mix new technology; the forecasting tools, the bar coding, and the tracking, with a very historical business, which is recycling, to make this new industry so successful, this company, which is relatively 14 years old, so successful?
MATTIAS WALLANDER: We have almost 200 employees now and we have a great IT department. We have developed this database in house and it’s a commitment of resources over many years that has made it possible but I would say I’ve always been a bit of a nerd and it intrigues me how you can use data to improve whatever you’re doing and now it’s a business, of course, with a triple bottom line but nonetheless, a business, so how do you make a good business so how do you make a good business better leveraging your data? I think it’s very interesting.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, Mattias, you hit on a couple of fascinating points. You are involved with some very big megatrends; sustainability, big data, so you’ve mixed those two and technology. Technology, big data and sustainability are three of the biggest megatrends for our generation and the next generation behind us and you’ve combined them to make a very, very successful enterprise here.
MATTIAS WALLANDER: Yeah, I think we’re not successful enough yet because we’re hardly making a dent in the amount of textiles that are being consumed every year. The latest data is that over 14 million tons of clothes and shoes are consumed every year and that’s more than 70 pounds per person and about 15% are being captured for reuse and recycling according to the EPA so we have a long ways to go, John, but of course, I’m very happy with the success we have had but I think it will take a lot of education. A lot of people still don’t think about textiles as a recyclable. Over the last 30 years, we have gotten used to in most of the country we have in-home recycling now with the curbside programs where you recycle paper, plastic, glass, metal, and we don’t even think about it anymore. It’s just habit but textiles is not part of most municipal recycling programs and it’s challenging to add it because it’s a material that’s very sensitive to contamination so you can’t commingle it with your other recyclables. If it gets wet or dirty or torn, then it’s degraded and can only be used as insulation instead of being worn again, which is the highest and best use so it’s challenging to add textiles to municipal programs. Nonetheless, we have to make it more accessible through more drop-off points across the country and we have to educate people about the benefits, that really this is a material that should be recycled just as much as aluminum or plastic.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Okay, so we’ve got five minutes, Mattias, and I want you to then share what are your favorite programs and partnerships that you’ve created with USAgain and what are your key initiatives with regards to education? Because like you said, accessibility is the key to great recycling but also educating people so they can be motivated to recycle more so talk a little bit about in these last five minutes your favorite programs and partnerships for accessibility and then your vision on education, Mattias.
MATTIAS WALLANDER: One program, one partnership I’m very excited about is our partnership with Eureka Recycling, which is a nonprofit zero-waste recycling organization in Minnesota. They have actually been collecting textiles for, I think, over 30 years and we joined their program in 2002 and they collect curbside in St. Paul, Minnesota, and many surrounding communities with specially designed trucks and we’re now looking at a pilot with them for how we can do curbside single stream for textiles so how can we protect the clothing in a single stream program? And that’s something I’m very excited about. Then another thing I’m very excited about is our work with schools. We have over 500 schools participating in our fundraising program and we just finished the Earth Month recycling contest where schools were competing for prizes based on how much clothing they collect during the month of April and that’s just a great program because it provides funding to schools and also because it helps educate the next generation about the benefits of recycling and the benefits of recycling textiles.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re down to the last two minutes, Mattias, so can you share some of those other benefits? Why should our listeners recycle their clothing and textiles? Share some of the important benefits of why your business model is so important to the future of our planet.
MATTIAS WALLANDER: Number one is that for every pound of clothing that’s manufactured, 14 pounds or almost 15 pounds, actually, of CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere, which means that if we collect that clothing and reuse it, we don’t need to replace the clothing with new clothing so we’re saving almost 15 pounds of CO2 for every pound that we reuse. If we compare that to other recyclables, we have paper coming in at about 2 pounds. We have plastics coming in at around four pounds. The only thing that compares is aluminum at 14 pounds so this is the most important data point I’d like to share. It’s really important for keeping CO2 out of the atmosphere that we keep reusing our clothing and then there is enormous quantities of gallons of water being used to produce textiles. If we reuse 90% of the clothing in this country, we’d save enough water to supply ever household almost twice the annual water consumption.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow, so for our listeners out there, Mattias, people have to recycle their textiles. It’s great for the environment, It’s great for our landfills and it promotes sustainability throughout our society and I’m so thankful for your time today. For our listeners out there, recycle your clothing more. Recycle your textiles. Go to Mattias’ great website and be part of it. Find out where you can find one of those 14,000 recycling drop-offs. It’s www.usagain.com. Mattias, thank you for being a textile recycling visionary and sustainability leader. You are truly living proof that green is good.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good. We’re so excited today to have Jeff Stanford with us. He’s the co-owner and founder of the Stanford Inn by the Sea and Mendocino Center for Living Well at The Stanford. Welcome to Green is Good, Jeff Stanford.
JEFF STANFORD: How is it in New York?
JOHN SHEGERIAN: It’s a wonderful day today in New York City, and how is it in Mendocino?
JEFF STANFORD: It’s absolutely awesome. We don’t have our normal weather, no fog at all, sunny and extremely bright, but unfortunately, quite dry.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. Well, welcome to Green is Good, Jeff. You have a great story to share with our listeners today and before we talk about all the great work you’ve done at The Stanford Inn, I want you to first share with our listeners your journey, the Jeff Stanford story. How did you even start The Stanford Inn? What was your background leading up to that before you even had the vision to start your wonderful eco-resort?
JEFF STANFORD: Well, first I didn’t do it alone. I did it with my wife, Joan. We’d been together for quite some time, and during that time, I was doing research as an anthropologist on what was something called The Human Potential Movement and those people that remember things like est and subtle mind control and those different things, as well as shamanism, which of course, leans on anthropology. What I discovered was a great dissatisfaction. People were really unhappy and with my experience in anthropology, I realized that people were much happier living integrated lives, working together with the people that they lived with, worshipping together with the people that they live with, educating their kids in that kind of community, and all that, so we really thought about working in an area that was more like the small family farm when we were kids. They don’t exist maybe today but anyway, creating that kind of context and innkeeping just seemed to be a natural way to go. Anyway, it was the way we ended up looking for jobs. We started helping run an inn in Carmel, California, and that’s how we got into innkeeping but the idea was an integrated life where you put everything together, small town and so on.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, I’m on your website and I want our listeners to follow. If you want to follow along while Jeff visits with us today, please go to www.stanfordinn.com. It is a beautiful website and I’ll tell you what. I want to fly across the country and check in right now because the views, both the interior shots and the exterior shots on your website are just beautiful so you started with your wife, Joan, this eco resort about 34 years ago so can you talk a little bit about the blocking and tackling of starting this kind of back then truly visionary eco resort?
JEFF STANFORD: Well, it wasn’t as visionary as it sounds. It was just the kind of decisions that we made. What we did is after our experience in Carmel that wasn’t completely satisfactory, that’s quite a different kind of community, some friends suggested that we check out Mendocino and we had very little money of our own. They actually helped us buy this property and we needed to buy an existing motel that would actually generate revenue that we could build from within, so to speak, and that’s what we did. We bought the Big River Lodge. Joan was pregnant with our first child and the owners were really excited to sell this thing to a young couple with young children, actually not really any children at all at this point. A dog and a cat is what we had and they sold it to us and lent us a big hunk of the down payment. They still live on a part of the property that they segmented out but in any case, we came here feeling that the energy, and it sounds very hippy, I know, but the energy was right for us to be and that’s how we got here. Then when we made improvements to the property, every decision that we made was well thought out as to be the least damaging to the environment or the most sustainable, which wasn’t the usual way of thinking, I suppose, but it didn’t seem strange to us. It was the way we did things. Where that came from, I’m not so sure. I think it came from working as an anthropologist. Maybe it also came from the fact that I practice a form of meditation that was taught by a guy named Christopher Merde, which just says you look at what you do, basically, and pay attention to it and choices become obvious. There’ s no choice because you’ll move in the right direction and so we created by the late ’90s, mid-2000s, some place in that 10-year period, we were discovered to be the first green ecological couple doing this kind of thing but we had never done it for that purpose.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s so interesting. Can you share with our listeners just what has evolved over the 34 years? Share some of the green practices that exist today on your wonderful property.
JEFF STANFORD: Well, the first one would be when we took over, we were kind of highly leveraged. We owed a lot of money so we wanted to reduce all our costs so the first thing we did is change all the heaters in the rooms and it’s something I could do because I had worked as an electrician so I put in different kinds of heaters that made people feel warm and got rid of all the baseboard heating and it reduced heating costs. It actually cut our PG&E bill, which they said was going to be doubling. It actually reduced it by a third. That was the first kind of decision. We were always researching and by the way, researching back then was going through catalogues, making phone calls, no internet, and we discovered the first small compact fluorescent bulbs. They didn’t have their own valise. You had to buy the valise separate but it would sit in the light fixture and we put those things in. That helped reduce our electrical bills. On diapers, I read a British report that said that in specific circumstances, cloth diapers were far more damaging to the environment and explained why and in terms of water use, horrendously damaging and we had very low water. We kept running out of water here so we went to disposable diapers but picked out the ones that would tend to break out the most though that wasn’t rated. You just had to kind of think about it. You had to look at it and be aware of that kind of process. Those were the kind of things. My wife says I over-research things but basically, that’s what we did. We looked at each decision that we made. We looked at the best decision that we could make and sometimes, it was very much tempered by money but at least you’re aware that you did that. You’re not hiding from it. You’re looking directly at that decision.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it, got it. Can you talk a little bit about your restaurant at The Stanford Inn, Raven’s? Talk a little bit about the kind of produce that you use and the kind of food that you prepare for your lucky guests.
JEFF STANFORD: Yes, well we use the produce from our garden and then we buy from jobbers and so on. Excuse me. That’s my son’s dog. Actually let’s start at the beginning. We started at Big River Nurseries in 1985 as a way to deal with landscaping on the land. That’s about where we were and so we made an organic nursery and I first was going to grow flowers and then one of my friends here said, ‘You ought to go to this organic garden.’ I had never heard of an organic garden, where they grow broccoli and such, so we went out there and it looked great so I decided that instead of growing flowers and plants to decorate the inn, we would grow vegetables and sell them so that’s how we got into it and of course, we did it organically. We didn’t want to use snail baits and anything that was toxic because there are wild animals here. We didn’t want them getting into it so we picked up the snails and put them in the woods, that kind of an activity. Well, that caused us to have an awful lot of produce. We had to get rid of the produce and to do that, we started selling to restaurants here. The economy wasn’t so great. We didn’t get paid so we opened other farmers to the first farmers markets in Mendocino county to off the vegetables, so to speak, and then when we were moving forward and we were able to add on to the property, it just took us 15 years before a bank would loan us any money. We wanted to put in a restaurant and we made a vegetarian restaurant because, of course, we were vegetarian at that time. Later on, we became vegan. I learned what was going on upstairs. I had no idea. I actually had no concept of what was actually going on then so that caused us to make it a vegan restaurant and the restaurant is really just the only place we would eat. The only thing we do is vegan there and I don’t know what else to tell you except that if I’m going to have a restaurant, I can’t do any other kind of restaurant than one that’s consistent with my own beliefs, from what I’d feed my own kids.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Yeah. Because now veganism seems to be picking up a lot of steam across the United States, as is vegetarianism, as part of one of the great things that your restaurant does as opposed to other vegan restaurants is that you’re producing so much of your own produce on site and able to serve that really farm fresh on your own tables at Raven’s?
JEFF STANFORD: No. Actually, I would imagine that most hotels back about 100, 150 years did that, farm fresh food from the backyard out here in the west. I don’t know how unique that is but I think what is unique in the vegan world is that most of the food that we use is whole foods. I’m a proponent of not using processed foods of any kind. I’m not even big on tofu like they have at a lot of vegan restaurants. We have some of that for those people that are used to it but the emphasis in our dining room is whole foods and that’s different and that is because it’s more sustainable. You have less resource imports to produce it and it tastes good. You just have to construct it in a way that’s appealing to the eye and people will eat it and because it’s whole food, it’s going to give you sustenance. It’s going to fill them but it’s not going to make them logey. They’re going to walk out of the restaurant feeling a little bit lighter and a little bit brighter.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it. For our listeners who just joined us, we’ve got Jeff Stanford on. He’s the co-owner and co-founder of The Stanford Inn by the Sea and the Mendocino Center for Living Well at The Stanford Inn and you can also check out his website, www.stanfordinn.com. Jeff, talk a little bit about your inn’s wellness center and The Mendocino Center for Living Well at The Stanford Inn. What does that really mean to you and what does that mean for your guests? What was your vision when you created this?
JEFF STANFORD: Well, it actually starts a long time ago when we bought a livery business, which is actually part of an illegal operation here on the Mendocino coast. There was all kinds of things going on. It was years ago and we had already started renting bikes to our guest just as an amenity and I did all the bike repair work and all the tuning of the bikes because every time the bikes come back, you want to check them out so when somebody puts on the brakes that they’re borrowing a bike that actually works. I decided to attach that to the canoe livery and when I did that, I had two guys working here who had been working for a bike shop and one, that was his primary job and the other one was also working as a server in town and I decided that we’d open a bike shop so that they had full time work because the canoe livery was only five months a year so we were able to build a staff by building jobs and that’s how we got going with it. In 1990, a long time ago, this woman from Thailand came to me and said, ‘How about doing a little massage?’ Well, I had never heard of it and back then, everybody made jokes about massage parlors because they weren’t really about massage and I said why not? She was legitimate. She had an M.A. in Sociology from Ohio State, and that’s where she’d come from and she had left a marriage and had gone off and done massage because of her ability to do Thai massage and she just retired two years ago at about 70, but she did an awesome job for us and that caused us to begin the Center for Living Well. The following year, we started yoga here because somebody needed a place to do a yoga program and we had just built a pool, which opened in ’91, that they could do yoga around the pool and they just thought it was a wonderful thing so that was how the wellness center began. It began by allowing our neighbors a place to practice and also to have gainful employment and work so it was really just sort of somebody comes to us, it’s a great idea. We say okay, let’s go with it and eventually we have an integrated program that’s got acupuncture, Tai Chi, and a variety of other programs, which are listed in there, nutrition cooking classes and so on.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow, so in 34 years, how many rooms do you have at your eco resort, Jeff?
JEFF STANFORD: Forty-one rooms.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Forty-one rooms, and is this the largest and most successful and longest-running eco-resort in America?
JEFF STANFORD: The only one. Eco-resort, by definition, would have to be vegan because of this carbon footprint and we’re the only one. There is no other one. There are some vegan bed and breakfasts, without a question, but there are no vegan resorts and we didn’t do it to be the only one. We were the first one because it was a conscious decision of ours to make a business and create a business that was consistent with our belief system and not only that. We’re able to enlarge on that by involving other people, as I said. Now we have six almost full-time massage practitioners here.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Holy Toledo! Plus the yoga, plus the acupuncture and all those other things so you have a lot going on at any given time. What is the feedback from your guests? What’s the typical feedback that you get and has the internet helped? With the democratization of information on the internet, has the helped fuel your business?
JEFF STANFORD: That’s a good question. I don’t have an answer to that. I think that most of the services that we do in terms of acupuncture and yoga are locally based. I know a lot of our guests use that but they’re just local people that use it and there’s not a huge population here. Our middle class left years ago when the logging stopped and the fishing industry stopped. There had been a toilet bowl cleaner. That sold and moved out here. Women and Weather, that catalogue, they sold and they moved to Pennsylvania. All these businesses left and when they left, the people had no jobs. It’s just service jobs and government and hospital and so therefore, there’s hardly a middle class here so we get very few people because there’s just very few people that are interested in it.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Do your guests come from around the world?
JEFF STANFORD: Yes, a lot. Of course, this isn’t around the world but it’s far from us, New York, Washington, DC, Florida, and places like that. A lot of people come here for the fact that it’s vegan. We just had some people leave from Boston, Massachusetts. They had gotten married there. They’re vegan and they had no other place to go but the west coast to get away from the east coast, which can be vegan heaven if you know where to go, like Philadelphia has Veg, one of the best restaurants in the United States, but they came here because there’s an awful lot of vegan opportunities so they landed in San Francisco and they’re working their way up to Portland or Seattle as part of their honeymoon and they’re having a great time because they can actually eat.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Nice. I love it. I love it. Hey, we’re down to the last minute or so. Jeff, can you share any of your pearls of wisdom to our listeners who are interested in starting their own businesses and how to align their own business, as an entrepreneur, with their personal values like you and your wife did?
JEFF STANFORD: Yes. Decide what’s important in your life and that’s what we did and what was important is that a total life is possible and how to understand what that is was through a process of meditation so start a practice and it doesn’t have to be that onerous of a practice. You don’t have to have a passion. You can just breathe and let your breath go and when you let your breath go, see how you feel. That’s a good place to start. It’s like a two- to three-second — if even that long — meditation. Just start paying attention to yourself and pay attention to what feels right for you. Don’t comment on it or judge it. Just pay attention and it’s a flow. You just start flowing in that direction. It doesn’t necessarily happen overnight but it happens fairly quickly and it’s life changing.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Thank you, Jeff, and I’m sure you’ve helped change many lives at your beautiful Stanford Inn. Jeff Stanford, look him up and look up all the great things he’s doing at The Stanford Inn at www.stanfordinn.com. Thank you, Jeff, for being an inspiring sustainability entrepreneur and trailblazer. You are truly living proof that green is good.
JEFF STANFORD: Thank you very much.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good. We’re so excited today to have with us Gene Baur. He’s the President and co-founder of The Farm Sanctuary. Welcome to Green is Good, Gene.
GENE BAUR: Hello. It’s great to be with you.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, you know, Gene, you are doing amazing and wonderful and great things at The Farm Sanctuary and we’re going to get into that today and we’re going to talk about it but you know, you’ve been called by Time Magazine, ‘the conscience of the food movement’. I’m a vegan, as my listeners know. I’ve shared that story many times with my listeners and before we get talking about The Farm Sanctuary and all the wonderful work you’re doing there, please share though the Gene Baur journey and story leading up to the creation of The Farm Sanctuary.
GENE BAUR: Well, you know, I grew up in Los Angeles, California, and I grew up eating meat without really thinking about it. But I also wanted to make a positive difference in the world and so in high school, I started volunteering at children’s hospitals and then in college, I started working with adolescents who were having difficulties, started working with environmental organizations and health organizations and as time went, I came to recognize that factory farming was an issue that was just not getting the kind of attention it needed to get so in the early 1980s, I started looking more into that and I went vegan in 1985 when I learned that I could live and be healthy without eating other animals and I felt that if I could live well without causing unnecessary harm and violence to other animals, why wouldn’t I do that? So, I did that in 1985 and then in 1986, I co-founded Farm Sanctuary and just started visiting farms to see firsthand what was going on and we would literally find living animals thrown in trash cans or living animals thrown on piles of dead animals so we started rescuing them and caring for them and at the time, we were in a little well house in Wilmington, Delaware so we didn’t have farms. We didn’t have a lot of space but we took care of the animals that we were able to rescue and then we found good homes for them and placed them and then as time went, it became apparent that there were lots of animals that needed help so that these animals became ambassadors and we were able to educate people about the cruelty of our food animal system by telling the animals’ stories and then we also started working on advocacy efforts to prevent the problem in the first place and to stop the systemic exploitation of animals for food so it’s been a journey and I’m still on the journey continuing to learn and to figure out how to live in a way that is aligned with compassionate values, which I think is very important, and also that is healthy and leaves a light footprint on the planet so I feel very lucky to be doing this work. It’s meaningful. I feel like I’m making a positive difference in the world and that’s really what ultimately brought me to this place. I always wanted to make a positive difference and I feel very lucky to be where I am right now at Farm Sanctuary.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: What a great, great story, and for our listeners out there that want to learn more about The Farm Sanctuary and all of Gene’s great work, please go to www.farmsanctuary.org. I’m on your site right now, Gene, and it is very educational, very colorful and beautiful, and very eye opening in many ways and I’m one of your fans without even knowing you because I’ve read for years all the great exposes that you’ve led in terms of investigative journalism and investigative reporting with regards to what’s going on in America’s slaughterhouses and beyond. Can you share with our listeners some of the important and eye opening facts, what they don’t understand, what’s really going on in today’s industrial farms across the United States right now?
GENE BAUR: Yeah, absolutely. In farming today, the animals are seen primarily as commodities, not as living feeling creatures, and so you have animals being raised by the thousands in these warehouses and in some cases, they’re packed into cages and crates so tightly that they can’t even turn around or stretch their limbs and they’ll live this way practically their whole lives and in the production of veal for example, calves are taken from their mothers immediately at birth and they’re chained by the neck in these small wooden crates where they can’t walk. They can’t turn around and they live that way their whole lives until they’re slaughtered and they’re not the only ones that suffer that way. The pigs are used for breeding with most of their lives in two foot wide metal gestation crates and then Eggland hens, who are exploited for egg production, are packed into these wire cages so tightly they can’t even stretch their wings. They constantly scrape against the bars of their cages. Their feathers wear off. They end up with bruises and abrasions on their bodies and they’ll live this way for over a year and then after they’re no longer considered to be profitable by the industry, they call them spent hens and then they’re killed. Sometimes they go to slaughterhouses but increasingly, slaughterhouses don’t want them because these are very stringy birds that are not in very good shape so sometimes these birds are just ground up, literally, at the egg factories when they’re no longer wanted so this is an industry that is completely disrespectful of other animals and when people see it, they don’t think it’s okay and that’s the big part of our effort is to educate people about what is happening to animals in the food production system and then to encourage consumers to eat in a way that they feel good about. Instead of saying, ‘I don’t want to hear about it because it’s upsetting,’ I think people should take responsibility and think about the way that we as consumers live and what we support by our food choices and then make choices that are aligned with our own compassionate values and support a more compassionate life for us and for all the animals on the planet.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gene, is it true that farm animals feel the same core emotions that human beings do with regards to pleasure, sadness, excitement, resentment, all those kinds of emotions?
GENE BAUR: Absolutely. Farm animals are very similar to us and similar to cats and dogs and other animals. They have emotions. They have complex cognitive abilities. They develop relationships. We have animals that get very close to other individuals and when their friend dies and they’re not longer around, the animals grieve because they miss their friend and so yeah, they have all the emotions that humans have and we’re just starting to understand that the more we look, the more we recognize that farm animals are not that different from us.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow, wow, wow, wow, that is incredible and I’m so glad that you are sharing that with our listeners today. You know, as you and I were talking off the air before the show started, we’re both vegans and can you share a little bit about what’s going on in terms of the more recent trends in the United States with regards to meat consumption dropping 10% in the past few years and 15 million or so Americans have stopped eating meat entirely and celebrities, such as Bill Clinton and even Jay Z and others have sworn off meat or become full-on vegans. What’s going on with this trend or might we even say what is now a mega trend?
GENE BAUR: As you point out, meat consumption is dropping in the U.S. and I think that’s a very positive sign and I think it shows that people are going to recognize that this system is cruel. It’s also unhealthy and it’s unnecessary. We can live without eating other animals and the way we have been raised in the U.S. to eat animal foods and processed foods is leading to significant health problems and people like Bill Clinton, for example, recognize that if he went off of meat and dairy products, his health would improve and it has improved. Experts estimate that we could save something like 70% on our health food costs by switching to a whole foods plant-based diet. Seventy percent, that’s an enormous amount of money and as our economy struggles, I think that there’s going to be more and more incentives to move away from a wasteful system and to eat food that is good for us and isn’t going to cost a lot for health care and also a food that is much more efficient. Raising animals for food requires enormous quantities of resources, water, fossil fuels, land. We could feed something like 10 times more people on a plant-based diet so it just makes all the sense in the world to stop raising animals for food, stop causing this enormous suffering, stop exploiting resources and squandering scarce resources, and improve our own health and save on health care costs. It makes all the sense in the world when you start looking at it and I think that’s starting to happen now so people like Bill Clinton, and I already mentioned Jay Z and Beyoncé have a vegan lifestyle. Recently, J-Lo announced that she was vegan. This is a trend but I think it’s more than that. It’s a growing awareness and the fact that we have the internet now and people share information on Facebook, share pictures and video tapes of factory farms, and also share recipes and information about what people can do to make a difference. All these resources are now available more than ever before and that’s making a huge difference.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: How many years, Gene, have you been a vegan yourself?
GENE BAUR: I went vegan in 1985, so it’ll be 30 years very soon, and I feel very good. You know, I’m in my early 50s now and going vegan was one of the best things I ever did.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well you know, the science is irrefutable when it comes to veganism and eating the vegan way but one of the fun things we talked about at the front of the show before we went on the air is that you’ve become an Ironman triathlete. Can you share a little bit about why you took up that avocation in your early fifties?
GENE BAUR: Yeah, sure. A lot of times, people grow up believing that we need to have meat for protein and we need to drink cow’s milk for calcium and those are myths. We can get everything we need from plant foods and without any animal foods and so I just wanted to demonstrate that not only can we live and survive, but we can thrive on a plant-based diet so I signed up to do some triathlons a couple years ago, starting running marathons a couple years ago, and just wanted to show that as a longtime vegan, you can perform these significant endurance feats so I’ve run four marathons now and every single time I’ve run one, I’ve done it in a time that qualifies for Boston. In fact, I just did the Boston Marathon last April and then I’ve done a number of triathlons. This is where you swim and then you bike and then you run and I did Ironman last July, which involved swimming 2.4 miles, biking 112 miles, and then running a 26.2-mile marathon, and I did all that in less than 12 hours as a vegan, so I just wanted to make the point that vegans get all the nutrients we need and we can do marathons, triathlons. There are professional football players that are now vegan, so this lifestyle makes a lot of sense and it can fuel high level athletic performance.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners who have just joined us, we’ve got Gene Baur on with us today. He’s the President and co-founder of The Farm Sanctuary and to learn more about The Farm Sanctuary and support their great, great efforts on all of our behalfs, please go to www.farmsanctuary.org. You mentioned a little while ago, Gene, how factory farming negatively affects the environment. Can you scientifically break that down a little bit so our listeners understand, so we all understand more about the negative effects of factory farming and how that has impacted us all in a bad way environmentally speaking?
GENE BAUR: Certainly. A few years ago, the United Nations put out a report called Livestock’s Long Shadow and in that report, they talk about how the livestock industry is one of the top contributors to our biggest environmental problems we’re facing on the planet today and this is things like the loss of biodiversity, the squandering of water and other scarce resources, contributions to climate change. The livestock industry contributes more to climate change than the entire transportation industry so it’s really good that people are walking and carpooling and using public transportation and doing things to lighten our footprint when it comes to transportation but we could have a greater impact by changing the way we eat and changing the way we eat plant food instead of animal food and then the other thing about this industry is that it requires enormous amounts of resources. There was an article in the New York Times a few years ago called “Rethinking the Meat Guzzler” and in that article, the author compared the amount of fossil fuels needed for a vegetarian meal versus to a meat meal and he said it took 16 times more fossil fuels for the meat meal so this is wasteful in terms of fossil fuels, wasteful in terms of land and water resources, and if you think about it, growing food, corn and soybeans for example, harvesting that and feeding it to animals takes a lot of energy. We could be growing corn and soybeans and other plant foods and just eating them directly. We get a lot more calories per acre per energy input by eating plants directly instead of animals and then the other thing is that when you confine these animals in factory farms, you end up with vast quantities of manure that then gets into the environment and pollutes it and not only are we talking about organic matter and waste in huge quantities that the environment can’t absorb. We’re also talking about chemicals, antibiotics, and other things that the animals are given to make them grow faster, arsenic even. Animals are eating arsenic in their feed, which people are surprised to learn this, so the manure includes these toxins as well as the waste toxins that come in fecal matter anyway so it’s a huge problem.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow. You know, Gene, we’re down to the last four minutes or so and I want to focus on some solutions because you’ve been doing this so long and you’re inspirational with how you guide us all through this story and not only the problem, but the solutions that are out there, which partially is all of us becoming more conscious in how we eat. What are some simple ways everyone can help protect animals from cruelty in their daily lives, some of your thoughts after doing this for thirty years or so?
GENE BAUR: The best thing each of us can do is to be more mindful about the food that we eat and to make choices that are compassionate and aligned with our own values and also to eat food that has good stuff instead of food that makes us sick and so that means shifting towards a plant-based diet and eating more vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, and it’s not that hard. You can even get vegan food at fast food places. You can get a bean burrito, for example, with no cheese and for a spaghetti meal, instead of putting meatballs, try putting veggies in there but you can also get vegan meat now so there’s tons of healthy alternatives now to meat products so shifting in that direction makes sense. Also, when there’s legislation introduced, it’s important to weigh in. The only way that laws are going to change is for people to get involved. You can go to The Farm Sanctuary website, FarmSanctuary.org, for updated information about current legislative efforts.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re down to a couple minutes, Gene. Talk about the three locations in New York and California, The Farm Sanctuary locations. If our listeners want to go to them, what are they going to see and what’s the experience going to be like when they go to your farm sanctuaries?
GENE BAUR: It’s a wonderful experience. At Farm Sanctuary, the animals are our friends, not our food. It’s a peaceful place where you get to know animals in a positive setting and the animals get to be who they are. They graze and the play and pigs can play in the mud. Chickens perch and the animals are raised with people around them. You can feel that joy and that’s a huge contrast to what happens in factory farms where the animals are scratching against the bars of their cages, the stench is horrible, so it’s a peaceful place and there’s the one in Watkins Glen, New York, which is in the Finger Lakes Region right next to Ithaca, New York, and then we have two farms in California, one on Northern California in the city of Orland and one in Southern California just outside of Los Angeles and for people interested in visiting, they can go to our Farm Sanctuary website, which is just FarmSanctuary.org. Another good thing for people to do is just to educate others about these issues and when people come visit Farm Sanctuary, they often go home with stories about how a chicken came and sat on their lap or how a cow came up and wanted to be petted just like a dog and those are really special experiences that we love for people to share.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. You know, Gene, we’re down to the last minute or so, and in 2008, you wrote a book, Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food. Can you please share any of your thoughts as a follow-up to that book to where we’re going as a society. If Bill Clinton has become a vegan and we know how much he loved his burgers and other types of junk food, it was well chronicled while he was a president, where are we going to go? In the last minute or so, give us your crystal ball on our future.
GENE BAUR: Well, I think that people will continue moving away from consuming animal products as they learn about the harms caused by our animal product system and we are seeing a growth in farmers markets across the country. That is a very positive sign and it’s been driven by consumer demand and interest. It means we’re healthier when these things become more sustainable farms and eating foods that are less violent so I think that this trend away from factory farming and towards wholesome plant foods will continue to grow. We’re also seeing more and more vegan restaurants and vegan food available at non vegan restaurants so that’s another positive trend. As it gets easier to eat plant foods, I think consumers are going to eat more plant foods and ideally, this whole factory farming animal industry will stop. We still have a long way to go. This is a very intense industry, sort of like the medical industry, but it’s one of why the economy is swollen. It produces a product that we don’t need and is actually bad for us and bad for the environment and bad for animals so I can see the meat industry going the way of the tobacco industry, which it isn’t gone yet but it’s largely seen as harmful, and I think that’s about it.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, thank you, Gene. Thank you for joining us today and thank you for all the amazing work you’ve been doing at The Farm Sanctuary. For our listeners out there, please go to their website, FarmSanctuary.org, and support all of Gene and his colleagues’ great work. Gene Baur, thank you for being the responsible conscience of the food movement and for protecting our animals and people coast to coast. You are truly living proof that Green is Good.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so excited to have with us Chris Sonnier today. He’s the Program Manager for the South by Southwest Eco-farm. Welcome to Green is Good, Chris.
CHRIS SONNIER: Hi, guys. Thank you so much for having me.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, happy to have you on, and before we get into your amazing expo that you put on every year, SXSW Eco Expo, I want to hear a little bit about Chris Sonnier. Tell us about your journey even leading up to this wonderful platform and position that you have.
CHRIS SONNIER: Sure, happy to do so. A couple years back, in 2008 or so, I was in undergraduate school here in Austin, Texas, at the University of Texas, focusing on anything from restoration ecology to cultural studies to business and essentially, I couldn’t sit any longer. I ended up actually graduating early because I had to get out in the world and I had to start making things happen so I graduated with a ton of passion and maybe slightly less direction, I guess you could say. I ended up doing a number of jobs but I really wanted to get into Central America to understand just a little bit more about the world and be able to view it through other lenses so when I was down there, I was very much prepared for all of the poverty and the social situation so what I had not really anticipated was the trash and as the world does not really have the capacity to actually process western packaging, in many regions of the earth, they don’t even have the capacity to hide it like we do here in the States so that kind of launched into a tirade of things. I ended up getting really into cellulosic chemistry and seeing if there was a way to produce a biodegradable alternative. That led me to chase down low impact high diversity biofuels and ended up doing prairie restoration in the Midwest for a number of years. A couple of different projects after that. I worked with AmeriCorps, worked with the law school at the University of Texas, and just a number of different things but basically, t was always a sort of difficult financial situation for me but I was very passionate about just doing whatever I could to make the world a better place from whatever position I was in.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: How did you end up at South by Southwest? This is like the premier place to be. You must have done a lot of things right along the way.
CHRIS SONNIER: Absolutely. They had a seasonal position open up and it was in tech production, and it’s one thing that my résumé could say was that I’m not afraid to do hard work in difficult climates so they brought me in right before the show, were happy with my production and basically, at the end of it, we were asking what is it that the company can do to continue to grow? What can we do? And always being one to look for a way to make things better, I pitched the idea for Eco. Let’s do a solutions-based conference at another time of year in Austin, Texas, and somewhat to my surprise really, a couple weeks later, after I had given them a formal pitch, they decided to go for it and ever since then, I’ve been managing the programming of the event and I’ve also been the producer of the event as well.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, you’re not only the Program Manager, Chris. You’re a very humble guy. You were the founder of the South by Southwest Eco Program.
CHRIS SONNIER: Well, not to use too many words, but yeah, I definitely was the driving force behind that.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Very cool. Let me just say that. Very cool, and thank you for the story. That’s awesome; so now tell us what it is. Tell us what it is, what was your proposition, and how has it gone since it’s launched and what are you doing?
CHRIS SONNIER: Sure. South by Southwest Eco is a conference that is designed to attract the global community to really explore and engage and co-create solutions for a sustainable world. This being said, as I had mentioned, I had plenty of inspiration, but what I was having difficulties finding were areas to act and maybe that’s poorly put, but finding ways to act in a way that was not completely economically depressing for myself, which never stopped me by the way. During all of that time, I was doing research on all of the sectors that I would say factor in to sustainability, anything from food and agriculture to energy to efficiencies and designs and so forth and I was really seeing that at the overlap of a number of these industries and sectors, there was a lot of potential for solutions to be had and very much in an economically advantageous way for the people involved so the idea is to bring this diverse group of people together, that group that will have the actual capacities, the abilities, and the diverse skill sets to make change, bring them all together, give them the top level knowledge that they need to pursue their jobs but also give them access into other facets of sustainability and most importantly, access to the connections that need to be made for these great projects to be moving forward.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Very cool, and for our listeners that just joined us, we’re really excited and honored to have with us today Chris Sonnier. He’s the Program Manager, but actually really the co-founder and the Producer of South by Southwest Eco, and you can follow along like I am right now at www.sxsweco.com. It’s a beautiful website. You can learn a lot and you can get really engaged so tell us now, when is the South by Southwest Eco going to be this year and who do you expect to come to the South by Southwest Eco this year?
CHRIS SONNIER: The conference this year is October 6th through 8th in Austin, Texas, at the Austin Convention Center — so downtown Austin, so that’s a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday event. That being said, Sunday, the 5th of October, we’ll end up doing more of festival-related programming, so a film series, for example, to welcome receptions, maybe some private meetings on that day as well and as far as who we expect to come, it’s always difficult to sum up because what we’ve really been noted for is the diversity of the audience that we bring, not just gender and racial diversity, which we’re definitely known for having the greatest diversity in those demographics, but also in professional diversity and as well as in age diversity so actually, most our audience is 25 to 34 followed by the next highest demographic, 35 to 44, so it’s an energetic group that come to the show ranging from across society, so really what they have in common are a desire to make the world a better place and really that desire is backed by the smarts and the abilities to make this a very economically viable dream.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: How many people usually come to the conference? How big is the group?
CHRIS SONNIER: Well, so in 2011, when we first launched, we were expecting that 400 people would come and we were actually shocked that closer to 1,100 people showed up. The year after that, we grew by roughly 100% and last year, we were coming in at just under 3,000 people so at this point, we’re not even actively trying to grow our audience base. We’re just really focusing on creating that special unique event that is most useful for the community, so we will be expecting roughly 2,500 to 3,000 people this year again.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s awesome. So, now let’s talk about your great speakers. Who are typically your speakers historically? Who have they been and who are going to be the speakers this year that you could sort of tease our audience with to get more people excited to come on down?
CHRIS SONNIER: Yeah, so we’ve actually been very blessed to have an amazing array of speakers that have come from the public sector, the private sector, academia. First year, 2011, one of my favorite speakers was Mark Tercek, who is the President of The Nature Conservancy so he was really speaking to natural capital. He came over from Goldman Sachs so had a very high finance background and was putting his efforts and expertise into land conservation so that’s a really good example of the type of speaker that we’ll have. We always have high ranking officials from a number of departments within the U.S. government. A lot of people come from the Department of Energy and from ARPA E, their Advanced Research Project Agency for Energy as well as the Department of the Interior.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: When you’re picking speakers, talk a little bit about the art and science between that in terms of really creating a convergence of where innovation meets commerce and art and science equals innovation and potentially commerce and therefore more sustainability. What goes behind the thinking about when you’re making the picks? Because I’m sure lots of people apply to speak at your great conference.
CHRIS SONNIER: There’s a number of things that go in. Definitely diversity comes into play because that spread of ideas and upbringings and life experiences is really something that is very valuable to share when it comes to generating just new thought and creative thought and inspiration within the registrants and with their fellow speakers as well. It’s also very much about the personal story of the speaker and it’s not a judgment on oh you’re story isn’t good enough but how is it that that can help to drive the creative process for others? Were you brought into clean technology for purely financial reasons? Maybe so. Maybe that’s not what would drive others to the conference but it’s a very good news story when things start getting down for purely economic reasons.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Right, right, right. That’s interesting. This year, talk a little bit about this conference coming up. Who do you have speaking at this year’s conference that you’re super excited about and what are you trying to accomplish? What subject matters are you trying to tackle or highlight or give more visibility to this year?
CHRIS SONNIER: We are in the process of actually now going through our panel picker submissions so, as you said, when people apply, we’re going through those now and we actually have a very democratic process, which is very unique to South by Southwest events. That means that it’s open for public voting. We also have an advisory board that votes and then the staff voting so it allows us to be very reactive to what is here and now in sustainability so that we can provide the most up-to-date and useful content to the community. From that, we also do a bit of programming of our own so one person in particular that I’m very excited about is Christine Bader. She recently released a book, just in March I believe, called The Corporate Idealist: When Girl Meets Oil, so she was very much one of these people with highest marks in all of her classes, got her M.B.A. from Yale and then went on to, hopefully, in her mind, utilize the great power of some of the world’s largest corporations for good and she was actually running the Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Programs for BP when the Deepwater Horizon Spill happened, so it’s very much an expose on what you do when you’re trying to do good within an organization that’s just done really bad and I think that will be a very unique and very interesting topic. We also have Judy Rushmore. This young woman is very inspiring. She is with TripAdvisor. She’s running their green travel programming and she’s really harnessing big data so she’s not only harnessing it but she’s actually creating how they acquire that data and then is using that data to make sustainable travel, which travel and tourism is the largest industry on earth, how to give choices and options very quickly and very seamlessly to consumers and it’s just very amazing to hear her story as to in order to make it very easy for you on the receiving end, how much work has to be done behind the scenes.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it, got it — wow, that’s really cool; so when will all the speakers be locked? When will you have your speakers and you start promoting that and your conference will be programmed?
CHRIS SONNIER: Come early to mid-June is when we expect to have at least 50% of our programming locked in. About a month after that, we’ll have about 80% and then over the next month or two, we will have the full conference saving maybe a couple spaces here and there for late breaking items that pop up in the news.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. Of course, it’s in Austin. We’re down to the last three minutes or so. Can you explain to our audience why Austin. Why is Austin such a cool location for a sustainability conference, besides being the home of Whole Foods and Dell and other great and cool companies?
CHRIS SONNIER: Sure. So, I think actually Austin makes perfect sense. It’s a progressive city in a very conservative state. If things can happen in Texas for society, for the environment, they can happen anywhere, so this really gets us out of some of the bubbles that where great ideas are generated, but typically have difficulties disseminating outside of that so I think that that approach of progressive city, very conservative state, of course the energy capital of the U.S., very commerce-driven state with an international border here as well, really makes it a unique place for an event like this and we’re starting to see in Austin as well a major push in the clean-tech ecosystem really building up clean energy, clean technology companies. How is it we can support them? But also, international philanthropies are coming up, which is the Rainforest Partnership. It’s really kind of a burgeoning place where I think that, over the coming years, we’ll really seen Austin recognized as a global leader in this space and on top of that, it’s a lot of fun so it’s not a bad place to come and have a conference.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: With a minute-and-a-half left, anything new besides the cool new speakers that you have at all your conferences? Any new programs, competitions or anything you want to give a shameless plug to that’s going to be going on at the South by Southwest Eco Conference this year?
CHRIS SONNIER: Sure. So, one thing that I’m really excited about coming back to Austin being a global leader is we’re launching a program called Cleantech Global this year so this is going to be a group of Cleantech clusters from around the world. A lot of them are focused on microgrids but also in energy storage, energy generation, all sorts of things just in the clean technology space and the idea here is really to bring people together in practices and really just share processes and ideas. The idea is that, instead of making Cleantech a pie that everybody’s fighting over a small piece of it, it’s really to grow the pie and just create more opportunities both here and globally. On top of that, we’ll be expanding our film series this year. We’ve had some phenomenal documentaries that we have shown. Over the next couple of year, we’re looking to really expand that, expand the number of our competitions and yeah, I have really high hopes for this year. It should be a great event.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s awesome. It’s going to be a great event because you’re running the show and it’s been so great to have you on today, Chris. For our listeners out there that want to attend or learn more or even apply to be a speaker, go to www.sxsweco.com. Thank you, Chris, for being an inspiring sustainability visionary ambassador. You are truly living proof that green is good.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and I’m so honored to have with us today Paul Polak. He’s the CEO and author of Out of Poverty. Welcome to Green is Good, Paul.
PAUL POLAK: I’m glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know, Paul, you have such a fascinating background and I’m going to let you share that in a second but I just want to share with our listeners up front here. Your most recent book is called Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail. That’s become a renowned resource around the world for global poverty and your last book, The Business Solution to Poverty, Bill Clinton called it, “one of the most hopeful propositions to come along in a long time”. Paul, you have a fascinating history and journey. Please share with our listeners before we get talking about what you actually have written about, before we get into your story, share your journey with our listeners first.
PAUL POLAK: I’d be glad to. I actually was born in what is now the Czech Republic. I’m a true bohemian. My family escaped from the Nazi invasion in 1939. We came as refugees to Canada. I went to medical school in London, the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, became a psychiatrist and worked for 22 years as a psychiatrist. In my last few years as a psychiatrist, I ran a complete mental health center in southwest Denver and one of the things that became very clear quickly was that in treating the chronically mentally ill people who lived in the community, including homeless mentally ill clients, the most important variable in determining their adjustment was their extreme poverty so we started doing poverty strategies, which included decent housing, access to jobs with self-esteem, and helped people’s poverty and we found that the readmission rate dropped radically. Then I got interested in how people who lived on $30 a month instead of the $300 to $800 a month that they earned in southwest Denver, I was curious about how the world’s poorest people survived and so I went to Bangladesh and talked to some farmers who made their living, which amounted to about a dollar a day, from one acre farms and that’s how IDE was born. IDE is a nonprofit development organization that works as a business and the first step was talking to some $3,000-a-day families all over the world. What they told me was they were poor because they didn’t have enough money and they needed affordable irrigation so that they could grow crops in the dry season when vegetables were three times as high in price as in the rainy season, when everybody else could grow them so long story short, we basically invented or found radically affordable irrigation devices for poor farmers and mass marketed them without any subsidy. That is, we treated poor people as customers instead of as recipients of charity. That effort ultimately raised some $20-million-a-day people out of poverty and I took what we learned from that, which is that market forces and creating new markets are the most powerful tool to end poverty. I moved that to a larger scale and now I’ve started four global multinational companies. Each one of them is designed to help 100 million $2-a-day customers move out of poverty and generate the revenues of $10 billion and most of these are environmentally sustainable companies so one of them uses solar energy to replace diesel pumps. One of them turns waste biomass into a green form of coal to replace coal and charcoal, and one of them sells safe drinking water to people who need it.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. And, for our listeners that just joined us, we’re so honored to have Paul Polak on. You can buy his books and learn more about Paul at www.paulpolak.com. This is your business solution, these three businesses that you just outlined is the business solution to poverty being people, planet, and profit.
PAUL POLAK: Yes, and I see those as representatives of a whole new generation of frontier multinational companies I see $2-a-day customers — there’s some 2.7 billion of them, 40% of the people in the world- as a virgin market that has not been tapped by existing businesses.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: What did you mean in your book though by, “zero base design”? What does that mean and what does that mean for us in terms of the future of the planet and sustainability?
PAUL POLAK: In order to effectively reach the bypassed 40% of the world’s customers, we need nothing less than a revolution in how we design products and services and how we market them and to make that revolution real, zero base design basically is the equivalent of zero base budgeting. In zero base budgeting in business, companies instead of tweaking categories like R&D, Operations, and Personnel, start from scratch and say, ‘What would we do, how would we spend money, if we started from scratch to design a business to meet the mission that our current business is meeting?’ and so in zero base design, you make no assumptions and you start from scratch. A perfect example is there are 26 million diesel pump sets in India pumping irrigation water now, mostly in the Gangetic Delta. A perfect alternative that is green is using photovoltaic solar energy to make electricity driven irrigation pumps but a two kilowatt solar powered pump costs in the range of $7,000 in India now, which is far too expensive to be competitive with diesel pumps so I gave a group of rocket scientists at Ball Aerospace the following challenge: I said, “Design me a solar photovoltaic pump that does the same as a two kilowatt existing pump and competes with a five horsepower diesel pump but cut the price from $7,000 to $1,500, which now makes it economically competitive.” They did that but they did that by making no assumptions and starting from scratch so for example, when you put a solar panel on your roof in this country, it’s fixed, but the optimal electricity output from a solar panel comes when it’s exactly at right angles to the sun so in big photovoltaic systems, they incorporate computer controlled tracking, which follow the sun on its east to west route every day but the cost of that fancy equipment is so high that it almost doesn’t make an attractive difference. Now when you adapt that problem to the situation in India, labor is about $2 a day and the farmer who is pumping irrigation water to his crops is in the fields most of the day anyway directing the water from one field to another so we designed a simple hand cranking tracking system. The engineers learned that 90% of the efficiency of continuous tracking can be attained by only moving it to three positions so the farmer uses a hand crank and moves the solar panel into three positions during the day. That increases the efficiency of the solar system by 30%, but more importantly, it increases the hours of operation from five hours a day to nine to 10 hours a day so a simple thing like that makes a huge impact on lowering the cost of a photovoltaic system customized for developing countries but it requires starting from scratch and making no assumptions. Does that give you an idea of how zero base design works?
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is a great idea, and for those listeners who have just joined us, we’re honored to have Paul Polak on with us today CEO and author of Wind Horse International. We’re talking a little bit about his book, Out of Poverty, which Businessweek called, “offers optimism, not just for those fighting poverty and for those fighting to get out of it, but for any company interested in basically an untapped one billion person market”. You can buy his books on his website, PaulPolak.com or Amazon.com, Barnes and Nobel, other great bookstores. Paul, we talked a little bit about people, planet, and profit. We hear those terms a lot in terms of the triple bottom line. Does one take precedence over the other when you’re trying to drive sustainability initiatives forward or are they all equal in the equation?
PAUL POLAK: Well, from my practical experience, neither of those options. I think the solution is to build a social mission that is a mission that incorporates what’s commonly described as the triple bottom line into the DNA and the overall mission of the organization so for instance, if your mission is to sell safe drinking water, at an affordable price that is a price that the $2-a-day customers deem affordable, if you’re successful at selling safe drinking water at an affordable price to customers who are getting sick from drinking bad water, the social objective is built in and will be accomplished. The real challenge is how to make that into a profitable business because if you can make it into a business with attractive profits, then there is no ceiling to the amount of investment funds you can attract so you can rescale. The key unmet challenge is how to achieve these social goals in a way that is a cost-effective profitable business and that’s what we’re focusing on in these three or four frontier multinationals.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Let’s talk a little bit about one of your basic tenets of ending poverty. Is that beneficial to sustainable growth and environment in the future or is making society stronger and bigger more beneficial to ending poverty or vice versa? How does this work? What comes first, the chicken or the egg when it comes to ending poverty? Which way do we pull on that equation?
PAUL POLAK: Well, I think from my point of view, it doesn’t really matter. If you help half of the 2.7 billion people living under $2 a day out of poverty, you make a huge impact on the positive environmental balance of the planet for the following reasons: One of the biggest contributors to reduce carrying capacity of the planet is population growth. The single biggest factor creating population growth is poverty. The data is very clear that once you reach a certain income level, a nation’s population growth rate goes down to zero so the first issue is that poor people need large families to survive so if you help hundreds of millions of poor people move out of poverty, you help lower population and the major population growth of planet earth is contributing to environmental imbalance. The second thing is that really poor populations need food donated to them and there are huge amounts of carbon expended in growing the extra food to feed people who are starving and transporting it to the people who are starving. The third thing is that most of the global conflict, extreme poverty is a huge factor and when you have wars, that creates a huge part of environmental imbalance so I could examples like this so ending poverty and environmental sustainability go hand in hand and you can help people end poverty in an environmentally sustainable way. That is not to say that when you help people pump irrigation water through green methods, there aren’t some negative consequences. Everything you do has negative and positive environmental consequences but if you do it in a way that is the most effective way, the positive environmental consequences far outweigh the negative.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. Speaking of such, there’s a cost benefit analysis to all of corporate action when we green them. Is that appropriate still or is that counter to their profit and their bottom line?
PAUL POLAK: Well first of all, a lot of the so-called greening is, in my view, sort of cosmetic so there’s a lot of publicity about greening of corporations but it needs to be substantially contributing to actual greening. Secondly, most of the data we have indicates that corporations who are oriented towards the common good are more profitable actually than the corporations who aren’t so there’s a lot of data about socially responsible businesses outperforming the businesses that are not classified as socially responsible in terms of long term profitability.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, businesses could do well and do good at the same time?
PAUL POLAK: Absolutely.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re down to the last three minutes or so. Talk a little bit about the business opportunities. Are they there? Are they real or are they not?
PAUL POLAK: The recycling opportunities are real. In the West, we think of recycling as taking plastics, paper, and other recyclable goods and making something useful out of them. One of the problems in that arena is that there still remains a lot of recycled goods that there isn’t any market use for so there’s a big pile of plastics that still go into the dumps but if you look at this on a global scale, not from the western developed countries, one of the huge opportunities for recycling is agricultural waste. Coal represents some 40% of carbon emissions. We burn 6 billion tons of coal and we produce as a planet 4 billion tons of agricultural waste, things like cotton stocks left in the field after the cotton is picked, but it’s possible to recycle that agricultural waste, much of it, into a green competitor for coal.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I want you to talk about that. We’re down to a minute-and-a-half. Talk about your two big green initiatives, Sudden Water and Green Biocoal.
PAUL POLAK: Let’s talk about green biocoal. Sudden Water, as I mentioned before, is a company that produces a radical form of electricity for poor people. Green Coal takes agricultural waste and, through a process called torrefaction, which is heating it to 300 degrees in the absence of oxygen for about three hours, it transforms it into a blackened substance. When it’s compressed into briquettes, you can substitute it for coal, for example, coal-fired utility plants, and lower carbon emissions by doing that and it’s a potential $250 billion market but it requires a radically affordable decentralized processing plant located in villages close to the waste and so we’re building those plants for 25,000 compared with existing torrefaction plants that start at $10 million and that will create a global network capable of recycling agricultural waste into a coal.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. Paul, thank you for coming on Green is Good today and for our listeners out there that want to learn more about Paul and his great work or buy his books, go to www.paulpolak.com. His two great books, The Business Solution to Poverty or Out of Poverty are available on his website or on Amazon.com or at other great bookstores. Thank you, Paul for being a visionary brave thinker and a hopeful sustainability evangelist. You are truly living proof that green is goo
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