marc marc
marc		 marc marc
blog about books journalism speaking contact

Archive for the ‘NGOs’ Category

« Older Entries

KaBOOM! What an impact!

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

Darell Hammond of KABOOM!

Fifteen years ago, Darell Hammond, a 24-year-old college dropout who was raised in group home outside of Chicago, had an idea. He wanted to build playgrounds for kids who needed a place to play. He started with a playground in southeast Washington, D.C., raising money from the Home Depot Foundation and others to pay for the job, and assembling a group of volunteers to do the work. Then he built another. And another. Since then, KaBOOM!, the nonprofit that he started  in 1996 (again with help from Home Depot, which remains a supporter to this day), has built 1,800 playgrounds across America, more than anyone. Lately KaBOOM! has done something even more unusual–it upended its business model, and decided to share everything it has learned about play and playgrounds, which happens to be quite a lot, with the rest of the world.

“We decided to open-source our model online,” Darell told me recently, when we met in the group’s playful surroundings–toys are scattered everywhere–on Connecticut Avenue in northwest Washington. “We realized we were a drop in the bucket, when compared to the demand.”

I’d run across Darell now and then over the years, but we’d never sat down to talk until then. He’s an impressive guy and, more importantly, he has built an impressive and deep organization. KaBOOM! brought in about $21 million in revenues last year, and it has a staff of about 75 people, including former senior executives from Ben & Jerry’s, U.S. Food Service, and Discovery Communications’ Animal Planet. More important, KABOOM! built 162 playgrounds last year, and mustered 40,880 volunteers to do so.

In every case, people from the neighborhood where the playground is located play get deeply involved in planning and building it. Typically, they spend three months planning and designing the space, involving kids and adults,  before as few as 200 and as many as 1,200 people gather to construct the playground in a single day. “Organized chaos,” Darell calls it. What happens next matters, too: Neighorbood groups often build a second playground, or organize a crime-watch group, or lobby a city for better services. (more…)

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Environment, Media, NGOs, Social Entrepreneurs, Sustainability | No Comments »

Sustainable consumption: Opportunity or oxymoron?

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

Imagine that you’re the chief sustainability officer of a FORTUNE 500 company. During a meeting with your CEO, you say: “We need to talk to consumers about using less.”

Improbable? Sure.

Impossible? Perhaps not.

An important conversation to start? Absolutely.

So, at least, says Aron Cramer, the CEO of Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), a nonprofit association of companies, whose mission is to promote a just and sustainable world.

“The American model of consumption cannot be extended to the entire world, and won’t be, because the planet simply can’t support it,” Aron told me, when we spoke by phone the other day. Yet billions of people around the world want to improve their standard of living. Figuring out how they can enjoy a better life, without destroying the environment, “is the mother of all innovation challenges,” Aron says,

Last month, BSR published a 26-page report called The New Frontier in Sustainability: The Business Opportunity in Tackling Sustainable Consumption [PDF, free download). It’s an attempt to get business leaders to think about what sustainable consumption might look like.

The topic “has been the third rail of sustainability politics,” Aron told me, but he added, with his usual optimism, that “more companies are ready to have this discussion.”

If nothing else, the report makes clear the urgency of the issue. Citing a WWF report [PDF], it says:

By recent estimates, our global footprint now exceeds the world’s capacity to regenerate by about 30 percent, and if our current demands continue, by 2030 we will need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles.

And yet:

…countless people have insufficient access to basic needs like food, clean water, and adequate shelter, and they also lack access to the resources they need to improve their lives. In 2006, the 1.2 billion people in the OECD countries had an average annual income per capita of US$30,580, while the 5.4 billion people in the rest of the world earned an average of US$3,130. Of those, 19 percent suffer from hunger, 28 percent are drinking polluted water, and 29 percent are illiterate.7 More than 2 billion people continue to rely on less than US$2 per day to meet their needs.

The question is, what business opportunities, if any,  await companies that figure out how to give poor and middle class people what they want in a sustainable way? (more…)

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in CSR, Consumption, Environment, Leadership, NGOs, Religion, Sustainability | 10 Comments »

Why big dams and big ag are good for the poor

Sunday, August 1st, 2010

Katse Dam, Lesotho

Recently, I interviewed John Briscoe, a Harvard professor and development expert who has spent decades thinking about how poor countries get richer, with a particular focus on water. He has come to believe that large-scale dams and genetically-engineered foods can be good for poor countries.

These are controversial views. See, for example, the website of a nonprofit group called International Rivers, which says:

Africa’s dams have done considerable social, environmental and economic damage, often with complete disregard for the human rights of dam-affected communities, and have left a trail of “development-induced poverty” in their wake.

Friends of the Earth, meanwhile, says that it “opposes the introduction of GMOs as it will constitute a threat to African biodiversity and the continent’s food sovereignty, and will make nothing to help Africa tackling poverty and hunger.”

For his part, John, who was trained as a civil and environmental engineer, has worked as an engineer in the water agencies of South Africa and Mozambique; as an epidemiologist at the Cholera Research Laboratory in Bangladesh; as a professor of water resources at the University of North Carolina; and, for the past 20 years in a variety of policy and operational positions in the World Bank. Most recently he has served as the Bank’s Senior Water Advisor and the Country Director for Brazil. John now a professor of environmental engineering at Harvard.

Here’s an edited version of our interview:

Marc Gunther: John, let’s begin by talking about water. You’ve called water scarcity “a massive and growing problem in the developing world.” What do you mean by that? Are you talking about drinking water and sanitation? Or water more generally? And if it’s the latter, why is it that we are experiencing scarcity since there is, essentially, a finite amount of water in the world? We don’t deplete our supply of water like we do, say, our supply of oil.

John Briscoe: I think it’s useful to think about water as you suggest: There’s the resource itself and then the services that are derived from that resource. So, when it comes to drinking water and sanitation as a service, in my view, there is a large but not a growing problem. In fact, the number of people who do not have adequate water and sanitation services is shrinking. Lots of people who never had services are getting services, because of economic growth in the developing world in general and China and India in particular. Of course, one person without these services is one person too many, but the situation is improving. You see this improvement reflected in the rapid decline of infant mortality rates in many countries.  There are important financing and institutional issues for delivering these services, but for societies at large, I do not consider that a huge, massive, existential challenge.

The greater challenge in countries like India, Pakistan and China is that the resource itself, as you said, is finite, and the demands on it are ever-increasing. We need more agriculture to grow our food. We need more energy. We need more industry. We need more water and sanitation. It’s essentially a Malthusian problem of a limited resource and the ever-growing demands on it. And that is a massive problem.

MG: For the west, or just for the developing world? (more…)

Tags: , ,
Posted in Consumption, Economics, Environment, Food, Global Poverty, NGOs, Sustainability | 3 Comments »

Fred Krupp: Seemingly indestructible

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

Fred_TCErickson-RF_CC

Fred Krupp is like a Timex watch.

timex-ws4

He takes a licking but keeps on ticking.

Those of you old enough to remember the commercials when Timex tortured its seemingly indestructible watches, using high divers, water skiers, dishwashers, jackhammers, and the propeller of an outboard motor, know what I mean.

Except that the instruments of torture that Fred has endured as he has labored, literally for decades, to get climate change legislation through Congress include coal-state Senators, Republican obstructionists, Washington trade associations, a largely indifferent press corps  and left-wing green groups that accuse the Environmental Defense Fund, which he leads, of selling out to big business.

If nothing else, you’ve got to admire his persistence.

It can’t be easy to calmly discuss the need for cap-and-trade legislation and the challenge of getting 60 votes in the Senate while oil is fouling the Gulf of Mexico, global temperatures are rising and atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are reaching dangerous levels.

Yet that’s Fred–calm, rational, pragmatic and seemingly undeterred by the fact that there appears to be only an outside chance that climate-change legislation will be passed this year, that next year looks a whole lot worse and that the congressional clock is ticking down.

Today, EDF invited reporters to the Washington offices of the Glover Park Group to hear Fred and Steve Cochran, the group’s chief lobbyist, make a last-ditch plea for a scaled-back bill, one with an emissions cap that initially covers only the utility industry.

They conceded for the first time publicly that EDF won’t get the economy-wide cap that it really wants and also, for the first time, gently criticized  President Obama and urged him to back up his climate-change rhetoric with action. (more…)

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Climate Change, Energy, NGOs, Politics, Sustainability | 2 Comments »

Modern-day slavery: Here, there and everywhere

Sunday, June 27th, 2010

57470512SH007_migrantsModern-day slavery is not just about sex workers or poor people in faraway places.

Some farmworkers in the U.S., for all practical purposes, work as slaves.  Laborers  with few or no rights, working under inhumane conditions, typically far home, have produced such products as  blueberries, organic milk, personal computers or cell phones and garments imported from India, a new report says.

Consider:

An estimated 12 to 27 million people are victims of slavery, and other forms of forced labor around the world. In the United States alone, 10,000 or more people are being forced to work at any given time.

The report, called Help Wanted: Hiring, Human Trafficking and Modern-Day Slavery in the Global Economy (PDF for download, here),  was published by Verite, a non-profit based in Amherst, Mass., that monitors and reports on  labor rights abuses around the world. (It was funded by Humanity United, a nonprofit focused on peace and human rights started and chaired by Pam Omidyar.) Over the years, Verite has helped identify and clean up the supply chains of such global brands as Timberland, Gap, Levi Strauss, Apple, Disney and HP. I met with Verite’s executive director, Dan Viederman, last week in Washington to talk about the report, and what can be done to deal with slavery. (more…)

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Business Ethics, Consumption, Economics, Global Poverty, NGOs, Sustainability, Workplace | 3 Comments »

Steve Zwick: Paying for nature’s services

Monday, June 21st, 2010

Steve_ZwickToday’s guest post is from Steve Zwick, who edits Ecosystem Marketplace, an online news service that reports on market-based solutions to environmental problems.  Based on the premise that the cost of production should include the cost of environmental degradation, EM is published by non-governmental organization Forest Trends and funded by a diverse array of NGOs, governmental agencies, and private companies.

A native of Chicago, Steve began contributing to EM in 2006, after more than a decade writing about sustainable business for publications such as Time and Fortune.  He also produces radio features for Germany’s Deutsche Welle Radio and National Public Radio in the United States. Steve’s background combines journalism, business and the environment—he studied journalism at Northwestern, worked as a runner at the Chicago Board of Trade, became a futures trader and then got involved in local environmental campaigns, which led to his writing career. Steve sent me this thoughtful post from Hanoi, where he was watching Ivory Coast play Brazil in the World Cup and preparing for the 17th Katoomba meeting this week, as he’ll explain:

BP’s Deepwater Horizon debacle reminds us once again that our economy depends on our ecology and that one man’s cheap solution is often another’s cost.  It’s as true in the United States as it is here in Vietnam, where subsistence farmers often must choose between feeding their families and preserving nature.

But the apparent conflict between commerce and nature is a false one, because in the long run everything we buy, sell, eat, and produce is derived from nature.  If we destroy nature, we destroy our own livelihoods.

mangrove0459smMangroves, for example, provide shelter for vulnerable fish and breeding ground for shrimp.  They also shield the coast from slow erosion and sudden storms; they extract impurities from water and pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, depositing it in the ocean floor – thus helping to reduce the greenhouse effect and slow climate change.

All of these are ecosystem services, delivered to us by nature, free of charge.  And because they’re free of charge, they are taken for granted – and destroyed to make things we can put a price on.

Over the last four decades, however, we’ve seen scores of efforts to measure the economic value of services provided by wetlands, forests, and other living ecosystems – as well as habitat supporting endangered species – and then attempts to entice those who either benefit from these services or contribute to their destruction to instead pay for their upkeep.

That’s what payments for ecosystem services (PES) are all about. Some of the more exciting emerging PES schemes involve water.  Indeed, water quality trading (WQT) schemes are proliferating in streams, rivers, and lakes across the world. WQT is a pillar of the Obama administration’s new scheme to clean up the Chesapeake Bay. (more…)

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Climate Change, Economics, Environment, NGOs, Sustainability, Water | 1 Comment »

The Gulf disaster, and the future of coal

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

If you like the BP oil spill…

cleaning-oil-spill-2

you’re going to love carbon capture and storage.

Coal_power_plant_Datteln_2_Crop1

Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is the technology that offers the best hope of generating electricity from coal in a way that doesn’t further heat up the planet. When people talk about “clean coal” – a phrase that deserves quotes because coal is never entirely clean — they’re often talking about CCS.

CCS technologies, which can be applied before or after the coal is burned, are designed to capture carbon dioxide, transport it to a secure location, typically deep under the ground, and then sequester it safely for a long, long time, with little or no risk that it will ever escape.

Get the connection? Just as the oil industry assures that they can safely drill for oil a mile under the ocean, the coal companies and utility industry are very confident that can bury CO2 deep under the ground, with little or no risk that it will ever escape.

Do you want to take them at their word?

I asked Mike Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club and a leading anti-coal activist, about BP and CCS. He replied by email:

The BP deep water oil disaster is an example of how seeking out new and riskier ways of feeding our addiction to fossil fuels leads to new and more catastrophic problems….If there’s a lesson in this, it’s that relying on unproven and complicated methods to sustain our dependence on oil and coal has disastrous consequences.

You may be surprised to learn that CCS isn’t favored just by the coal guys or the utilities. Some environmental groups like the technology, too. David Hawkins, the estimable head of the climate program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which strongly opposes conventional coal plants, says it’s essential that we figure out CCS. Here’s his very thoughtful argument on behalf of CCS, from NRDC’s Switchboard blog:

As a community, we have achieved great success in blocking new coal plants one by one but we need a comprehensive coal policy as well.  Showing CCS is an available tool helps us to convince policymakers that they should oppose construction of coal plants that do not capture their carbon.  Is such a policy as attractive to many in our community as a law that says no more coal plants, period? No.  But we need to ask ourselves — what are the realistic odds of getting Congress or any significant coal-using state to adopt a “no new coal, period” policy in the next handful of years?   I have fought the coal industry for 40 years and in my judgment the odds of a total ban on new coal plants are not large.

The Obama administration is also an enthusiastic supporter of CCS on a grand scale, in the form of a controversial, costly project known as Future Gen. Just a week ago, even as oil was spewing into the gulf, Obama’s DOE  announced that it would spend up to $612 million in recovery act money (to be matched by $368 million in private funding) to demonstrate large-scale CCS from industrial sources (not power plants, although the technology is similar).

One project will store CO2 in a “deep saline formation,” as part of a corn ethanol project. Two others will use the CO2 in “enhanced oil recovery” in the Gulf, believe it or not. Such well-connected companies as Archer Daniels Midland and GE are among the beneficiaries. From the DOE announcement:

·         Leucadia Energy, LLC (Lake Charles, LA)—Leucadia and Denbury Onshore LLC will capture and sequester 4.5 million tons of CO2 per year from a new methanol plant in Lake Charles, LA. The CO2 will be delivered via a 12-mile connector pipeline to an existing Denbury interstate CO2 pipeline and sequestered via use for enhanced oil recovery in the West Hastings oilfield, starting in April 2014. The project team includes Leucadia Energy, Denbury, General Electric, Haldor Topsoe, Black & Veatch, Turner Industries, and the University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology.  (DOE share: $260 million)

·         Air Products & Chemicals, Inc. (Port Arthur, TX)—Air Products will partner with Denbury Onshore LLC to capture and sequester one million tons of CO2 per year from existing steam-methane reformers in Port Arthur, Texas, starting in November 2012. The CO2 will be delivered via a 12-mile connector pipeline to an existing Denbury interstate CO2 pipeline and sequestered via use for enhanced oil recovery in the West Hastings oilfield. The project team includes Air Products & Chemicals, Denbury Onshore LLC, the University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology, and Valero Energy Corporation.  (DOE share: $253 million)

·         Archer Daniels Midland Corporation (Decatur, Ill.)—The project will capture and sequester one million tons of CO2 per year from an existing ethanol plant in Illinois, starting in August 2012. The CO2 will be sequestered in the Mt. Simon Sandstone, a well-characterized saline reservoir located about one mile from the plant. The project team includes Archer Daniels Midland, Schlumberger Carbon Services, and the Illinois State Geological Survey. (DOE share: $99 million)

Unfortunately, these subsidies don’t appear to be linked to actual tons of carbon sequestered. They support demonstration projects. Still to be determined are such issues as who “owns” the store CO2, who will be responsible, financially, if it escapes, etc.  To be fair, CO2 has been stored underground for years as part of enhanced oil recovery, but we’ve also been doing deepwater drilling for a long time.

Interestingly, the connection between the BP disaster and CCS was suggested to me,  not by an environmentalist, but by a very sophisticated investor in clean technology. This investor—who asked not to be identified, because he works closely with big companies like GE and with the Obama team—has placed bets on solar power, energy storage and efficiency, so he’s no fan of coal, but he’s also driven by a personal passion around the climate crisis.

Since I can’t quote the investor, I’ll give the last work to the Sierra Club’s Mike Brune:

Relying on carbon capture and storage is like a heroin addict finding a new vein to shoot. It’s not a solution, it’s simply a new way to perpetuate the problem. The Sierra Club has no objection to using private, corporate resources to fund CCS research to see if CCS can ever be done safely, cheaply, and without requiring massive amounts of energy. In the meantime, we shouldn’t be seeking out more expensive and dangerous ways to feed our dependence on oil or coal. Instead, we should be putting our innovation and resources to work in the service of clean energy that will create jobs and keep our coasts, wild places, and communities healthy and intact.

Photo links/credits: duck (Audubon Society of Florida)  coal plant (wikimedia)

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Climate Change, Energy, Environment, NGOs, Politics | No Comments »

The Gulf disaster, and you can hum along

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

So much has been written about the disaster in the Gulf that I’ve felt no need until now to add my two cents. But I’ll ask you to check out this video from the Environmental Defense Fund which uses music and images to get to the heart of the issue. Better, I might add, than our president did last night.

Please, let’s not allow this crisis to pass without taking action to cap carbon emissions and promote clean energy. This is about our legacy.

-

Here are a few words about the video from David Yarnold, the executive director of Environmental Defense Fund:

From a comfortable distance the BP oil disaster is depressing and horrific. But up close, it’s worse.
Two days in the Gulf of Mexico left me enraged – and deeply resolved. Both the widespread damage and the inadequacy of the response effort exceeded my worst fears. I’d spent a full day on the Gulf and we ended up soaked in oily water and seared by the journey.
By Tuesday night, I was home. My throat burned and my head was foggy and dizzy as I showed my pictures and video to my wife, Fran, and my 13-year-old daughter, Nicole, on the TV in the family room.
Images of the gooey peanut-butter colored oil and the blackened wetlands flashed by. Pictures of dolphins diving into our oily wake and brown pelicans futilely trying to pick oil off their backs popped on the screen. And, out of nowhere, Nicole put on the music from the season finale of Glee.
With all these horrific images on the screen, she had turned on the show’s final song of the year, “Somewhere Over The Rainbow.” The song, a slow, sweet, ukulele and guitar-driven version, couldn’t have added a deeper sense of tragic irony.
I choked up. And then that resolve kicked in: I wanted anyone/everyone to see what our addiction to oil had done to the Gulf and to contrast that with the sense of hope and possibility that “Somewhere” exudes.
Long story short, last weekend, Peter Rice, Chairman of Fox Networks Entertainment, gave Environmental Defense Fund the green light to use the song. The pictures you’ll see were shot by two incredibly talented EDF staffers, Yuki Kokubo and Patrick Brown – and a few are mine.
The inspiration was Nicole’s. This is for her, and for all of our kids – and theirs to come.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Climate Change, Energy, Environment, Media, NGOs | 2 Comments »

Walmart: Still the green giant

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

051026_MB_GreenWalmart_exWalmart and GE are the superpowers of corporate sustainability. They have enormous impact (WMT) and influence (GE). Recently, I hosted a dinner about sustainability for Motorola where an executive named Bill Olson described how the company developed its Eco-Moto W233 Renew carbon neutral, energy efficient, environmentally friendly phone. To do so, Motorola needed a company that would sell it recycled plastic for the phone. That was GE. It also needed a retailer to enthusiastically sell the phones. That was Walmart. In fact, as Bill recalled, WMT exec told him that giant retailer would before long be selling nothing but “green” phones.

The point is, WMT and GE are changing business, often in unseen ways. So it’s worth keeping up with their efforts to meet their own ambitious sustainability goals. Where are they succeeding? Where are they falling short? How strong is their commitment?

WMT’s 2010 Global Sustainability Report, which was released recently, provides a snapshot of the retailer’s work. The 47-page report (available here) is, if nothing else, a reminder of the scope  and depth of WMT’s efforts—the company is buying renewable power, reducing packaging, reducing waste, making its fleet more efficient, and selling more sustainable products, and not just here in the U.S.

Here are some highlights:

Bentonville Buddies: Mike Duke and Environmental Defense Fund's Fred Krupp

Bentonville Buddies: Mike Duke and Environmental Defense Fund's Fred Krupp

When CEO Mike Duke took over last year from Lee Scott, there were questions about his commitment to the sustainability efforts. He now appears to be a believer. In the introduction to the report, he writes that  WMT has been able to “broaden and accelerate” its commitment to sustainability even during the recession. And he says:

Sustainability continues to make Walmart a better company by reducing waste, lowering costs, driving innovation, increasing productivity and helping us fulfill our mission of saving people money so they can live better.

That’s about as good a summary of the business case for sustainability as you’ll find. (more…)

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in CSR, Climate Change, Consumption, Energy, NGOs, Sustainability | 6 Comments »

PNC Bank: Helping to destroy mountains

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

2825430279_a3aa7cd059_oPNC, a big regional bank (annual revenues: $16 billion) based in Pittsburgh, has become the bank that environmental activists love to hate because of its support for mountaintop removal mining.

The bank was identified as the worst of the worst in Grading the Banks: A Mountaintop Removal Scorecard, a new ranking compiled by the Rainforest Action Network and the Sierra Club.

According to the report, the bank has made loans to six companies engaged in mountaintop removal mining: Massey Energy, Patriot Coal, Alpha Natural Resources, International Coal Group, Arch Coal and Consol Energy.

PNC, by the way, was a recipient of TARP funds (since paid back) so these loans were, at least in a small way, your tax dollars at work.

I emailed PNC to ask for their comment and got a prompt reply from Fred Solomon, vice president, corporate communications:

PNC’s practice is not to comment on analyst or other research reports, and in general, our credit policies are proprietary information.

Interesting. We’ll see how long that no-comment approach lasts, if any of the enviro groups decide to bring pressure directly on PNC, a major consumer bank in the mid-Atlantic region. Transparency, evidently, is not for now part of the PNC culture.

I’m returning to the topic of banks and coal after just a couple of weeks (See J.P. Morgan Chase’s Coal Problem) because of a couple of significant new developments. The first is the RAN/Sierra club report card–a tactic that, in the argot of the corporate campaigns, is known as “rank ‘em and spank ‘em”. The second is a new policy from by JP Morgan Chase, released just before the bank’s annual meeting, which was held today. (more…)

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in CSR, Climate Change, Energy, NGOs, Sustainability, Transparency | 2 Comments »

« Older Entries