A coffee farm in Costa Rica

Aside from being in the coffee trade, Starbucks and Thanksgiving Coffee would appear to have little in common.

Seattle-based Starbucks is a FORTUNE 500 company (2011 revenues: $11.7 billion) that sells its brews all over the world, pursues global dominance (its latest outpost is Helsinki) and owns an iconic  brand. The company bought about 428 million pounds of coffee last year.

Thanksgiving Coffee is a family-owned, artisan roaster that sells most of its coffee to grocers, specialty stores and restaurants near its home base in Mendocino County, CA, where the other popular crop is often smoked. Thanksgiving bought about 500,000 pounds of coffee last year.

Yet the big coffee company and the little one share a couple of important goals.

First, they want to win the trust of their customers and, of course, their own employees. One way to do that is by showing them that their coffee is ethically-sourced. Starbucks talks about responsibly grown coffee, citing its Coffee and Farmer Equity (CAFE) Practices, a set of social, economic, environmental and quality guidelines. Thanksgiving’s slogan is ““Not Just a Cup, but a Just Cup.”  Reputation matters, whether you are big or small.

But, even if reputation didn’t matter (and to most customers, it probably doesn’t), Starbucks and Thanksgiving need to devote their attention to the social and environmental practices of their growers, upon whom they depend for a reliable supply of high-quality coffee. If their coffee farmers run into trouble–because of low coffee prices, poor environmental practices or climate change–Starbucks and Thanksgiving will struggle, too.

The other day, I wrote about the Fair Trade movement and its efforts to improve the lives of coffee growers. (See my blogpost, A Schism over Fair Trade.) About 9 percent of the coffee sold by Starbucks in the US is certified as Fair Trade; about 75%  of Thanksgiving’s coffee is Fair Trade certified. Today, I’ll dig a bit deeper into the ways Starbucks and Thanksgiving work with growers.

By way of background, coffee, as you may know, is the most widely-traded agricultural commodity in the tropics, providing a livelihood to tends of millions of farmers. (Brazil and Vietnam are the largest exporters, followed by Colombia, Ethiopia and Indonesia.) Historically, the relationship between buyers and growers has been transactional; prices paid to farmers sometimes didn’t cover their costs, forcing them into cycles of debt and poverty. Cheap, low-grade coffee known as robusta is still traded as global commodity, with wildly fluctuating prices, sometimes less than $1 a pound.

At Starbucks, I spoke by phone with Ben Packard, vice president of global responsibility, and Kelly Goodejohn, director of ethical sourcing. (Disclosure: Ben is a friend, and we’re both members of the board of Net Impact.) They told me that Starbucks has worked with Conservation International, a global nonprofit, since 1998 on coffee buying; together they launched CAFE practices in 2004. Their relationship isn’t arms-length; Starbucks pays CI for its advice and consulting services. Starbucks has pledged to have 100% of its coffee “ethically sourced,” either by meeting the CAFE practices standards, or by being certified as Fair Trade or Organic, by 2015. In 2011, about 86% was certified.

Carlos Mario Rodriguez (left), the director of agronomy at the Starbucks Farmer Support Center in Costa Rica, with farmer José Manuel Barrientos Alfaro

The CAFE practices program has 249 (!) indicators to measure growers’ social and environmental performance–everything from the wages and benefits they provide to their use of pesticides and water. They are classified in three categories: Verified, Preferred and Strategic. “The goal is continuous improvement,” Ben told me.

Farmers that perform well enough to enter the program are rewarded with higher prices, technical support and, in some cases, loans. Starbucks paid an average price of $1.56 per pound for our premium green (unroasted) coffee in 2010.

Since 2008, Starbucks and CI have monitored and evaluated the program to see what difference it is making on the ground. “Almost all the indicators are moving in the right direction,” Kelly said. Between 2008 and 2010, about 30% of the farms that were certified moved up a category. About 99 per cent did not convert any natural forest to farmland. The added income made a difference, too. “More CAFE practices farmers sent their children to secondary school,” Kelly said. Not everything was working as well as it should. Between 19 and 23% of farms applied chemicals within 10 meters of bodies of water. Between 8 and 31% of mills failed to provide their workers with clean drinking water.

Justin Ward and Bambi Semroc, who oversee the program for CI, concurred that most of the findings were positive. What makes the Starbucks program a standout, Justin said, is the company’s willingness to measure impact and be open about what it has found. You can download the 153-page report here.

Ben Corey-Moran

At Thanksgiving Coffee, I spoke over Skype with Ben Corey-Moran, the president and director of coffee, about the company’s work helping farmers in Rwanda adapt to climate change. Climate change is a worry for growers:  A peer-reviewed study reports that higher temperatures are already allowing a pest known as coffee borer beetle to spread further in East Africa, threatening livelihoods, and a coffee journal, Fresh Cup, devoted a recent issue to climate change threats and adaptation.

Ben told me that Thanksgiving is very focused on its growers. “We envision ourselves as the bridge that connects coffee lovers with farmers on the other side of the world,” he said. ”How can every transaction, how can every pound of coffee we buy and sell be sourced in a way that restores the environment and benefits the farmers?”

Thanksgiving Coffee was invited to work in Rwanda in 2004 by US AID, which was helping rebuild the Rwandan coffee industry. The company, to its surprise, found fruit that was literally dying on the vine. “I’d never seen a crop fail before it had actually been harvested,” Ben said. Farmers told him that summers were drier than they had been. “We’ve always know that weather affects our business. Climate change makes that weather more extreme,” he said.

The solution was fairly obvious. Coffee is best grown under a shade canopy. In Rwanda, it was being grown in the open sun. So Thanksgiving Coffee, with the help of a Dutch nonprofit named Progreso and a Rwandan NGO called, Redi, began a tree-planting project, to create a forest canopy. Together they financed the construction of seedling nurseries, hired agronomists and brought information technology to the Dukunde Kawa cooperative, which has about 1,800 farmer-owners. Tree planting does more than cool the coffee as it ripens; it helps protect topsoil, buffers the impact of rain and allows the soil to retain more moisture during dry periods. “We can’t change the weather, but maybe we can change the way the farms withstand the weather,” Ben said. For an investment of less than $40,000, the farmers and their allies planted about 300,000 trees.

Neither Starbucks’ CAFE practices nor Thanksgiving’s Rwanda work (which just won an award from the specialty coffee association) are charity projects. But they’re not business as usual either. They require a long-term horizon and an expansive view of the firm’s  responsibility. They aim to turn what had been transactions between the buyers and growers of coffee into a durable, win-win relationships.

A seedling nursery in Rwanda

Photos courtesy of Starbucks and Thanksgiving Coffee

Paul Rice is a man on a mission.

The 51-year-old president and CEO of Fair Trade USA, who has led the group since 1998, says he wants the practice of Fair Trade to become bigger, engaging more consumers and helping more farmers around the world. To that end, Fair Trade USA last year quit the international Fairtrade Labelling Organizations, or FLO, an international federation of fair trade groups, to pursue a vision that Rice calls “Fair Trade for All.”  He and his allies want to broaden the definition of Fair Trade, which when it comes to coffee now requires importers to buy from grower-owned co-operatives. The “Fair Trade for All”  permits buying from collections of small farmers and even coffee estates, or plantations, that are deemed to be worker-friendly.

“Fair Trade can be more than a tiny market niche,” Rice says. “It can be scalable and significant.”

Bringing in plantations will make it easier for big coffee buyers like Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Starbucks and Whole Foods to buy more Fair Trade products–and that’s exactly the problem, his critics say.

Including bigger farms, they argue, will endanger the co-ops that are the heart and soul of the Fair Trade movement.

“Fair Trade is designed to change commerce,” says Rodney North of Equal Exchange, a cooperative that sells Fair Trade and organic coffee, tea, chocolate bars, cocoa, bananas and almonds.  “We shouldn’t be changing Fair Trade to accommodate commerce.”

Equal Exchange's campaign

Equal Exchange has launched a petition drive asking companies, organizations and consumers to choose “authentic, small farmer-centered Fair Trade.” It says:

Small farmer co-operatives are the center of our Fair Trade movement. We believe that cooperative organization is essential for small farmers to survive and thrive, and the cooperative model is an important vehicle for economic empowerment and social change….

Therefore we vigorously oppose Fair Trade USA (previously Transfair USA)’s Fair Trade for All initiative, which seeks to allow coffee, cacao and other commodities from plantations into the Fair Trade system. This strategy means that small farmers will now be forced to compete with large plantations for market access… We oppose the lower standards Fair Trade USA proposes and the lack of farmer and producer governance on Fair Trade USA’s board. We believe that their Fair Trade For All initiative threatens small farmer co-operatives’ existence and Fair Trade itself.

Caught in the middle are coffee companies (and other retailers big and small), which must decide whether to embrace Rice’s “Fair Trade For All” mantra or side with the international federation and traditionalists in the US who favor the co-op model. The brouhaha creates a risk: That what is now a relatively small market — roughly 5% of the coffee sold in the US is certified as Fair Trade — will be further splintered, with competing logos, brands and ideologies.

“This is an exciting moment in the Fair Trade movement’s history because it’s a chance to revisit our purpose, our goals and our practices,” says Ben Corey-Moran, the president of Thanksgiving Coffee Co. , a socially-conscious artisan roaster in northern California. (Its slogan: “Not Just a Cup, But as Just Cup.”) “But it’s also a very dangerous moment. We could confuse or alienate a lot of consumers.”

The idea of Fair Trade dates back to the 1940s when a prominent Mennonite woman from Pennsylvania began selling imported crafts in small stores that eventually grew into the Fair Trade retailer Ten Thousand Villages. “Max Havelaar,” the first Fair Trade label was launched in Europe in the late 1980s. Other labels followed, and FLO was established in Germany in 1997 to bring the labels together and set worldwide certification standards.

Now producers and consumers faced a proliferation of labels and standards–not just Fair Trade International and Fair Trade USA but also independent labels like Rainforest Alliance, which certifies cocoa, coffee, flowers, tea and other products, and a Bird-Friendly seal from the Smithsonian Institution. In every instance, buyers are assured that growers are being paid a premium price for their products, and and that in return they adopt social and environmental practices that are verified by third parties. It’s a market-friendly way to fight global poverty.

The current battle over who owns the idea of Fair Trade is likely to focus on coffee, America’s biggest food import ($526 million in 2011) and the most-traded Fair Trade commodity. Last year, Fair Trade USA certified more than 138 million pounds of  coffee, a 32 percent increase over 2010.  This  enabled Fair Trade coffee cooperatives to earn $17 million in community development premiums, up 61 percent from 2010.  The extra money goes to projects selected by each co-op in education, health care, environment, business management, quality improvement or productivity.

Rice wants to double the impact of Fair Trade by 2015. To make a bigger dent in global poverty, he argues, Fair Trade has to include all kinds of producers, including workers on plantations. FLO limits its certification for coffee, cacao and sugar to co-ops, although it will certify plantations that grown banana or tea.

“We tried our damndest over the last three years to get FLO to move,” Rice told me. “They flat out said no. I find it very rigid and unrealistic for the Fair Trade movement to insist to the farmers out there that we won’t work with you unless you join a co-op.”

Money, not surprisingly, played a part in the disagreement. Fair Trade USA paid more than 20% of its revenues to FLO  which sets global standards, coordinates labeling and advocates on behalf of Fair Trade. Rice will save that money by going out on his owns, and it could come in handy: Fair Trade USA has about $5 million in loans outstanding to the Ford Foundation, among others. (Its annual revenues will be about $11 million this year.) “We needed an injection of growth capital in order to invest in consumer awareness” and drive demand for Fair Trade, Rice says.

Fair Trade USA also collects fees from the roasters and retailers that use its logo. Critics say that creates an incentive for the NGO to loosen standards and expand the market to bring in more revenue for itself.

A graduate of Yale with an MBA from Berkeley, Rice spent 11 years working in Nicaragua where he started a successful coffee co-op called PRODECOOP. Under his leadership, Fair Trade USA has won awards from the likes of the World Economic Forum, the Skoll Foundation, Ashoka and Fast Company magazine.

“Our approach is, by definition, unconventional,” Rice says. “Some people celebrate that. Some people don’t. The purists in the movement don’t.”

Some of the purists who are unhappy include coffee growers–the very people Fair Trade is supposed to serve. Three networks of co-ops, which together represent 800 producers groups and about 1 million farmers in 60 countries, have opposed Fair Trade USA’s split. They fear they won’t be able to compete with the big plantations that are approved by “the people who are trying to steal fair trade from us,” as Rink Dickinson, a co-founder of Equal Exchange, said last year in a speech.

Rodney North

Equal Exchange’s Rodney North told me that  Fair Trade at its best should democratize economies and empower to farmers who form co-ops. “People who were formerly marginalized become participants in the economy,” he told me. “They go from being a peasant to becoming owners of a going concern.”

“Fair Trade should be transformative,” he said. “No plantation, no matter how benevolently run, delivers that kind of change.”

But Erik Nicholson, who is national vice president of the United Farm Workers union, and a board member of Fair Trade USA, says it’s wrong to leave the plantation workers behind. He told me: “My concern with the traditionalists is that their position is one of exclusion. They offer no hope or alternative to farm workers.”

The argument goes on and on (and this blogpost can’t). The critics say there’s no need to broaden the definition of Fair Trade because there’s more than an ample supply of Fair Trade coffee available just from co-ops. Rice responds that it’s not a zero sum game, that expanding the supply will drive demand and end up helping the co-ops. He’s hope that some big buyers will go 100% Fair Trade, which they can’t do without including larger farms.

An industry insider, who asked not to be identified, told me:

Paul Rice is a cowboy. He goes at things with guns blazing. For him, FLO does not move at the speed of business, and he’s right. FLO does amazing work, but they do it very slowly. Paul wants to go for mainstream distribution. He’s got an MBA, and he’s taking a classic business approach and he’s leaving the hippies behind.

I called a number of coffee companies to see what they think. Most seem to be taking a wait-and-see approach. At Green Mountain Coffee, which has embraced Fair Trade for years to become the No. 1 US buyer of Fair Trade Coffee, Lindsey Bolger, the senior director of coffee sourcing and relationships, said:

We’re maneuvering cautiously through this landscape. We have made it very clear to the producers that we work with that we are not going to throw the co-ops off the back of the bus, even if we bring the estates onto the front of the bus.

Ben Packard, vice president of global responsibility at Starbucks, which has been less enthusiastic about the Fair Trade model, at least here in the US, told me: “We are waiting, along with everyone else, to see what the implications of the split will be.”

Brooke McDonnell, the founder of a widely-admired boutique roaster called Equator Coffees & Teas, said: “I’m inclined to give Fair Trade USA the benefit of the doubt.” Her company, while small, has made loans to co-ops in Ecuador and Nicaragua, and bought land to set up its own operations in Panama. “As coffee roasters, if we’re concerned about a future supply of quality coffee, we’ve got to support the growers in any way we can,” she said.

Other companies, meantime, are working with FLO to set up a new affiliate in the US that would presumably adhere to the traditional co-op model. Equal Exchange is small but influential; it has long term relationships with colleges, churches, food co-ops and progressive retailers. Divine Chocolate, which is 45%-owned by cocoa growers, is also supporting what some call “authentic Fair Trade.”

I’m not sure what to make of all this. I agree with Ben Corey-Moran of Thanksgiving Coffee that this is a risky moment for Fair Trade. This dispute has surfaced some unavoidable tensions in the Fair Trade model, not just between the pragmatists and the pursuits but between the labels and the brands: Fair Trade USA and FLO are asking Starbucks and Green Mountain, as well as the small roasters, to pay them fees that are then used to promote the Fair Trade “brand.” In its own way, Fair Trade is competing with Starbucks and Green Mountain to become the trusted brand in coffee. The coffee firms would prefer to persuade consumers that any coffee they buy from Starbucks or Green Mountain is socially and environmentally responsible. If they succeed, that could marginalize Fair Trade.

Brooke McDonnell of Equator is right, too, when she argues that ultimately the onus falls on the coffee roasters to take a long-term view and build win-win relationships with their growers. That’s what the better importers are doing, for business as well as humane reasons, because they want to preserve a secure supply chain. I’ll take a look next week at the ways a big company (Starbucks) and a small one (Thanksgiving Coffee) are working to close relationships with growers, along with the trust of coffee drinkers.

Yields from organic farming may not match those produced by farmers who use synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, but there are other good reasons to buy and support organic–its health benefits, the good that it does for farm workers, even its animal-welfare rules.

So, at least, say executives of the Organic Trade Association, a Washington-based group that represents about 6,500 organic farmers, producers, retailers and suppliers.

“Yield is only one window into organic farming,” says Laura Batcha, executive vice president of the trade group. Organic farming is “good for the environment. It’s good for local economies. It’s good for the farmer incomes.”A 2008 USDA survey of organic production found that organic farms had average annual sales of $217,675, compared to the $134,807 average for U.S. farms overall. Overall, the US organic industry, including fiber as well as food, generated about $31 billion in 2011, up from just $1 billion in 1990. Despite the US’s sluggish economy, organic food and farming remain growth businesses.

I went to see Laura and Christine Bushway, who is CEO of the organic trade group, at their offices on Capitol Hill to talk about several issues, including the push to require labels on food containing genetically-modified organisms, the Farm Bill and food safety, including a recent incident of mad cow disease in California. But we talked a lot about yields because it’s in the news: A recent survey of 66 research studies published in Nature, which found that organic yields lag those of conventional farming, has stirred up a bit of a brouhaha. [See my blogpost Organic food is not as green as you think, and the comments.]

Yield is an environmental issue, of course. As demand for food increases on a planet with limited resources, we’ll want to use of land, water and other inputs efficently. But, as Laura Batcha notes, maximizing yield is not the only way to feed today’s global population of 7 billion, which is expected to grow to 9 billion. “Poverty drives hunger. War drives poverty,” she said. “It’s a lot more complicated that bushels per acre out of Iowa.” We can also eat lower on the food chain (more vegetables, less meat), reduce food waste, stop growing corn for ethanol, etc.

Still, Laura says, yields are important. Agricultural research can help drive them higher. One goal of the OTA is to secure a bigger share of the USDA’s research budget for organic growers. Right now, a version of the Farm Bill approved by a Senate committee sets aside $16 million for research into organic farming; that’s less, proportionately, that organic’s share of the retail food market, which is about 4 percent.

Less than 2 percent of the acreage in the US is farmed organically. Laura is herself an organic farmer; she and her husband have been growing vegetables and berries in southern Vermont for about 20 years. So I asked her why, if organic methods are more profitable for farmers, so few farmers choose to use them?

It’s partly a matter of habit and tradition, she said, and partly the fact that most ag schools teach conventional methods. Because it takes three years of harvests for a farm to be certified as organic, making the transition is a challenge. “Organic farming is hard,” she said. “You have to learn a new way to farm. You have to manage pests and weeds without chemicals. It’s easier said than done.”

As for the other benefits of organic, some seem clear, while others are unproven or a matter of debate. Soils managed organically have less runoff, Laura says, reducing water pollution in places like the Chesapeake Bay. Organic methods clearly reduce the use of pesticides, which have been shown to harm farm workers.

When it comes to health and nutrition–the main reason most people buy organic–the OTA’s website cites a number of studies showing nutrition benefits, and Laura and Christine noted that a 2010 report from the National Cancer Institute’s President’s Cancer Panel said that Americans face “grievous harm” from unregulated chemicals in their food, water and air. “People are much more attuned today to the connections between health and longevity and their personal lifestyle,” said Christine. But a survey of research, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, concluded that “evidence is lacking for nutrition-related health effects that result from the consumption of organically produced foodstuffs.”

Still, I learned some things about organic agriculture during my visit to the OTA that made me feel better about buying organic food (particularly milk and produce) and paying a premium for doing so. Animal-welfare standards for cows, pigs and chickens are all higher under the organic standards than they are for conventional livestock and poultry. The organic rules also say that cows can’t be fed “mammalian byproducts,” that is, parts of other cows, a practice that is otherwise permitted and a potential cause of mad cow disease.

On the controversial issue of GMOs, the OTA supports the petition asking the FDA to require labels on foods containing genetically engineered ingredients. “If GMOs are going to be used, consumers have a right to know,” Christine says. To those who argue that there’s no reason for labels because there’s no meaningful difference between genetically-engineered plants and those developed by conventional breeding, she says: “Apparently, they are different enough so that (genetically engineered methods) can be patented.”

—

For more on the benefits of organic ag, take a look at the websites of the Organic Farming Research Foundation and the Organic Center (HT to Melissa Schweisguth).

Tom Philpott of Mother Jones put the Nature study in a broader context here.

Finally, here’s a comment from Navin Ramankutty, an author of the Nature study.

First, all of the authors of the study were/are biased toward organic. My family buys produce from a CSA each summer, because we like our farmer and like buying food from someone we know, love visiting the farm with our 2.5 year old, etc. We buy a lot of organic food. Our reasons for doing so are partly for health, but mostly for environmental reasons. The main reason my co-authors and I have chosen to work in the area of agriculture is because we recognize the huge environmental degradation wrought by agriculture. In fact, 99% of what I have written about or talked about in the past is related to this. If you don’t believe me, here’s a profile McGill did about my work recently (http://publications.mcgill.ca/reporter/2011/04/navin-ramankutty-feeding-the-world-without-destroying-the-planet/). So, I still strongly “believe” (although not sure about the evidence) that organic farming has environmental benefits. But one of the biggest criticisms of organic has been that it will take up more land because of its lower yields, thereby needing the clearing of forests, release of carbon dioxide, and loss of biodiversity. To test this argument, looking at yields is important. In research, we often focus on one particular issue in order to do a thorough analysis. But we haven’t forgotten the other dimensions, especially the environmental dimension, where organic may well strongly outmatch conventional, but also the livelihood dimensions (i.e., what’s good for farmers?). We do plan to look at these other issues. Unfortunately, there wasn’t room in our paper (Nature restricts us to ~1500 words) to provide a lot of context, and especially the personal context.

I applaud Navin, Jonathan Foley and  Verena Seufert for their work. When it comes to sustainability, there should be no sacred cows–organic or conventional.

To Hindus, cows are sacred. Jewish dietary laws (kashrut) and Muslim dietary laws (halal) prohibit pork consumption. Traditional Catholics abstain from eating meat on Fridays during Lent. Religion and food have forever been intertwined. Food is deep, emotional stuff.

So it’s perhaps not surprising that devotees of organic food often embrace with quasi-religious fervor the practice of growing food without synthetic fertilizer or pesticides. [See, for example, my blogpost about Maria Rodale.] But if we want to understand impact of organic agriculture on the planet and on our health, science and not faith ought to guide us.

New scientific research points to a key drawback of organic agriculture, unfortunately: It is typically less efficient and productive than conventional growing methods. That’s a problem for fans of organic because the world has a limited supply of farmland, a billion or so undernourished people, a growing population, an expanding middle class and therefore a vast appetite for affordable and nourishing food. If, in fact, organic methods are less productive, scaling up the production of organic food at will require more land, contribute to deforestation and cost more than growing our food using conventional methods. That suggests that organic methods alone can’t feed the world in a sustainable way.

In a meta-analysis of 66 research studies  called “Comparing the yields of organic and conventional agriculture” published last month in Nature, Verena Seufert, Navin Ramankutty and Jonathan A. Foley write:

Overall, organic yields are typically lower than conventional yields.

They go on to say that the yield differences are highly contextual, depending on  crops and localities. The studies that they studied, it must be noted, use different methods and many are a decade or two old. This is by no means the last word on this issue. Still, they report that the yield differences

range from 5% lower organic yields (rain-fed legumes and perennials on weak acidic to weak-alkaline soils), 13% lower yields (when best organic practices are used), to 34% lower yields (when the conventional and organic systems are most comparable)

Of course, there are other reasons to embrace organic methods, which may be able to match or even outperform conventional farming methods under certain conditions. Organic methods reduce the use of agricultural chemicals that damage farm workers’ health, for example. But, as the authors write, the yield issue should not be ignored:

To establish organic agriculture as an important tool in sustainable food production, the factors limiting organic yields need to be more fully understood, alongside assessments of the many social, environmental and economic benefits of organic farming systems.

Navin Ramankutty

To learn more, I called Navin Ramankutty, a geography professor at McGill University and an author of the study. Much of the debate that goes on about food today focuses on methods rather than outcomes, he told. That was obvious to me after he said it,  but I’d never thought about it that way. Organic farming is a method, or management system; it may well  generates less water pollution and fewer greenhouse gases than conventional agriculture, but organic certification doesn’t measure those outcomes. Likewise, locavores, a group that includes not just the folks browsing the stands at a farmer’s market, but also Walmart, which has promised to buy more locally-grown produce, are all about location, and the environmental benefits of localism, if any, are unclear. One reason why we don’t look at outcomes, Navin said, is that “measuring those outcomes is extremely difficulty.” Broad generalizations about agriculture don’t tend to hold true because, like politics, all farming is local. Florida tomatoes have a different environmental profile from those grown in California.

Instead of wondering how and where an agricultural product was grown, we should be asking different questions, Navin suggested: “Is it good for the environment? Can it feed people? Is it good for the farmer?” To answer those last two questions–can it feed people and is it good for the farmer–you have to understand yields. Land is scarce and expensive, and if organic methods require more land (because they produce fewer calories per hectar), they will drive up food costs. That’s troubling in a world where hunger is a bigger problem than obesity.

The Nature report has provoked a variety of responses. In an email to Andrew Revkin, who wrote about it at Dot Earth, author Jon Foley wrote:

The bottom line? Today’s organic farming practices are probably best deployed in fruit and vegetable farms, where growing nutrition (not just bulk calories) is the primary goal. But for delivering sheer calories, especially in our staple crops of wheat, rice, maize, soybeans and so on, conventional farms have the advantage right now.

I asked Stave Savage, a scientist and industry consultant who blogs about agriculture at Applied Mythology, for his reaction. He looked at the underlying studies and told me that the evidence for the claim that organic can compete with conventional methods, even when it comes to growing fruits and vegetables, is skimpy. He told me by email:

The authors ultimately come out saying that some sort of hybrid would be a good idea.  On that I agree.  Organic was very ahead of its time in the early 20th century by focusing on building soil quality.  No-till and cover cropping achieve the same benefits without having to haul in massive amounts of compost or manure.

The problem is that many of the avid supporters of organic have no interest in anything like a hybrid or one learning from the other.  There is too much emphasis on philosophical purity and about demonizing regular agriculture rather than observing how much it has changed over time.

Less than 1% of US farmland is farmed organically. If farmers could improve their yields by giving up chemicals and genetically modified seeds, why wouldn’t they?

I’m planning to interview Laura Batcha of the Organic Trade Association this week, and I’ll ask her that question. We’ll also talk about the Farm Bill, the campaign to label genetically-modified foods and mad cow disease. I’ll report back in a few days.

This month, just for fun, I’m doing to devote most of my writing to food and sustainability. My plan is to write about organic vs. conventional yields, a controversy around Fair Trade, the giant candy company Mars, clean cooking fuels in Mozambique and the goings-on at a pair of upcoming events where I’ll be moderating: the 2012 National Policy Conference of CropLife America, about “The Politics of Food and the 2012 Farm Bill,” and the always-fabulous Cooking for Solutions extravaganza at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Today, though, I want to tell you about a quirky, provocative and enjoyable book called An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies (Dutton, $26.95), by Tyler Cowen.

A free-market economist who teaches at George Mason University, Cowen writes for a broad audience. His blog, MarginalRevolution, is extremely popular. He contributes  to the Sunday NY Times business section. His interests are wide ranging (see this Grantland column on the end of football) and he seems to read every nonfiction book that matters.  His short ebook, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, is very smart, and a bargain at $3.99: It argues that what ails the US economy is not merely the aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis or the distortions caused by the collapse of the dot-com bubble but a more fundamental slowdown in innovation that dates back for 40 years.

In An Economist Gets Lunch, Cowen muses about loosely-connected topics, ranging from how American food got bad (it’s not what you think) to the mysterious differences between Mexican food in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, its neighbor across the border (US regulators comes into to play) to what happened when he spent a month shopping at an Asian supermarket called Great Wall in Merrifield, VA (he ate healthier, fresher, cheaper foods).

Tyler Cowen

If, like me, you’re interested in the social and environmental impact of the food, you’ll want to read Cowen’s defense of agribusiness, technology and global supply chains. He rejects the argument summed up by the title of the movie Food Inc. that American food is bad for us and bad for the planet because of the commercialization of food. While Cowen is no fan of donuts or McDonald’s, he notes that by the end of the 20th century “more people ate well than ever before” and “the American poor are more likely to be obese than starving.” He writes:

Cheap, quick food–including its embodiment through our sometimes obnoxious agribusiness corporations–is the single most important advance in human history. It is the foundation of modern civilization, and the reason why most of us are alive.

The reasons why American food isn’t very good, he says, have less to do with business than with us, i.e., our government and culture. Prohibition all but killed fine dining because restaurants make more money from liquor than from food. Anti-immigration policies “kept American food away from its best and most fruitful innovators for decades.” Because “Americans spoil and cater to their children,” he argues, we grow up eating food that is “blander, simpler and sweeter” than food elsewhere:

A lot of American food is, quite simply, food for children in a literal sense. it’s just that we all happen to eat it.

Interesting, no?

Efficiency and technology, by contrast, have benefited the environment and the poor as well as the Cargills and ADMs of the world.  Since 1950, “global affluence increased by a factor of 6.99 while global cropland increased by a factor of only 1.32.”  In the US, agriculture feeds many more people today on no more land than was harvested at the beginning of the 20th century. Land is expensive, so farmers will try to use as little of it as possible.

“The net result is an environmental boon,” Cowen writes. “A lot of America has been reforested and this footprint of agribusiness is shrinking rather than rising.”

Because malnutrition remains a bigger problem than obesity, we should welcome innovations that improve agricultural productivity, which has slowed in recent years. Cowen is a fan of GMOs (though he dislikes the name), writing: “It is nature that is cruel and harsh, not commercial engineers and gene splicers and Monsanto.” About that I’m skeptical; there’s scant evidence, so far (Hawaiian papaya aside), that GMOs have helped feed the world, though the potential is there.

On the question of how we can eat our way to a greener planet, Cowen the economist trumps the free-marketer. Rather than worry about what constitutes a Low Carbon Diet, we should adopt a carbon tax so that the prices of food reflect the full cost of growing, shipping and producing it, including the environmental externalities. He writes:

Relying on prices means taxing fossil fuels and it also means higher taxes on meat, which through methane emissions (e.g., cow farts) contribute to climate change.

…Prices are far more powerful than lists of instructions to green-minded consumers.

Carbon pricing could also help us sort through the debate over localism. When it comes to protecting the environment, buying local isn’t necessarily better and it may be worse if you live in a place where lots of water, energy and land are required to grow food. Cowen writes:

The environment is better off if the residents of Albuquerque import most of their food from far away.

It feels greener to buy from the local farmer than to patronize a large, multinational banana company, but perhaps with a dubious political history at that. But there’s nothing especially virtuous about the local farmer, even if it feels good to affiliate him.

As Matt Ridley once said, we’ve tried eating local before. That was called the Middle Ages.

Like politics, poverty alleviation makes strange bedfellows. CARE is one of the world’s largest humanitarian organizations, formed in the aftermath of World War II to deliver relief to a battered Europe.  (CARE then stood for Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe. Who knew?) Mennonites are a Christian, but neither Catholic nor Protestant, faith organization with a strong tradition of pacifism and service. Together, they stand behind a for-profit company called MicroVest — whose purpose is to help build capital markets serving the global poor, and whose investors include J.P. Morgan Chase and Prudential Insurance.

Strange bedfellows, indeed–and that’s no accident, as Gil Crawford, the CEO of MicroVest, told me when we met recently.

MicroVest, he told me, reflects a belief that we no longer live in a binary world, one that’s divided between amoral profit-maximizing companies and pure-of-heart nonprofits aimed at doing good.

“Our core premise is that doesn’t work,” Crawford said.

Instead, MicroVest raises money from institutional investors, mostly here in the US, then makes loans or equity investments in microfinance institutions around the world that lend money to the poor. This activity is designed to generates positive financial returns for everyone along the line–the US investor, MicroVest, the local lender and the ultimate borrow. It’s using the power of business to fight poverty.

Some people call this impact investing. In a 2010 report, JP Morgan and the Rockefeller Foundation described impact investments as “an emerging asset class” that will create “an investment opportunity of between $400 billion and $1 trillion and profit opportunity of between $183 billion and $667 billion over the next decade in five sectors – housing, water, health, education, and financial services — – serving global populations earning less than $3,000 annually.” They wrote:

In a world where government resources and charitable donations are insufficient to address the world’s social problems, impact investing offers a new alternative for channeling large-scale private capital for social benefit.

Gil Crawford

To learn how MicroVest puts the principles of impact investing into practice, I sat down with Gil Crawford at the company’s office in Bethesda, MD. Gil previously worked for Chase Manhattan, the state department, the Red Cross and the International Finance Corp., doing tours of duty in Guinea and Chad.  I also spoke by phone with W. Bowman “Bo” Cutter, the co-founder of MicroVest. Cutter, who held senior jobs in the Clinton and Carter administrations, is a former managing director at Warburg Pincus, a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute  and chair of the board at CARE.

Cutter told me that Microvest got started because CARE had successfully backed microfinance entities around the world, but didn’t want to finance and vet many more local lenders on its own. “These are essentially little banks that do un-collateralized lending,” Cutter said. “CARE’s a big NGO and a good NGO but it doesn’t have an infinite balance sheet.” What’s more, special expertise is required to make sure that the local microfinance institutions are trustworthy and well-managed.

CARE turned to the Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA) as its original partner to form Microvest. MEDA, as it’s known, has been lending money in poor countries since the 1950s when it was formed by a group of US and Canadian Mennonite businessmen who loaned their own money to thousands of Russian Mennonite refugees in Paraguay who wanted to start businesses. The group went on to become a microfinance pioneer, working in Africa and Russia as well as Latin America. “They’ve been doing what we call impact investing quietly for 55 years,” says Crawford, who became MicroVest’s first CEO.

Today, MicroVest manages about $130 million in assets; that’s small beans by US investing standards, but the money goes a long way once it filters down to poor people in the 26 countries where MicroVest has supported about 80 finance institutions.

Microfinance isn’t a cure-all for poverty but it can help poor people enter the middle class, Crawford says. That, in turn, can build stable communities.

“Having small business owners in a society is, I believe, absolutely essential for there to be a liberal democracy,” Crawford told me. Small business owners tend to get involved in their communities, and stand up against crime and pollution. “A liberal democracy depends on a a vibrant, educated middle class demanding that they no longer be treated as serfs,” he said.

Bo Cutter

MicroVest typically makes loans of $1 million to $1.5 million to local institutions, some quite small. Vision Banco serves farmers and merchants and makes home loans in a remote area of Paraguay.  Arnur Credit has 26 offices and 5,200 clients in rural Kazakhstan. Before making investments, MicroVest’s staff checks out each local lender, relying not just on ratings but site visits. “I think we do the best due diligence in the world,” Cutter says. Interestingly, a nonprofit called the MIX Market analyzes more than 2,000 microfinance institutions; its backers include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Susan and Michael Dell Foundation, the Citi Foundation and the Omidyar Network.

Last year, the Cordes Foundation, a nonprofit run by financier Ron Cordes and his wife Marty, took an 18.75% stake in MicroVest Holdings, MicroVest’s parent company, joining CARE and MEDA as owners. Ron Cordes is a veteran investment pro and co-chairman of Genworth Financial Wealth Management, a $20 billion investment management platform.

How have the investors in MicroVest’s funds done? Not badly, it turns out. MicroVest’s first fund raised $15 million from limited partners in 2004 and 2005, and the internal rate of return to partners as of December 2011 was 5.7%. The value of remaining assets is expected to add another 1 to 2 percent to that return. “For some investors, it was the best investment in their portfolio,” Crawford says.

At the end of our conversation, I learned that I’ve got money being managed by MicroVest, through yet another intermediary. MicroVest has raised money from the Calvert Foundation, which sells community investment notes to individuals. They’re worth a look–you can earn a small, safe return and know that your savings are having an impact.

Imagine a company that says it can produce virtually limitless amounts of cheap gasoline, create arable land for food production and solve the climate crisis–all at once.

That’s the promise of CoolPlanet BioFuels.

Mike Cheiky

Mike Cheiky, the company’s founder and CEO, spoke about CoolPlanet’s “negative emissions technology” at Brainstorm Green, FORTUNE’s conference about business and the environment. Yes, negative emissions.

Does that mean, I asked him, that the more you drive a car powered by CoolPlanet’s biofuels, the more CO2 will be pulled out of the air? Yes, he replied.

“The world doesn’t have too much carbon,” Cheiky explained. The problem’s is that the carbon’s in the wrong place. There’s too much in the atmosphere, causing global warming,  and not enough in the soil. Essentially, Cool Planet has a plan to use plants to remove it from the air and then restore it to the land.

Before you decide that this is too good to be true, you should know that Cheiky, a veteran entrepreneur, has persuaded Google, General Electric, BP, ConocoPhillips, NRG Energy, Exelon and venture capital firms Shea Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners to invest millions of dollars–he won’t say how many millions–in CoolPlanet Biofuels.

“We have been poked and prodded so many ways by so many people,” Cheiky told me. “GE sent 17 people to do their due diligence at a time when we had only 15 employees.”

These investors wrote him checks, he added, because of his track record. “I’ve done six start-ups in my career,” he went on, “and I’ve never had a down round. They’ve all been very successful.”

Cheiky does not lack self-confidence. He and his wife, Charity, started Ohio Scientific, one of the world’s first personal computer companies, in 1975, right after he graduated from college. “I was very successful as an early pioneer in the microcomputer era,” he told me. He built an electric car in the early 1990s but subsequently decided that “we would not be able to deploy electric vehicles fast enough to combat climate change.” More recently, Cheiky founded Zinc Matrix Power, which became ZPower, a company that makes small rechargeable silver-zinc batteries for mobile applications. He also started, Transonic Combustion, which aims to dramatically improve the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. Venrock and Khosla Ventures invested in Transonic, and former GM exec Bob Lutz sits on its board. Cheiky is no longer involved in ZPower or Transonic–a sign that he is probably better at starting companies than managing them. He says he left Transonic when he realized that “just making the engines more efficient wasn’t going to do the job. I had to crack the problem of the fuel.”

The concept behind CoolPlanet is simple. Begin with biomass, in the form of wood chips, corn cobs or fast-growing crops like miscanthus. Process it through a bio-fractionator using a proprietary thermal/chemical process. Make gasoline that’s identical to the fuel pumped into your car. Then take a carbon-rich byproduct, a solid biochar, and bury it to sequester carbon or use it to enhance soil. (Here’s a long interview with Mike Rocke, vp of business development at CoolPlanet BioFuels, explaining the process.  I’ve also pasted an explanation from the company website, below.)

Cheiky says that that CoolPlanet Biofuels will be able to make gasoline for $1 a gallon. Yes, $1 a gallon. The company then will deploy biochar to make more land on which more crops can be grown to make more gasoline, and so forth.

He said:

We have a sustainable model. We can power the world, literally, provide all the liquid fuels need for the world, with land that we can create, basically. You’ve got to take carbon out of the atmosphere and put it back into the ground to have more fertile land to grow more food crops and fuel crops at the same time.

In a decade or two, he told me, as the company gets to massive scale, this new way of making fuels could not only destroy OPEC but offset all of the world’s carbon emissions.

Can this  be true? It’s hard to know, because CoolPlanet is a bit of a black box. The company won’t get into the details of its technology, which is understandable; that’s its competitive advantage. Cheiky also won’t say how much money he has raised, which is unusual; most startups are transparent about their financing. He was also a bit vague when asked about how much water will be needed to grow the feedstock crops. Whether biochar can be used to sequester carbon, and for how long, is yet another unanswered question. (See my blogpost, The carbon negative economy)

Yet Cheiky says the company’s technology is already working, albeit on a small scale, near its headquarters in Camarillo, CA. His plan is to build a commercial plant somewhere in the midwest next year. Initially, the plant will probably run on waste products like corn cobs or wood chips, but it can also consume fast-growing plants like miscanthus, switchgrass and sorghum.

“A giant miscanthus can grow 20 feet tall in a season,” Cheiky says. The company said recently that it generated 4,000 gallons of gasoline per acre of biomass  in pilot testing using giant miscanthus.

CoolPlanet Biofuels could be a game-changer — or it could prove to be another disappointment in the biofuels business, which has so far has produced more hype than economic or environmental benefit. Let’s hope that Cheiky is right, and that his company is onto something big.

Here’s how CoolPlanet explains its process:

This breakthrough utilizes mild process conditions, with process temperatures comparable to a kitchen stovetop and maximum pressures comparable to a portable tire inflator. Input biomass is coarsely ground from in field air-dried bioenergy crops with moisture content in the 10-20% range. Many advanced energy crops retain root structure for several years and are simply cut down once a year for harvesting, dramatically reducing the carbon intensity of agricultural activities versus other bio sources such as algae farming or wood clearing, chipping and drying. The total process time from biomass to fuel is under one hour. Total energy and biomass feedstock cost using today’s commodity pricing is under 60 cents/gallon.

And here’s a video of Mike Cheiky talking about the company at a Google event called Solve for <x>:

Since launching its ambitious Sustainable Living Plan in 2010, Unilever is buying more sustainable palm oil and cage-free eggs, putting less salt and fat in its tomato sauces and spreads, selling water purifiers to poor people in the global south and rolling out climate-friendly freezers for its ice cream.

No big company is doing more to limit its environmental footprint, while improving health and well being and growing its business. Unilever’s commitments are wide and deep. It’s no wonder that the firm and its CEO, Paul Polman, have become darlings not just of corporate-friendly NGOs like WWF, but also a favorite of  hard-charging activists from Greenpeace and the Humane Society of the US.

But even as Unilever today [Tuesday, April 26] reported making good progress towards its sustainability goals, questions remain about its strategy: Will consumers–and investors–notice and reward Unilever for its efforts?

It’s obviously too soon to say whether sustainability will drive growth at Unilever, but the early evidence appears mixed. Eco-efficiency efforts in factories have reduced waste and saved money. Unilever revenues have grown nicely, to $46.5 billion in 2011, up $44.2 B in 2010 and $39.8 B in 2009. But the company’s share price is up by less than 2% in the last year in the US market, slightly trailing the S&P500. (It’s doing better in European markets where currency factors don’t come into play.) Meantime, Unilever’s corporate identity is all but hidden behind consumers brands like Lipton, Skippy, Ragu, Bertolli, Hellmann’s, Suave, Dove, Ben & Jerry’s and Breyers, at least here in the US. That makes it hard to win over those consumers who care about companies that do good.

Today, I attended a Washington event with company execs, partners and NGOs where Unilever’s president for North America, Kees Kruythoff, released a progress report on the company’s sustainability efforts.

“Broadly speaking, we feel like we’ve made good progress,” he said, citing gains around agricultural sourcing, waste reduction and energy efficiency, among other things. Some highlights:

–24% of the company’s agricultural raw materials, including palm oil, soy beans and soy oil, paper and wood, tea, fruits and vegetables, were sustainable sourced last year.

–48 million people in poor countries were reached with Lifebuoy soap’s handwashing program aimed at curbing disease.

–100% of the electricity that Unilever buys in Europe comes from renewable sources.

–Pure-it, a water-purification technology, is expanding from India, where it has reached 35 million people, to Bangladesh, Mexico and Brazil.

This week, Unilever also said that as part of its commitment to source all of its palm oil sustainably, it will build a $100 million palm-oil processing plant in Indonesia, to accelerate its efforts to buy palm oil from sources that can be certified as sustainable. Palm oil is used in many products–soaps, detergents, shampoo, potato chips and ice cream–but expansion of palm oil plantations can destroy forests, threaten biodiversity and increase climate pollution.

Kees Kruythoff

More impressive than any single accomplishment, though, is the scope and seriousness of the plan, as well as the thinking behind it, as I’ve written before. (See my 2011 blogpost, Unilever CEO: Don’t stay on the sidelines) To see for yourself, you can download the progress report here.

During his presentation, Kees Kruythoff said sustainability is being embedded into all of Unilever’s operations–its procurement and supply chain, its manufacturing, its marketing (more slowly) and even in its efforts to influence the way consumers use its products.That’s partly because the world’s big problems create big opportunities for business.

“We live in a world where the population is growing, climate change is accelerating, water is scarce and 1 billion people are hungry. And another 1 billion are overweight,” Kruythoff said.

“Companies,” he said, “can no longer sit on the sidelines waiting for governments to take action on the huge environmental and social problems that face us.”

He said there’s no turning back from the company’s commitment to sustainability: “It drives growth. It drives efficiency. It drives innovation…This is how we run the business.”

But–aside from the obvious eco-efficiency gains–what’s unclear is how the effort will pay off with consumers. It costs more for the company to source sustainable palm oil or cage-free eggs, executives said. But will consumers pay more, for example, for Hellman’s Real Mayonnaise because it is made with cage-free eggs?

Kruythoff told me that outside the US, brands that have been showcased as sustainably have performed well. Lifebuoy soap, concentrated laundry detergents that use less packaging and water and Comfort One Rinse fabric conditioner, which saves water, have all performed well. “These brands have all grown by double digits, faster than the average of the company,” he said.

He also told me that the Unilever brand and its sustainability commitments will become more prominent in US marketing soon. Lipton Tea, for example, will be positioned as a brand that is healthy and good for the environment.

In an interview today with the Guardian, Unilever’s Paul Polman said many in the financial markets still don’t understand that the company has moved beyond old-style corporate social responsibility:

With Unilever, the Sustainable Living Plan is our business model. So we spend an enormous amount of time explaining it to our investors.

Does everyone get it in the City [and Wall Street] ? No, and to expect it will ever happen is wishful thinking but investors will increasingly value our business on the basis of what we are doing.

But Polman also said Unilever’s sustainability strategy is creating waves across the corporate sector: “We are showcasing a different business model that shows how you give to society and the environment rather than just taking from them.”

It will be fascinating to see Unilelver’s bold approach will spread.

It’s no surprise that many runners care about the environment. We depend on the outdoors to enjoy our sport, and most of us love to run in beautiful places.

But, unlike so many other cause-oriented nonprofits or charities–think of the Race for the Cure or Run MS–environmental groups have been slow to take advantage of the opportunity to connect the work they do to the running world.

The Nature Conservancy is trying to change that, which is how I found myself at the start of the GW Parkway Classic 10-mile race, which goes from Mount Vernon to downtown Alexandria, on Earth Day, a drizzly Sunday morning. Here in the capital region, and elsewhere around the world, Nature Conservancy chapters have organized Team Nature (“Healthy You, Healthy Planet’) to encourage people to get outside and run, and to raise money for the conservancy’s work.

When I had the opportunity to join Team Nature for today’s race–thanks to Mark Tercek, the Nature Conservancy’s CEO, and Kate Hougan, the regional marketing director–I was delighted to do so. TNC does important work, including efforts to protect and restore Chesapeake Bay, which I heard about today from Mark Bryer, who also ran the race. Plus I knew Scott Jurek would be there.

I’m too old for heroes, especially sports heroes, but I am a huge admirer of Scott, who I met recently for the first time. In a terrific book about running called Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen (which set off the minimalist running craze, a topic for another day), author Christopher  McDougall writes:

Scott was the top ultrarunner in the country, maybe in the world, arguably of all time.

Scott, who is 38, is a seven-time winner of the  Western States 100-mile endurance run, a trek through the remote and rugged Sierra Nevada mountains, and he set a course record the first time he ran the Badwater Ultramarathon, a grueling 135-mile run through Death Valley where temperatures routinely top 120 degrees.

With Scott Jurek before the start

A vegan,  Scott credits his plant-based diet for his endurance and good health. (He’s also an accomplished cook, as Mark Bittman reported here.)  Eating less meat is, arguably, one of the simplest things anyone can do to help protect the planet. Scott’s got a new book out called Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness, and I’ll have more to say about him after I get a chance to read it.

In June, Scott and Mark Tercek will travel to Kenya with a group of Team Nature runners to join in the Safaricom Marathon and Half Marathon at the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy. According to TNC:

The challenging dirt course follows Lewa’s undulating hills at an average altitude of 5,500 feet. Adding to the challenge and thrill is the runners’ awareness that they share the terrain with elephants, antelopes, cheetahs and lions.

Sounds like fun, no? The event raises money for wildlife conservation and community development.

If you’re a runner, keep an eye out for Team Nature events near you. If not, support a running friend–or, better yet, lace up a pair of (minimalist) shoes and give running a try.

CEOs like Alan Mulally of Ford and Lew Hay of Next Era made headlines at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green last week, but some of the most interesting ideas came from the NGOs, academics, writers and sustainability consultants at the conference.

One of my favorites is L. Hunter Lovins, a Colorado cowgirl (with medals to prove it) who’s been a leader of the sustainability movement for decades. Hunter is the co-author (with Paul Hawken and her ex-husband Amory Lovins) of Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, a groundbreaking and influential book, maybe the most important ever written about “green” business. More recently, she wrote (with Boyd Cohen) an excellent book called Climate Capitalism that has been given a new title, which sounds more like Hunter, for the upcoming paperback: The Way Out: Kickstarting Capitalism to Save Our Economic Ass.

Nick Aster of Triple Pundit interviewed Hunter at Brainstorm Green, and she talked about how the sustainability movement is doing (not bad, but it’s mostly been about incremental movement) and why more radical change is needed companies (to save ecosystems that are required for life, to stop from overheating the planet). “All of the good work that’s being talked about at this conference isn’t enough,” she says. Companies need to rediscover their purpose to thrive, she argues. It’s worth taking 10 minutes to hear what she has to say about Unilever, Puma, the importance of bees and a new group of business advocates and advisers called The Blue Earth Network: