Reposted from LivingEconomies.org, by Michael Shuman Even though these are tough times for tens of millions of Americans, there’s reason for hope.  That’s the message of my new book from Chelsea Green, Local Dollars, Local Sense:  How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Achieve Real Prosperity, which [...]

Imagine a man who lived some time ago.*  From an early age, he was drawn to religion.  He went to the formal service every week, sometimes even taking notes.  He believed everything his church taught him, never felt a need to challenge the teachings, and tried to live as he was told he should.  He took his church’s teachings literally: God rewarded or punished us for how we had lived on earth, by assigning us to an eternal heaven or hell after we died.  He internalized these teachings until he didn’t even have to think about them; they became part of his nature.

This man took tremendous comfort in knowing that he would spend eternity with God, and kept that thought in mind when making hard ethical or moral decisions.  He made and kept friends easily: perhaps because he forgave easily, as he had been taught at church, and looked for the good in everyone he met.  The man married, was a good provider, a good and faithful husband, and helped his wife in raising two happy and healthy children, as well as a third child who was troubled and troubling almost from birth.  He gave generously of his time for what he saw as healthy civic causes, and was in all ways a good citizen who seemed to bless his world as he passed through it.  He lived to see several of his grandchildren come of age, grieved deeply over one killed in the war-du-jour. Several years later, he passed away peacefully in his sleep.  Everyone in the town came to his memorial service, and many of them spoke of the ways in which his kindness had touched them.  Some of their stories could move anyone to tears of gratitude for this man’s life.

Two weeks after he died, it was suddenly proven beyond all doubt that almost everything the church had taught him was wrong: there was no God, nor any afterlife with rewards or punishments.  So: we can say the man’s beliefs were false.  But can we say his life was false?  If not, what does truth really have to do with living a fulfilling life?  How would we judge whether someone’s beliefs are good?  If metaphorical trees are known by their fruits, then religious beliefs must be judged by our behaviors, especially toward the weaker and those who don’t share our beliefs.

It’s no coincidence that this has been the message of history’s best prophets and sages, nor the fact that it has always been – and will continue to be – the broad path: the path that Jesus and most other sages and prophets have preached against for millennia.

* Adapted and expanded from a story by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

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It’s hard to think about brand leadership without thinking about Apple, now neck-and-neck with ExxonMobil as the world’s biggest company by market cap.

Last week, Apple was top of mind for many of us, with two major pieces of reporting: the UK release of Adam Lashinsky’s book, Inside Apple, which describes in part-admiring, part-unmerciful detail Apple’s tough organizational culture, and the New York Times’s excellent investigation into conditions in Apple’s supplier factories in China.

This last piece spurred CEO Tim Cook to email his 63,000 employees as follows: “Some people are questioning Apple’s values today… Any suggestion that we don’t care is patently false and offensive to us.”

The Meaning of Brand Leadership

I don’t doubt the sincerity and hard work of Apple’s supplier responsibility team – see, for example, Apple’s increasing disclosure and auditing efforts – or of Cook’s words.

But reading the two pieces side by side, it’s heartbreakingly clear to this Apple lover that two of the things that help Apple to make “insanely great products” – its culture of secrecy (designed to maximize pre-release buzz and to keep its teams razor-focused), and its unsparing operational excellence (that is: ability to make heavy demands on suppliers) – have heavy human costs.

Without deeper changes in how business is done, even the most stringent auditing and inspections will have limited impact. As one expert we spoke with said about the systemic challenge of labor conditions in global supply chains, “Eighty percent of problems are due to brand demands.”

For such changes, we’ll need patience, courage and muscle. And that’s what Apple has: while these challenges are certainly not unique to Apple, Apple may be unique in its global influence on manufacturers and its hold on consumers.

I offer three thoughts for Apple (written on a well-loved MacBook Pro) – and, by extension, for all brands – on brand leadership into the 21st century.

Thought #1: Delight Your Customers – and Your Stakeholders

“Apple obsesses over user experience, not revenue maximization,” says one former Apple executive quoted in Inside Apple. Apple does this even when the short-term costs are higher, leading to tremendous longer-term financial rewards.

What if Apple applied this long-term thinking to the “stakeholder experience”? There’s growing anecdotal evidence connecting better working conditions with quality and stronger supplier relationships. And as competition for skilled Chinese labor increases, will Chinese workers remain willing to be woken at midnight with a biscuit and a cup of tea to start assembling iPhones?

Thought #2: Engage in Brand Activation Activism

Should a brand have a “point of view” on sustainability – in other words, should it nudge consumers towards better behaviors? Or should it take a quieter stance, providing choice but leaving it up to the consumer?

We need more brand activism.

Brands can’t and shouldn’t take the place of civil society. But we’re in a world where brands are what get noticed.

“The act of making people think about these issues is a revolutionary act, because no one is talking about it,” says Mike Daisey, playwright and performer of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. That “revolutionary act” was a crucial contribution of pioneering labels such as Fairtrade and Energy Star. But as such movements struggle to get noticed amidst the noise, it’s time for brands to take up the cause as well.

Greenpeace used Apple’s social capital to great effect with its 2006 “Green My Apple” campaign. Imagine what Apple could do with its consumer love – and buyer clout – to spur system-wide action on factory labor conditions.

Thought #3: Think Drive – Not Demand

Starting at last June’s Sustainable Brands conference, SustainAbility conducted research on the value and challenges that businesses experience in using sustainability certification and labeling. We proposed that businesses start by asking how to define, deliver, demonstrate and create demand for better sustainability outcomes, rather than rushing to decide “which certification or label?”

This last D – demand – is the nut we all want to crack. How do we get customers to reward companies for the sustainability investments they’ve made? Is green marketing dead, or are we just getting started?

Much as I like the alliteration of the 4Ds, I now think “demand” is too narrow. In economics, demand equals purchasing behavior. But many sustainable practices are a public good, and we’ll be disappointed if we expect their communication to translate invariably or directly into B2C sales. Instead, brands may reap demand-side rewards in the form of brand loyalty, brand equity, or trust.

At our report launch, Rob Cameron, the then-chief executive of Fairtrade International, proposed we add a fifth D to the 4Ds: Drive. This got an immediate “Yes!” from the businesses and NGOs in the room. For it captures beautifully the notion that progress will come from the power of unreasonable people (and companies, and governments) with the courage and stamina to play a long-term game with long-term rewards.

That’s brand leadership. It’s not just about Apple – but today, there’s no one better positioned than Apple to deliver.

This article originally appeared on Sustainable Brands website.

Today, SustainAbility, Inc. released the findings from its consultation of select stakeholders regarding the draft roadmap developed by six footwear and apparel brands to eliminate the discharge of hazardous chemicals from their supply chains by 2020.

The brands – adidas Group, C&A, H&M, Li Ning, NIKE, Inc. and PUMA, together published Joint Roadmap: Toward Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals on November 18, 2011. With the publication, the brands announced a period of stakeholder consultation to gather feedback that they believe will result in a stronger roadmap and help the industry realize this ambitious goal. The brands asked SustainAbility to conduct this consultation on their behalf.

Between November 2011 and January 2012, SustainAbility captured perspectives through phone interviews and email feedback from over 30 individuals representing a variety of stakeholder groups including academia, chemical companies, environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs), other apparel brands and regulatory agencies. SustainAbility conducted this consultation anonymously, but has identified the individuals and organizations with whom we consulted in the Appendix.

The findings are not an exhaustive list of every point of feedback raised, nor do they represent consensus. Rather, the document reflects SustainAbility’s perspective on the topics that most frequently and prominently came up in phone conversations and email feedback.

Download and read the findings of the consultation process below. If you would like to share feedback on the roadmap or the consultation findings, please email ztdi@sustainability.com.

There is a growing realization in organized religion that something is awry in our industrial food delivery system. Churches are actively urging their members to become more involved directly in local and family gardening and farming. This is great news for those of us who have been fighting this battle for a long time. Organized religion can be a very powerful force in getting society’s feet back on the ground (literally) and we welcome all the help we can get.

But I am not sure how this is going to turn out. Hardly a week goes by now that someone doesn’t send me a book about church involvement in food production or I am not invited by a member of the clergy or a professor at a Christian college to give a talk, which pleases me deeply. But it also causes me a problem. I hardly qualify as a Christian anymore. I don’t know what I am. Sometimes I lean toward Buddhism but then I read a little more in that direction and don’t much agree with that either. I sort of envy Christians and Muslims because they believe in something so fantastically wonderful as an eternal life of utter bliss. I’ve tried to believe. Just can’t. Sorry.  So anyway when I am asked to give a talk about farming at a private religious college or, horrors, in a church, I get nervous. If the inviters knew that I was a godless contrarian, would they really want me to speak? America is a place where “godless” suggests “sinner” or certainly not saint. So I retreat into hypocrisy, giving my talk while cagily hedging my words so that I do not sound too heretical or hypocritical.

Last week when a professor of religion at a private college wanted me to give a talk, I decided it was time to be honest. I told him he might not like what I would say especially about how religious institutions so often glorify rich industrial farmers who practice destructive farming but who give generously to the churches. I told him I was sort of a godless heathen. Did that bother him?

Find out the answer on Gene's blog, The Contrary Farmer!

Gene Logsdon is the author of, most recently,

Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind

Didi Emmons, chef and author of Wild Flavors: One Chef’s Transformative Year Cooking from Eva’s Farm shows you how to prepare two healthy and scrumptious dishes in these new videos from How2Heroes! How2Heroes is a how-to online video destination that celebrates people’s passion for food – the flavors, the presentation, the secrets to success, [...]

I did not think about it before sitting down this evening (January 16, 2012), but to write about leadership on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is to feel one’s own limitations.

I am Canadian, and as such I am obliged to reflexively protest how different I am from the American cousins among whom I have chosen to live (and marry). But with King there is no protest. He is a sterling example of the inspiration the USA has periodically offered the world regarding the hope and change possible when citizens unite, and long has been one of my own inspirations. I took joy watching my six-year-old daughter study his legacy this month at school. She’s been enraptured, and I immersed in the power of his message all over again.

Warren Buffett

I flew today from San Francisco to Washington, DC – where I hope to visit this week the new MLK Memorial on the National Mall. I read en route the Time cover story Warren Buffett Is on a Radical Track. Buffett attributes most of the reason he’s become activist and engaged over time to his late wife, Susan Thompson Buffett. The article singles out the occasion she took him to hear Reverend King speak at Grinnell College, where King’s words ‘It may be true that the law can’t change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless’ galvanized Buffett to get more involved in issues of equity and justice.

My title plays with this notion of changing hearts, with the way in which Buffett came to believe things need to be different and has since set out to do what he can to make it so. He is a business leader who has had a change of heart so profound that his persona now seems to be about giving (like 99% of his billions already pledged to charity kind of giving) and demanding recognition of a different notion of fairness for capitalism. His recent and now near infamous prescription? Rich and powerful people and organizations should pay more (literally: and, yes, even in taxes) for the tremendous opportunities society allows them to enjoy.

Resist (Risk), Accept (Risk), Act

The transition from accepting sustainability issues to addressing them is a tremendously difficult thing for business leaders to embrace. When issues (BIG issues: think ecosystem limits which mean commodity inputs for profitable products will spike in price and then dry up) demand changing or abandoning familiar, comfortable and successful business models, resistance is to be expected.

Even so, the change from resisting data likely to demand change to admitting its fundamental truth generally proves simpler than the subsequent shift to action. For even once new information and worldviews are embraced, leaders’ ability to evolve their organizations is limited by context e.g. available skillsets, historic mindsets, consumer preference, investor expectations and the regulatory environment.

2012

This year, like its peers, is just another on the calendar. But not for sustainable development. Ecological systems are stressed in such that we almost can’t afford the luxury of worrying about the classic sustainability focus on intergenerational equity. Rather, individuals and brands that want to make a difference have to think in terms of how to deliver sustainability in this generation, else there might be no future equity to apportion. Sustainability demands leadership capable of accepting the enormity of the challenge that sustainable development entails and willing to explore and support the evolution of business models and markets to address it.

New Pioneers

To plumb lessons of sustainability leadership past and catalyze greater scale and speed on this agenda in the near future, SustainAbility and GlobeScan set out in 2011 to interview a remarkable set of nearly two dozen sustainable development pioneers including: Lester Brown, Madame Gro Harlem Brundtland, Bill Ford, Israel Klabin, Sir Mark Moody-Stuart and Rajendra Pachauri. We will couple insights from these conversations with global public opinion research and use both as a platform to engage a wider public discussion on sustainability leadership in 2012 and beyond.

As much as we are excited about the intelligence we will gain from taking stock in this way, the key will be how we use it to ensure that new pioneers emerge, whether because of their own change of heart, or motivated by their ability to change the hearts of others. As individuals and organizations, our collective challenge for the year and years immediately ahead must be to increase our capacity to identify, nurture and then follow these trailblazers.

As with the pioneers who dared to transit west across the American frontier, this will mean embracing risk – but we are increasingly aware of great and growing risks in stasis, so must believe it will be possible to develop in leaders in business, civil society and government the will to create a sustainable economy in the near term. Inverting King, it’s an effort to change and then steel hearts to action where laws both natural and human have failed to do so.

This article originally appeared on Sustainablebrands.com.

Business Green highlights some key elements of the latest GlobeScan/SustainAbility survey.

The results of the survey will feed into a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report on the business case for the Green Economy, due to be published later this year.

Read the entire article at BusinessGreen.com.

Sustainability labels should focus more on actual company performance

When we talk about the “eco-label model” we’re really talking about a combination of three things.

First, standards – a set of requirements, usually taking a consensus-based approach. Second, certifications – providing assurance of conformity against this standard. And, third, the eco-labels themselves – on-pack marks that indicate conformance with the standard.

This model came into being over 30 years ago, and, surprisingly, has changed very little in that time.

Pioneers

And until now, it could be argued, little change was needed. Certification, labelling and the standards-setting organisations behind them have been pioneers in building a more sustainable economy.

For businesses, they provide a credible reference point for collective action, access to expertise and networks, and can spur demand for certified or labelled goods.

But the mass proliferation of eco-labels in the marketplace – 400 and counting – and the move to mainstream for many (thus removing their value as a differentiator) is significantly reducing their value.

Couple with that the fact that the model itself – based on consensus and inclusiveness – is posing challenges for businesses seeking to take leadership positions in the marketplace.

Embedding sustainability

The time has come to rethink the eco-label model. Certification and labelling are time and money intensive; we can’t – we shouldn’t – certify and label everything. The aim behind certifications and the aspiration beyond labels is the creation of organisations and market systems that are just and sustainable in their entirety.

Rather than certifications and labels driving endless incremental improvement, it would be preferable if the future was built on increasingly rigorous, pre-competitive standards for sustainability performance, above which brands compete to make sustainability intrinsic to their mission and products.

In this future new business models will emerge whose DNA will embed factors previously requiring certification, and civil society will find more effective and efficient ways of holding business accountable.

A new direction?

There is evidence that such change is underway. Different types of certification are emerging.

Greenpeace has verified Nestlé’s commitment to no deforestation. The Better Cotton Initiative standard sets a base level sustainability standard for more sustainable cotton, but is not consumer facing.

And as a marketing tool, some companies have opted to use labels as a “back of pack” mechanism to complement the brand. For example, Method uses Cradle to Cradle certification as a design tool, which matches the brand’s design focus.

Outcomes not standards

In the future there is opportunity for businesses innovate to deliver outcomes rather than standards, complement certification with strong supplier-buyer relationships, and use the power of their brands to delight and mobilise consumers into adopting more sustainable behaviour.

In turn, standards organisations can stretch and innovate alongside business, certification will be complemented by new mechanisms such as partnerships and national regulation, and labels will fade into a quieter, background role, acting as trust marks for those who seek them, and leaving brands – and consumers themselves – to take the lead.

This article originally appeared on EthicalCorporation website.

Okay guys, here is a flow chart with some of the plethora of steps you might encounter when building a licensed cheesemaking facility. Some the steps are highlighted in pink- these you may only encounter as options or mandatory steps in California. The green steps should all be decisions made early in the process, even if the permitting step occurs later. Let me know if you have any input on this chart, I am tweaking it for my EcoFarms Presentation in Pacific Grove February 3rd.

Gianaclis Caldwell is the author of The Farmstead Creamery Advisor.

“Michael Shuman answers a lot of questions I’ve always wondered about, and in the process paints a practical vision of exactly where we need to be headed in this country. Consider this book an excellent investment!”—Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth and The End of Nature We’re very excited to announce that Local Dollars, Local [...]

Author Mat Stein joins FTMWeekly Radio to discuss his latest book, When Disaster Strikes: A Comprehensive Guide for Emergency Planning and Crisis Survival. Mat shares disaster survival skills and his insights into why emergency planning should be a vital component of your family’s overall gameplan. The show specifically discusses the disaster potential [...]

Physicians who prescribe opioid drugs to patients with neuropathy (nerve pain) ought to consider recommending cannabis as an alternative therapy, according to a peer-reviewed paper published online this week in the Harm Reduction Journal.

“There is sufficient evidence of safety and efficacy for the use of (cannabis/cannabinoids) in the treatment of nerve pain relative to opioids,” the commentary states. “In states where medicinal cannabis is legal, physicians who treat neuropathic pain with opioids should evaluate their patients for a trial of cannabis and prescribe it when appropriate prior to using opioids. … Prescribing cannabis in place of opioids for neuropathic pain may reduce the morbidity and mortality rates associated with prescription pain medications and may be an effective harm reduction strategy.”

The author notes that between the years 1999 and 2006, “approximately 65,000 people died from opioid analgesic overdose.” By contrast, he writes “[N]o one has ever died from an overdose of cannabis.”

In clinical trials, inhaled cannabis has been consistently shown to reduce neuropathic pain of diverse causes in subjects unresponsive to standard pain therapies.

In November, clinical investigators at the University of California, San Francisco reported that vaporized cannabis augments the analgesic effects of opiates in subjects prescribed morphine or oxycodone. Authors of the study surmised that cannabis-specific interventions “may allow for opioid treatment at lower doses with fewer [patient] side effects.”

Neuropathy affects between five percent and 10 percent of the US population. The condition is often unresponsive to conventional analgesic medications such as opiates and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.

Full text of the paper, “Prescribing cannabis for harm reduction” is available online here.

Paul Armentano is co-author of the book
Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink

Many people want to grow fruit on a small scale but lack the insight to be successful orchardists. Growing tree fruits and berries is something virtually anyone with space and passionate desire can do—given wise guidance and a personal commitment to observe the teachings of the trees. A holistic grower knows that producing fruit is not about manipulating nature but more importantly, fostering nature. Orcharding then becomes a fascinating adventure sure to provide your family with all sorts of mouth-watering fruit.

Using the words “Science” and “Salvation” in the same breath needs some preparation so people in both camps don’t hyperventilate.  “Science” means “knowledge.”  It can’t guarantee that the knowledge is good, or that it will still be considered true in a year.  “Salvation” can mean “to save,” or to make healthy and whole (with its connection to the word “salve”).  Using the word in scientific circles or communities of religious liberals, “salvation” usually means to help people come to their full humanity here and now rather than elsewhere and later.  Some say that, defined this way, we should slough off the religious jargon, and just speak in plain ordinary language: we’re hoping to help ourselves and our society become more integrated and whole around universally admired behaviors like fair play, truthtelling and compassion.  For now, being able to use both jargon and plain talk will open the dialogue to a very wide spectrum of people and beliefs.

The kind of wholeness “Science” can offer is intellectual integrity, in which we don’t have to check our brains at the door.  It’s a kind of salvation/wholeness through understanding – overwhelmingly intellectual.  When we capitalize Science and say things like, “Science says…” or “Science tells us …” we are anthropomorphizing the word, making it a stand-in for a capitalized “God.” In the real world, we don’t have “Science.”  We have sciences and scientists, who often disagree about how to connect what they see as facts.

Some scientists believe they do have a salvation story that can offer us greater intellectual integrity here and now, and some people find that to be adequate – though I’d side with Christopher Hitchens in saying that science is “necessary but not sufficient.”  Some scientists want to offer us the intellectual integrity of thinking about our beliefs with the same rigor scientists use in their “scientific method.” This puts the salvation/wholeness they offer in the same key as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s saying, “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”  It is a powerful kind of wholeness that is impossible when what we know and what we believe contradict each other.

More than being simply defenders of facts, modern cosmologists, for example, are offering persuasive arguments that we live in Deep Time and infinite space that were inconceivable when the world’s religious scriptures were written — and that make the worldview of most traditional religions incoherent today.  Deep Time means putting the evolution of humans, and the four billion year story of life on earth against the background of around 13.8 billion years since the universe began in, they assume, a Big Bang.  Infinite space means just that: for all practical purposes, the distances between the far reaches of the universe are infinite.  The light from all the stars we see has been traveling for thousands, millions or billions of years before reaching us on Earth. We couldn’t reach the stars whose light has come the furthest to reach us – stars that may not even exist any more – in a hundred million lifetimes, traveling at the speed of light.  It is impossible even to imagine a distance of seven or eight billion light years.  Cosmology has been popular since Carl Sagan’s television program Cosmos, thirty years ago.
But the most revolutionary science today isn’t cosmology, but ethology: the study of comparative animal behavior.  Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz was the founder of ethology, and argued that comparative animal behavior offered a much stronger proof of evolution than comparing bits of fossilized skeletons.  Today, ethologists are producing more detailed observations of animal behavior every year – often filmed, many on YouTube — and it’s clear that we share many of those behaviors with dozens, hundreds or thousands of other species.

Primatologist Frans De Waal, the most articulate and prolific of the current ethologists, has compared the way we do politics with the way chimpanzees do – and found a near-perfect match.  His 1982 book Chimpanzee Politics is still in print, and in 1994 Newt Gingrich assigned it to all who were just coming into Congress.  The message seemed clear: if you’re going to play politics at this level, you need to understand how it works.  Ethologists are claiming political, ethical and moral behaviors for their field of study that once belonged to religion and philosophy. Just a few of De Waal’s book titles show some of the scope of behaviors we share with hundreds or thousands of other species:

• Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes
• Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals
• Peacemaking among Primates
• Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved
• Our Inner Ape: Why We Are Who We Are
• The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society.

There is even, understandably, some territorial behavior emerging, as when De Waal wonders how religions could think they have unique insights into the human condition because “They’re just too new.”  When religion loses any special claim to behaviors like empathy, compassion, altruism, trusting and fair play, it has lost much of the foundation that has already been eroded by the passage of time.  But ethologists, new neuroscientists and scientists in new fields like evolutionary psychology are sketching a view of human nature as part of the broader behaviors found in many other kinds of animals.  There is a revolution brewing here.
And whether it’s likely or not, students preparing for the ministry need to begin learning enough about cosmology, ethology, neurosciences and evolutionary psychology to have some idea about the world in which we live – quite different from and infinitely larger than – the world people thought they lived in when the world’s best-known religious teachings originated.  19th Century author Ludwig Feuerbach wrote in 1841 that theology needed to grow into its legitimate heir: anthropology, the study of humans.  Ethology takes the search one step beyond Feuerbach, showing that human behavior, motive, ethics and morality can be best understood by seeing our behaviors on a continuum with many other species: as Darwin would later say.

So, yes: our sciences are weaving an intellectual understanding about human nature, human behavior, including empathy and compassion that have already become at least as important in aspiring preachers’ tool kits as the Bible and religious writings.

Scientists – as well as religious believers – are right to say that the education of ministers is willfully ignorant without them.  Some very basic religious assumptions, teachings and preachings must change for, as William Russell Lowell had already observed 165 years ago, “New occasions teach new duties.  Time makes ancient good uncouth” — not merely wrong, but insulting and uncouth. The kind of salvation/wholeness a scientific perspective can offer is an intellectual salvation by understanding.

All this said, however, there is also an important list of things our sciences can’t offer to us: ways in which mere intellectual correctness falls naively, painfully short of cradling our enduring yearnings.

The list would include music, dance, rituals, a community of mostly like-minded people trying to take their lives more seriously and needing a community where that vulnerable quest can be done with some safety.  Other serious shortcomings of mere knowledge include our love of rituals to magnify the significant moments of our lives: baptisms, wedding ceremonies, memorial services, inspiring sermons calling us to become More, to envision ourselves serving something both true and compassionate — though the role of truth may be seriously over-rated here.
And what about potluck dinners, community parties and social functions – or a place, a building where we can gather within a mood of reverent seriousness – and, hopefully, compassion?

Dishonest or willfully uninformed religion is, if not a sin, at least a moral outrage and an insult to people’s intelligence and seriousness.  But without the warmth of genuine human interaction with each other and our wider world, mere knowledge can become “corpse-cold” – as Ralph Waldo Emerson once described 19th century Unitarians.

With regular church attendance at only 18% and continuing to decline, we’re not only “Bowling Alone” as Robert Putnam put it.  We’re increasingly being alone and growing alone.  E-mails and Tweets can’t take the place of hugs, kisses, or just touching each other.  Since we are, as ethologists are showing us, a profoundly social species, we can’t grow to our full humanity, can’t become whole, can’t find real this-worldly salvation – either through sterile truth or out-of-date religious stories and hollow rituals.

So we live in a transitional time, when neither outdated religious orthodoxy nor empirically constrained sciences can help the majority of our people grow into their full — and most fulfilling — humanity.

Hence the anguish.

Davidson Loehr is author of the book
America, Fascism, and God: Sermons from a Heretical Preacher

In their February/March 2012 issue, Herb Companion magazine is printing an excerpt from Peg Schafer’s new book, The Chinese Medicinal Herb Farm. It’s available to read on their website now. Here’s what some growers and herbalists have to say about this exciting new book: “Peg Schafer is the best artisanal grower I know. For this book, [...]

Nairobi/ Paris, 26 January 2012: Financial short-termism represents a critical barrier to businesses’ transition to sustainability, according to a new poll.

The latest wave of The Sustainability Survey – GlobeScan and SustainAbility’s regular survey of attitudes across businesses, NGOs, academia and government – reveals that a very large majority (88%) of the 642 experts polled see pressure for short-term financial results as a barrier to businesses becoming more sustainable.

The survey, conducted in December 2011, asked experts to say whether they considered a range of factors as being barriers to increased sustainability by businesses. Although most of those polled identified multiple barriers, financial short-termism was seen as the most significant by some distance. The next most significant barriers were inappropriate regulations and low awareness of the business imperative, both cited by 65% of respondents. Low consumer demand was identified by 57% of respondents, followed by the lack of effective management tools (45%) and the lack of international standards (50%).

While financial short-termism was consistently identified as a barrier by large majorities of all groups, the survey revealed that experts’ views differed on the importance of other factors according to their sector.

Experts working in academia (56%) were much more likely to identify the lack of international standards as a barrier than those working in corporations (43%). Experts within academia were also more likely to blame low awareness of the business imperative for sustainability among business leaders (71%) than their corporate counterparts were (58%).

In contrast, experts within corporations were more likely to identify lack of consumer demand for green business practices, products and services as a barrier to sustainable transformation (66%) than other groups of experts, particularly those within NGOs (46%).

These latest survey findings will be featured in a forthcoming UNEP report on the business case for the Green Economy, to be published later this year.

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Executive Director, said: “The Green Economy analysis by UNEP and partners clearly outlines pathways towards growing the global economy, generating employment and combating poverty while keeping humanity’s footprint within ecological boundaries.

“This survey underlines that governments must play their part, national and internationally, in setting the standards and backing the smart policies needed to promote sustainability over extraction and degradation of the world’s natural resource base. It is happening, but not fast enough. Rio+20 in June offers an opportunity for governments to accelerate and to scale-up a better future for seven billion people,” he added.

GlobeScan President Chris Coulter commented: “Clearly, more work needs to be done to help business find ways to overcome financial short-termism as a barrier to corporate sustainability. It may be timely for a multi-stakeholder initiative to explore new thinking to tackle this major obstacle to facilitate the transition to sustainability.”

Jeff Erikson, Senior Vice-President at SustainAbility commented: “The experts in our poll are telling us that of the many factors that make a transition to sustainability difficult, impatience from shareholders is the most important. This implies that understanding and communicating the business case is critical. We are excited to be working with UNEP once again on their upcoming report, which will provide further support to the business community to make the case.”

Read the full press release at UNEP.org.

The Art of Fermentation is the most comprehensive guide to do-it-yourself home fermentation ever published. Sandor Katz presents the concepts and processes behind fermentation in ways that are simple enough to guide a reader through their first experience making sauerkraut or yogurt, and in-depth enough to provide greater understanding and insight for experienced practitioners.