Must-read NYT Mag profile of Jeremy Grantham, the investor who believes that "humanity’s vexed relationship with the planet is the great economic story of our time." He observes that "most economists see global trade as a win-win, but resource limits turns it into a win-lose, zero-sum contest" – and he wants to be one of the winners.
Writes the author, Carlo Rotella:
Sitting in a Panera in Boston’s financial district in early July with Jeremy Grantham, I suddenly found myself considering how I might safeguard my children’s and notional grandchildren’s future by somehow engineering the U.S. annexation of Morocco. Grantham, the founder and chief strategist of the asset-management firm GMO, was reading aloud from a rough draft of his next quarterly letter to investors, in which he ranks some long-term crises of resource limitation along a scale from “merely serious” to “dangerous.”
Energy “will give us serious and sustained problems” over the next 50 years as we make the transition from hydrocarbons — oil, coal, gas — to solar, wind, nuclear and other sources, but we’ll muddle through to a solution to Peak Oil and related challenges. Peak Everything Else will prove more intractable for humanity. Metals, for instance, “are entropy at work . . . from wonderful metal ores to scattered waste,” and scarcity and higher prices “will slowly increase forever,” but if we scrimp and recycle, we can make do for another century before tight constraint kicks in.
Agriculture is more worrisome. Local water shortages will cause “persistent irritation” — wars, famines. Of the three essential macro nutrient fertilizers, nitrogen is relatively plentiful and recoverable, but we’re running out of potassium and phosphorus, finite mined resources that are “necessary for all life.” Canada has large reserves of potash (the source of potassium), which is good news for Americans, but 50 to 75 percent of the known reserves of phosphate (the source of phosphorus) are located in Morocco and the western Sahara. Assuming a 2 percent annual increase in phosphorus consumption, Grantham believes the rest of the world’s reserves won’t last more than 50 years, so he expects “gamesmanship” from the phosphate-rich.
And he rates soil erosion as the biggest threat of all. The world’s population could reach 10 billion within half a century — perhaps twice as many human beings as the planet’s overtaxed resources can sustainably support, perhaps six times too many.
His re-framing of the fight against climate change: “Global warming is bad news. Finite resources is investment advice.”
Museum bookshops (and museum shops in general) are the best - well-curated, in beautiful venues, and next to airy cafes. Oh yes, and the museum itself. I'd imagine these shops are also under less pressure to pay their own way, which has to be a good thing these days.
One of my favorites anywhere is the Blackwell's at London's Wellcome Collection, "a free destination for the incurably curious" where "you can consider what it means to be human" and explore "ideas about the connections between medicine, life and art." Fittingly, they've got a wonderfully edited selection of books covering science, medicine, psychology, language, sustainability, art, design, creativity and more, not to mention a great selection of science-oriented children's books and games. And an Oyster cardholder printed in red blood cells. And ballpoint pens shaped like syringes.
The Wellcome Collection's current special exhibit, Dirt, is a fascinating look into human hygiene and sanitation, from the days where cleanliness was almost literally considered next to godliness, to London's 1854 cholera epidemic (and of course John Snow's masterpiece of information design tracing the outbreaks to a single pump in Soho), to a brief history of soap advertising, to Joseph Lister's work in Glasgow, to today's "untouchables" human waste collectors working in India (still) and finally a New York City landfill that's becoming a park.
According to Rose George, author of The Big Necessity, a social history of the way we treat sh*t and one of the books in the Dirt exhibition's study area, 2.6 billion people do not have access to a toilet of any kind. When, as Ms George says, 80% of the world's illnesses are caused by fecal matter, it's easy to see why sanitation is the biggest unaddressed public health issue. Here are some excerpts from The Big Necessity in Slate.
(On a different but equally global topic, she is now working on a book about shipping, I'm guessing building on her experiences of living on a Maersk container ship for five weeks. I want to meet her!)
Here are the slides from a talk I gave at Brand Next, a seminar organized by Robert Jones of brand strategy agency Wolff Olins. It was a real privilege to be among the group presenting there - a set of compelling thinkers and speakers from Faber & Faber, Millward Brown, Zopa and Seren. (Gracias John E for the referral!)
I came away amazed by how much the leading edge of brand thinking overlaps with sustainability thinking, and believing fervently that we have a role in pulling out that overlap and helping to grow it. All the things that brands do best - creating trust, desire and movement(s), via intense insight into consumer motivations and behaviors - just need to be harnessed towards the outcomes we'd like to see. The other speakers were game to answer my questions on how we could use their way of thinking to further our agenda: e.g. one could easily extrapolate thinking about ‘the brand experience’ to include all stakeholders, not just the customers.
In the last fifty years, the value of internationally traded goods has increased from less than a fifth to more than half of world GDP. A couple of years ago, a shipping container followed by the BBC went twice round the world in a year, stopping at Scotland, Shanghai, Brazil and Los Angeles along the way. Whereas a century ago we might have known where, how and who produced the things we eat, wear and use, in so many instances today all we know is what we're told. And how can we be sure that what we're told can be trusted?
Read the rest of this piece in the Guardian.
The Mother Nature Network features a slideshow of ten of the world’s smallest homes. From energy expenditure to building materials, living in a smaller house is one of the best ways to reduce your ecological footprint. Giving up the luxury of space and living more minimally isn't always easy, but it does come with a few perks: fewer possessions, bigger skies and open spaces! Plus, a smaller house makes it easier to cozy up to your loved ones. Here's a reminder that bigger isn't always better: 10 of the tiniest homes in the world. Reduces your housing expenses too – giving you time, flexibility and further footprint reduction possibilities.
[originally published on SustainAbility.com] “The opportunity to make our planet smarter is both real and measurable on one hand, and truly inspiring on the other.” – Sam Palmisano, CEO, IBM, quoted by Lee Green, VP Innovation, IBM at Sustainable Brands, Monterey, California, June 2010 For us, this captures the Sustainable Brands 2010 conference in a nutshell: the sustainability efforts most likely to succeed are those that are both robust and data-driven on the one hand, and joyful, surprising, delightful and principles-driven on the other. Sustainable Life Media and its flagship conference Sustainable Brands, founded by KoAnn Skrzyniarz in 2007, brings together the brand, design and sustainability communities to catalyze sustainable innovation. SustainAbility has been a part of the Sustainable Brands community since its early days: executive director Mark Lee serves on the advisory board and has given plenary presentations at the event the last three years, and team members Chris Guenther and Preetum Shenoy have both participated in the conference. This year, Jennifer Biringer facilitated a panel organized by Patrin Watanatada on “Restoring ‘Places and Faces’ to the Global Value Chain”. Below are the seven key themes we heard at this year’s conference. The first three are perennials – they are why so many of us believe strongly in the connection between sustainability and brands (see, for example, our Five Principles for Sustainable Brands) – while the last four are more recent insights, reflecting lessons learned by brands along the way.
- What we value as a society is changing – and the brands that respond will be the brands that win.
- Sustainability is (really) good for brands.
- Brands are (really) good for sustainability.
- Sustainable brands connect supply and demand in innovative ways.
- Sustainable brands meet consumers where they are.
- Sustainable brands “create the crowd.”
- Sustainable brands rely on lots of data – but not too much.
Read on for more on each of these themes…
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Two years to the week after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the new Basel III global financial regulations are out ( what’s that?) and the British Bankers’ Association complains on behalf of consumers everywhere: “This means the end of 'cheap money'!”
Well. That is a good thing, is it not?
Remember what’s at the heart of our global environmental and social challenges:
- Our key resources are too cheap – be they food, oil, money.
- Our systems are too good at separating reward from risk – be it here and now, over time, through geographies.
Are there insights to be gleaned for other sectors from how financial regulators conceptualize and try to manage these issues? The financial system represents our economy at its most abstract and quantified, so it's fascinating to think about, anyhow.
Basel III raises the Tier 1 capital requirement, which means that banks will need to hold more common equity to buffer against unexpected losses, which essentially comes down to this: more skin in the game. And more protection against financial crises, and, apparently, good things for the economy (at least as measured through GDP - see explanation from finance blogger Felix “Shedding No Tiers” Salmon).
…the danger of New York City cycling is due to mindset: cyclists behave and are treated like pedestrians, but are moving many times faster and in the road – also, loving the term “bike salmon” for a cyclist who goes the wrong way up the street and generally ignores traffic laws with abandon (Felix Salmon)
…sustainable consumption = shared consumption (Joel Makower, Collaborative Consumption, McKinsey Quarterly)
…“#Wherewereyou: WaPo puts the humble hashtag to work” – on journalism as curating, and the semantics of Twitter’s hashtag (Nieman Journalism Lab)
…(short) URLs are the new cookies: “whoever owns the shortener sees the engagement between the audience and the content, no matter where it happens” (O’Reilly Radar)
…is Google design overly data-driven? what about principles? (Co.Design)
…Tom Friedman on why the United States “is #1(1)” – its problems are incremental, American leaders don’t ask Americans to sacrifice, Americans don’t sacrifice on their own, and as for global leadership, “After you” (NYT)
…human beings were designed to pulse – sound tips from the Energy Project on how to get more done, be happier, and be better to your loved ones (openforum.com)
Photo: With colleague Jennifer Biringer, test-driving the Th!nk EV at Better Place's Palo Alto headquarters back in June.
Many of us at SustainAbility have a big sustaina-crush on Better Place, the start-up working to build the infrastructure for electric vehicles—charging stations and battery packs—in cities around the world, and its founder Shai Agassi. (Our biggest Better Place fan, Gary Kendall, has contributed to their blog here and here, and the urgent need to transition our systems away from oil is a recurring theme for our team—see most recently Jeff Erikson's blog on the BP Deepwater Horizon spill.) But what's a crush without a little analysis? Here are seven reasons why we think Better Place is one of the best examples of a 21st century enterprise out there.
1. Better Place started with an urgent social need, is moving rapidly to bring a solution to market, and is doing so by prototyping around the world
First, Agassi started with a Big Hairy Audacious Goal for his country: no less than independence from oil. Says Better Place Australia CEO Evan Thornley in an interview on CNET’s CarTech blog: "[When Shai Agassi was coming up with his initial white paper] he went through the stages of 'how can we run a country without being dependent on oil?'... We’re a mission-driven organization; we want to get the world off oil. There’s nothing good about it: fighting over it, paying for it, running out of it, or polluting the atmosphere with it." And Better Place is not wasting any time, as Cisco strategy EVP Inder Sidhu writes in a nice excerpt from his strategy book Doing Both, which argues that pursuing two seemingly disparate paths at once is often mutually reinforcing:
Agassi hopes to move quickly—before the next wave of first-time car buyers choose gas- or diesel- powered vehicles... Over the next five years, Chinese and Indian consumers are projected to buy as many as 70 million vehicles—more than all of the cars that exist in the UK and Germany today. Most technology startups set out to build advanced products for sophisticated customers in established countries... Afterwards, they typically water down their innovations for sale to customers in emerging countries. Agassi has dispensed with this model and is instead focused on building simple solutions that can be deployed anywhere around the world simultaneously.
2. Better Place is thinking service, not product. Why are service-based business models often a better bet from a sustainability perspective? Service-based models incentivize manufacturers to make assets that last and to take end-of-life responsibility (think Xerox copiers). They allow many more people to get use out of the same amount of physical assets (think laundromats, or car sharing services like Zipcar, and see Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers’s Collaborative Consumption website and book for more examples). And they start with the human need and ask, “How can we best meet this?” Agassi understands that people fundamentally seek the service of convenient mobility. This insight means that his business model is designed around meeting that need for mobility as effectively as possible, rather than making the current model (liquid-fuelled cars) somewhat better. For transportation, says Agassi in an interview, what matters is miles:
Oil companies sell miles…at the end of the day [not gasoline]. [Better Place is like] an oil company that has a guaranteed supply of oil at a cost of zero dollars a barrel… I don’t sell the energy—the battery makers do that. I sell the convenience. (Interview by Martin LaMonica, CNET)
And access to a service is often a much better model for the customer than owning the asset itself, say Better Place's Evan Thornley and Guy Pross in another interview:
Separating the battery from the car is a key to our business. It not only takes that battery [technology] risk from you, but also saves you from purchasing the battery up front, which is a huge part of the cost of hybrid and electric vehicles. (Interview by Derek Fung, CNET)
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