LewisPerkins

“In order to move the needle for humanity we need to do things together”

Sustainability Strategist Lewis Perkins discusses his most important post-recession trend: Partnerships for sustainability.

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Reprinted from Fastcompany.com

BY FC EXPERT BLOGGER LEWIS PERKINS

This blog is written by a member of our expert blogging community and expresses that expert’s views alone.

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In recent months, I find my messages on sustainability to be shifting. That shift is really more of a focus as I have grown in my understanding of a greater issue we face today which makes conservation and environmentalism more relevant to the average American. And this shift is more than a trend or even a mega-trend. It is a movement. A conscious uncovering of a truth which corporations and businesses big and small are beginning to comprehend as a further retooling of all we make and all we do in the world today.

William McDonough and Michael Braungart in their 2002 manifesto Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things strengthened a now popular dialogue on the need for green chemistry. This is an understanding that while technology and innovation on the planet has been remarkable, if not sheer genius, over the past 60 years since the second World War. However, we have forgotten a very important stakeholder in the name of development and the quest to make the human life easier and more convenient. That stakeholder is humanity. Yes, as sustainability champions we speak about the environment and the planet quite often. And ultimately environmentalist believe that we, humans, are a subset of nature, not a the other way around. However, for the sake of this audience, I will move us aside from the conversation of conscious capitalism as a means to save the earth and move to something much I hope is more relevant to the hearts of the readers. Conscious Capitalism as a means to save mankind.

Now, as a blogger for Fast Company Magazine, perhaps I would want to keep those pie in the sky aspirations of global salvation to myself, however, I believe more and more of the American public, let alone our global family, is silently pondering the future of our species, so why not go there. The “Cultural Creatives”, for those of you who read Paul Ray and Sherrie Ruth Anderson’s 2002 novel of the same name, are the millions of growing Americans (and a fellow International body) who believe there is something pivotal about this particular time in our course. Many fear we could look back on these last 60 years and the period in which we began to poison ourselves with toxic chemicals which caused epidemic increases in cancer, ADHD, allergies, autism and obesity (among many other health concerns). Chemical Body Burden studies conducted by the Environmental Working Group, have revealed that we all carry a low level of chemicals in our body from the moment we are created in our mother’s womb to the present. These chemicals have increased over time so that a child born today is exposed to a myriad of toxins – far greater than our grandmothers.

Now the good news. There is a revolution occurring – the return of consumer insight to the health and wellness of our personal care products which is leading our corporations to reformulate products. This move is away from the creation of products with toxic chemicals and toward a more mindful development of our chemistry.

This “mindful” chemistry is not only green for the earth, it is also conscious of it’s short and long term effects on humans and other animals. It took the proverbial canary for us to realize the toxins in the coal mine. Today as our marine life and amphibians are disappearing, we now know that the chemicals we produce and pump into our cosmetic and personal care product industry are ending up in our water supply and continuing a vicious cycle of toxic exposure. Remember, the ocean denies no river. Dead zones in our oceans miles wide can be directly drawn back to the chemicals leaching into our water systems.

With all of this knowledge in mind, I recently had the benefit of meeting with the CEO of Burt’s Bees, John Replogle and the Vice President of Research and Development, Celeste Lutrario. I am very encouraged to know that companies such at Burt’s Bees not only understand the responsibility they have to produce safe products, but they also embrace their role as a leader in this movement. The great news is it is not just Burt’s Bees, but hundreds of companies which are awakening in the development of better products to meet the health needs of consumers.

In my conversation with Celeste Lutrario, I learned a bit more about some of the chemicals we have all been hearing about in mainstream media today. Celeste spent 20 years in the traditional cosmetic industry where she formulated synthetic skin care and cosmetic products. When she joined Burt’s Bees five years ago, she was anxious to study the benefits of natural products on the skin. She was aware that there were ingredients in use in the US that were banned in other countries due to concern with toxicity. It was a natural move to Burt’s Bees in her role in R&D as she develops products with this mindful chemistry I mentioned before.

Three chemicals Lutrario gave me some insight into are phthalates, parabens and oxybenzone. Phthalates for example, allow products in formulations to become more flexible, squeezable, harden more readily and have a longer shelf life. In and of themselves, these qualities are beneficial to the product use and for the companies’ profitability. However, they are widely overused and the damages which are being caused by such products may be having an effect on our health since some phthalates are suspected carcinogens in humans. They have been banned in other parts of the world.

A second chemical is paraben, a preservative used against mold and bacteria which is inexpensive to use. However, there has been much controversy over their use since studies suggest they can have health effects such as endocrine disruption. Other preservatives such as DMDM Hydantoin, can produce formaldehyde when they break down in a product. High levels of formaldehyde can be dangerous in humans, and studies have shown it to be a suspected carcinogen. The EWG.org Skin Deep database is an excellent source for information about which products producing formaldehyde. Burt’s Bees products are paraben and formaldehyde free. All preservatives they use are approved by the Natural Products Association.

Finally, I learned from Celeste Lutrario about oxybenzone, the active ingredient in products boasting SPF levels. The CDC conducted a study and found that 97% of the participants tested positive for oxybenzone in their urine. We are also finding high levels of this chemical in our water table and it is causing issues with fish reproduction. So, that means the sunscreens we are using are causing a high level of oxybenzone in our earth, water and fish. The problem? In preliminary scientific studies Oxybenzone is showing endocrine disruption characteristics as well as photo-allergenicity. Meaning, if exposed to light, Oxybenzone may be producing free-radicals. So the very ingredient we use to protect us from the harmful rays of the sun, could actually be contributing to free radical damage and possibly skin cancer.

There is so much more I could write on with this topic and I am not here to scare you but rather to help educate. If each of us could go to the Environmental Working Group website and look at the skin deep database, we could learn more about which chemicals we are exposing to our bodies and family on a daily basis. I suggest you take one product out of your bathroom a week, look at the ingredients on the label and educate yourself on the safety of the chemicals being used. It could save your life or that of your children. www.ewg.org and http://www.cosmeticsdatabase.com. And their report on safe sunscreens this season is a MUST for all you beach and pool goers.

And other thing you can be doing it to support your congress men and women regarding the Safe Chemical Act (which reforms the current Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) introduced the Safe Chemicals Act 2010, which is intended to enhance the federal regulation of chemicals. Is was previously called the Kids Safe Chemical Act, but we really are addressing all humans, and other species, not just our kids.

And perhaps more than a few of you are reading this entry from work where it might encourage you to carry some of this knowledge into your job and the decisions we make every day in the workplace which can influence and effect the products and services we put out into the world.

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Thank you all who attended. We had an amazing turnout and Chuck and Laura truly inspired the audience with their vision and work.  You can check out Chuck’s work at his website ChuckLeavell.com and Laura’s work on LauraSeydel.com

Lewis Perkins, Chuck Leavell, Rose Lane Leavell, Laura Turner Seydel

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The 14th Annual Landmark Lunch
Friday, May 14, 2010
11:00 a.m. – Social
11:30 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. – Luncheon & Program
Greystone at Piedmont Park
Hat Suggested

Join us for lakefront hors d’oevres and champagne by the pool, followed by lunch at Greystone. Enjoy a conversation with Chuck Leavell & Laura Turner Seydel, facilitated by Lewis Perkins. Catch up with old friends, meet new ones and learn about the efforts to Reduce, Reuse and Renew in Piedmont Park. This year we are honoring Coxe Curry & Associates and Kaiser Permanente for their important contributions to Piedmont Park and other green initiatives in Atlanta.

Last year more than 600 friends, neighbors, and business leaders attended the luncheon, with proceeds funding the continuing restoration and enhancement of Piedmont Park.

Parking is available in the SAGE Parking Facility, which may be accessed from Worchester Drive.

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Reprinted from Fast Company Magazine
BY FC EXPERT BLOGGER LEWIS PERKINS

Tue Apr 27, 2010
This blog is written by a member of our expert blogging community and expresses that expert’s views alone.

I wanted to write this week about how important I believe education is in order to transition into a new way of operations in our corporations, communities and homes. Last week, a friend sent me an interview with President Bill Clinton from Digg.com on Earth Day. The first question was “How can we best engage our nation’s youth on the issues surrounding climate change?”

President Clinton replied that empowering our youth to green their schools, create organic schoolyards, develop sustainability curriculum was the most important thing we should all being doing today.

It was no coincidence that during that same week I had spend time to Peg Watson, of the Green Schools Alliance, Rachel Gutter, from the USGBC LEED for Schools and Laura Seydel and her team from the Captain Planet Foundation (developing organic school yards).

I also believe it was no coincidence that I received an email from the Dean of my Business School alma mater, Goizueta Business School, telling us that we had dropped in the US News and World Report Rankings. My question back to him was “where is sustainability in the curriculum?”

As a part of a book project I am working on, I had the benefit to meeting with Hunter Lovins to discuss the future of our country and planet. Hunter, founder of Natural Capitalism Solutions, has consulted with many major organization such as Walmart and the U.S. Department of Energy, but it is during this time that she is spending much of her focus as a founding professor at San Francisco’s Presidio Graduate School. Hunter knows that what Bill Clinton has said is true and also believes that sustainability is the most important discipline we can be teaching our future corporate CEO’s today.

I wanted to use this week’s blog to feature the work of one very diligent social entrepreneur, Tom Feegel and his organization called Green My Parents. I asked Tom to tell me about the program and his overall mission. Tom writes:

GreenMyParents is a revolutionary, nationwide program to help young people teach their peers and parents how to work together to help the economy, earn money at home, and save the planet through simple, everyday actions.

Launched Earth Day 2010, this movement enables youth to bring their insightful perspective on how to reduce their parents’ use of resources and save money at home to make a huge difference in saving the planet and securing their future. Based on the book, Green My Parents, available on
Amazon.com http://amzn.to/GreenMyParents

Our youth environmental leaders will be equipped with the tools and resources to train and educate an additional group of 100 peers each about
eco-friendly actions they can take in their own homes with their families.

By continuing the cycle of recruiting another 100 kids, GMP aims to bring together one million students in an effort to save the planet. Operating with the family pocketbook in mind, kids will find environmental allies in their parents as they work together to bolster family savings, help the economy, and save the planet by conserving home resources through following
and completing “eco assignments.” From reducing water and energy usage to cleaning with non-toxic products, families are estimated to save at least $100, which brings the collective savings of American families to an estimated $100 million over the course of a year.

Environmental Charter High School (ECHS), an award-winning college-prep PUBLIC charter school in Los Angeles, has learned
this week that we are recognized by The White House and the Department of Education for academic excellence and has been named a finalist in President Obama’s Race to the Top High School Commencement Challenge.

To vote for ECHS http://bit.ly/Vote4ECHS

ECHS is one of six public schools selected to compete for a presidential commencement address from Obama, the only school
in CA and the only environmental school. The Commencement Challenge invited the nation’s public high schools to submit applications.

“At ECHS the question is not whether you will go to college. It is which college will you go to?” said student Jordan
Howard, is the editor of GreenMyParents, and a senior at ECHS. Jordan is a fantastic representative for the student body of ECHS, and her web site is

http://jordaninspires.com/.

Thank you Tom!

I believe this work is very relevant to the readers of FastCompany magazine. It is from THIS work and THIS training that we are going to find the next wave of innovative leaders and the very people who will help us retool our corporations to safely and responsibly operate in the world. When I met with Rachel Gutter last year to discuss her work with the USGBC, she told me that the kids today are sustainability literate. They know no other way. They are engaged in solutions and operate with a collaborative world-view approach. From what I have learned from Tom, this is not only true, but the vital skills needed as we transform business.

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On Friday, March 26, Laura Seydel and I will be speaking at the Georgia PRSA Chapter on the role of corporations in advancing environmental missions via communication & messaging. Below is a list of favorite books Laura and I will discuss at the end of the talk. There are SO MANY books to include – but here are a top list for those who want to improve their Spring reading list and educate themselves. These are in no particular order.

1. Organic Manifesto – Maria Rodale, CEO and Chairman of Rodale Inc., sheds new light on the state of 21st-century farming.

2. The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food Is Making Us Sick – And What We Can Do About It – Robyn O’Brien – the story of how one brave woman chose to take on the system and a call to action that shows how each of us can do our part and keep our own families safe.

3. Healthy Child Healthy World: Creating a Cleaner, Greener, Safer Home ~ Christopher Gavigan – the essential guide for parents! All parents want a happy and healthy child in a safe home, but where do they start? It starts with the small steps to creating a healthier, less toxic, and more environmentally sound home – and this is the definitive book to get you there.

4. Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America ~ Thomas L. Friedman - Friedman takes a fresh and provocative look at two of the biggest challenges we face today: America’s surprising loss of focus and national purpose since 9/11; and the global environmental crisis, which is affecting everything from food to fuel to forests.

5. Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization ~ Lester R. Brown - explores both the nature of this transition to a new energy economy and how it will affect our daily lives.

6. Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the Worlds Problems ~ Michael Strong, John Mackey – In BE THE SOLUTION, Michael Strong (with an assist from John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market) makes a case for common-sense, do-it-yourself, entrepreneurial capitalism in a way you’ve never seen before. His discussion of free enterprise as a way of doing good in the world is as far removed from today’s headlines, featuring greed-is-good corporate capitalism, as the America of today is from the ideals laid down by our founding fathers.

7. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto ~ Michael Pollan -Pollan provides another shocking yet essential treatise on the industrialized Western diet and its detrimental effects on our bodies and culture. Here he lays siege to the food industry and scientists’ attempts to reduce food and the cultural practices of eating into bite-size concepts known as nutrients, and contemplates the follies of doing so.

8. Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered (Hardcover)
~ Woody Tasch – Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money presents the path for bringing money back down to earth—philosophically, strategically and pragmatically, and with an entrepreneurial spirit that is informed by decades of work by the thousands of CEOs, investors, grant-makers, food producers and consumers who are seeding the restorative economy.

9. Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit – Daniel Quinn – Winner of the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship, a literary competition intended to foster works of fiction that present positive solutions to global problems. Ishmael, a gorilla rescued from a traveling show who has learned to reason and communicate, uses these skills to educate himself in human history and culture. Through a series of philosophical conversations with the unnamed narrator, a disillusioned Sixties idealist, Ishmael lays out a theory of what has gone wrong with human civilization and how to correct it, a theory based on the tenet that humanity belongs to the planet rather than vice versa.

10. Our friends, The Frogs – Laura Elizabeth Seydel – In this colorful book, Laura Elizabeth Seydel introduces her readers to an array of interesting frogs in her quest to educate and save her slimy friends from extinction. Full of beautiful photography, expert knowledge, and optimism for the future of frogs, this is the perfect book for kids wanting to make a positive impact on the planet! All proceeds will be donated to Amphibian Ark (www.amphibianark.org), a global conservation community that is working endlessly to save our frog population.

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PODCAST ON GREEN TECH: PODCAST on Green Tech with Paula Collins

For more information on Our Green Value or to contact Paula Collins, click here.

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PODCAST ON CONSCIOUS CAPITALISM: Sustainability Is One Tenet of Conscious Capitalism

For more information on Our Green Value or to contact Paula Collins, click here.

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PODCAST ON SOCIAL MEDIA: How Your Sustainability Story Can Be Advanced with Social Media

For more information on Our Green Value and to contact Paula Collins click here.

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Many have asked me to share where I like to get my information. While I subscribe to many RSS feeds and podcasts, much of my information comes from trusted friends, such as my co-author, Laura Seydel in our upcoming Green Heroes Book and Multi-media project (Stay tuned for more information on this exciting project).

But when I am not tapping into the brilliance of my fellow eco-warriors, I enjoy checking for the latest “green” news and info on the following sites:

Treehugger.com – Partial to a modern aesthetic, it shares sustainable design, green news and solutions.

HuffPostGreen – Green News and Opinion on The Huffington Post.

MNN.com – MNN is the leading resource for daily environmental news, green commentary and simple steps to save money, stay healthy, and support the environment.

ecofabulous.com – The authority on stylish, sustainable living – your inside source for all things both eco and fabulous!

EWG.org – EWG is a nonprofit environmental research organization based in Washington, DC and a leading content provider for public interest groups and concerned with public health and the environment.

gengreenlife.com – Find everything you need to live a sustainable life: Local green business directory offering products and services; Events and classes where like-minded people.

grist.org – Environmental news and green living tips from Grist, the most recognizable voice in environmental journalism.

Healthy Child Healthy World – Igniting a movement that inspires parents to protect young children from harmful chemicals.

Check out the sites and let me know what you find. It is sure to be good information whatever it is.

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