My Big Meme for 2013

Pull out the firecrackers and Mardi Gras beads! It’s time for the Nonprofit Blog Carnival, where we’re writing about our big dreams for 2013.

My big dream is to advance a meme.

Memes are catchy ideas that stick in one’s imagination and influence one’s worldview. SmartMeme’s book Re:Imagining Change contains many examples of nonprofits deliberately disrupting existing social memes and creating new ones.

Here’s an example of an environmental organization’s disruption of a popular meme:

Greenpeace satirized genetically modified corn with this ad.

The meme I want to promote this year is about a broader topic than Greenpeace’s – and it might appeal to a wide range of people.

Here it is:

Our environment is the root of our economy.

Everything we manufacture, produce, sell and trade comes from the planet we inhabit. If we disregard our environment, we will have no economy left to show. This is all we have – our somewhat damaged planet and its many resources.

Since I like automotive analogies, I’ll make one here. Imagine that you’re moving from New York to Arizona with everything you own in the back of your truck. As you drive across the desert, your truck starts having mechanical problems and your cell phone dies. It’s time to get out the wrench set.

Similarly, if we want a healthy planet, it’s time to repair our decisions and set a better course. Like the driver in the middle of the desert, we have no alternative. The repair will have to include economic adaptation and innovation. Businesses have the energy to transform society.

How do I plan to advance this meme in 2013? I plan to tweet and write about the green economy. I want to focus on solutions, reconstruction, and the repair of our existing systems.

How will this influence what I write? There are multiple avenues I can pursue to expand on this meme and make it part of my work.

1. Using constructive angles in journalism and in this blog can motivate readers to take positive actions at home and at their jobs.
2. Breaking news about university research can disseminate creative solutions.
3. Supporting cross-pollination between sectors can build collaboration.
4. Writing about urban sustainability projects can shine a light of possibility on the road to economic and environmental recovery.
5. Building work relationships with larger organizations that support this meme can give me the tools and resources to take this message to larger audiences.

I work for an organization which supports sustainable business decisions and plan to make connections with other groups in New England which are doing the same. These groups include Sustainable Business Network of Massachusetts, New England Clean Energy Council, and E2Tech.

Do you have any other ideas about ways to advance this meme about the environment and the economy?

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The Leverage of Buying Locally

The Sustainable Business Network of Massachusetts’ Sustainability Leadership Summit 2012 on June 7 opened my eyes to the multidimensional value of supporting local businesses. This value is especially high when communities develop  business-to-business relationships.

Before attending the summit, I was already aware of how buying goods from local farms and supporting local tradespeople reduces the environmental impact of freight transportation. But, when I thought of supporting local businesses, I also thought of paying high prices for high-quality products. This perception may discourage some working class and middle class people from buying locally.

At the summit, I learned how much supporting sustainable, locally owned businesses can create a network of community resilience. Rather than being islands in the marketplace, businesses can form connections and support one another, building their local economies and creating jobs.

Andrew Meyer, co-founder of Vermont Soy and founder of Vermont Natural Coatings, described how businesses support each other in the small community of Hardwick, Vermont. Hardwick has attracted national attention because its network of local businesses generated over 100 jobs during the recession. A researcher concluded that the secret to Hardwick’s success was that local businesses supported one another. Business leaders socialized, collaborated, and shared resources. This resource sharing allowed the businesses to become more efficient and expand their operations.

Joe Grafton, Executive Director of Somerville Local First, described the massive growth of local business support networks in New England during the last few years. The number of networks has increased from three to 20. These groups are now scattered throughout New England. Many of them participate in awareness-raising campaigns such as Buy Local Week.

Tech Networks of Boston‘s CEO, Susan Labandibar, has created an infographic showing the advantages of supporting her locally owned business. Tech Networks spends 72 percent of its revenues within Massachusetts, produces 28 local jobs, invests in job skills training and tree planting, and uses a radically equitable pay scale for its employees.

Labandibar describes sustainable business practices as “generative” rather than “extractive.” Many speakers at the summit said that they want to see the role of business move toward a generative model. Sustainable businesses can partner with the communities they serve and share resources with the other businesses that are in their neighborhoods.

Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) has collected research on the benefits of encouraging locally owned business development. The advantages range from local economic stability to job creation and a stronger tax base. For more information, you can visit the websites of BALLE or the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

Building Homes for the Not-So-Nuclear Family

When I first moved to Boston, I became convinced the way we design houses needs to change. A persuasive editorial in the New York Times this week agrees with me. Building cookie-cutter houses for nuclear families has left us with houses that can’t adapt easily to hard economic times, changing lifestyles, and immigration.

In Chicago, one of my friends rented an apartment which was a former coach house and was built above a stable. The apartment was near the main house on the property, but detached from it. When recent graduates need to live with their parents, semi-detached apartments like that would give them autonomy.

Making housing modular – adding entrances and exits, providing small units that are partly detached from common spaces, and not assuming that everyone in the house will be part of a close-knit family – would add flexibility to home construction. If the traditional dream of owning a house is no longer families’ top priority, apartment buildings should be able to accommodate extended families and changes in their life situations.

The New York Times article talks about immigrant families sharing suburban houses. There are at least two more angles to that story:

1. Families of choice are rarely – if ever – a target market for housing construction. But many people who are distant from their families of origin may prefer to share space with their friends. Buildings that combine shared space with private sections or apartments could accommodate this social reality.
2. Since the recession, recent college and high school graduates often live with their parents. Since they are eager for autonomy and may even be in long-term relationships, this lack of privacy could cause family tension. Designing sections of houses with kitchenettes and independent entrances would make their lives easier.

The New York Times article recommends turning old industrial buildings into flexibly designed lofts that can accommodate larger families and changing work situations. A loft-style building would be one potential answer to the dilemma of families squeezing into small spaces in ways that may lead to conflict and stress.

Cohousing is another practical and relatively affordable model. In cohousing developments, shared spaces are surrounded by compact apartments or houses. Cohousing is usually designed for unrelated groups who share social values about common space. The same idea could be adapted for multi-generational families.

Telltale Statistics from The Real State of America Atlas

Since I’ve heard through the rumor mill that search engines and blog readers like bullet points, I’ve decided to toss Google a bone. This post is a series of statistics from The Real State of America Atlas: Mapping the Myths and Truths of the United States. These numbers may surprise you.

Poverty and housing

• In 2000, 12 percent of Native American houses on reservations lacked complete plumbing. This situation is almost nonexistent in the rest of the United States.
• In 2009, 32 percent of Native Americans were living below the federally set poverty line. The matching statistic for whites was 9 percent.
• Subprime mortgage lending has led to many people losing their homes. 61 percent of African-American women who borrowed mortgages in 2005 received subprime ones. The matching statistic for white women was 22 percent.

Journalism and diversity

• In 2008, 88 percent of United States radio reporters and 76 percent of TV journalists were white. (In 2009, 75 percent of United States residents identified as white.)
• 53 percent of foreign-born residents of the United States are from Latin America.
• The national average number of foreign-born workers in the labor force is 16 percent.
• Meanwhile, 64 percent of United States newspapers reduced their coverage of international news between 2007 and 2009. It’s unlikely immigrants made those newsroom decisions.

Environmental emotions and actions

• 61 percent of Americans surveyed said they were sympathetic to the environmental movement in 2010.
• As of November 2010, there were 1,280 Superfund sites in the United States in line for cleanup, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Does sympathy equal action? Not necessarily.
• In 2005, women became the majority of motor vehicle owners in the United States. However, only 26 percent of auto industry employees are women. Women are also more likely than men to believe global warming is a serious concern. Guess who’s designing our cars?

Climate Change Is Not an Apocalypse

An enlightening article in the Wall Street Journal informed me and other readers that belief in climate change is a religion.

This was news to me. Most religious beliefs – including the prophecy that the world will end in 2012 – are not tested by crowds of scientists working overtime.

But there is a grain of truth in the article. Movies such as The Day After Tomorrow do use apocalyptic images to describe climate change. In the real world, erratically changing corporate profits, peanut butter shortages, an end to Kentucky bourbon supplies, and even mass migrations are not apocalypses. Even a resource war over water or energy does not qualify as an apocalypse – although civilians and veterans might wish they still had bourbon after that.

Some of the more extreme peak oil preparation websites show how panic can grip people in the face of change. Faced by large-scale environmental revolt – unpredictable weather, changeable agriculture, species migration, and economic and global instability – environmentalists may be tempted to pick an apocalypse narrative as the best fit.

Choosing to call climate change an apocalypse is a serious tactical mistake because apocalypses are completely outside our control. It would be better to compare climate change to the Great Depression or World War II. We should mobilize, adapt, do public works projects, strengthen the social safety net, and set up systems of mutual aid.

And no, predicting poverty and war is not a religious or apocalyptic statement. Climate change isn’t equivalent to a near-earth supernova. However, we need to work hard to avert unnecessary suffering.

"We Can Do It!" Source: J. Howard Miller (Wikipedia)

How Majora Carter Changes the Image of Cities

Urban visionary Majora Carter described her ability to reimagine cities and neighborhoods at the Boston Museum of Science on Nov. 2. She told the story of her work to “green the ghetto” by connecting young people with environmental jobs, her efforts to transform an abandoned dump and a jail into community-friendly spaces, and her plans to use civic spirit to spruce up the image of local food.

When some people visit a city, they fall in love with a scenic vista. Majora Carter fell in love with the view of brilliant sunlight on the Bronx River behind a garbage dump. After cleaning up the waterfront, she got married in the park she helped create. The park won the Rudy Bruner Award in 2009. Her work has received many awards and has also been the subject of a TED talk.

Hunt's Point Riverside Park before the redesign (Source: Majora Carter Group)

Hunt's Point Riverside Park after the redesign (Source: Sessions College)

Carter described the community where she grew up, the South Bronx, as “a war zone.” She grew up surrounded by poverty, white flight and arson; her father worked as a janitor at a local jail. Landlords torched their own properties instead of renting to low-income people of color.

Carter decided to leave the neighborhood and chose higher education as the best route. But her quest for education led her to move back to the South Bronx to save money during graduate school.

“The hopeful ones” leave low-income neighborhoods when it’s no longer legal for landlords to segregate by race, Carter said. The departure of entrepreneurial youth and lack of investment leave two types of businesses in poor communities – marginal businesses that are unwanted in other neighborhoods and exploitative companies such as payday loan businesses.

When she rediscovered the South Bronx, Carter was impatient to change her neighborhood. She began by cleaning up the riverfront. “Public space is the great democratizer,” Carter said. She is now making plans to convert the jail where her father worked into a business development center and apartment building. She described standing outside the former jail with posters of her ideas to get feedback from people in the community.

“Poor kids who do poorly in school go to jail in this country,” said Carter. She links pollution – specifically, fossil fuel pollution – to the learning disabilities which put children on the path toward a life of crime.

One solution to deepening poverty and frequent incarceration is to put people to work. Green jobs programs can increase workers’ income, integrate them into the community, inspire them to seek higher education, and keep them out of the prison system. Carter built the Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training (BEST), which taught green jobs candidates workplace skills and routed them into urban environmental careers. She said 85 percent of the graduates are still employed and 10 percent have gone to college. She believes this approach should be the norm, not an exception, in low-income communities. She showed a slide of her neighborhood covered with green rooftops; this is her goal.

“No one has to move out of their neighborhood to live in a better one,” said Carter. But to transform cities, neighborhoods need to organize around a vision of a better community. When Carter became involved in the environmental justice movement, she said, “we were good at fighting against stuff, but we weren’t really good at figuring out what we wanted to fight for.”

One answer: fight for your city. Civic pride is the motif of a new national brand of locally grown food which Carter is developing collaboratively. The brand has a simple label: Root for [your city]. Each participating city will have its own Root brand.

Carter’s work encourages civic pride in low-income communities. There are many places like the South Bronx in the United States – neighborhoods that need vision, energy and optimism. “Good uses will drive out the bad ones,” Carter said. “It is going to raise the bar for what is beautiful and what is acceptable and what is needed in our communities.”

How Environmentalists Can Respond to Americans’ Need for Personal Space

While reading about social science and environmental communication, I’ve noticed a gap between how environmentalists in the United States view personal space and how their audiences perceive it. If environmentalists tell audiences not to “say ‘eww’ to thrift stores,” avoid public transit, or live in suburbs, they may encounter resistance—not because their audiences are opposed to sustainable choices, but because they value personal space.

Instead of overlooking personal space issues, environmentalists should address them constructively. Understanding the way United States audiences respond to these questions could transform the way we design eco-friendly housing, products and communities.

If environmentalists fail to respond to these issues, apathy is one likely outcome. Suzanne Shelton, the CEO of an environmental marketing organization, writes  that “gas may hit $10/gallon and folks may still want to live in the suburbs… because it’s more serene/away from the hustle and bustle.”

Although market research participants may see environmental actions as  morally positive , they may or may not integrate these actions into their lives—especially if other issues, like the economy, are on their minds.

In personal conversations, I often see the value of developing answers to these questions. Some of my friends and family drive frequently despite my attempts to persuade them to use public transit.

When Concordia marketing professor Zeynep Arsel interviewed me about thrift shops and clothing exchanges, she acknowledged that another personal space issue—hygiene concerns—can interfere with sustainable behavior.

Although social distance has some undesirable effects on communities, it also gives people the space they may expect or require. If someone is allergic to perfume, is it reasonable to ask her to take public transit daily? Expecting people who have spent their lives surrounded by lawns and picket fences to adapt to life in Manhattan may be somewhat naive.

Fortunately, environmentalists can respond to this problem upfront by altering their approaches to marketing and design. Recognizing personal space as a valid concern is an essential step toward developing solutions.

1. If you are promoting clothing reuse, look into the reasons people may object to buying products secondhand. Washing clothing and testing electronics are two pragmatic responses. Transaction ratings could improve the reliability of sites such as Craigslist.

2. If you are encouraging people to move from single-family homes to apartments, how can you take personal space into account? Soundproofing and visual privacy could make apartment living easier for people who have lived in larger homes.

3. If people are avoiding public transit or bicycle use, cities can improve safety in stations and parking lots, reduce the rate of bicycle accidents, and take other steps to make public spaces more welcoming.

One clear message which emerges from social marketing is that environmentalists can’t expect the people we are trying to reach to share our views. What is a fun thrift shopping outing for me may be an awkward or even unpleasant experience for someone who buys everything new.

Washing secondhand clothes doesn’t dilute environmental messages about reuse and recycling. Giving people privacy in their homes and a sense of safety in public spaces could make it much easier to promote high-density, sustainable urban living.

Image credits: Street photo by mrjamin

Originally published at Scientific American

An Alternative Perspective on Green Jobs

As I hear public conversations about green jobs programs, I find it puzzling that so little attention has been paid to marketing these programs to trainees, businesses and unions.

Regardless of conservative spin, green jobs are a win-win solution to many social issues. If conservatives want to get tough on crime, reduce drug abuse, improve social cohesion in low-income neighborhoods, and practice the bootstrap approach they advocate, supporting green jobs programs is a logical response. The costs of incarceration and poverty are very high.

Let’s take a look at the source of the stigma green jobs programs face. These programs have, from the start, been framed as a socialist solution to capitalist problems. I find it disturbing that these programs – which, ideally, could support businesses, unions, and low-income populations – are being labeled socialist at all.

There is nothing socialist about green jobs programs. These programs support capitalist production and employment. Their structure is, if anything, economically conservative. They direct resources toward educating potential employees and giving them the skills they need to succeed in the workforce.

The only excuse I can see to reduce support for these programs is racial bias. I believe the idea of hiring minority and working-class employees has been used to intimidate many potential allies of green jobs programs.

Businesses stand to gain substantially from green jobs training. In fields where there is a shortage of workers, there is no reason qualified employees shouldn’t step in to fill the gap. This is classic capitalism – supply and demand. There is nothing socialist about this approach.

The only “socialist” part of green jobs training is the fact that some public and private resources are redirected to prepare new employees for work. Currently, college tuitions are skyrocketing in the United States. Expecting lower-to-middle-class young people to fork over a large amount of their future pay to gain job qualifications is not realistic. College dropout rates are related to students’ after-school commitments. I documented the effect of part-time jobs on Latino college students for the PoliMemos project.

The picture that emerges from these facts is far different from the media spin. I see large numbers of people who have the initiative and entrepreneurial potential to succeed and improve their neighborhoods, but who are held back by lack of resources and lack of access to social networks.

Let me make this clear – it is social capital and money that holds green jobs trainees back, not lack of ambition. It surprises me that I haven’t seen any social scientists step up to the plate to challenge this damaging media message.

One can design effective green jobs programs by listening to audiences, including businesses. In the aftermath of the recession, this approach is essential. This is not a luxury. This is a bread-and-butter, capitalist solution to severe social problems.

The only reason I can give for the resistance I see is a lack of awareness that these are ambitious young people who deserve a chance to shine. We may not be able to get them all of the resources their peers can access, but at least we should give them job training.

I saw a rock carving in Gloucester, Massachusetts a while ago which said, “When work stops, values decay.” This is not a radical idea. Although I don’t know about changes in values, I do know unemployment leads to depression and a host of other social ills. What surprises me is that so many people are unable to see that their tax dollars also support prisons and drug treatment programs. These dollars could be sending young people to college.

To the extent that green jobs programs are ineffective, it is because they lack the investment, messaging and coalition building to make their promise a reality. Like Obama’s “hope” slogan, these programs cannot deliver without work.

I’d like to see people put their shoulders to the wheel and make a solid effort to back up the promise of the American dream.

Note: All of the statements here are based on conclusions I reached independently. None of these views reflect the perspectives of any of my employers – past, present or future. I am willing to provide additional information to support any of these statements.

On the Trail of Our Garbage Trucks

Where in the world are our cell phones going? It shouldn’t be as difficult to answer this question as it is to find Carmen Sandiego.

MIT’s Senseable City Lab produced an award-winning Trash Track website which shows that it does take some sleuthing to find the final resting places of our waste. Here’s their video which excavates the fate of garbage from Seattle. While viewing this, remember that this video covers a limited time period; in 20 years, these batteries and cell phones may migrate elsewhere.

Because we live in a closed ecological system, what we have on this planet stays here (unless we send it out to orbit in space). And, one way or another, our garbage will be reused.

Like petroleum, which is made of compressed swamp residue – imagine the Everglades being buried for thousands of years – yesterday’s trash will become tomorrow’s treasure…. or, at least, tomorrow’s fast food packaging.

Our descendants will work with whatever we make – wherever we leave it for them. Think of it as a partly recyclable, sometimes toxic inheritance. This is one reason that I write about DIY.

Even sea animals may live inside bottles or reuse bits of glass. The video below shows that some of them already do.

What’s for Dinner? Sociologists Ask…

At what point can one say one’s addicted to reading a website? I contemplated this last night while paging through Sociological Images, a site which published an article on food deserts six days ago. The article opens with a blotchy map of the United States (shown below). The red and brown spots show locations where over five percent of the population is living without a car and is more than a mile away from the nearest supermarket.

This graphic shows lack of access to supermarkets impacts large numbers of people, especially in southern states. In contrast, Wyoming – a state which I drove through twice without seeing a single supermarket – is in much better shape. Is this because people in Wyoming are more likely to own cars than people in Tennessee are? It’s hard to say without more information.

When we do have access to groceries, what are we buying? An earlier article from the same website shows regional differences in meat, vegetable, fruit, soda and fast food purchases. California is especially interesting; areas of high meat consumption alternate with areas of almost no meat consumption. In Texas, there’s an area near the border where people are buying large amounts of produce.

The graphic also shows people in eastern Massachusetts, where I live, aren’t shopping for any of these products very often. Maybe we are eating pasta, fish or cheese instead. It’s a mystery.