Clean Water = Sustainable Living = Life

While elements of our life that use energy sources, such as gasoline or electricity, could be moderated in an effort to better use the natural resources, drinking water does not have many (or any) alternatives. And with only 1% of all water today being drinkable, it represents a massive opportunity to solve a near-term problem.

This CNN video highlights the "Slingshot" water purifier system from Dean Kamen's DEKA Research. The technology to clean large amounts of water in developing countries is available today, it requires some clever & creative minds to figure out how to make it cost effective to build. So if you're a creative mind, it might be worth contacting DEKA.




If you're interested in the concept of clean water, but don't have a great idea for making it economically feasible, then maybe Charity Water is the opportunity for you. This would only require a monetary donation.

So unlike some other sustainable efforts that might be stalled by technology or politics, clean water allows opportunities for people to get involved and make an impact today. If you'd like to get involved, thristy people all around the world would appreciate your help.

Enormity

As usual, Seth Godin sums up my feelings about our Environmental Sustainability challenges in much more succinct wording than I can. But this inspired an idea that I think might be able to make an impact. I can't go into the details yet, as I need to work them out with my project-partner, but I think we might be onto something that could help move the needle and get a lot of everyday people involved. It's going to involve a very cool existing project, and a bit of Web 2.0 viral distribution.

Stay tuned...

The Big Environmental Problem - The First Step to Change

[Cross-posted from my WFU MBA blog]

One of the major themes of our last semester will be Environmental Sustainability, as it will come into play in our Global Strategy, Leading Change and Management Practicum courses.

As prep work, we're reading:

• Natural Capitalism - Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
• The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability
• Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility

I haven't read all of these books yet, but a couple common themes come through in each of them.

• The world's current consumption rate of natural resources will deplete the planet by the end of the 21st century (give or take a few years).
• Much of the technology needed to solve today's problems exist today. It isn't necessarily ready to be deployed in a "cost effective" manner, but it exists today.
• The interconnectedness of many of the problems is extremely complex (ie. Pollution comes from A, affects B/C/D, this depletes E/F/G, causing problems with X/Y/Z, etc.)

Unlike many people that want to bash things like Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, turning it into a political debate, or a science debate, or a morality debate, I don't believe it's really a debate about any of those things. This is a marketing debate and it's being lost by everyone that is passionate about the concept.

Let's break this down a little bit and see if we can make a few suggestions:

• If the scientists are right and the world (at the current or forecasted pace) will run out of natural resources by the end of the 21st century, almost every person that can influence it (financially, politically, etc.) will be dead before that happens.
• As we've seen with things like the Y2K computer bug, or the underfunded U.S. Social Security program, intelligent people don't take action upon well known issues until they are right in front of them and teetering on the edge of chaos.
• As I've mentioned before, almost all of the discussions about sustainability are phrased in such massive scope that the average person can't grasp what that means. Is the rise of the ocean by 6" alot? Is a 1* increase in water near the Arctic Circle alot? 200 years of coal reserves available in the US seems like a long time, isn't it?

So essentially they are asking people to take action on things where they will never see the final act (or maybe even the intermission), they can't economically afford them today, and they can't actually grasp the scope of them other than in simple things like the price of gas in the summer.

So if you're selling this at the G8 summit, then it's a political or economic or moral discussion. But for the average person, it's hard for me to look at this as anything more than a massive marketing problem. And like many marketing problems, we need to convince people to make a change, especially the first change.

Let's try a simpler concept -

What if instead of the massive amount of money used for some of the 2008/2009 Gov't bailouts, that money had been focused on something that almost everyone in the US could grasp (since the US is the largest net-polluter in the world)? What if they had allowed GM and Chrysler to fail (real Chapter 11, not gov't bailout version), and completely focused the "Cash-for-Clunkers" program on trade-ins for vehicles that didn't use gasoline? You have a clunker, you MUST trade it in for a non-gasoline burning vehicle within 18 months. And within 5-10 years, all vehicles in the US must run on non-gasoline products. And while the initial price tags on the vehicles will be slightly higher, that can be blurred through subsidies, alternative taxes (sales tax, tire tax, whatever..). We have no idea where all the taxes dollars go today. And it's the law.

It would be the equivalent to the JFK "Man on the Moon" edict. It would focus all the industries surrounding automobiles to focus on green technologies because there is already a consumer demand for transportation, and it's the law. And it would be something that every person could grasp because cars intersect our lives on a daily basis. It's simple, it has a understandable timeline and it has massive scope of impact.

Would it have political and economic ramifications? Absolutely!! Both positive and negative, but at least they would be tangible by everyday people and governments.

• Less dependence on foreign oil - lower trade deficits; lower military expenditures to protect sea channels which carry oil; less fear of terrorist bombings
• Less pollution - lower healthcare spends on asthma, etc.
• Job creation - new distribution channels for the alternative energy mechanisms (refueling stations, repair services, etc.)

And it might be partially impractical (at this point), but that's OK. All change is considered impractical until you can convince someone to do it.

This isn't a tree-hugger vs. non tree-hugger issue, this is a citizens of Planet Earth issue. It's a massive set of issues and it's a long-term set of issues. But people need to do a better job of starting the discussion.

I'd just ask that the passionate people around this industry consider this approach for a second. See if it makes any sense. Maybe you aren't in the automotive sector, but how could this type of thinking be applied to your sector or sustainability. What is the first step you wish you could get people to take, and then how might you force that to happen? Maybe it wouldn't all happen through a new law, but maybe it happens through some other event. What would be your first step to change?

"Eat Your Vegetables" might prevent us from fixing Environmental Issues

Show me a young child that loves to eat vegetables and I'll show you a kid that had his Wii taken away one too many times. That familiar parental request of "eat your vegetables" is burned into our brains. And while our parents were trying to encourage us to eat healthy, I fear that it may become a major barrier to America getting on the right track towards sustainability.

Here's where I'm going with this. As highlighted in this recent locavore article in Forbes, and this three tips for a greener you article, moving more people to a vegetarian lifestyle would led to far less usage of land and water to raise cattle.

But if you're in your late 20s, 30s or 40s, do you really want to give up meat? Do you want to give up backyard BBQs or Tailgating? My initial response is "No!" Not because I don't want to do my part, but because I can't fathom a diet of entirely vegetables. If we dig into this a little more, that type of logic doesn't really make sense. There are plenty of ways to make meat-tasting products out of soy beans. And the variety of vegetables (or pasta) is at least as varied as there are choices for meat. So why the harsh initial reaction? I think it goes back to the "stigma" that parents place on vegetables. They aren't considered fun foods. They aren't considered foods that you choose to eat.

So while this is an excellent concept, and one that thousands or millions of people could endorse, it requires a cultural change here in the US. They already have that diet and lifestyle in many parts of the world (including China and India), but not here in the United States.

Lucky for me I'm going to be forced into that diet due to terrible genetics and a cholestoral levels that would make most bowlers jealous (if it were their average score). So now we just need to add this to the list of things to make simple for people to understand.

The list keeps getting longer...

# of Planets needed to sustain Western Culture

As I mentioned before, one of my key goals for this blog is to find a way to communicate the scope of the challenge in a very simple way. In a way that average people can rally around, or feel compelled to engage with.

This article shows an interesting way of communicating how much impact the United States has on the global sustainability challenge.

As the article highlights, "It is simply impossible for everyone on the planet to live as Westerners do today. We would indeed need three planets to do so. We still only have one."

This is a troubling statement, not just based on existing Western lifestyles (which many of us enjoy), but based on the growth of Asian societies that are frequently trying to emulate Western culture.

One Bottle of Water at a Time

Unless you're at an airport or fancy restaurant, a bottle of water typically costs around $1 (give or take). Spending $1 or saving $1 doesn't typically make people think too much about the consequences, but we all love to save $1 when it's easy. That's the whole premise behind why I started this blog, to help people understand that there are easy ways to save $1 (or many iterations of $1) by doing simple things that also happen to help move the cause of sustainability forward.

So my ultimate metric to determine if I make any progress on this idea will be the level of simplicity with which I'm able to explain that concept. Will it make sense to an adult? To a teenage? To my youngest child, in the same way that they understood how to use my iPhone within the first 5 minutes of seeing it?

My good friend Gregg Lewis, award-winning environmental architect, recently sent me this article and hoped it might be help explain to readers why this is such a difficult topic to understand. My response to him was this:

"Interesting article. This is exactly why I tend to believe that the really big thinking should be reserved for the 0.001% of people capable of thinking that big. These would be the people that were able to actually do the math to put a man on the moon in 1969. For the other 99.999% of us, we need a way to be inspired to just do something that we didn't know we could be inspired to do the day before. That's where the simplification of concept comes in.

What you're doing is brilliant, and noteworthy and noble, and I admire the hell out of it. It'll save 100M gallons of water. I've come to the conclusion that my role in this is to figure out a way to inspire someone to save 1 bottle of water, or maybe 1 gallon. I think I might have the capacity to convince a regular person to do that. And if I can figure out a way to get that inspiration to spread just a little, then maybe I've done something worthwhile."

So my goal is to help make this simple, and actually show how ordinary people can save $1 (or many $1's) by doing something that will be good for them and lots of other people.

An Introduction - Trying to Simplify the Problem

Like most people, I've heard the discussions from both sides about issues like Global Warming, "Green" Energy and Sustainability. Intelligent people from all sides (scientists, business leaders, politicians, etc.) make great points about why their view on these issues is right or the other side is wrong. But the more and more I listen to these people, the more that several thoughts continue to run through my mind:

• Most people (individuals) can't comprehend problems of this magnitude, so how do you expect them to act?
• Most people don't think in those timelines (2020, 2050), so how do you expect them to want to get engaged?
• Most conversations seem to focus on "save the environment" vs. "it's costs too much money", as if it's always a binary decision. Many of these discussions could be win-win if positioned properly.
• Nobody seems to have found the right community rallying point. such as Kennedy's "Man on the Moon" speech, or Lance Armstrong's LiveStrong yellow wristbands. "Green" needs that simple yet powerful rallying point.

So the purpose of this blog is to explore ways that allow people to want to not only get involved in creating more sustainable solution, but also to show them how it can benefit them and their families.