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Dr Tom Crompton: Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Values in Environmental Communication

admin — Mon, 28 May 2012 05:48:29 +0000

Dr Tom Crompton

By Bhavani Prakash

Dr. Tom Crompton is a Change Strategist at World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) UK, and if you’re intrigued by his job description, suffice it to say he has been involved in some cutting-edge research on going to the heart of what should be the approach of communication campaigns – of environmental organisations and those of the non-profit sector in general.

Dr. Crompton stresses the importance of engaging people’s intrinsic or non-materialistic values, versus extrinsic or materialistic ones, to achieve lasting and positive behaviour change. He is one the people behind the project called Common Cause: The Case for Working with Cultural Values. Much of his work can be found on the thought-provoking website called Values and Frames.org

EWTT: How did your interest in human psychology and environmentalism evolve?

Dr. Tom Crompton: I have worked at WWF-UK for ten years .The first five years, I worked on international trade and investment policy – for example, World Trade Organisation (WTO) law. I was convinced then and am still convinced now that the international trade regime is crucially important from the sustainability perspective to ensure that we are producing and trading in more sustainable products with lower carbon footprints. Several senior negotiators were themselves deeply convinced for the need for more fundamental change to the trade regime on a sustainability basis but they’d say, “look, our hands are tied, we don’t enjoy the political space, we don’t experience public political pressure for more proportional change” and as a result the change that we saw was small.

I think that forced us really to reflect on what is it that creates political space and pressure for more proportional change, what is it that motivates people to engage with the political process, whether it is to lobby with members of parliament or to demonstrate on the streets or however else they may express their political frustration. Some social psychologists came back to us and said that one of the things they see as missing at the moment from environmental campaigning or indeed third sector campaigning generally, is an understanding of values and the importance of values in underpinning people’s commitment to engage in political process and to express concern about social and environmental issues.

EWTT: In this context can you introduce the work you do with the Common Cause Project?

Dr. Tom Crompton: We’re working to open debate with a wide range of third sector organizations – not just environmental organizations but also development and disability organizations, children’s charities and animal welfare charities – about the cultural values that seem to consistently underpin expression of concern about a wide range of social and environmental issues.

One implication of this work is that we should be designing or shaping our campaigns and communications, and indeed our entire external engagement, in a way which helps to engage and strengthen those values. These are values which almost everybody seems to hold already. It’s a question of bringing them to the fore, because they underpin not just our concern about environmental issues, but also the concern about a wide range of other social issues.

It seems that when we activate what psychologists call extrinsic values -which are concerns about things like wealth or social status or image, those values tend to suppress the importance that people attach to intrinsic values, or values associated with social and environmental concerns.

So there is an antagonistic relationship between these two sets of values. From that we suggest it is important that NGOs think carefully about the occasions in which they may be drawn to appeal to extrinsic values in the course of pursuing a particular campaign outcome. For example, drawing attention to the money that might be saved through increased energy conservation measures like turning down the central heating thermostat or drawing attention to the social image or status that might be achieved through buying a luxury hybrid car. These are messages that may be effective in encouraging uptake of that particular behavior but are likely to have collateral damages.

This work also points to the possibility of beginning to work across a wide range of NGOs in new coalitions, with groups which hitherto have not really collaborated. Many NGOs can find common cause to engage those more intrinsic values and begin to tackle and remove those things which tend to engage and strengthen extrinsic values.

For example, we might find common cause in tackling an influence which currently serves to strengthen unhelpful extrinsic values at a cultural level, namely, the impact of advertising. We have begun to build a coalition of NGOs working again on a very wide set of issues to ask what’s the role of advertising in potentially frustrating emergence of greater public engagements and more stronger expressions of public concern on all of our issues. But we might also work to help strengthen intrinsic values – for example, working with those who set the standards for teacher-training to introduce work to help children reflect on the importance of kindness in their lives.

Image Courtesy: ValuesandFrames.org

EWTT: Our society has become so materialistic. Is there a danger that there may be no common ground if we don’t address the ‘what’s in it for me?’ Are people going to listen to messages for less materialistic values?

Dr. Tom Crompton: There are several dimensions to that question and it is a very critical question. You wouldn’t embark on what we are suggesting unless you are convinced that the problems we confront are really quite immense and will require really fundamental changes in terms of the level of ambition we show to respond to those problems.

If you really believed that a few behavioural changes in the private sphere in terms of domestic energy efficiency savings or a bit of green consumption were going to be sufficient to tackle a problem like climate change, or if you believe that increasing people’s willingness to donate to development charities was really going to be sufficient to tackle the problem of global poverty, then you probably look at what we are proposing and suggest that it is too ambitious.

So the first thing to say is that the scale of challenge that we are confronting at the moment would require an ambitious response and at the moment we are not seeing that level of ambition.

The second thing to say is that whilst it’s true that on some indicators, it seems that some cultures are becoming more materialistic, and are holding those extrinsic values to be more important, in most nations, people still hold intrinsic values to be more important. In the UK, if you ask people what’s important to them they first and foremost mention those intrinsic values. They voice the importance of the connection to friends and family, they talk about self- direction, the importance of self -determination and creativity, they talk about sense of social justice and the sense of environmental concern. Extrinsic values such as wealth or power rate less importantly. The evidence also seems very clear that these intrinsic values are there in everybody to be engaged.

We recently conducted a study with psychologists from University of Cardiff where we took 750 ordinary citizens from the Cardiff community, and asked them what values were important to them, we gave them a value survey and we picked the top 10% for whom the extrinsic or materialistic values were most important.

We then asked half of these people to reflect for a few minutes on the importance of affiliation to friends and family, the importance of broad-mindedness. We made no mention of the environment. We asked the other half to reflect on the importance of wealth or popularity. Then we interviewed each participant about climate change, amongst other things. We transcribed the interviews and sent them a linguist who analysed the interviews without knowing whether a participant had been asked to think about intrinsic or extrinsic values.

We found that even though these people were by disposition more inclined towards extrinsic values, simply asking them to pause for a few minutes to reflect on the importance of affiliation towards friends and family or broadmindedness led to a statistically significant increase in the extent to which they saw climate change as being something that they felt they had some personal responsibility to address and something that they wanted to see addressed because of its importance for a wider society and not just for their own self- interest.

What we take from an experiment like that, and it corroborates several other lines of evidence, is that those intrinsic values matter for a lot for people and that it’s possible to engage them even in the short term. We are not necessarily talking here about changing in values. It’s more about thinking carefully about which values people already hold, which of these underpin a greater commitment to express social or environmental concern, and engaging with these in the course of our campaigns or communications.

EWTT: Companies often say they are bound by short-term results, such as sales targets or increasing shareholder returns, which relate to the extrinsic values you talk about. They tend to initiate sustainability initiatives only if it makes financial sense. How do you convince them to undertake them because it’s the right thing to do?

Dr. Tom Crompton: It is a challenge certainly. What we are suggesting goes beyond the business case for sustainability. It goes beyond simply pointing to those things that it’s in a business’s short-term economic interests to do, for example increasing energy efficiency or supply chain efficiency in a way which will simultaneously save money. We need to move to a situation where the responsibility that companies have to the societies in which they operate is seen to extend beyond simply making money.

Many companies are already demonstrating willingness to go beyond the business case for sustainable development and are taking unilateral action. It is of course easier for family owned companies or cooperatives to do that than it is for publicly owned companies, but even in the case of publically owned companies there are examples where at the very least they come together and demand a regulatory intervention or legislative intervention in order to shift the level of the playing field. In the UK, The Prince of Wales’ Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change calls of government to enact new and longer-term policies to tackle climate change. Members of this group recognise that some steps to tackle climate change incur economic costs. But if together they can change the level of the playing field then these competitive costs could be equally shared across the competitors.

The other thing is to widen our concept of what corporate social responsibility means, to recognize that companies have a responsibility not just with immediate material foot prints of their activities – how much carbon do they produce, how much tropical rainforest is cut down in the course of them sourcing their raw materials – but also with what you might call mindprint. Mindprint includes impacts on cultural values, and that’s affected in a whole range of ways: the way in which a company advertises, the values that are activated in the course of using the products it manufactures, or how a company manages decision making processes. These include their HR practices and internally recognizing that many people work for business and that it is an important part of their lives. When you spend 40 hours a week in a business, the culture of that business is likely to impact your values as an individual. So there is a whole range of ways in which we are arguing businesses have a responsibility to look at not only their footprints but also their mindprint, which may be even greater than the impact that they have through their direct environment impacts – their footprint.

EWTT: Can businesses exploit intrinsic values in their advertising, and can this cause harm?

Dr. Tom Crompton: Many businesses are well aware of the importance of intrinsic values in building a loyal customer base and clearly those intrinsic values are the ones often reflected in terms of a company’s brand or its advertising. A lot of advertising appeals to intrinsic values in terms of strength of family relationships or connection to nature. The report we produced last year called ‘Think of Me as Evil’ was an attempt to open some of these ethical debates as they relate to advertising. Nobody knows for sure what the cultural or social impact of advertising that appeals to intrinsic values are, but some of the social psychologists we have worked with constructed quite persuasive arguments that actually such ads may be unhelpful. What these ads may actually serve to do is to increase people’s cynicism about intrinsic values or to create the impression that those values, when they come from elsewhere, are being deployed manipulatively in order to get them to do something; whether that’s to buy a product or to show some act of kindness. So it seems that there are dangers in deploying intrinsic values in pursuit of commercial interest.

EWTT: What about the behaviour or governments? How do you convince governments to look for alternative indicators of growth outside of GDP or overcome their fear of losing competitive advantage?

Dr. Tom Crompton: I agree with you fully on this. Those were precisely the constraints we hear from senior policy makers or decision makers in the trade regime. We would be arguing that at least for us in the UK we should be taking a unilateral stand in multilateral negotiations in order to help change the regime. What we hear constantly is that, “Oh well, we don’t have the political capital”, or “there would be competitiveness costs to the industry”: exactly the arguments which you have just been advancing. I suppose I just come back again to our starting point. One of our responses to that degree of political paralysis is that the change we need isn’t going to occur without far more vocal and powerful citizen engagement. It isn’t going to happen unless more people are writing to their MPs, or unless more people are out in the streets demonstrating; unless it is made clear to the political leaders that their own political future depends upon being more ambitious in responding to these things – even though there are economic costs. So our question at the outset was: What is it that underpins increased citizen engagement? What is it that underpins citizen concern? And this brings us back to values. If a diversity of third sector organizations come together to ask how it is that our cultural values influence our collective responses to social and environmental problems, they could have a profound impact on public debate.

Policy makers don’t enjoy the political space and public pressure for more ambitious change. So this whole work from the outset has been premised on the grounds that we need to find ways to increase public engagement on these issues. I don’t think governments are ready to embrace the scale of response that is necessary to respond to the challenges. But that said, there are certainly opportunities for governments within this and we have been engaging several governments on precisely this agenda.

The Welsh government is, for example, currently asking what are the narratives they have set down nationally within Wales around sustainable development? They have recognized that they have adopted a series of environmental policies in a piecemeal fashion, so we have a charge on plastic bags, for example, but they recognize as well that there are some fundamental limitations to what you can achieve by picking individual actions which are often quite modest in terms of their environmental impacts. They see the need for some sort of national narrative around sustainable development. Should this be constructed around the economic opportunities early investment in green technologies such as wind provides, that might give a country a competitive edge? Or should it be built around a sense that Wales has something important to contribute to the world as a small country that is light on its feet and has a strong sense of community and social justice? Clearly, I would argue for the latter.

In the case of the UK government, we are hearing that they too are frustrated by the limitations of a piecemeal approach to reducing individual’s carbon footprint for example. So they are confronting the fact that whilst they may urge people to insulate their loft on the basis that they will save money, they are finding at the same time that if people are insulating their loft solely to save money, there is no particular reason why the money that they save shouldn’t be spent in turning the central heating thermostat up and enjoying a warmer house or flying off to enjoy a weekend break: all of which are more carbon intensive activities. We have to look carefully at the values we are appealing to in trying to change private-sphere behaviours.

EWTT: What do you have to say about the way one should engage on social media?

Dr. Tom Crompton: Social media is only one way in which third sector organizations impact on cultural values, albeit an important one, and the most easily changed. I think that there are many others, including policies that they are campaigning for, the way in which they campaign, the way in which they organize their own organizations and their own internal policies.

Online groups might begin to look at the values that they appeal to in the course of constructing their online requests for people to sign petitions: what’s the impact of these values on the longevity of people’s engagement, and the success with which they encourage people to actually sign the petition?

My expectation would be that they would be likely to build a more loyal relationship with their supporters when that relationship is premised on connecting with people’s intrinsic rather than their extrinsic values. There may be instances where you can successfully encourage large numbers of people to sign a petition on the basis of their self- interest, but I would argue that those supporters are likely to express a less general, or less systemic concern about a wide range of social and environmental issues, particularly where those depart from their immediate self- interest, and they are likely to make for less durable relationships. They are likely to be more fickle.

EWTT: How do you intend to take your studies forward? What’s the broader vision for the kind of work you do?

Dr. Tom Crompton: Our aim is to engage in the first instance a wider swathe of NGOs in this debate. In the UK at least, there is a huge appetite for this at the moment. We have already run over 60 workshops for different NGOs in UK from a very wide range of different issue groups and interest groups. That work will continue in terms of engaging third sector organizations in this conversation. It’s increasingly becoming an international conversation. We recently ran a series of workshops in a number of Scandinavian countries as there is an appetite there to begin to put together hubs of NGOs who are working on these issues and building a conversation in those countries. We are going to be running workshops soon in Australia; we have got workshops in Brussels, possibly in Canada so there is an increasing international interest which we haven’t really gone out to court, this is interest which has come to us really.

Part of what we are doing is deepening our already extensive relationship with academics on the evidence. Hitherto that evidence base has been drawn largely from social psychology but we are aware that social psychology represents only one route into this discussion. So we want to increasingly work with people from other disciplines, political science, psychotherapy, anthropology, and neurosciences and we are beginning that process. We are doing more research ourselves in terms of taking real NGO communications and asking what the impacts of those are. For example, we have put together a consortium of all the main UK conservation groups and we will be working with a psychologist and a linguist to analyse our entire external communication over a 6 month period to ask “what are the values that we are activating at the moment in the course of those communications”.

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About the Interviewer:

Bhavani Prakash is the Founder of Eco WALK the Talk .com. She is a sustainability speaker, trainer and writer can be contacted at bhavani[at]ecowalkthetalk.com. Follow Eco WALK the Talk on Facebook, Twitter, Linked IN and YouTube

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Further links you may be interested in:

WWF: Common Cause Report

Values and Frames.org

Video link here

EWTT: Joe Brewer: An Interdisciplinary approach to understanding complex issues

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Thomas L. Friedman in Singapore: Why We Need A Green Revolution

admin — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 06:53:23 +0000

by Bhavani Prakash

Thomas Friedman, one of the world’s most influential columnists with The New York Times, with a following of over 20 million readers, and best-selling author of “Hot, Flat and Crowded” was in town (Singapore) yesterday to give an interesting lecture on “Why We Need a Green Revolution.”

He was invited by the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPP), one of Asia’s leading thinktanks, and introduced to the audience by the Dean of the School, Dr Kishore Mahbubani. Dr Mahbubani himself is a well known public figure in the region, and author of books such as “Can Asians Think” and “Beyond the Age of Innocence.” He commenced the night with a sober note, “We are facing the biggest challenge in human history. The Earth is in distress. We don’t know what to do, and how to do it.”

Friedman asserted that though Hot, Flat and Crowded prima facie talks of energy and the environment, it is essentially about America rediscovering its ‘groove’ as a global leader by addressing the major and pressing problems of the world.

Hot is the planet warming up with increasing human made greenhouse gas emissions in the thin atmosphere that blankets it. Flat is a globalised and interconnected world, where rising middle classes aspire for higher “America –like’” consumption standards. Crowded is because our population is going to balloon to 9 billion by 2050, with higher per capita consumption, and more pressure on the finite resources of the earth.

Here are some of the main points he brought out in his talk to an audience of about a thousand invited by the LKYSPP.

The environmental crisis and the financial crisis are flip sides of the same problem. 2007-2010 was when the markets and Mother Nature hit the wall, an early warning heart attack that we are growing unsustainably -financially and ecologically.
The world is seeing a never ending growth loop which is clearly unsustainable and has to be broken. Friedman explained it thus:

More and more factories built in China –> More and more stuff produced –> More and more coal used (with emissions) –>More and more dollars for China –>More and more Treasury Bills issued by the US –>More and more factories in China…and back again to the loop.

The fundamental problems in both financial markets and in Mother Nature are due to three fold reasons. We are

Underpricing Risk (such as credit risk in subprime mortgage or the risk of carbon molecules in fossil fuel emissions)
Privatising Gain ( Profits accrue to owners of capital who benefit from financial markets, or due to cheap oil and coal)
Socialising Losses ( If things blow up, the taxpayer bears the losses through bailouts, and our children and future generations pay the consequences of disruptive climate change)

There is a larger ‘values breakdown’ in society. We have moved from sustainable values that used to be the basis for relationships, communities, business and politics, to situational values of the baby boomer generation. Ploughing up hundreds of acres of biodiverse Amazon rainforest to plant soyabean, is an example of situational value which places financial gain over long term sustainable value – which would dictate that this is the wrong thing to do.This is dangerous, because both markets and Mother Nature are fiercesome, cruel and unemotional when it comes to excesses. According to Friedman, if we don’t find a more sustainable way we will be ‘less free than if the Soviet Union had won the cold war.’

Friedman sees five megatrends that impact the world tremendously:

-          Supply and Demand of Energy and Natural Resources. Demand is increasing at a mind boggling rate, with the rise of new consumerist middle classes in China and India and other nations. In two cities he had visited – Doha in Qatar and Dalian in China, another ‘Manhattan’ had sprung up in a span of only three years. This kind of development has staggering implications for resource and energy use. Friedman calls this the problem as ‘Too Many Americans.’ If the whole world caught up with American consumption rates, it would mean an equivalent of 72 billion people on this planet.

-          The impact on Petropolitics is the clear inverse relationship between the price of oil and the political freedom in the major oil exporting nations – which is graphed by the ‘Freedom Index’ By increasing our demand for fossil fuels, we are indirectly supporting petrodictatorships in these countries.

-          Climate Change as an issue is so polluted by climate deniers, he prefers not to use the term Global Warming using ‘Global Wierding’ instead. This is because the result of increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is going to be increasingly extreme, frequent, and violent weather patterns.

In a tongue-in-cheek way, Friedman says he prefers to be like “Dick Cheney” during the Iraq war, who said “if there is 1% chance that nuclear weapons are found in Iraq, it would irreversible and catastrophic.”
Likewise he says, “If there is even 1% chance that what climate scientists say is true, it would be irreversible and catastrophic for the planet.”

-          Energy Poverty is something 1.6 billion people on this planet face as they are not connected to electric grid. This is going to leave behind a vast part of the population behind, as they have inadequate access to water, education, and technology.

-          Biodiversity Loss is happening at an unprecedented rate. We are facing the fastest rate of extinction since the age of the dinosaurs – about 1 new species every 20 minutes disappears, which is about 1000 times the background rate of extinction.

Friedman asserts that all these 5 problems can be solved by the “Green Revolution” by finding a way to produce “abundant, cheap, clean and reliable electrons” and the country which does that will get the most global respect. He wants that country to be America, as he thinks this is the only way that clean technology and energy will scale up with the speed required to solve the global crisis. It’s not going to be ‘easy’ – a revolution implies suffering and radical change. At the moment, the world is seeing is only incremental and small scale change – or to put it more cynically, “we’re all having a big green party.”

According to Friedman, “We’ll know when we are really having a Green Revolution and that is when the word “green’ disappears. There won’t be a ‘green’ building. You simply won’t be able to build something that doesn’t adhere to the highest energy and resource efficient standards. There won’t be a ‘green’ car, only a car which is built to highest mileage and environmental standards. “

Friedman lays more faith on engineers and entrepreneurs than on regulators or “192 countries trying to agree on reduction in emissions” as in the COP meetings, for change to happen. Price matters in the Green Revolution, and a durable, long term price system for carbon is critical. He also favours subsidy support to renewables especially in the intial take-off stages, as well as a carbon and gasoline tax to reduce the price advantage on fossil fuels.

For systemic change to happen that supports ‘an ecosystem of innovation’, one requires firm leadership and Friedman wishes America could be China for a day, just to be able to impose all the rules and regulations to support the green revolution, and let the system take over.

My thoughts on Friedman’s call for a green revolution:

- It looks increasingly like it may not be America’s call to take leadership on Climate Change. China for good or bad, does have the political advantange of firm leadership (or dictatorship) to make swift decisions on green technology. Friedman himself admitted during the Q & A that necessity is the “mother of innovation” and that China is moving faster toward clean technology, as it discovers the downsides of environmental pollution.

(According to BNEF, new global investment in clean energy reached $243 billion in 2010, up from $186.5 billion in 2009. Last year’s investment figures double those from 2006. The main factors in this growth were the massive Chinese market, the expansion of offshore wind, hot European solar markets and global R&D.

Investment in China was up 30% to $51.1bn in 2010, by far the largest figure for any country. In 2009 Asia and Oceania overtook the Americas, and in 2010 it narrowed the gap further on Europe, Middle East and Africa as the leading region of the world for clean energy investment. Facts from Renewable Energy World )

- My question to Friedman during the Q & A was that though removal of fossil fuel subsidies is one key step in giving the right price signals to the market, political leaders do get ‘wobbly knees’ when actually taking action on this front. I wanted to know if there are case studies of countries who have been successful with this. Look at India where the price of onions is enough to give politicians the jitters. (I also had at the back of my mind the reversal of Bolivian President Eva Morales’ decision to raise fuel prices over the new year. India too had deregulated petrol prices in June 2010 but not diesel prices because it was too sensitive an issue. )

Friedman didn’t answer my question directly, but he did give an interesting perspective about what fossil fuel subsidies really mean to an economy. If you don’t tax fuel in your country, you are simply handing that money over to the oil cartel, instead of using it for education, health and green tech within your own economy. Even though the per unit price of oil goes up, the total bill goes down leading to a more efficient system. Yes, it’s a difficult decision, but it has to be done, and all it may take is one gutsy polician to bring about that change.

- Friedman doesn’t really mention a role for civic society, in fact he dismisses all the small, green actions that individuals take, without a larger systemic, macroeconomic change happening. My take on this is yes, we absolutely need systemic change, but more often than not, it happens when millions of individuals start demanding that change, and no matter what level it is – at an individual level (as a consumer, employee or neighbour), at a community level, at a national or international level – it is at the end of the day, individuals and groups of ‘thoughtful citizens’ who will change the world.

We can’t hang around and wait much longer for that change to happen, as there is no “later” in Friedman’s sober conclusion. I share his cautious optimism in these words, “We have exactly enough time – starting now.”

About the writer:

Bhavani Prakash is the Founder of Eco WALK the Talk .com. She is passionate about the role of individuals and communities in bringing about the much needed change we need to see in the world. She was an economist in her previous avatar, and is now an environmental and social justice activist using social media as well as offline community participation in her advocacy of a greener, fairer and happier planet. She writes and conducts talks and workshops on sustainability and can be contacted at bhavani[at]ecowalkthetalk.com. Follow Eco WALK the Talk on Facebook, Twitter, Linked IN and YouTube

Further links you may be interested in:

NYT: Serious in Singapore by Thomas L. Friedman

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A Green Lesson From Mumbai about Food Packaging

admin — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 09:15:06 +0000

by James H. Wandersee and Renee M. Clary

This an inspirational story that describes an exemplary “green” food-supply-and-packaging system that exists in India. The dabbawalas of Mumbai practice a 125-year-old trade which involves the daily delivery of a fresh, home-made meal from each customer’s suburban home to his or her city office workplace. The word dabbawala translated literally, is “lunchbox carrier.”

A typical delivered Mumbai meal, in levels of a stackable metal container (tiffin):

The distribution system the dabbawalas have designed uses color-coded symbols to mark the top of each customer’s personal food container. It runs like clockwork. Over 200,000 fresh, client-specific lunch meals are delivered each day, directly to each customer’s office, at the proper time each day, with a documented 99.99% accuracy!

The system employs long-life, reusable food packaging. The more than 5,000 highly efficient workers utilize head trays, bicycles, hand carts, and the local railway system to transport the food containers. They not only pick-up a personalized meal which has been prepared by a customer’s spouse or family member, and deliver to it the correct Mumbai workplace at lunchtime, they also return the empty metal container (called a tiffin) that same evening to the customer’s home for tomorrow’s reuse and refilling. This customized, 2-way, daily delivery service only costs Mumbai’s citizens the equivalent of $6.50 SGD ($5 USD) per month!

The dabbawalas’ graphically efficient container coding system:

The steps in the dabbawalas’ food delivery system are as follows:

Dabbawalas at Work

1. The first dabbawala receives the customer’s lunch container, at the same time every morning, from the meal preparer at the customer’s home and transports it to the nearest railway station.

2. The second dabbawala at the rail station sorts the incoming containers by color code, routing them to the proper destination by loading them into the correct train’s luggage car.

3. The third dabbawala travels on that train with the sorted meal containers and unloads them at the station nearest their destination

4. The fourth dabbawala picks-up the specific containers at the rail station that are bound for his customers, and he delivers them to the correct offices at lunchtime.

5. At this point, the steps are reversed, as the empty containers are picked up at the offices after lunch and returned correctly to all of the customers’ homes later that day.

The average Mumbai lunch container travels 43 miles per day and changes hands 10 times.

The food supply chain system that the dabbawalas have developed is second to none. Prestigious university business and economics researchers world-wide have traveled to Mumbai to study it. In 2003, the UK’s Prince Charles arranged his schedule just so he could see the system in full operation.

Dabbawala loading bicycle with 18 tiffins

The green lesson for us is that a fast-food diet is not a necessity for today’s busy big-city office worker and commuter. Fresh, healthy, personalized, home-made, dietary-appropriate lunchtime food can be packaged in washable, durable, reusable containers, such as the tiffins of Mumbai.

Equally important, we can see that it is possible for a city to design human service systems that support and encourage green and sustainable living, and that high technology and high expense are not necessarily essential for their efficient operation. Mumbai, with areas of population density up to 1 million people per square mile, is the world’s most crowded city, and yet, that huge city of 14 million people boasts a green and efficient food distribution system such as this.

With respect to food containers and their environmental impacts, there is a continuum of food packaging that we all should consider. We have ranked them, in order of ecological desirability, from best to worst. Packaging should always be sufficient to preserve the freshness of the specific food product in question for a reasonable time and thus prevent the wasting of food. The spectrum of food merchants’ sales methods includes:

A Stainless Steel Tiffin Carrier can last for years

1. Edible packaging sales, where the product is held by its own edible “container;”

2. Bulk, unpackaged sales, where customers are required to bring their own containers;

3. Fully biodegradable package sales, where containers are made from plant sources that can be municipally composted or home-composted after use;

4. Reusable package sales, where product containers are systematically returned to the manufacturer, cleaned, and reused;

5. Recyclable package sales, where the product containers are systematically returned to manufacturers, transformed, and then used as raw materials for new containers or other products;

6. Disposable package sales, recommended for highly limited use when no better and more environmentally friendly alternative is available at the present time. Polystyrene foam containers should be avoided.

The tragic irony of today’s “convenient” food packaging is captured in this quotation by sustainable lifestyle expert David Wann— “The packaging for a microwave dinner is programmed for a shelf life of maybe six months, a cooking time of two minutes, and a landfill time of centuries.”

We think one of ecologist Barry Commoner‘s most important contributions to scientific literacy about packaging is his four laws of ecology, found in his classic book: The Closing Circle (1971.

Law 1. Everything is connected to everything else. There is only one biosphere for all living things and what affects one species ultimately affects all of them.

Law 2. Everything must go somewhere. There is no garbage in nature and there is no “away place” to which things can be thrown.

Law 3. Nature knows best. Humans have designed technology to improve upon nature, but the impact of such changes upon a natural system is likely to be detrimental to that system.

Law 4. There is no such thing as a “free lunch.” Every human exploitive action has an environmental cost.

Barry Commoner also wrote: The most meaningful engine of change, powerful enough to confront corporate power, may be not so much environmental quality, as the economic development and growth associated with the effort to improve it.

In many ways, food is one of the best and easiest levers for environmental activists to push for environmental awareness and green living. Look at the results of the following research study.

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Research Study on Environmental Awareness of Packaging

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Note: 1,010 British adults, ages 16 and higher; 2008, Ipsos Group, UK

Awareness of Evironmental Issues with Food Products

51% mentioned the amount of food packaging used

40% mentioned chemicals/pesticides in food

37% mentioned fair-trade benefits for farmers

33% mentioned animal welfare

27% mentioned the number of plastics bags used at the check-out

24% mentioned food miles traveled

16% mentioned the carbon footprint of the product

8% no awareness

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Wise food choice doesn’t just have to do with being mindful of the latest food pyramid or a food package’s nutrition label, but it also has to do with knowing where your food came from, how much non-renewable energy was consumed in its producer-to-plate cycle, how it was packaged, how it got to you, and who was involved in all those constituent processes.

Remember the success story of Mumbai’s dabbawalas!

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About our Guest Writers:

Dr. James H. Wandersee is the W.H. LeBlanc Alumni Association Professor of Biology Education in the College of Education at Louisiana State University and Chair of the Teaching Section of the Botanical Society of America.
Dr Renee M. Clary is the Director of the Dunn-Seiler Geology Museum and Assistant Professor of Geoscience Education in the Department of Geosciences at Mississippi State University. Both are part of the EarthScholars™ Research Group and have done extensive research in the pioneering area of Plant Blindness and how to sensitise people to plants.

Links you may be interested in:

Further blogs you may be interested in:
1. Plant Blindness: What research says by James H. Wandersee & Renee M. Clary
2. The Bridge Between Ecological Knowledge and Green Living by James H. Wandersee & Renee M. Clary
3. Teach Me About Soil by James H. Wandersee & Renee M. Clary

Image Credits:

Photo 1: Dabbawalla tiffin image

Photo 2: Dabbawalla’s Container Coding System

Photo 3: Mumbai Dabbawalla’s at work

Photo 4: Dabbawalla Loading his bicycle with 18 tiffins

Photo 5: Stainless Steel Tiffin Container

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Matt Harvey: Less is More

admin — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 05:09:08 +0000

Matt Harvey is a poet, broadcaster, writer and well known stand-up comedy artist in the UK. He is one of Radio 4′s Saturday Live‘s poets and performs widely in the UK in colleges, literary festivals and events. He’s also the founder of Wondermentalist, a movement which fuses poetry, music and humour. Matt has graciously allowed EWTT to share with our readers this witty yet profound poem created by him.

LESS IS MORE

by Matt Harvey

Can less be more, can more be less?

Well, yes and no, and no and yes

Well, more or less…

More bikes, fewer cars

Less haze, more stars

Less haste, more time

Less reason, more rhyme

More time, less stress

Fewer miles, more fresh (vegetables)

Fewer car parks, more acres of available urban soil

More farmers’ markets, less produce effectively marinated in crude oil

Less colouring, more taste

More mashing, less waste

Fewer couch potatoes, more spring greens

Fewer tired tomatoes, more runner beans

More stillness, less inertia

Less illness, more Echinacea

More community, less isolation

Less just sitting there, more participation!

More wells (not oil ones, obviously), fewer ills

Fewer clean fingernails, more skills

More co-operation, less compliancy

Less complacency, more self-reliancy

Less competition, more collaboration

Less passive listening, more participation!

Less attention defic…, more concentration

Less passive listening, more participation!

(Less repetition)

Less of a warm globe, more a chilly’un

More of a wise world, at least 340 fewer parts of C0₂per million

Less stress-related cardio-vascular and pulmonary failure

More nurturing quality time in the company of a favourite clematis or dahlia

More craftsmanship, less built-in obsolescence

More political maturity, less apparently-consequence-free extended adolescence

More believed-to-be-beautiful, known-to-be-useful things

Less cheap, pointless, petroleum-steeped stuff

So Yes, less is more – and enough’s enough…

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The poem “Less is More” appears here in the Wondermentalist site. Matt has kindly provided EWTT with the slightly revised version of the poem as shared above. It will appear in the forthcoming book called “Where Earwigs Dare” which is due to be released in the UK later this month. Published by Green Books, it promises to be ” a collection of Matt’s latest poems, horticultural, whimsical, ecological, political and just plain funny.”

Matt Harvey reads a part of the poem, “Less is More” in this interesting BBC production on Transition Towns (7:32 to 8:22 minutes of the video) . Matt lives in Totnes, UK’s first Transition Initiative, which envisions a sustainable future given the twin challenges of peak oil and climate change.

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How to find Hidden Palm Oil in Supermarkets

admin — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:36:10 +0000

By Bhavani Prakash

Palm Oil is the largest plantation crop in the world, and much of it is grown in Malaysia and Indonesia where primary rainforests that are rich in biodiversity and home to millions of species are being rapidly cleared.

Rapid expansion of plantations releases huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as peat swamps are drained, or rainforests burnt down. This threatens to accelerate global warming. Over 2 species an hour or 55,000 species a year globally are becoming extinct, much of it from tropical rainforests.

Are we all unwittingly contributing to this, each time we fill up our shopping trolleys?

One out of 10 supermarket products contains palm oil in some form or the other. Palm oil is such a versatile product. It’s colourless and odourless, and improves the shelf life of several products. These attributes as well as the low cost make it attractive for manufacturers.

Food products which contain palm oil are as follows. This is not an exhaustive list :

Dry Biscuits (Crackers, Breadsticks, wafers, twists, flatbreads etc)  * Sweet Biscuits ( Shortbread, Thins, Cookies, tartlets, crepes etc) *   Cake Mixes * Chocolate * Crisps * Snack Foods (Chips – Potato, Tortilla, Rice etc, Other Snacks like seaweed, chickpeas, soy) * Frozen meals & fish * Frozen pizzas/pastry/pies/snacks * Frozen chips & wedges * Margarines, Spreads & Peanut Butter * Instant noodles * Cereals *

Why does this sound all too familiar? Palm oil has insidiously infiltrated into a majority of products that we see and consume every day! Contributing to this is also the fear of transfats, that has lead to a rush to replace hydrogenated oils with Palm Oil as this TreeHugger article highlights.

Apart from this, there are inedible uses for Palm Oil. Non-Food Products which contain Palm Oil are :

Soaps & Detergents * Shampoos* Candles * Cosmetics * Lubricants for Industrial Machinery * Grease for Bread Moulds * Drilling Mud for Petroleum * Grease to plastify and sterilise plastic products * Glue * Prints * Acids to lubricate fibres in textile industry

This video on Palm Oil in Supermarket products is worth watching:

How can we buy responsibly?

1. Recognise brands which do not use palm oil in their contents. Though the site is Australian, some of the brands mentioned are global. For a local or regional brand, look at the ingredient list as mentioned further below.

2. Consume less Processed Foods : If you take a good look at the products containing palm oil, you’ll soon see that they are mostly highly processed foods, which use an enormous amount of resources, such as fossil fuel based inputs in large scale agriculture, processing and packaging, and food miles in terms of distance travelled from place of production to the supermarket. So in general, reducing the quantity of processed foods we consume is the best way to help reduce palm oil consumption, and help conserve resources for the world.

3. Recognise the ingredients which contain hidden palm oil. Read the labels behind every product that you buy. From the Borneo Orangutan Society website:

“As a rule of thumb, if the saturated fat content is about 50%, there is a good chance that the vegetable oil will in fact be palm oil.

Another thing to watch out for on the ingredients list is margarine. If the product contains margarine, it is highly likely that the margarine will have been derived from palm oil.

Additives and agents such as emulsifiers (E471 is a common one), while a small component of the overall product, can also be derived from palm oil.”

Palm Oil Action.org lists these Unlabelled Palm oil ingredients to look out for.

Sodium Laureth Sulphate (Can also be from coconut)

Sodium Lauryl Sulphates (can also be from ricinus oil)

Sodium dodecyl Sulphate (SDS or NaDS)

Palmate

Palm Oil Kernal

Palmitate

Cosmetics:

Elaeis Guineensis

Glyceryl Stearate

Stearic Acid

Chemicals:

Steareth -2

Steareth -20

Sodium Lauryl Sulphate

Sodium lauryl sulfoacetate (coconut and/or palm)

Hydrated palm glycerides

Sodium isostearoyl lactylaye (derived from vegetable stearic acid)

Cetyl palmitate and octyl palmitate (and anything with palmitate at the end)

This video captures the effect on palm oil plantations on Orangutans:

Isn’t it tragic that magnificent, biodiverse rainforests are being cut down and burnt away for soaps and shampoos, cakes and biscuits. How can we even justify this to our grandchildren? We as consumers shouldn’t be waiting for companies who are dragging their feet on “sustainable palm oil certifications” to protect rainforests. We have to start demanding palm-oil free products every time we make that shopping trip.

It is upto us to watch what goes into our shopping trolley, even if it means a bit of inconvenience. If that little bit of inconvenience by way of reading labels, and perhaps using more fresh produce instead of processed foods, saves our precious rainforests and the orangutans…it’s surely worth it.

Further links you may be interested in:

BBC article: Big Business leaves big forest footprints

Please watch this moving film on what palm oil does to rainforests and the Orangutans- a highly endangered ape. It’s called Green the Film.

The Greenpeace report on how Palm Oil is Cooking the Climate is also an enlightening read.

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The 10:10 campaign to reduce carbon emissions

admin — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 05:44:56 +0000

The 10:10 campaign has been initiated by Franny Armstrong’s team to complement the documentary on global warming, “The Age of Stupid” enabling each one of us to take action in our lives to reduce our emissions.

As the 10:10 website points out, the idea of the campaign is “By committing to cut your emissions by 10% in 2010, you will join thousands of individuals, schools, hospitals, businesses and organisations all actively helping to combat climate change by making simple changes to their lifestyles, homes and workplaces.”

The website provides a convenient 10 step family checklist which can be downloaded. Ideas are also provided for companies, schools and colleges, and other organisations. These 10 steps are:

1.    Fly less
2.    Save 10% on heating (which would translate to airconditioning for warmer climates)
3.    Save 10% on electricity
4.    Drive less
5.    Eat better
6.    Buy good stuff
7.    Dump less
8.    Don’t waste food
9.    …or water
10. Feel happier

For more information, read about Franny’s reasons behind the campaign here.

Eco WALK the Talk will take each of these points in the forthcoming blogposts and show you how these steps can be taken.

The ideas are from the free e-book which is available on this website called, “A Quicklist of 1001 Steps to Save the Planet”

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Ecological Intelligence

admin — Sat, 02 May 2009 02:23:04 +0000

It doesn’t come as a surprise at all that Daniel Goleman, the No. 1 International Bestselling author of books such as Emotional Intelligence, Primal Leadership and Social Intelligence, has chosen to write “Ecological Intelligence- Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy.” After all, it is a logical extension to the theories espoused in the earlier books.

He started the journey with the intelligence of mastering the emotions of the self, moved on to the effectiveness in managing our social lives and now in a timely fashion to what the planet needs at a critical juncture- our collective intelligence in understanding the impact of our actions on the environment so as to live sustainably, our “Ecological Intelligence.”

The current state of the environment is a result of this mega industrial machine that is churning out billions and billions of products, entailing trillions of minute processes endlessly looping into each other, creating a mind-boggling array of pollutants in our ecosystems and in our bodies. And it is each one of us who is propelling this gigantic machine through our demand for and consumption of goods.

Radical transparency

No matter how determined I am as a conscious consumer, walking into a supermarket is usually the most frustrating of experiences, because of the sheer paucity of information about the product, even amongst the “green” labelled ones. Many a time, I wish to touch a bar of soap or a T-shirt, for a video to pop up and play the entire life history of the product from the extraction of raw materials, to production and packaging, to the arrival at supermarket shelves – with a vivid portrayal of how workers are treated, and how the air, rivers and soils are affected in the process, so I can make the ethical choice of whether to purchase it or not.

Oblivious shopping ?

Much of our ignorance lies in our mistaken belief that “what we don’t know and can’t see does not matter.” But what if we as consumers had access to information in a clear and easy format, that gave us an immediate understanding to the spectrum of impact on people and the environment? And what if this information were made available to us, as we are about to make the purchasing decision, at the store? With this full information, are we are more likely to make smarter and ethical choices that are in line with our values?

Goleman delves into the evolving field of Industrial Ecology for the answers. Using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) it is possible to get extraordinarily precise data on the entire life story of a product from resource extraction, production, manufacture and packaging, storage, and all the way to the point of sale as well as end use and disposal. Making a simple glass bottle, for example, entails 1,959 distinct processes and every single process has an entire range of consequences which can be precisely measured using different metrics.

On April 1, 2008 Dana O’Rourke, an industrial ecologist, launched an innovative software called Good Guide. *(1) The software takes a product’s LCA, which is made up of massive and complex bits of information and sums it all up into a single metric, which can then be compared with other products in that category and ranked on the basis of what has the least/most effect in all three areas- health, environmental and social impact.

As this can be downloaded on the iphone, it can be used at the store as we are about to buy the product. Using Good Guide will hopefully revolutinise consumption on ethical lines as it rates products as well as companies.

For a more inquisitive consumer, the metric has underlying layers of information that gives details on the methodologies used and ratings on Health Performance, Environmental performance and Social performance.

Impact on Businesses

Till date, much of LCA data has stayed in proprietory hands. There has been a huge informational asymmetry between companies (as holders of this information) and consumers. As of now, there is not much incentive for companies and manufactures to move towards sustainable production, as the only pressure is the financial yardstick of shareholder value which they seek to improve.

The end of informational asymmetry has important ramifications for business. With radical transparency, power transfers from the hands of sellers to those of buyers. Consumers will be able to vote with their dollars for those products which are healthily, humanely and sustainably produced. This could be the most powerful tool to influence companies and manufacturers. Those who listen to enlightened choices of consumers will have greater competitive advantage as they make changes in manufacturing design and move towards creating sustainable products and processes.

While Good Guide is for individual consumers, the same concept is extended to B2B (business to business) buyers, through the development of a free, open-source, web based program called Earthster, developed by Dell and the state of Texas, among others. This will highlight suppliers who score well on environmental, health and social criteria. Goleman hopes that one day, these two softwares can work together, to create a virtuous cycle of changes triggered by the consumer, that reverberates all the way down the supply chain.

Swarm of the bees

Will a single metric make everyone ecologically intelligent? There is always a chasm to be bridged between knowledge and action. Knowing a metric may not automatically translate into changed behaviour. Then there are always those who simply couldn’t care less to use it. This is where I’d say, Goleman’s earlier wisdom on Emotional and Social intelligences come into play.

Our ability to deal with ourselves, gives us the ability to take action, in our personal sphere, and beyond in the social sphere. The empathy we feel for another’s perspective that is so useful in interpersonal relationships has to extend to empathy for all life forms and ecosystems.

For all of us to become what Goleman calls active agents of change, we need “shared information,” which is something that many of us do regularly on social media and other networks. In fact, the internet is now a really potent tool to add to this collective knowledge and influence behaviour.** (2)

In a sense, using Goleman’s analogy, we are like swarming bees. Acting individually (or in groups), we are part of a larger hive adding to a growing collective vault of ecological wisdom. We are all pushing a big juggernaut of positive social change, one that Paul Hawken poetically calls, as in his book title, “Blessed Unrest.” He calls it the “largest social movement in history that no one saw coming, one that is restoring grace, justice and beauty to the world.”  This comprises of a loose interconnection of at least a million social and environmental groups, growing organically with no central authority, each focussing on a specific issue or local problems with the ability to link, connect and share because of the internet. ***(3)

But…

We are still at the nascent stages of the exciting promise of informational transparency. Important questions to be asked are : Who supports Good Guide? This is a key question if we are to trust that the data is without biases. How will this site be sustained as there are no clear plans for this yet? Can all the complex data be accurate? Hopefully these will be answered to our satisfaction over time.

At the moment, Good Guide has about 65,000 products under its ambit. Many thousands if not hundreds of thousands have yet to come under its umbrella. And then, a thought struck me as I strolled near Little India today, what about the plethora of unbranded products that flood markets all over the world, can data even be obtained for these to do an LCA? What about the local homegrown Asian brands?

Alternative approaches to economic growth are being fashioned by different well intentioned think-tanks. Environmental economics, for example, which proposes that ecological costs be incorporated in the market price is nice in theory, but has been hard to put into practise. A lot of progress has been made in formulating policy tools, through Environmental Pricing Reforms (EPR) by way of cap and trade systems, carbon pricing and congestion fees, but as much rests in the hands of governments, there is inertia galore.

Somehow, in this model of marketplace transparency, I find a flicker of hope as it puts power in our hands and gives us the ability to fuel the kind of massive change and sustainable growth required at this juncture. Whether this flicker turns into a shining beacon depends on whether you and I, the consumer are willing to use the information, and more importantly, act upon it.

Links:
* (1) See www.goodguide.com This is still under beta testing. One of the supporters of Good Guide is the Environment Working Group which rates brands, products and companies for personal care and household cleaners through its Skin Deep database, on the basis of the concerns about toxic levels of a product. Good Guide is more encompassing, as it includes scores on Health, Environment and Social impacts, and will have far more categories such as food, electronics and electronics.

**(2) Golemen cites Coke’s extraction of ground water in Plachimada, Kerala when the region was suffering from drought as a case to illustrate the power of shared information. A global web of activists brought the world’s attention to this issue through the internet, which led to Coke’s shutting down the plant and committing to $20 million to installing rainwater schemes in the area to regenerate water. (However, the activists group India Resource Centre highlights, this is still ongoing issue , as the activists claim only 8% of the groundwater extracted for the Mehdiganj plant, for example, is being recharged.)

***(3) Paul Hawken’s project in www.wiserearth.org is an inspiration connecting over a million individuals, organisations, social and environmental causes.

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Part II: Is your coffee table worth it?

admin — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:15:21 +0000

by Bhavani Prakash

Sleuthing around for good wood

In Part I : How much is a tree worth? I suggested briefly that trees have a greater value when you consider them as part of a vibrant ecosystem.

As much as I love trees, practically speaking, wood is a very important material for a wide range of residential and industrial uses. It’s durable, reusable, recyclable, and biodegradable.

But because wood is so versatile, widely used, and so commonly available without much labelling, we may unwittingly be a party to much of the destructive and illegal logging that takes place especially in tropical countries.

According to Greenpeace, more than half of all logging activities in particularly vulnerable regions – the Amazon Basin, Central Africa, Southeast Asia, the Russian Federation – is illegal.
- 88 percent of logging in Indonesia is against the law
- 80 percent of logging in the Brazilian Amazon violates government controls
- 80 percent of logging operations are illegal in Bolivia and 42 percent in Colombia, while in Peru, illegal logging equals 80 percent of all activities.
- in Africa, rates of illegal logging vary from 50 percent for Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea to 70 percent in Gabon and 80 percent in Liberia – where revenues from the timber industry also fueled the civil war.

Hardwood tree from rainforest

Tropical rainforests are one of the most vulnerable of ecosystems, being cleared at the rate of 26 hectares every minute (according to Oxfam), much of it for timber and now increasingly palm oil plantations. At this rate, we may not have any large swathes of tropical forest left in 30 years time. That’s within our lifetime! Rainforests are home to half of the planet’s plants and animals. It’s no wonder that we are witnessing the largest rate of extinction of species since the disappearance of the dinosaurs.

What does rainforest destruction have to do with me? “Big” environmental problems like deforestation and global warming often seem so remote and overwhelming, that individual actions may seem like a drop in the ocean. However, as part of a burgeoning humanity of 6.5 billion people, we are through our “small” everyday actions, creating these very large scale problems through all the things we buy, eat, wear and yes, deck our homes and buildings with. By the same reasoning, if each of us change what we consume to something that’s less damaging for the environment, we can make a “big” difference and make up that mighty ocean.

So we as consumers are key to discouraging illegal logging of wood or even legal logging with suspect environmental standards.

How can I help to save rainforests?

First, here’s a short one minute video worth watching about “How Rainforest Timber is Used“.

Isn’t it amazing to see how stealthily rainforest wood enters our homes? And it is not only through furniture, but also via picture frames, parquet floorings, musical instruments, toys, wall hangings, statures, salad bowls, spoons, curios – the list is endless.

What if that very chic and expensive “Indonesian teak” coffee table or the “mahogany” wardrobe may indirectly be leading to the plundering of tropical rainforests?

Buying the right kind of wood from sustainable plantations or managed forests, rather than from threatened ecosystems, is therefore critical.

The challenge is great, because unlike the various requirements for labelling of food items, for example, there is very little labelling done on wood. And there’s not a whole lot of information out there.

So we have little choice but to become “Wood Detectives” in our search for “Good Wood” :

CLUE 1 Where does my coffee table come from?

Enquire about the origin of your wood. Your antennae should stretch up if your wood comes from Brazil, Congo region of Africa, Madagascar, Phillipines, Papua New Guinea, Malaysia, Indonesia and Myanmar(Burma) or any other country where tropical rainforests are located. Buying wood that comes from Myanmar means you are supporting a military with human right issues as well as a record of blatant environmental damage. Look where the wood for the finished products from China have come from. Without labelling, it may well have come illegally from Eastern Europe or Russia or tropical countries.

CLUE 2 What wood is my coffee table made from?

Know and recognise your wood, just as well as you can recognise the finished products. Friends of the Earth (FOE) have a guide to different woods, with a ranking as to whether they are critically endangered, endangered, vulnerable or near threatened, which may help you choose the better wood to buy.

CLUE 3 What names should I memorise?

It’s easy to remember country names (Clue 1). If your wood doesn’t reveal the countries, and you don’t happen to carry the FOE guide (Clue 2) in your pocket, it’s a good idea to memorise a few common tropical rainforest wood names to avoid. These are:

TEAK (and Teak substitutes such SHOREA called Red, White or Yellow Meranti, Balau, Almon ), MAHOGANY, ROSEWOOD, EBONY, BRAZILWOOD, MERBAU, RAMIN, WALNUT

CLUE 4: Is the wood certified?

There are a few labelling standards, but the one that is most reputed is the Forest Stewardship Council’s standard for wood from managed forests.

When wood is illegally logged, on an average 30 trees which are not needed are also decimated in the process of harvesting that one hardwood tree. Managed forests are those that do not plunder the forest, but allow it to regenerate.

However, the fact that only 4% of all wood is FSC certified, makes it a daunting task as a consumer to find FSC certified wood. WWF has a list of tropical wood which are FSC certified with pictures of the wood to recognise at http://assets.panda.org/downloads/tropical_wood_images.pdf

Here’s a guide at http://www.ecotimber.com/ which throws more light on sustainable wood, which certifications are suspect, and how FSC is more reliable. If you’re in the US or Canada, this is also a good place to source eco-friendly timber.

CLUE 5: How conscientious is my retailer?

Buy from suppliers who are environmentally conscious. If you know of any retailer making “green” claims, don’t take it for granted. Ask your own questions, and do your own research.

CLUE 6: What if my retailer doesn’t know?

ASK your retailer where the wood is sourced from and whether it comes from managed forests. Usually this may mean talking to the purchasing manager. If the information is not forthcoming, write to the CEO of the retail store, seeking information.

CLUE 7: What if I can’t find out?

When in doubt, don’t buy. Because of the sheer extent of illegal logging, in case of wood you can follow the rule: guilty unless proven innocent. Unless you are absolutely sure about where the wood has come from, and whether it has been certifiably obtained, abstain from your purchase. Look for other sources to buy from, or for alternatives to wood. (And yes, it would help if you wrote again to the retail store why you refuse to buy their product).

CLUE 8: Is there a better way to buy hardwood?

Buy second hand, from garage sales, classified ads, friends and neighbours disposing off their furniture, supermarket noticeboards, ebay and the like. Keep an eye out for reclaimed wood too, which is wood from old houses, torn down buildings and houses and scrap from factories. Recycling is a good idea to prevent new demand for timber. You can learn more about reclaimed wood from one company’s mission of reclaiming woods from around the world at Terramai.com

CLUE 9: What are the “wood” alternatives to tropical rainforest wood?

Look for alternatives to tropical rainforest furniture from temperate climes, such as FSC Certified Ash, Beech, Pine, Douglas Fir, Larch from N.America, UK and Europe, and FSC Oak which also comes from Australia. They may pose a lower environmental risk.

Without the FSC certification, please be on your guard for these wood:

- Ash wood from Romania, Bulgaria, Russia are illegally logged to be sent to mainly Chinese markets

- Beech from Romania, Poland and Armenia are being decimated for markets in UAE and Italy. PEFC certification of Beech from France is not very robust

- Canadian Douglas fir which may be destructively logged if not certified and threaten the bears www.savethebear.org

-Canadian or Siberian larch(used for timber fencing) as illegal logging in Russia threatens habitats of the Siberian Tiger and the Far eastern leopard.

(Facts from www.independent.co.uk)

CLUE 10: What are the “non-wood” alternatives to wood?

Rattan, a climber palm

RATTAN

is a climbing palm (of about 600 species) which can be harvested in 7-10 years and best of all, it requires the original forest to climb on, and actually increases the economic value of retaining forest cover. It is labour intensive and good for local employment opportunities. Hardwood species taken from the rainforest can take 60 years and permanently destroy forest cover. Wild rattan have been widely overharvested, but sustainable rattan plantations can be critical in preserving the remaining rainforests.

Bamboo, a type of grass

BAMBOO

is a grass, harvested in 3 to 5 years. It is a tough and versatile building material and can be used for furniture, flooring, scaffolding, bridges, fences and bridges. It is a very environmentally friendly alternative to wood, provided it has not been harvested in the wrong time and place, such as where the giant pandas or West African mountain gorillas depend on it for sustenance.

Star Bamboo is a company which supplies bamboo flooring, and a wide range of products including chopping boards.

WICKER Wicker refers to the process rather than the material (which can be straw, rattan or bamboo) using either of these or a combination of these.

HEMP is often confused for the plant from which the drug, marijuana is extracted and is discouraged for large scale growing. Industrial hemp is particularly useful as a wood and paper alternative, as well as for making cloth. Read more here: www.woodconsumption.org/alts/hempfs.pdf

COCONUT timber, curios, spoons and other items made from old coconut trees. Super Timber is a company which does furniture from coconut.

BANANA FIBRE makes for lovely artefacts, lamp shades, stools and chairs.

FIBRE REINFORCED COMPOSITE is material made from discarded agricultural wastes (which either go to landfills or burnt) such as rice husks. There’s an interesting video on this again by Super Timber.

RECYCLED METALS, PLASTIC or other innovative, eco-friendly materials that are being created all the time. Some of these are designer quality and pricey, but worth checking out the concepts.

Recycled Aluminium
Emeco uses 80% recycled aluminum content to make chairs. Of the recycled aluminum, half is post consumer (soft drink cans) and half is postindustrial (manufacturing scrap). Recycled materials use less resources than from scratch.

Recycled domestic plastic waste is used to make some funky designs by COHDA

Cork Have you seen ever stools made from cork? Check out these VITRA stools.

Is your coffee table worth destroying a precious ecosystem such as the rainforest? Is your coffee table worth all this detective work? If this added effort on your part saves even a single standing tree in the rainforest, the thousands of vanishing species and life forms that thrive on it and surrounding trees, they will thank you for it.

I leave you to watch this video till the next EcoWALKing day.

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Do men or women use more resources of the planet?

admin — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 04:23:48 +0000

I’m not a big fan of gender based questions for I think most of them end up stirring a lot of dust, rather than solving any issues. Do you recall for example, the “intellectual tsunami” triggered by the question posed by Dr. Lawrence Summers, the Harvard Dean, “Are men’s brain are better hardwired for maths and science than women?”

I must admit though, that my curiosity was piqued when “The Tree hugger,” the venerable website of all matters green came up with the poser,“Are women greener than men?” No surprises then, that a flood of comments poured in, from the balanced to the emotional to the outright vitriolic ones. However, the post didn’t quite answer the question, so I ventured into a bit of research.

Women’s carbon footprint are smaller…

The 90 page report by Gerd Johnsson-Latham for the Ministry of Sustainable Development in Sweden, analyses consumption patterns of men and women in rich as well as poor countries, and found that men, particularly those who are “rich” to be bigger users of the world’s energy resources, and leave a larger carbon footprint as they usually set infrastructure and political trends.
It also points to great gender differences in poorer countries where women have fewer options, resources, leisure time, and are more likely to give priority to the needs of others in the family. Studies in Latin America and Asia show that many men spend a great deal (1/3–1/2) of their earnings on themselves before distributing what remains among their families.

According to the report, the way to achieve sustainable development “ is the need to reduce unsustainable consumption, including luxury consumption, while at the same time boosting unacceptably low consumption among poor people”

….but it depends. What happens when women do move up the economic ladder?

Would carbon footprints of women equal or surpass that of men as their economic wealth increases? Intuitively it seems that women, as they become more well off, have better choices, and are inclined to playing a larger role in influencing what to buy.

To delve deeper into this, I decided to step into the shoes of a marketing expert. Marti Barletta, President of Trendsight and author of “Marketing to Women: How to increase your share of the World’s largest market”says “Women are the no.1 market economic opportunity in America, the largest market segment in the world, the chief purchasing officers of just about everything consumer, corporate or small business- and most importantly, there is no close second.”

According to her book and other sources like Diversity Best Practices & Business Women’s Network:

- Consumer spending in the US accounts for 2/3rds of the economy and women in US households are estimated to make 85% of all household buying decisions
- In addition to traditional female categories of spending like beauty and hygiene, clothing and accessories where women make up for more than 90% of the share
- Women are responsible for more than:
o 50% of all do-it-yourself purchases
o 51% of electronics and 66% of all home-computer purchases
o 80% of healthcare
o 60% of internet usage
o 50% of business travel and a majority of customer travel
o 50% of all auto purchases and influence 85%
o 70% of all privately held start-ups and small businesses over the last 15 years

So women in a rich economy like the US are no longer a niche, but the majority of the audience and have a larger influence on the purchasing decisions of products, even those that are stereotypically seen as a male preserve. I would imagine there is a similar influence in better off households in the developing countries as well.

If women do have a larger influence, would they be more inclined then to behave in a greener way or make choices that are environmentally friendly? I don’t have any conclusive surveys pointing to this at a consumer level. (If you come across one, please do share it with me). One report suggests however that women managers are more environmentally conscious that males.

What does all this mean?

If all this presents confusing or conflicting views, one thing’s for sure. Whether you’re a man or a woman, it makes better sense to reduce one’s own footprint on the planet rather than point fingers. (How nice it would be for nation states to follow this logic too!) Macro-trends are one thing, but the important question is who’s really influencing the purchases of different products in one’s own household…and how best can one make better decisions by asking a few fundamental questions:

Do I really need the product in the first place?
Can it be obtained elsewhere- by borrowing or secondhand?
What are the materials and ingredients in its making? What do the labels really mean?
Can I get an alternative product which is less damaging to the environment and to my health in its usage?
Is it manufactured in a way that does not damage the natural resources of the place of manufacture and the health of the workers?
How far has it traveled to reach the supermarket shelf?

That’s EcoWALKing hand-in-hand!

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Bottled Water Part II: Breaking the habit

admin — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 07:59:57 +0000

Bottled water is fast becoming a habit, a habit that takes a huge environmental toll as was discussed in Part I of the blog.

Bottled water, no doubt, is convenient. At times, it even makes a lifestyle statement. And it is becoming increasingly common to think that it’s the only alternative, as one may have lost faith in local public utilities to deliver uncontaminated water, regardless of whether one lives in the developed or developing world.

Here are some ways to help break the habit

- Learn more. Read the books recommended at the bottom of this blog as well as this excellent report by Food and Water Watch. This insightful report is a must read. It’s entitled “Take back the tap:Why choosing tap water over bottled water is better for your health, your pocketbook and the environment”

- Invest in a good filter. If you live in the developed world, chances are that your bottled water is no safer than your tap water, as scientific studies have shown time and again. This doesn’t mean that tap water is necessarily safe by itself. Regardless of where you live, the presence of chlorine and chlorine by-products, pesticides, synthetic fertilisers and chemicals, dirt and bacterial contamination in pipes and overhead tanks are genuine concerns. It makes sense to research into a good quality water filter, such as one with activated carbon, with natural magnetic stones to energise the water.

Here’s a guide that may help you choose one:
http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/take-action/consumer-tools/choosing-a-water-filter/

Another website which has loads of information on the contaminants in bottled as well as tap water is www.thefreewaterreport.org

- Carry your own bottle of water, preferably a stainless steel one with filtered water from home.

- If you’re dying of thirst and can’t get hold of any potable water, look for alternatives such as fresh juice or fruit or pick up bottled water that has been manufactured as close as possible to where you live. Please recycle your used bottles. My friend, Vinisha suggested a great website for recycling ideas. It’s http://www.instructables.com/contest/keepthebottle/

-Refuse free bottled water that is dispensed liberally at events, parties and functions and avoid providing them when you are organising an event. Hire or install a water dispenser instead.

- Encourage your company not to distribute bottled waters at seminars and conferences and place water dispensers instead

Your saying NO to bottled water can make a huge difference in reducing a host of environmental ills, conserving oil and reducing carbon emissions. More importantly, you will help in conserving water that belongs to communities, and in ensuring water quality that belongs to future generations.

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