Sustainable Development | Kendra Pierre-Louis | Tuesday 9th February 2010

Four months into my first stint living abroad, I was desperate.

I wanted a taco, or a nice bowl of pho, maybe some shrimp shumai, a deep fried Oreo, a cookie dough cupcake the size of my head, all washed down with a fruit smoothie roughly the size of a small island nation.

In other words, I wanted a taste of my home nation (and city) of New York.

But I

Leading News and Opinion

	When scientists become priests Sustainable Development \| Sara Wolcott \| Tuesday 9th February 2010 I'm greatly saddened by the current controversy over how reliable the IPCC is - and the IPCC's response. I don't think I need to go on about how great the IPCC is on this website - I don't hear many conversations here discussing whether or not climate change is happening. Though maybe that's a sign of how little 'we' - those who 'believe' in climate change are distant from those who do not believe. When I looked through some recent online environmental photos, I was surprised at how many of them related to climate change. The blossoms pictured here are blooming earlier than usual, which is being attributed to global warming. The American pica pictured below has become the latest symbol of climate change (though still nothing rivals the drowning polar bear). Obama's administration just declared that the pica is resilient enough to survive 3 degrees of global warming. Scientists from environmental groups say this is ridiculous - the pica populations are already dwindling. I'd go with the pica being unable to survive - and its worth reminding us all that people, such as many of the (now dead) victims of hurricane Katrina, also a population native to the Un...

	Climate Change Communication Challenges Part 1: Language Climate Change \| Brian Kahn \| Tuesday 9th February 2010 A 2009 survey of Earth scientists shows that 90% of the 3146 respondents believe the Earth's temperature is warming. Of those surveyed, 82% believe human activity is a significant contributing factor. The numbers are even more stark for self-identified climatologists. Of the 79 individuals, 96% believe temperatures are rising and 95% believe humans are the cause. This indicates a strong scientific consensus on climate change. Yet public opinion lags far behind these numbers, with only 57% of US citizens saying they believe climate change is real. Why the discrepancy? Part of it is due to a communication problem. This three part series will examine some of the challenges of communicating climate change. This first part examines the "language barrier." Next week's installment will explore the media's role in communicating (and not communicating) information. The final installment will discuss the challenges of visualizing climate change causes and effects. Two weeks ago, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) released a report on the climate change policy debate authored by an unlikely source: Frank ...

	Top Three Corporate Social Responsiblity (CSR) Principles to Live By Corporate Social Responsibility \| Amelia Timbers \| Tuesday 9th February 2010 CSR is both cool and vexing in that it has emerged organically, representing ideas formed jointly by corporations and NGOs. It's a difficult topic because of the absence of unified leadership; no single thought leader, academic work, law or other authoritative sources of definition tell us what CSR is. This article volunteers three CSR principles that should underpin all CSR policy. 1. CSR: Do No Harm Borrowing from the medical profession, "Do No Harm" applies to business in that CSR's most basic form means that companies should not knowingly inflict harm to create profits. This fits traditional business theory; businesses are supposed to create value. Causing harm undercuts and may overwhelm the utility of any value a business creates. Biofuels are a prime example of this harm-cancels-value idea. Initially, biofuels were touted as a silver bullet substitute for oil, prized for their potential to slow or reverse climate change. Yet profit-oriented biofuel crop cultivation motivated destructive agricultural policies and deforestation. The harm to the climate caused by the deforestation cancelled out whatever positive climate effect biofuels might...

	Hi, my Name is Amelia and I'm a CSR-oholic. Corporate Social Responsibility \| Amelia Timbers \| Tuesday 9th February 2010 Hey there CSR Editorial Crowd! You can read my bio, but here's an additional truncated life story. I started out in environmental nonprofits as a tyke, and fisheries specifically. After grinding otoliths (Google for fascinating explanation) to save salmon for just long enough to send me over the edge, I realized that salmon aren't just endangered- they're endangered as the result of "meta issues". Fast forward ten years, in my pursuit of the root of the problem I landed in a JD/MBA at Northeastern School of Law in Boston. After long and contemplative study, I feel confident that corporations (I'll throw in economics as well) have a lot to do with the root of the problem, and will also be the root of the solution. That's why I am passionate about corporate law, governance, finance and social responsibility. I'd say I'm equally and relatedly passionate about triple bottom line/ social enterprises, or, nonprofits that are so efficient they trick me into thinking they're actually businesses. Starting this week, my humble posts will join Madeline's great work on the CSR editorial thread. I will post about: CSR through the eyes of the l...

	GreenXchange: The Sustainability of a Green Patent Commons Corporate Social Responsibility \| Madeline Ravich \| Tuesday 9th February 2010 For anybody who has not yet heard about the latest in sustainability technology-sharing, I urge you to read Marcia Stepanek's blog post on the GreenXchange. Marcia does a nice job summarizing the idea of the GreenXchange but also poses an interesting question: "Is it possible -- and/or desireable -- for companies to team up in this way for the common good?" Here's the basic idea behind the GreenXchange. Companies with patents join forces via a website which allows users to find out about new technologies they can purchase. While Nike gets the credit for initiating the idea, the range of players drawn into the development of this "patent commons" is extensive. Several organizations--- among them creative commons, salesforce.com, 2degrees, nGenera, and Yahoo! --- collaborate to support different aspects of the platform (BTW, you know you've stumbled on something hip when all company names listed either begin with lower-case letters or end with exclamation points!) The GreenXchange website's value proposition is that it "brings together companies, people, and ideas to create sustainable change that affects us all." I wa...

	Career Planning Involves Thinking Outside the Box Responsible Careers \| Cynthia Stringer \| Tuesday 9th February 2010 President Obama announced in February that the federal government would spend $8 billion developing a nationwide high-speed train system in the United States. This investment the White House says is needed to help create more jobs and develop long-term economic growth. What do you think? Having worked for Amtrak doing a training engagement for two years I know the importance of the rail system and the possibility it has in our lives. The investment is being made through state grants, coming from the government's $862 billion economic stimulus package. The overall, projects and planning involving the rail corridors will take place in 31 states, according to a White House statement. More than 30 rail manufacturers have agreed to establish or expand U.S. operations. Given this there will be new jobs and opportunities made available to people with the appropriate skills. Why not explore a new career in the railroad. Each of the corridors identified by the administration last year are between 100 and 600 miles long which means a great deal of job needs and work opportunities all around the United States. Take a look at the rail...

	Obama setting some standards for US sustainability Sustainable Development \| Sara Wolcott \| Monday 8th February 2010 OOOOOOhhhh, did you notice it? Big news, but a lot of newsie types are not covering it. It was on the Justmeans board. That's where I found out about it. Obama is setting a new bar for the fed gov't. He issues an Executive Order - on energy constraints. It calls for each federal agency to embark on a concerted program of sustainability over the next decade. This is big.He might have received a lot of flack for not being more supportive for climate change but this is giving him greater credibility - and making a significant contribution to reducing the carbon emissions of the country's largest polluter, the federal government. For the first time, agencies will have to figure out what their carbon foot print is, report it, and make plans to reduce it. I bet many, many companies are going to start to line up to help the big beast of the Fed think about what it is doing to the planet and put it on paper (and eventually, online). I'm also looking forward to what some branches of the US government come up with - what is the US military, for example, going to do to reduce their carbon footprint and aim towards sustainable...

	M-health collaborations for global health Health \| Ano Lobb \| Monday 8th February 2010 You've probably heard the term "E-health," used in this forum and elsewhere to refer to things such as electronic health records, but a possibly more interesting advancement from a public health standpoint is the burgeoning area of M-health. M-health is the use of mobile hand-held devices, especially text and web-enabled cell phones, for the delivery of health information and messaging. Some 3.3 billion people, one of every two people on the planet, owns at least one cell phone. In the rural and developing world, cell phones are the fastest growing means of communication. Market penetration in the developed world is around 90 percent, and in the developing world about one-third of that, and growing. Even among the poor, the cell pone is becoming ubiquitous. M-health collaborations are occurring in numerous countries, addressing a multitude of health conditions. Often they provide reminders about healthy activities, sources for disease-specific information. While high quality assessments of their effectiveness are still forthcoming, there is reason to be hopeful based on the limited data on outcomes and process that are available. For example, Project M...

	EPA Investigates One Town's Public Health Mystery Health \| Sara Libby \| Monday 8th February 2010 The term "public health scare" is usually trotted out to refer to disease outbreaks like the recent pandemic of H1N1, or to food-related issues like when E. coli is found in mass-produced foods like spinach or peanut butter. But one small town in California is seeing a public health scare manifest itself in a much different, perhaps scarier way: a spate of birth defects. The small town of about 1,500 residents has had at least six children born between 2007 and 2008 with facial deformities, and other birth defects, including brain damage. About half of those children have died. Recently, the federal Environmental Protection Agency waded into the issue, touring the town and hoping to determine what is causing the problems - and taking a look in particular at a nearby landfill that is one of the largest toxic waste dumping sites west of the Mississippi. Officials were urged to act on the public health crisis after California's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and other health agencies called on the government to investigate. The incident has re-introduced the concept of environmental justice, and how race and income factor into public health. Kettleman C...

	Sustainability and You: What Have You Done for the Earth Lately? Sustainable Development \| Kendra Pierre-Louis \| Monday 8th February 2010 It's easy to talk about what's wrong with the planet. For example: Global climate change is warming the environment rapidly irreparably shifting weather patterns, rain patterns, and bringing many species and ecosystems to the brink of collapse. The Pacific Ocean is home to an man-made island of floating plastic and debris twice the size of the US state of Texas. The rate of biodiversity loss is increasing rather than decreasing with each passing year. So what? Or rather, what are you going to do about it? It's very easy to mope, and whine and complain about the problems with the world. It is very easy to point fingers at those who should be doing something, but aren't. But at the end of the day expending all of our energy complaining a problem without lifting a finger to fix the problem does little to bring about solutions, although it does help to assuage guilt and give us inflated feelings of superiority. Theodore Roosevelt said, "It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done better." I worr...

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	When scientists become priests Sustainable Development \| Sara Wolcott \| Tuesday 9th February 2010 I'm greatly saddened by the current controversy over how reliable the IPCC is - and the IPCC's response. I don't think I need to go on about how great the IPCC is on this website - I don't hear many conversations here discussing whether or not climate change is happening. Though maybe that's a sign of how little 'we' - those who 'believe' in climate change are distant from those who do not believe. When I looked through some recent online environmental photos, I was surprised at how many of them related to climate change. The blossoms pictured here are blooming earlier than usual, which is being attributed to global warming. The American pica pictured below has become the latest symbol of climate change (though still nothing rivals the drowning polar bear). Obama's administration just declared that the pica is resilient enough to survive 3 degrees of global warming. Scientists from environmental groups say this is ridiculous - the pica populations are already dwindling. I'd go with the pica being unable to survive - and its worth reminding us all that people, such as many of the (now dead) victims of hurricane Katrina, also a population native to the Un...

	Climate Change Communication Challenges Part 1: Language Climate Change \| Brian Kahn \| Tuesday 9th February 2010 A 2009 survey of Earth scientists shows that 90% of the 3146 respondents believe the Earth's temperature is warming. Of those surveyed, 82% believe human activity is a significant contributing factor. The numbers are even more stark for self-identified climatologists. Of the 79 individuals, 96% believe temperatures are rising and 95% believe humans are the cause. This indicates a strong scientific consensus on climate change. Yet public opinion lags far behind these numbers, with only 57% of US citizens saying they believe climate change is real. Why the discrepancy? Part of it is due to a communication problem. This three part series will examine some of the challenges of communicating climate change. This first part examines the "language barrier." Next week's installment will explore the media's role in communicating (and not communicating) information. The final installment will discuss the challenges of visualizing climate change causes and effects. Two weeks ago, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) released a report on the climate change policy debate authored by an unlikely source: Frank ...

	Top Three Corporate Social Responsiblity (CSR) Principles to Live By Corporate Social Responsibility \| Amelia Timbers \| Tuesday 9th February 2010 CSR is both cool and vexing in that it has emerged organically, representing ideas formed jointly by corporations and NGOs. It's a difficult topic because of the absence of unified leadership; no single thought leader, academic work, law or other authoritative sources of definition tell us what CSR is. This article volunteers three CSR principles that should underpin all CSR policy. 1. CSR: Do No Harm Borrowing from the medical profession, "Do No Harm" applies to business in that CSR's most basic form means that companies should not knowingly inflict harm to create profits. This fits traditional business theory; businesses are supposed to create value. Causing harm undercuts and may overwhelm the utility of any value a business creates. Biofuels are a prime example of this harm-cancels-value idea. Initially, biofuels were touted as a silver bullet substitute for oil, prized for their potential to slow or reverse climate change. Yet profit-oriented biofuel crop cultivation motivated destructive agricultural policies and deforestation. The harm to the climate caused by the deforestation cancelled out whatever positive climate effect biofuels might...

	Hi, my Name is Amelia and I'm a CSR-oholic. Corporate Social Responsibility \| Amelia Timbers \| Tuesday 9th February 2010 Hey there CSR Editorial Crowd! You can read my bio, but here's an additional truncated life story. I started out in environmental nonprofits as a tyke, and fisheries specifically. After grinding otoliths (Google for fascinating explanation) to save salmon for just long enough to send me over the edge, I realized that salmon aren't just endangered- they're endangered as the result of "meta issues". Fast forward ten years, in my pursuit of the root of the problem I landed in a JD/MBA at Northeastern School of Law in Boston. After long and contemplative study, I feel confident that corporations (I'll throw in economics as well) have a lot to do with the root of the problem, and will also be the root of the solution. That's why I am passionate about corporate law, governance, finance and social responsibility. I'd say I'm equally and relatedly passionate about triple bottom line/ social enterprises, or, nonprofits that are so efficient they trick me into thinking they're actually businesses. Starting this week, my humble posts will join Madeline's great work on the CSR editorial thread. I will post about: CSR through the eyes of the l...

	GreenXchange: The Sustainability of a Green Patent Commons Corporate Social Responsibility \| Madeline Ravich \| Tuesday 9th February 2010 For anybody who has not yet heard about the latest in sustainability technology-sharing, I urge you to read Marcia Stepanek's blog post on the GreenXchange. Marcia does a nice job summarizing the idea of the GreenXchange but also poses an interesting question: "Is it possible -- and/or desireable -- for companies to team up in this way for the common good?" Here's the basic idea behind the GreenXchange. Companies with patents join forces via a website which allows users to find out about new technologies they can purchase. While Nike gets the credit for initiating the idea, the range of players drawn into the development of this "patent commons" is extensive. Several organizations--- among them creative commons, salesforce.com, 2degrees, nGenera, and Yahoo! --- collaborate to support different aspects of the platform (BTW, you know you've stumbled on something hip when all company names listed either begin with lower-case letters or end with exclamation points!) The GreenXchange website's value proposition is that it "brings together companies, people, and ideas to create sustainable change that affects us all." I wa...

	Career Planning Involves Thinking Outside the Box Responsible Careers \| Cynthia Stringer \| Tuesday 9th February 2010 President Obama announced in February that the federal government would spend $8 billion developing a nationwide high-speed train system in the United States. This investment the White House says is needed to help create more jobs and develop long-term economic growth. What do you think? Having worked for Amtrak doing a training engagement for two years I know the importance of the rail system and the possibility it has in our lives. The investment is being made through state grants, coming from the government's $862 billion economic stimulus package. The overall, projects and planning involving the rail corridors will take place in 31 states, according to a White House statement. More than 30 rail manufacturers have agreed to establish or expand U.S. operations. Given this there will be new jobs and opportunities made available to people with the appropriate skills. Why not explore a new career in the railroad. Each of the corridors identified by the administration last year are between 100 and 600 miles long which means a great deal of job needs and work opportunities all around the United States. Take a look at the rail...

	Obama setting some standards for US sustainability Sustainable Development \| Sara Wolcott \| Monday 8th February 2010 OOOOOOhhhh, did you notice it? Big news, but a lot of newsie types are not covering it. It was on the Justmeans board. That's where I found out about it. Obama is setting a new bar for the fed gov't. He issues an Executive Order - on energy constraints. It calls for each federal agency to embark on a concerted program of sustainability over the next decade. This is big.He might have received a lot of flack for not being more supportive for climate change but this is giving him greater credibility - and making a significant contribution to reducing the carbon emissions of the country's largest polluter, the federal government. For the first time, agencies will have to figure out what their carbon foot print is, report it, and make plans to reduce it. I bet many, many companies are going to start to line up to help the big beast of the Fed think about what it is doing to the planet and put it on paper (and eventually, online). I'm also looking forward to what some branches of the US government come up with - what is the US military, for example, going to do to reduce their carbon footprint and aim towards sustainable...

	M-health collaborations for global health Health \| Ano Lobb \| Monday 8th February 2010 You've probably heard the term "E-health," used in this forum and elsewhere to refer to things such as electronic health records, but a possibly more interesting advancement from a public health standpoint is the burgeoning area of M-health. M-health is the use of mobile hand-held devices, especially text and web-enabled cell phones, for the delivery of health information and messaging. Some 3.3 billion people, one of every two people on the planet, owns at least one cell phone. In the rural and developing world, cell phones are the fastest growing means of communication. Market penetration in the developed world is around 90 percent, and in the developing world about one-third of that, and growing. Even among the poor, the cell pone is becoming ubiquitous. M-health collaborations are occurring in numerous countries, addressing a multitude of health conditions. Often they provide reminders about healthy activities, sources for disease-specific information. While high quality assessments of their effectiveness are still forthcoming, there is reason to be hopeful based on the limited data on outcomes and process that are available. For example, Project M...

	EPA Investigates One Town's Public Health Mystery Health \| Sara Libby \| Monday 8th February 2010 The term "public health scare" is usually trotted out to refer to disease outbreaks like the recent pandemic of H1N1, or to food-related issues like when E. coli is found in mass-produced foods like spinach or peanut butter. But one small town in California is seeing a public health scare manifest itself in a much different, perhaps scarier way: a spate of birth defects. The small town of about 1,500 residents has had at least six children born between 2007 and 2008 with facial deformities, and other birth defects, including brain damage. About half of those children have died. Recently, the federal Environmental Protection Agency waded into the issue, touring the town and hoping to determine what is causing the problems - and taking a look in particular at a nearby landfill that is one of the largest toxic waste dumping sites west of the Mississippi. Officials were urged to act on the public health crisis after California's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and other health agencies called on the government to investigate. The incident has re-introduced the concept of environmental justice, and how race and income factor into public health. Kettleman C...

	Sustainability and You: What Have You Done for the Earth Lately? Sustainable Development \| Kendra Pierre-Louis \| Monday 8th February 2010 It's easy to talk about what's wrong with the planet. For example: Global climate change is warming the environment rapidly irreparably shifting weather patterns, rain patterns, and bringing many species and ecosystems to the brink of collapse. The Pacific Ocean is home to an man-made island of floating plastic and debris twice the size of the US state of Texas. The rate of biodiversity loss is increasing rather than decreasing with each passing year. So what? Or rather, what are you going to do about it? It's very easy to mope, and whine and complain about the problems with the world. It is very easy to point fingers at those who should be doing something, but aren't. But at the end of the day expending all of our energy complaining a problem without lifting a finger to fix the problem does little to bring about solutions, although it does help to assuage guilt and give us inflated feelings of superiority. Theodore Roosevelt said, "It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done better." I worr...