UPDATE: In exciting news, Ray Anderson will be in Sacramento on Tuesday March 13 at 1:30 pm as part of the Green California Summit. Contact me if you’re interested. I’ll be taking a headcount at Thursday’s meeting.

Fortunately for this friar, just as I was losing steam slogging through The Lexus and the Olive Tree, my buddy Josh shows up out of nowhere with a documentary about globalization and its impact. The movie, The Corporation (trailer here), raises all kinds of great points and topics for discussion here.

I’m going to kick off this series with the man who really steals the show throughout the movie, Ray Anderson. He is the CEO of Interface, Inc, the world’s largest commercial carpet manufacturer. His company has also set the goal of becoming truly sustainable by 2020. There’s good reason to skeptical when corporations talk like this. Often they just want to make it sound like they’re doing good, without actually making much effort (in environmental areas, this is called greenwashing). However, when I took a quick look at Interface’s reports on their progress, it looks very encouraging (landfill waste is way down, and their making significant strides in renewable energy and greenhouse gas emissions).

Video Clips, and pithy quotes, and a sustainability love-fest are below the fold.

First, watch this series of clips from Anderson’s performance in the movie. Pithy quotes, with my running commentary, are below.

For twenty-one years I never gave a thought to what we were doing to the Earth, or taking from the Earth, in the making of our products.

Later, in response to customers asking what Interface was doing for the environment, the company formed a task force to “frame answers for our customers.”

They asked me if I would speak to that group and give them a kick off speech, to launch this new task force with an environmental vision. And I didn’t have an environmental vision. I did not want to make that speech.

There’s a bluntness to these statements. His willingness to admit that he was wrong goes a long towards giving him credibilty with me. Then, he’s able to explain how his thinking has changed.

Unless we can make carpets sustainably, perhaps we don’t have a place in a sustainable world. But neither does anybody else producing products unsustainably.

One day, early in this journey, it dawned on me that the way I’ve been running Interface was the way of the plunderer. Plundering something that’s not mine. Something that belongs to every creature on earth. And I said to myself, “my goodness, the day must come when this is illegal. When plundering is not allowed, it must come.” So I said to myself, “My goodness, someday people like me will end up in jail.”

And then, speaking out, to a group of civic and business leaders in North Carolina:

Do I know you well enough to call you fellow plunderers? There is not an industrial company on Earth, not an institution of any kind, not mine, not yours, not anyones, that is sustainable. I stand convicted by me myself alone, not by anyone else, as a plunderer of the Earth. But not by our civilization’s definition. By our civilization’s definition, I’m a captain of industry, in the eyes of many a kind of modern-day hero, but really… really…

And finally, showing some vision and passion about the issue:

It is our plan, it remains our plan to climb Mt. Sustainability. That mountain is higher than Everest, infinitely higher than Everest, far more difficult to scale. That point at the top, symbolizing zero footprint. But before I die, I want to see the top, the view from there.

Color me impressed, Mr. Anderson.

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