We had a great meeting last night and wanted to keep you in the loop. To summarize, we discussed what we want our mission/vision statement to say, what key topics we want to hit on as this group moves forward, what we consider our core values to be, and how to structure our meetings together.

Proposed structure:

Meet 2nd Thursday of each month. Next meeting dates: July 12th, August 9th, Sept. 13th

1st Half Hour of mtg: debrief of the previous month and action items

2nd Half Hour of mtg: education and discussion on new topic

3rd Half Hour of mtg: discuss what we can do in the next 30 days in relation to the new topic.

Hot topics we’d like to explore:

1. Sustainable Living

2. Local Poverty

3. 2008 Election: Voter registration & intentional citizenship

4. International Trade Justice

5. Genocide / War

6. Capitalism

7. Biodiversity

8. Climate Crisis / change

9. Health Care System(s)

10. The Religion of Islam (Extremism, etc)

11. Community Development (practices, community organization)

12. Agribusiness / Agriculture / Food Systems

13. Immigration

Mission Statement (it’s not final, but we like it a lot- give feedback!)

“We are about… educating ourselves about social, economical, environmental, and political issues in order to more responsibly take ACTION as followers of Christ.”

Core Values (also not final, please give imput!)

1. Educate ourselves (in regards to the 4 major themes: Economics, Politics, Social, and Environment)

2. Responsibly take ACTION (for ourselves, for others)

3. Seeking wisdom through the Bible and prayer

4. Engage the Church and the community

Now… What does “success” look like like for each of these core values if they are indeed our core values? Discuss.

Our upcoming “The Next Step” gathering will be April 12th at 6:30pm at Bidwell Pres. This month’s theme of discussion will be local issues of Chico. In particular, poverty and homelessness (Jessica and Dave correct me if I am wrong about that). We’ll hear from guest speaker Jim Culp, pastor at Orchard Church. If you come across any interesting information about Chico and these issues, please post them.

Oh, and we also hope to watch a slide show from those of you who attended the California Green Summit last month! GOOOOO Sustainability!!!

We’ll spend about half our time on globalization, and watch a clip from The Corporation. In the second half we’ll be discussing our group’s identity and direction.

10 min: Globalization Powerpoint

10 min: excerpt from The Corporation

15-25 min: Reactions & Discussion

10-15 min: What are we doing here?

20 min: 30 day goals

10 min: Group Leadership

15 min: Plan for April meeting.

email: davecarlton209 [at] yahoo [dot] com

Another piece that I found educational about The Corporation was its explanation of a word economists use called “externalities.” Borrowing from dictionary.com, an externality is “An incidental condition that may affect a course of action: ‘Our economic system treats environmental degradation as an externality—a cost that does not enter into the conventional arithmetic that determines how we use our resources’ (Barry Commoner).”

Video below.

For a much better explanation of what an externality is, watch this.

That pie in the face really seems to drive the point home. As part of doing business, a corporation pays for raw materials, labor, marketing, and so forth. But when it comes to social costs and impacts of that system, it lets someone else pay the bill.

This comparison also struck me:

A corporation is an externalizing machine in the same way that a shark is a killing machine. Each one is designed in a very particular way to accomplish certain objectives. In the achievement of those objectives there isn’t any question of
malevolence or will. The enterprise has within it, and the shark has within it, thosecharacteristics that enable it do that for which it was designed.

I’m sure that if corporations had feelings, they wouldn’t like being compared to sharks. But at the same time, the comparison points out that it isn’t about corporations being “evil.” The shark doesn’t “want” to kill people, that’s just what it does. That what it was designed to do. Corporations were designed to minimize costs. That’s what they do. As much as they seem like evil oppressors, they often end up stuck in the system (at the mercy of Friedman’s Electronic Herd), compelled by their shareholders to make profit now (and always). As Ray Anderson explains:

So the pressure’s on the corporation to deliver results now. And to externalize any costs that this unwary or uncaring public will allow it to externalize.

Stopping the abuses of corporate power has to, in some way, recognize this need that corporations have to satisfy their shareholders with consistent profits. The shareholders willingness to accept large externalized social costs in exchange for an investment that looks more profitable in the short term is a large part of the problem.

I also had a moment last weekend where I went out running errands, and planned on doing my grocery shopping, but halfway through I looked down in the car, and there were no cloth bags. I thought about going back home to get them, but then I thought that driving more would defeat the whole purpose of using less resources. So I waited and went grocery shopping another day. I still think I ended up using more resources from driving than I saved by not using grocery bags. But, in the long run, it is good that I’m integrating cloth bags into my daily routine.

On that note, I should point out that I haven’t purchased a Chico Bag, or other reusable bag. Not that I’m against them or anything, but since I’m trying to save resources, I should use the cloth bags I already have (like my old backpack).

I’ve also noticed that there are some cases where I still end up using grocery bags. Like in the produce section, where I have to put those apples in something, and just grab the plastic bags below. I suppose that counts as a “grocery bag.” I also let a clerk talk me into using a bag for some chicken (so I didn’t get salmonella all over everything). So there is room for improvement. I’ve probably got a small bag somewhere that I can use for produce. Preventing salmonella will be a harder task, I don’t quite know what I’ll do about that.

Anyone else have environmental stories to update?

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.

One of the big changes that happened at the end of the Cold War is that it suddenly got a lot easier to get a loan. It used to be that you had to either know someone on the inside at the bank or already be independently wealthy to get a loan. In the 1980s and 90s lenders discovered that loans to ordinary Joes and Janes who passed their screening process did not end up in default any more than the loans they were already giving to people inside the banking circle.

Combine this with the fall of Soviet communism and improvements communication technology, and suddenly there’s a lot of money being loaned to places all over the world. Developing countries wanted a piece of this new money, as it promised improvement for their quality of life. And the global financial community was happy to lend it.

But it wasn’t lending out of the goodness of its heart, it was lending because it intended to make money in the long run. If economic conditions showed that it might lose money, it would pull its investments and move them elsewhere, potentially causing economic collapse (as happened in Thailand in 1998). These investors would run from one corner of the globe to other, pulling and pushing investments in ways they thought profitable. Friedman says these global investors are like cattle, because the anxieties of one investor can often trigger massive actions by many others (for example, “Uh, oh! Charles Schwab is pulling out of Singapore, there must be something wrong going on there, let’s pull our money out too). Friedman calls this group The Electronic Herd.

The herd is powerful because it has lots of money that it is willing to lend to others. Once invested, it has the ability to sell off its investments if conditions in the country are no longer favorable for them. To get the herd’s money, you have to make yourself look attractive to it. That means fulfilling a whole list of economic requirements, including:

making the private sector the primary engine of its economic growth, maintaining a low rate of inflation and price stability, shrinking the size of its state bureaucracy, maintaining as close to a balanced budget as possible, if not a surplus, eliminating and lowering tariffs on imported goods, removing restrictions on foreign investment, getting rid of quotas and domestic monopolies, increasing exports, privatizing state-owned industries and utilities, deregulating capital markets… eliminating government corruption, subsidies, and kickbacks as much as possible, opening its banking and telecommunications systems to private ownership… (p 105)

Friedman calls this list of conditions The Golden Straitjacket. It’s a straitjacket, because many countries find it restrictive. Even in the US, we’ve had some bad experiences with deregulation (like the California Energy Crisis in 2001). Things like privatization, tariffs and balanced budgets are often fiercely contested. But countries put on the straitjacket, because with it comes the promise of more capital from the Electronic Herd, and with that, the promise of more prosperity for their country.

I’ve often complained that the Electronic Herd, in its pursuit of profit, ignores critically important social concerns. This Herd has led to things like sweatshop labor, clear-cutting the rain-forest, and enormous environmental pollution. To this Friedman has a couple of things to say. First, don’t look for alternatives to free-market capitalism. After taking a look at some of these alternatives, he concludes:

There is only one thing to say about those alternatives: They didn’t work. And the people who rendered that judgement were the people who lived under them. So with the collapse of communism in Europe, in the Soviet Union, and China– and all the walls that protected these systems– those people who are unhappy with the Darwinian brutality of free market capitalism don’t have any ready ideological alternative now. When it comes to the question of which system today is most effective at generating rising standards of living, the historical debate is over. The answer is free market capitalism. (p. 104)

It kind of stings me to admit it, but Friedman is right here. As much as I am unhappy with “the Darwinian brutality of free market capitalism” (and boy howdy, I am), I don’t really have an alternative. I’d like CEOs to recognize the benefit of providing a living wage for their workers, and producing their products in an environmentally sustainable manner, but I don’t have a suggestion for another system, other than a regulated free market, that makes them comply.

A little later in the book, Friedman starts to raise this issue.

Therefore, when it comes to enforcing global norms– for the environment, human rights, financial interactions or worker conditions– the shaper is not going to be a global government, at least not any time soon. But what then do we do? We can’t ignore these problems and we don’t just want to leave them to the marketplace to solve…. How do we manage and regulate issues that we really value as human beings and communities, but without some global cop to do it for us?

The answer is to understand that in a world of networks, individuals, companies, communities [and others]… all have the power to be shapers– to shape human value chains. And when you are the shaper of a coalition in support of a certain human value, you would be amazed what you can do without global government to create better global governance… It requires thinking about how one can exploit the Internet, the power of consumers, and the exposure of multinational companies who need business all over the world and therefore need to protect their brand names all over the world. (p 206)

Friedman does seem to make this all sound a little easier than I think it is. It’s not like Nike will let its sweatshop workers unionize just because we threaten them with a little bad publicity. At the same time, activists can now use the new technology of globalization to advance their causes, and I suppose that counts for something.