The Green Magazine Issue and Good Magazine

I love magazines, and in my constant perusing of the newsstand at my neighborhood bookseller (operated by two neat local chaps, Misters Barnes and Noble) I notice the increasing appearance of dedicated “Green issues” from a cross-section of editorial genres.

Some are natural fits, like the April Outside magazine, with a preppy/outdoorsy Governor Arnold on the cover and a fantastic Tim Dickinson article about the humorously compelling Grist.org, founder Chip Filler and Grist's irreverent approach to all things green.

Others unsurprisingly sex-up the topic with celebrity focused coverage of the Green attitude, like the April Vanity Fair (not their first annual Green issue), with a preppy/outdoorsy Leo DiCaprio (and the assertion of his taking the Green baton from Al Gore), and Robert Redford and Prince Charles and water activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Green anti-hero Rush Limbaugh on the inside, plus a fantastic Robert Levine spread on electric cars.

(For the record, you won’t find an ounce of cynicism here toward the celebrity pandering that featuring Leo and others exemplifies. Every movement needs a poster child and fortunately the Green one has several, and counting. Any awareness is good awareness, one would think, at least at this point.)

And still others size up the investment potential of the Green business opportunity, like the April Fortune, with big-business slanted coverage of "Green Giants" and a fantastic Susan Casey profile of cover subject Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia and legendary outdoor lifestyle entrepreneur (plus more Green Governor coverage).

There have also been plenty of more topical magazines diving deeper into specific aspects of Green, like Dwell and it’s emphasis on modular housing, including a story on LivingHomes, one of the original inspirations of The Optimist, in one of my favorite issues of any magazine, the November 2006 issue.

One final magazine honorable mention: Good, which isn’t directly focused on green, business, or green business, but is worth mentioning. Good itself is a good company: it is for-profit, but donates all subscription revenue ($20 annual) to organizations like Room to Read, Generation Engage and the World Wildlife Fund. While in business school last year at Pepperdine's Graziadio School of Business and Management, some students and I co-founded an organization that we were going to call The Good Business Lab. More on school and the student group to come, but in short we didn't go with "Good" because founder Ben Goldhirsh and co. had already scooped it up. "Good" is a word that still resonates strongly with us at The Optimist, and you'll see it used often because there's no better word to describe what it means, so kudos to Good magazine for laying it out with a word that hopefully becomes ubiquitous in business (as in: that's a Good company!) and elsewhere.