Last Minute Green and Good Gifts

You're still Christmas shopping, aren't you? That's okay, so am I. Plenty of time!

On the web, there are more resources on the web than you or are I know to help us out of this fix. But this Christmas you want to do something special and buy your friends and family something special- a green gift, or a gift with a Good company behind it.

Why? Because you are a Considerate Consumer.

Inhabitat's holiday gift guide
Evo - green stuff, rated
ThisNext's green Christmas gift guide
Green and Greener
Treehugger's guide
Etsy, a directory of handmade things from all over the world

And case you don't have time to consult one of these many guides, go with The Optimist's favorite gifts of 2007 (sorted by price point in ascending order!)

The Bulb- it's better than your standard
Good Magazine- good reading about good stuff!
T-shirts from Save the Ta-Tas
TOMS Shoes- buy one, one gets donated!
Freitag- stylish messenger bags made from recycled transportation tarps
The Laptop project- buy one, one gets donated! (I love that idea)
Tesla Motors - high end sportster
LivingHomes- amazing, low eco-footprint, LEED Platinum homes


Happy Holidays!

More on the Green Backlash

For another perspective on the potential "green backlash," check out this post from Celso Oliveira, who dishes on Dell, GE and the potential consumer backlash of blatantly PR-driven green programs.

I thought about this not once but two other times today, aside from a quick chat with Celso:

1) Talking to a colleague and Civic Hybrid driver, who cynically acknowledged the electricity requirements of hybrids like hers. We then started talking about hydrogen vehicles, high end electric cars like the Tesla roadster...and I even found myself again quoting Michael Crooke at LOHAS 2006: It's not enough to be eco-groovy.

2) Watching The Office and Scrubs tonight on NBC. During commercials they promoted next week's Green-themed episodes of Chuck, Heroes and 30 Rock, with a guest spot by Al Gore.

Cementing my moderate outlook on all things Green, I'm not nearly as cynical of NBC's attention grabbing programming stunt as I am of its name ("Green is Universal," a silly pun nodding toward NBC's parent.) Like Celso I'll conclude that it's up to the consumer to distinguish between PR and a genuine green effort.

Arrived: The Inevitable Green Backlash

Recent front page news on my iGoogle gives me more current foretelling of the inevitable backlash against Green. I suppose that's how you know a movement has gained enough momentum or "critical mass" to have legitimately arrived- when critics start cropping up and saying, "Yeah, but..."

I'll always come back to the Michael Crooke comment, "It's not enough to be eco-groovy." It's not a justification of lower standards on what defines "green" improvement but an admission that we'll take incremental steps- each supported by a viable business model- on our way to being truly green.

Still, it's worth checking out the flipside:

Fast Company ponders whether carbon offsets are a cop-out and then concludes, "Ditch the guilt. You aren't a sinner for buying offsets."

Better still, Fast Company explores the commercial exploitation of LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) and concludes with Rob Watson's (the "father" of LEED) statement that it's time to "redouble our efforts" in defining LEED. Great story by Anya Kamenetz

Inc., currently my favorite business rag, astutely (ahem) surveys job seekers and finds they are none too concerned about the green-ness of their employees. (By the way, Seth Godin puts surveys in their proper perspective.)

And BusinessWeek's Ben Elgin uncovers green corporate pioneer Auden Schendler's mounting frustration in the crusade to make "corporate sustainability" both a good and a profitable thing, with his employer, the Aspen Skiing Company, as his living lab.

PS: Great magazines like Fast Company and Inc. are ALL OVER Green (see Fast Company's 50 Ways To Green Your Business , also this month), so the stories above are really nothing more than objective counterpoints to one of their favorite topics.

Fast Company September: Microsoft in the Schools

Fast Company nails yet again on a profile of Microsoft's collaboration with Philly schools on a technology-driven school of the future. I'm not too editorially balanced to admit that education is my favorite of all Optimist topics even though Green usually takes center stage.

My favorite angle of the story is the idea that the companies who have funded free-form, technology-oriented programs that move secondary education beyond "batch processing" toward white collar career development (from pioneering Citigroup and American Express to Google, Boeing, Intel and Chevron) can't simply point to a percentage of pilot students who have become future employees...but that progams like the National Academy Foundation (funded by such companies) CAN point to dramatically higher graduation rates, college achievement and career stickiness.

We should probably just submit to doing a monthly recap of Fast Company's best stories per issue, as this month's issue also features a great story on one-time green whiz kid Adam Werbach's (former 23 year-old head of the Sierra Club) date-with-the-devil, his controversial paid consulting work with Wal-Mart's sustainability efforts.

Google: Doing Good, Locally

Google. Do No Evil. Google.org. There are so many "Optimist" facets to one of the most fascinating and fastest growing companies out there (and one with unbelievable brand-building momentum, according to Interbrand.) Here's another:

If you believe that small business is the life blood of this country, which we do, then this project, Google Local Business Referrals, is an example of a technology company doing good while probably also doing well. Google is enlisting paid local representatives to take digital photos and collect information about local businesses for integration with Google Maps (with the participation and permission of the business, of course.) This is a win for the small business, the end user looking for a solid referral, and certainly, in some way, Google.

If promoting small business doesn't meet your definition of doing good, consider:

• Free AdWords advertising for non-profits through Google Grants
• The business world-leading solar installation at the Google campus (see BoingBoing)
• How Googlers and non-Googlers like the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum have teamed up to use Maps to track Darfur and the genocide tragedies of the region (also see StopGenocideNow.org)
• Google releasing a version of the Apps suite for non-profits and educators
• Google planning to go Carbon Neutral by next year (see Shiny Shiny)...

...and of course, the legendary treatment of its employees, from work-life balance to the fabled amenities to a stipend for buying a hybrid, all well-document on the Fortune 100 Best Companies To Work For list and even on Oprah...

...and underlying it all, Google.org, the philanthropic arm which, lead by the legendary Dr. Larry Brilliant and endowed by Google cash and equity, is focused on public health, climate change, and global development, and supporting or launching great programs from the Acumen Fund (supporting entrepreneurial pursuits against poverty) to RechargeIT.org, which targets auto emissions.

(Equal Opportunity: Yahoo! For Good is a great program for using Yahoo tools to make a positive impact. No one could say it simpler or better than that!)

Critics point to privacy concerns, click fraud, or other standard criticisms, but that's not what this is about; they may also scoff that any company with Google's cash position could do such good things.

To which we say, to all other huge companies with lots of money, "Great, so do it like Google does it."

Disclaimer: The Optimist Company doesn't reflect Google's position and in no way are they connected; the only things they have is a vision that companies can make money while doing good. Even though The Optimist isn't about journalistic integrity (which I respect as a trained journalist) and instead simply celebrating companies that make money while doing good, this bears mentioning, because I can't go much further without mentioning Google.

Drinking Bottled Water Makes You Lazy; plus Nalgene

Fast Company's Charles Fishman just destroyed bottled water for me, and I'm glad he did.

He visits Fiji, Maine, and the souls all of us of who have supported the marketing juggernaut of bottled water into a$38B bottle, $16B a year industry, framing the environmentally unfriendliness of our little luxury habit with so many damning soundbites that I can't even summarize, but here's a thought that stuck with me. Most cities in America have perfectly safe tap water- San Francisco's comes from Yosemite and doesn't even need to be filtered!- yet we truck 1 BILLION bottles around weekly, requiring 37,800 18-wheelers (since water, and all the plastic spent in containing it one time, is so heavy that a carrier has to be partially empty). It's not the money, although if we paid for home water what we paid for bottled, our monthly bill would be $9,000. It's that on top of all the this waste, while we trendify the next cool label that we don't need it (the other top-consuming nations, Mexico, etc., do), 1B people worldwide don't have any clean water at all- including half the people on Fiji.

Nalgene gets our nod as an Optimist Company, just because of the stark logical contrast an empty water container makes, and because, as far as I can tell, Nalgene has done the best job of branding, making cool, an empty bottle.

Drinking bottled water doesn't make you lazy, although I think spreading an untrendy rumor about it might help age the trend and get more people toting around reusable bottles. (Guess what! Drinking bottled water makes you smell bad!) I already had some notion that I was lazy by drinking a bottle or two of Smart Water every day, especially as my 20,000+ person employer de-emphasized its free bottled water, gave out free reusable bottles and installed filter machines in our kitchenettes.

But now I REALLY feel lazy, so I'm going to take a crumby old plastic cup with me today, be seen everywhere with it, and make some noise about it.

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.