Read the full story at Sierra Magazine
Garbage In, Garbage Out - A Trashy Truth
Read the full story at Sierra Magazine
Read the full story at Sierra Magazine
Wal-Mart and the Business Case for Green
Walmart’s effort to green its stores, trucking fleet, products, and supply chain, alternately dismissed from the left as window dressing and from the right as a costly distraction, has accomplished something that 40 years of environmental activism and regulation never managed: It moved sustainability from the fringe to the forefront of business concerns.... Read my full article at Grist.org
The point of my piece is not to serve as a counterpoint to the recent series of stories at Grist by Stacy Mitchell -- who found the specifics of Wal-Mart sustainability projects wanting, to say the least -- but to point out that the real value of having such a mega-company trying to become greener, however imperfect those efforts may be, is that it drags the rest of the big business world along with it. Wal-Mart has used the same clout with which it has driven prices down and crushed competitors to do something shockingly different: mainstream sustainability. I have no interest in either lionizing or lambasting Wal-Mart on this score; it's simply a fact, and one that utterly destroys the arguments of the drill-baby-drill crowd by showing that sustainable and planet-friendly choices help America compete and prosper.
The point of my piece is not to serve as a counterpoint to the recent series of stories at Grist by Stacy Mitchell -- who found the specifics of Wal-Mart sustainability projects wanting, to say the least -- but to point out that the real value of having such a mega-company trying to become greener, however imperfect those efforts may be, is that it drags the rest of the big business world along with it. Wal-Mart has used the same clout with which it has driven prices down and crushed competitors to do something shockingly different: mainstream sustainability. I have no interest in either lionizing or lambasting Wal-Mart on this score; it's simply a fact, and one that utterly destroys the arguments of the drill-baby-drill crowd by showing that sustainable and planet-friendly choices help America compete and prosper.
Blood & Oil - Why the Military Likes Green
...Read more of my new article, "Blood and Oil," in the latest Sierra Magazine.
Page 99
Ford Madox Ford once asserted: "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you."
Marshal Zeringue, author, playwright and head honcho at the Campaign for the American Reader, turned Ford's quip into an actual test. So when Marshal asks if you'd like to run your book through the Page 99 test, a mad scramble ensues to see what accident of typography and layout had put on that particular page, before you email back and say, sure!
Here's the Page 99 test for Force of Nature, which, as it happens, concerns a pivotal moment in 2005 when Wal-Mart, Hurricane Katrina, and a fledgling green initiative at the king of the big box stores all collided --with surprising results.
Marshal Zeringue, author, playwright and head honcho at the Campaign for the American Reader, turned Ford's quip into an actual test. So when Marshal asks if you'd like to run your book through the Page 99 test, a mad scramble ensues to see what accident of typography and layout had put on that particular page, before you email back and say, sure!
Here's the Page 99 test for Force of Nature, which, as it happens, concerns a pivotal moment in 2005 when Wal-Mart, Hurricane Katrina, and a fledgling green initiative at the king of the big box stores all collided --with surprising results.