What is a Green corporation?
Buzzwords, fads, politically correct, spin, lies, and damn lies. "Global warming" "A 15% reduction from last year" "SUV hybrid cars" "No sugar added" "Greener bullets" "Unpropaganda" "No artificial blah blah blah" The truth lies in seeing and measuring the overall picture (not somebody's little one-sided bit)...and that is very difficult to do. Very difficult politically and economically. And very difficult for a complex person in a complex world.
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Green:
1. Being responsible in Buckminster Fuller's Spaceship Earth.
2. Clean and healthy in your own home.
3. Economical in Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond.
The fact of the matter remains that we are the corporations:
1. We are stealing our children's energy. By over-consuming and needless consuming and careless consuming, we are using up more than our fair share. There is only so much to go around. That's an economic law and a historical law. Our children will be cursing somebody's name in the future. All they want is their fair share.
2. We are polluting our children's future homes. This is nothing new historically. Somebody will have to work extra hard to right this crime...to clean up the streets in the not too distant future.
3. We are spending our children's money. Too much over-spending and needless spending and careless spending. It's the same crime as the energy example. These three facts cannot go on. It's not sustainable. In this case, the future children will just refuse to honor this debt. I don't really blame them. They will have their own kids to feed.
These three non-Green directions are a clue. If you want Green, then go in the opposite direction: more efficient designs, cleaner designs, cheaper designs.
In the end, we may be forcing the kids in the future to properly manage their energy, pollution, and money economies because we will have left them with less than what we had in our time and more serious debts than what we had to bear. But that's their problem.
What's the answer? I don't have one for you. Get your own. But I have seen things. People who make a difference. For thousands of years, we have had a history of design. Just take a look around you. People design their lives. Live closer to work. Work better. Work cleaner. Eat cleaner. Create a new medicine. Cook great, tasty food. Art more. Teach children. Garden. Buy local. Buy Green products. Do more with less. Clean house. Throw out the junk. Refuse some fast food. Don't recycle what never should have been produced in the first place. Buy only the best chocolate. Watch where you put your garbage. Design a poster. Don't kill. Don't steal. Improve some gadget. Play a guitar.
It does all make a difference. Design doesn't only work with things. It also works with how we do things and why we do things. Design a better time. Plan ahead. Design your environment. Organize your language. Buy smarter. Vote stronger. Vote with your money. Spend your time. Invest. Push generic drugs. Help a teacher. Read the manual. Demand things from the city for your neighborhood. Live in the global village.
If life is a door, then design your own door. Don't let them do it. They will NOT do as good a job as you. Fuller and Thoreau didn't need a school to tell them how to design. They just did it. Design is hard work. We all know want we want. We all know what's Green. We all know what's good. We all know what we shouldn't be doing right now. We can leave the future more than what we were given: that is design.
We can, of course, do a lot of these things on our own. There is nothing really stopping us, but us. But we can't do everything alone. It is a complex world. There are lots of big problems around. And more are coming. Sometimes, we need family, friends and neighbours...and strangers...to design it and do it right.
In the end, Green corporations (like Green cities) are made up of Green people.