The Triple Bottom Line Blog

Words influence us in many ways. Words can move us, alter our attitudes, and change our behavior. Politicians and judges know that their power to define words legally is the power to shape the future, which is why lobbyists and lawyers are highly paid to contort language beyond its plain meaning.

Of course, it isn't only the legal definition of words that matters. Advertisers are constantly reshaping our understanding of words like free and new to give their products fresh luster. In the area of sustainability, just consider how the emergence of words like stakeholder and transparency have changed our understanding of how businesses ought to behave, or how the phrase corporate responsibility, by expanding to include everything from human rights to community impacts to diversity, has raised the bar for companies.

For many Jews, the word kosher conveys deep meaning, associated with ideas such as goodness, purity, and quality. For me, it evokes memories of cheese blintzes, frying onions, and of my grandmothers, both of whom kept kosher homes and for whom preparing and serving kosher food was a way of saying, "I love you, so eat."

And in America, the multicultural melting pot, the word kosher has entered the vocabulary of millions of non-Jews as a synonym for legitimate, honest, trustworthy--a kind of verbal Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

But the meanings of words can be fragile--as a recent story out of Postville, Iowa, demonstrates.

The nation's largest producer of kosher meat, a company called Agriprocessors located in Postville, has been cited for violating a slew of environmental and safety laws including, most egregiously, those prohibiting child labor. State investigators identified 57 under-age workers working at the company. The state labor commissioner said he had never seen anything like it in his thirty years in the field. Children as young as thirteen were reportedly wielding knives on the killing floor; some teenagers were working 17-hour shifts, six days a week. Allegations have also been made of sexual harassment, shorted wages, favoritism and bribery in work assignments, inadequate safety practices, food contamination, and environmental violations.

Of course, we always need to acknowledge that those accused of such misdeeds are innocent until proven guilty. But if even a fraction of the allegations are true, it's a terribly sad story, one that suggests a number of significant lessons. Among other things, this episode should lay to rest the common notion that child labor is not an issue in this country. In the Jewish world, it has also rekindled a long-standing argument about the meaning of the word kosher.

Most traditionalists say that kosher means simply that a food product conforms to the technical requirements of kosher practice as defined by Jewish law, interpreted by rabbinic experts, and certified by specially-designated organizations. If a cut of meat, for example, is taken from a permissible animal that has been slaughtered, processed, and prepared under rabbinic supervision, then it is kosher--period.

Many progressives, on the other hand, argue that kosher should embody a broader set of standards, closer to the secular meaning of the word, including healthy and safe workplace conditions, legal compliance, and environmental protection, as well as more general concepts of corporate responsibility and fairness.

A third position has also emerged, something of a middle ground, called Hekhsher Tzedek ("justice certification" in Hebrew), which seeks to create a new kind of certification alongside the traditional kosher one. This "God Housekeeping Seal" (forgive me) would include standards for wages and benefits, worker safety, animal welfare, and environmental protection.

Although many agree with the spirit of Hekhsher Tzedek, I think its practical effect may be to delay or derail the necessary expansion of the definition of kosher. According to The New York Times, Rabbi Morris J. Allen, who is spearheading the Hekhsher Tzedek campaign, disavows any desire "to change ancient kosher dietary laws, which are traditionally administered by Orthodox Jews."

With all due respect, I think this is a big mistake. Words must evolve if our thinking and actions are to evolve. In striking down the practice of government-sanctioned racial segregation in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court observed that the phrase used to justify it, "separate but equal," was a contradiction in terms. As the historic decision noted, "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

In effect, the court was declaring that the meaning of the word equal had to evolve to meet the demands of a higher standard of justice. Eventually, practically all Americans came to agree.

Perhaps the problem with the word kosher is that it's a relic of ancient religious practice now being applied in a modern, secular context--that of contemporary business practice. Relying on a separate vocabulary will almost always impede rather than hasten the transformation of mainstream thinking. We see this in the way the language of corporate social responsibility (CSR) tends to separate it from mainstream business thinking. CSR reports unintentionally provide an "alternative certification" separate from--and unequal to--the company's financial reporting.

Companies that claim to want sustainability as part of their DNA but who rely on CSR reporting as the chief mechanism are actually providing evidence that sustainability is not part of their daily business regimen but rather a separate way of thinking, relegated to a sustainability "ghetto" (to use another word with roots in Jewish history).

I think the time is ripe to challenge the traditionalists in both the Jewish and business practice by working towards one vocabulary, one way of measuring and reporting progress.

In time, this may entail redefining some basic business terms and concepts. Someday the word profit, for example, may expand to include, at least by inference, some indication of how the profit was made. (We already have phrases like blood diamond and dirty gold to describe illegitimate profits.) The simple word trade is developing a counterpart with ethical implications, fair trade. Economist Jeffrey Sachs suggests that we should think less about wealth and more about commonwealth. In all these cases, a change in thinking demands, or drives, a change in the very language of business.

Words shape thought; thoughts shape actions; and actions shape the future. Are profits made by exploiting workers or despoiling the environment kosher? It depends what you mean.

Labels: Agriprocessors, kosher, Personal Musings, sustainability

Mary-Jo and I just got back from an extraordinary weekend in San Francisco attending the first Slow Food Nation conference.
(The picture at the left shows the "Victory Garden" created on the grounds of the city's civic center as part of the conference.)

After spending four days joining an estimated 50,000 participants in sampling many of the activities offered--including food tastings and sales, panel discussions, film screenings, educational exhibits, and (of course) some amazing dinners--I came away feeling as though I'd witnessed one stage in the emergence of a new social, political, and economic movement.

As you may know, Slow Food is an international organization founded by the Italian cultural critic Carlo Petrini. Its original intention was, as the name implies, to combat the spread of American-style fast food and to defend more traditional forms of agriculture and food preparation. It has spread to the United States (as well as around the world) and has now become--as I witnessed this past weekend--a popular movement that strives to address and link an array of economic, cultural, and political issues related to the production, sale, and use of food.

Thus, the people and organizations loosely affiliated with Slow Food come from many varied backgrounds and bring a wide range of interests and values to the table. Some are food lovers for whom the pleasure of fresh, local, well-prepared farm products is the chief motivating factor. Others are economists focused on issues like global hunger and the exploitation of farm workers. And still others are scientists and activists concerned with nutrition, food safety, pollution, and global climate change. In a vague way, most of the people I met and heard from this weekend could probably be described as "leftist" or "progressive," but it's not at all obvious that their disparate interests add up to a single coherent "food agenda."

Nonetheless, it seems clear that something big is happening here, represented not just by the thousands of people who attended Slow Food Nation in San Francisco but also by millions of other people around the country who are engaged in activities like shopping at organic food stores, at local farmers' markets, or through community-supported agriculture programs (CSAs); asking their kids' schools to get junk food out of the cafeterias; planting community gardens; writing their representatives to call for changes in farm subsidies, better regulation of meat production, and clearer food labeling standards; and ordering fair trade coffee when they get their morning caffeine fix.

The overall tone of the weekend was best captured, I think, by the standing-room-only panel I attended on Saturday at the Herbst Theater. The avid audience listened enthralled--and frequently broke in with applause--as a who's who of food celebrities discussed the meaning and significance of the conference.

Essayist, poet, short-story writer, and farmer Wendell Berry, who has been writing about the need to reform the U.S. agricultural system since the 1970s, spoke about how industrial farming damages communities, destroys ecosystems, and squanders resources.

Restaurateur Alice Waters (who launched the Slow Food movement in the U.S.) shared her dream that the next U.S. president will plant a garden and harvest vegetables to be served at state dinners at the White House.

The movement's Italian founder Carlo Petrini explained (through a translator) that Slow Food is not merely about the pleasures of good eating--though these are important--but also about community, family, and the creation of a truly humane and sustainable way of life.

Activist Vandana Shiva gave a fiery talk about how corporations like Monsanto and ADM are driving a new enclosure movement that is driving millions of farmers in developing nations off the land and impoverishing entire societies.

And journalists Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) talked about the political prospects for reforming the U.S. food production system so as to better protect workers' rights while producing abundant, nutritious, safe, and healthful food for all.

Where is the Slow Food movement heading? Is its dream of a reformed food supply system attainable? That remains to be seen. It's obvious that food-related issues--hunger, childhood obesity, rising food prices, water shortages, soil depletion, and many others--are on the radar screens of plenty of individuals and organizations. But nothing that adds up to a global "food issue" is on the agenda at a national political level--for example, in the platform of the Obama or McCain campaign.

Still, events like the Slow Food Nation conference may play an important catalytic role by bringing together thousands of people and getting them to draw lines connecting seemingly unrelated economic, political, and social issues. Someday, food activists may look back on Labor Day weekend of 2008 as the coming-out party for their movement--one that may end up having a vast impact on the national and world economy.

Labels: Alice Waters, Carlo Petrini, Eric Schlosser, Food and Agriculture, Michael Pollan, Slow Food Nation, Vandana Shiva

If you've read our book The Triple Bottom Line, you know the story of the Penobscot River in Maine, which has long been a subject of contention between environmentalists and business forces.

Like many rivers in the Northeast (and elsewhere), the Penobscot has been blocked by a series of dams that generate electric power but also harm wildlife--in particular, the Atlantic salmon that must travel up the river in order to spawn. For years, the utility company that manages those dams--PPL Corporation--battled relentlessly against any effort to remove those dams or even to mitigate their effects.

But as we recount in our book, several years ago, under new, enlightened management, PPL began to work with its critics, including not only environmental activists but sport fishermen and Native American tribes (for whom the Penobscot River is holy territory). Complex negotiations produced a landmark plan for restoring the river. Now a milestone in the project has been reached: a Maine environmental coalition, the Penobscot River Restoration Trust, has raised $25 million needed to purchase three dams from PPL.

It's a classic win/win solution: The dams will be dismantled, allowing salmon and other fish to travel freely up the river, while PPL and its shareholders will receive fair compensation for the loss of productive capacity. In addition, the utility has been granted by the state the right to increase its electrical generation capacity at other dams in the Penobscot system, so there should be no difficulty in keeping up with the growing demand for power in the region.

The tale of the Penobscot is a remarkable illustration of what can happen when an embattled company gets out of its defensive crouch and starts collaborating with opponents in search of creative solutions to shared problems.

Labels: Penobscot River, PPL, Role of Government, Water

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is a big boy--author of several best-selling books and one of America's most influential opinion-shapers about topics like globalization, economic policy, the "war on terror," and the energy crisis. Over the years, his ideas have been subject to plenty of scrutiny and criticism. But I was a bit startled to see his recent column on sustainable energy policy attacked by Daniel Luzer in the respectable Columbia Journalism Review not on the basis of any logical or factual errors but on purely personal grounds:

Friedman . . . is married to Ann Bucksbaum, the heiress to the $2.7 billion General Growth Properties fortune. Founded by Friedman's father-in-law in 1954, GGP is America’s second largest real estate investment trust and owns, develops, and operates regional shopping malls in forty-one states.

That's right, malls. Fat, energy-hogging, climate controlled, sprawl-inducing—many of the most palpable examples of American waste and ecological irresponsibility are owned and managed by Tom Friedman's family.

This makes [Friedman's] gee-why-don't-you-write-your-congressman naivete a little hard to take. Friedman actually has direct access to a company with some control over the level of waste the United States perpetuates on the world.

Is this fair or reasonable? Arguably not. Who knows how much actual influence Tom Friedman wields over the company his father-in-law founded? Nor does Luzer's article offer any information as to whether GGP has taken any steps to move the properties it manages toward greater energy efficiency or eco-responsibility. Apparently, as far as Luzer is concerned, the fact that GGP runs malls is damning in itself--and it thoroughly undermines Friedman's credibility.

This little episode offers an interesting reflection on the place of sustainability in the American dialogue today. Although more and more people now recognize the legitimacy of sustainability issues in the political and business arenas, there is somehow still a need to prove one's bona fides before advancing a sustainability argument--as though, unless you can somehow prove your personal purity, you're likely to be considered a hypocrite just for talking about sustainability. (Remember the attacks on Al Gore for owning a big house and flying around the world by jet.) And as Luzer's column suggests, criticism of your sincerity is just as likely to come from the left (i.e. from environmental advocates) as from the right (i.e. environmental skeptics).

It's funny: Anyone can make an argument on behalf of self-serving, absolute laissez-faire policies ("Down with regulation! Drill in Yellowstone! Pollute at will!") without having their right to make that argument questioned. The assumed sincerity of self-interest insulates the anti-sustainability crowd from this form of criticism. Environmental advocates are held to a higher standard, one that extends not only to their own behavior but even to that of that families.

If you're a CEO working to position your company at the forefront of the sustainable business movement, you should devote a little time to analyzing (and, if necessary, "cleaning up") your personal behavior as well, including the kinds of cars you drive, the houses you own, and the holdings in your retirement account. If your efforts on behalf of sustainability provoke resistance or resentment from any quarters, you can be sure all those purely personal matters will come under scrutiny--fair and reasonable or not.

If it can happen to Tom Friedman, it can happen to you.

Labels: Ann Bucksbaum, C-Suite, Daniel Luzer, GGP, malls, Personal Musings, Thomas Friedman

We've given Wal-Mart a fair amount of credit for some of the smart sustainable business moves they've made in recent months--for example, see what we wrote here, here, and here. Thanks to the favorable coverage Wal-Mart has (deservedly) received for some of its current initiatives, the company's bad reputation among citizen stakeholder groups has begun to dissipate.

On the other hand, it won't take too many stories like this one to undo all the good from a year's worth of well-meaning environmental and social efforts:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is mobilizing its store managers and department supervisors around the country to warn that if Democrats win power in November, they'll likely change federal law to make it easier for workers to unionize companies--including Wal-Mart.

In recent weeks, thousands of Wal-Mart store managers and department heads have been summoned to mandatory meetings at which the retailer stresses the downside for workers if stores were to be unionized. . . .

Wal-Mart may be walking a fine legal line by holding meetings with its store department heads that link politics with a strong antiunion message. Federal election rules permit companies to advocate for specific political candidates to its executives, stockholders and salaried managers, but not to hourly employees. While store managers are on salary, department supervisors are hourly workers.

Not only is this terrible public relations for Wal-Mart, it's a very clumsy way of trying to influence the political climate regarding labor. In the words of Daniel Gross, the Slate magazine commentator on business and economics, "Wal-Mart may be a master of many domains: global supply chains and logistics, local politics and zoning, anti-union warfare and branding. But on the stage of national politics, it has proved to be strikingly inept."

For one thing, why shift your political spending from overwhelmingly Republican to half-Democratic--as Wal-Mart has done in recent years--and then get caught awkwardly trying to torpedo Democratic electoral chances? If your goal is to make friends on both sides of the aisle (a wise strategy, especially during a period of political volatility), this is no way to go about it.

Gross goes on to point out that, in any case, Wal-Mart's assumption that having a Democrat in the White House would be bad for business is quite possibly wrong:

Despite Clinton's Arkansas roots, most Wal-Mart executives probably opposed Clinton in both his successful campaigns. But during his presidency, Wal-Mart's stock more than tripled. By contrast, Wal-Mart executives polled in 2000 would have been exultant at the prospect of two George W. Bush terms, especially if they were to be coupled with mostly Republican control of the House and Senate. And yet this decade has been a lost one for Wal-Mart shareholders: In the Bush years, the stock hasn't budged at all.

Yes, politics matters. But in the end, the macroeconomic climate matters a lot more. Wal-Mart's success ultimately depends on whether the lower-income and middle-income customers on whom it depends are doing well or getting eaten up by stagnant incomes and rising costs for health care and gas.

As Talleyrand once said, Wal-Mart's ham-handed political manuevering is worse than a crime--it's a blunder.

Lesson for business leaders: If you're going to get involved in politics, better rely on a team of people with shrewd political instincts and know-how. Otherwise you may end up doing yourself more harm than good.

Labels: politics, Role of Government, unionization, Wal-Mart

Because I worked with Jimmy Carter on three of his books (a decade or more ago), I am on the Carter Center's mailing list for periodic reports about the ex-president's overseas travels. They tend to be a little more interesting than my family slide shows from Disney World, since they deal with things like peace negotiations, monitoring elections, and trying to wipe out infectious diseases in Africa. I guess everyone has a different idea of fun.

The latest report I received is from a trip to the Arctic that Jimmy and Rosalynn took in July aboard the Endeavor, a National Geographic ship operated by Lindblad Explorations. The passenger list was rather unusual. Carter writes:

Participants included Madeleine Albright, Tom Daschle, Chevy Chase, Larry Brilliant and Larry Page from Google, CEO of National Geographic John Fahey, Director of the Centers for Disease Control Julie Gerberding, CEO of Monsanto Hugh Grant, CEO of DuPont Chad Holliday, CEO of Aspen Institute Walter Isaacson, Governor of Colorado Bill Ritter, eBay CEO Meg Whitman, and President of Lindblad Explorations Sven Lindblad.

If you're like me, you don't know most of these people personally, but the list certainly includes some folks I think of as "good guys" and some as "not so good." (I recently saw an advance copy of a film about the industrialization of agriculture that depicts the behavior of Monsanto in the most dire terms imaginable--more on this as the movie gets closer to its release.) Of course, President Carter brought Yasir Arafat and Menachem Begin to the same conference table, so I guess he is used to being in the same room with people whose goals and motives are (to the say the least) divergent.

The entire trip focused on environmental issues. Carter spoke "regarding my experience as president dealing with an inherited energy crisis (reduced oil imports from 8.6 million barrels/day to 4.3 million/day--it's now 15!)." That much-maligned malaise speech about the need to address environmental challenges isn't looking so silly now, is it? A couple of other notable points from his report, with my comments:

The leaders of Google, Monsanto, DuPont, Aspen, CDC, Alliance of Automobile manufacturers, eBay, German CEOs of huge wind-power companies, NGOs, etc. reported on current plans and progress.

(That must have been interesting. Obviously a cruise like this would be no place to launch a fierce debate or even to ask harsh questions, but it certainly seems as though the organizations represented have one or two differences of opinion and practice when it comes to sustainability.)

Biggest international interest now is how to extract more from Arctic region (fishing, minerals, transport, military) and not how minimize global damage. U.S. has refused to ratify the Law of the Sea treaty while Russia and other Arctic nations are making claims and taking action.

(Am I crazy or does this sound like a very big problem that is not getting anything like the attention it deserves from the mainstream media?)

Overall, the U.S. (and therefore the world) can act only if the next president can inspire the public and work harmoniously with a bi-partisan Congress, business, labor, science, environmentalists, educators, news media, etc.

(While undoubtedly true, this strikes me as a fairly depressing statement, since it will take a lot more than "inspiration" to get this motley group of self-interested players to work together harmoniously.)

All in all, I'm afraid the environmental crises we are facing are going to have to get worse before we have much chance of making them better.

Labels: Arctic, Climate and Carbon, Jimmy Carter, Monsanto, Role of Government

As the 2008 presidential campaign heats up, perhaps the only point of agreement between Barack Obama and John McCain is that our country needs dramatic change. Both candidates are campaigning as change agents: Obama's slogan is "Change you can trust," while McCain campaigns on "Reform, Prosperity and Peace," which, if you stop to think about where America is today, is just another way of saying "change."

Neither candidate has been specific about what change is needed nor about how he plans to make the change, and I doubt that either one has a detailed plan for change that goes much beyond the hope to change his own address to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Perhaps you're wondering what this has to do with the theme of sustainable business. Actually, the connection is simple. In the world of sustainability, corporate executives are trying to change their organizations in all sorts of ways, from culture and systems to the way they recruit and compensate their people to how they measure and report their performance. What can this year's presidential candidates learn from business leaders about creating change?

I've written before about how Mike Morris, one of my favorite CEOs (and clients, although I had very little to do with what follows) has created culture change at the electric companies he has been invited to lead, from Consumers Energy to Northeast Utilities (NU) and now American Electric Power.

At NU, Morris worked with his deputy Dennis Welch, the VP of Environment, Health and Safety, to turn New England's largest power company from a cantankerous, arrogant, regulatory scofflaw into a model of environmental compliance.

On arrival, he announced that he would not tolerate obstructionism or hardball tactics when it came to dealing with regulators. Within days, he set an example by going to see the Connecticut Attorney General and legislative leaders, and traveling to meet with employees at the plants for face-to-face discussions on critical compliance issues. At the same time, he appointed Welch to create a company-wide environmental management system. Plant managers and employees would now be evaluated on their ability to make their programs compliant and keep them that way.

As a result, NU drastically reduced its legal problems and was ultimately able to sell its "troubled" (i.e. historically non-compliant) nuclear power plant (aptly named Millstone), for hundreds of millions of dollars more than its predicted sale price.

Now Morris and Welch are making change again at AEP, one of the nation's largest electric companies, which also happens to be the single largest consumer of coal on the planet. For over a century, AEP has been an innovator in the electric business, with hundreds of patents to its credit. But the company's ability to create solutions, along with its gigantic size and financial success, led to a sense of hubris and an our-way-or-the-highway approach to doing business.

When Morris arrived, deregulation and climate change were already rocking AEP's world. Reliance on coal, our dirtiest source of energy, was increasingly under attack He realized that the company's culture needed to change, and change quickly.

Morris sent a strong message, first to his leadership team and then through the ranks: "In today’s interdependent world, our ability to succeed as a business will be based on our willingness and ability to work collaboratively with all of our stakeholders, not just tell them what we plan to do." He then modeled this behavior, not only by demonstrating direct, solid and useful relations with political and industry leaders, and with AEP unions and employees, but also by showing candor and honesty in discussing the company's strengths and weaknesses.

For example, Morris wrote in the company’s first sustainability report that, despite many accomplishments, "2006 cannot be counted as a good year for us. One of our employees died on the job doing what should have been a routine task, and a contract worker died in a fire at a construction site . . . [T]his is completely unacceptable to me, to our company and to our employees." The report also detailed the company’s positive and negative environmental, health, and safety impacts--unlike many sustainability reports, which are filled with pure "happy talk."

Once again, Welsh began to create programs to back up Morris' words. He buttressed the company's health and safety programs with clear accountability standards. He launched a stakeholder engagement process with Ceres and national environmental organizations, and held periodic environmental calls with them like those the company held with investors and financial analysts. This year, the company has expanded the process to include stakeholder engagement at the regional, state, and local levels.

Will this new approach provide AEP with the breathing room it needs to develop the new clean-coal and other technologies it needs to succeed for another hundred years? The jury is still out. But it's fair to say that Morris and AEP have been a breath of fresh air in the debate over how to address climate change.

Which brings me back to our presidential candidates. If they're serious about change, Morris and other corporate sustainability leaders like Chad Holiday at DuPont and Katsuaki Watanabe at Toyota, who are transforming their companies for leadership in the 21st century, have a lot to teach them--about sending clear, unambiguous messages concerning the need for cultural change, and then matching their own actions to their words; about altering processes and incentives within an organization (or an administration) so as to reward new modes of behavior; about establishing lines of communication and accountability with outside stakeholders of every kind, including those usually considered adversaries; and, above all, about practicing genuine transparency--which, of course, is possible only when you really have nothing to hide.

If the next president practices policies like these, he'll go a long way to restoring the faith in government that millions of Americans have lost in the last decade.

Labels: American Electric Power, Barack Obama, C-Suite, John McCain, Management and Organization, Mike Morris, Role of Government

Here's a quite interesting report from The Economist about how business executives are incorporating environmental factors into their decision-making. The highlighted list of findings from the survey of 320 international execs includes:

(1) Environmental risk management is frequently managed in an ad hoc fashion.

(2) There is no clear consensus about who should be responsible for environmental risk.

(3) Many companies conduct strategic activities without a formal assessment of environmental risk. . .

That third item is perhaps the most interesting. To spell it out in more detail, consider these specific data:

Less than half [of the companies surveyed] conduct an environmental assessment when developing new products and services, falling to 32 percent when selecting suppliers or partners, 26 percent when planning geographical expansion and 19 percent when planning mergers and acquisitions.

These findings certainly call into question the general assumption that most corporations today are doing a reasonably good job of considering environmental factors when making major decisions. In fact, they suggest just the opposite--that most companies are facing environmental risks not pro-actively but reactively, scrambling to figure out what to do with environmental problems after they jump up and bite them rather than anticipating and avoiding or minimizing them.

The survey leads me to conclude that we're mostly past the point of having to convince CEOs and their stratospheric colleagues of the relevance and importance of environmental issues. Now the challenge is getting these issues built into the decision-making systems of corporations, alongside financial, regulatory, legal, and other issues that routinely get examined and addressed before any big decision is made.

Labels: C-Suite, environmental issues, risk management, strategic planning, The Economist

I recently visited St. Paul, Minnesota, with my seven-year-old daughter to attend the wedding of a friend. At the suggestion of the bride, we stayed at the Radisson Hotel Bloomington, near the airport. "It’s connected to the Mall of America Water Park. Your daughter will be in heaven."

Now, I like Minnesota a lot, especially the Twin Cities: fabulous public universities, the highest literacy rate in the nation, and millions of my kind of people—progressive Democrats, and nice folks too. But this trip threw me for a loop, literally and figuratively.

We checked in and went straight to the water park. "America’s Biggest Indoor Water Park" does not nearly begin to describe the incredible size, variety, and complexity of its many features, which involve pumping millions of gallons of water up and down three-story water slides, surfing safaris, lazy rivers, family rafting excursions, gigantic buckets that fill until they tip over and douse you, artificial beaches with three-foot waves, and much more.

If you’re among those who are concerned about the wastefulness of shipping bottled water around the world, we are talking about waste of another order of magnitude here. Picture—as just one example—thousands of jets of water being pumped up a 30-degree incline so hard and fast that a 200-pound man can actually "surf" along it without ever slipping towards the bottom. And this thing runs from nine a.m. until ten p.m. every day, whether someone is riding the wave or not.

It's well known that Americans, who make up just five percent of the world's population, consume twenty-five percent of its energy resources. Who knew how much of it went to hanging ten in Bloomington?

Don’t get me wrong, my daughter and I had the time of our lives—screaming hilarity, endless giggling, and serious father-daughter bonding as we spent about the monthly income of the average Kenyan to cavort indoors while outside was one of the most beautiful early summer days imaginable.

I thought this was a guilty pleasure until we dried, changed, and crossed the street to experience the Mall of America (MOA).

Of course, it's the largest mall in America--which must mean the world, right? Wrong: A little research reveals that the Mall of America is actually seventeenth on the list of the world's largest malls. As measured by Gross Leasable Area (GLA), it's less than half the size of the South China Mall in Dongguan, China--yet another category in which the United States is being left in the dust by countries many of us still think of as second-rate competition.

Nonetheless, Mall of America boasts a startling list of superlatives. It has an amusement park at its center five times the size of the water park. We rode several different roller-coasters, including Pepsi's Orange Streak (see how I worked in the name of my client there?), but decided to skip the nausea-inducing Splat-O-Sphere after watching it haul 75 people up sixty feet, then drop them fifty-nine feet back down.

Of course, shopping is the main attraction. The mall directory lists over 520 retail stores and restaurants on three gigantic floors. The first-time shopper orients herself by locating the four humongous anchor tenants—Macy’s, Nordstrom, Bloomingdale's, and Sears—each of which occupies all three stories and is located at one corner of the mall.

I have written about over-consumption, but we need a new word to describe what happens at MOA. The term mega-consumption comes to mind. You can shop at 17 jewelers, get footwear at 24 shoe stores, and dine at any and all of 74 eateries. Looking for a souvenir to bring home? MOA houses 37 gift shops, from the ubiquitous Yankee Candle and Disney store to regional establishments like Love From Minnesota and the Minnesota Wild Hockey Lodge.

We were in Minnesota for exactly 41 hours (25 of them awake), enough for three trips to the mall. We found great clothing bargains for my fashion-conscious daughter as well as a lifetime supply of SpongeBob SquarePants memorabilia.

I'm still trying to recover from the trip. Not the expense, but the alternating sense of terror and glee that the mall and the water park inspired in me.

I wonder what people will see and think when they visit the same site two hundred years from now. My guess is that the water park will be long gone, a victim of rising energy prices and water shortages. But the mall may still be there, unless virtual shopping has replaced the real deal—or society as we know it has collapsed under its own weight due to causes it will take some future Jared Diamond to analyze and chronicle. In which case MOA will be an abandoned hulk, overgrown by the returning north woods and perhaps used for shelter by animals and the occasional homeless human.

The few witnesses who wander past will probably think, "In their time, they lived like gods." Then again, they may wonder, "What the hell were they thinking?" Maybe both.

This is the first in a new series of columns we're writing for Ethical Corporation magazine.

Labels: Mall of America, Minnesota, Personal Musings

Check out this nice little piece from the Columbia Journalism Review online about how and why environmental reporting goes wrong, often generating more buzz and controversy than information (let alone wisdom).

Some of the problems highlighted by author David Downs are pretty much unavoidable. For example, there's the need to constantly define and explain environmental terms and scientific principles, which eats up precious column space and frustrates journalists who want to write brief, snappy, alluring stories. Other problems are products of today's culture of journalism, such as the pressure to build stories around great quotes (whether or not those quotes are truly enlightening) and the urge to treat every factoid or scientific study as important (whether those details represent outliers or genuinely meaningful symptoms of real change).

In any case, it's clear that journalists and editors who read Downs's article and make a conscientious effort to avoid the mistakes he lists will do a better job of informing readers about environments issues. Come to think of it, there are reporters covering lots of other fields, especially politics, who could benefit from a similar analysis.

Labels: David Downs, journalism, Personal Musings