The Triple Bottom Line Blog

Maybe you noticed this curious item in the front pages of the March 3rd Business Week (no link to this story):

In a recent poll, only 30% of 1,015 Americans said they morally approved of nanotechnology--the engineering of matter at the molecular level to create everything from slice-resistant golf balls to cancer drugs. That's much lower than the results of similar surveys in key nanotech markets like Britain (54%), Germany (63%), and France (72%), notes Dietram Scheufele, a University of Wisconsin life sciences professor who ran the U.S. poll. He believes the approval gap is due to religion's "important role" in America. On both sides of the ocean, he says, many who identified themselves as religious objected to the idea of altering molecules.

I found the story weird because I've heard so little in the mainstream media about nanotechnology--and certainly nothing that would stir fears of Frankensteinish nanobots running amok. (By contrast, genetically engineered foods have gotten a lot more negative publicity--to say nothing of the hotly controversial stem cell research.)

When I did a little further reading on the poll, I became even more puzzled, especially when I read a comment from Professor Scheufele to the effect that the popular opposition to nanotechnology is not due to ignorance about the technology but rather to religiously-based objections: "The issue isn't about informing these people. They are informed."

What does this mean? Are we to believe that there are large numbers of devout Christians who are deeply knowledgeable about nanotechnology and have developed thoughtful theological arguments against it? The idea struck me as rather implausible--so much so that I emailed Professor Scheufele for further information.

The articles the professor linked me to did a lot to clear up the mystery. Turns out that one of the things Scheufele and his colleagues studied was whether knowledge about nanotechnology is correlated with positive attitudes toward it; and another was how religious belief affects this relationship. As explained in a forthcoming article in Public Understanding of Science, co-authored by Scheufele, Dominique Brossard, and Eunkyung Kim,

. . . highly religious respondents . . . showed the lowest levels of support for funding for nanotechnology; and being more knowledgeable about nanotechnology did little to influence their support for funding. For less religious individuals, however, our data showed a strong link between knowledge about nanotechnology and greater support for nanotechnology funding.

In other words, to know about nanotechnology is to love it--unless you are religious, in which case you hate it whether you know anything about it or not. (I'm oversimplifying, but you get the point.)

I find this story slightly depressing. It suggests that the U.S. contains, at the moment, a large, essentially irreducible minority of people who reflexively oppose new technologies, fear them, and express these fears in moral terms. For these people, scientific innovation is equated with "playing God" or "tampering with nature," and they assume that there is something sinister about technology unless the opposite can somehow be convincingly demonstrated.

The apparent link between technophobia and religious sentiment suggests specific issues that business people need to address.

If you're in charge of public relations at Monsanto, Dow, Schering-Plough, Amgen, or any other company that is in the business of marketing technological breakthroughs, you ought to consider creating a department for religious outreach. Talk to theologians, including some conservative ones, and work on developing an appropriate, non-scientific, spiritual language for explaining what you do--perhaps describing technology in terms like "human stewardship of creation" and its benefits as "blessings produced by God's gift of reason."

And devote resources to making connections with religious leaders, especially in the United States. When future public battles are fought over issues like technology regulation and funding, you'll probably want to have some well-informed, open-minded, and widely-trusted pastors on your side.

In this day and age, it may seem strange that these strategies are necessary--but evidently they are.

Labels: Amgen, Communications and Marketing, Dietram Scheufele, Dow, Monsanto, nanotechnology, Schering-Plough

Time flies when you're having fun, which I guess explains how two and a half weeks have elapsed since we last posted here: Christmas, New Year's Day, college bowl games, a wild and unpredictable presidential primary season, and an exhausting schedule of personal activities seem to have conspired to keep us away from our keyboard for an unconscionable period.

Our apologies. One day we will share with you some of our adventures during the past few weeks, including sitting in on twelve focus groups in four different cities across the United States to learn about the social and political attitudes of the Millennial Generation (under-30 Americans). Biggest takeaway: For the Millennials, the culture wars are over. It doesn't matter whether they are atheists from California or Evangelical Christians from Alabama; their attitude toward people of other religions, philosophies, and sexual orientations is live-and-let-live. Personally, I found this heartening news.

And on the eco-business front, here's a quick roundup of news and ideas you may find interesting--we did.

Seeds as intellectual property. Check out Grist, a green-oriented website we somehow didn't know about until recently, which actually lives up to its promise of "Environmental News and Humor." (Yes, they are funny . . . when appropriate.) One of the more intriguing stories currently up on Grist is this account of how Monsanto's genetically-modified soybean seed business has put the company in the awkward position of suing farmers for unauthorized use of the intellectual property represented by those patentened gene sequences. And although the Supreme Court recently upheld one of Monsanto's legal victories, it doesn't strike us as a sustainable business strategy to be taking your own customers to court. In the long run, it won't work for the record companies, and it won't work for Monsanto either.

Creating a commons for eco-friendly thinking. By contrast with Monsanto, a consortium of companies, including IBM, Nokia, Pitney-Bowes, and Sony, is participating in a system for openly sharing intellectual property (specifically patents) with environmental benefits. As described here, this system, organized by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, encourages corporations to donate green-business patents for free use by other companies. For example, one of the patents being made available by IBM is for a less-polluting method of cleaning surfaces that the company designed for microchips but that might be useable for other products such as eyeglass lenses. (You can watch a video about it on YouTube.)

Obviously, there will be significant limitations to the kinds of patents companies will be willing to share. Patents related to a company's core business processes, those that provide a significant competitive advantage, and those with the potential to generate large licensing fees will probably not be donated to the Eco-Patent Commons any time soon. But it's very interesting to see some of the world's most innovative companies taking this fresh approach to managing the intellectual property they create. We'll be watching to see how significant an impact they have.

More on greenwashing. There's a new attempt to distinguish legitimate environmental claims by companies from illegitimate ones, following on the heels of the controversial "Six Sins of Greenwashing" report that we wrote about here. This new initiative is called The Greenwashing Index, and although I've spent quite a bit of time studying the site and trying to figure out how it works, I'm still rather confused. The idea seems to be that consumers can post ads on the site and rate them, on a scale of one to five, as to their honesty and accuracy. A score of one means a "good ad," and score of five "total greenwashing."

What puzzles me, though, is that the ratings seem to be very subjective. Although the organizers of the site have provided a set of five criteria that consumers are supposed to use, in the end anyone can post an ad on the site with whatever rating they want. It's not unlike the one-to-five-stars rating system for books on Amazon. Of course, the accumulation of many ratings from various individuals for a single ad should mitigate the subjectivity somewhat. But this system still seems to me an inadequate substitute for the hard word of actually examining and evaluating the environmental practices of a company--something that demands a degree of expertise that few ordinary consumers possess.

We'll keep an eye on the Greenwashing Index site. It'll be interesting to see how it develops over time. But somehow I don't think this will become the authoritative source for reliable evaluations of environmental claims that so many people seem to be looking for.

Labels: Greenwashing, Grist, intellectual property, Millennial Generation, Monsanto, Personal Musings