Q4a 2005

The other day, I was outside watching our dog Funny eyeing the neighbor’s cat coming in to our yard. Funny is a light-colored Canaany, a local breed usually found in desert terrain. She’s a good-hearted dog, smart enough, young, and very sociable. And she was all tensed up watching this wizened old tabby cat approach her food dish. The cat tensed up as well, making sure Funny got the message that he knew the dog was there. And then the cat casually sauntered over to Funny’s bowl and began eating. Funny relaxed a bit, somewhat content to share her food with her encroaching neighbor. But the cat began to overdo it, taking the relaxed gesture on Funny’s part as an open invitation to knock off the entire supply. And so Funny barked, made an aggressive move (she really wouldn’t have had a clue what to do had she caught the cat), and the cat sped off.

I felt as if I were watching the drama of the sustainability movement play out, in its uncertain push me-pull me stance toward the business world.

Push Me. There is a certain position within the sustainability movement that feels the need to take an aggressive stance, to say: "Hey business world, you are nourishing yourself at the planet’s expense and we’re not going to take it any more." Most anyone who has read Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose, even those who are fervent believers in the benefits of an unfettered free market, are today taken aback by Friedman’s claims, made 25 years ago, that one person’s pollution is another person’s pleasure, that public interest groups have no true constituency, and that governments are less well equipped to address environmental problems than a self-regulating market (pp. 213 – 218).

No wonder that the sustainable movement has taken a number of top-down approaches to push businesses to change their ways. From the plethora of environmental laws in the 1970s starting with the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, to recent shareholder activism taken by such investor giants as CalPers, to strategies by such non-profits as the Natural Step to nudge our largest companies to mend their ways: all these worthy efforts stem from a sense of urgency and impatience. We are 30% beyond the current carrying capacity of our planet, meaning that this very day, we would need a planet 1/3 bigger than we have just to meet the current demands placed upon it. And those demands are just getting greater every day, with no let-up in sight.

Friedman might be right that the market is the most effective way to effect change. But without a gentle or not-so-gentle push in the right direction, we might never get there.

Pull Me. There is also a position within the sustainability movement that echoes the philosophy of my grandmother Jenny Stein, who use to say: "Honey, you can catch more flies with honey rather than vinegar." (let’s ignore the humorous rejoinder provided by our COO, who says, "who would want to catch flies anyway?"). This stance has more to do with building alliances, creating broad stakeholder groups, developing processes that enable a broad spectrum of folks to sit together at the table and hammer out a consensus – whether that consensus is how to construct a building more sustainably, or create an entire sustainable community, or develop guidelines for smart growth for the state, etc. As Warren Bennis notes in Organizing Genius, "None of us is as smart as all of us."

Support for this pull-me tactic can be found, of all places, in Milton Friedman’s same work. Friedman notes that "ultimately, the cost of getting cleaner air, water, and the rest must be borne by the consumer." Which means that, by working from the ground-up, in local markets, demand can be created that will indeed pull businesses to supply consumers with what they want.

So which tactic is right? Or, as a recent envrionmental website asked me recently, as a pragmatic environmentalist, should the focus be on political action designed to change policy or individual action designed to change lifestyle?

It’s a great question, one for which I wish I had the answer to. We’ve certainly, as a company, taken both tacts. At the moment, we are trying to push our local government into starting up a recycling program. Meanwhile, in a high-rise condo development we are embarking upon in Atlanta – one of the first LEED condos anywhere – our effort is one of trying to pull disparate interests and professions into a consensus as to what a truly sustainable high-rise urban living environment should look and feel like.

I think the problem here is viewing the question as an "either-or" question, a dilemma of forking paths. That’s understandable. The original concept of Push-Me, Pull-Me, after all, comes from Hugh Lofting’s two-headed llama in his story, Dr. Dolittle. It’s a character that simply is facing in two opposing directions. What we need is to re-draw our llama so that the two heads are aligned in the same direction.

I don’t think I’ll try that on our dog Funny though.

Martin Melaver

CEO