Straight Reporting, Q1a, 2005

If you go to the Seventh Generation home page (http://www.seventhgeneration.com/), you will find a link to their Corporate Responsibility report for 2003. And if you go to page 11 in that report, you find something that I think, I hope, more and more, will become a feature of the way companies talk about themselves to others: It’s a declaration of some of the things this company feels it is not doing very well, things it very much needs to improve upon.

I find that inspiring. Here is an innovative company taking the lead in providing envrionmentally safe household products talking about its shortcomings.

Of course, like anything else, these admissions can also be a bit much. Not too long ago, I had the chance to attend a brainstorming session about all the exciting things that were happening in the field of sustainability. And at the close of this workshop, we were each asked for our comments about what this movement needed. And one after another, people held their heads in their hands and talked about how the world needed to wake up and realize how bad things are. “We need,” one very compassionate person said, “a theology of sustainability.”

True. But I’m not sure I want to wake up for the early Sunday service.

We’re a small company. With some big dreams about trying to make a difference in the way real estate is practiced. Since the early 90s, we’ve been wrestling with what that means. We’ve been very fortunate to have the guidance and leadership of the US Green Building Council (http://www.usgbc.org/ ), teaching us how to develop more sustainably. We’ve also been fortunate to have the help of The Natural Step (http://www.naturalstep.org/ ) teach us how to think for ourselves. Hopefully, we will soon have a set of sustainable Property Management practices that will complement our Development guidelines. And, quite frankly, we are still trying to get our hands around what it means to be sustainable brokers of commercial real estate – a phrase that probably seems as much of an oxymoron as the famous George Carlin line about “jumbo shrimp”.

In short, ours is a story very much in motion, with lots and lots to do and also lots to share with others. A workshop we sponsored recently on how to do sustainable residential construction (a business we are not in) resulted in one local homebuilder deciding to do a whole new subdivision according to EarthCraft guidelines. One of my colleagues at work is designing her new home according to those same guidelines.

A number of years back, we held a symposium on whether we should just liquidate the company and invest the proceeds in a mutual funds devoted to Socially Responsible Investing. And Paul Hawken, whom we were blessed to have as one of the facilitators of that seminar, looked at us all and asked: “why would you let others make decisions about what you feel passionate about?” Why indeed.

Martin Melaver, CEO Melaver, Inc. Q1 2005