This article first appeared in Sustainable Brands.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  Like most clichés, this one conveys some truth, as do words attributed to ancient Greek poet Hermesianax: “As within, so without.”  Those who have endured inner-work fully enough to enjoy the outward results will attest that self-awareness leads to empowerment, which in turn leads to voice.  Leadership, expressed through courage and contribution over passivity and disengagement, begins when we recognize our potential and accept the responsibility that goes with it.  As within, so without.

So what does this have to do with sustainability?  Everything.  Truly sustainable sustainability - the kind that occurs when a critical mass internalizes new ways of thinking and being and leverages that into organizational and societal change – begins with the transformation of individuals.

As a consultant, you get used to seeing a certain amount of slippage when a project ends.  Too frequently in change management, once key players make their exit, the momentum dies and the culture reverts to type.   However, when the type of organization you are dealing with possesses qualities of strong leadership, community spirit, and efficiency, they are capable of achieving outstanding results, even when they are continuing the project on their own.  I frequently stay connected to clients to hear their progress, but last Friday was rare.  I had the privilege of applauding my client’s success at an awards celebration, along with elected officials, top-level administrators, community leaders, and hundreds of happy children.

Keep America Beautiful, the nation’s largest volunteer-based community action and education organization, recognized Sam Rutherford Elementary in Mesquite, Texas, as the first-place Texas state winner of “Recycle Bowl,” the first comprehensive nationwide recycling competition for K-12 students.  Teachers and students earned $1,000 in prize money for recycling a total of 19,657 pounds of recyclable material (about 38 pounds per capita).   “The amount of energy saved could power a television set for 857,000 days,” said David Feckley, Senior Regional Natural Resources Manager for Nestle Waters North America, who sponsored the contest.

Politicians aren't the only ones saying one thing and doing another. Consumers are constantly flip-flopping, especially when it comes to their claims of living sustainably and buying green products. OgilvyEarth, the sustainability division of advertising agency Ogilvy Mather, collaborated on a project aimed at understanding the gap between consumers' intentions and actions in the US and China markets, the two largest consumer markets in the world. This project, Bridging the Green Gap [PDF] set out to understand why this gap exists and how to close it. Graceann Bennett and Freya Williams, who led the US project, presented the findings at the recent GreenBiz Forum.

Click here to continue reading my article on this topic for Greenbiz.com.

As one of the largest sports organizations in the country, the National Football League has a long-standing commitment to sustainable practices. In fact, for nearly two decades the NFL has been "greening" the management of Super Bowl. This year, however, the NFL has gone further than ever in that effort. Due to a partnership with Green Mountain Energy Company, the nation's longest serving clean energy provider, the game in Indianapolis was the greenest yet.

The NFL selected Green Mountain Energy to lead the charge by powering all of the major Super Bowl facilities with green power – including Lucas Oil Stadium, site of Super Bowl XLVI, the Indiana Convention Center, site of the NFL Experience Football Theme Park, and all four of the major NFL hotels including the NFL headquarters, the Super Bowl Media Center, and the AFC and NFC teams' hotels. The renewable energy provided helped the NFL avoid over 29 million pounds of greenhouse gas emissions – about equal to the weight of nearly 33 million official NFL footballs!

Click here to continue reading my article on this topic for Greenbiz.com.

This article first appeared in the Daily Record.

The pursuit of a sustainable future is the biggest and most difficult challenge of our time. While it has some aspects which are simple and relatively easy — and these are important and get much of the attention — much of what we will have to learn and address will not necessarily be so.  Our pursuit of sustainability is hampered by perceptual, cognitive, and ideological blinders which make it more difficult to see and assess a fuller range of possible approaches to problems.

A few of these are the ways we tend to see certainties in life, as opposed to probabilities; categorize things in black and white, instead of with nuance; quickly define who the heroes and villains are in a given situation, instead of seeing “the other” as coming from a different place and as having an important perspective; or assume that no better solutions are possible, or ways exist to find them, than what we’re doing today

At last year's GreenBiz Forum in Washington D.C., I had the opportunity to interview Al Iannuzzi, senior director of product stewardship at Johnson & Johnson.  Al is a leading expert in the field, so when he told me he was working on a book, I couldn't wait to gain access to his extensive knowledge. Now that I've read his book, I can affirm that Al has created the definitive guide on the making and marketing of greener products.  I highly recommend Greener Products as one of the premier handbooks in its category.

For many years I’ve been frustrated watching sustainable business consultants stay within the existing paradigm, position every potential green decision as narrowly dependent on whether “it meets the business case,” avoid asking the big questions (or even acknowledging there are any), and show no awareness that they—and their clients—live on, and have a stake in, endangered planet Earth.  They may quietly have known this, but were careful not to show it.  But I’m happy to detect considerable progress in the past few years, particularly in the last one and a half years, from a growing number of them.

Greetings Readers, 

I wanted to share an interesting video with those who have Netflix accounts.  As we are all aware of, human activity is having an impact on climate change.  It came to my attention that there is also another effect that we are causing.  This effect is a topic that was first visited a good number of years ago, but has seemingly been swept under the rug.  I wish to bring it back to the forefront and find out from our readers any updates on this situation.

Vehicle drivers typically slide into a parking space front-first and then back out when it's time to leave. But reversing your car into your spot — a method some call "tactical parking" — is actually a more efficient approach. One website devoted to the technique has even termed it Fancy Parking, saying it's "a way of saying to the world, 'I'm not going to rush into things, I'm going to plan sensibly.'"  Tactical parking enthusiasts claim that there are more benefits to taking a bit of time to reverse into your driveway and then driving straight out, face-front.

In Triple Pundit’s recent article, “Changing Perceptions at Chevy: Feedback Please,” Eban Goldstein, a sustainability advisor to Chevrolet, requests comments on the company’s new video campaign. Judging from the first posted comment on the piece – “just more of the same bunk” - their goal of changing perceptions may prove difficult.

With the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement emphasizing the inequity of the current system, and also the Tea Party coming from a different (but not necessarily opposite) direction, we’ve entered a new era of societal debate and discussion about the proper roles of capitalism and socialism.  The socialism charge is a legitimate issue to be discussed with as much open mind as we can muster.  In fact, figuring out solutions to the challenges we face in pursuing a sustainable planet will be even more difficult without such an overall orientation. So let us begin.

As local governments move forward with sustainability initiatives, they are discovering that “green teams” are a creative, low-cost, high-impact way to begin efforts, engage stakeholders, and embed sustainability into the culture.  Green Teams are an effective solution to sustainable change, bringing together one or more groups of stakeholders in planning, developing, and/or implementing initiatives or an overall sustainability program. 

Less water, less waste, less energy, less fossil fuel, less carbon emissions. Less, less, less. Sounds like a dull evening, but not for the green enthusiasts who attended the newest chapter of Green Drinks in South Philly.

Our inaugural event was held in the evening of August 8^th at Kennett Restaurant. My co-host Lauren Leonard of GreenLimbs and I chose Kennett for its sustainably and locally-sourced food, local beers on tap, organic wine and spirits, and living wages for staff.