A recent issue of Fast Company magazine featured its annual "Fast 50" leaders in business innovation, and this year's focus was on concepts and products that address environmental, social, and health issues around the world--in other words, "green" business ideas that show concern for the world rather than obliviousness to it.

At first, I was really impressed with what they chose to highlight--there area lot of great innovations going on out there, including biodegradable plastic that comes from plant cellulose, the ingenious concepts used by Polyface Farms, peer-networking systems that work around government-imposed Internet censorship (as in China), reemerging electric car technology, some great ideas for cleaner energy sources.

But as I read and considered further, along with all the great ideas for replacing wasteful or toxic technology and practices with healthier substitutes, there was an unsettling thread running through many of the other featured items. The best way I can describe it is a type of business approach that addresses serious problems by adding something to them rather than by trying to truly solve them.

A few examples might explain this best. One featured item involved GAIN, a global partnership between social organizations, the UN, and big agriculture corporations. Their goal is to improve the nutrition of the poor around the world. An extremely important issue, no doubt. But the example the magazine chose to highlight was NutriSip, a nutrition-fortified drink that's distributed in juice-box-style plastic bags to Nigerian schoolchildren. It's even made with local ingredients, so how could that be troubling?

Well, call me picky, but it just seems wrong somehow that the children of Nigeria, with nutritious local food ingredients already available, will become reliant on a Swedish company to provide their nutrition for them, in a plastic-packaged liquid form. Children plagued by poverty are in dire need of nutrition, but "solutions" like this not only trade empowerment for reliance on outsiders, but base their very business model on a lack of self-sufficiency in the customers. If the Nigerian people become more self-sufficient and develop better ways to feed themselves, it will hurt this business venture. Never good to have capitalism blocking your way. It seems to me that it would be better for Nigeria if entrepreneurs found ways to help the people develop their own nutritionally-balanced food production that keeps everything local and removes reliance on outside manufacturing, packaging, and distribution. But where's the money in that?

Another featured item was GE's Water division and its new water-filtering technologies. GE is in the midst of acquiring many new water-purification companies and products, one of which is ZeeWeed, which is "powerful enough to transform Singapore's raw sewage into clean water". Brilliant, from a technological standpoint. What's troubling, though, is that same concept of adding something to a problem instead of truly solving its root cause. The immediate problem, of course, is that there's too much dirty water and not enough clean water. The approach taken here is, "how can we make the dirty water clean?" What seems to be ignored in the process is what seems to me the better question: "how can we prevent the water from getting dirty in the first place?"

Again, it might sound curmudgeonly, but this is troubling to me. We have a situation where industry and overpopulation are creating a massive problem of water pollution and scarcity. Clean water is perhaps the most essential and precious substance on earth (try living off diamonds, baby), and it's under the greatest threat it's ever been. But rather than looking for ways to protect it in the first place, GE's basing a massive corporate venture on ways to profit from polluted water. In other words, its business model relies on the existence of polluted, unusable water.

Now, so long as there are people, there will be polluted water. It's impossible to escape that altogether. But this scenario depends on the continuation of unsustainable polluting behavior by masses of people. Corporate success isn't about mere profit--it's about continuously growing profits, reaching greater and greater heights every quarter, forever. Because of that, only huge-scale pollution will sustain this huge-scale venture. And anything that reduces pollution works against the success of GE.

Think about that. Reducing pollution will weaken GE's business.

It's situations like that which should make us all tremble at the Frankensteinian implications or large-scale capitalism.

Do we really want to rely on distant corporations for our nutrition? Do we really want to rely on massive corporate juggernauts like GE for the most basic elements of life? Almost everywhere in the world, the ingredients for healthy, nutritious, clean, sustaining lifestyles are readily at hand. Corporate control of these resources has created a market where there doesn't need to be a market, and has created need where there doesn't have to be need. This has worked to distance all of us from our own self-sufficiency and virtually obliterated the practice of community self-sufficiency in the developed world.

A great example of a more positive direction is the much-heralded zeer pot, invented by Nigerian professor Muhammed Bah Abba. This simple, ingenious device nests one earthenware pot inside another, separated by an insulating layer of wet sand. It's simple, clean to make, uses readily available ingredients, and can be made, sold, and used locally, without reliance on any outsiders. The results not only improve health, through increased shelf-life for vegetables, but have cultural and local-economic benefits as well:

Traders use desert coolers in the weekly Dutse market which attracts 100,000 people. Farmers and their wives store vegetables in the coolers at home and sell from there or at the market at a good price, instead of sending out their daughters to hawk them at a poor one. This means the girls can go to school, while young men can earn a living in the village instead of going off to Kano. "Aubergines," says Muhammed Bah Abba, "can last for 21 days." Without a desert cooler, they last only a day and a half.

One of his aims is to improve the situation of married women who, traditionally, cannot leave their village. He runs education centres for them and has found that his desert coolers help them earn the money to buy soap and other things they need. They make soft drinks called kunu, zobo and lamurje and sell them from the coolers. They trade in fruit and vegetables, either grown by their husbands or bought from other farmers.

To me, this is real innovation. Something that integrates into and preserves existing cultures, improves quality of life, and creates economic opportunities that produce secondary benefits rather than more waste and pollution.

There's green, and then there's greed. While the new wave of concerned corporate ventures will produce many wonderful things, we must be careful that we don't lose more of our humanity in the process, and must keep "voting with our money" in the best ways we can.

Labels: Culture, Environment, Life

I don't normally write about technical or web topics, but as someone who's prone to information overload, this is one I thought was worth sharing.

I just recently started using the personalized home page option on Google. This allows anyone to customize the standard Google home page with all manner of information, news feeds, and miscellaneous gadgets and handy tools.

I normally try and keep up with a lot of different news sources--local news, some of the major progressive news sites, music news, all kinds of things. My most recent forays into audio blogs (more on that in a later post, probably) finally tipped the scales and pushed me to seek a better way to keep track of it all without having to take a long time to browse a ton of sites.

Enter the new Google home page. In just a few minutes of customizing, I now have quick access to a vast amount of information all on one page, with a layout that makes it easy to track and not get overwhelmed by. To give you an idea, my home page includes:

• News feeds from the Huffington Post, Alternet, Democracy Now, the New York Times, Pitchfork (music news), Ain't It Cool News (movie-geek news), and the Columbia Daily Tribune
• Updates on about a dozen audio blogs I subscribe to via RSS
• The latest messages in my Gmail account
• A three-day weather forecast
• A to-do list that automatically sorts by priority
• A 'sticky note' notes-to-self area
• A photo of the day from National Geographic
• A daily set of brain teasers and math puzzles
• A Buddhist 'thought of the day'
• A free font of the day
• A virtual guitar neck that can identify and play any chord

(There are also some very handy-looking iTunes widgets you can add, but since I don't have access to it at work, I haven't added them yet.) On a second tab--one click away--I have several more items on top of that, but this allows me to keep all of my most frequently accessed content all in one place and scan it so much more quickly than ever before. Sometimes I'll catch myself thinking, "okay, where do I need to go next?"--and then realizing that I'm already caught up on everything I need to be. It's been a great time saver so far, and is highly recommended.

Labels: Life

Depending on your view of things, this is either shocking or sadly familiar, or both. According to a report on Democracy Now, the U.S. and Israel are sponsoring terrorist attacks inside Iran by a Kurdish guerrilla group.

Apparently, both of these governments are working in a clandestine way with at least two different groups, classified as terrorist organizations by the State Department, to carry out terrorist activity throughout Iran. The primary group, called the PKK, is an ethnic Kurdish group that is responding to discrimination against ethnic Kurds in Iran with violence.

We have a history of getting involved with groups like this in the Middle East when it's served our political purposes--an involvement that's had dire consequences for us:

...On the one hand, the United States is very much opposes to the P.K.K.'s actions in Turkey. On the other hand they're supporting P.K.K.'s attack on Iran. This is kind of typical of the clandestine efforts by the United States when we saw the U.S. support for the Mujahadeen against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. They sided with some pretty nefarious characters who ended up forming al Qaeda and bombing New York.

So once again, the U.S. is allying with one faction of this party, but not with the other, playing a very dangerous game and they're playing a very similar game with the Mujahadeen al-Halb, another Iranian group and with groups in Baluchestan which is near the Pakistan Iranian boarder where some revolutionary guard buses were blown up. It's a very very dangerous, duplicitous game that the United States is playing.

And news of this comes just shortly after the U.S. has very publicly chastised Iran on the world stage for supposedly sponsoring terrorist activity in Iraq (something for which good evidence has still not been found). Another lesson that when the Bush administration accuses another country of doing something wrong, we should start looking for evidence that we're in fact doing it ourselves.

Is this the way we uphold the noble ideals of freedom and democracy around the world? Is this the example we wish to set for other countries? Can you fight a "war on terror" with terror as your weapon? How tragic, and how sad.

Labels: Politics