We in the sustainable business movement believe that solving the economic, social and environmental challenges facing our country and world today presents the greatest business opportunity of our era. We believe that through innovation and new business models, solutions will rise to meet those challenges.
We're an optimistic lot. When others point out the long odds we face, we talk about game changers and one-in-a-million ideas. Today we're confronted by crises that reach around the globe, connecting nearly every hut, home, village and megacity, with the conference rooms and corner offices of commerce and the chambers of every legislature, congress, and parliament, to the palaces of presidents and potentates.
If there were ever a time for a one-in-a-million idea, it would be now. So I am announcing the launch of the Million Green Ideas Campaign.
The Million Green Ideas Campaign is dedicated to uncovering, discovering and sharing one million green ideas, and raising $1 million dollars over the next year in hopes of finding and funding at least one one-in-a-million idea. The campaign will combine the online success of the crowdsourcing movement that's brought us things like Wikipedia, with good old-fashioned face-to-face discussions to get us away from Facebook and Twitter (at least for a time), and back to talking and making real interpersonal connections. I'm calling it "crowdservice."
The online effort begins June 1, and the off-line campaign kicks off Wednesday, May 13, in Los Angeles at the first of what will be a series of social mashup salons called the Taverns on Green. Participating in the Taverns on Green and the entire campaign is free of charge. All that is required to participate is to participate, opting in is the only thing that's not optional.
How did I arrive at this point of boundless optimism? By feeling sorry for myself.
The economic crisis has nailed me as hard as anyone, killing a couple of projects I'd been nurturing for years, and the shenanigans on Wall Street have literally hit home. Totaling up the funds I've spent or caused to be spent over the last five years trying to create business opportunities that address our pressing economic, social and environmental challenges, I came to over $250 million. I mounted the largest public referendum on clean energy in history, put together multimillion dollar cleantech manufacturing deals in China, defeated a greenwashed ballot initiative backed by T. Boone Pickens to grab $5 billion from California taxpayers to subsidize natural gas vehicles, and more.
The big bummer came when I met with an Indonesian businessman making millions converting the rainforest into palm oil plantations. Here was a man at the intersection of global warming emissions, biofuels and biodiversity loss. I presented him a plan I'd been working on for about a year that would have preserved enough of Borneo's great forest to guarantee the survival of the planet's last wild orangutan population while still earning him a healthy rate of return.
The Indonesian man smiled at me like I was the slow kid in class, and said simply, "The market teaches us that we should exploit all available resources, convert them to productive use, and invest the cash flows for the highest possible returns."
It was like the first day in business school. I thought he was going to force me to calculate his portfolio Beta. Based on everything I was taught at b-school, I knew he was absolutely correct, and dead wrong. Then the bottom fell out of the world.
So I was wallowing, tallying the time and money spent, when a friend forwarded me a Tom Friedman column about Van Jones, the founder of Green for All, the successful green jobs training program based in Oakland, Calif. It said that Jones was partly inspired to start his organization by the oil industry's opposition campaign against the 2006 California Clean Energy Act, of which I had been the founder and campaign chair.
That's when the light bulb (compact fluorescent) lit up: A guy whom I had never met, was inspired by an idea of mine, one that didn't succeed, and created a great success for himself and others. Given the present urgency, why not generate a million ideas, pass them around, share and tweak them, and agree on the very best? Maybe, just maybe, there'll be a couple winners among them. At the very least we'll get some discussion flowing, help people to connect, show their chops, perhaps find some financing or jobs, and certainly, we'll have some fun.
Please opt in, go to www.MillionGreenIdeas.com. If you are able to make it to the Taverns on Green on Wednesday evening, you can sign up to attend. We need your help. All of us need all of you. Especially if you're a web developer. My (mis)adventures in getting the campaign website up and running is the subject of my first blog there. Joel Makower from here at GreenBiz.com has generously offered to let me chime in here from time to time too, one idea at a time.
Anthony Rubenstein is a cleantech business strategist in Los Angeles. He was founder and chairman of Californians for Clean Energy, and was recently named "Consumer Champion of the Year" by the California Consumer Federation for helping to defeat California Proposition 10 in 2008.
Image CC licensed by Flickr user jpockele.