Sustainable Business Practices-Talking With Tom Osdoba

I would have posted this earlier but Ive been dead sick all weekend.

Anyway, Tom Osdoba , the director of the center for sustainable business practices at the UO, came and spoke to my green branding class last Wednesday, it was nothing short of inspirational.

After we hashed out some definitions of sustainability, he began to outline what a sustainable economy looks like. A sustainable (or alternatively conservation) economy is equally balenced on all sides by social capital, natural capital and economic capital. It uses all these capital resources wisely and gives back to all of them at the same time.

He also explained that we need to approach our environmental problems with humility and realize that we are not going to be able to "fix" every problem we created. Instead we need to start acting like the "native species" that we are. he further emphasized that how we are living currently is "incongruous with being native."

Tom then began to show us how the biggest challenges to sustainability are institutional. He emphasized how, if businesses started thinking long term, sustainable practices become more than cost effective, they become profitable.  Tom also emphasized that change doesn't some about easily and it needs 3 major steps before someone (or more importantly, some business) will take action: concern + best practice+ institutional capacity= action.

I found Tom's speech inspiring on two levels.

One it showed in concrete ways how business and economic powers are the ones that have the ability to change things for the better. This is similar to what Adam Werbach talks about in "Strategy for Sustainability" and it begins to show me that maybe through business and economics (and of course advertising) we can begin to make some of the positive changes we so desperately need.

And two, it touched on ways to effective communicate to people about sustainability issues. Tom talked about getting residents of Vancouver to ride their bikes one day out of the week and instead of framing this as a sacrifice (which of course riding a bike never is) he used value messages to compel them. The key values he emphasized were: quality of life, natural environment, more time with family and friends. I believe this is important because we need to stop telling people to "make sacrifices" for the good of the environment and show them how living sustainably drastically improves your quality of life.

This is the message we need to drive home with all of our communications about being "green".