John-Paul Maxfield thinks compost can help solve this problem. Environmentalists love compost for several reasons, including that it helps divert waste from landfills -- the world's largest source of human-produced methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. But for Maxfield, composting organic matter isn't so much a waste-reduction issue as it is an ecological and agricultural one. He wants to create a market solution to get compost back into the soil.

He's part of a small but growing community of people and companies around the country that recognizes the lifecycle of the food supply, and the need to link the production of food with what happens to the scraps of food after it is consumed.

"We have been losing topsoil across the planet at an alarming rate over the past 50 years, largely due to poor agricultural practices," Dan Sullivan, managing editor of BioCycle magazine, said in an email. "Amending our soils with compost, basically recycling organic waste back into the earth just as natural ecosystems such as forests function, is really the only way we can correct that damage."

He said he's starting to see a transition even on conventional (non-organic) farms from petroleum-based farming to compost, largely because of increasing costs of petroleum, but also because the advantages of compost are becoming ever-clearer. "Compost use improves water infiltration and storage capacity, thereby protecting agricultural lands long-term from drought, while chemical farming tends to dry out the soil, deplete nutrients over time and cause erosion," Sullivan said.

Dan Matsch, compost program manager at Eco-Cycle, put it this way: "Any land from which nutrients are harvested, whether it’s a lawn from which the clippings are removed and leaves are raked up, or a giant agricultural field, needs to have those nutrients replaced one way or another or the soil becomes depleted over time."

But the transition is relatively slow, particularly in urban areas, where farming is on the rise around the country but where soil tends to be nearly devoid of nutrients and microbial activity, which Maxfield says is the key difference between soil and dirt. Urban areas also produce huge amounts of food waste that are, in most cities around the U.S., treated as trash and sent to a landfill -- preventing the nutrients from ever reaching the soil again while also contributing directly to climate change.

So Maxfield started a company, Waste Farmers, that takes organic waste collected from around Denver and produces organic agricultural inputs like fertilizer, potting soil, biochar, and compost tea. Waste Farmers currently sells products in bulk, and is preparing to move into the retail home and garden market in 2012. Ultimately, the objective is to develop a stronger market demand for compost. The products that Waste Farmers make are essentially a delivery mechanism for getting compost back into the ground and part of the food production system again.

"At the retail level most people don’t really know what to do with straight compost, so it makes good sense to package it in a more ready-to-use form as [Waste Farmers] is doing," said Matsch. "The company is "not marketing straight compost – tea, char, and castings are all ‘value-added’ additional ingredients that make it an entirely different product."

By getting compost into people's hands in these more usable forms, the company is essentially creating a closed-loop process for agriculture and the organic waste stream.

To explain the function of Waste Farmers to people without an agricultural background, Maxfield asks you to picture a farmer using biodynamic principles, which are designed to be self-sustaining:

"What he can't consume, he feeds to his pigs and his cattle, and then they poop. And then a chicken comes through and picks through the poop," he said. "That becomes a refined product that then goes back to feed the soil. We kind of play the role of the chicken in this system, refining and adding value to this soil."

Matsch, whose organization has worked with Maxfield and is the largest community-based recycling organization in the country, chose to describe Waste Farmers another way, commenting on the shared goals of the company and Eco-Cycle. "What both [Waste Farmers] and Eco-Cycle are doing is to try to create an association in people’s minds between food waste and soil fertility and to create a very local circle of resource recycling – from plate to compost pile to soil and back to the plate."

The other thing that Waste Farmers' potting soil has going for it is that the presence of compost displaces the need for peat moss, a plant material sourced from limited supplies in sensitive ecosystems -- and is found in just about every retail potting soil.

Waste Farmers, now about three years old, has seen impressive growth. Maxfield said at six months, they were operating with a pickup truck and processing about one ton of compost a month. Now they're up to about 300 tons a month. But the more notable achievement is the quality of the product they're retailing. Maxfield said that side-by-side comparisons of plants grown in Waste Farmers' potting soil and in their competitors' soil have produced double yields for the Waste Farmers soil.

Maxfield said the company brought in about $500,000 this year, and expects to grow to between $3 and $5 million by 2014. He bases that largely on the growing demographic of urban farmers, the support he has received so far from the local food community and from the city -- Maxfield sits on the Denver Mayor's Seeds Task Force, which is focused on developing the infrastructure for urban agriculture, and the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce named Waste Farmers the "2010 Green Business of the Year" and on the interest that local retailers have expressed in selling his product.

"Costco said, 'let's talk.' Independent lawn and garden centers have said, 'let's talk," Maxfield said. "The conversation's the same: 'Tell us when you have your packaging.'"

The packaging isn't easy: "We tried compostable packaging. It composted. We tried a burlap sack, it composted the burlap sack," Maxfield said in the Waste Farmers testing lab. They expect to have a solution in time to start selling sometime this year.

For Maxfield, the big-picture plan for Waste Farmers is to expand to other cities, so that organic waste is collected, turned into compost, and put back into the soil all in a closed-loop, localized system.

Establishing smaller and more distributed systems in this way makes financial sense. "The current economics of compost have a lot to do with proximity to agricultural markets. Compost is heavy (and so is food waste), and most commercial composters will tell you that 100 miles is about the farthest you can haul it and have the numbers line up," said Sullivan from BioCycle.

But for Waste Farmers, setting up shop in multiple cities is also part of the quest for sustainable answers to agricultural -- not just financial -- problems. He said, "What we want to do is decentralize a very centralized, failing agricultural system."

Photo: Waste Farmers

Seattle joins several U.S. cities in launching benchmarking programs for building owners

Humans are an increasingly urbanized species; for the first time in history, more people live in cities than in rural areas. And that, of course, means more buildings, which means more concentrated energy usage.

Many cities are trying to limit carbon emissions by monitoring energy use to keep it at sustainable levels. A new monitoring approach, called “benchmarking," counts on a combination of raising awareness, motivating people through comparative measures, and fostering a sense of responsibility, to help building owners be greener. In New York City, benchmarking was piloted in August 2011, and it launched in November in Seattle; it is also currently launching in Austin, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. The idea behind benchmarking is that measuring and rating a building’s energy performance, and making that information available in certain contexts, can help owners identify ways to increase building energy efficiency and lower energy costs.

The key to the program’s success is its emphasis on transparency – even though the information is not completely public. “Benchmarking creates awareness,” said Jayson Antonoff, Seattle’s Program Manager for the Benchmarking and Reporting initiative. After a building owner has done benchmarking, any current or potential tenant, buyer, or lender can request to see the energy performance report, so they can make informed decisions on using the building. “We’re trying to get the framework in place so that the market can motivate building owners to improve energy performance,” added Antonoff.

In Seattle, the city sent out letters to the owners of 8,000 buildings a few weeks ago, notifying them that they need to begin benchmarking and reporting the energy use of their buildings by April 2010. In this initial phase, nonresidential buildings over 50,000 square feet will be obliged to comply with the program. The next phase will require nonresidential buildings over 10,000 square feet and multifamily buildings with five or more units to benchmark and report by April 2012.

To assist building owners, Seattle’s city government has developed educational materials, including hands-on training workshops, webinars, and a “How To” guide on benchmarking, as well as information packets on utility energy-saving programs. The city has also partnered with local utilities to provide owners with the building energy consumption data they need. A free online tool called Energy Star Portfolio Manager allows owners to easily see their buildings’ energy performance and how it compares to other, similar buildings. The next step in the process is an energy audit, where an expert comes on-site to look for opportunities to improve a building’s energy performance.

The benchmarking program is one component of broader efforts for cities to reduce their carbon emissions and energy-related costs. A few years ago, the city of Seattle established citywide goals of 20 percent improvement across the entire stock of existing buildings by the year 2020. Now, as building owners report benchmarking data once a year to the city, they will be able to see their progress in meeting their sustainability goals.

There will be hefty fees for any building owner who does not comply with the program by its April deadline – but the punishment stops there. Seattle program, unlike New York City’s, does not require the benchmarking information to be available to the public. “Only people involved in a transaction with a building can request the info from the owners – this makes owners feel like the issue is framed in a positive way, rather than ‘shaming,’” explained Antonoff. The private nature of the conversation also allows the owner to provide an explanation for a relatively bad rating – maybe he or she hasn’t had time to work on improving it yet, but plans to, for example.

The program seems promising precisely because it requires so much engagement – the evaluation and reporting of buildings’ energy usage is complemented by education and action. “We are putting resources into outreach and training because we really want people to understand why this is important, valuable information, that can help them operate businesses more efficiently and increasing building values,” explained Antonoff. By finding ways to work within a positive mentality, and increasing awareness of energy issues, Seattle hopes that it will reach its goals of reducing carbon emissions, reducing energy waste, and becoming a greener home for its residents.

By 2020, Oregon will get rid of all of its coal-fired power plants. The state mainly runs on hydroelectric power now, and the last coal-fired plant, run by Portland General Electric Co, will be either closed or converted to biomass-burning within the next nine years. This plan shows a growing trend not only toward cleaner energy sources, but also toward companies realizing that the high cost of updating to current emission controls is often more expensive than converting to cleaner energy.

According to Reuters, PGE would shell out around $500 million to upgrade emission controls for the plant to operate through 2040, and the company has decided it is simply not financially sound to proceed. PGE will already have to spend about $75 million to upgrade the plant enough to run it until 2020. The 2020 deadline aligns with Oregon regulations requiring the state’s largest utilities to get a minimum of 25% of electricity from renewable sources like wind, solar, wave, geothermal, biomass, or new upgrades to existing hydropower by 2025.

These type of regulations, called renewable portfolio standards (RPS), exist in much of the United States. The first RPS was established in 1983 and after 200 the majority of states created or strengthened standards. Oregon’s RPS was passed in 2007.

With clear profit advantages and legal restrictions, clean energy is becoming not just a good deed, but a business-must in the Northwest. As a result, power companies are truly thinking through energy’s sustainable future. Hydroelectric power is particularly cheap in the Northwestern United States because of existing natural resources; in Oregon, hydroelectric power is a full 3 cents lower per average kilowatt hour than the national average.  Burning coal simply isn't as profitable, and as a result, coal-fired plants are dwindling in the region. The state of Washington also has only one remaining coal-powered power plant in use, the Centralia station.

Throughout the world, governments are providing financial incentives that make renewable energy and emission reduction start to look more financially sound for companies than options like coal. In 2004 New York state passed an RPS so that, by 2013, 25% of the state’s electricity would come from renewable sources.  Several Brazilian and Mexican states signed an MOU with California to receive “carbon credits” for reducing deforestation through California’s cap and trade program, as many believe that saving forests is the cheapest way to fight global warming. Cap and trade programs reduce pollution by requiring companies that emit more pollutants to purchase permits, also known as “carbon credits, from a government or from companies who pollute less. That way, companies end up paying for pollution. The UN program Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD), established at last year Copenhagen summit on climate change, seeks to spread this kind of trade across countries and to provide financial incentives to reduce deforestation. Even without national and international policy, state regulation has moved in to develop financially motivating solutions, even outside of the hydo-rich Northwest.

• A group of businessmen from around the world come to see one of Honey Care Africa's bee Apiary in Nairobi, Kenya, and learn about HCA's innovative social business model.

   

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• The "Langsroth Box", a more modern way of capturing honey from honey bees, was introduced into Kenya by Honey Care Africa in 2000.

   

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• Masaki John, a widowed farmer with her two children in Kitui, Kenya. Masaki has eight beehives, which she inherited from her recently passed husband. They produce several kilograms of honey each year, which is guaranteed to be purchased at fair market prices by social enterprise Honey Care Africa.

   

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• Joyce Kavinya Motunga, one of Honey Care Africa's suppliers with just 5 beehives, takes us on a tour of her apiary. In 2005, she won the “beekeeper of the year” award, and became one of Honey Care Africa’s Service Providers, offering training, instruction, and assistance to other bee farmers in her area.

   

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• Peter Bernard Mutisya and his son look up at one of their hives in Kitui, Kenya. Bernard provides beekeeping training and services to over 150 farmers in his district.

   

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• Honey Care Africa's workshop in Nairobi, Kenya, where they produce the Langstroth Box.

   

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• At Honey Care Africa's workshop in Nairobi, Kenya, a more finished version of the Langstroth Box, almost ready for sale to entrepreneurial farmers, NGO's, and others.

   

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• At Honey Care Africa's processing facility, a worker puts the final labels on the honey jars.

   

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Bees. More specifically, African Bees. They’re probably not the first, or even the fifth thing that comes to mind when you think of poverty alleviation. Yet these little insects are causing a stir, and the raw honey they produce is playing a role in lifting thousands of rural farmers out of poverty in East Africa.

Honey Care Africa is a Kenyan based social enterprise which for the past 11 years has brought modern honey production methods to East Africa, built a local market supply and demand for honey, and provided more than 15,000 rural farmers with an simple, gender equal, income generating opportunity. They’ve also achieved something even more remarkable. They’ve done it, for the most part, profitably.

Honey Care Africa’s farmers, who receive the “business in a beehive” package to help get them started, on average earn between 10,000-20,000 Kenyan Shillings per year ($120-$250) depending on the amount of hives they have, for less than 30 minutes of work per week. Considering most of these farmers earn less than $2 per day on average, the additional income, according to farmers, is well worth the investment. Additionally, some of Honey Care’s best bee farmers have gone on to earn a small income training other farmers in their areas.

The company is currently working to scale the business, and begin a transformation to turn honey from a “luxury good” into a nutritional supplement and daily dietary staple, because of its micronutrients. It's "nature's perfect immune system booster", says Honey Care Africa's CEO Madison Ayer. They are also starting to market their products to the base of the economic pyramid- essentially creating a “closed loop” BoP business model.

This Wednesday, the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee held a hearing about a failed $528 million government loan to Solyndra, a solar equipment manufacturer that recently filed for bankruptcy. During the investigation, e-mails surfaced suggesting that the White House had pressured officials to expedite the loan approval process for political purposes.

The debacle has since “drawn attention” to the fifteen other renewable energy firms that are stimulus loan candidates (which ends September 30), and Wednesday night, the Treasury joined the FBI and the Department of Energy in the Solyndra investigation.

The discussion surrounding this news has taken three distinct paths.

The first, and most important to settle, is the barrage of media and political myths that have popped up surrounding the Solyndra scandal. Several media outlets have failed to mention that the Bush administration was, as TIMES Swampland’s Michael Grunwald put it, “just as hellbent to make this loan.” The media often overlooks that the Solyndra loan is about 1% of the Energy Department’s $40 billion clean-energy portfolio.

Climate Progress has created a timeline, verified by the Department of Energy, that documents the full life of the Solyndra loan. The Washington Post’s Brad Plumer also created a nice, tight explainer that dispels five of the most common myths.

The second line of conversation wrestles with the growth of solar energy and Obama’s green jobs strategy. Republicans have taken this opportunity to question the validity of Obama’s jobs creation strategy, which placed a heavy emphasis on the clean energy sector.

But environmental and energy bloggers were quick to point out that the solar industry is doing just fine. TIMES’ Ecocentric blogger Bryan Walsh responded with “meh,” noting that the solar industry is actually thriving, thanks in large part to money from the Obama administration. And Grunwald pointed out that the U.S. solar market doubled last year, and is expected to double again. “How many other industries are growing that fast in this economy?” he wrote.

“Trial and error of new approaches is the lifeblood of technological and thus economic progress,” pointed out Garvin Jabusch, cofounder of Green Alpha Advisors, LLC, in a nice overview of the solar investment space. Pointing out that solar products account for $1.8 billion net exports last year, he urged readers to remember that Solyndra is a business. “Companies fail all the time in this world,” he continued. “It doesn’t logically follow that the underlying industries are somehow fatally busted.”

But the third line of debate, regarding whether or not the government should gamble in business ventures, is, Walsh believes, “a fair debate to have.” As Jonathan Mariano argued last week on Triple Pundit, the risky realm of startups is not the place for a debt-laden government. “Is this to say that private venture capital should stop investing in clean tech start ups?  No,” he wrote. “Is this to say that the U.S. Federal Government should stop investing in clean tech start ups? Yes. It cannot afford to take the risk venture capital can.”

Several Republican representatives agreed with Mariano in a piece on the New York Times. “It seems like crony capitalism was trumping the smart decision-making,” said Louisianan Republican Representative Steve Scalise.

But meanwhile, Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist John Doerr, a high-profile investor who made his millions in early-stage Internet companies like Google and Yahoo, championed the clean energy industry and the government’s involvement. “Keeping the nation competitive in energy technology is critical,” he said. “[America] does not want to outsource energy future to the rest of the world.”

Al Gore determined to prove the inconvenient truth about climate change

If you’re reading this, you’re probably reasonably savvy about the effects of climate change, which are happening at an unbelievably fast pace. Grist recently published photos taken by climate scientists who monitored a glacier as it shrank, drastically, over the course of two (only two!) years. The difference is drastic and sobering.

But many Americans don’t believe in climate change, and studies show that disbelief is on the rise. Al Gore is one American who has had enough of this skepticism This week, he launched a 24-hour TV campaign to educated Americans about climate change. From the evening of Wednesday the 14th to the following night, “24 Hours of Reality" broadcasted a presentation by Al Gore across 24 different time zones.

Denialism of climate change does appear to be growing. But not everyone is sure that Gore is the right one to set the record straight.

As Forbes reported this week, a recent UPI survey showed that “the percentage of people saying that humans are causing global warming has reached a record low. Only 44% of Americans believe that carbon dioxide emissions are warming the Earth, down from 51% in 2009, and 71% in 2007.” The rest of the Forbes article, however, was in support of such denialism. Written by Larry Bell, it quoted several scientists saying that recent natural disasters are actually not an indication of climate change. The article did not mention prominent experts like NASA’s James Hansen, who insists that climate change is definitely occurring and that Hurricane Irene was one exemplar. The Daily Beast pointed out that this year has already seen more billion-dollar weather-related disasters than any year in U.S. history. And 2010 tied with 2005 as the warmest year ever recorded on planet Earth.

On Twitter, people were using hashtags #reality and #climate to share their reactions to the presentation.

Dowser tuned in to Climate Reality at 9:28 am EST, when the presentation was taking place in New Delhi. The speaker went through specific examples of all-time high temperatures in places like China and Iran. The presentation was interjected with quotes by climate skeptics like Republican U.S. Congressman John Boehner. Then the discussion shifted to solutions: windmills powering villages in the developing world, India’s plans to quadruple renewable energy generation by 2022 with wind farms and solar power plants, solar-powered laptops in Sierra Leone - one by one examples of eco-friendly energy solutions appeared on the screen.

Meanwhile Leo Hickman at the Guardian wondered if the Climate Reality campaign was just preaching to the choir rather than converting skeptics. He also pointed out that Gore is a politically polarizing figure in the U.S., which makes him less than ideal as the leader of a publicity campaign for the climate change movement.

Though climate change may be news to some, environmental organizations like Greenpeace have been advocating for solutions to global warming for decades. As Greenpeace celebrated its 40th birthday this week, Damian Carrington at the Guardian both praised the accomplishments of the environmental movement over the past few decades and suggested reasons why it is not convincing skeptics. Thanks to activists who pushed for policy change and cultural awareness, Carrington wrote, many people have changed their habits and begun to conserve fossil fuels and recycle. Until very recently, the article said, “new coal-fuelled power stations, ready to pump their carbon pollution into the sky, were seen as inevitable, while renewable energy was just science fiction. Dumping our rubbish was simply a case of digging a hole in the ground.”

But, Carrington wrote, challenges remain for the environmental movement, and for counteracting climate change that results from our previous lack of care for the planet. “By making green issues mainstream they have weakened the traction they had as pressure groups,” he wrote.

Environmentalists, said Carrington, need to be more savvy in their tactics, and show people “why it is good to live within one's planetary means.” The green message, he said, “needs to be sold.”

SOCAP and GOOD Offer Alternatives to Rising Unemployment

A NY Times story earlier this week illustrated just how bad the economic situation is hitting regular Americans: this year about 6.7 percent of Americans have slipped below the poverty line, earning around $11,000/year - an increase of 20.5 million people. Twenty and thirty-something Americans are moving in with family instead of gaining independence by earning a living.

The cause, according to economists who the Times spoke to, was joblessness. An expert cited in the article called the last ten years a “lost decade,” echoing lamentations by writers such as George Packer who earlier this week wrote a chilling article in the New Yorker on ways the US Government has neglected to take care of its citizens at home while waging wars in the Middle East.

The Americans who have suffered most from the rise in poverty are minorities, according to the Times article. “Minorities were hit hardest. Blacks experienced the highest poverty rate, at 27 percent, up from 25 percent in 2009, and Hispanics rose to 26 percent from 25 percent. For whites, 9.9 percent lived in poverty, up from 9.4 percent in 2009. Asians were unchanged at 12.1 percent.”

GOOD’s editor, Cord Jefferson, responded critically to two recent suggestions on how to resolve unemployment, which suggested, respectively, the creation of “enterprise zones” in minority communities where minimum wage rules are not enforced, and the creation of “charter cities” in developing countries that are run as business centers by foreign, wealthier governments. Jefferson emphasized that corporations can be part of the solution as long as they are offering fair wages, but both of these proposals stank of exploitation and dominance, rather than empowerment, to him.

Meanwhile attendees from last week’s SOCAP 11 conference, which brought together leaders in the impact investment sector for the fourth time,  have been reflecting on takeaways from that event. Kathy Brozek pointed out at GreenBiz that the conference was a timely alternative to Wall Street capitalism, which operates on Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT). Unlike impact investment, which aims for social and financial benefits, MPT focuses on “economic growth, risk, and utility” as the path to profit.

Kevin Starr, executive director of the Mulago Foundation and the keynote speaker at the conference, spoke with NextBillion about creating real, scalable impact. The main ideas: have a clear goal, use appropriate metrics, and tailor your organization’s model to match the mission.

And in a SOCAP recap on SustainableIndustries, Piper Kujac shared some highlights from the conference: “We learned about polycentric philanthropic solutions to poverty through shared power and mutual responsibilities among investors and stakeholders. We learned how seed funders such as Gray Ghost Ventures & Village Capital, Invested Development, and The Eleos Foundation, help social enterprises get started and scale. We learned how to leverage social media for investment and impact, from the likes of Causes, Amazon Watch, and DBL Investors.”

Worthwhile Weekend Reads
In the Guardian, some tips for social enterprises thinking on taking on public assets.

FastCompany explains why startups looking to raise venture capital should focus on solving problems as a service.

NASCAR going green? Yes! Solar panels and recycling at the races.

One SOCAP attendee's vision of how to achieve future sustainability.

Have the Gates Foundation’s efforts at extending banking services to their poor had an impact? An article by Johnathan Morduch of NYU’s Financial Access Initiative examines how focusing on service delivery can help in this regard.

Yahoo aims YouTube aims to revamp bookmarking site Delicious.

Norman Foster's architectural plans for Tower 2 at the WTC site

On September 11, 2011, Americans turned their eyes to New York City, and the vacant space in the skyline where the towers that fell 10 years ago would still be. That patch of cityscape was dedicated as National September 11 Memorial, a tribute to the nearly 3,000 lives lost in the attacks on that day.

The long hand-wringing over what might fill such important space in the city in the end boiled down to particulars: designs, blueprints and a construction site. And the building of the 9/11 Memorial, along with the office building known as 7 World Trade Center and the three buildings under construction at the Ground Zero site represent a massive shift in New York City architecture toward sustainable design. 7 World Trade Center is the first office building in Manhattan to be certified as “green,” and the Memorial has environment-friendly features such as stormwater management infrastructure.

Here Neil Chambers, a green building designer who led the movement for the World Trade Center site to be an example of green design, and author of the recently-published book Urban Green, shares his insight into current debates on sustainable urbanism.

Dowser: How did the attacks on 9-11 factor into your career path as a green architect?
Chambers: I saw the towers fall on Sept 11. I was down at the site. I had friends who died there. I was shocked for weeks afterward. There was smoldering ash, the National Guard, impending war.

In 2001 I had been doing environmentally-sensitive designs for six years. At the time of the attack I was working on a subway terminal that has solar panels on the roof – the first ever in the US like this. I remember waking up one day and said to myself, 'Neil if this doesn’t give you a reason to really try to do something, you will never find a reason.'

I started a nonprofit called Green Ground Zero in 2002 that advocated for a green reconstruction of Lower Manhattan. At that time, Mayor Bloomberg and Ground Zero site developer Larry Silverstein wanted nothing to do with LEED or anything else.

We were advocating and educating the NY community about green methods of how to rebuild. We held events constantly for about a year and a half. We met with [architectural firm] SOM and we met with the environmental consultants for the Freedom Tower [as it was formerly called].

How did you see your organization creating impact as you spread information?
Before September 11 no one in this country, or city, was talking about architecture. Then they produced those first options for rebuilding and there was a huge outcry – and then everyone was talking. In those designs, there was no character, no master planning, just these white buildings stuck there.

In 1998 the LEED rating was introduced to the public. By 2001 people still hardly knew what it was. Today everybody knows. So there was a natural evolution of a standard. But when September 11 happened and organizations like ours insisted that we had to do it green, people asked, what does that even mean?

Our impact was that we helped change the perspective. We started to give people a good understanding of green and what it could be.

And what were your takeaways from your outreach efforts?
I wrote my book, Urban Green, because I was frustrated by what people call green. This was something I saw while I was running Green Ground Zero. People were squeezing 'green' aspects into their projects. But at my events people said, 'This is something people want. Why aren’t we pushing this more?' So I started my own company in 2005 because as a nonprofit we couldn’t really do anything.

What is 'green' building'?
A green building consists of four main things: energy-efficiency, water-efficiency, good indoor air quality, and sustainable materials. But we need to think more broadly about green building if we’re going to use architecture to enrich the planet.

Those four qualities only apply to a finished building. Right now no one considers anything beforehand, like the life-cycles of materials. Typically you use more energy to produce all the things that go into a building than a building will ever use in its life span.

So you might have bamboo floors – a renewable product – but it might have taken fifteen times more energy and water to make them. But the life-cycle of that product isn’t being considered, so it’s seen as sustainable.

The three new World Trade Center buildings will be running on a fuel cell. By how much does a fuel cell reduce a building’s carbon footprint and how widespread can this technology be used?
Fuel cells emit 10 percent of the carbon that a normal building emits. They are powered by natural gas, which brings up the issue of fracking. [Fracking refers to the process by which natural gas is extracted from the earth and is a controversial issue for environmentalists.] Fracking can be nasty but compared to coal it’s not as bad. It’s the lesser of two evils. And nuclear power is just as bad as coal – if you look at the life-cycle analysis – if not worse. Not all fracking sites have had the water problems that have been documented in some cases. Right now, there’s not a lot of options besides natural gas if you want to reduce carbon emissions.

Fuel cells have heat recovery so you can heat water for free with high-quality domestic water that’s heated to 270 degrees or more.  It creates good hot water, it costs less, and it reduces your carbon by 90 percent or more. And it’s more reliable and less costly than an electric grid.

In the near future, fuel cells will probably become standard for large-scale buildings. They are expensive to install – 2.7 million dollars for a 400 kilowatt unit- but overall they save money.

In your book you explain the importance of ecomimicry, which you define as the 'integration of human civilization with the components of the natural world essential for ecological health so that all species have the ability to thrive, not just survive.' How you see this concept playing into cities of the future?
Look at beavers – they are completely unsustainable in their practices and they deplete natural resources when they build dams.

But the difference between humans and beavers is that they are a keystone species so they help the overarching ecosystem thrive. An ecologically-healthy city or society will act the same way.

If we want to establish an ecologically-healthy society we need to be more discerning about where we build. For example estuaries have a huge potential to sequester carbon and improve biodiversity. Estuaries house oysters, which filter pollutants in water. One oyster cleans four gallon of water per hour. But we’re building on top of those places, so we’re destroying that opportunity.

Would that best be achieved through policy reform?
No, not necessarily. Our political system is so polarized and regulation is like a bad word. You lose people right away when you use that word. 'Green' has become politicized.

Instead, we need to create incentives that help people change their behaviors.

But I’m not against regulations. If we get rid of environmental regulation we’re talking about going back to levels of air pollution that China has – and 656,000 people die there each year from air pollution. Another 95,600 people die from water contamination in China. In the US, we take for granted what regulations have done.

In your book you emphasize the importance of focusing urban planning efforts on megalopolises, extensive, sprawling metropolitan areas. How might this be done?
We are using an outdated model for thinking about urban growth. This growth is happening in metropolitan areas, including suburbs, not inner cities.

Suburban areas have always been a part of urban areas. In New York, neighborhoods like Brooklyn and Flatbush were once their own cities. The next step was becoming a metropolitan area. Now that includes Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania.

From Washington DC to Boston is a megalopolis. It acts and will be acting more like one large economic engine. If this becomes completely developed with no natural spaces, this will be a problem.

We need to think carefully about where and how we build as this region expands. We need to think about preserving things like old-growth forests as we make a master megalopolis plan.

Interview has been edited and condensed.

A materials flowchart, courtesy of Except

By now, the field of social entrepreneurship is an established career path, and MBA programs all over the country have launched tracks dedicated to its study.

But another field of work, also geared toward environmental and social sustainability, has flown under the radar: sustainability consulting. With unemployment near ten percent and the market sagging, full-time jobs are hard to come by. Being a consultant is a way to use your skills for good and get paid while building up experience.

Ariana Bain is an industrial and urban ecologist, and she currently works as a consultant for Except, a company dedicated to helping businesses achieve sustainability. (Industrial ecology, Bain explains, is the study of the flow of energy – water and materials – through systems at different time and space scales, and of the environmental and social impacts of those flows.)

Here Bain shares with Dowser some tricks of the sustainability consultant trade.

Dowser: What are one or two experiences in your life that led you to do what you do now?
Bain: The most central point was when I was 21, and I stopped eating dairy and soy for medical reasons. I had to read the packaging on everything I ate. I started digging into what was going on with the industrial food system. I started focusing on life cycles – the trajectories of consumer goods. I use those same analytical tools now, within my field of industrial ecology. Looking at the life cycle of a human, a society, an object – you can use the same analytical framework.

What is a typical day at work like for you?
The main thing I do is work with companies and organizations to deliver a carbon footprint for a product or an activity. I usually split my days into content and management days. It’s important to think about ways we can be more productive. One of the challenges in this field is that we have to know how to do a million things – and do them efficiently, to feel that we actually accomplished them and then move on to something else. It’s really about allocating time.

How do you find technology helpful in your work?
For one, there would be no way to run this company [Except] without free, cheap, and abundant communication tools, because we are split between the US and the Netherlands. We’re in the process of launching our use of an enterprise wiki – which should aggregate all of the other social media and communication tools that we use. We’re committed to Open Source software like Open Office. I’m a numbers person, and some of the functionality is lost--it doesn’t compare to Microsoft Excel. But we avoid having a lot of resources tied up in software licenses. We have to use certain things, like Adobe programs such as InDesign – we haven’t found an alternative. All our office computers run on Linux.

Ariana Bain

Our principle is that information should be abundant and available. Knowledge should be in the common space so that we can all create solutions. When we publish our work we publish it with Creative Commons so that everyone can access it.

What is something you are learning in your job? Something that challenges you?
The biggest challenge I have, and I think this extends to my company, is that we are a hierarchically flat company – we have no hierarchy. When it comes to management, we assign roles for each project based on peoples’ skills rather than how long people have been at a company. But the hardest part within that is learning how to tell someone what to do, and do it in an equitable way. It’s a question of creating a fluid organization, when people shift back and forth between organizational and content positions.

Tell me more about the consulting firm you work with.
Except is a collaboration between people, some of whom met in graduate school at Yale. Tom Bosschaert founded the company in 1999. It’s a model for developing a consulting company free of any initial capital investment. A consulting company is not an investible vehicle – so the next way to fund it is to each work really hard to find as many clients as you can, individually, and then building up and merging everything together.

Our work is mostly corporate sustainability and planning work, and we focus on product development. For example we’re doing a carbon footprint project with a coffee exporting company in Nicaragua. We’re working with them to develop this as a product to sell to future clients. We have about eight projects like this right now where we’re working with other partners to develop a product we can use repeatedly.

What’s the trick to a successful consultancy?
In consulting you don’t want to be doing one-off projects all the time. Sooner or later, unless people have huge margins on their work, doing projects where you have to reinvent the process flow and the content is not a way to run a business. You need to have a scalable product – and this means developing proprietary databases. The first time you develop a carbon footprint it takes forever, but once you’ve made it you can re-do it pretty quickly with energy and material data. These are startup costs to having a consulting company – doing all that work in the beginning. This is why LEED has been successful – it’s a known product, it’s a certification, it has a set process.

What is the most important advice you’d give to someone who wants a career that creates sustainable change?
My advice is very oriented toward certain brain types – people who like to think in systems. A lot of people in the sustainability world like to think this way. I wouldn’t think about a career trajectory in terms of boundaries like NGO versus government. I know people working in venture capital positions in government, and others who earn $20,000 a year in the private sector doing jobs they believe in.

The important thing is for people to decide what level within a system they want to work at. An example of that would be: there are some people who are really good with their hands. So whether that’s being an urban commercial greenhouse grower, or running a kids’ program at a farm, that’s one way to work within a system – whereas other people like myself like to work at a design and numbers level. I am never happier when someone gives me a problem and tells me to work it out and I’m crunching numbers in a spreadsheet. So people need to see where they are most happy and can be most effective within a field.

Interview has been edited and condensed.

World Water Week proposes new solutions to the global water crisis

This week, global thought-leaders gathered in Stockholm for World Water Week, a forum for exchanging ideas and strategies to solve the global water crisis. This year’s focus is “Water in an Urbanizing World” - no small matter, since cities are expanding everywhere.

Throughout the week, participants emphasized community engagement and participation as key to maintaining water development projects. They also focused on the intersections between water and food production. Alexander Mueller, the assistant director-general for natural resources at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, emphasized the need for innovations in irrigation and farming techniques.

This argument was reiterated by the release of a report made by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and the UN Environmental Program (UNEP). The study concluded that innovative solutions to the water crisis could boost agricultural production and protect the environment simultaneously, what the authors call an “ecosystems services approach.”

The implication is that food and water security are closely tied (as the current drought and famine crisis in Somalia has shown). "Sustainable intensification of agriculture is a priority for future food security, but we need to take a more holistic ‘landscape’ approach,” said Eline Boelee of IWMI, the lead scientific editor of the report. In other words: a solution to the worldwide water crisis should be part of a larger “green economy.”

Meanwhile, in an article in the UK’s Independent, Andrew Wigley argued that people and organizations need to be as concerned about their water footprint as they are about their carbon footprint. "Companies which innovate not only to reduce their water consumption, but also the water footprint of its products, will be best placed to face the consumer and regulatory front," he writes.

Away from the conference, social entrepreneurs made news with their efforts to resolve water problems around the world. The philanthropic branch of ITT Corporation, which partners with Mercy Corps to implement disaster response in developing countries, unveiled six new water-related disaster risk-reduction projects. Additionally, a new consortium created by the World Resources Institute is creating a global water risk database, meant to provide access to information about water crisis situations across sectors. It’s more of a solution for businesses than it is for humanitarian crises.

The conference will continue until the 29th, and you can follow by watching the livestream or tracking the hashtag #wwweek. Dispatches from the conference came from the Twitter account @world H2o. A video of a two-hour panel discussion on social entrepreneurship and water solutions during the conference is available here (though you have to sign up on the 2degrees website and wait for your free membership to be approved to access the video).

For-Profit or Non-Profit: That is The Question

This debate isn’t exactly new, but on the heels of last week’s GOOD-Buys-Jumo news, a few new interesting pieces came out.

First of all, on the for-profit side of things, many prominent business thinkers have begun to pinpoint social enterprise as a potential fix to the global economic mess. Many doubt the sustainability of capitalism, at least in its current form, which is characterized by what they call a dangerous disconnect between business and society. Or, as Roger Martin, dean of Toronto’s Rotman School of  put it “in danger of rotting out its moral core and destroying itself from within.”

Simon Caulkin has produced a nice explainer in Management Today that rounds up the key critics and their opinions.

On the flip-side, some excellent case studies came out this week highlighting non-profits that realized they more effective as for-profits. Kevin Short covered two on NextBillion: the Mexican-based Echale a Tu Casa, formerly Adobe Home Aid, and Argentinian forest conservation organization EcoMadre. “By fusing the efficiency and flexibility of market mechanisms with the conscious and equity of philanthropy,” Short summarizes, “these regional actors have found unprecedented success - especially when guided by advisors and intermediaries.”

And on the Harvard Business Review, Pierre Omidyar, founder of EBay and the Omidyar Network, outlined how he transformed his philanthropic foundation from a non-profit to a hybrid organization. This was circa 2003, before the term "impact investing" became vogue, and he says his lawyers had never seen such a structure. But, he says, the move was a "no-brainer," especially when he looked at EBay's profound social impact. “If we want to make sustainable change, we have to put all the tools at our disposal to their best possible use,” he says.

Bradford Smith, founder of the Foundation Center, is a little wary that some organizations may start to see 501(c)3 as an easy way to collect seed capital, pointing to the GOOD-Jumo deal as a recent example. He supports hybrid organizations, but he says we need to think carefully about the process.

“We still live in the real world of tax codes and institutional structures, and I'm not aware of any suggestion or proposal to allow foundation grant dollars to be used for anything with the world "social" in it,” he writes. “Shapeshifting is here to stay and now is the time to think clearly, creatively, and responsibly about how to deal with it.

Meanwhile, over on The Guardian, Saba Salman tackles the practicalities of multiple funding streams. She offers a great overview on how to attract a variety of investments to your social enterprise. “How you articulate what your business is about is vital,” she says. “Grant funders and mainstream investors do not regard community-based businesses as capable of dynamic growth. Offer detailed information to funders and consider a broad investment base."

Environmental protesters ask Obama to stand up to Big Oil

This week we saw the biggest environmental protest in recent memory, as environmentalist author Bill McKibben and hundreds of others gathered at the White House to fight a proposed 1,702 mile-long pipeline that would carry some 500,000 barrels of crude oil daily from Central Alberta to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The sit-in began on August 20, and by Friday morning, some 322 arrests had been made. McKibben himself was arrested on the protest’s first day and released three days later.

The protesters are brilliantly exploiting the power of the Internet and social media to raise support for their cause. They are posting manifestos on their official website. On Twitter, protesters, their followers and the media are posting updates with the hashtags #TarSands, #noKXL and #tarsandsaction, and tweets about the protests are also coming from @TarSandsAction . The protesters plan to remain outside the White House for fifteen days total.

As the NY Times explained in an editorial, the protesters’ main objections to the pipeline are that it poses the risk of oil spills in “highly sensitive terrain,” and that petroleum extraction emits significant amounts of greenhouse gases. TransCanada must get US government approval before beginning construction. The State Department is set to give an OK to the contractors upon finishing an environmental assessment of the pipeline proposal. Once that happens, only President Obama holds the power to block the decision to drill for oil, and this moment, the protesters say, is an opportunity for Obama to show his colors as a leader - and live up to promises he made to protect the environment when he ran for president in 2008.

“If [Obama] makes the wrong decision, it’s gonna send sharply negative signals to Detroit and American consumers everywhere that we’re still heavily addicted to filthy fossil fuels” said Mike Tidwell, founder and director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network in a video the protesters made for The Nation.

New York Task Force To Investigate Nonprofit Executive Salaries

Under order from Governer Cuomo, thousands of not-for-profits are required to send data on executive and board member salaries. "[We are] conducting a top-to-bottom review, not only to audit current compensation levels, but also make recommendations for future rules to ensure taxpayer dollars are used to serve and support the people of this state, not pay for excessive salaries and compensation," said Department of Financial Services Superintendent Benjamin Lawsky

Though technically all nonprofits are fair game in this audit, it seems to have a particular focus on healthcare, on the heels of a scathing NY Times expose on disabled abuse in state institutions and a Brooklyn-based home healthcare firm that  swindled nearly over $2 million in Medicare funds.

The Wall Street Journal reports that some organizations are already fighting back. “Some six-figure salaries are necessary to attract doctors, effective managers and other professionals to serve often low-income, underserved neighborhoods when they could command much higher wages in the private sector

Random weekend reads

• An interview with the Knight Foundation CEO on the intersections between philanthropy and journalism asks whether media can have a “double bottom-line.”
• A report by Social Enterprise London looks at the impact of public sector cuts on the social enterprise industry.
• Writer and activist David Korten proposes that the economic reconstruction should focus on sustainability in business practices and citizen
• Steve Goldberg, author of Billions of Drops in Millions of Buckets, stresses the need for intermediaries in the Social Impact Bond sector.
• A book review examines the links between Corporate Social Responsibility, the law, and human rights.
• The fascinating story of how Dahna Goldstein founded Philantech, a company that develops web-based applications for foundations and nonprofits.
• This engaging FastCompany article about the annual Burning Man festival bears some surprising insights about leadership, organization, and how creativity flourishes.
• And speaking of leaders, the NY Times published two profiles of Steve Jobs, who resigned on Wednesday as Apple’s CEO, explaining what made him such an effective leader and innovator. Prolific blogger Umair Haque also published a collection of Jobs quotes in the Harvard Business Review that could help all leaders re-think how they run their organization.

Every Thursday, thanks to a content partnership with brother-sister duo Journey of Action, we'll be exploring Gen Y changemakers--and how they fit in with the rest of the world.

In 2010, the United States imported 24,400,00 60-Kilogram bags of coffee. It's the second-largest importer in the world, after the European Union.

And here is where that coffee came from. This is a heat map showing bags of coffee exported, by country, in 2010 (roll over the countries to see exact numbers in thousands of 60-kilogram bags). The top five, in order, are Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, Indonesia and Guatemala-- all regions that share, aside from similar weather patterns, developing economies. Coffee is the second-most valuable commodity exported from developing countries, after oil.

However, the majority of coffee that you see on supermarket shelves is sold at a steep markup that increases the profits of the company selling it to you, without helping the farmer who grew the beans and harvested them under the hot sun.

By now, most people have heard of "fair trade." But the real-life, on-the-ground effects of the model are often overlooked. So here's a quick breakdown of what fair trade really means:

Rather than rely on the fluctuating, often low prices that the global commodity market tends to offer,  Fair Trade International (FLO) guarantees farmers a minimum per-pound price for their product. That means they can sell beans into a market that promises them a "fair" price, which right now for coffee in the United States is $1.40 a pound, and five cents above market price if the conventional market surpasses the fair trade price. Here are detailed fair trade standards for the United States.

On the whole, it's widely praised not only because it boosts impoverished farmers' income and marks a small step toward equalizing the very imbalanced global economy, but also because it frees up resources for the greater communities in which farmers live.

By earning a better price for their crop, farmers are often able to afford goods and services that are considered necessities in the developed world, but are still a form of luxury in developing economies—such as the ability to send children to school.

Fair trade can also involve companies reinvesting in the community in the form of development projects that benefit entire towns or villages, not just individual families. Because fair trade companies are often built upon principles of providing a quality product to the consumer while also benefiting the product's origin community, you'll often see that kind of reinvestment being made to build a school, recreation center, or even a hospital, for example, or to help with other needs identified by the community.

Fair trade really established itself in the world marketplace through coffee, but has since expanded to other foods—chocolate, tea, bananas, and some spices are among the most common—as well as to non-edible goods like artisan-made clothing and jewelry.

Critics' main qualm is that Fair Trade, at least for the coffee industry, doesn't live up to the theory behind its model. They argue that little data exists about its actual results; that their model overlooks multinational companies that may treat producers well; that regulations restrict Fair Trade to small farmers and overlook the poorest segment--migrant laborers; that price standardization, coupled with a rising market price for commodity coffee, often results in  low-quality Fair Trade coffee. The farmers sell their high-quality goods on the commodity market, and leave the dregs for the Fair Trade price - which, in turn, roasters don't want to buy.

"Fair Trade coffee has evolved from an economic and social justice movement to largely a marketing model for ethical consumerism," said Peter Giuliano, president of the Specialty Coffee Association of America and a green coffee buyer based in Durham, North Carolina.

One solution to the discrepancies? Cut out the middle man, and purchase beans directly from farmers you've visited.

That's the approach for the young founders of the Bicycle Coffee Co., which delivers coffee to local businesses that is not only fair trade, but is also organic and locally-roasted. They purchase from farmers they met on travels through Central and South America. And they make their zero-emissions deliveries by bike.

The company has further advantages over other fair trade companies because with minimal overhead costs, it can sell its coffee at the same price as its non-fair trade competitors. That means a consumer does not have to make the choice to spend a premium for a fairly-traded product. (Although to be fair to consumers, at least one study has shown that such a premium does not stop customers from choosing the fair trade option, even if it's more expensive, and even during the recession.)

Ultimately, its founders aim to build a "micro-replicable business" that's easy to sustain from city to city. Check out the video to see how they're doing it.

Additional reporting by Blair Hickman

The top American news this week: the debt ceiling. Mother Jones produced one of the best explainers I found, and the Huffington Post has a nice live-blog documenting the unfolding events. But in a nutshell: the U.S. government is out of money, Congress is at a stalemate, and if we default on our debt on August 2nd, it could have “catastrophic” effects on both the domestic and global economies.

Since this is a site about social change, we’re most interested in the ancillary activity in the citizen sector, characterized, with efficiency, by a single hashtag: #f**kyouwashington.

People began to vent their frustrations on Twitter on Saturday. Media pundit and CUNY J-school prof Jeff Jarvis tweeted, “Hey, Washington assholes, it's our country, our economy, our money. Stop f**king with it." Twitter pushed the tweet into a chant, which turned into the aforementioned hashtag (a way to organize topics on Twitter).

Some people in D.C. were a tad bothered that Jarvis’ tweet didn’t differentiate between Congress and their city. Others fixated on the eff bomb. But most tweeters used the opportunity to vent their frustrations on everything from the debt ceiling to the war to banks to total incompetence of a government that’s acting “like 3-year-olds.” In some ways, it was reminiscent of the beginnings of the Arab Spring.

It never trended on Twitter, and most wondered if the profanity caused the block. But as Jarvis noted in an interview with CBS, the word seemed appropriate for the situation - and ultimately, the hashtag wasn’t about his tweet. It was about public opinion. Many compared the situation to Howard Beale.

The anger has yet to take to the streets, but on Tuesday, phones started ringing off the hook on The Hill. The Coffee Party, a grassroots democracy movement that does not, contrary to their name, identify as a political party, is trying to organize a march on their Enough Is Enough! Facebook page. And today, the @BarackObama Twitter account began tweeting the names of Republicans in Congress, asking constituents to appeal to them to come to a compromise.

Some solutions have also bubbled up to change the actual political structure. Senate majority and minority leaders have proposed creating a “Super Congress” -- a new legislative body comprised of six members from each party -- to prevent future stalemates. Americans Elect, a political party vying for a third spot on the presidential ticket, is using the Internet to establish an “open-nomination” process.

Maybe it’s just me, but power structures seem to be shifting.  The Atlantic’s new blog, the Foreign Policy Frontier (also launched this week),  plans to explore this new arena, acknowledging that progress is no longer solely about government to government (or party to party) interactions, but must also address all groups of actors--corporations, foundations, NGOs, universities, think tanks, civic groups, politicians and social enterprises. The debt ceiling debacle seems like the perfect backdrop for its launch.

New Strategy For Fighting Climate Change

There was a lot of buzz in the environmental space this week, spearheaded by the release of a new report by the bipartisan Hartwell Group, called Climate Pragmatism.

Essentially, it asserts that our old way of fighting climate change--by telling people to, as Marc Gunther put it, “study climate science and make sacrifices”--isn’t working. Instead, it argues, we should shift our policy frame to focus on (cheap) energy innovation, curbing air pollution and adapting to extreme weather. In other words: measures that let people see immediate benefits.

Bryan Walsh expanded on the report with a nice article in TIME that explains exactly how  a shift in policy priorities might work. Mayor Bloomberg, for example, donated $50 million last week to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign - not to save the environment, but because coal is bad for people’s health.  Similarly, Walsh points out, the fact that 1.4 billion people don’t have access to electricity impedes public health and economic growth. “Try running a hospital without electricity,” he writes. “If we want developing nations to be better prepared to deal with the effects of climate change--or just about any other threat--we need to get them wired.”

Some immediate solutions popped up this week, too, as a new study claimed that over the next hundred years, four times more carbon dioxide can be removed from the atmosphere if we switch from steel and concrete to sustainably harvested wood.

But Marc Gunther, director of a sustainability think tank, wondered whether or not the suggestions in Climate Pragmatism really are all that practical due to the realities of bipartisan disagreements. As we've seen this week, they run rampant--and it's not restricted to the debt ceiling.

A bit of a scuffle took place this week between the European Union and airlines in the states, as the EU prepares to enact a carbon emissions fee on all planes flying into their airports that don’t meet regulation standards. While the EU stands firm behind its policy, claiming that it’s not fair for airlines in Europe to pay fees while the rest of the world pollutes, carriers outside of the EU are worried about higher fees, and higher ticket prices.

Meanwhile, as the debt crisis rages, Republicans have piled on more than 70 anti-environmental amendments to a new bill.

Heritage Foundation Claims America's Poor Aren't Poor.

This week, the Heritage Foundation released a new report, “Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What is Poverty in the United States Today?” It questions America's definition of poverty, noting that the poor actually have an array of amenities like refrigerators, air conditioning and microwaves.

Robert Rector, who authored the report, noted in this ABC News article that the government will spend about $900 billion on poverty assistance programs this year. He argued that we should cut funding for programs like Medicaid and food stamps, and though his report acknowledges poverty as a “serious social concern,” he demands that we fight the problem with “accurate information.”

Some outlets agreed with the Heritage Foundation’s assertion that Americans really don’t understand poverty. Compassion International’s Senior VP, Mark Hanlon, pointed out that America's definition of poverty pales compared to the rest of the world. He noted that American families in poverty actually live amongst the top 20th percentile of global wealth, and urged people to view Compassion International's WhoAreTheJones.org to see how their salary compares with that of a family in another country.

But others let the criticism fly. Commenters on Hanlon's article pointed out that wealth is relative to the local consumer price index, and that the amenities cited in the Heritage Foundation Report -- refrigerators, DVD players and microwaves -- often have no resale value and can be found lying on sidewalks. ABC’s Bryan Wolf noted that income inequality in the United States is at its highest level since the Great Depression, and Sarah Bloom Rasking, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, said that this disparity is undermining our economy’s ability for steady growth. For those who want a deeper understanding about poverty and the problem of inequality than the Heritage Foundation can offer, read the books Poor Economics or The Spirit Level.

Beck Pryor, who works for Community Enterprise Solutions, says that this report takes the wrong perspective. The real issue, she argues, is that people spend their money on Xboxes instead of healthy food. The follow-up question should be, “Why?” Not, “Does this really count as poverty?”

And Stephen Colbert absolutely slammed the report, slashing the idea that since federal assistance has lifted people out of poverty, we should therefore cut federal assistance. “These programs are like a dam we built back to hold the river of poverty,” he says. “So let’s tear down the dam! I’m sure the river will stay put.”

You can watch his full video here:

And watch his interview with Georgetown law prof Peter Edelman on whether or not we have actually won the war on poverty. (Spoiler: he points that for 6 million people in America, their only income is food stamps):

Random Weekend Readings

• The World Bank blog argues organizations shouldn't just release their data; they need to verify it.
• The Guardian released a nice podcast on how to achieve success through failure.
• Mark Bittman argued in the New York Times that we should start to tax junk and subsidize healthy food, using revenues to build public health programs.
• Google released an amazing new Think Quarterly - insights from industry leaders on where they get their inspiration. This one is on innovation.
• Philanthropy had an excellent, extremely usable data visualization that lets you track the spending of big corporate donors
• Buzzfeed had a beautiful photo essay of newly-legal gay marriages in New York.
• And finally, social entrepreneurship is taking off in Brazil. Read about it here.