Earth Equity News-April 29, 2008

Going Blue-Green. Commentary by Adam Werbach, SFChron, April 10, 2008. "After spending most of my life as a full-time environmentalist, I declared in 2004 that environmentalism was dead, unable to effectively work at the scale of the problems we faced. Since that time, I've been on a journey... to find the next stage of ideas that can help catalyze a new movement... I've come to see that you can eat locally, co-op grown, organic heirloom tomatoes and still be a bad person. Eating those tomatoes is only one small way to take care of yourself, your community and the planet. [They] are an entrance point, not an end. While I'll always be someone with green ideals, it's clear that we need a new mass movement... When you travel to countries that have been green for decades, such as Switzerland, there's already a color for this movement -- it's blue. I propose that we begin to adopt this blue movement here... [using] a platform that is a daily practice for most of us - shopping... Shopping is a regular activity for most people on the planet, and if trends continue, for virtually everyone... Engaging people as consumers, as people who shop, allows us the possibility of building a billion-person movement... Every product you buy should be a gateway to a personal sustainability practice." [Click here for a full text of this speech, which was made to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.] Adam Werbach is the global CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi S and formerly served as the national president of the Sierra Club.