Intrigued by what we learned about Agent Green during a recent interview with the owners of the Pike Brewing Company, Aurea Astro and I decided to further explore this mysterious environmental force moving through Seattle businesses.  First we made our way back to Pike Pub—the site of Agent Green’s inaugural appearance—and then our investigations led us to Terra Bella Flowers in Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood, one of Agent Green’s most recent missions.

Re-Vision Labs founding partners Gabriel Scheer and Dan O’Shea designed the Agent Green program as part of Seattle Greendrinks in an effort to capitalize on the power of crowds and community partnerships.  Agent Green utilizes these elements in order to help make it easy and ultimately financially beneficial for businesses to become more environmentally efficient.  Proponents of Agent Green use social media, traditional media, and good old word-of-mouth to announce an upcoming event, and on the day of the event a crowd descends to support the participating business and help fund energy retrofits.

Back to the Pub We Go!

Gabriel approached Drew Gillespie, manager of the Pike Pub, early in 2009 and proposed that the restaurant host the first Agent Green event in Seattle.  They decided to schedule the event during Earth month, and Pike Pub committed 25% of sales made to the Agent Green crowd to energy retrofits.

When the scheduled day arrived, the crowd flooded in and raised $3,700.  After much research and analysis, Drew decided that lighting was the best place to invest in energy retrofits.  With the help of energy incentives offered Seattle City Light (which amounted to $14,000!) and the money earned from the Agent Green event, Pike Pub only had to pay about $1,000 out of pocket—an investment that Drew estimates will pay for itself with energy savings in less than a year and a half.

“We’ve always been a fairly green company, but [Agent Green] was the beginning of us really striving to be leaders,” Drew told us.

The lighting improvements have resulted in 31 tonnes of carbon gas reductions and 51,000 KW hours savings!  Drew is now working with Puget Sound Energy to improve the restaurant’s heating and cooling systems, and he continues to look for more opportunities for promoting environmental excellence.

“It’s amazing the small things you can do to make a big difference—it doesn’t take much to compost or change your light bulbs…a lot of it can save you money in the long run.”

Drew appreciates that events like Agent Green allow the Pike Brewing Co. to support social awareness and engagement: “That’s where I’m really seeing an impact on a business side is people in Seattle who are in these communities, who are environmentally responsible, now respect us and come here.”

This year for Earth Day, Pike Pub will be hosting an Earth Dinner “to support Chefs Collaborative and to raise awareness of the importance of a sustainable food supply.”  And where will Agent Green be heading this month?  Read on, gentle reader, read on…

And North, to Greenwood!

Aurea and I continued to track the Agent around Seattle, and ended up in a somewhat magical Greenwood neighborhood flower shop.  We spoke with the Terra Bella Flowers owner, Melissa Feveyear, amidst a visceral feast of vibrant blossoms, rich scents, and fanciful ornaments.  Oh, and how could I neglect to mention the gigantic canine Oscar—closer in stature to a horse than a dog—who rested his delightfully large head in my lap for the duration of our conversation.

Terra Bella Flowers was one of six businesses to join Agent Green and the Sustainability Committee of the Greenwood-Phinney Chamber of Commerce in February for the fourth and most extensive mission to date.  Melissa’s shop already operates “under the umbrella of organic, local, and sustainable” products, so the Agent Green partnership was an obvious match.

The crowd convened yet again, this time to enjoy food, shopping, and art all around the neighborhood.

“We had more traffic come through here than I’d ever seen before…I had roughly twenty to thirty people in here at all time,” Melissa recounted.  “It really helped us with publicity and I think in the long term it will help us financially for that reason.”

Melissa hopes to eventually insulate the cold concrete floors and improve the Terra Bella heating system with the revenue and resources generated by Agent Green.

Where Next?

If you’ve decided by now that you want to do a little sleuthing of your own and you happen to be in Seattle,  don’t make plans next Tuesday evening: April’s Agent Green event will be at Sport Restaurant & Bar on 4th Avenue.  Hope to see you there!

Last Friday I checked out Globe 2010, a Vancouver-based fair dedicated to doing business in green. The fair is “one of the world’s largest and longest-running events dedicated to the business of the environment” and was fairly spectacular in terms of exhibitors and attendees. Exhibitors paid over $3,000 dollars for a booth. This goes to show you that doing business in green does not mean that running around dressed like a hippie giving out free hugs and cookies is the best and only way to promote your business.

Being green means serious business. The Globe 2010 company representatives were fully decked out in suits and ties (though yes, there were a few t-shirts and slacks. Vancouver has never been your most formal city), some of the booths resembled elaborate lounges, and wow, the schmoozing and networking demonstrations were definitely on par with any other corporate affair!

But I digress from my original intention of writing about Globe 2010. There was one company that caught my interest in particular at the fair: Ecosystem Restoration Associates (ERA).

ERA is a Vancouver-based company which focuses on the restoration of degraded ecosystems primarily in British Columbia’s West Coast temperate rainforest areas. The company is currently in the planning phase of carrying out restoration projects abroad in developing countries. In simpler diction, ERA plants a lot baby trees in areas where they’ve all been cut down. Of course they do this keeping in mind the genetic specificity of the area they’re planting in and working with local communities as much as possible to guarantee some sense of longevity for the new trees.

What really caught my interest about ERA is not that it’s effectively battling the world’s climate change woes by planting a lot of trees or that it’s working as diligently as possible with local communities, rather it’s the way that ERA makes money that I thought was really quite intriguing.

ERA isn’t a non-profit like a lot of ‘do-gooding, tree hugging’ companies might be. Instead, it makes it’s money by selling the carbon offsets of its projects to paying customers on the carbon market.

We’ve all heard of the carbon market. It’s had a fairly dominating role in the news recently, but I guess I’ve been a bit fuzzy on the details. I assumed it was mostly a cap and trade system limited to transactions within particular industries or between countries. What I didn’t realize is that there’s an inter-industry carbon market where companies like Shell Oil can purchase carbon offsets from companies like ERA so that they can tout their brand as green.

Furthermore, I had no idea that an entire company can run on the profits made in the carbon market. In any other circumstance, I would have thought an ecosystem restoration company was either paid by the government to take on certain projects or operated entirely as a non-profit. ERA, however, is a for-profit company. Its owners aren’t even necessarily concerned for the environment. “They’re in it to make money,” as one of the reps at the ERA booth told me.

Fascinating. Selling green really can be good business.

But is selling green – specifically selling green on the carbon market – really good business in all senses of the word ‘good’? Can we view these carbon offset producers as having the same sense of corporate social and environmental responsibility as other organizations?

ERA might be making a profit, but  I couldn’t help but bring up the point with the ERA reps that allowing companies like Shell whose everyday activities have a substantially detrimental impact on the environment to purchase carbon offsets from another company is a bit of a cop-out.

Yes, you could argue that the money Shell purchases offsets with will eventually make its way as an added cost to consumers of Shell products. Shell products therefore become more expensive, and therefore consumers will slowly shift to a cheaper product. In some senses, Shell is being forced to incorporate its negative externalities into its business plan.

However, for some reason, the practice of buying carbon offsets still bothers me to some extent. I agree with the ERA rep that I was speaking with: companies who purchase carbon offsets are better than companies that do nothing at all, and if there’s a business model for ERA to profit from in selling those carbon offsets by planting more trees, then by all means, go ERA. We have to start somewhere in our fight for more sustainable lifestyles.

Something still rankles.

After some snooping around on the internet, I found an article that perfectly describes why the sale of carbon offsets bothers me: It’s almost synonymous to the ‘sale of indulgence’ practices of the Catholic Church throughout and beyond the Middle Ages.

“Catholic doctrine maintains that to avoid time in Purgatory after you die, you need to expiate your sins via some sort of punishment or task that is an external manifestation of your repentance. The idea was that the clergy were doing more of such actions than their meager sins demanded, so they effectively had a surplus of good deeds … these could be sold as indulgences to sinners who had money, but not necessarily the time or inclination to repent for themselves.”

-Smith, Kevin. “The Carbon Neural Myth: Offset Indulgences for your Climate Sins.” The Carbon Watch. 2007.

With the sale of indulgences, people who were sinners, who were thieves, murderers, rapists, what-have-you, could buy their way into Heaven.

Isn’t the sale of carbon offsets similar to this? Companies who rape and pillage the earth and who have practically no environmental conscience themselves beyond what’s required for good publicity, can now buy their way into being green?

The sale of indulgences culminated in paramount corruption and eventually caused the complete reformation of the Catholic Church in the 16th century. Could the carbon market ever culminate in a similar kind of corruption?

Carbon Indulgences

The above argument is a bit left winged, I’ll admit. You can definitely draw some parallels between the sale of carbon offsets and the sale of indulgences, but I don’t realistically think the carbon market will follow the way of the Catholic Church into corruption.

As with any venture meant to improve the lot of the greater good, the complexities need to be examined especially with regard to guaranteeing the permanence of carbon offset projects (if all of the planted trees are cut down, they’ll merely add to the carbon in the atmosphere), checks and balances have to be put in place, and transparency must be guaranteed.

ERA could be on their way to incorporating all of these different features. The representatives I spoke with promised a careful, well-researched procedure when looking to carry out their projects in developing nations noting in particular that they work in politically stable areas with local non-profits and community leaders; ERA projects are evaluated by a third party in terms of what value they have on the carbon market; and the representatives seemed open and willing to discuss their business procedures, even admitting upfront that Shell is their biggest customers (I should note that I ran into an individual who works with ERA’s biggest competitor at the Globe 2010 Fair. He claimed that ERA has a lot of ground yet to break in terms of transparency).

On the other hand, ERA is facing enormous complexities in guaranteeing the value of the carbon offsets it sells. The future is unpredictable, and if ERA is hoping to work with individual communities abroad, they best be ready to do battle with an infinite number of complexities.

I’ll end by directing any interested parties to a Canadian Broadcast Company podcast which focuses on the good and the bad of carbon offset sales and which features ERA CEO Robert Falls: http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/current_20091005_21132.mp3.

By Martina Welke & Aurea Astro
Re-Vision Labs Fellows

Part Three:  The Rest of the Story

(Check out Part One and Two if you missed them)

The Finkels are not only successful business people, talented artists, and environmental stewards, but also masterful storytellers.  Aurea and I delighted in hearing about their adventures around the world and learning how their stories have influenced the Pike Brewing Company.

According to the thorough, rich history provided on the company website, Charles and Rose Ann met at a wine tasting in 1968: “Over shared Shiners they discover[ed] they both love beer and each other.”  During our interview, the 40 plus years the Finkels have spent together became increasingly apparent in our dialogue: Charles or Rose Ann often seamlessly completed the other’s sentences or added details to a story without ever interrupting the flow of their narrative.

Customers have taken notice of the stories and personalities behind the brewery and pub.  The Finkels get a lot of compliments on their website and the fact that they are a family-owned business.

“In an environment where increasingly people are relying on the Walmarts and chain businesses to satisfy their need to eat and to shop, I think people find it refreshing to go to a genuine place, that’s authentic, that real people own it, real people care about it.  Real people know their employees and care about their employees.  People who care about the quality of the food that they serve,” Charles told us.

The care Charles referred to is evident in the attention to detail the Finkels pay in every step of their business process.  Food purchasing, menu design, brewing recipes, bottle labels, and community outreach are all meticulously handled by the Finkels, and it’s this personal touch that gives their restaurant and their beer unique appeal.

“In our previous life as a beer importer, we introduced the first organic beer ever in America.   I designed the label, and I put organic on there, but I understated it.  I wanted people to buy the beer because it was really a delicious beer, not because it was organic.  And the same thing with our restaurant.  We want people to come here because the food is delicious, because the place is fun to be in, because the beer is so good, not because it’s necessarily organic.  It is, but that’s an added bonus.  The real most important thing is the food.”

Watch for Charles and Rose Ann at the pub enjoying a pint of Pike XXXXX Stout or Kilt Lifter Ruby Ale, walking their mascot—a one-eyed Boston Terrier named Dirby, or riding around town on their bicycle-built-for-two, complete with “tandem talker” headsets and matching jerseys.

By Martina Welke & Aurea Astro
Re-Vision Labs Fellows

Part Two: Building a Movement, System and Community

(In case you missed it, find Part One here)

During the same year that the Finkels originally found the Pike Brewing Co., another movement was brewing across the Atlantic.  In 1989, delegates from fifteen countries signed a manifesto that officially began Slow Food, an organization dedicated “to counteract[ing] fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.”

The Finkels became involved in the Slow Food movement in the late nineties and started regularly traveling to Italy for Slow Food functions, such as the Salone del Gusto, the largest craft food fair in the world.  After selling the Pike Brewing Co., the Finkels had more time to devote to Slow Food and other charitable causes, which strengthened their already staunch commitment to high quality food and green practices. (Stay tuned for Part Three for more details on the Finkels’ Slow Food adventures…)

As the Finkels have implemented their sustainable philosophy after repurchasing the Pike Brewing Co., they’ve found tremendous value in two things we happen to value quite highly here at Re-Vision Labs: community and collaboration.  In addition to the resources they discovered through Slow Food, the Finkels have joined national and local networks that support their vision for sustainability.

“We’re very active in an organization called Chef’s Collaborative, which is a national organization that connects restaurants to farms,” Charles said.

Five Pike Brewing Co. staff members recently participated in a Chef’s Collaborative event called Farmer Fisher Chef Connection, a full day of panel discussions and networking opportunities for the Northwest food community (where Re-Vision Lab founding partner Dan O’Shea was a featured speaker).

The Finkels have noticed it’s become easier to find sustainable food sources that can deliver in a timely manner as more restaurants have taken an interest in becoming green.  Bringing more players to the table not only encourages suppliers to rise to meet demand, but also allows for more collaboration.  A Pike Pub beef supplier, Heritage Meats, facilitated one such collaborative opportunity with Canlis, an upscale Seattle restaurant.   Since Canlis purchasers are primarily interested in prime beef cuts, and Pike Pub needs a high volume of hamburger, Heritage Meats struck a mutually beneficial balance that efficiently meets both restaurants’ needs.

Charles: “The system has to be in place to facilitate an expedient business plan.  And that is what is happening now, both in terms of food and beer.”

Rose Ann: “Exactly.  And that’s why more and more restaurants can follow a sustainable philosophy.”

The Finkels have found many ways to support the local communities they are a part of, beginning with their food-purchasing priorities.

“While we like organic, we’re not going to buy something organic that gets shipped 1400 miles.  Our goal is to deal with local purveyors,” Rose Ann said.

Sunday Evening Whiskey Club musicians relax between sets at Washington for Haiti event.

Pike Pub also frequently hosts events that bring lovers of food and beer together.  Days before Valentine’s Day—as “foreplay before the big day”—the Pub hosted the second annual Chocofest.  According to the press release, over twenty vendors gather together to share “the best beers, wines, spirits, and mead with an assortment of chocolate that would make Willie Wonka jealous.”  I’m definitely going next year.

A few weeks before Chocofest, Pike Pub generously hosted Washington for Haiti in partnership with Re-Vision Labs, a fundraiser that resulted in over $3,400 for Fonkoze, a microfinance organization in Haiti.  To celebrate Father’s Day in June, the Pub is hosting a Pints for Prostates event as part of a national campaign to raise awareness of prostate cancer.

Whether uniting people for the sake of environmental sustainability, global development, public health, or unadulterated appreciation of delicious viands, the Finkels are impressively demonstrating the power of communities within their restaurant, brewery, and worldwide network of epicureans.

By Martina Welke & Aurea Astro
Re-Vision Labs Fellows

On a recent Friday afternoon, I was fortunate enough to have a meeting that included all my favorite elements: a group of passionate people sharing good stories and ideas, lots of opportunities to learn, plenty of laughter, and some high-caliber beer.   Of course, meetings at Re-Vision Labs generally have the first three of the aforementioned qualities, but the beer was a great added bonus as my colleague Aurea Astro and I sat down with Charles and Rose Ann Finkel, owners of the Pike Brewing Company, to talk about sustainability, community, tandem bicycling, and life’s finer pleasures.

After a quick jaunt up Harbor Steps, Aurea and I arrived at our neighborhood brewery, armed with a small camera, a notebook, and a healthy dose of curiosity. Our conversation with Charles and Rose Ann yielded so much great information and video footage that we decided to turn it into a three-part blog series.  Happy reading!

Part One: The Win-Win Transformation

The Finkels originally opened the Pike Brewing Co. in 1989, then sold it the late 90’s, and re-purchased the brewery and pub in 2006 (once a brewer, always a brewer).  Upon regaining ownership, they initiated changes to make the business more environmentally sustainable.

Charles was quick to point out the inherent sustainability of beer-making, because all of the byproducts are recyclable.  Residual spent grains are transferred to a local farm to feed livestock after completion of the brewing process. Additionally, the tanks are heated with steam from nearby Seattle Steam, which recently began using a biomass boiler and reduced its carbon footprint by 45,000 tons.  Other aspects of the business, however, have taken a bit more work and time to become more earth-friendly.

Over several months, the Finkels trained their staff about sustainable practices, such as minimizing landfill waste.  Every trash station in the restaurant consists of two large bins for recycling and compost accompanied by a much smaller garbage bin.  During the transition, a few employees “abandoned ship,” but many embraced the Finkels’ green philosophy and still work for Pike Brewing Co. today.

The Finkels have researched area farms and built connections with nearby ranchers in order to find local suppliers for all meat products served in the restaurant.  By the end of March, 100% of the protein on the Pike menu will be sustainably sourced.  Since Rose Ann estimates the Pub serves three to four thousand hamburgers each month, that makes for a lot of sustainable meat.

“It’s hard to source, for example, grass-fed beef.  It’s not that everyone is knocking on your door and saying ‘we’ve got grass-fed beef.’ In fact it’s quite the opposite, and the ones that are knocking on your door are mass market,” Charles explained.

Shrimp have also proven to be a very difficult menu item to source.   Most shrimp are produced on farms in Southeast Asia, oftentimes at the expense of mangrove swamps, so the Finkels went searching closer, less ecologically destructive options.  They eventually found two sources: pink shrimp from Oregon and wild prawns from Louisiana.

Rose Ann told us that all of these changes have resulted in tastier food and less environmental strain, as well as a higher price tag: “Your food costs are higher, definitely.  But we feel strongly enough about it that we’re willing to try to be more efficient in the way we work to offset the added cost of the product.”

In April of 2009, the Pike Brewing Co.  partnered with Agent Green, a program of Seattle Greendrinks that utilizes smart partnerships and the power of a crowd to “reduce the capital costs that can prevent businesses from undertaking efforts to become more sustainable and energy efficient.” With the help of $14,000 in City Light incentives and $3,700 from the Agent Green mob, the Pike Brewing Co. was able to invest in efficiency retrofits that will reduce their energy use by 51 Kilowatts a year and save about $200 each month.

“It’s all win-win.  It has to be win-win to be sustainable,” Rose Ann asserted.  “In the long run, it’s not harder.  It’s the transition that’s harder.”

If the delectable Pike Double IPA and Tandem Double Ale that Aurea and I sampled are any indication of how delightful sustainability can taste, I’d say the Finkels have found a winning combination indeed.

Part Two Coming Wednesday: Building a Movement, System, and Community

I like Ted Talks, can you tell? I think it’s an amazing database full of amazing videos featuring amazing people and their amazing ideas!

The video above features Majora Carter, founder of an organization called Sustainable South Bronx which works to promote holistic community and sustainability developments in New York’s South Bronx. Carter speaks passionately in this Ted Talk about the connections between economic degradation, environmental degradation, and social degradation. It’s an inspiring presentation and definitely worth watching!

In terms of community, I think Carter hits on a couple of important points, as follows:

1. Healthy communities need healthy environments. Carter mentions how the residents of South Bronx have higher rates of obesity and asthmatic inflictions. A community that does not or cannot care for its common space cannot fully prosper even at the basic health levels.
2. Sustainable, holistic development carried our from a bottom-up and people-first approach can lead to long term economic and social success.
3. Sometimes identifying with a community can have negative implications for a group of people. As Carter says, ”If you are told from your earliest days that nothing good is going to come from your community, that it is bad and ugly, how could it not reflect on you?”

I never thought of community in this light. I’ve always assumed it was 100% positive, and that people need and thrive in a community atmosphere. While I still maintain that people need community, I think it makes sense that sometimes the ’shared’ or ‘common belief’ that knits a community together can be negative, especially if the community ethos has been defined by society as negative. Food for thought!

A New Kind of Worker

Last spring, I came across a series of articles in Time Magazine called ‘The Future of Work.” The series stated that the coming decade will bring an end to the ‘climbing the corporate ladder’ trend that we’re all so familiar with.

The upcoming generation of workers, according to a consulting firm quoted in the Times series, will no longer be defining success by paycheck, rank, or seniority. Instead, people will begin to define success “‘by what matters to [them] on a personal level,’ whether that’s the chance to lead a new-product launch or being able to take winters off for snowboarding”(Fischer, “When Gen X Runs the Show”).

The series goes on to point out that workers are no longer as willing to commit themselves, body and soul, to their jobs and only their jobs. Balance in life is becoming a new and important priority.

A New Kind of Company?

My question is this: If money is no longer the primary determinant of success for individuals, how will this new trend affect the way our corporations and businesses measure success?

If this new generation of workers are defining success by how well they maintain a work/life balance and how often they’re able to achieve their personal goals, does that then mean that our companies will cease to operate only for money? Could there ever exist a future where entire businesses measure their success not by sales or clients but by their ability to attain certain goals while maintaining balance?

Being a bit of a realist and subscriber to free market philosophies, I’m not entirely convinced this could, indeed, be a feasible future.

However, it is interesting to note that there are already some companies who are seeking to define their success on these new, more balanced terms. The long-standing outdoor clothing company, Patagonia, Inc. is one of them.

Founded by climber and surfer, Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia has always been a little bit of an anomaly among businesses for a couple of reasons:

1. The goals of the management team and employees are closely related to the goals of the clients. Those goals are, predictably, enjoy the out-of-doors in comfortable out-of-door-wear. That’s how the company got started in the first place: Yvon Chouinard started making his own equipment for personal use.
2. The company’s long term success depends on the preservation of wild spaces.

So here we have a company run by people with personal goals of enjoying wild spaces with both a personal and corporate interest in the preservation of those wild spaces.

The end result? A company who, like the future generation of workers, measures it’s success in a new way.

As Yvon Chouinard writes in his book Let My People Go Surfing, Patagonia evaluates its success not on sales numbers but on the “number of [environmental] threats averted: old-growth forests that were not clear-cut, mines that were never dug in pristine areas, toxic pesticides that were not sprayed,” or conversely, on the positive results of dismantled dams, restored wild areas, and creation of parks and wildernesses (Chouinard, 78).

By those measures, Patagonia has been extremely successful. As of 2006, Patagonia’s 1% for the Planet program in which 1% of the company’s sales are donated to grassroots, environmental groups has caught on with over 400 other companies (Chouinard, XI). Since 1985, over $22 million has gone to environmental groups from Patagonia alone (Chouinard, 78).

A Hopeful Outlook

Every company has a mission statement. Patagonia’s is: “make the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis” (Chouinard, 78). The company focuses not just on a profit or even solely on producing a product. It also brings into consideration somewhat loftier goals like avoiding inflicting unnecessary harm and seeking to sustain the environment.

Perhaps the corporations of the future will have mission statements of a similar nature that look at success from a broader, more open perspective and that make more of an effort to incorporate all three of the elements of the Triple Bottom Line (people, planet, profit) than they do today. Profit will always be an integral part of business, but perhaps, someday, people will view profit as something that ca be achieved not through the ‘rape and pillage of the earth’ but rather by doing the right thing (Chouinard).

Perhaps someday, corporate success will be defined not just by numbers in a bank but also by what good that company has done for humanity at large. Perhaps someday, the new business philosophy will be: Why stop with profit alone when your business can change the world?

I’ll close out with another quote from Let My People Go Surfing that really highlights the potential role that business can play in making our world a better place:

“A certain void exists now with the decline of so many good institutions that used to guide our lives, such as social clubs, religions, athletic teams, neighborhoods, and nuclear families, all of which had a unifying effect. They gave us a sense of belonging to a group, working toward a common goal. People still need an ethical center, a sense of their role in society. A company can help fill that void if it shows its employees and its customers that it understands its own ethical responsibilities and then can help them respond to their own.

Patagonia will never be completely socially responsible. it will never make a totally sustainable non-damaging product. But it is committed to trying” (Chouinard, 259).

*Chouinard, Yvon. Let My People Go Surfing. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.