Modeshift

Among the priority hazards of joining capital and technology the way we do in the 21st Century is that it can blow up the ordinary and familiar — a farm, for instance — into shapes and sizes that are extraordinary. That is what’s happening in Michigan and in many other states in animal agriculture. American meat, poultry, and milk, increasingly, are produced on immense sites that have come to be known as “factory farms.” For those who haven’t followed this development, one problem is that confining huge numbers of animals produces quantities of manure that often exceed the levels of raw sewage produced by major cities.  A second problem is that neither the federal government nor the states require modern waste water pollution controls. Owners of factory farms, several of them multi-billion dollar food companies, have convinced state legislators they are mere farmers, unable to afford the settling basins, digesters, and filtration equipment that municipalities have used for years to clean their waste water. Instead they generally dump manure into smelly lagoons that inevitably leak and pollute the nearest stream or lake. 

In this edition of Flip, Mode Shift’s spotlight of useful applications of Internet technology, we draw your attention to the interactive Factory Farm Map, which details how many factory farms there are in the United States, and does so state by state, county by county, and sector by sector. The map, for example, can show you have many factory dairy farms there are in Barry County, Michigan (3), the number of factory hog farms in Allegan County (38), and how many cattle operations exist in Huron County (13). The Factory Farm Map is a genuine breakthrough in data gathering and presentation for a sector of the agriculture industry that is deserving of the pubic attention it is starting to attract. 

My organization, the Michigan Land Use Institute, has been interested in factory farms  since our founding in 1995.  Patty Cantrell, who wrote “Hog Wars,” a first-of -its-kind report on the subject while working for the Missouri Rural Crisis Center early in her career, brought that expertise to Michigan in 1998 and helped build the statewide campaign to limit the expansion of factory farms. Three years ago, Stephanie Rudolph, an intern from Haverford College then and now a graduate fellow at the Institute, reported on the worst of all factory farm polluters in Michigan, the Vreba-Hoff dairy farms of Hillsdale County. In 2004, Governor Jennifer M. Granholm’s administration brought sanctions against the farm that have curtailed pollution.  

The Factory Farm Map was produced by Food and Water Watch, a non-profit healthy food organization founded last year in Washington. The New York Times this morning noted the map’s contribution to the public interest in an editorial: “It’s important to read this map not as a static record of farm sites or a mere inventory of animals,” the paper said. “It is really a map of overwhelming change and conflict. It raises two of the fundamental questions facing American agriculture. Do we pursue the logic of industrialism to its limits in a biological landscape? And how badly will doing so harm the landscape, the people who live in it and the democracy with which they govern themselves?”

Illinois, our neighbor to the west, has been doing a lot of things right of late for its residents, environment, and economy. It makes a Michigan resident a bit jealous. The Center for Neighborhood Technology and Bethel New Life, for example, convinced the Chicago Transit Authority to rebuild rather than tear down the elevated Green Line in the 1990s, helping to promote the revival of the city’s West Side. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley turned a tree-planting campaign into a full-fledged green economic development strategy that not only helped Chicago become, arguably, the most beautiful city in America but also among its fastest growing and most prosperous. Lots of great Chicago organizations were involved included the Metropolitan Planning Council and its A list dynamic leader, Mary Sue Barrett (see pix).

Now comes the state General Assembly and state Senate, which last month approved The Green Neighborhood Grant Act, an experimental economic incentive to encourage developers to build healthy, energy efficient, environmentally sustainable, walkable, beautifully designed new neighborhoods. In becoming the first state to approve a LEED-ND incentive package Illinois had some very big 21st century ideas in mind, according to Mandy Burrell, the communications associate at the Metropolitan Planning Council.

Ms. Burrell told me that the Legislature is seeking next year to provide three builders of sustainable LEED-ND developments grants of up to 1.5 percent of their total cost. Of the three projects that qualify for the grants not more than one can come from Chicago. Legislators expect to encourage the construction of 300 new households in Illinois, said Ms. Burrell, and more than $944,400 could be redirected annually into the state’s economy because of the money that home owners will save in energy and vehicle expenses alone because of where they live. 

Other interesting forecasts:

• A family living in a LEED-ND certified neighborhood stands to cut annual costs by $3,148, due to savings from their well-designed, energy-efficient homes, the easier access they have to transit, jobs, schools, and recreation - meaning they won’t spend nearly as much money on cars. 
• LEED certified developers also earn more for their homes, and buyers gain higher resale premiums, according to a number of studies and realty assessments.

Jennifer Henry, who manages the LEED-ND project for the U.S. Green Building Council, said she knows of no state other than Illinois that has adopted  publicly financed incentives for LEED-ND. And while the pilot project is small, the consequences can be huge.

You may recall that the LEED idea itself, promoting better design through environmental sensitivity and energy efficiency started small. But in certifiying standards for green design LEED had the effect of creating a market that never existed previously. The LEED idea is now written into zoning standards and building codes. Cities, like Chicago, compete to be the place that has the most LEED-certified buildings. Neighborhoods that promote walking rather than riding, energy efficiency rather than profligacy, healthy living rather than conventional toxic design just make sense in a world of higher expenses and scarcer resources, space, energy, and time. And Illinois, right here in the economically scarred upper Midwest, was the first to get there.  Nice work Illinois.

It’s an odd sight to venture to the shores of Lake Superior in Michigan’s upper peninsula and see dry dirt where there used to be water. Lake Superior, which holds 14 percent more water than the four other Great Lakes combined, is 18 inches below normal, lower than it’s been since 1926.

We’re sort of used to low lake levels out here in the upper Midwest. Not long ago Lake Michigan was so low that the bones of an old shipwreck, slick and dark brown, emerged from the sand beach not far south of the Watervale, a nearly century old resort set between Lake Michigan and Lower Herring Lake here in Benzie County. On the Lake Huron side some shoreline owners got so anxious about the grass and water weed growing where there used to be a placid liquid surface that they sent bulldozers into the surf to clear what they viewed as a mess. It was illegal no matter how hard the conservatives in the Legislature complained about property rights.

Lake Superior, though, is a different matter. Scientists are convinced the up and down of the water levels is cyclical and that eventually the tub will fill. But a drought has gripped the upper Midwest for several years. Warmer winters prompted by global climate change are producing less snow and much less ice. Mighty Superior just isn’t as deliberately provocative as it was just a few years back. Dock owners can’t moor their boats along the shoreline in hundreds of places because of shallow water. Freighters set off for foreign ports over 10,000 tons lighter than they did a few years ago.

The upper Midwest is one of three regions in the United States that is feeling the burn from global climate change.  The other two are the Deep South and the Southwest, particularly around the Colorado Plateau. The Upper Midwest has the water. We have more clean fresh water than any place on earth.  The two other regions have all the people. The Deep South and the Southwest are growing faster than almost any other region of the nation. Now answer this one. Do the states of the Great Lakes, which are growing more slowly and gradually shedding electoral college votes and House members, also begin to lose the capacity to safeguard  their water supply? 

You may have missed this little note out of Wall Street last week but many of the renewable and alternative energy funds are doing very well. The New Alternatives fund is up nearly 37 percent the last 12 months and 20 percent so far this year. The Guinness Atkinson fund is up 17 percent and 27 percent while the Wilder Hill funds, which launched last fall, are each up about 11 percent this year. By comparison, reports CNN, the S&P 500 has climbed about 21 percent over the last 12 months and is up about 5 percent this year.

The surge in renewable funds is part of a much larger two-path conversation happening on energy in the United States. At the grassroots, and in the investment portfolios of folks with a little dough there’s a tremendously interesting discussion about what will replace fossil fuel in an era of climbing prices, escalating environmental contamination, and soaring temperatures. Over the weekend, for instance, 3,000 people and 120 clean energy vendors showed up at the second annual Michigan Energy Fair in Onekama, Michigan, which is about a driver and a three-wood long. From Vespa scoooters to hybrid vehicles of every make, to windmills and solar displays,  off the grid, and non-toxic energy efficiency, to design and architecture and much more, the energy fair offered a fine exploration of what’s available for an ordinary Joe to get tuned up to the new cost and supply realities of the 21st century. 

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You may recall that Veep Cheney once called conservation “a personal virtue” that had no place in a national energy strategy. Like almost everything else out of the current administration, what nonsense. In fact conservation represents an authentic response to scarce oil and high prices, as well as to global climate change. In essence, many of the products for sale at the fair framed sipping rather than slurping as a virtue. The market and consumers will steadily move conservation and alternative means for generating energy to the top of the national priority, regardless of what political folk think. That was perfectly plain in Onekama.

The big question is whether the elected leaders at the state and national level will catch up. That is not at all assured. Just before the Michigan Energy Fair got started the U.S. Senate approved an energy bill that significantly raised fuel mileage standards in cars and light trucks for the first time since 1975. The lawmakers also approved subsidizing 36 billion gallons of ethanol production at 51 cents a gallon. There was no new incentive for renewable energy, no shift from fossil fuels to clean sources, and fortunately no spending to turn coal into fuel, which is what the Nazis did in World War Two.

How much of the Senate bill will stick? Probably not much. The Michigan House delegation is determined to blow up the mileage standards, saying it threatens the domestic vehicle manufacturing industry. The industry has been dying for 30 years, so you have to wonder about that one. The Japanese don’t mind the higher standard. They’ve already reached 35 miles per gallon in Europe. And don’t be surprised if the coal boys in the South, West, Midwest, and mid-Atlantic somehow convince taxpayers to shell out billions to turn black rock into liquid diesel-like fuel. It’s a grim world when the grassroots go one way and the elected state and federal officials go another. Something about that campaign finance reform we ought to take a look at. 

Earlier this month I attended the New York opening for The Unforeseen, Laura Dunn’s new documentary about the clash of values and struggle to protect Barton Springs in Austin from the consequences of sprawling exurban development. I also met Laura and her husband, Jef Sewell, a well-known executive for an entrepreneurial fulfilment company that serves entertainment Web sites. 

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David Brancaccio, the host of PBS’s Now program, also has taken an interest in Laura and the film and featured it and her in an online review for the show last week. It’s timely stuff, well worth watching, and includes a take with Robert Redford, who co-produced and appears in the film. I’ve been doing a little bit to help Laura get the film into the upcoming Traverse City Film Festival, Michael Moore’s three-year-old celluloid celebration that is now a much-awaited event on northern Michigan’s calendar. It occurs this year from July 31 to August 5.

The Unforeseen’s strength comes from its even-handedness and its universal qualities, displaying the drama of the contentiousness about how to grow in the United States, and the real pain suffered by advocates on every side. Lost in the center of the struggle, as in almost every important question about our future, is the Austin government and the state of Texas. Public officials have almost nothing useful to add to the much more thoughtful considerations offered by citizens and developers. There is, however, a telling moment in the film that spotlights George W. Bush, who was able to seize on one side of the argument about property rights and ride it to victory in the Texas governor’s race in 1994.   

Ruy Teixeira, a journalist who does a very good job keeping track of public opinion at the Center For American Progress in Washington, published this analysis of where citizens think the energy bill being debated in Congress ought to go. The verdict: Towards green, efficient, conservation measures and not to new production. 

The money quote: “The public is also quite clear on its priorities when it comes to promoting energy conservation versus increasing the supply of oil, coal, and natural gas. When asked which of these should be the higher priority, the public chooses energy conservation by a very wide 68 percent-to-21 percent margin.”

In 1954, the year that Detroit was busily completing the Lodge Freeway and starting construction on the city’s other major highways Toronto (see pix) opened 12 stations on the Yonge Street subway line, the city’s first. Since then Toronto has built three more regional rapid transit lines, 69 stations, and nearly 43 miles of subway and rapid transit track. The city’s subway and surface streetcar system carries 1.2 million passengers a day, many of whom also use the seven commuter train lines into town. Only New York and Mexico City have a more extensive rapid transit system than Toronto. Detroit, meanwhile, has none.

 The contrast between the two cities in economic competitiveness, quality of life, and opportunity is just as stark. Detroit’s population, now less than 900,000, is less than half of what it was in 1954, when the number of Detroit residents peaked. The Detroit metropolitan region, where 4.8 million people live, has grown by roughly 100,000 residents since 1970. The number of vehicles, meanwhile, has increased by 1.6 million during the same period. Southeast Michigan has the highest rates of racial and economic segregation, joblessness, income stagnation, home foreclosure, heart disease, diabetes, and obesity of any major metropolitan region in the United States.

Toronto, meanwhile, has steadily grown to a city of 2.5 million, and the population of the metropolitan region — 5.1 million — is nearly double what it was in 1970. The largest city in Canada, and the fifth largest city in North America, Toronto also challenges New York as the continent’s most racially diverse and most prosperous. 

Toronto’s economy is booming, and a great deal of its well-being has to do with how regional managers and residents view rapid transit as an excellent investment for responding to the new market signals of the 21st century. Canada was a signatory to the Kyoto Accord, which commits the country to reducing global climate change gases by 2012 to 6 percent less than the levels produced in 1990. Canada also has a national transit strategy that calls for:

• Improving the global competitiveness, quality of life, and environmental sustainability of Canada’s cities.
• Requiring cities to have land use and transportation plans that favor transit as the primary means of accommodating future travel demand.
• Providing funding necessary to maintain and expand Canada’s urban transit systems in order to accommodate population growth and to allow transit to attract a larger share of the total travel market.
• Providing increased mobility for people so that they can take advantage of the employment, educational, recreational, and many other opportunities cities offer.
• Improving air quality and, in doing so, improve people’s health and their ability to enjoy outdoor spaces and activities.
• Ensuring the long-term economic stability and environmental sustainability by reducing climate-changing emissions and reliance on fossil fuels.

These, by the way, aren’t just hopeful words. Canada means what it says, and nowhere is it more visible than in Toronto. On June 15, Ontario’s Premier Dalton McGuinty announced that the provincial and federal governments are teaming up to spend $17.5 billion to modernize and build roughly 550 miles of rapid transit lines throughout the Toronto metropolitan region by 2020. It is the largest and most extensive metropolitan rapid transit investment in North America since New York spent $24 billion from 1982 to 1999 to modernize its aged subway and bus system. That investment helped to spur an economic and demographic revival that reestablished New York as a choice place to live and do business.  

Toronto already is a grand place. Its downtown is a hub of activity 24/7 with outdoor cafes busy well into the evening. Its suburbs, though jammed with vehicles, are a display of gleaming office towers set amid a natural and agricultural landscape that the provincial government is determined to conserve. One of the region’s land use plans calls for preserving 1.8 million acres of open space and farmland in the region; one million acres already have been saved. 

Detroit turned down a $600 million federal transit grant in 1976 and can’t agree even now on using $100 million in federal funds to revive a heavy commuter rail line between Ann Arbor and the central city.  Toronto’s new transit construction plan, meanwhile, will reduce pollution, congestion, and travel costs in a world where temperatures are rising and gasoline is heading to $8 a gallon. If you were a young person, which city is more inviting?  

NEW YORK — Early this morning, before the sun peaked over the roofs of the grand old apartment buildings of the Upper East Side, I followed the road bikers and dog walkers and joggers over to Central Park for a splendid four-mile run. New York is full of young people now, bright, educated, trim, and ambitious. A whole bunch of them are up just after dawn to clear their minds and keep their bodies tuned sufficiently to compete in a global capital that is at the leading edge of what great cities are becoming in the 21st century — clean, green, energy efficient, safe, and beautiful. This is a different place than the polluted, crime ridden, deficit-panicked, dirty city that I grew up with when I came of age in the 1970s. New York, according to demographers, is young, younger than its suburbs. Traffic is barred from most of Central Park’s perimeter roadways in the morning, making it a surprisingly quiet green garden for thousands of them to exercise.  

This week, Democrats in the United States Senate introduced their version of an energy bill that the message guys in the party described as — hold your breaths — a plan to wean the country from foreign oil and promote domestic energy supplies. The bill has next to nothing in it that will produce more of the prosperous metropolitan regions, like New York, that are becoming ever more energy efficient, and not surprisingly, the strongest generators of jobs, income, and opportunity in the United States. Instead, the Democratic bill is almost solely intended to benefit the corn belt in the Midwest, keep the oil companies happy drilling for domestic oil supplies that no longer exist, and sustain what author Jim Kunstler describes as “America’s drive through economy.”

The 2007 Senate plan deploys almost precisely the same language used to advertise every energy bill introduced in Washington since the 1973 Arab Oil embargo, which produced long gas lines and helped a lot of teenage guys like myself bond with friends as we waited to fill our Dad’s cars. The bills did nothing to reduce America’s oil apetite, especially for foreign oil. In 1973, the United States consumed under 16 million barrels of oil daily, less than half of it imported. In 2006, oil consumption reached 21.9 million barrels a day, according to the Energy Information Administration, of which 13.21 million barrels or 60 percent was imported. At current prices, the US is sending roughly $800 million a day out of the country, nearly $300 billion in cold, hard, needed American cash sent overseas a year. 

What’s so dismaying about the Democratic plan, like the Republican plans before it, is that the hyped legislative exercise comes as home prices are falling in the suburbs, mortgage foreclosures are rising (they’ve nearly quintupled since 2000 in my corner of rural northwest Michigan), Walmart sales are static, gasoline prices are climbing to nearly $4 a gallon in some parts of the nation, incomes are static, and a war fought for oil in Iraq is not going well. These are the unmistakable signs of the new global order for the United States, still strung out on oil, unable to agree on a national response other than doing more of the same. Even Democrats are divided about plans to secure higher fuel mileage standards, conservation initiatives, and massive subsidies to the nation’s corn growers who already receive 51 cents a gallon from taxpayers to produce ethanol. Meanwhile energy consumption, especially gasoline, continues to rise despite record high prices.  

All of America is addicted to oil, of course, and there are no foreseeable substitutes. Which is precisely why Washington needs to pay attention to the places where the habit isn’t quite as strong. One of those is New York City, which has been doing a lot of very smart things for two decades to insulate its citizens from an oil shock and simultaneously produce a better place to live and do business. Yet none of things that New York did, or is thinking about now, is on the national energy agenda considered by lawmakers in Washington. They should be.

From 1982 to 1999, according to a study by Schaller Consulting, New York City spent $24 billion — an average of $1.41 billion annually — to modernize its mass transit system. The intent was to reduce congestion, improve transportation efficiency, provide alternatives for getting around town, lower family costs, and attract residents and businesses to the new  nodes of business activity around the 468 transit stations and hundreds more bus stops. The money was spent to replace or overhaul the system’s 4,500 buses, 1,200 subway cars, 530 of 660 miles of subway tracks, and a quarter of the subway stations.

The demographic and economic results are impressive in every way. Subway and bus ridership in the 1990s increased much faster than the rate of car ownership and use and has continued since. Between 1990 and 2000, for instance, the number of new vehicles in the city climbed by 104,000, from 1.695 million vehicles to 1.79 million, or less than 7 percent. But subway ridership increased by 353 million riders, from 1.028 billion riders to 1.381 billion, or more than 35 percent. Today the system serves over 2 billion riders annually. The effect on gasoline consumption also has been impressive. Drivers in New York City consume an average of 146 gallons a year, less than drivers in San Francisco (238 gallons), much less than drivers in Los Angeles (392) and much, much less than the national average of 463 gallons a year.

The city’s population, which plummeted to just over 7 million in 1980 has climbed to more than 8 million. The number of visitors reached 44 million last year, 11 million more than in 1998, attracting $23 billion in annual spending that employed 333,158 jobs and $5.44 billion in tax revenue, according to city figures. Hotel occupancy rates exceed 85 percent annually. The city’s subway system, which I ride during my trips here, is clean, cool, inexpensive ($2.00 a ride), and the fastest way to get anywhere during business hours. The system is so popular again that peak hour crowding has returned  as a major civic issue. 

Earlier this month the city’s moderate Republican mayor,  Michael Bloomberg, proposed further increasing residents’ reliance on transit, and diminishing the influence of cars and light trucks by emulating a “congestion pricing” traffic management program that has been used in London since 2003. If the plan is approved, the city could significantly raise tolls on Hudson and East River bridges and require motorists to purchase permits, monitored by a system of surveillance code readers, in order to charge drivers headed south of 86th street $8 a day. Those who don’t pay face fines.

On Earth Day, Mayor Bloomberg proposed a separate plan to make New York the best big city in the world to live and do business, principally by making it a much greener, energy efficient, and more beautiful place to live. Among its 127 steps is further reducing the use of private vehicles, cleaning up power plants, requiring more green roofs on major buildings, and investing in rapid transit. Congress continues to hug the 20th century. New York and other big cities understand they need to find their own path to the 21st.

“I make this promise to you: I will not spend my last 984 days in office pretending that all is fine and leaving these challenges to the next mayor, who may well pass them off to his or her successor,” Bloomberg said in April. “Residents of a city that is a beacon to the world will not abdicate our responsibility to that world. That’s not leadership. Leadership is about recognizing challenges and seizing opportunities. And we are going to seize this opportunity – to lead the way forward and create the first environmentally sustainable 21st century city.”

On the day late last month that Rachel Carson would have turned 100 years old I posted a piece on Mode Shift that focused on the surprising failure of the nation’s major environmental organizations to defend the mother of modern environmentalism. The free market right has set out on a deliberate path to diminish Carson, and by extension the American environmental community, as credible in responding to the consequences of industrial technology. The attack on Carson is an important facet of the free market right’s campaign to diminish the reach of local, state, and federal safeguards. And it’s been remarkably effective and destructive. The federal government, for instance, has no strategy for responding to global climate change because of its sympathy to free market assertions that the science of climate change is deeply flawed.  

In any case on Tuesday this week John Tierney, an influential free market science writer and columnist at the New York Times, leveled a broadside at Carson in the pages of Science Times. Calling Silent Spring a “hodgepodge of science and junk science,” Tierney accused Carson of using “dubious statistics and anecdotes (like the improbable story of a woman who instantly developed cancer after spraying her basement with DDT) to warn of a cancer epidemic that never came to pass. She rightly noted threats to some birds, like eagles and other raptors, but she wildly imagined a mass ‘biocide.’”

I know Tierney and worked with him at the Times in the early 1990s, when he joined the paper. He’s smart, thorough, and delights in being a contrarian on environmental issues. He wrote a famous piece questioning the value of recycling, essentially saying that recycling wastes more energy and materials than it saves. In another piece for the Times Magazine, Tierney singlehandedly changed the public’s view of Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich when he reported on a bet that Ehrlich made with Julian Simon, an economist at the University of Maryland. In 1968 Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which predicted a runaway global population boom (he was right on that) and mass starvation globally and food riots in the United States in the 1980s (he was wrong about that).  Ehrlich bet that the prices of five key metals would rise as a result of population increases and scarcity of natural resources. Simon bet that innovation would drive prices down. In 1990, Ehrlich conceded defeat and sent Simon a check for $576.07, the amount that represented the decline in the metals’ prices after accounting for inflation, he reported.

Now Tierney is after Rachel Carson, using as the basis of his critique a 1962 review of Silent Spring in the journal Science written by I. L. Baldwin, a professor of agricultural bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin. Baldwin’s review was the subject of debate as intense at the time as Carson’s ground-breaking journalism. Her assessment of the toxic trail left by pesticides in plants and animals was defended and confirmed then by independent scientists, some of them working at the behest of President John F. Kennedy. And they’ve been reconfirmed time and again in the real world since.

Pesticide use has resulted in mass killings of songbirds and wildlife, and the poisoning of farm and industrial workers. I personally reported on the consequences to production workers in Lathrop, California in the 1980s who were left sterile because of their exposure to the pesticide DBCP during its manufacture. I reported on the incidence of young children who’d been born deaf in a California community where the drinking water supply had been contamined by DBCP and other toxic farm chemicals. 

I tracked through the forests of western North Carolina in the early 1980s, identifying uncommon rates of death and illness in communities exposed to the defoliants 2,4-D and picloram, which were used to kill broad-leafed trees. The mix of 2,4-D and picloram, by the way, was sprayed in Vietnam, was known as Agent White, and was used to clear forests where Agent Orange didn’t work. A military study of the effects of Agent White, which I found in the library of Auburn University in Alabama, said that Hmong tribes exposed to the defoliant displayed levels of cancer and birth defects far in excess of neighboring communities that weren’t exposed. 

So you can’t tell me that Rachel Carson’s reporting inspired “chemophobia” as Tierney charges, or is exaggerated or untrue. What he does is focus the knife edge of an eloquent rhetorical attack on the outer membrane of Carson’s reporting, such as the predictions she made that haven’t come to pass — a big loss of robins, for instance. He doesn’t note that such a prediction might well have come to pass, and fortunately hasn’t, because several of the most toxic compounds she critiqued, especially DDT, have been banned for agricultural use. 

I appeal again to the major national organizations to get involved in setting the record straight about the value of Carson’s journalism and scholarship. Their credibility and the salience of the environmental movement’s science is at stake.

Here’s a name worth paying attention to in the space where sustainable business practices and the non-profit sector cross. He is Joshua Scott Onysko, a 30-year-old native of Rhode Island who turned a bonding experience with his mother making organic soap into Pangea Organics, a very successful Boulder-based manufacturer of organic body and skin care products. I first learned of Onysko and Pangea Organics from a friend in Saugatuck who was as enthusastic about the company’s all natural French Rosemary with Sweet Orange facial toner as she was about the box it came in. The package contained Genovese Italian sweet basil seeds embedded in the 100 percent post-consumer moulded fibre. The compostable box is designed to be moistened and planted. Two to three months later sweet basil will sprout from the seed bed.

Not only is the idea and execution of a plantable package just totally cool, it also indicates a facile business executive who is dialed into his customers’ values, as well as global market trends. I made a couple of calls, knocked around the Internet, and discovered that Onysko, who says he never gained a formal education, even as a grade schooler, is quite the instinctive entrepreneur who knows his way around a growing business. He also views himself as an agent of social change and is using the revenue and profits of his growing $2 million, five-year-old company to build the Pangea Institute, a non-profit devoted to teaching business executives how to be more environmentally sensitive and economically sustainable. 

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His own company, he says, operates a 10,000 square-foot manufacturing plant that is completely wind-powered. None of his employees earn less than $12.50 an hour, and receive generous health, dental, and eyecare benefits. Pangea employees manage a 3,000 square- foot organic garden that produces food that an onsite cook turns into a daily lunchtime feast. His line of soaps and other skin and body care products, Onysko says, supports 40,000 acres of organically grown oils and other crops around the world, much of it produced by women. 

The neat compostable package with embedded basil seeds was developed by UFP Technologies, a 44-year-old maker of custom packaging based in Georgetown, Massachusetts. UFP Technologies described its cutting edge package this way: ”Molded Fiber, a division of UFP Technologies, manufactures the customised shells, which are made from 100% recycled paper fibres and offer a cost-effective, environmentally friendly alternative to petroleum-based packaging materials. Pangea Organics recently redesigned packaging for its entire product line, and UFP Technologies provided recycled moulded fibre for a visually appealing packaging solution.”

It’s just this kind of union between a bright young entrepreneur intent on making things better, and a mainline technically savvy manufacturer willing to be inventive that is the essence of the Mode Shift we’re seeing in business, communities, and in peopleorienting their lives to respond to the powerful market forces that are reshaping the world.