"Here is the truth: The Earth is round; Saddam Hussein did not attack us on 9/11; Elvis is dead; Obama was born in the United States; and the climate crisis is real. It is time to act."
Read the rest of Gore's latest article in Rolling Stone.
Stay going.
Friday, June 24, 2011
Friday, June 10, 2011
For the love of Baramaasis…
This is a re-blog of a post by Ashka Naik, Director of Strategic Initiatives, Second Nature as part of a weekly series by the Second Nature team about why we do what we do. See the original post here.
One late evening, around dusk, my mother and I were walking into our house, making a beeline through my grandma’s garden. While we were passing by some neatly laid flowerbeds, I saw a pink Baramaasi (a perennial flower, which literally means “perennial” in Hindi, Bara=twelve and Maasi=months) on the side of the brick path leading to the patio. My mother was holding my hand to balance my little figure as I paused and started to bend my knees to pluck that beauty from its stem. My mother, not a very vociferous person, watching me do what I was about to do, very lovingly said, “Ashkee, do you know her mother puts her to bed every night, just the way your maa does? Imagine how she must feel when she doesn’t find her baby in the bed tomorrow morning.”
I often saw my grandma worship random shrubs in her garden. One specific day of the Hindu calendar she would worship one plant, and on a different day she would worship another. I always wondered why one needed to venerate rather unattractive shrubs to understand the mysteries of the universe or to please the Gods above. However, I did understand why we worshiped Ganesha (the Elephant God) and Naagraaj (the Snake God), as I was informed that these creatures were embellished with bizarre powers to wade off evil forces and misfortune. Looking back at the time when I truly believed that a species other than of Homo sapiens could ever have such power over others, I find myself succumbing to the naïve imagination of a child’s mind.
Anyways, as Hindus, we were also to follow vegetarianism. We were to give bird food to birds even though they smeared our verandah with their mucky droppings, because it was drilled through our brains that one of those could be our brother or a sister from a past life. We were to take a few morsels out of our dinner to offer to the wandering cow or a street dog (same logic about past lives, brothers, sisters, etc.).
We had a different cuisine for each season, and sometimes even for each month. We had and still have hundreds of festivals, days on which one can only consume certain things, each festival having its own menu of delicacies and rituals. How else could all this have evolved, if not in respect of and in response to the rich diversity of crops and life in general in the Indian subcontinent! We even have a million and a half Gods, pick one that suites your taste the most. One size fits all just wasn’t the way.
All in all, we didn’t need Greenpeace to tell us that whaling was bad and Food Inc. to tell us that monocultures were unhealthy.
One day in school, and there were indeed many such days, when I hadn’t finished my homework, the teacher punished me by asking me to sweep the classroom floors for two consecutive weeks. Nothing unusual about the punishment though, since every student had to sweep and mop the floor for one week in a year in spite of an impeccable homework record. I must have been in the 5th grade then, so you could argue how a 12-year old could be punished in such an uncaring manner. I can imagine repercussions of such punishment in the US of A! Anyways, a little background on my school, I received my K-12 education in an institution that espoused the Gandhian thought – the institution was founded during the British Raaj by a small group of freedom fighters. Self-reliance was Gandhi’s mantra, and asking a child to sweep the floor wasn’t an inconsiderate act. As part of our education, we were to clean our classrooms, we were to sow the seeds and follow their growth in the hundred acres of farmland that encircled our school building, we were to spin cotton on a spinning wheel – the spool with the finest thread was used to make garlands for guests and the rest were taken to the loom to make our uniforms – we were to bow down to our teachers with a formal gesture of Namaste (“I bow to you”) every time a teacher entered the classroom.
That was then, when it was difficult to distinguish where spirituality blended with daily chores to concoct a wholesome life.
In the past two decades things have changed. Everything, good and bad, rich and poor, old and new, was somehow interwoven before India opened its door to globalization – the trees, the school uniforms, the education, the Elephant Gods, the Baramaasis – all seemed connected. Now the trees are gone, clothes come from Bangladesh, education is for sale to help one compete in a high yield job market of developed countries and Baramaasi, this perennial flower blooms very rarely (mainly due to severe water shortage and changing weather patterns).
However, the irony is that today more people use the word “sustainability” in India, just like everywhere else in the world, than ever before. If you had asked us then, we wouldn’t have known the meaning of it. It wasn’t discussed in the way we refer to the subject today. There were many different nuances of it, but no names. It could have been thrift for some, and religious practice for someone else.
Sustainability was a novel word to us as students of country’s premier architecture school, when the first time I heard the term being used in the context of buildings – Sustainable Buildings. These were not the LEED certified, Energy Star buildings. They were vernacular dwellings of indigenous peoples of the desert regions of Kutch and the forests of Daang and the mangroves of Sundarbans; buildings built by communities that have evolved to build, sustain and flourish with the land, and not off it.
Once I went through higher education, especially after my education in the UK where I studied Sustainable Product Design, then I understood what sustainability actually meant. The absurdity was that by then I had been pushed as far away from a sustainable lifestyle as I possibly could’ve been.
However, I returned home to India after two years, when reality hit me head-on.
This was the first time I was seeing what I had seen for twenty-five years, but in an entirely different light. Hunger stricken children with skeletal bodies begging on the streets, plastic bags clogging sewage, concrete forest replacing my school’s farmlands… Though nothing seemed that new, since the poverty had been in India’s veins for ages, and the physical transformation had already begun a few years ago. However, what was new was me suddenly finding every brand of luxury SUV on those same tiny streets where children still begged for food, school kids not being able to ride bikes to school because to let them loose in the maddening swarm of cars and trucks was nearly fatal, McDonalds and Starbucks being erected where once stood the street vendors who served scrumptious seasonal delicacies, monstrous shopping malls replacing the greens of the town, and my Grandma going to Wal-Mart like chains to buy her groceries? Until then the change that some call “progress” had stopped at my doorstep, but now, it had reached the heart of my home. It was unacceptable for me not to find the snack-vendor and to actually see my Grandma walk into a Reliance-Mart to buy vegetables that she had been buying at a local farmers market for last seventy years. Not only that, everyone, and I mean everyone, I knew now had a cell phone. But when I went to the fruit market to buy seasonal fruits, I wondered how a middleclass family could afford those? (But of course, they could afford the cell phones.) Even worse, I only found kiwis and strawberries on the shelves, hardly any babugoshas and chikoos. Kiwis and strawberries?! In Ahmedabad? There was certainly something wrong with this picture.
The interconnectedness was lost.
Sanskrit, the classical language of Hinduism, from which many Indian languages have evolved, has 65 words to describe various forms of earth, 67 words for water, and over 250 words to describe rainfall; each word depicting the myriad of nuances of that specific element of nature, each word capturing the context, the importance, the beauty, the usage, the geography, the climate, the ecology, and even the personality of that element. The way water would mean differently to a man of the desert than to someone living in the flood zone, these words emphasized the relevance and interconnectedness of objects. But now, that context has vanished, rather, there is a new context; the context of how eminent, lucrative and globalized a company that manufactures water is. And, based on this logic, we have a new set of words for water, “Dasani,” “Evian,” “Fiji,” “Aquafina.”
So, I may say that I work to make people forget about Aquafina.
As a society, we may just need anterograde amnesia to overcome the ways of life popularized by industrialization in the last hundred years and reminisce what we once already knew. Instead we have the retrograde type, where we have forgotten the very lessons our ancestors had learnt after living with the nature for eon after eon.
So, I see my responsibility as first reminding myself that there could be another reality and then sharing that vision with others. Vision of an alternate reality where the fabric of life is woven in veneration of mother earth, with the warps of natural principles, and wefts of sustainable choices, and embroidered with the splendor of diversity and preserved by the species with the intellect to get the job done.
What Second Nature offers in this journey, is a strategy to help the society realize this vision. I have heard a few times how the organization gets its name, and in my mind its mission, hence our mission, is to second nature… to re-connect the pieces to create a beautiful portrait of a life that I was fortunate to live as a child and am confident that my children will live one day.
One late evening, around dusk, my mother and I were walking into our house, making a beeline through my grandma’s garden. While we were passing by some neatly laid flowerbeds, I saw a pink Baramaasi (a perennial flower, which literally means “perennial” in Hindi, Bara=twelve and Maasi=months) on the side of the brick path leading to the patio. My mother was holding my hand to balance my little figure as I paused and started to bend my knees to pluck that beauty from its stem. My mother, not a very vociferous person, watching me do what I was about to do, very lovingly said, “Ashkee, do you know her mother puts her to bed every night, just the way your maa does? Imagine how she must feel when she doesn’t find her baby in the bed tomorrow morning.”
I often saw my grandma worship random shrubs in her garden. One specific day of the Hindu calendar she would worship one plant, and on a different day she would worship another. I always wondered why one needed to venerate rather unattractive shrubs to understand the mysteries of the universe or to please the Gods above. However, I did understand why we worshiped Ganesha (the Elephant God) and Naagraaj (the Snake God), as I was informed that these creatures were embellished with bizarre powers to wade off evil forces and misfortune. Looking back at the time when I truly believed that a species other than of Homo sapiens could ever have such power over others, I find myself succumbing to the naïve imagination of a child’s mind.
Anyways, as Hindus, we were also to follow vegetarianism. We were to give bird food to birds even though they smeared our verandah with their mucky droppings, because it was drilled through our brains that one of those could be our brother or a sister from a past life. We were to take a few morsels out of our dinner to offer to the wandering cow or a street dog (same logic about past lives, brothers, sisters, etc.).
We had a different cuisine for each season, and sometimes even for each month. We had and still have hundreds of festivals, days on which one can only consume certain things, each festival having its own menu of delicacies and rituals. How else could all this have evolved, if not in respect of and in response to the rich diversity of crops and life in general in the Indian subcontinent! We even have a million and a half Gods, pick one that suites your taste the most. One size fits all just wasn’t the way.
All in all, we didn’t need Greenpeace to tell us that whaling was bad and Food Inc. to tell us that monocultures were unhealthy.
One day in school, and there were indeed many such days, when I hadn’t finished my homework, the teacher punished me by asking me to sweep the classroom floors for two consecutive weeks. Nothing unusual about the punishment though, since every student had to sweep and mop the floor for one week in a year in spite of an impeccable homework record. I must have been in the 5th grade then, so you could argue how a 12-year old could be punished in such an uncaring manner. I can imagine repercussions of such punishment in the US of A! Anyways, a little background on my school, I received my K-12 education in an institution that espoused the Gandhian thought – the institution was founded during the British Raaj by a small group of freedom fighters. Self-reliance was Gandhi’s mantra, and asking a child to sweep the floor wasn’t an inconsiderate act. As part of our education, we were to clean our classrooms, we were to sow the seeds and follow their growth in the hundred acres of farmland that encircled our school building, we were to spin cotton on a spinning wheel – the spool with the finest thread was used to make garlands for guests and the rest were taken to the loom to make our uniforms – we were to bow down to our teachers with a formal gesture of Namaste (“I bow to you”) every time a teacher entered the classroom.
That was then, when it was difficult to distinguish where spirituality blended with daily chores to concoct a wholesome life.
In the past two decades things have changed. Everything, good and bad, rich and poor, old and new, was somehow interwoven before India opened its door to globalization – the trees, the school uniforms, the education, the Elephant Gods, the Baramaasis – all seemed connected. Now the trees are gone, clothes come from Bangladesh, education is for sale to help one compete in a high yield job market of developed countries and Baramaasi, this perennial flower blooms very rarely (mainly due to severe water shortage and changing weather patterns).
However, the irony is that today more people use the word “sustainability” in India, just like everywhere else in the world, than ever before. If you had asked us then, we wouldn’t have known the meaning of it. It wasn’t discussed in the way we refer to the subject today. There were many different nuances of it, but no names. It could have been thrift for some, and religious practice for someone else.
Sustainability was a novel word to us as students of country’s premier architecture school, when the first time I heard the term being used in the context of buildings – Sustainable Buildings. These were not the LEED certified, Energy Star buildings. They were vernacular dwellings of indigenous peoples of the desert regions of Kutch and the forests of Daang and the mangroves of Sundarbans; buildings built by communities that have evolved to build, sustain and flourish with the land, and not off it.
Once I went through higher education, especially after my education in the UK where I studied Sustainable Product Design, then I understood what sustainability actually meant. The absurdity was that by then I had been pushed as far away from a sustainable lifestyle as I possibly could’ve been.
However, I returned home to India after two years, when reality hit me head-on.
This was the first time I was seeing what I had seen for twenty-five years, but in an entirely different light. Hunger stricken children with skeletal bodies begging on the streets, plastic bags clogging sewage, concrete forest replacing my school’s farmlands… Though nothing seemed that new, since the poverty had been in India’s veins for ages, and the physical transformation had already begun a few years ago. However, what was new was me suddenly finding every brand of luxury SUV on those same tiny streets where children still begged for food, school kids not being able to ride bikes to school because to let them loose in the maddening swarm of cars and trucks was nearly fatal, McDonalds and Starbucks being erected where once stood the street vendors who served scrumptious seasonal delicacies, monstrous shopping malls replacing the greens of the town, and my Grandma going to Wal-Mart like chains to buy her groceries? Until then the change that some call “progress” had stopped at my doorstep, but now, it had reached the heart of my home. It was unacceptable for me not to find the snack-vendor and to actually see my Grandma walk into a Reliance-Mart to buy vegetables that she had been buying at a local farmers market for last seventy years. Not only that, everyone, and I mean everyone, I knew now had a cell phone. But when I went to the fruit market to buy seasonal fruits, I wondered how a middleclass family could afford those? (But of course, they could afford the cell phones.) Even worse, I only found kiwis and strawberries on the shelves, hardly any babugoshas and chikoos. Kiwis and strawberries?! In Ahmedabad? There was certainly something wrong with this picture.
The interconnectedness was lost.
Sanskrit, the classical language of Hinduism, from which many Indian languages have evolved, has 65 words to describe various forms of earth, 67 words for water, and over 250 words to describe rainfall; each word depicting the myriad of nuances of that specific element of nature, each word capturing the context, the importance, the beauty, the usage, the geography, the climate, the ecology, and even the personality of that element. The way water would mean differently to a man of the desert than to someone living in the flood zone, these words emphasized the relevance and interconnectedness of objects. But now, that context has vanished, rather, there is a new context; the context of how eminent, lucrative and globalized a company that manufactures water is. And, based on this logic, we have a new set of words for water, “Dasani,” “Evian,” “Fiji,” “Aquafina.”
So, I may say that I work to make people forget about Aquafina.
As a society, we may just need anterograde amnesia to overcome the ways of life popularized by industrialization in the last hundred years and reminisce what we once already knew. Instead we have the retrograde type, where we have forgotten the very lessons our ancestors had learnt after living with the nature for eon after eon.
So, I see my responsibility as first reminding myself that there could be another reality and then sharing that vision with others. Vision of an alternate reality where the fabric of life is woven in veneration of mother earth, with the warps of natural principles, and wefts of sustainable choices, and embroidered with the splendor of diversity and preserved by the species with the intellect to get the job done.
What Second Nature offers in this journey, is a strategy to help the society realize this vision. I have heard a few times how the organization gets its name, and in my mind its mission, hence our mission, is to second nature… to re-connect the pieces to create a beautiful portrait of a life that I was fortunate to live as a child and am confident that my children will live one day.
Thursday, June 09, 2011
Making Connections
We know the human brain isn't great at conceptualizing time. Events can simultaneously "feel like yesterday" and "like a lifetime ago." With our busy day-to-day extreme events can fade from memory altogether - headline news, millions of people's lives forever changed. This video helps remind us of what we've seen in the past few years -- the expected impacts of greenhouse gas emissions from years ago, decades ago, accumulating and now resulting in more frequent and extreme record-breaking weather events.
As a result of our inaction and lack of global leadership to reduce emissions over the past 20 years, more and more people in the scientific and sustainability communities are increasing their attention on adaptation - that is, recognizing that we've locked in significant impacts, how can we change our systems - agricultural, transportation, cities, energy - to handle the unpredictable impacts of climate disruption in the least painful way possible?
ICLEI's had an adaptation program since '06 and hosts an annual Resilient Cities event. Clean Air - Cool Planet's "Climate Preparedness" program also aims to help communities survive for more climate impacts. The National Academies of Science has more resources and reports on adaptation. The federal government recognizing the threat to Americans this poses, and requested an interagency report last year. The threat climate disruption poses to the global economy and rich and poor people alike is clear to the Economist. Business managers are increasingly being called on to evaluate how climate impacts will impact their business. On Monday Fast Company ran a story titled "The 'New Normal' Weather."
That last piece is authored by Curt Stager, whose president at Paul Smith's College, John Mills, is serving on the Higher Education Climate Adaptation Committee - a group we've convened through the ACUPCC, made up of college and university presidents, scientists, and other experts to evaluate how our institutions of higher learning should be preparing society to be more resilient in an unstable future - through their education, research, operations, and community engagement. (Stager's also got a new book out - Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth - which I'm about to dive into.)
With dangerous heat advisories in effect in NYC and the tristate area, in early June, it's not hard to keep the need to adapt this front-of-mind. In fact, if you're paying attention, it's impossible not to.
Stay going.
Tweet
As a result of our inaction and lack of global leadership to reduce emissions over the past 20 years, more and more people in the scientific and sustainability communities are increasing their attention on adaptation - that is, recognizing that we've locked in significant impacts, how can we change our systems - agricultural, transportation, cities, energy - to handle the unpredictable impacts of climate disruption in the least painful way possible?
ICLEI's had an adaptation program since '06 and hosts an annual Resilient Cities event. Clean Air - Cool Planet's "Climate Preparedness" program also aims to help communities survive for more climate impacts. The National Academies of Science has more resources and reports on adaptation. The federal government recognizing the threat to Americans this poses, and requested an interagency report last year. The threat climate disruption poses to the global economy and rich and poor people alike is clear to the Economist. Business managers are increasingly being called on to evaluate how climate impacts will impact their business. On Monday Fast Company ran a story titled "The 'New Normal' Weather."
That last piece is authored by Curt Stager, whose president at Paul Smith's College, John Mills, is serving on the Higher Education Climate Adaptation Committee - a group we've convened through the ACUPCC, made up of college and university presidents, scientists, and other experts to evaluate how our institutions of higher learning should be preparing society to be more resilient in an unstable future - through their education, research, operations, and community engagement. (Stager's also got a new book out - Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth - which I'm about to dive into.)
With dangerous heat advisories in effect in NYC and the tristate area, in early June, it's not hard to keep the need to adapt this front-of-mind. In fact, if you're paying attention, it's impossible not to.
Stay going.
Tweet
Friday, May 13, 2011
I'm a Climate Scientist
Sustainability folks often talk about the need to improve scientific communication to the general public; well, here you go. Parental discretion advised.
Stay going.
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Stay going.
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Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Oct. 31, 2011 - 7 Billion
Remember in math class how our teachers would always try to find ways to get the concept of exponential growth to really sink in? Apparently, most of us didn't really get it. I don't think its our math teachers' fault - our minds have a tough time conceptualizing that kind of growth. As the video below from Population Action International also shows, most people really don't understand the systemic implications of this kind of growth when it comes to population, sustainability and an integrated global economy. Don't forget that population is only one component of the "double explosion" of population and economic growth in the developing world. These are huge underlying drivers in the urgency for us to move towards sustainability as quickly as possible.
We hit 1 billion in 1804; 2 billion in 1927; 3 billion in 1960; 4 billion in 1974; 5 billion in 1987; 6 billion in 1999 and now 7 billion in 2011. Of course it's very difficult (technically impossible) to forecast population growth; but in general the rate of growth is expected to slow. Policy measures, demographics, disasters will all likely play a part. But regardless if we hit 9 billion or 11 billion, we already now need to re-think how we meet our needs in ways that are equitable and effective if we're going to navigate the coming century with any measure of grace.
How Many People Are In the World Today? from Population Action International on Vimeo.
Read more on this topic at this related article on Grist.
Stay going.
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We hit 1 billion in 1804; 2 billion in 1927; 3 billion in 1960; 4 billion in 1974; 5 billion in 1987; 6 billion in 1999 and now 7 billion in 2011. Of course it's very difficult (technically impossible) to forecast population growth; but in general the rate of growth is expected to slow. Policy measures, demographics, disasters will all likely play a part. But regardless if we hit 9 billion or 11 billion, we already now need to re-think how we meet our needs in ways that are equitable and effective if we're going to navigate the coming century with any measure of grace.
How Many People Are In the World Today? from Population Action International on Vimeo.
Read more on this topic at this related article on Grist.
Stay going.
Tweet
Saturday, April 23, 2011
The Capital Institute
The Capital Institute is exactly the kind of organization we need to start putting the concepts of ecological economics into action in the real world.
The videos below show a wide-ranging conversation between John Fullerton -- an ex-JP Morgan executive and the Founder and President of the Capital Institute -- and Robert Johnson, Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
Fullerton touches on a broad array of inter-related sustainability topics, including ecology, ecological economics, systems thinking, reductionism, transdisciplinarity, biomimicry, complexity science, interconnectedness, resiliency theory, social sustainability, happiness, and the purpose of capital.
It's clear that he's read and learned from the best, and has a lot to add to this field - I highly recommend working your way through each of the short clips below.
The Profound Ecological Implications of a Perpetually Growing Economy
Inspirational Authors Who Challenge the Growth Economy
Is Growth Becoming a Scarce Commodity?
Rethinking Finance as a Part of the Whole
Systems Theory: Balancing Efficiency with Resiliency
Social Sustainability: Does Wealth Equal Happiness?
How Detroit Did Everything Wrong
A Challenge for the Next Generation
Mobilizing the Top 1%
Stay going.
Tweet
The videos below show a wide-ranging conversation between John Fullerton -- an ex-JP Morgan executive and the Founder and President of the Capital Institute -- and Robert Johnson, Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
Fullerton touches on a broad array of inter-related sustainability topics, including ecology, ecological economics, systems thinking, reductionism, transdisciplinarity, biomimicry, complexity science, interconnectedness, resiliency theory, social sustainability, happiness, and the purpose of capital.
It's clear that he's read and learned from the best, and has a lot to add to this field - I highly recommend working your way through each of the short clips below.
The Profound Ecological Implications of a Perpetually Growing Economy
Inspirational Authors Who Challenge the Growth Economy
Is Growth Becoming a Scarce Commodity?
Rethinking Finance as a Part of the Whole
Systems Theory: Balancing Efficiency with Resiliency
Social Sustainability: Does Wealth Equal Happiness?
How Detroit Did Everything Wrong
A Challenge for the Next Generation
Mobilizing the Top 1%
Stay going.
Tweet
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
IKEA's Social Sustainability Risk
IKEA is in many ways a sustainability poster-child. They were one of the early companies to work with The Natural Step and have a good looking list of projects aimed at reducing their negative social and environmental impacts.
But this recent news on complaints about poor working conditions and racial discrimination in one of their US factories is a stark reminder about how the funnel walls are everywhere and closing in -- with such fierce demand for low-costs, manufacturers too often find it tempting to put the squeeze on their own employees. From the LA Times story:
The dust-up has garnered little attention in the U.S. But it's front-page news in Sweden, where much of the labor force is unionized and Ikea is a cherished institution. Per-Olaf Sjoo, the head of the Swedish union in Swedwood factories, said he was baffled by the friction in Danville. Ikea's code of conduct, known as IWAY, guarantees workers the right to organize and stipulates that all overtime be voluntary.
"Ikea is a very strong brand and they lean on some kind of good Swedishness in their business profile. That becomes a complication when they act like they do in the United States," said Sjoo. "For us, it's a huge problem."
There are many interesting undertones in this story of course - chief among them the fact that Sweden seems to be treating the US like the US treats China, taking advantage of lower labor standards. And the obvious cultural differences between Sweden and the US, and what that means in terms of leading a shift towards sustainability (they're way ahead of us, and I think in large part because Swedes have a more collaborative, community-focused, rule-following nature than the individualistic, cowboy Americans).
But for me the interesting thing is that it underscores just how tough it is to set that vision of truly sustainable future and continuously, diligently, repeatedly monitor and adjust activities throughout a large organization, so that the vision is clear and everyone's invested in avoiding missteps like this one.
Thanks to @NilsJK for the heads up on the story.
Stay going.
Tweet
 |
| Photo: LA Times - Workers prepare pieces of Ikea furniture for packing at the then-new factory in Danville, Va., in 2008. (Steve Sheppard, Associated Press / April 10, 2011) |
The dust-up has garnered little attention in the U.S. But it's front-page news in Sweden, where much of the labor force is unionized and Ikea is a cherished institution. Per-Olaf Sjoo, the head of the Swedish union in Swedwood factories, said he was baffled by the friction in Danville. Ikea's code of conduct, known as IWAY, guarantees workers the right to organize and stipulates that all overtime be voluntary.
"Ikea is a very strong brand and they lean on some kind of good Swedishness in their business profile. That becomes a complication when they act like they do in the United States," said Sjoo. "For us, it's a huge problem."
There are many interesting undertones in this story of course - chief among them the fact that Sweden seems to be treating the US like the US treats China, taking advantage of lower labor standards. And the obvious cultural differences between Sweden and the US, and what that means in terms of leading a shift towards sustainability (they're way ahead of us, and I think in large part because Swedes have a more collaborative, community-focused, rule-following nature than the individualistic, cowboy Americans).
But for me the interesting thing is that it underscores just how tough it is to set that vision of truly sustainable future and continuously, diligently, repeatedly monitor and adjust activities throughout a large organization, so that the vision is clear and everyone's invested in avoiding missteps like this one.
Thanks to @NilsJK for the heads up on the story.
Stay going.
Tweet
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