Summer Sustainability Intership – What I learned Part 1

Gallows Humor

Summer is winding down. Kids are back in school, the sunflowers are toppling over, their bright, little yellow heads are balding, and the temps are cooler in the morning when I take the furs out for their walk.

My two-month summer sustainability internship ended on the 20th of this month so it seems like a good time to review what I’ve learned. This may take several posts for me to capture everything because there’s so much change going on in this field at the moment.

The Polar Bears are %$#@ed but How am I Looking?

There seems to be a real shift in how sustainability is framed; it’s less about conservation and a save the earth mentality and more about focusing first on the health and well-being of ourselves and our communities and then addressing the benefit to the environment. The recent effort by Mayor Bloomberg to support the Sierra’s Club Beyond Coal is a good example.  Bloomberg’s focus is on improving the health of Americans by supporting campaigns that seek to shut down polluting coal plants.   The emphasis is on human wellness, then the environment. Perhaps, this is a shift that has to happen. Maybe images of scorched earth, polar bears trapped on small pieces of ice or of devastating flooding aren’t personally accessible enough to get any of us to understand how immense climate change is. So, we have to reduce the conversation to ideas that we can comprehend, like helping to reduce asthma by closing polluting plants.

CSR & Business Data

Another recurring theme I noticed was the emphasis on measuring and reporting. I suspect that we are very much in the first iteration of how water, waste, GHGs, etc. are measured but what I think is more interesting is that 1) companies are beginning to monitor the resources they use 2) might this be a way to assign a real value to currently undervalued resources. Do I see companies being required to submit a CSR in the U.S? Unlikely. But do I see elements of CSR thinking integrating within a companies P&L or as a variable in their current exposure to risk and opportunity? Yes. And that’s a good thing.  Thinking about sustainability separately from day-to-day business operations is one of the reasons adoption of greener business practices starts and falters, it’s perceived to be a separate consideration from the factual, hard-nosed thinking of running a business. Until the two are combined, and the value and risks associated with a resource-dependent business are realized, then businesses and consumers will continue to perceive a disconnect.

Those are the two big ideas that surfaced to the fore today from my internship. My next segment will probably be on the intersection of technology and sustainability. In the meantime, I’m still looking for Boulder commuters.