Newsweek Looks at "The New Greening of America"

Newsweek's July 17 cover story, "The New Greening of America," reveals a growing social and business mentality in America characterized by sustainabiliy. The interesting part is that partisanship is not necessarily fracturing this paradigm. According to the piece, it seems the economics of sustainability are speaking for themselves. The cover story press release follows.

One morning last week, Kelley Howell, a 38-year-old architect, rode 7.9 miles to a bus stop to complete her 24-mile commute to work. Compared to driving her 2004 Mini Cooper, the 15.8-mile round trip by bicycle conserved approximately three fifths of a gallon of gasoline, subtracting 15 pounds of potential carbon dioxide pollution from the atmosphere. That's 15 pounds out of 1.7 billion tons of carbon produced annually to fuel all the vehicles in the United States. She concedes when you look at it that way, it doesn't seem like very much. "But if you're not doing something and the next family isn't doing anything, then who will?" On that very question the course of civilization may rest, reports Senior Writer Jerry Adler in Newsweek's July 17 cover story "The New Greening of America" (on newsstands Monday, July 10).

One by one -- and together, in state and local governments and even giant corporations -- Americans are attempting to wrest the future from the dotted lines on the graphs that point to catastrophe. They have come to this view by many routes, sometimes reluctantly. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, thinks unhappiness with the Bush administration's environmental record plays a part, although many of the people Newsweek spoke to for this story are Republicans. "Al Gore can't convince me, but his data can convince me," venture capitalist Ray Laneremarks ruefully. Lane is a general partner in the prominent Silicon Valley firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which has pledged to invest $100 million in green technology. He arrived at his position as a "Republican environmentalist" while pondering three trends: global warming, American dependence on foreign oil and the hypermodernization of Asian societies. Looked at another way, these are thrilling times, the beginning of a technological and social revolution that will vault our society into apost-post-Industrial future. "If you mention green tech or biotech in a presentation," says Lane, "you'll get your funding before you get to your third slide."

Even Wal-Mart wants to help shape a sustainable future, and few companies are in a better position to do so. Just by wrapping four kinds of produce in a polymer derived from corn instead of oil, the company claims it can save the equivalent of 800,000 gallons of gasoline. "Right-sizing" the boxes on just one line of toys - redesigning them to be just large enough for the contents - saves $3.5 million in trucking costs each year, and (by its estimate) 5,000 trees. Overnight, the giant retailer recently became the largest purchaser of organic cotton for clothing, and it will likely have a comparable impact on organic produce as well. This is in line with CEO H. Lee Scott's goal of reducing the company's "carbon footprint" by 20 percent in seven years. If the whole country could do that, it would essentially meet the goals set by the Kyoto treaty on global warming, which the United States, to the dismay of its European allies, refuses to sign.

And even as "green" products make inroads among Wal-Mart's budget-conscious masses, they are gathering cachet among an affluent new consumer category which marketers call "LOHAS": Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability. "The people who used to drive the VW bus to the co-op are now driving the Volvo to Whole Foods," exults David Brotherton, a Seattle consultant in corporate responsibility. Brotherton estimates the LOHAS market, for everything from organic cosmetics to eco-resort vacations, at up to $200 billion.

But probably the most common formative experience is one that Wendy Abrams of Highland Park, Ill., underwent six years ago, as she was reading an article about global climate change over the next century; she looked up from her magazine and saw her four children, who will be alive for most of it. That was the year the hybrid Prius went on sale in the United States, and she bought one as soon as she could. This reflects what Pope describes as a refocusing of environmental concern from issues like safe drinking water, which were local and concrete, to climate change, which is global and abstract. Or so it was, anyway, until it came crashing into New Orleans last summer with the force of a million tons of reprints from The Journal of Climate. Katrina, says Pope, "changed peoples' perceptions of what was at stake."

All over America, a post-Katrina future is taking shape under the banner of "sustainability." Architects vie to create the most sustainable skyscrapers. The current champion in Manhattan appears to be Norman Foster's futuristic headquarters for the Hearst Corp. But it is expected to soon be surpassed by a new Bank of America tower, designed by Cook & Fox and also in New York, which takes "sustainability" to a point just short of growing its own food. Every drop of rain that falls on its roof will be captured for use; scraps from the cafeteria will be fermented in the building to produce methane as a supplementary fuel for a generator intended to produce more than half the building's electricity; the waste heat from the generator will both warm the offices and power a refrigeration plant to cool them.


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