Pepcom Green PR Lunch

So I'm heading to a Pepcom green PR lunch today, and am excited because I haven't met a lot of pr folks out there working in the green space. I know there are a lot of us - as the green segment has obviously ballooned over the past 2 years - but nonetheless, I think it will be good to meet some more folks in the trenches, see what they are seeing and compare notes.

I also think that its going to be interesting because it just goes to show how many of us there are - the mere existence of this lunch is telling. What inspired this post is not that however.

Last night I was thinking about what made me jump into green PR, and my early experiences in high school including AP English and a paper I wrote on endangered species. Moving on to college, I kept listening to that part of me that was interested in the environment. I read a book called "The Heat is On," by Ross Gelbspan.

Ross was a great inspiration to me in college - I was also thinking about a journalism career, and if there was anyone writing about the things that mattered, it was him. Not only did he write a book that foretold the consequences of global warming well before "An Inconvenient Truth," but he also covered things like renewable energy. A concept that stuck with me since back then was that if we don't take a leadership role in developing these technologies, we will be stuck purchasing them from foreign developers. Instead, we can be putting Americans to work on these projects here and creating a clean energy infrastructure. Indeed, if we take a back seat and we're purchasing these technologies from Europe - we might as well continue to import foreign oil too.

But truly what inspired this post (to get to the point) is that back then, when Ross wrote his book, he discussed the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is set up by the UN and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Many who are new to the green movement may have heard of the IPCC recently as they released a fourth climate change assesment report in 2007. The IPCC released their first report in 1990, and the second in 1995. What I took away from what Ross and other sources wrote about the IPCC's findings in their early reports was that despite the scientific evidence for global warming, businesses were mostly resistant to change as business-as-usual economics continued to take precedence.

That all needs to change.

I also concluded in an independent study of the environmental movement that because of the profit motive, their power to mobilize individuals and resources, and their grand scale and reach, businesses would have to be the true creators of change. Now - we have a phenomenon called green business. Some iterations can be less green than others - but the efforts are a needed start. And Hunter Lovins will tell you something to that effect at one of the Presidio School of Management's open houses.

But getting to my point - what dawned on me last night was that the mere fact that the IPCC issued their first report in 1990 means that, for some years, research was apparent enough to motivate the United Nations to create the IPCC in the first place. Fact is we have known that there is a need for a greening of operations in this world for quite some time, and so I think we are deeper into this storm than most of us may know.

So, today I'm putting on my green hat, inspired once again to spout out and hopefully inspire some other folks. Seems like a lot of capability has been built into Silicon Valley for supporting green action - and I'm glad to be a part of that. I look forward to meeting others with the same goal.