February 20th, 2007

Is BIG Green Business a Good Thing?

Jason Mark and Kevin Danaher’s post on AltnerNet asks this question, close to my heart. They point out that GE and BP are ramping up their renewable energy efforts; prominent architects are using recycled and reused materials, and the market for non-residential green building is at $43 billion a year; more than $2 trillion in assets are invested in socially responsible funds; and sales of organically grown food are growing at 20 percent per year.

They also ask lots of more detailed and important questions related to this theme:

How can we celebrate companies that move toward better practices while acknowledging how much farther they need to go? Will transnational corporations use green practices to more effectively wipe out their mom-and-pop competitors? Will organic standards be weakened by the power of large corporations? Will Americans retain their bad habits of overconsumption but simply switch to earth-friendly products?

There are no hard answers, of course.

I agree with the authors’ premise that we need not view the BIG green business revolution (that has followed the small green business revolution, in progress for decades) through either/or thinking that says we can either have Safeway organic broccoli or we can have local farmers’ markets.

Rather, we should adopt a both/and mentality that makes room for each path. There always has been and always will be more than one way forward.

In fact, as a “mom-and-pop competitor” myself (there are lots of much larger marketing agencies out there seeing the advantage of green initiatives), I remain optimistic that smaller, nimbler organizations will always find and better serve the right niches. And when the time is right, those smaller, green organizations that offer enough continued value will either remain in business or be integrated into larger organizations reaching greater numbers of people. That’s been the case with such companies as Stonyfield Farm (acquired by Danon), White Wave (acquired by Deans Foods), and Green & Black’s Organic (acquired by Cadbury-Schweppes), to name just a few. If the acquiring company looses the purpose of the green brand, new smaller competitors will emerge to serve the niche.

As Mark and Danaher state: “The idea is to construct a green economy broad enough to accommodate a range of interests, niches for both the deeply committed and the newly curious — while of course at all times pushing farther and constantly redefining ‘mainstream’ and ‘normal’ and ‘acceptable.’”

For more on these questions as specifically applied to the organic foods industry, see Jurriaan Kamp’s article in Ode magazine — Organic goes mainstream – and why that’s cause for celebration.