“Cashing In On Green Jewelry?” This Is The Wrong Message
I just returned from a four day Business and Consciousness conference where some of the most visionary leaders in the business world, from Steven Covey to Bill Strickland, spoke about how we can transform our relationship to economy, ecology and community. Yet the conference also faced the issue around sustainability, global warming and the fragmentation of our most trusted institutions..
The heart of the problem is, I believe, how we do business, this notion of “cashing in.” Business views all of life through the lenses of how much money can be made. The result is that our entire resource and community base is merely a commodity in our resource to cash to trash economy.
Posts like this, by Deidre Woollard, is an example that reinforces this perspective by reducing the”ethical” movement in the jewelry sector to merely an economic opportunity of “cashing in.”
Read this and you’ll see what I mean:
“Popular jewelry designer Rhonda Faber Green’s name alone makers her a natural for “green” merchandise. Cashing in on the trend for eco-friendly merchandise, the “Green for Green” collection is two necklaces and a lapel pin, is made from recycled metals.”
http://www.luxist.com/2008/01/29/rhonda-faber-green-goes-green/
Everyone who runs a business has to focus on marketing to draw community support. But for those agents of change, the circle of people I work with who are trying to break a consensus trance, it is not about cashing in on the green movement.
This is about hundreds of species dying every year. It is about the polar caps melting and the strong possibility that Florida and Manhattan will be under water within fifty years. It is about polar bears dying and mountain glaciers drying. It is about massive displacement and migrations and wars over water and the degradation of our eco system that will make life miserable at best for billions of people.
These imperatives require new business models that are based a connectedness that roots us to all our relations.
Once we align ourselves to these values, we can talk about a marketing plan. One such plan is my FRE system, www.celticjewelry.com which is about restoring trust, once again, between the people (not consumers, PEOPLE) and the business world by honestly letting them know what the impacts of their decision making is.
I cannot stop the ice caps from melting. But I can be honest, accurate and know what is important in my work on behalf of the next seven generations. You have this power, too.
