Debbie Deland | Green Leader

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Powerful approach to accelerating sustainability

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

Reported by Debbie Deland, President of Net Impact Orlando

‘The Designers Accord’ is a creative approach to accelerating sustainability and a role model for other job disciplines or industries. So what is ‘The Designers Accord’? It asks designers worldwide (new product developers, architects, interior designers) to commit to 5 sustainability principles for themselves and their businesses. It is about addressing sustainability on every project with every client. Designing sustainability into a new building, a new product/service, etc. is the best way to achieve sustainable results. (more…)

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Why focus on business for sustainability action?

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

Biggest resource consumer and polluter

Based on reliable data from numerous sources, business and organizations use the most world resource and create the most pollution and waste. As undeniable, business enables a lifestyle across America that is not sustainable in that: (more…)

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G8—G20, UN 50 year planning will deliver nothing

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

I don’t want to hear about goals out 50 years for climate change and our other environmental issues, decreasing fresh water and farmable land availability, less than a 30 year stock in oil, depletion of fish worldwide, destruction of forests worldwide, global warming approaching tipping point now, etc. Fine to have those goals, but they have to be translated to very near term targets with accountability and transparency. I want to know what commitments are for 2011, 2012, 2013, and up to maybe 2019. There is no accountability with a 50 year planning timeframe. Year over year specific actions, tracking results and focusing on your own country’s contribution, action, and measurable results is what is required. If I hear one more time, I am not going to commit or take action because another country is not committing or taking action yet, it will continue to confirm that we are led by a bunch of kids. (more…)

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“The water content of things” to choose what you use and consume?!

Monday, August 10th, 2009

Fresh water is increasingly an issue. Over 1.2B people don’t have access to safe water today. Safe water and good sanitation are two key foundations for a healthy human and animal society. Incredibly, less than 1% of the world’s fresh water is accessible to humans. This second statistic, like the metaphor of our atmosphere being like a piece of paper around a soccer ball, always reminds me that the Earth is a lot smaller than I imagine especially knowing I share it with over 6 Billion brothers and sisters. But, that’s not new. Have you thought about the water content of things in our everyday lives and in our businesses? I have to admit that I hadn’t thought much about it. (more…)

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A lot more impact than ‘I’m just one person’!

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

Deb Albers is a hero of mine because she took on sustainability within her company in a way where she and like-minded employees could contribute. Her initiative led to a lot more employee involvement and a lot more sustainability progress for Dell. She didn’t think of herself as ‘just one person’, but someone who had a passion to contribute on sustainability through her day job. (more…)

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Insufficient, outdated coverage doesn’t help economy

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

The small article on Wal-Mart’s major move to eco-rate deserved front page coverage and a different angle. Positive action toward green or sustainable living commensurate with the size of our problems is news I want to read. The news limelight on N. Korea, Iran, even to some degree all of the Middle East is counter-productive. As they say ‘what you measure is what you get’. Perhaps what you consider news is what you get. These hot spots need addressing, but with the issues we face, they seem almost irrelevant to having a livable future based on the current reality of our$700B/year foreign oil dependence, natural resource depletion, severely declining eco-systems, the onset of climate change, etc. (more…)

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Green job heresy?

Monday, July 20th, 2009

The green job frenzy of job seekers, web sites, recruiters, etc. isn’t helping us make major progress on sustainability. The two things that strike me are that people want green jobs, but haven’t determined the personal and professional development required to qualify for green jobs. Second, the green job frenzy seems to set us up to think that green or sustainability jobs are separate, when every job and every employee needs to apply sustainability concepts to their current jobs and businesses. From all the sustainability case studies, sustainability progress is a journey that involves learning and application at all levels, i.e., integration of sustainability in the way we do all jobs and business processes. With a basic foundation in sustainability, employees applying sustainability in their day jobs within their companies will bring more progress toward sustainable business and living than green jobs themselves. (more…)

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System thinking blog —Your mental models (part 5)

Friday, July 17th, 2009

I am not going to talk about what I said I was going to talk about in my last blog until the next Systems Thinking Blog. A key element of systems thinking is understanding and updating mental models. This week Fox News set me off with their outdated mental models of the world, today’s reality, so I decided to talk mental models. (more…)

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American personal freedom challenge

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

We were raised with the ideal that ‘all men are created equal’. It took us a long time to achieve this ideal at least in policy/law, and our consciousness, if not yet in all our actions, except probably for the Gay community today. In fact, we had to make the ideal more real because our founding fathers excluded some (at least women and blacks, gays for sure) from the equality ideal. We’re still working on race and other biases and the mental models or generalizations we have for each other. Our strength is in our diversity, our commitment to equality, along with a willingness to update our mental models to get closer and closer to the ideal that ‘all men are created equal’ in all aspects of our society. (more…)

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Bad Government, but first climate change step - (Long bill gets long feedback from an informed layperson)

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

A 1000 or 1300 page Climate Bill not even off the copier is bad government, but at least we have a first step Climate Bill in progress. In the last month I had begun to sour on the Climate bill due to its length and not being able to get adequate assessment of the details and deals included in the bill. I certainly didn’t have the time and wouldn’t read the over 1000 pages of the usual legal language our government speaks. My husband, a not so active climate change action supporter, took me to task saying that all of us have fooled around with climate change action for years and have not done anything. Whatever this bill does, it is better than doing nothing and doesn’t preclude us from doing more as soon as we muster the political will to do more. He got me. (more…)

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Posted in Uncategorized, United States | 1 Comment »

Systems thinking (part 4)

Friday, June 19th, 2009

We are on blog #4 for Systems Thinking. It is important for me to tell you that this blog is intended for the layman. There is plenty of top notch scientific information, diagrams, etc. on systems thinking. Two of my favorite books on systems thinking are Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows and The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge. There are many sites that go into a lot of detail on systems thinking, systems dynamics as well. But my objective with this blog is to encourage you to take a whole system view when looking at problems and issues, and maybe even spur your interest to learn a little more about systems thinking. I find the basic foundation I have in systems thinking has and continues to change my mental models of the world and problems. (more…)

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Systems thinking blog (part 3)

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Easy Way to Identify A System

From Thinking In Systems by Donella Meadows:

How to know whether you are looking at a system or just a bunch of stuff:
A) Can you identify the parts? AND
B) Do the parts affect each other? AND
C) Do the parts together produce an effect that is different from the effect of each part on its own? AND perhaps
D) Does the effect, the behavior over time, persist in a variety of circumstances. (more…)

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A different level of consciousness

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Not sure this is a good match for a post on this site, but here goes. Over the past few months, I’ve experienced a different level of consciousness for my own sustainability. I am not sure why except that I am so much more aware and interested in our progress through reading a lot about sustainability and writing about it. Awhile ago, my family made some of the common lifestyle changes to begin living more sustainably: (more…)

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Urban myth busted

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

I just saw a report out of Nielsen Business Media. ORC guideline, a part of Opinion Research Corporation, a leading global market research firm, survey finds that many Americans are willing to spend more to support eco-friendly initiatives. Some notes from the national survey (over 1000 adults in private households, May 2009): (more…)

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Posted in Climate Change, Sustainability | 3 Comments »

There are 6 Americas when it comes to climate change!

Friday, June 5th, 2009

I often wonder why more Americans aren’t clambering for radical climate change action. The research study, Global Warming’s 6 Americas 2009: An Audience Segmentation Analysis, gave me a lot of insight. I am not in favor of many of the studies that the government spends our money on, but this one provides a foundation for reaching more Americans on the climate change crisis. From their Executive Summary: (more…)

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Posted in Climate Change, United States | 10 Comments »

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