Three great forces are colliding at this moment in history.  You, as a green marketer, are privileged to have even better than a ring-side seat to this spectacle.  You're right in the middle of the smash-up!  The three forces are these:

We've just finished a series of posts on the green wave.  But even as I was writing them, the green wave was colliding with another mighty wave, the current economic crash.

What does the economic downturn mean for green marketers?  There are two parts to the answer, because of the split personality of these curious professionals.  Green marketers are green marketers,  and also green marketers.  And yet they are always both at once — they must market green.  But economy impacts the two halves differently.

So let's first see how the current economic climate affects us as marketers.  Here, we're in the same boat with all other marketers at this moment in history.  Then we'll explore the difference that green makes in our situation.  (It's big.)

So... we know which way the economic winds are blowing.  They're blowing down — although we don't yet know how far.  The question is, how should your business respond?

The first thing to remember is that the winds are blowing down for almost everyone — your company, your customers and also your competitors.  You are not the target — the change is across the board.  So you need to respond proactively to outmaneuver your competitors in winning customers during this economic downturn.

From that standpoint, at least, the downturn is not bad news.  It's not good news, either.  It's just a change.  And as business guru Peter Drucker once said, the job of business leaders is to "exploit change" — that is, to leverage it to your advantage.  So rather than thinking of this as "bad times" during which you need to tighten your belt, look at it as a market change to leverage competitively with the resources you have available.

How do you leverage an economic downturn?  Respond to the total situation.  The cash & credit crunch is only part of it.  More important is how your marketplace will change in response.   So begin by asking, "How will my customers respond?  How will my competitors respond?"  Then you can craft your own response to leverage their responses.

Your customers — and, if you're selling B2B, their customers — will likely be cutting back.  But they still have needs.  In some cases, they'll be putting off the fulfillment of those needs, or cutting down on quantity, and there may be nothing you can do about that (although lower-priced models and extended payment plans can help).

In other cases, customers will still make purchases to fulfill their needs, but they'll tend to do it more selectively.  Or more accurately, they'll shift their selection criteria.  They may downgrade their quality standards in favor of lower price, for instance, and shift from a focus on long-term value to immediate cost.  And their values will shift away from luxury or "frills" towards practicality, the basics.

All of this may indeed shrink your market for the time being, and there may be nothing to be done about it, other than retooling your products and prices towards the downscaled values of the marketplace.  But if you stop there, you've left out the most important part of the picture.

What's that?  See our next post.

Keith Borden, Consultant
Brilliant Green Marketing

Over the last nine posts, we looked at several strands which together weave the green wave, today's growing concern for the environment.  I selected those aspects of the green wave which are most useful for understanding why it arose when it did, why it didn't arise sooner, and why we can't count on it to continue without interruption.

This selection of topics was strategic , but there's more to the story  Before moving on, I want to mention some other factors behind today's green wave.

• the environmental awareness, principles & track record of indigenous people around the world, and their contribution to the green wave
   
• the development of green principles & practices in the East and the contribution of these to the green movement
   
• the complexities of the relationship of humans to nature and the wilderness in the West throughout history
   
• early forerunners of the environmental movement in the West
   
• the social justice movement, which goes back millennia
   
• the increasing convergence of the social justice movement with the environment movement

We'll be expanding on some of these down the road, but they at least deserve mention now as important contributors to the green wave.

Right now, though, the green wave is crashing into another wave — the Great Economic Downturn.  In our next post we'll begin discussing what this means for green marketers.

Keith Borden, Consultant
Brilliant Green Marketing

Attention Deficit Disaster

In our last post, you saw — unless you are very unusual — that you can't hold your attention steady for a minute.  We also said that to stabilize our species in sustainability would require sustained attention by the public for a century.  We asked, if attention can't be sustained for sixty seconds, what could possibly sustain it for a hundred years?

The obvious answer is — nothing.  And if that's the case, we're doomed.  So let's see if we can find a non-obvious answer.

Attention is drawn by change.  Immediate change.  Change now.  That's true of individual human attention, and also of the baby bottle from which we all nurse, media attention.  Environmental changes are monumental, but for precisely that reason they are generally not fast — at least on the scale that captures human attention.

For example, global warming should register in human consciousness as a HUGE change.  And when we hear about it or think about it, it does, and we realize it requires a huge response.  But as we continue to hear about it, it sounds more and more like NO change.  Even the weekly ice-sheet collapse soon sounds like just more of the same. 

And then our attention shifts.  "If the economy tanks, I'll lose my job."  "Who's winning American Idol?"  Attention — how fickle it is!

From the standpoint of long-term planetary health and human survival, nothing is more urgent than green issues.  But from the standpoint of human attention — in the face of war, recession and football — nothing may seem less urgent than green issues.  The ark which must save our species (and other species too) floats on the green wave, which is fed by the fickle waters of human attention.  If  those waters change their course, the green wave subsides, and the human experiment fails.

Of course, after each time that the green wave subsides, it will arise again as another environmental crises hit us.  But then each time, it will be swamped again by boredom, distraction, attention fatigue and other personal and community crises — for example, the current economic meltdown.  So the wave will rise and fall.  Even if it grows overall, it will grow unevenly, in fits and starts.

Systemic Action And Science

This will cause the kind of erratic response that is our habit, causing both inefficiency and ineffectiveness.  That will be compounded by competition for resources.  As the 21st century unfolds, and crises increasingly crash upon us on all fronts, there will be insufficient funds to deal effectively with each of them symptomatically in a crisis-response level.

Resources will be sufficient if — and only if — problems are dealt with rationally, strategically, systematically and systemically at a root-cause level, for two reasons:

1. Proactive preventive action is more cost-effective than reactive crisis response.
    
2. Even though each problem has multiple causes, most of our major problems have several causes in common.

Unfortunately, everything in our history, habits and nature suggests that in the long haul, over the course of this century, we will not achieve the sustained public attention required for this rational, strategic, systematic and systemic approach, but will instead continue to respond with erratic crisis management.  If so, we're sunk.

But it's even worse than that.  Dealing with problems rationally, strategically, systematically and systemically requires more than just sustained attention on the problems from an action point of view.  It also requires sustained attention from an analytic point of view, in terms of sustained, well-funded scientific research.

Changing a situation strategically requires understanding its causes.  Otherwise, we're just flailing in the dark.  Effective environmental action — whether by government, industry or individuals must be based on good science, good sources and good sense.

Unfortunately, the science on which effective green action depends is also at risk.  In fact, at this very moment it's under heavy fire..  Republican presidential candidate John McCain rails repeatedly against "pork" and "earmarks" in the federal budget, but there is one example he pulls out almost every time to show how ludicrous our budgetary waste has become.

John McCain:  We're never going to spend three million dollars again to study the DNA of bears in Montana.  I don't know if that was a paternity issue or a criminal issue, but it's not going to happen again!

He makes it sound so silly.  Bear DNA in Montana!  But this is not a paternity issue or a criminal issue.  It's science regarding an environmental issue.  And it's McCain's favorite example of the kind of "pork" he'd totally eliminate from the federal budget! 

If he were to state the facts of the case and argue it on its merits, that would at least be honest, but it's revealing that he feels no need to do so, and disturbing that he's right.  As I write this, it seems likely that McCain will lose the election.  But the very fact that he can win cheers again and again with this insidious line — playing upon public ignorance — shows how precarious the funding for green science is over the long term.

This is not just serious.  It's ominous.  Poisonous!  See our next post for the antidote — and how it involves you.

Keith Borden, Consultant
Brilliant Green Marketing

In our last post, we saw why the green wave — a wave of growing environmental concern — arose in the late 20th century, not sooner or later.  The 29th-day dynamic which we explained may make us feel that the green wave is inevitable, leading us to take it for granted. 

But we shouldn't.  The green wave is all about sustainability, but is it sustainable itself?

The green wave is fed by two converging trends — rising awareness of green issues, and rising severity of the issues themselves (led by global warming in both cases).  These trends are not independent — the second (severity) feeds the first (awareness) through drawing increased attention to green issues.

If these were the only dynamics operating in today's world, the green wave would indeed continue to grow inexorably.  And in the long run it will, because human activities will continue to make environmental problems worse, and only an extreme change of course can begin to gradually make them better.  So on the surface, it seems the dynamic we have outlined will continue — worsening environmental problems will draw more attention to green issues, leading to greater concern — an ever-growing green wave.  And that sounds great for green companies!

But notice that it all depends on a sustained and growing attention paid to green issues.  Worsening green problems will indeed draw the public's attention, but so will other things, like war, terror attacks, economic problems, personal financial struggles, and the deliberate distractions of sports, celebrity and entertainment (to name just a few).  In this ongoing battle for attention, what will win?

Attention is indeed the ultimate battleground.  Take a minute now — exactly a minute, timed by your watch — to keep your attention fully on your watch.  Specifically, on the seconds as they tick by.  Don't let your attention stray — and notice how far along in the minute you are when another thought intrudes, as it almost surely will.

Well?  How did you do?  How many seconds did you last?

If you can't keep your attention on your watch for a minute, what will keep the public's attention on green issues for a century?  That's literally the question of the century, because it will probably take about a hundred years to stabilize humanity in sustainability.  So that's the question on which our future depends.

The question of the century!  Read our next two posts for the surprising answer.

Keith Borden, Consultant
Brilliant Green Marketing

In our last post, we said there are two reasons why the green wave — a wave of growing environmental concern — is hitting us now, rather than sooner or later.  The first was the 29th-day principle of exponential growth, which we described last time. 

Today we discuss the second reason:  the combination of population growth, technological growth and economic growth over the past couple of centuries has created a 29th-day situation for many environmental issues.

Among the first to recognize this, with an emphasis on resource depletion, was Club of Rome authors Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows in their 1972 Limits to Growth.  The specific numbers they plugged into their equations have needed repeated revision — as they themselves expected — but their basic argument still stands.  Their calculations, based on published resource estimates at the time, predicted that we would soon start running out of several key resources.

Here's why it's happening now.  Any aspect of the environment — oil reserves, atmospheric carbon, fish in the sea — exists in a finite quantity.  In some cases (iron deposits, diamonds) the quantity is relatively static, consisting of material that just stays there (until we remove it).  In other cases (river water, forests) the quantity can vary and is maintained by a dynamic balance of input and output.  In either case, if humans alter this aspect of the environment at a rate which accelerates exponentially, it will approach its limit in a curve that follows the pattern of the 29th day.

Over the past 300 years, the combination of industrialism, industrial agriculture and scientific medicine kicked human population growth into exponential overdrive.  Simultaneously, especially over the past century, commercialism, consumerism and advancing technology also drove per capita consumption exponentially.

Of course, everything consumed is made of materials extracted from the environment, and all of its byproducts eventually return to the environment.  So the exponential growth of both population and per capita consumption meant that the total human impact on the environment — impact/person x number of people — grew explosively during the 20th century.

This made it inevitable that in terms of the 29th-day principle, a whole host of environmental issues — from wilderness to resources to pollution — would reach the late 20s of their 30-day count during the 20th century.  It's no accident that the pioneers of environmentalism — Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, Rachel Carson and so many others, on issue after issue — all sounded the alarm within the last 100 years.

The pioneers, of course, sounded the alarm around day 27, not day 29.  And so they were often ignored.  They were not the green wave, but they initiated it.  And as the century rolled on, and issue after issue hit day 29, it grew to a mighty swell.

So what day is it today?  It varies with the issue — for some it's just day 27, for others it's early 30 — but there's one thing we can be sure of.  The 21st century is crunch time.  As world population continues its mighty heave, while simultaneously capitalist commerce and consumerist culture sweep across the planet, we face an avalanche of 30th-day catastrophes that even today few can conceive.

But at least people are at last waking up.  Finally, in the nick of time, we can count on the green wave to save us.  Or can we?  Read our next post.

Keith Borden, Consultant
Brilliant Green Marketing

In our last post we asked, if advanced thinkers took our war against nature for granted just a century ago, why have we come so far so fast?  Why is the green wave washing over us now?

There are two reasons.  The is the 29th-day principle, and if you're reading this blog you've probably heard of it.  Briefly, a lake is invaded by a water weed that floats on its surface.  This weed grows so fast that each day, it doubles the area it covers.  In 30 days, it covers the entire lake.  The question is, on what day does it cover half the lake?

If we haven't heard the story before, we may feel intuitively that the weed must cover half the lake somewhere around day 15 or 20.  But of course, it's day 29.  Then on day 30, it doubles again to cover the whole lake.

Let's look at how much of the lake's surface is covered on any given day, starting at the end and working backwards.

On day 28, the weed covers a quarter of the lake; on day 27, an eighth; and on day 26, a 16th.  Just 5 days before the lake is completely covered, the weed covers barely 3% of it.  Two-thirds of the way through the invasion (day 20), you might not spot the weed if you tried — it covers less than one tenth of 1% of the lake.

This is called exponential growth.  It's a mathematics many of us in the green movement have become familiar with, but most of the population haven't.  But they'd better get used to it fast, because it applies to a host of environmental problems.  And precisely because it does, these problems are about to slam into us hard.

Why is exponential growth so insidious?  Think about the weeds in the lake.  Suppose you use the lake for fishing, and for that you need the lake to have a surface that's mostly clear.  It doesn't have to be completely clear.  A few patches of weeds here and there are fine — in fact, they're to be expected.  All you care about is that enough of the surface is clear so you can fish.  On that basis, when do you become concerned about the weeds?

It depends on whether you're watching the weeds or the lake.  If you happen to be a botanist, and you happen to notice the weed early on, and you happen to check it the next day and the next, and you happen to measure the extent of its growth each day, and on that basis you happen to compute its growth rate, and then you happen to extrapolate it forward a few weeks, you might become concerned about the weed early in the process.  But notice how many "happen to's" there were in that sentence.  And every single one of them is unlikely! 

If what you care about is fishing, you won't notice the weed early on even if you happen to see it.  Your attention won't be on the weed but on the lake.  (Actually, it won't even be on the lake, but on the fish.)  So you won't notice the advance of the weed but the loss of clear surface.  At what point will you become concerned?

Not when the lake is 1% covered (day 24).  Not when it's 10% covered (day 27) — that's when you might actually first pay attention to the weed, considering it a minor nuisance.  But on day 28 — with the lake's surface 25% gone — you'd realize there was a problem.  On day 29 — with the lake's surface 50% gone — you would convene a committee to look into the matter.  One day later, wham!  It's too late.  Your lake is gone.

But what has this to do with the green wave?  We said there are two reasons why the green wave is washing over us now.  The 29th-day principle is the first.  For the second — and how it relates to the 29th day — read our next post.

Keith Borden, Consultant
Brilliant Green Marketing

In our last post, we asked how it could have taken us so long to recognize that we needed to protect nature, centuries after environmental destruction should have been evident to any observant person.  The answer lies not in external nature, but in human nature — the nature of our mind.

Many of us can recall a moment when we realized we were bigger and stronger than our parents.  Not just physically, but psychologically too.  And we recognized their vulnerability, perhaps for the first time.

What a shock!  Our whole lives had conditioned us to regard our parents as bigger and stronger than we were, perhaps even invincible, and certainly invulnerable to anything we might do.  Then some event thrust the truth upon us:  the roles had been reversed.

Some younger readers may never experience this reversal, because in recent decades many parents lost control the moment their babies were born.  Their children ruled them.  If you were one of these children, please take my word for it that once upon a time, parents were in charge.

When this moment comes — when we realize we are bigger and stronger than our parents — we usually also realize that we've been bigger and stronger than them for quite some time.  The real reversal occurred long before we recognized it.  Why didn't we see it before?  We were held in a habit of the mind, caught by our conditioning.

Precisely the same thing happened with humanity's relationship to the environment.  That's why, as we saw in the last post, just 102 year ago  William James  could speak of enlisting our youth in a war against nature as a moral step forward.  For most of history, as we said, nature was not something to protect, but something to protect ourselves against.  Few of us worry about protecting our enemies. 

Over thousands of years, our antagonistic relationship with nature was deeply grooved into the culture, continually reinforcing our conditioning.  Do you see the magnitude of the role reversal required to go green?

Of course, nature was not just an enemy.  It was always also a source of resources — fish, game, land, stone, timber, coal, oil — as well as the ultimate repository of all our waste.  As such, it seemed infinite.  Boundless, bountiful, and self-replenishing without limit.  And far beyond our capacity to damage it.

When we did damage it — as we did again and again — it was often on a scale so vast it could not be seen, and a time scale so extended it could not be noticed.  If you were about to kill the last mammoth, how could you have known?

Despite considerable advances in science, technology and communications over the past 10,000 years, many people today are just as oblivious to the environmental consequences of their actions.  The human mind does not naturally attend to things on such a scale, although it can learn to do so.

There were a few far-sighted exceptions.  As early as 400 BC, Plato noted that the nearby hills had been denuded of trees by human activity.  But more than 2,000 years later, white pioneers in America saw cutting down all the forests as progress.  And in Moby Dick (1851), Herman Melville asserted that whaling could never exhaust the supply of whales.  Nature's boundless bounty went unquestioned.

This seems strange to us now, looking back.  But for so long, we had experienced our vulnerability in the face of nature.  The idea of the vulnerability of nature was a total reversal.  So in our minds, nature continued to loom large, even as we loomed ever larger.

In the 19th century, many people had difficulty believing that something as small as a germ could make a human being ill.  And they were right. A single germ couldn't. But bacteria by the billions are a different story.  And in the 20th century, most people came to realize that this story is true.

Similarly, in the 20th century, many people had difficulty believing that something as small as a human being could make Mother Earth ill.  And they were right. A single human couldn't. But humans by the billion are a different story.  And in the 21st century, more and more people are realizing that this story is true.

Given the magnitude of the role reversal required — against millennia of cultural conditioning — it's no mystery that the green wave did not arise earlier.  The question instead is why it arose at all — and why, in the last century, we've come so far so fast.  Why is the green wave washing over us now?  See our next post. 

Keith Borden, Consultant
Brilliant Green Marketing

As we saw in our last post, for most of history, nature was not something to protect, but something to protect ourselves against.  Especially to those who lived literally behind the walls of civilization, nature was an enemy.  It was to be feared and fought.  And so we fought it.

Gradually, we won.  We cleared the land, and killed or chased away our predators.  We conquered the seas.  Today there is nowhere on earth that humans cannot go, usually with as much comfort and safety (except sometimes from our own species) as we care to have — and so as not to run out of challenges, we've set our sights on Mars.

As nature was subdued, we gradually became less afraid of it — to the point where today people take idiotic risks like climbing mountains without due precautions, because they take their safety for granted even beyond the zone of human control.  We've forgotten the nature our ancestors knew.  For most of us, most of the time, today's nature is as tame as a teddy bear.

And as we became less afraid of nature, sensitive souls began to appreciate her beauty.  (Yes, her beauty.  It was always her.)  This was the West's "romantic" movement.  In 1798, William Wordsworth wrote his poem Tintern Abby, in which he describes himself as "a worshipper of Nature."   Eight years later, he wrote his famous lines calling attention to what we had lost by trading nature for the world civilization and commerce:

The  world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours....

These lines, which have become a mantra of the green movement, were written just 202 years ago — barely 2% of the period since the dawn of agriculture — and could not have been written much earlier.  It's no accident that the romantic movement arose when it did — it's hard to appreciate the beauty of a feared enemy.  Only when industry and science had rendered nature relatively tame was it safe to appreciate what we were missing by our separation from her.

But even as our appreciation of nature slowly grew, our war against her was far from over.  One of the most progressive and enlightened men of the late 19th century was William James, a Professor of Psychology at Harvard.  His The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) is still cited by both scholars and enthusiasts of today's consciousness movement.  Early in the 20th century, he turned his attention to a perplexing question:  modern  warfare was increasingly destructive, yet men were drawn to it, and war often brought out the noblest in men.  As a psychologist, he thought war could not be eliminated unless we could find a suitable substitute.

So James searched for a substitute for war, and finally thought he'd found one.  In 1906 — a full century after Wordsworth's words, and just 102 years ago — he published The Moral Equivalent of War.  In it he described a great leap forward we could now take in our moral development.  Instead of continuing the carnage of war against our fellow human beings, we could turn our weapons upon a new enemy.  This new war would have all the advantages of war with none of the drawbacks, all the adventure with none of the destructiveness.  It would only bring benefit, not harm.

What was this enemy so evil that vanquishing it could only be good?  Nature!

If now — and this is my idea — there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the injustice [between rich and poor] would tend to be evened out.... 

To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clotheswashing, and windowwashing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded [i.e., rich & spoiled] youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.

They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation.  [my italics/underlining.]

As you can see, what James had in mind would have been remarkably like today's AmeriCorps.  It was an excellent idea, and far ahead of its time.  But the fact that an advanced thinker conceived it as a war against nature a mere century ago reveals how far we've come since then.

It also raises a puzzle.  Looking back — for example, by reading Clive Ponting's A New Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations — we can clearly see that environmental devastation began much earlier.  It should have been clearly evident to someone as aware and progressive as James.  How, then, could he have still seen nature something to attack rather than protect?  We answer this in our next post.

Keith Borden, Consultant
Brilliant Green Marketing

We ended our last post by asking, "Why aren't we green by nature?  Why didn't the green wave arise earlier — and why is it here with us now?"  Green is an orientation towards nature — an attitude of appreciation and concern for the environment, coupled with a feeling of responsibility towards it — so understanding the green wave requires understanding the relationship of human beings with nature.

In the beginning, we had no relationship with nature, because there was no nature.

Huh?  What do I mean, there was no nature?  Didn't we arise from nature?  Weren't we initially a part of nature?  In the beginning, wasn't nature everything?

Yes, of course.  And precisely because nature was everything, it was nothing.  We know things by contrast, by their differences from what they are not.  When we were just a part of nature, and nature was everything, there was nothing to contrast it with, so nature as a concept did not arise.  And because we had no concept of nature, we had no relationship with nature.  We just lived.

Looking back, we can say that in those early days we lived within nature, as a part of nature — but that was not our view at the time.  We just lived.  And that may be one reason why, as Flannery points out (see previous post), we often lived destructively to our own future.  We related to the parts of nature — hunting and gathering some parts of nature and defending ourselves against other parts — but we took for granted the larger whole (nature) that supported what we hunted and gathered.  We didn't see nature because it was too big.  Because it was everything, it was nothing, and so we unknowingly abused it.

In some small, isolated ecosystems such as Easter Island and New Zealand, this abuse led to disaster as we stripped the land bare, but in larger ecosystems like Eurasia and the Americas we got away with it and came out ahead.  We grew, prospered and populated, to a point where the land could no longer support us by hunting and gathering.  So we switched to a more disagreeable way of living — initially less productive per hour of labor, but more productive per acre of land —  agriculture.

Agriculture allowed concentrations of people in towns and cities, surrounded by fields and farms, ordered by religion and government, protected by armies, and functioning through industry and commerce — humanly constructed environments. 

Some people — hunters and fishermen, soldiers and traders, foresters and hermits — still dealt with the fringes of the humanly constructed environments or ventured beyond them, but as cities and civilization grew, more and more people lived solely within them.  Now there was something to contrast with nature, so now it could be conceptualized.  This was the birth of nature.  Nature as a concept.  And nature was dangerous.

Once we had lived in that danger.  We took it for granted then, and were always on guard.  But in civilization we learned safety.  And the safer we felt, the more we feared nature, where civilization's safety did not hold.  Once our home, it became increasingly alien to us.  The more we became tame, the more we shunned the wild.

So we built walls, but nature often breached those walls in wild ways such as storms and floods.  Nature's incursions were not friendly, but often destructive and deadly.  Natural disasters.  We strove to isolate ourselves from the wilderness,  and the word wilderness itself contains "wild" — the opposite of tame.  Tame is controlled and safe; wild is uncontrolled and dangerous.

Today we agonize over rainforest destruction, and rightly so.  We treasure our visits to "untouched" wilderness, and so we should.  But old fairy tales truly tell the tale of old.  When a child ventures into the forest, it is not good.  It's an ominous moment in the story.  And that's no fairy tale!  For most of history, the boundaries of civilization demarked the zone of safety.  Beyond them lurked nature, invincible and terrible.

In the beginning, then, we weren't concerned about nature because we didn't even recognize it.  That's why we didn't develop a green instinct, an inborn concern for the environment.

Later, as we saw here, we did recognize nature — and feared it.  That fear kept us from appreciating nature and going green much earlier.  In our next post, we'll see how we overcame that fear.

.Keith Borden, Consultant
Brilliant Green Marketing