The green industry’s green movement

It looks like 2007 will be the year that global warming will shake loose from political posturing and become a mainstream topic. It will be interesting to see if the concept retains the name “global warming,” since that is a provocative term in some eyes.

The ANLA Management Clinic in Louisville, Ky., started with a speech from William McDonough, who talked about what the megabuck groups are doing about what he called sustainability (perhaps the new moniker? This site uses the word for organic gardening.). He showed slides from Brazil to China (the last photo in the gallery is very cool!) of entire cities that are designed to be self-sustaining. He showed a powerful image of a green field with a bird’s nest full of eggs in the foreground, then told us that the field was actually the green roof at the Ford factory (click on Photo 2 in the gallery). Heady stuff.

But what grabbed my attention was how everyone reacted. Sustainability became THE conversation piece for the week. Everyone was asking what the green industry can realistically do to make an impact, to perhaps even be a leader in the green movement.

Our industry is pretty diverse, politically speaking. We have hot-under-the-collar conservatives and too-politically-correct liberals and every philosophy in between. Yet retailers, growers and landscapers of every political stripe were talking to one another about sustainability. I didn’t hear any tit-for-tat arguments about it, either, but rather pragmatic discussions about what can be done.

So what can be done? Actually, a lot is already being done that we can tap into. One of the concepts that has the strongest momentum relates to planting trees. The U.N. has its Billion Tree Campaign, and the Arbor Day Foundation has fantastic literature on the benefit of trees. Sounds like a good tie-in promotion for a garden center. You can work with community groups, from schools, scouts, churches (who are now putting their political weight behind environmental causes), gardening clubs and even the city council to plant more trees. You can target your full customer base with in-store promotions that draw upon the Arbor Day Foundation resources. The issue is much bigger than just planting trees, but trees are a good, practical start.

As you talk with your peers about how to cut back on water use and incorporate alternative fuels and green roofs, here are couple of sites to visit and think about.

The first illustrates the growing public hunger for green garden centers. A group of customers decided to open a co-op organic garden center. Take the time to read the comments. One of the founding members of the new garden center has a comment three or four posts down.

The next site shows you just how deeply we can link our industry to the green movement in the public eye (green = plants = growing plants). The folks at Nexus Greenhouses told me about the project (that’s a Nexus greenhouse on the barge).

-- Carol

Comments

[Carol Miller]

Here's another article to check out (from USA Today). It's about another bio-city in China: http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-02-15-china-eco-city_x.htm