Adam W.'s Profile

Why I love Green Business

I always knew that I wanted to help make the world a more environmentally friendly place. I think it all stems from where I grew up. I hail from Palos Verdes, a gorgeous, not so quaint town just south of LA right on the beach. I have done lots of traveling in my time, and in my opinion, it is still the most beautiful place on earth.

I still remember the day I was heading out to that beach with my board in tow and was told by my mom that I couldn’t go surfing today. “Why not?” I innocently asked. Apparently, she said, a pesticide plant that manufactured DDT just two towns up the road had lied when they claimed to dispose of all of their waste products safely. Instead, they had simply dumped them into the waters outside my town, and a new study showed that there were levels up to 15 times the safe level for human beings in the water. These chemicals would exist there for decades. That was the day I knew I had to do something.

So I dabbled in several different professions that I thought might help me toward my goal of creating a more sustainable world. I started off working for a non-profit (Cal-PIRG and the Sierra Club, and eventually Greenpeace). I loved my time there. I met the most interesting people, and there is no doubt in my mind that we influenced legislation. The problem though was that we spent the vast majority of our time trying to get enough money to run commercials, post ads, set up phone banks, hire lawyers etc. It just wasn’t working.

So then I got it into my head that I could make the biggest impact in politics. After all – these were the people I was constantly trying to persuade while working for non-profits – I figured I could just cut out the middleman. No such luck. It took me about 4 weeks of living in Washington DC to see how much more is involved in politics than your ideas. They are, in order: money, money money.

The next step was law. I did a semester with the NRDC (National Resource Defense Council). Once again, I had a great time. I worked with brilliant people, and once again, we did make a difference, but I still felt like something was lacking. We had to do everything in such a roundabout way. We would sue over something a business was doing, have to get the EPA or some other regulatory board to try and do something about it, the business would sue to make things confusing, and while we often made good inroads, we very rarely had any out and out victories.

That’s when I realized making business itself sustainable is the only way I was ever going to make a real change in the world. Individual achievements, though both admirable and necessary, will only take us so far. Nonprofits try to affect law, and lawyers sue to help make that happen. The law, while admirable (I love law, I come from an entire family of lawyers) can be easily subverted by politics, and we all know who controls politicians - BUSINESS! When it comes to cutting out the middlemen, going right into the heart of business really is the final solution. By showing that business is not inherently anti-environmental, and in fact has a stake in the environment in the long run, I believe we can turn this country, and hopefully the planet, around. While everyone working to help make the world a greener place is doing the right thing, in my opinion, the real tipping point will be when businesses don’t have to decide whether or not to be green – they have to be in order to survive. And I think we are closer now than I ever could have hoped.