The Portland Bottom Line is going green with Eco-Libris!

We are happy to announce a new collaboration, this time with the editors of 'The Portland Bottom Line', a new book exploring how small businesses can effectively and efficiently shift toward sustainability and thrive.

This interesting and unique book, which was released earlier this month, includes 51 essays of small-business people from Portland who share their experiences with sustainability in their companies.One tree will be planted with Eco-Libris for every printed copy of the book.

Here's more about the book:
Co-edited by Peter Korchnak and Megan Strand and organized into 12 sections along the triple bottom line of People, Planet, and Prosperity, “The Portland Bottom Line: Practices for Your Small Business from America’s Hotbed of Sustainability” explores how small businesses can effectively and efficiently shift toward sustainability and thrive. In their short, 400-word essays, 51 small-business people from the City of Roses share their experiences with sustainability in their companies.

“The Portland Bottom Line” demonstrates how small businesses can innovate to put people before profit, help restore the ecosystem, and prosper. The book is also a community benefit project. Contributors collectively chose, by vote, the local community organization Mercy Corps Northwest, which supports the launch and growth of sustainable ventures, to receive 100% of profit from the book’s sales.

We are happy to partner with this book as we strongly believe in the power of local businesses to create change and move the local economy towards sustainability. We know very well from our involvement with SBN in Philadelphia and Portland is also a good (if not the best) example of this process. Hopefully this book will help and inspire other places to follow and create the change we are looking for.

This book is also a very interesting experience in crowdsourcing, as the sustainable marketing expert and co-editor Peter Korchnak points out in the introduction to the book:

"As I delved deeper into my exploration of sustainability and marketing, the questions seemed increasingly pressing. In my search for the best way to explore and publicize the issue, I recalled my experience co-authoring mass-collaboration book projects such as "Connect! Marketing in the Social Media Era" and "Age of Conversation 3: It's Time to Get Busy". Could I employ the same crowdsourcing technique of co-creation to produce a collection of essays highlighting answers to those burning questions?" Did you receive answers to these questions?"

We talked with Peter about the book, the working process and the answers you can find this book:

Hi Peter. How "The Portland Bottom Line" started?
Three factors motivated the creation of “The Portland Bottom Line”:

First, after I contributed chapters to “Connect: Marketing in the Social Media Era” and “Age of Conversation 3: It's Time to Get Busy”, I realized collaborative books that benefit causes are a fantastic way to create microcommunities around topics of interest and raise money for good.

Secondly, as principal of Semiosis Communications [link: http://www.semiosiscommunications.com/ ], a Portland, Oregon-based sustainable marketing company, I have focused on strategies and tactics that support social sustainability – the People bottom line.

Finally, Portland is on the national, if not worldwide, forefront of sustainability, and I'm always on the lookout for additional ways to share our accomplishments here.

I thought, why not combine it all? Can I create a crowdsourced book in which Portland's business community can share their experiences with sustainability? “The Portland Bottom Line” is the answer.

Did you receive answers to the questions you brought up at the introduction to the book (see above)?
Absolutely. Each essay in the book demonstrates sustainability and business go well together. For Portland's small-business community, sustainability is both personal and profitable.

Can you highlight one or two stories that taught you new lessons about integrating sustainability and business together?
What really struck me was how personal doing business in a sustainable way is for contributors. Adopting sustainable practices in business is certainly a business decision, but personal experiences and convictions drive it long-term.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the range of stories, from deeply autobiographical narratives to number-crunching case studies, as well as by the range of businesses that contributed. To see very little shameless self-promotion was also very encouraging.

Alan Gunderson's piece “Growing and Staying Green” highlights how company growth and environmental sustainability can go well together. As a marketing professional, I was happy to see Rich Bruer write about sustainable branding in “Sustainable Branding: It May Not Be What You Think”: small businesses, too, need to cultivate their brands to stay in business.

With all these stories that show you how sustainability is a win-win business strategy, why do you think the majority of businesses still avoid this path?
Though the essays in “The Portland Bottom Line” demonstrated that sustainability is partly a personal, emotional issue, none of the contributors would have applied sustainable practices in their business if it hadn't made business sense as well.

There's a widespread, albeit slowly diminishing, misconception out there about what sustainability means. For far too many people sustainability still equals 'being green', even though it, in fact, includes social and financial benefits as well. That's why the triple bottom line is often depicted as a three-legged stool: Profit, People, and Planet must be balanced in our business decisions, otherwise it won't work.

As the number and success of sustainability-minded companies grows, more will join them on that path.

Do you think there's a next level to making local businesses more sustainable or what we read in these stories is as good as it gets?
I believe that outside of nature, total sustainability does not exist. We can only strive to conduct business as sustainably as possible. In other words, sustainability isn't a goal, but, as the previous question pointed out, it's a path. In sustainability, the journey truly is the destination.

Why is it (almost) only Portland? Why don't we see similar sustainable/local business hubs in other cities?
Several theories exist why Portland is a hotbed of sustainability. A while ago I summarized my take in a dedicated blog post “Portland is an island”. In brief, we must thank our natural environment, climate, people and their connection to this place, liberal politics, government policies, and the virtuous circle connecting it all together. Portlanders love their city and its surroundings, and we'll do everything possible to preserve and nourish both.

At the same time, while Portland may be on the forefront of sustainability, we still have a ways to go. As I said earlier, sustainability is an ideal. In a small city like this one, sustainable business stands out because of its higher-than average concentration. A lot of good, and often better, stuff is happening in other cities as well, and we have plenty to learn from them.

How was the crowdsourcing process? Would you do it again?
I am doing it again. Volume 2 of “The Portland Bottom Line” will be out in November 2011.

Crowdsourcing is a lot of work – it takes more than you think at the outset. Particularly coordination of the crowd is a huge task, testimony to the fact that crowdsourcing requires good management, it doesn't just happen. The experience made me wish there were an easy way, and I look forward to soon delivering that with GoodBookery, which will enable people to create and publish collaborative books that benefit causes.

How come you don't have even one story from a bookstore?
I did notice that. I guess no bookstore owners are in my social network yet. Please connect me or, if you run a bookstore that would be interested in carrying “The Portland Bottom Line”, please get in touch at editors[at]portlandbottomline[dot]com.

Any advice to someone who might be inspired from your project and would like to do something similar in their city?
Start working on the concept now, but hold off until July 2011 when GoodBookery will be launching. In the meantime, go to GoodBookery.com to sign up for updates!

Thanks, Peter! More information about 'The Portland Bottom Line' can be found at http://portlandbottomline.com

The book can be purchased and downloaded on Lulu.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!

Green Options - STATE OF THE WORLD Book Series Pivotal to Understanding our Paths to Sustainability

As part of Eco-Libris' ongoing content partnership with Green Options Media, we feature a post that was originally published by John Ivanko on April 22 on Sustainablog. Today's post is about a book that can change your life and the good part is that you get a new version of it published every year.

People often ask me: “So what set you on your present course of operating a sustainable business, growing most of your own food organically, working from home, and powering your entire farm and business with renewable energy?” People ask me about that definitive moment where it became obvious that I needed to live and work a different way, a better way that didn’t involve never-ending growth, consumption, and earn-and-spend.

There was no such moment, or crisis, that transformed my life of power suits, lattes, or gotta-have-it-all-now mindset. Instead, my sustainable journey (which very much continues to this day as an evolving journey) resulted from a growing understanding about the issues facing the planet and its inhabitants, both through personal experience and by learning of these changes from other organizations or individuals.

One such organization that serves as a compass for my endeavors is the Worldwatch Institute, a nonprofit organization that produces the authoritative State of the World book series as well as numerous other books and resources to build an ecologically sustainable society that meets human needs. Each year, a new State of the World book is not only jam-packed with interdisciplinary research and analysis that a non-scientific mind (like mine) could comprehend, but organized in such a way to make it both practical and powerful for anyone searching for ways to express a vision for how to live on a planet without destroying it or exploiting its inhabitants.

Each year, the State of the World book series focuses on a particular theme which might address energy, community, food and agriculture, population, health, trade policies and natural resource use, just to name a few. For 2008, their State of the World: Innovations for a Sustainable Economy provides both a timely analysis of how our “free trade” global economy has gone astray and insights into the powerful movements afoot, including localization, a triple bottom line approach to business, microfinance, and the low-carbon economy.

“In response to the grim realities of climate change, resource depletion, collapsing ecosystems, economic vulnerability, and other converging crisis of the twenty-first century, a consensus is emerging among scientists, governments, and civil society about the need for a rapid but manageable transition to an economic system where progress is measured by improvements in well-being rather than by expansion of the scale and scope of market economic activity,” writes John Talberth in his chapter "A New Bottom Line for Progress." I only can hope that a copy of State of the World 2008 is on President Obama’s desk since it’s unlikely that Americans can consume our way out of the present financial crisis. Even if we did, Talberth argues that such consumption will not likely lead to furthering our happiness, but rather to further degradation of the planet.

State of the World is one of those books that helped me change course and better comprehend what is happening to the planet. State of the World 1992 -- which I read in preparation for my self-imposed sabbatical and exit from corporate America -- served as my launch pad for discovering what was happening to the planet and what I could do about it. Life is not a spectator sport for those who want to champion change. The State of the World books provide the global insights from leading thinkers, academics, professionals and analysts who dive into the social, environmental and governmental aspects of how our world functions, revealing ways in which we could, once again, thrive more sustainably.

The State of the World books are not End of the World books; they’re revealing and sobering at times, but they provide numerous pathways to achieve greater sustainability within our culture, society, economy and community.

Not surprisingly, their latest release, State of the World 2009: Into a Warming World, is devoted to the technological and institutional developments most likely to help humanity weather the storm of global warming. Most scientists agree that we have only a few years to reverse the rise in greenhouse gas emissions and help avoid abrupt and catastrophic climate change. As the world governmental leaders come together to negotiate a new climate agreement in Copenhagen in December 2009, State of the World: Into a Warming World can guide our understanding of how a warming planet threatens everyone and everything on Earth -- and what we could do about it.

“A sustainable world is not an impoverished world but one that is prosperous in different ways,” writes Tim Jackson in the chapter “The challenges of Sustainable Lifestyles” from the 2008 State of the World. “The challenge for the twenty-first century is to create that world.”

So, how are you creating that sustainable world?

At Inn Serendipity, my family and I are creating it with renewable energy, local food, and living below our means.