Amy's Writing | Environmental Debt

Biomimicry Lessons for Business on Triple Pundit

This article featuring Amy’s recent talk at a BiomimicryNYC event was originally published on Triple Pundit by Raz Godelnik:

How do we create a better future? How do we redesign our economic system to be more sustainable?

Exploring these and similar questions, a growing number of people look for inspiration from the greatest lab of all: Nature. This type of exploration already has a name (biomimicry), definition (“an innovation method that seeks sustainable solutions by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies”) and even an inspiring visionary leading the way (Janine Benyus).

It also has a growing number of followers, as I could see last week at an event titled “Biomimicry + the Regenerative Economy.” Organized by BiomimicryNYC, a network dedicated to fostering a community of nature-inspired practice in the New York City metro region, it took place at Impact Hub NYC with more than 100 attendees who came to learn more about aligning business with nature from two experts in this field: Amy Larkin and Katherine Collins.

… Amy Larkin, founder of Nature Means Business and author of “Environmental Debt: The Hidden Costs of a Changing Global Economy,” was the first to go on stage. One of the main topics she focused on was harmonizing the laws of business with the laws of nature…

Read the rest of the article here.

Radical cooperation is the only antidote to climate chaos

First published in the Guardian on June 20th, 2014

Throughout the 20th century, millions of people banded together in nonviolent revolutions across the globe to secure their freedom. From India to Czechoslovakia, South Africa to Poland, they declared their right to self-determination. Why, in the 21st century, are so few of us ready to fight together to secure our right to clean air and water?

To wake us from our fossil-fueled dreams, we need nothing less than radical cooperation.

Given the scope and importance of the conflict, it’s notable that many of the most poignant voices calling for a more holistic view of climate change are in fact battle-tested veterans of war. In a new report,National Security and the Accelerating Risks of Climate Change, an all-star array of retired US military brass weighs in, writing that “The potential security ramifications of global climate change should be serving as catalysts for cooperation and change. Instead, climate change impacts are already accelerating instability in vulnerable areas of the world and are serving as catalysts for conflict.”

What moves people to cooperative action? Environmental activists and scientists often ask how they can get Americans to care about climate change. And, on the other end of the spectrum, many business people are trying to encourage both their customers and Wall Street to work with them on solutions.

Meanwhile, those of us fighting to stave off climate chaos are working to send a palatable message, telling one another that we cannot scare people to death and that alarmism is ineffective. But watch The Weather Channel. Read the business news. Follow the agricultural commodity markets or your region’s farming news. Climate change’s high impact traumas and costs on people, planet and

Fossil fuels and peace don’t mix

First published in the Guardian on June 4th, 2014.

Why doesn’t anyone do anything about the situation in Ukraine?

One reason is that Russia supplies one third of the European Union’s oil and gas. The EU, in turn, represents 20% of the world’s economy, and any precipitous rise in the energy prices they pay is a very scary proposition.

In other words, oil and gas are both the fueling impetus for Vladimir Putin’s current forays and the reason for subsequent global inaction.

Russia is hardly alone. On the other side of Asia, China is risking a hot war with Vietnam in order to plant an oil rig in disputed waters. No nations have come to Vietnam’s side. Meanwhile, Russia and China have just signed a $400bn deal for 30 years of natural gas supply and demand. This alliance creates an economic and defensive bloc that could limit the rest of the world’s move towards safe energy development.

China’s $400bn bet on natural gas added to its central role as the world’s top manufacturer and primary emerging market, create a conflict. If the world chooses to place a price on carbon, which is desperately needed, China and Russia now have an alliance against other economies that might want to incentivize safer renewable energies.

Some of the world’s great oil reserves are on land governed by repressive regimes and dictators, including the House of Saud, Vladimir Putin, Sudanese warlords and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The pipelines and ports to transport this oil go through lands of every geo-political leaning, from Canada, whose tar sands aim to serve the US, to Kazakhstan, whose pipeline to China is now being expanded.

Oil and gas wars (hot, cold and economic) will only intensify as at

Forbes’ Inspiring Social Entrepreneur Ideas

This Forbes website list of inspiring social entrepreneur ideas highlights Amy’s proposal for accelerated depreciation for green infrastructure. See more of her thoughts on the issue here.

From the Forbes list:

#3. Corporations harm the environment but many don’t want to. Amy Larkin, author of Environmental Debt: The Hidden Costs of a Changing Global Economy explained the connection between the growing environmental crisis and global economics. She noted that many corporations want to invest in clean tech, but choose not to because of the short term financial pain—even though many green investments have positive long term financial impacts. She advocated specifically for accelerated depreciation for green infrastructure investments to incentivize, really enable, corporations to invest in reducing the environmental harm.

Climate change survival: companies need courage… and new metrics

First published in the Guardian on April 24th, 2014.

Today, tremendous work is being done to develop the metrics of natural capital. All kinds of very smart people and organizations are making the “business case” for sustainability, making tortuous calculations as they analyze the life cycles, carbon production and water footprints of a variety of products, all in an attempt to make the best possible business and marketing choices.

This arduous work is being done – finally – by gifted and smart accountants, economists and supply chain and manufacturing experts, from the Global Reporting Initiative to the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board to the Carbon Disclosure Project to the World Bank’sNatural Capital Accounting. I appreciate all of this work. We need it.

But, impressive as this work is, it is no replacement for having the courage to actually contemplate the state of the world around us. Right now, we are looking on with a mix of disbelief and ennui as extreme weather engulfs us. In some cases, we are trying to take what appear to be reasonable steps, mostly in order to protect our precarious perch in the world’s economy. The trouble is, the time for reasonable has passed. We have somehow forgotten that if there is no nature, there is no business.

We are in a global environmental emergency, but we are behaving as if incremental improvements to “business as usual” will do. Talk to a scientist, a fisherman, a native of a low-lying island or a farmer stymied by drought, heat or floods. Or for that matter, talk to anyone who has been flooded in southern England or Pakistan; or who is making flood

A simple accounting change can make green infrastructure more attractive

First published in the Guardian, April 8th 2014

Many businesses struggle with the question of how to invest in large fixed assets. These are painstaking decisions, because they always demand long-term thinking and guessing about markets, future technologies and risk factors. How much revenue will a new factory generate? How much savings will a new technology produce? What unintended consequences might occur because of a purchase?

As companies attempt to answer these questions, they also have to deal with long-term trends that further complicate the question of fixed-asset purchases. Issues as diverse as globalization, environmental degradation and climate change can affect commodity prices, cause fires or floods, drive up the cost of living, and undermine political stability and security. And even positive developments, like the growing use of renewable energy, can lead to instability as coal producing areas will need new economic lifeblood. For governments hoping to deal with these trends by incentivizing green investment, one simple accounting change – accelerated depreciation for green infrastructure – could make a considerable difference.

Companies attempting to adjust to these changes with large fixed assets often find themselves trying to balance a financially viable long-term solution with a steep up-front cost. At the same time, companies also have to deal with several long-term issues that further complicate their purchasing decisions. I recounted one such story in my book,Environmental Debt: the Hidden Costs of a Changing Global Economy. Several years ago, PepsiCo built a state-of-the-art facility for its Frito-Lay division in Arizona. The installation had near net-zero waste, water, and energy systems. It isn’t hard to see how these advanced systems not only helped PepsiCo, but also the surrounding community: approaching net-zero water use would seem pretty valuable, actually imperative,

Feelings, not facts: negotiating for a new business paradigm

First published in the Huffington Post, March 6th, 2014

When I first started working with corporations on transformative green technologies, I would discuss my excitement to other environmentalists, and they would retort: “But they’re only doing that because they’re greedy… not because it’s the right thing.” I would reply, “Who are we, the morality police? They’re taking a great leap forward.” Very few businesspeople and politicians are primarily motivated by a grand vision of a better world. Some certainly are, and we need more of them — but they are often fired or dismissed as the office nag, lunatic or nuisance. It takes a huge amount of courage to be a whistleblower or to suggest something out of the box. Keeping a company profitable is daunting enough. The lyrics from Frank Loesser’s Broadway show, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying says it all… the song is called “The Company Way.”

Finch: When they want brilliant thinking, from employees
Twimble: That is no concern of mine.
Finch: Suppose a man of genius,makes suggestions?
Twimble: Watch that genius get suggested to resign.
Finch: So you play it the company way?
Twimble: All company policy is by me OK.
Finch: You’ll never rise up to the top.
Twimble: But there’s one thing clear: Whoever the company fires,I will still be here.

Ain’t that the truth? But the company way ain’t gonna take us where we gotta go. Only emotional intelligence and peer pressure will help us breach the delta between today’s business as usual and a radical rethink of sourcing, operations, profits and products. While accountants and consultancies are planning the future of financial reporting, it is time for the rest of us to pave the road for true profits. That road is less

On steroids and quarterly reports: short-term fixes can screw up the system

First published in the Guardian, February 17th, 2014

Something – maybe a bat, although nobody was certain – recently bit my good friend Arnie. What happened next is an allegory for how short-term fixes can really screw up a system, whether it’s an ecosystem or an immune system or, while we’re at it, a financial system.

Erring on the side of caution, Arnie (not his real name) got the rabies vaccine, which consists of five shots. Shot number one went fine. But after shot number two, he immediately started feeling sick – his symptoms resembled the flu, but with some weird neurological symptoms – and he ended up in the emergency room.

A Benadryl drip seemed to relieve him somewhat, and he went home, still feeling pretty bad and non-functional, but not feeling like he would crumple into a ball on the floor. Then Arnie got the third shot, and got even sicker. I wanted to know why Arnie was so sick … scary sick. So I took to the internet and learned about adverse responses to rabies shots, how rare they are and, also, how serious they can be – kind of like a black swan event for business.

Twelve days after the initial shot, Arnie asked me to meet him at the emergency room because he thought he would pass out. He could barely move or keep his eyes open. At the hospital ER, the doctors seemed perplexed and checked for the “emergent” problems. Did he need to be intubated, coded, operated on? None of the above.

The doctors hydrated him and offered more Benadryl. Then they brought him steroids, which they explained would make him feel much better. I intervened directly – in fact, I stepped

Human error: how business can learn from past mistakes

First published in the Guardian on February 7th, 2014

There are at least two areas where I agree with most major religions. First, we must treat one another with compassion and kindness – the golden rule of do unto others as you would have them do unto you applies. Second, humans are inherently imperfect. We make terrible mistakes and we are capable of incredible negligence and cruelty in addition to our numerous finer qualities such as valor, graciousness and creativity.

Somehow, in our use of technology and chemicals, we presume that this second maxim of imperfection and moral failings doesn’t hold. That’s why we think it’s OK to have tens of thousands of nuclear weapons globally despite the launch codes being in the hands of the imperfect humans who have manufactured them. No surprise, then, that 92 US air force officers who hold these codes are in the middle of a scandal involving cheating and drug use. Errors could obviously be catastrophic – blackmail and impaired judgment do not mix well with nuclear capabilities.

We continue to deploy technology with the running assumption that humans won’t make mistakes or behave badly. That is genuinely stupid; history continues to show us so on every continent and in every culture. These kinds of disasters are not black swan events: they should be anticipated if we just presume that humans will err. As Mark Twain noted, “Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”

With this in mind, one of the most important guidelines for 21st century business, where technological prowess is unbelievable, is theprecautionary principle. First adopted by the United Nations in 1982 as part of the World Charter for Nature, the precautionary

The sharks and the bees: what nature’s patterns teach us about sourcing

First posted in the Guardian, January 22, 2014

“Although human subtlety makes a variety of inventions by different means to the same end, it will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple, or more direct than does nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.”

– Leonardo da Vinci

When sharks, honeybees and other animals forage for food, they move in a pattern of short movements in one area combined with a few longer treks to more distant areas. This pattern is called Lévy walks (or flights).

A National Academy of Sciences study released last month, “Evidence of Lévy walk foraging patterns in human hunter–gatherers”, also found that the Hadza, hunter-gatherers from northern Tanzania, perform Lévy walks when foraging for a wide variety of food items.

The authors suggest that this type of movement profile is a “fundamental feature of human landscape use, regardless of the physical or cultural environment, and may have played an important role in the evolution of human mobility”.

We can see the same kind of pattern closer to home: in Saturday Night Fever and HBO’s Girls, young people seek their mates in their local Brooklyn neighborhoods, with an occasional jaunt to Manhattan. And in Law & Order: Criminal Intent, brilliant detective Robert Goren often solves the crime by identifying the movement patterns of serial murderers.

Nature, our subconscious master, is very, very powerful. Nature’s intricate web is the genius embedded in every breath we take and every morsel we eat. It’s incumbent upon us to start looking more closely at its patterns and constraints.

Many scientists and investors are already doing this. Janine Benyus, who named the emerging discipline of biomimicry, describes “seeking sustainable solutions by emulating nature’s designs and processes (for instance, solar