A team of U.S. researchers has suggested that a system of tradable quotas for whales could significantly reduce the number of the animals killed each year. Writing in the journal Nature, researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara and Arizona State University propose that putting a price on whales will allow conservation groups to “purchase” some whales and prevent whalers from killing them. While they acknowledge that critics will argue that a species should be protected “irrespective of its economic value,” the authors say previous efforts to reduce whaling have failed because of this lack of accounting for economic value. Despite a global moratorium on whaling, the number of whales killed annually has more than doubled since the 1990s, with nearly 2,000 now harvested per year. The authors propose splitting the majority of the quotas between whaling and non-whaling nations, with the rest being auctioned off to benefit whale conservation. According to their calculations, the price per whale would be about $13,000 for a minke and $85,000 for an endangered fin whale.

Photo by Isaac Kohane/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

Indian banker Pavan Sukhdev has been grappling with the question of how to place a monetary value on nature. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, he discusses the ways natural ecosystems benefit people and why policymakers and businesses must rethink how they assess environmental costs and benefits.

How do you put a price tag on the value of nature? That’s the question Indian banker Pavan Sukhdev and his colleagues are seeking to answer in their international project on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), which culminated in a major report issued last month. The challenge, as Sukhdev sees it, is how to address the “economic invisibility of nature,” which allows the economic value of ecosystems to be ignored by governments and businesses.

In an interview with Yale Environment 360 editor Roger Cohn, Sukhdev, who heads a green consulting firm in based in India, cited crucial benefits from nature that are often overlooked, including the capacity of wetlands for filtering water, the role of forests in preventing erosion and flooding, and the importance of bees in pollinating crops. “When did the bees last send you an invoice for pollination?” he asks.

Sukhdev contends that the current tough economic times globally might be the right moment to promote awareness of the real value of natural systems. “If we think differently,” he says, “if we value natural capital, if we see its productive potential and its employment potential, we might have solutions in our hands.”

Yale Environment 360: You’ve been focused on the importance of putting a monetary value on nature and on ecosystem services. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Pavan Sukhdev: Well, partly it’s the challenge of addressing what I call the economic invisibility of nature, because nature provides a hell of a lot to us — whether it’s clean air, fresh water, or nutrients and water cycling for agriculture, or whether it’s disease prevention or recreation. There’s a lot coming to us free. These are goods and services which are not market goods and services. They’re in the nature of public goods. But the problem is that we are not in a situation of plenty anymore. We have been eating into this capital, so to speak, that’s providing us free, but valuable, services. We use nature because it’s valuable, but we lose it because it’s free.

As a society, we just got so entranced by this idea that value means market value. And we can’t seem to get over the fact that there’s a lot that’s valuable which doesn’t have a price. Now how do you get this inside people’s heads? I think that’s the challenge for my [TEEB] project... I hate the term “putting a price on nature,” because there’s more than that. It’s more about valuing nature.

e360: But you have, in some of the studies you’ve done, tried to put a monetary value on it. Can you give an example of an ecosystem service that should have a value placed on it, and how you would go about monetizing it? Give a couple of examples.

Sukhdev:Well, a slightly tongue-and-cheek one, if I may. It has to do with sanitation. Toilets. And this is about basically a sewage system for the city of Kampala, Uganda. Now as it happens, their sewage system in Kampala was a swamp — basically a large swamp of about 40 square kilometers — which the local administration at one point decided to convert into additional land by damming up the swamp and converting it to agricultural land. Until an economist pointed out that the value of this horrible mosquito-infested swamp, as a way of eating up the human sewage from the city of Kampala, was something like $2 million. The economist also pointed out that to build an alternative physical [sewage-treatment] plant would cost a huge amount of money and would cost another one-and-a-half-million dollars to run. And all this was being provided free by this swamp — the swamp was doing it for free.

When did the bees last send you an invoice for pollination? That’s a more global example where a group of researchers calculated the global value of pollination for food-bearing trees and various forms of agriculture to be of the order of $190 billion per annum. Billion. We are not talking about small numbers.

e360: And that has been an issue, of course, the collapse of bee populations.

Sukhdev: Correct. In fact, a few years back, I think the estimate was a loss of something like $15 billion of value here in the U.S., thanks to [bee-population collapse]. So these are, again, free services, but you really feel the cost of them if you lose them. We should put in these values and make people understand that when they’re making trade-off choices. If you’re thinking of it as a weighing scale, it’s not as if the pan on one side is empty. Nature has value — it’s just that it’s not market-price value.

e360: How do you realistically get governments and businesses to think this way and to start acting this way? It’s one thing to sit here and theoretically talk about it. How do you do that?

Sukhdev:Well, we found in the TEEB project that there’s actually a strong correlation between the persistence of poverty and the dying out of nature. Typically we find that the people who suffer the most when you lose forest, or you lose wetlands, are actually the poor. I mean, the forest is not theirs, but the poor farmer is the one who suffers from the flood or the drought. If the forest is not there, then it’s his goats and cattle who can’t go in and forage for leaf litter. If the forest isn’t there, it’s his wife that has to walk an extra ten miles to get fuel wood for the cooking. So it’s usually the poor farmer and the poor pastoralist who are the sufferers of loss of nature.

By various estimates, there’s something like a billion to 1.2 billion people around the world who are still dependent on natural ecosystems for their survival. And we did economic projections for Brazil, India, and Indonesia and found that the costs of these ecosystem services are not huge if you compare them with the GDP of developed countries. But if you look at the poorest people, this is, like, 50 to 90 percent of their total livelihood income — all the stuff that comes to them free from nature. That’s its real value. So once governments get that logic, then attitudes do change.

e360: What countries are those that have been receptive to what you’ve been saying in the TEEB reports?

Sukhdev: Well, the ones who have actually sort of embraced the TEEB project, who actually started local implementations, are Brazil, India, and the rich ones you sort of expect — Norway, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries. And we are finding a very interesting set of developing countries like Georgia, where the president has just written us and the UN a letter saying, “Can you please assist with a Georgia TEEB study?”... I mean, there are about 20-odd countries where there is an interest in taking this forward and basically working out nature values. And there are some developed countries where work is really pretty advanced, like the UK, for instance. They’ve done a complete ecosystem assessment.

e360: What about business? Has business been as receptive as government?

Sukhdev: With business, it’s a lot more difficult, because business is driven by profits. It has to be by law. It’s about shareholder value. So you have to prove it on one of three counts. Either that they’re missing out on risks which they’ve not recognized — for instance, if BP had thought about the ecological value at-risk concept [before the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill], then they might have come to the view that these pressure-sealing, sound-sealing caps — which close immediately whenever there’s a shock or a sound and are worth half a million dollars a piece — are actually a good investment. They’re an insurance policy against a huge ecological value at risk.

So sometimes companies can get it right because they understand risk. Sometimes they get it right because they see an opportunity, as in there is a carbon market, or an eco-certification market, or an eco-labeling market, or there’s a premium being paid on such and such. And sometimes it’s that you will have to disclose these impacts eventually anyway [in public and shareholder documents].

e360: Can you give some of the examples besides BP and oil where a type of company or a specific company would have to factor in and disclose something like that?

Sukhdev: Sure. Let’s take a construction company, for instance, which is using logs or wood. Now if it’s sourcing them sustainably, that’s fine. It’s probably worthwhile for them to disclose how little impact that has on ecosystems. But if it’s sourcing its logs and wood unsustainably, you need to disclose the total of forest impact.

For example, we did a study of the entire construction sector in China between the years 1950 and 1990 using data from China — correlating the drawing of wood from China’s forests, and working out what was the impact on the Chinese people in terms of loss of nutrient value, disruption due to floods and droughts, loss of waterway value, and things like that, which are basically as a result of deforestation. To give you an example, in 1997, there was a severe drought. The Yellow River went dry for nine months. No water. Villages lost their entire livelihoods. 1998, a year later, the Yangtzee floods, and 5,500 people die after a lot of destruction. During the period from 1950 to 1998, there was a huge amount of cost.

So we calculated what the costs would have been if you were a construction company in China — how much would the cost be? — and then we converted that into what would have been the real price of wood in China had you accounted for these costs? And lo and behold, the answer was 250 percent higher.

e360: Wow.

Sukhdev: Another example is fresh water. Take the impact of the cotton industry in central Asia on fresh water and on the drying up of the Aral Sea, and the economics of that. There are many examples where at a company level, or at a sector level, you can calculate the impacts.

e360: A cynic might say that you actually in a sense devalue nature by putting a price on it because there’s no way of calculating the intrinsic value in nature. How do you respond to that?

Sukhdev: I respect that cynic, because that is a valid point and a genuine concern that’s been bothering us literally from the beginning. The people who worked on the TEEB project all agree that the economic invisibility of nature is a problem. But we also all agree that there’s a huge risk in blind monetization. And that’s not what we’re about. So when we talk about valuation, we see it as a human institution. And we know that there are societies, and there should be societies, that just value pristine nature because it’s a connection. It’s a spiritual connection.

In my country in India, there are sacred groves. Thousands, literally thousands of sacred groves where villages will just simply not touch that piece of forest. They will not allow it to be touched because, you know, it’s their spirits and their ancestors and their deities that live there, and they’re concerned. Now, what’s the value of that sacred grove? Well, it’s infinity, because you have to kill them before they let you cut it. So society has valued it, in a sense, at a spiritual level. That’s valuation as well, right?

Then sometimes societies value it from the point of view of heritage, patrimony. A century or so ago when, you know, national parks were declared in the UK, in Yorkshire or in the Lake District, or here [in the U.S.] in Yosemite and places like that. There was a sense of patrimony, that this is extraordinary and we need to leave this as a bequest to our future generations. Well, do you think they’re putting calculators with economic numbers? Forget it. They just said, this is patrimony.

e360: You, in the TEEB report, did try to put a monetary value on the damage done to the natural world in a single year by human activity, and I think you put the damages somewhere between $2 trillion and $4.5 trillion. How did you arrive at a figure like that, and what accounted for some of the most costly and significant damage?

Sukhdev: What we did was to calculate all of the ecosystem service values and make estimates. For instance, how much is there in terms of eco-tourism? How much is there in terms of providing medicinal cures out of discovery of new remedies? How much is there in terms of bee-based pollination, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Literally a long, long list of values. And the biggest one was the carbon values — if you have a forest, and it’s being lost at a particular rate per annum, that is creating further emissions, or if you have a standing forest, it would provide carbon capture. If it’s being lost, it’s creating emissions, and those emissions have an economic cost.

e360: Your latest [TEEB] report came out last month, and you’ve been focused on this issue now and talking about it publicly at a time when the world economy has been tanking.

Sukhdev: That’s right.

e360: Are people receptive to this message or this way of thinking now, or is this something that may have to wait for flusher times for people to really respond to it?

Sukhdev: The knee-jerk reaction is, “Oh God. This is not the time to talk about it. Let’s get jobs back.” I have a contrarian view. My point is that, look, when things are good, people don’t think of change. People only respond to the need to change when things are bad, and they’re struggling, and they want different solutions. Adversity opens the mind. And we have adversity. And therefore, minds must be opened...

Let’s work on a global green new deal because this is the time to communicate that there is a problem with the economic model. If we think differently, if we value natural capital, if we see its productive potential and we see its employment potential, we might have solutions in our hands.

Photo by Kevin Dooley/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

by Mariana Ashley

Since the start of the environmental revolution in the 1960s, institutions of higher education have been at the forefront of being advocates and innovators for their efforts in green living, business, and policy. In the last decade or so, online sustainability degrees have become a popular academic aspirations for the new generation of movers and shakers, but are they worth it?

What is an Online Sustainability Degree?

Vigorous curriculum focused on multi-disciplinary learning introduces students to the growing discourse surrounding environmental science and activism throughout various disciplines of learning. Sustainability programs offer courses within several academic departments, including science, business, and education. By taking a holistic approach, sustainability degrees are able to better prepare students for the widespread challenges environmental initiatives face within every aspect of the developing world.

With the knowledge gained from these programs, students begin to understand that the world is a series of dynamic, interrelated, and interdependent processes both physical and social. With this knowledge and thinking, young students can begin to identify and articulate the challenges as well as promises of moving forward toward a more environmentally aware world.

The Benefits of Online Sustainability Degrees

Sustainability degree programs lend themselves well to the world of online education for many reasons:

- Online institutions have the ability to connect an array of students from various backgrounds and locations throughout the world. This diversity can particularly benefit students within a sustainability program because they can collaboratively learn about environmental issues pertaining to the many places represented in the class. In order for any truly significant change to occur a sustainable lifestyle must be agreed upon across the world.
- In general, online degree programs pose less of a financial encumbrance than traditional degree programs do. In this way, online learning can be a great option for individuals interested in a gaining an accelerated degree without suffering a significant cost.
- At a very basic level, online degrees in general are a more environmentally conscious endeavor than traditional universities can be. While many brick and mortar higher learning institutions are dedicated to sustainable living, there is no doubt that college campuses and classrooms can be wasteful. Attaining a degree completely through the web means that less paper is wasted, less energy is used to cool and light a classroom, fewer books are printed out and then returned, and fewer cars are driven to campus.
- Also, because the body of knowledge on sustainability and environmental practices is constantly changing and evolving, the speed of an online degree is essential. A student who enters a sustainability program at a traditional college and spends 4 to 5 years achieving their degree may enter the working world with the information they attained already outdated or obsolete. Online programs are commonly completed more quickly and, therefore, the information attained is more current to today’s environmental issues.

Do These Degrees Mean Anything in the Green Job Market?

With the U.S. economy under constant debate, college students are entering the job market with feeble confidence that they may find the job they have spent the last four years (and a significant amount of money) preparing for.

That being said, the green economy could quickly become the nation’s fastest growing job segment. Job hopefuls with degrees in sustainability, environmental policy, environmental science, etc – be it from a traditional or online institution – will be better suited for positions within this booming job sector.

Employers in areas various areas of environmental interest are seeking intelligent, educated, and passionate job hopefuls. Three of the fastest growing jobs in the nation are also three of the fastest growing jobs in the green market. Environmental Engineers, Geoscientists, and Landscape Architects are in high demand among various employers throughout the world.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Environmental Engineering is expected to see a 31 percent employment increase in the next decade, the employment of Geoscientists is expected to increase by 18 percent from 2008 to 2018, and the employment of Landscape Architects is expected to increase by 22 percent in the next decade. These increase in employment are due to the continuing awareness of environmental needs in business.

Each of these positions can be obtained with the education and knowledge gained in sustainability degree programs such as environmental management, environmental science, geosciences, and agricultural science. For example, an individual majoring in environmental management can obtain a career as a Range Manager. A Range Manager is responsible for protecting the natural resources vital to rangelands, such as wildlife, plants, and energy resources. This position aids farmers and ranchers with using their land in the most productive and environmentally sound way. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2008 the median annual salary of conservations scientists, including range managers, was $58,720.

Online Programs

There are numerous online and traditional universities throughout the nation offering environmental degrees at all levels. Some examples include:

- Ashford University offers an online Bachelor’s of arts degree in Organizational Management with an Environmental Science concentration and a BA in General Environmental Studies.
- Oregon State University offers online Bachelor’s degrees in Fisheries and Wildlife, Natural Resources, General Horticulture, Environmental Studies, and an online Master’s in Natural Resources.
- Kaplan University offers an online B.S. in Environmental Policy and Management and an M.S. in Environmental Policy.
- Arizona State University offers an online Bachelor’s degree in Sustainable Leadership. All of these degree programs offer the education needed to get a leg up in the green job market.

As green initiatives become an even more essential aspect of government, business, education, and more, online sustainability degrees will be increasingly more valuable. With businesses looking to establish more sustainable practices, a certificate of education in Sustainable Studies could prove a viable employment asset in nearly any field.

Furthermore, because sustainability degrees are intrinsically involved in many different disciplines, students can translate their skills to many different sectors of business and they are not limited to employment directly within the green job market. Many employers in different areas of businesses may be drawn to a candidate with knowledge in environmental degree because they know how important sustainability and corporate responsibility is for the future.

Reprinted with permission from Green Living Ideas

by Jennifer Shockley

The events that make the biggest impact on the attendees do not have to leave an impact on the earth. Executive Director, Jan Hamilton with the CARTM Recycling Center in Manzanita, Oregon, developed an event which produces almost entirely no waste.

They started it in 1998 and on Friday, May 20, 2011 it will be their 13th annual Trash Bash. This is a community party with dancing, art and a fashion “Trashion” show all dedicated to recycling, re-using, and the non-wasting of materials.

The festival takes place on a nine-acre plot from 5pm – 9pm and hosts the mighty goal of 100 percent zero waste from the approximate 1000 visitors. So far they have not reached their zero waste goal, but they are very close. In 2009, one smuggled in trash bag was the one item of waste and in 2010 three snack chip bags were the left-behind culprits. But no other event nationwide can lay claim to even a close second in the name of zero waste. CARTM wrote,

“According to a 2006 California study, a typical event generates four pounds of garbage per person – so, for a 1,000-person event to produce less than one ounce of landfill is a remarkable achievement. Even zero-waste events themselves typically produce about one ounce of trash per person, which means that, for the past two years, Trash Bash has been roughly 62.4 pounds ahead of the national average.”

CARTM is a private, non-profit organization that collects community trash, separates, re-uses, reduces, and recycles all the materials that are possible into new products or new-to-you items. The proceeds from their re-use sales fund the recycling center. They are dedicated year-round to making the small community of Manzanita devoted to recycling. Events like Trash Bash help to renew the spirit and continue the encouragement. Hamilton stated,

“When people are here, they’re thinking about zero waste, and when they go home, they’re thinking about zero waste… It inspires them to think about repurposing, to look at everything in a different way.”

Zero waste events have been given the nickname of ZeeWees. The ZeeWee Trash Bash has no trash containers, only recycling bins and staff stationed at each bin to direct where waste should be placed, i.e. food vs. its containers, etc.

This year’s festival will cost $5.00 for adult admission and is free to children twelve years and younger.

Art categories that can be found and entered for Trash Bash 2011 are welding, wearable art to be showcased in the Trashion Show, and mosaics. Two new categories this year are pop art and collage art. All of these, again, are only with the re-use of existing materials/products into new designed goods.

Trashion Shows are becoming more trendy but zero waste events are still almost unheard of. Hamilton and the CARTM Recycling Center are setting the bar high and leading by the ultimate example; going green can be a party!

Reprinted with permission from Green Building Elements

Second in Jana Branch's 'Clean Speak' series. Find the first entry here (http://bit.ly/eZNDFY).

If you’re a regular in the world of sustainability, it’s easy to forget that most businesses and consumers aren’t. Marketers or managers who personally embrace organics, clean tech and electric cars may itch to promote a sustainability claim for their own brand - at their peril.

What if there’s really not much to talk about? Worse, what if your company touts a shallow claim to “green” that invites consumers to examine how un-green the rest of the business is? You may get away with it, help your company make its numbers, and keep your job. Or the issue might blow up in your face.

Before you jump into the wash, consider this:

1. Do you need to be clean? Personal beliefs aside, does your brand or product really need to differentiate itself on the basis of social and/or eco responsibility? Don’t be convinced by juicy statistics that cite hordes of consumers lunging for brands that are clean over those that aren’t. Consumer choice is also pushed by price, convenience, and quality. And depending on how a study defines that consumer -- “green,” “conscious,” “sustainable” -- and whether it surveys intentions or actual behavior, that “horde” in the context of your business may be just a small tribe.

2. Is clean what your customers want? If every consumer wanted clean products and voted with their dollars, our marketplace would look very different today. There are plenty of mainstream consumers who think that global warming is bunk and that social responsibility is not a company’s responsibility. If that’s your customer base, get real about it.

3. Is your reputation worth the risk? Clean Speak is as much about building trust as delivering information. Don’t risk your reputation for a messaging point unless the reward is worth it. And if the reward is really that significant, consider the message a wakeup call to your company that it should be embedding sustainability at a credible level.

4. Bigger isn’t always better. Customers swayed by clean claims aren’t expecting you to save the world. They’re looking for evidence that your company gives a damn, in a way that’s relevant to them. Miss that mark by overhyping, and you will have done more damage than good.

5. Could a clean claim sting? Research suggests that, in some product categories, consumers link ethical superiority with inferior performance. Sustainable = Gentle isn’t so great if you’re selling tires or laundry soap. Review your marketing plan in 360 degrees to make sure “clean” sends the right message.

6. Beginners welcome. Sustainability is a process, and it’s OK to give customers a peek. If your clean claim isn’t real yet, last-century marketing says, “Make the claim. By the time anyone checks it out, you’ll have it nailed.” But Clean Speak says, “Talk about your process, your aims, and a realistic time frame for getting there.” If this kind of transparency worries you, go back to No. 1 and No. 2.

7. If you can’t say something green or clean, say nothing at all. Cleanmuting and greenmuting are the practice of simply saying nothing. While they’re more benign than outright wash, consumers are already beginning to see them as lies of omission (especially in sustainability reporting). While muting is far from ideal, it’s still better to button it up until you can back it up.

Simply put, if sustainability isn’t part of your business practice, it has no place in your marketing tactics.

But in the real world, even well-intentioned companies sometimes weigh the risk/reward of shaky claims and take the route of risk. Then what do you do?

Being directed to deliver a dose of cleanwash or cleanmute is painful for any marketer of conscience, especially because quitting your job is a luxury in this (or any) economy. If you find yourself forced down that murky path, be sure your higher-ups know what they’re really asking for: a bomb wired to your brand’s reputation.

Photo by Mathieu Gasnier/flickr/Creative Commons

Jana Branch is a brand and marketing communications consultant who has advised Fortune 500 companies. Her independent practice, Articulo Consulting, is based in Santa Monica, Calif.

"Mass chaos."

This is how Scot Case, executive director of the EcoLogo certification program, describes the current state of eco-labeling. If this sounds like entirely bad news, it's not. It's a sign that after twenty sluggish years, the market is finally waking up.

Eco-labeling in North America dates back to around 1990, a time when people were very excited about green consumerism as the Next Big Thing. The logic for eco-certification was compelling. If the anticipated throngs of eco-conscious buyers could be helped along in their purchase decisions by clear, straightforward guidance about what products were environmentally preferable, this would eliminate marketplace uncertainty and send green consumerism into the stratosphere, to the benefit of eco-vendors and the planet.

Unfortunately, the eco-labeling rocket never achieved lift-off.

In large part, this was because green consumers turned out to have more bark than bite. "We went through a period when there was appalling consumer interest," recalls  Case. Another factor was that in the giddily free-market United States, the federal government took a hands-off approach and left it to small, modestly-funded entities to drive eco-labeling. Inevitably this led to factionalization and fragmentation—and sharply curtailed market inroads.

By the late 1990s, consumer eco-certification was on life support. Market leaders EcoLogo and Green Seal turned for survival to institutional markets such as higher education and government. Because the buyers were professional and often had a mandate to buy green, this was a more orderly and attentive market. It proved robust enough to sustain the eco-labeling organizations through their dark times.

Green Seal and EcoLogo never lost interest in their original market. Indeed, both viewed their institutional customers as potentially a back door into the consumer sector. "We believed that if we could develop eco-labels for enough institutional markets, that would prove there was demand for what we were doing, and the products would trickle across to retail," explains Mark Petruzzi, Green Seal's vice-president for certification.

Their faith was borne out. "To take one example, there are now about 600 certified institutional cleaning products," says Petruzzi. "This creates enormous market pull that is carrying over to the consumer side."

Increased retailer interest is another reason for eco-labeling's new traction. In 2006, Wal-Mart pledged to source all wild-caught fresh and frozen fish for the U.S. and U.K. market from fisheries that meet the Marine Stewardship Council’s (MSC) independent environmental standard. In 2007, Home Depot introduced its Eco Options program, which affixes a green label to selected products. "Home Depot's program has some flaws, but it's drawn attention to green products and that's a good thing," says Petruzzi.

A third factor has been the rise of organic foods, which have been growing at 20% per year and are increasingly finding a place on supermarket shelves, where about half of organic products are now sold. In 2002, the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved a standard for organic food. The "certified organic" label has become a familiar sight on supermarket shelves—and the awareness of one eco-label gets people looking for others.

These trends, along with the more general rise of interest in all things sustainable, have produced a supply-side boom in eco-labeling. "There are 398 and counting eco-certification programs in the U.S.," says EcoLogo's Case.

Making it even more confusing, eco-labeling programs come in a bewildering array of shapes and sizes. There are labels certifying single attributes in single products, labels covering multiple attributes and products, and product "scorecards" that grade multiple product attributes in a single mind-bending matrix. In addition to the green labels developed by known and respected organizations like Green Seal and EcoLogo, there are certifications from newcomers, fly-by-night organizations, and manufacturers who have developed their own labeling standards. Step right up and get your chaos!

What has given birth to this free-for-all? Eco-labeling continues to be an unregulated industry. Because there are no sheriffs in town, anyone can claim pretty much anything with impunity.

It's also problematic when companies certify their own products as green without external verification. Paint manufacturer Sherwin-Williams does this with its GreenSure program. While there's no particular reason to distrust Sherwin-Williams, it's also the case that some corporations have earned a less than stellar reputation for disclosure about their products and processes over the years.

The market isn't completely chaotic. In addition to the Green Seal, EcoLogo and USDA organic labels, certification programs for fish (the Marine Stewardship Council), forest products (the Forestry Stewardship Council), and fair trade (TransFair USA and the Fair Trade Federation) are among the most respected, and enjoy good name recognition. With so few trusted names in a field with 398 eco-labels and counting, there a lot of unknown entities to confuse consumers.

In addition to the Wild West character of the current market, eco-labeling proponents have another big problem. Only a tiny percentage of products actually undergo certification. At Home Depot, for instance, about 6,000 products are expected to carry the company's Eco Options label by 2009. While that's an impressive number from one perspective, it's only about 3% of their total product line. "Paucity of coverage is the Achilles heel of eco-labeling," says Case.

How consumers respond to this marketplace madness depends on how knowledgeable they are about sustainability. "What we call 'core" sustainability consumers understand the intricacies of labeling and appreciate the diversity," says Laurie Demeritt, president and chief operating officer of The Hartman Group, a consumer research organization. "However, for the vast majority of consumers, it can feel quite overwhelming."

For the eco-certification market to flourish, order will need to emerge from the chaos, and credible green labels will need to become a much more visible fixture on the retailing landscape. EcoLogo's Case envisions three ways this could happen. First, the leading certifying organizations would collaborate more. Second, more retailers step up. "Since retailers are vouching for the eco-claims of the products they carry, it's in their interest to exercise oversight," he says.

Finally, the federal government could seize the current opportunity and extend involvement beyond its USDA program. "An enormous amount of money is going to be pushed through Congress to stimulate the economy, and a lot of these funds are pegged for green-collar jobs. If we're going to do this effectively, we'll need to define what green is—and that's what eco-labeling does," according to Case.

Not only products have life cycles; markets have them, too. Eco-labeling is now in its awkward phase of rapid growth, thrashing about with the frenetic energy of an adolescent drunk on hormones. Like every teenager, it will need strong supervision to reach market maturity.

If you're Internet-savvy, there's a good chance you know about flash mobs. One part performance art and one part happening, they're a hip and quirky concept. A large group of people assembles at a pre-established place, does something unusual like freezing in place, and then disperses. They're a relatively new concept—the first flash mob dates back to 2003—and they're driven by Internet communications, including social networks, which is how word gets out about them.

Flash mobs are conspicuously—and indeed, self-consciously—apolitical. In fact, that's where they get their charm. People join a flash mob because it's a fun and offbeat thing to do, not because it will help them achieve something practical, like buy a coat or get a job.

Beneath this artsy concept, there's serious social-change potential. What if flash mobs were organized around a public purpose? Instead of, say, entering a Hyatt hotel to synchronized applause (the theme of an early flash mob), what if people were asked to show up at a retail store at a given hour and buy lots of stuff, as a way to reward the company for going green?

This was the insight that set budding twenty-something entrepreneur Brent Schulkin on a path that has led to the formation of an innovative start-up called Virgance.

Earlier this year, Schulkin organized a socially conscious flash mob that he called a CarrotMob because it uses a carrot, not a stick, to drive positive change. He went to over twenty convenience stores in the Bay area, offered to deliver them lots of customers, and asked what percentage of the revenue they would be willing to dedicate to an energy retrofit. The winning bid came in at 22%, and on a March Saturday, the company got its reward as hundreds of CarrotMobsters lined up to buy stuff at their store. By the time the mob had dispersed, the store's tills had swollen by close to $10,000, generating around $2,000 for the retrofit.

It was a win all around: the CarrotMob participants had a great time, the store had a Really Big Day and got a "free" money-saving retrofit, and the environment got a modest but measurable reduction in pollution.

Schulkin's idea had succeeded beyond his expectations—and, more importantly still, it was scalable. If you could do it in the Bay area, you could do it anywhere. Why not Memphis or Munich or Manila? The next thing Schulkin knew, he had teamed up with entrepreneur Steve Newcomb, and Virgance, a new concept in socially responsible business—and activist campaigning—had been born.

In the less than a year since that first CarrotMob event, Schulkin and Newcomb have raised venture capital and a highly innovative Web 2.0 company is blooming.

"We want to facilitate thousands of CarrotMob events," says Schulkin. "We've decided that we don't need to plan the events ourselves. They're something anyone can organize. Our focus has been on creating a system that empowers people to create their own events."

It's a scalable concept in two senses—in the number of events that can be held, and in the size of the companies to be targeted. Schulkin's Bay Area CarrotMob proved the concept for a small retail business. What about a Procter & Gamble, though, or a Wal-Mart?

Schulkin is persuaded the concept can work at this level, too. "Companies will participate in the CarrotMob process for one of two reasons—to generate revenue or improve their reputation. We believe big companies will get involved because they want to build their reputation. They may even transfer dollars from their advertising budget."

Virgance is developing other initiatives as well. One project, Lend Me Some Sugar, is "a way to crowdsource corporate philanthropy," according to Virgance's website. The notion is to let the Virgance community determine where the company's donations go.

Another project, 1 Block Off the Grid (1BOG), is, so sayeth the website, a "community-based program that organizes residents locally and negotiates group discounts with solar installers, using a comprehensive vendor selection process." A pilot project in the Bay area to group-buy solar power enlisted 450 participants, well over the minimum goal of 50 buyers. Fueled by this success, 1BOG is being expanded to 20 cities, five of which—San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Portland, and Berkeley—are already running full-on campaigns. Earlier this month in Brooklyn, a CarrotMob took over Tanzania Hardware, which set aside a portion of the profits to becoming more energy efficient.

Long-term, Newcomb and Schulkin envision Virgance as a platform for activist campaigns that confront, says Newcomb, the "core issues of our time, like health, education, poverty, and the environment ... Virgance will be a publishing house in the same way game publishers publish games, only we'll be 'publishing' campaigns. We want to build a portfolio of successful campaigns that can be used to seed new ideas and projects."

In addition to its lofty social goals, the company also has to succeed financially. Investors have this thing about wanting a return on their investment.

Virgance's business model, which includes advertising and commissions from successful bidders, varies from initiative to initiative. In one way, though, it's consistent across the board. "We will never take a piece of the revenue our programs generate," says Schulkin. Translation: in a case like the first CarrotMob initiative in San Francisco, Virgance would not take a percentage of the money it generated.

The entrepreneurs have dubbed their approach Activism 2.0. That's aiming big—but it's not an inappropriate monicker. It's an exciting idea: hitch social networks to social activism and reap the benefits of Internet-driven People Power.

Let's hear some applause! And it doesn't have to be synchronized.

Image of CarrotMob courtesy of Flickr's Matti KK