Take investors, for example. For a long time, investors either didn’t care about social and environmental performance or actively discounted companies that took action. In fact, research has shown that for years investors penalized a company for being environmentally and socially active. But that’s no longer true. For example, finance firm Lazard studied 16,000 equities over a period of four years and discovered that investors drove down the P/E ratio of firms with higher GHG emissions.

When it comes to employees, even more has changed. First, big companies’ employees are increasingly concentrated in metropolitan areas and, second, they’re increasingly looking to recruit from the Gen Z and Millennial generations. Since both residents of metropolitan areas and younger people are more likely to be concerned about social environmental issues, that means companies who want to recruit them have to be also.

Customer expectations and preferences haven’t stood still either. NYU’s Stern School of Business studied tens of thousands of products over a six-year period and found that those marketed with sustainability claims grew faster than those without. McKinsey and Nielsen IQ conducted a different study covering 600,000 products representing over $400 billion in annual sales—and found the same thing. And my own company, Valutus, has collected over half a million data points on four continents showing the causal connection between environmental and social attributes and customer preference.

I was only five, but I remember the hunt for the bodies of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman after the Freedom Summer murders in Mississippi in 1964. I recall watching the search on TV, my parents’ anguish, how sickened they appeared. A local Black man and two Jewish men from New York City had gone missing, abducted it appeared, and believed dead.

The two Jewish boys, we learned later, were shot at close range and buried under an earthen dam. The young Black man, James Chaney, appears to have been buried beside them while still alive. It was the first time I knew anything about racism or its effects.

I didn’t know it then, but the lynch mob that killed them was composed of “members of the local White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Neshoba County Sheriff’s Office and the Philadelphia (Mississippi) Police Department…”[1] 

That was 56 years ago. And here we are again.

The three young men were working to register Black people to vote as part of the civil rights movement. They were doing extraordinary things and were killed for it. But the lives of those whose names we’ve heard intoned like a litany, a dirge these past few weeks, were Black lives casually taken as they jogged, played, slept in their beds, snacked, barbequed in their own backyards, sat in their living rooms and their cars, or did any of the other quotidian things all people do.

James Chaney’s name, and the names of hundreds of others, belong among them.

Last week, as we all know, soldiers and police were once again out in force – and using force – in the streets of a dozen major American cities. This time, as we all know, the dam burst under the shock of watching a police officer slowly, painfully, and seemingly indifferently, snuff out yet another Black life. Crack!

There were no pointed hoods, no abduction in the dead of night, no attempt to hide the evidence. This one happened in plain sight, in daylight and in front of witnesses, by officers in full uniform.

For 8 minutes and 46 horrifying seconds onlookers tried to intervene in the death of George Floyd while three other policemen looked on.

Despite a constitution touting equality, far too much of the U.S. – and global – economy has been built upon a substrate of injustice, wealth inequity, and racism, all of which have been on full display since George Floyd took his last, tortured breath.

In fact, members of the U.S. armed forces had to be told, last week, that it is inappropriate to display the battle flag of a group whose goal was to continue and perpetuate a slave-based society.

Crack! A torrent of boiling, raging, furious magma was released onto the streets in the form of grief, rage, peaceful protest, sometimes even violence, as bottled-up emotions exploded into full view. The country saw, in raw, unequivocal terms, that to those policemen the Black life of George Floyd did not matter. But it did matter. It does matter.

This is not the piece anyone wants to be reading or writing. We want to read about how we’re solving the pandemic, and how we’re making progress on climate change, and about a new innovation that may be the answer to our power needs, or anything other than the news that this week yet more unarmed Black men have been shot by police or were found hanging under mysterious circumstances.

We have a global virus and a global climate emergency and without unprecedented action at unprecedented speed, they will overwhelm us. But we can’t do so right now, when there are armies in riot gear breaking up legal protests rather than an army working to save the coastlines, working to move the hundreds of millions who, as we report in R.O.I. this week, will have to relocate as the seas inundate their communities.

The one ray of light is that very thing: the speed and scale with which we now know the world can act together to tackle major disruptions.

There is one other thing that is different this time. This time there are marches around the world. White people. Brown People, in dozens of countries, all marching, all demanding justice, all committed.

My daughter is the same age I was when Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman were killed. She has seen me watching, and she has seen the anguish on my face. She is the child of two races, half Asian, half Caucasian. It is impossible for me not to wonder if she will be writing something like this in 2076, when she is the age I am now.

We cannot go on like this. Black lives matter and our society can’t be truly healthy until everyone in it understands that. Until no one needs to be told the Confederate battle flag has no place outside a museum. That flag, of course, hung over a short-lived confederacy founded “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man,” according to that entity’s Vice President.[2]

We can fix this, and we must. The climate is not holding still while we confront our demons. There are matters at hand that require the attention, and the best efforts of all of us. This could still be our finest hour. It could be.

I won’t be around to see what my little girl, Kailin, has written some half-century hence. I can only trust it will be the story of how we saved the planet and warded off pandemics and of how she saw the Confederate battle flag somewhere, a relic, as she wandered in a museum, and wondered what it represented.

References
[1] Wikipedia, Murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner
[2] The ‘Cornerstone Speech’, from an address given in in Savannah, Georgia, by Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens on March 21, 1861

As a teenager, circa 1975 or so, I visited friends on Cape Cod just as moon and bay hosted the longest neap tide of the year. Launch your dinghy on the Brewster Flats, row frantically ‘til the receding tide overtakes you, and walk the tidepools on the endless sandbar another half mile to the clamming grounds. The basin’s sands are pristine and glistening.

Crabs and other scuttling creatures nip and run, the scent is the ineffable pungence of exposed and fermented sea bottom. Dig, dig, dig for an hour or two, then race back to the boat with your swag before the fast-returning tide overwhelms you. Haul up at last on warm sand decorated with shells and seaweed. What a great day!

The Vietnam War ended that year and, as time has passed in its steady fashion, I’ve circled away from those shores, having made a new life as an Expat American in Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon.

This weekend my own little family visited the local equivalent of Cape Cod, a town called Phước Hải near the peninsular shorefront city of Vũng Tàu.

On arriving, I eagerly took my 4-year-old hunting for shells among the fishing craft lining the beach. At the seawall steps, however, for the first time, I came face-to-face with a reality I’d only read about before.

Pictures and accounts had not adequately prepared me for what I saw.  Some hundred yards away the East Sea roiled uneasily at low tide. In between, another ocean—a tattered sea of plastic trash—lay washed up, blown, buried and fluttering in the sand at our feet.

Boats of unusual design—round tubs housing acres of nylon-mesh netting—were hauled up on the beach. They’re oddly picturesque, but all made of battered, blue plastic.

Originally, such boats were of plaited bamboo with bamboo oars and poles. Now the oars, the nets — once plant fiber — the fish boxes once of wood, and the lunch bags are all plastic too. It’s monsoon season and plastic’s the ideal material to keep things dry in an open dinghy.

Kailin, unperturbed by the shambles, kicked off her flip-flops and set out after shells. There are some truly unusual corkscrews here which I have not seen elsewhere, a sea snail my wife tells me.

It was a smorgasbord to Kailin, who was just as happy to pick up a brightly colored bottle cap as a mussel shell, but I was heartsick.

I have skinny dipped the post-hurricane rollers on a moonlit night off Montauk. Body surfed Santa Barbara’s swells. Braved frigid sands off Mount Desert Island. Spent a romantic week in a Bedouin hut on the dunes of Dahab along the Red Sea coast.

I’ve popped seaweed pods in the rocky estuaries of Vancouver Island, walked beneath the curls of Lake Michigan’s frozen waves, and trolled beaches up and down America’s east coast.

After dipping my toes in three oceans, pulping my shoulder in the surf at Jones’ Beach, and snorkeling off La Romana in the Dominican, I feel I’ve had a fairly good sampling of the world’s shorelines.

Never, ever, have I seen a nightmare such as this.

And here’s the thing. I can’t complain. Because I did this. We all did.

Forty years of retailing, stuffing millions of stenciled T-shirt bags with juice jars, milk jugs, toothbrushes, yogurt cups and thousands of other plastic disposable objects. I’ve wrapped fine cheeses in acres of plastic, swaddled pallets in layers of shrink wrap and sold water bottles by the hundreds of millions. I did this. We did this.

Later that day, with the rest of the family, I took to the waves and introduced Kailin and our new baby, Annika, to seawater for the first time.

It odd, knowing that everything strewn on the sand had come from this same sea, washed up in concentric ribbons by the tides, like ephemeral geologic strata—ephemeral, that is, except for the plastics, which will plague humanity for 50 generations.

In the morning Kailin and I walked the seawall, the breeze cool and salty. A deep-water fishing fleet, of unmistakable Asian design, lay bobbing low in the waters offshore.

To my surprise, I saw patches of green vegetation along the wall a few blocks down and went to investigate. Sure enough, it was a type of dune greenery festooned with delicate purple and white flowers but, as I approached, something wasn’t right. The white flowers weren’t flowers at all, but trash.

After the beach it was back to the house for a late-morning kip, the luxury of those on a weekend’s vacation, one I won’t soon forget.

Well, now you’ve met my family, and joined me on my first close encounter with ocean plastic at its ugliest.

I’m not out to make this blog a drag. As you’ve seen in our newsletter, there’s a ton to be hopeful about, a lot of brilliant, committed people sweating to keep us cozy in the comfortable envelope our earth provides. Expect more of that in here, for sure.

But even after Daniel came back from the Bermuda coast with tales of microplastics, high-level confabs, and a new website called www.PlasticStandard.com…even after all that, this was a shocker.

Just like Daniel, I’ve returned more committed than ever to fixing the problems we—me and a few billion others—created, and It seemed a fitting way to begin this blog.

I’m not the wonky expert Daniel is but I keep some smart company and ride herd on current events and innovations for Valutus. I will gladly share those, and anything else I learn, with you. Please join me on my own sustainability journey.

Thanks for reading. Your comments are very welcome.