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Heath Combs

Greenthoughts - Vol. 1 Num. 14

New home

I’ll be contributing my greenthoughts now from the green light blog. If you’ve been following them, they’ll come every two weeks as you’re accustomed when the newsletter is released. I plan on getting some of the old ones up in between because they were formerly PDF files and are now dead links.

Greenthoughts is short this week as I’m traveling to the West Coast this week. I just returned from the Tupelo Market in Mississippi last week.

Planes are a great place to catch up on reading and I’m very much looking forward to re-filling my brain.

Especially when you feel like your tank is running on fumes.

Friedman’s new book

The following is my column from this week in Furniture/Today. It’s expanded off my last green newsletter.

Will Friedman’s new book demystify green movement?

Thomas Friedman’s new book, “Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — And How It Can Renew America,” will be released in September. I read his column in the New York Times pretty regularly, as I’m sure many of you do.

If you have, you’ve certainly noticed he’s plugging away at energy issues — especially the failure of the Senate to renew production tax credits for renewable energy.

I would hope the book serves as positive momentum and another green spark. Just when the green wave starts to calm down, some storm of new ideas blows in and freshens up what’s been hitting the shore.

In our industry we’ve had a pretty solid two years of building momentum on the green front. We have two industry groups taking the lead, focusing on product and operations, and they’re doing a good job of making these issues accessible. That’s a good start.

However, I’m of the opinion that aside from major calamities, our collective memory as Americans is short. Despite this tendency to lose interest quickly, we’ve kept green-America issues in the front of our minds. We have a highly recognized U.S. green building standard, LEED, and we’re probably more familiar than many countries with forest certification.

As an industry, we poured praise over Friedman’s earlier work, “The World Is Flat,” because it showed that someone recognized what had happened in our industry with its U.S. design and sales base and increasingly global manufacturing operations.

“Demystification” is a good word I’ve seen to describe what “The World Is Flat” did for globalization.

Will we give such accolades to the new book? Will he say a flat world is too complicated to tackle climate change issues? Is he going to bash business and sell out to the eco-friendly crowd?

A bigger question is whether green efforts have carved out enough of a niche in our resource-intensive industry. Or do we believe the issue still sits at the fringe of mainstream and won’t have a long-term impact on our businesses?

Mostly, I’m hoping the book helps demystify the biggest issues — such as a carbon tax, the successful efforts of other countries to change their economies, and the failure of the largest industrialized nations to take the lead and act — instead of pointing fingers at each other and say, “You do it first.”

We’ve been part of the wider green movement these past two years. Keep an eye out for the book next month.

Spoke the Lorax never more

I got a deserved talking to for my mistake listing the characters wrong in The Lorax. I noted in my last greenthoughts how impressed I was by the story, but I got a little worried, I was in a hurry and mixed the characters up that morning.

For those of you who read along - I characterized the Lorax wrong. The Onceler was the bad guy. The Lorax voiced the sighs of the Truffula trees that died. The Lorax had a beard and was short. The Once-ler held court in the forest, but was never interested in what the Lorax had to report.

A few of you pointed this out with a snort. The Lorax called from an undisclosed location. I will not make the mistake of not listening to the Lorax.

So, correction, duly noted.