Sustainable Business Models and My Ebook Launch

Hi there! :) I want to tell you write a little about my business philosophy. I believe that sustainable business practices can work.

These practices can work as well in creative fields like writing, as in any other field.

In fact, I found a great example of sustainable business practices that I posted on a blog where I've been promoting independent booksellers.

Now, given that I'm an ebook author who makes most of my money through sales on a big online publisher/retailer's site, there is a certain irony about my position.

However, I've chosen not to sell exclusively through the huge online retailer, FWIW.

And I've attempted to warn explain my position about the retailer further here and here.

Having said that, I've put together a book launch for my new novel RIPTIDE that amounts to a collective promotional effort as described in this post.

As you can see, the launch week for RIPTIDE will begin on Monday, March 12. The launch will run all week and end on Saturday, March 17. Saint Patrick’s Day.

If you read the post, you'll see there will be drawings for book giveaways and a charitable donation made to the Dalai Lama's Mind & Life Institute, if the novel reaches the indicated rank.

And if you're on Facebook, feel free to join the Riptide Launch Party, where all the action is.

PS: Here's another creative project that's being funded by collaborative effort online.

PPS: FWIW, I've never used the word "unputdownable" on this blog. :)

The Secret Lives of Clothing and Ethical Branding

As you may be aware, there's a video called The Secret Lives of Our Clothes.

Basically, the premise is as follows:

There’s a price tag that’s being hidden from us everyday. Not the one that tells us how much money to pay but the underlying costs of every outfit’s life cycle. Uncover the lives that our clothes led before they got to the store and discover your voting power as a consumer towards a fairer, healthier and more sustainable planet.



Awesome! :) There's just one catch.

Have you seen this article, Ethical branding: Fairtrade laid bare?

I will quote some of the article.

The US retailer Victoria’s Secret sells fantasy with its line of slinky thongs. It’s not just sex the brand is promoting, but also the belief that consumers can do good by buying products made in socially responsible workplaces in the emerging world.

But then last December, Bloomberg News ran a scathing exposé purporting to show that Bonn-based Fairtrade International (FLO),the world’s largest labeller of ethical goods, had failed dismally in its oversight of a project in west Africa that supplies Limited Brands-owned Victoria’s Secret. “Paying lucrative premiums for organic and fair trade cotton has – perversely – created fresh incentives for exploitation,” wrote Bloomberg’s Cam Simpson.

 

According to Simpson, the project that made some Victoria’s Secret garments was paying sub-par wages to children labouring in inhumane conditions.

 

Oops! I think your lacy slip is showing.

 

In January, FLO responded to the investigation, claiming Bloomberg’s reporter had fabricated key elements of the story. The young girl profiled, they said, was not 13 but 18, and worked not on a Fairtrade-certified cotton farm but in her family’s vegetable business. The facts remain in dispute. But as the story heated up, it was announced that FLO’s chief executive, Rob Cameron, had resigned, although FLO stated it had nothing to do with the Bloomberg allegations.

 

 

 

The contretemps is emblematic of a growing controversy that threatens to upend the burgeoning ethical consumer market: child labour is a persistent, global problem and there are no easy fixes.

Imagine! So ... this isn't just isolated to a few terrible companies, but may be endemic throughout the industry? Maybe.

It’s a battle royale between the self-proclaimed reformists and old guard purists, who are afraid the movement will be coopted and the label reduced to little more than a corporate rubber stamp. FLO agrees that sales would rise under the rival system, but would water down worker protections. It says the changes suggested by Fairtrade USA amount to an assault against the movement’s founding values – the focus on small farms, self-management and sustainability.

 

The Fair Trade USA proposals are a “neoliberalisation of Fair Trade,” writes Francisco VanDerhoff Boersma, co-founder of the first fair trade certifying body in a joint response to the plans issued with the renowned small farmer co-operative UCIRI (Union of Indigenous Communities of the Region of Isthmus) in Mexico. “Our small producer organisations can only move forward with authentic fair trade and sustainable or organic production.”

 

“Do we want it to be small and pure or do we want it to be fair trade for all,” responds Paul Rice, chief executive of Fair Trade USA. He believes the move is “visionary,” saying it will bring benefits to the “poorest of the poor.”

 

So who’s right? That’s a tough call. There is no question that fair trade label rivalry will dilute the movement’s message. Consumers, particularly those in the US, who want to support small, sustainable farms, will be out of luck.

 

So ... what will these labels mean exactly? Now, I'm completely confused.

The new label would open the door for game-changing giants such as Wal-Mart, Whole Foods and Starbucks to follow suit. Starbucks says it has not yet decided whether it will put fair trade labels on its larger, organic farms.

 

Well, good for them.

 

The good news is that such fractiousness suggests the movement is going through growing pains as demand for organic products rises. Fair trade labels should be seen as a symbol of that healthy growth, but not a certification of ethics. No person or product certification system can provide a guarantee that any product is free of child labour. But either labelling system is far better than nothing.

 

I'm lost for words.

 

 

What Would Pierre L'Enfant Say?

Urban planning has traditionally been structured along geometric lines. In the past, the grid system has been the norm, by and large. Naturally, there are exceptions, such as the nation's capital in the U.S. Pierre Charles L'Enfant designed the city streets not only along the lines of a grid system, but with diagonal avenues and circles. Don't ask me why, but he did and it looks real pretty and screws up the tourists like you wouldn't believe. And as for traffic, don't get me started.

Oh, and have I mentioned that the whole mess is divided into four quadrants? Yeah. Big fun.

So when I saw this speech about Connecting the Fractal City, it just about blew my mind.

To wit:

This essay describes distinct types of cities as characterized by their connective geometry. The different types contain entirely different degrees of urban life. The life of a city is directly dependent upon its matrix of connections and substructure, because the geometry either encourages or discourages people's movements and interactions. Such an understanding is crucial for superimposing the electronic city driven by Information and Communication Technologies. Contrary to what is widely assumed, the electronic city is not an automatic outgrowth of the "high-tech" modernist car city, but in fact connects much better to the more human-scaled 19th century city.

Wait! I thought this was a speech. And you're saying that the Internet works better in a 19th century city? Okay.

In order to discuss these purely geometric issues, it is necessary to have a clear definition of terms. I spend some time to define "fractal", "scaling", and "connectivity" in the more technical Appendices to this paper. Urbanists might incorrectly assume my title to mean: "Connecting the disconnected city". Yes, contemporary cities are disconnected, but in a separate sense, they are also not fractal. The distribution of the sizes of urban components and connections can define fundamentally different types of city. A picture emerges of a city made of distinct interacting networks, each of them working on several different scales. Though competing, these networks with very different character have to connect with each other, and cooperate in a seamless fashion to define a living city.

Okay, I know the term "fractal." I once read a book called THE FRACTAL MURDERS. Does that count for anything?

I used to work as a land use attorney, but never had to rely on my shaky recollection of calculus studies.

Now ... if you read the speech essay, you'll see all sorts of bizarre interesting diagrams representing models of future cities.

They run the gamut from these:

To these:

Which all add up, finally, to this:

And in conclusion, the speech essay states:



If we can get over the ideological blinders imposed on the world by otherwise well-meaning but false ideas about "modernity", then we can begin to understand how the urban fabric forms itself and changes dynamically. We can then build new cities that incorporate the best characteristics of traditional cities, while utilizing the latest technology to facilitate instead of frustrating human interactions. At the same time, we can regenerate older cities, which already contain physical structures that would today be impossible to duplicate economically. Those buildings and urban spaces are being sacrificed to an intolerant design dogma, to be replaced by faceless and lifeless rectangular slabs, cubes, and parking lots.

Pathological components of the city can be selected against. Either an underconcentration, or overconcentration of nodes strains the infrastructure and resources of the city. Two extremes are suburban sprawl, and skyscrapers. Individuals desire the first, whereas governments and corporations want the second. Neither is acceptable. The first of these urban typologies uses up most of the automobile fuel in the city for the simplest transportation needs. The second typology concentrates non-interacting people into one building, drawing resources from the rest of the city. The urban forces generated by the overconcentration of a skyscraper tend to erase the urban fabric in a significant area around it. Skyscrapers feed off the rest of the city, and require more infrastructure and larger expressways to maintain them.

The electronic city offers help in two distinct ways. Firstly, it replaces many "dirty" connections of the older city, freeing up infrastructure and fuel consumption. It makes pedestrian pockets in the city much more attractive and practicable than ever before. Secondly, its very structure offers us a template to follow in rebuilding the urban fabric. I mentioned that the internet follows the same structural laws as the traditional city. This should be enough reason to finally discard the misguided, simplistic twentieth-century models of urbanism that did so much to damage our cities. IF WE NEED TO CONNECT THE ELECTRONIC CITY TO A PHYSICAL CITY, THEN THE PHYSICAL CITY MUST FOLLOW THE SAME STRUCTURAL LAWS. By selectively applying successful prototypes from the past, together with insights from the science of networks, we can generate an entirely new type of living contemporary city.

Well, scream whatever you like in capital letters. I think it looks an awful lot like modern-day Washington, DC.

How Do You Ditch Your Drugs?

When you have drugs that are no longer effective, how do you dispose of them properly?

The Drug Enforcement Agency will help you with that.

Of course, I'm not talking writing about the drug pictured above. That's a controlled substance. Depending on where you live. Kinda.

I'm speaking writing of prescription drugs.

The DEA is doing a big take-back day for old, expired pharmaceuticals.

To quote the site:



The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has scheduled another National Prescription Drug Take Back Day which will take place on Saturday, April 28, 2012, from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.  This is a great opportunity for those who missed the previous events, or who have subsequently accumulated unwanted, unused prescription drugs, to safely dispose of those medications.

This has been done three times before. Apparently. I never knew.


Americans that participated in the DEA’s third National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day on October 29, 2011, turned in more than 377,086 pounds (188.5 tons) of unwanted or expired medications for safe and proper disposal at the 5,327 take-back sites that were available in all 50 states and U.S. territories. When the results of the three prior Take Back Days are combined, the DEA, and its state, local, and tribal law-enforcement and community partners have removed 995,185 pounds (498.5 tons) of medication from circulation in the past 13 months.

Damn! That's a lot of drugs for a program that didn't get a whole lot of press.

“The amount of prescription drugs turned in by the American public during the past three Take-Back Day events speaks volumes about the need to develop a convenient way to rid homes of unwanted or expired prescription drugs,” said DEA Administrator Michele M. Leonhart. “DEA remains hard at work to establish just such a drug disposal process, and will continue to offer take-back opportunities until the proper regulations are in place.”

Right. These are take-back opportunities, aren't they? Not confiscations?


“With the continued support and hard work of our more than 3,945 state, local, and tribal law enforcement and community partners, these three events have dramatically reduced the risk of prescription drug diversion and abuse, and increased awareness of this critical public health issue,” said Leonhart.

Just say no to drugs, okay?

Please check back in March to locate collection sites near you.

I'll be sure and do that.