Why is this so? I’ve pondered this at length. Here’s what I think explains it.
1. SMALL BUSINESS IS LIKE GRAVITY: POWERFUL BUT INVISIBLE.
Big businesses are visible because they’re big. Thus the Fortune 500 is comprehensible. We know they’re immensely powerful. But America’s 23 million small businesses are like gravity—immensely powerful, but invisible. Small business now makes up one-half of the economy, provides more than half of all non-farm employment and creates virtually all new jobs. But people don’t know it. They may know that corporate downsizing in the 1990s made big business smaller. What they don’t know is that downsizing made small business bigger. Today, many of the components and services integrated, packaged and delivered by big businesses come from small manufacturers and suppliers. So if you purchase an automobile—or even a pair of shoes—you are buying something that may be produced largely by small businesses.
2. UNLIKE BIG BUSINESS, SMALL BUSINESS IS DECENTRALIZED AND FUNCTIONS ORGANICALLY.
Even persons striving to focus on small business have a hard time getting a clear picture of it. Unlike big businesses that are centralized and hierarchical, small businesses are decentralized and non-hierarchical. At first, this appears unfathomable, even disorderly or chaotic. But try imagining small business as a system. You’ll see that it functions as a complex, interdependent, dynamic web, much as nature does. These characteristics, just as they do in natural systems, make the small business system strong, resilient, efficient, flexible and responsive. Like nature, small business is a universe teeming with boundless diversity and engaged in constant experimentation. In the small business universe, as in nature, cycles of birth, death and rebirth revolve continuously. But how many people are walking around with this image inside their heads?
3. THE REVOLUTION LAUNCHED BY NEW SMALL BUSINESSES IS STILL UNFOLDING.
Today, the Industrial Era, which was about big, centralizing technologies, is swiftly declining. Rising in its place is the post-Industrial Era, which is about small, decentralizing technologies: laptops, cell phones, email and so on. The shock troops of this revolution are innovative, entrepreneurial small businesses, playing their traditional role of challenging the status quo.
This revolution is hard to see because it’s still unfolding. It’s also hard to see because old Industrial Era organizations still dominate the landscape politically. They are big enough to block our view. Meanwhile, post-Industrial Era organizations are newborns struggling to get on their feet.
CENTER FOR SMALL BUSINESS AND THE ENVIRONMENT (CSBE)
CSBE is working to organize these new innovative, entrepreneurial and efficient small businesses into a political force. We call them Green Gazelles (www.greengazelles.org). We aim to make these post-Industrial Era small businesses a primary means of environmental protection and restoration. This is a big deal. It’s not some minor add-on to the traditional environmental agenda; it’s a paradigm change.
Now, changing paradigms is a hugely audacious goal. Can it be done? Are we up to it? My answer: you bet!
BEEN THERE, DONE THAT
I was once part of a process that changed paradigms on the grand scale. I am talking about my experience working to organize the environmental movement in the years prior to Earth Day in 1970. When we got started, only a handful of people could explain what ecology meant. When we got through, virtually any third-grader could explain it.
I became an environmentalist in 1963 when I read the serialization of Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, in The New Yorker. Like Saul on the road to Tarsus, I saw the light. Back in those days, the going was hard and slow. If you were an “environmentalist” you had to define the term for people. If you were trying to get an “environmental” story covered in the press, you were referred to the guy who wrote the hunting and fishing column in Sunday’s newspaper.
PROVING THAT THE EARTH IS ROUND, NOT FLAT
The ecological idea that “everything is connected to everything else” was particularly hard to sell. People didn’t see it. They simply didn’t “get it.” It was as if they thought the earth was flat, and I was trying to persuade them that it was round.
Let me provide some illustrations.
* Back in the Sixties, I cut my teeth as an organizer by fighting the proposed construction of the Three Sisters Bridge over the Potomac River just north of Georgetown. The bridge would have connected I-66 in Arlington, Virginia, with K Street in the District of Columbia and brought the super-highway through downtown Washington.
One of the things I did was to get the Board of the DC Lung Association to adopt a resolution opposing construction of the bridge. I took this resolution to the reporter from The Washington Post who was covering the story and urged him to use it in a story. He read it and then, with a furrowed brow, asked, “Byron, why would the Lung Association oppose construction of a bridge?!” Now, this guy was no dummy, but he hadn’t yet made the connection. I had to explain to him that a bridge was a highway on which cars traveled, emitting exhausts that went to the air that people breathed into their lungs. And that did the trick.
* In 1968, Russell Train, then-President of the Conservation Foundation, hired me to help organize a citizen’s movement for clean air. One of the first things I did was to go around briefing leaders of conservation organizations about the project. This was necessary for protocol and diplomatic reasons because, as it then happened, traditional conservationists were wary of these new people calling themselves “environmentalists.” Who were they? Did they pose a threat to traditional conservation values? Would they obscure or set back the conservation agenda? When I went to see the head of the National Wildlife Federation he demanded, “What does air pollution have to do with conservation?”
* Also, in 1968 I remember trying to get Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign to issue a “white paper” on ecology that I had submitted. The campaign’s research director rejected it because, while he personally agreed with me, “The American people will never buy this idea. It’s way too complicated for them.”
These reactions were then typical. Even so, an immense amount of grassroots ferment was occurring during these years, building a new “environmental” consciousness. For example, the Federal Highway Administration then had construction plans for 800 new freeways on its agenda. Most of these roads were slated to invade some neighborhood, park or wilderness area. Not surprisingly, wherever a freeway construction was scheduled, a local opposition group sprang up. Soon there were hundreds of them. I became one of the people who networked for these groups, helping to forge a unified political force. At the same time, hundreds of local anti-pollution groups began to appear in response to mounting environmental pollution, and I helped network these groups too.
It wasn’t until Earth Day in 1970 that the full extent and power of these groups was marshaled, taking what we then called “the establishment” by great surprise and launching the environmental revolution. Now we are engaged in a similar process of change. As we have seen, this change is evolving in ways that are little noticed. But this time the change is more economic and technological than social and political. And this time the change is called the efficiency revolution, not the environmental revolution.
This new revolution, however, is rife with profound environmental implications. Imagine an economy led by small businesses, entrepreneurs and innovators zealously committed to “doing more with less.” Imagine an economy where decentralized small businesses devise countless, diverse solutions to environmental problems that are:
* Low-cost, innovative, resource productive and non-bureaucratic;
* Sensitive to and appropriate for local social, political and ecological conditions;
* Profitable for buyers and sellers;
* Dramatically effective in reducing pollution and the threat of global warming.
What does all this portend for the environmental movement? Once again I recall the fear and suspicion with which traditional conservationists in the Sixties viewed this new thing, environmentalism. Looking back now, it’s clear to see that Earth Day 1970 was the best thing that ever happened to traditional conservation. In Earth Day’s aftermath, progress in conservation was made that would have been unthinkable before. This was because the conservation ethic was transformed into something broader and more basic.
Now it’s time for the environmental movement to be transformed into something broader and more basic. What this “new thing” will be called I cannot say, but it will be a world in which the economy itself serves as the principal means of environmental pro-tection. In this case, the environmentalists deserve ample congratulations. It turns out that they were right all along in contending that good business and environmental protection do go together hand in hand. If so, let’s make the most of it.
Making the most of it depends on people seeing the transformation. How are we going to do that? The answer, I think, is to lay vivid images before their eyes. An example: a small businessman from Massachusetts was on the panel when I testified before the Small Business Committee. He manufactures fuel cells, and he showed the Committee three photographs of his technology. In the first photograph, taken in the early 1990s, the fuel cell was as big as a room. In the second, taken in the mid-1990s, it was as big as a closet. In the last photograph, taken recently, the fuel cell was the size of a refrigerator. And this fuel cell can provide enough energy to power a small office building!
Here’s where our Green Gazelles come in. They provide the powerful, vivid images that will help people see the connection. In the sidebars that accompany this article, you’ll find a summary of three such companies.
There are many other entrepreneurial small businesses producing innovative technologies that profitably serve human and environmental needs. Indeed, our forays indicate that the woods are full of them. CSBE’s job is to track down these Green Gazelles and cast a spotlight on them.
Stay tuned!
Green Gazelle #1
IdleAire: Improving the Environment at Truck Stops www.idleaire.com
The 1.3 million long-haul trucks operating in America waste 4.4 billion gallons of diesel fuel each year when drivers stop to rest and leave their engine idling. Thanks to IdleAire Technologies Corp., a new small business in Knoxville, Tennessee, this problem may soon be eliminated.
IdleAire has developed a technology that allows long-haul truck drivers to heat and cool their cabs without having to idle their engines. IdleAire installs individual heat and air units above parking spaces at truck stops. A tube attaches these units to a console that allows drivers to turn off their engines and adjust temperatures as needed.
A.C. Wilson, inventor of the technology, came up with the idea in response to a challenge from his truck-driving brother-in-law. While camping one night, Wilson’s brother-in-law challenged Wilson, who is known for solving problems, to come up with a solution to help him sleep better on the road. He said the noise and fumes from his truck when it idled made it difficult to sleep. If the truck did not idle, though, it would be too hot or too cold to sleep, depending on the season.
Besides reducing emissions, the technology saves the trucking industry money. Even with a charge of $9 to $12 for eight hours of IdleAire service, truck owners save as much as 40 percent over the cost of fuel. And drivers are given a safer, quieter sleeping environment while neighborhoods close to truck stops are exposed to less air and noise pollution.
Byron Kennard, Executive Director of the Center for Small Business and the Environment in Washington, DC, is a long-time advocate of both the environment and small-scale enterprise. Working as a community organizer for the Conservation Foundation in the late 1960s, he helped lay a foundation for the environmental movement and the subsequent explosion of grassroots action on Earth Day. In the 1970s he collaborated closely with the late E. F. Schumacher, author of Small Is Beautiful, to realize the book’s vision of small-scale enterprise as a principal protector and restorer of the environment. Byron also served as National Vice Chair of Sun Day, 1978, National Chair of Earth Day 1980 (the tenth anniversary celebration), and as Special Consultant to the EPA Administrator for Earth Day 1990.
A graduate of the Ohio State University (BA, 1959), Byron is the author of Nothing Can Be Done, Everything Is Possible, a book of essays on social and political change that the Christian Science Monitor called “a primer for the modern-day activist.” Also a playwright, lyricist and songwriter, he wrote Out of Style, a musical play presented at d.c. space, and Sweet Talk, a musical play featured at the Source Theatre Company's Eleventh Annual Washington Theatre Festival. He was Artistic Director of The Public Interest Follies, a community theater whose satirical revues entertained Washington, DC audiences for almost a decade. You’ll find Byron’s photo and a recent article about him in the March 2002 Bulletin of the Center for a New American Dream: http://www.newdream.org/bulletin/kennard.html.
Byron Kennard has long been a friend of REP. Several REP members are Fellows at CSBE: Gordon Durnil of Indianapolis, Indiana; Mark Clevey of Farmington Hills, Michigan; and REP President Martha Marks. REP is grateful to Byron for allowing us to publish his intriguing personal glimpse into the world of environment-friendly, innovative small businesses.
