I went to LOHAS last week. LOHAS
stands for Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability and is a conference
focused on health and fitness, the environment, personal development,
sustainable living, and social justice. It was my first time at LOHAS,
and my first time in Boulder. By the way, Boulder is awesome. But
that’s beside the point.
I got to speak on a panel that included Deepak Chopra’s
daughter, Mallika Chopra, founder of Intent.com; and Wolf Ludge, CEO of
HessNatur. We discussed how to design business for good and how to
stay ahead of the mess of green noise by driving true innovation. You
can see the talk about the death of the “steal and donate” model of
corporate responsibility by visiting the LOHAS website here.
In addition to getting to speak on that awesome panel,
other personal highlights were hearing Hunter Lovins, author of Natural
Capitalism, Wade Davis, a National Geographic Explorer, and my personal
buddy Adam Werback.
Hunter wrote Natural Capitalism, a seminal work in the sustainable
business community, and now she consults with a range of larger
companies starting down the sustainability path. She had a charisma,
charm, and salt-of-the-earth practicality that had me leaning out of my
chair thinking that too often we overcomplicate this stuff, and we need
to ‘just do it’. Be sure to check out more about her at hunterlovins.com.
I love Adam Werbach’s approach to business. He starts with the
observation that what has worked in the environmental movement in the
past no longer works. And that business must drive the solution. In
addition to providing methods of linking corporate goals to ecosystem
and social goals, he does an awesome job of motivating the individual
to take action. Check out this campaign they put together for their
internal team, saatchitrueblue.com.
Wade Davis explained how the traditional cultures that we often
consider ‘primitive’ all reinforce through their rituals the role of
man within nature. We ‘advanced’ cultures could use a little such
humility, rather than continuing under the assumption that nature is
something to be made subservient. Tragically, these cultures are
endangered; threatened by the mass homogenization being driven by
consumer culture. You simply need to check him out here.
Needless to say, I returned with lots of inspiration and a head brimming with ideas. Time to roll the sleeves up!
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To see more photos of Adam at LOHAS, be sure to check out our Flickr page here.
