phSFca's Open Salon Blog

Men Sleep Around. Let's Get Over It.

Sat, 3 Oct 2009 16:10:08 -0400

A friend and I were talking today about David Letterman and men having sex with someone not their spouse and how upset and scandalous many seem to be about it. And how stupid this whole attitude is. We should get over it. Men sleep around. Men have always slept around. Yeah yeah, I know it’s a sweeping generalization, but really… Men have two heads and much of the time the lizard brained one is driving the bus.

Why do we think this is scandalous? Or unnatural? Why are we trying to make men into something they are not? Why do we look askance at women who are attracted to power, or really anyone attracted to power – wanting and willing to get close to it?

Prostitution has been around a long time, maybe forever. Why don’t we legalize it, keep it clean, protect the workers, and get some taxes from it? Why don’t we simply accept that this is part of being human? Why do we somehow want to put men in straightjackets and tell them they have to behave in ways that run counter to their strong natural behaviors?

Why do we act surprised? Why do we snicker about this?

What seems to me to be a serious issue here is not where Letterman or any other man puts his magic wand, but what kind of work or personal environment the relationship creates. If the relationship creates a hostile work environment or someone can’t be treated fairly if they choose to not participate sexually – then throw the book at him. But to create this false Puritanical set of values that so many find impossible to meet seems to create public scenarios that are a huge waste of time.

Let’s look at another recent sex scandal -- the one where Senator John Ensign had an affair with a colleague’s wife, used his office and his contacts and his parents (his parents!) to pay everyone off and keep them quiet. What matters to me about the Ensign affair is that Ensign slept with a trusted colleague’s wife – not the affair per se but that he betrayed a friend and colleague. That really sucks and that really makes me question his judgment and his leadership qualities.

There is public pain and private pain – and it seems to me that we need to define and separate these areas a little better. There is enormous private pain in these scandals, but to somehow equate that with public judgment seems wrong. Do I think less of these men who cheat on their spouses or find pleasure in public restrooms? Yes, I do. Do I make judgments about them and find this all distasteful? Yes, I do. Do I think it equates with whether they are good leaders, good presidents, good attorneys general, or even good talk show hosts? No… I do not.

Why can’t we grow up and accept our own humanity in all its messiness? Why must we confuse the private with the public and in the process ourselves become so prurient and childish. I congratulate David Letterman on “coming clean” – it makes him look courageous and human. Let’s have more of that.

Chevron met Sierra Club June 10th

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 23:06:29 -0400

Dave O’Reilly, CEO of Chevron, and Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, in a discussion moderated by Alan Murray, Executive Editor of The Wall Street Journal. Commonwealth Club | Climate One. Nikko Hotel. June 10, 2009.

O’Reilly and Pope have not met face to face in a forum such as this before and one of the surprises was how many things they agreed upon. And the other was how scary it was to hear this powerful CEO not even acknowledge the specific goals to reduce carbon emissions. He just pretended doing something would be enough.

What they agreed on:

Climate change is happening and man is contributing
We need to protect the environment
We need to do something – actually many things
Congress doesn’t get it as a national issue
Need federal regulations, policies, legislation to make this happen
We need to look at everything from coal sequestration to renewables
Neither a member of US CAP org for the same reasons (they would hogtie too much)
Coal needs to go away
Want transparency and prefer emissions tax/ fee rather than cap and trade which is unnecessarily complex

Pope came across as knowledgeable about the big picture and had numbers not just emotions to back up his positions. O’Reilly came across as knowledgeable about Chevron but not as much about national or global issues and implications.

The most serious disagreement was about the amount of carbon reduction and the timing of those reductions.

While O’Reilly agreed climate change and global warming are serious issues, that man is major contributor to global warming, and that we need to move quickly to reduce carbon emissions… he believes we will be lucky to achieve 20-25% reductions by 2050.

Pope was much more optimistic about the ability of the US, and the energy companies, to meet the goals of 80-90% reduction by 2050 citing how California reduced its electric consumption by 50% between 1973 and 2003.

These are serious disagreements about the pace at which the US needs to move on these issues, but they both agreed that getting Congress on board was critical. Both men indicated a willingness to talk privately about potential joint lobbying efforts in Washington DC. Both men recognized the government’s role in developing regulations and policies that will make business planning much easier and more predictable. They both also agreed that a carbon tax was preferable and more easily understood than a cap and trade system.

Good news and bad news -- but an important event and I am optimistic about their agreements.

Stephen Fowler - Shame on You

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 13:02:57 -0500

I just came across an article about the Stephen Fowler fallout from his performance on Wife Swap, a show I have never watched. And he should be ashamed of himself. He has done damage to himself, his family, San Francisco, liberals, environmentalists, entrepreneurs, Brits, ex-pats, men, and so many people trying to live their lives in good ways.

I suppose it’s like watching a train wreck – the horror is there, but I can’t stop watching it either.

The Fowlers, who live in Noe Valley in San Francisco, switched wives with the Long’s from rural Missouri. On camera, he called Gayla Long stupid and uneducated and insulted her over and over in a wide variety of ways. I’m surprised, frankly, that the show’s producers let this abuse continue.

My respect for the folks from the MidWest just went up and I have a deeper understanding of why they might resent liberals from San Francisco – of which I am one.

I was appalled, disgusted, and ashamed. How are we going to solve our collective problems when we have so many who think so little of others? We may not be alike, but we are all Americans and we are all human. My brother and his family live in the MidWest – in South Dakota and Minnesota. We don’t agree on a lot, but I respect them. I get angry at him sometimes because he doesn’t see my way, but he sees life differently and his experiences are different from mine and I respect that.

I'm glad Fowler has resigned from his non-profit boards -- he has done them such damage.

For more, go to The article at Yahoo News, the Stephen Fowler Sucks web site, the Facebook group, "I Can not Stand Stephen Fowler from `Wife Swap,'" and Renee Stephens (Fowler’s wife) blog comments and his apology

How do you feel about this kind of insensitivity? Am I over-reacting here?

Changing our language

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:02:11 -0500

I keep hearing a lot about how the system is broken. How everything is broken – from politics to food to health care to energy to infrastructure to cars to well you name it. That we need to hit the reset button.

Last year when the levees collapsed and the bridge near Minneapolis broke – not that long after the debacle with Katrina in New Orleans – I saw these events as metaphors signaling decay from within.

And few in the mainstream media are writing about the real implications of this. Few are talking about re-naming the problems, looking at them in new ways, and few are finding ways to talk about solutions with new language. Some who are include Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman, Matt Miller and James Howard Kunster – see his latest article at alternet: “Everything Still Looks the Same, But We've Become a New Country.”

We need new solutions. We need a new paradigm. We need to be thinking in new ways and looking at new solutions. We need to develop a new language. Let me use green jobs as my example.

I’ve been researching green jobs as part of my role as Green Jobs point person for the Job Forum here in San Francisco. People who attend our sessions are interested in green jobs – because they believe there will be increasing numbers of them and because they want to do something meaningful that contributes positively to the sustainability of our planet, our nation, and our economic well being. So, I’ve been looking into where they are and how we can get them.

What I am finding is we need to define them first – and that is surprisingly difficult. If we believe green jobs will increase the number of jobs, then we are looking at new jobs that are green. If we are looking at green jobs as jobs that contribute positively to the sustainability of our future, then the definition gets murky. And if we want to measure green jobs – the number of them, who has them – it gets even murkier because the government definitions of jobs do not include anything green or even sustainable.

This is not to say there aren’t green jobs and that you can’t find them. There are green jobs and you can not only find them, you can define them.

Last week I attended the State of Green Business Forum here in San Francisco. It was a one day event that covered several broad topics – water as the new green, the politics of green, what are some big guys doing about green, as well as the green job opportunity. This event was created and hosted by Greener World Media, which has several media outlets for facets of green business, and they put on these forums and conferences regularly to tap into prevailing knowledge and to stimulate conversation around key issues. Their next conference is Greener by Design to be held here in San Francisco in May

To reiterate what I had written in a previous post, I believe, there are several ways to define green jobs:

1) New green jobs in expanding and new industries such as energy generation or new food systems. Any job in these new industries (solar, smart grid, wind, organic food) would be a green job.

2) New green jobs in companies that recognize some investment in this area is good for business and long-term sustainability. Management level sustainability jobs and sustainability departments – think Wal-Mart – would be new green jobs.

3) New jobs in existing sustainable businesses such as my web host, pair networks, or Seventh Generation could be defined as green.

4) Greening your new job in a non-green business could also be considered a green job.

5) Greening your exiting job or adding sustainable responsibility to an existing job or changing a job function to one that is more sustainably focused are also green jobs.

But how we measure these is difficult. And sometimes an organization goes completely green and in the process eliminates some title green jobs but the organization as a whole becomes more sustainable and every job becomes green. The Presidio Trust here in San Francisco is a good example.

So, as we move toward a new paradigm, we need to pay attention to the language we use and the definitions we create.

We are building a new system and the communications change as we do this. When we look at Wall Street, none of this new recovery package changes anything fundamental. And somehow I am not seeing better oversight. Perhaps transparency is the first step. If we can begin to see what is actually happening and who gets what, and how the monies are being spent, perhaps we can then begin to understand the process and begin to name things – actions, processes, and causes, results – and once we can begin to name things we can begin to compare them, see how they interact with other elements… and we can then begin to think about them in new ways and play with ideas around them.

But to just tinker with the old, let the politics of the old shape the ideas – well that’s just scary. Just as we are beginning the debate about news, newspapers, the media, the role of citizen journalism and the need for trusted editors (or curators) to filter the valid and relevant from the lies and trash, we need a debate about all our other systems as well: food; transportation; density and land use; health care; the built environment.

I look forward to these discussions, but Obama is missing an opportunity to think in new ways and it’s a major disappointment.

Where are the green jobs?

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 12:01:41 -0500

I have been looking for green jobs for two reasons – one is that I want one and one is that I’ve volunteered to be the green jobs expert for our volunteer panel, The Job Forum. I live in the Bay Area and if there were lots of green jobs it would seem to me that they would be here. I haven’t secured one yet and they seem to be elusive.

We have better consumer protections than many other states. We have Silicon Valley with a focus on cleantech. We have a city that has allocated resources to personnel and our fleets to make them greener and to ferret out initiatives to counteract climate change. We have the Presidio and the Thoreau Center for Sustainability. We have one of the greenest government buildings – Thom Mayne's Federal Building. And more green non-profits then you can shake a stick at.

And yet… there just don’t seem to be many green jobs. And so many people are looking for them. As a volunteer panelist on the Job Forum (every week the Forum meets with job seekers to assist them in their job search at the Chamber of Commerce), we often hear from people who want to do something that matters, something sustainable, something green.

The Green Economy has been touted by the media, in books by experts, as being our potential savior – from nation building to restoring our social contract to simply providing many jobs here at home. This new economy will affect every part of our economy and will provide millions upon millions of jobs soon. But when is soon?

The reality is sobering and requires some creativity to figure out. I have spoken to quite a few people over the past nine months and gone to talks, job fairs, and lectures on this topic. I’ve heard Van Jones of Green Jobs for All and Eric Schmidt of Google. I’ve read about Sun Micro and the greening of their company and their clients’ companies.

And here’s what I’ve found out. Green jobs, new jobs, are hard to find and it doesn’t look like there will be a massive wave of them any time soon. Jobs with sustainability in the title are few and far between. And the competition for them is fierce.

Green jobs, redefined, however, are everywhere. One way to think about them is to look at industries, companies, and all jobs with a broader perspective. In the days of high tech, many people found low-tech jobs in high tech companies or high tech jobs in low-tech companies. This is happening to green, too. Look for green jobs in non-green companies as well as non-green jobs in green companies.

One problem is that our current measuring criteria are really not up to the task, which means it’s hard to get a grasp on the big picture as well as on a granular level. It is helpful however to think about what a green job really is, or could be. Jim Cassio has put together a free Green Careers Resource Guide that is invaluable – with information on employment statistics, green jobs, green careers, job boards and the like. He and others talk about green jobs as follows:

Jobs in new industries that were not here 10 or even 5 years ago
Jobs in businesses that are already green
Jobs in businesses that are moving toward green
Green jobs in businesses that don’t yet have a clue

Let me tell you a couple of stories. I spoke with someone in operations at the Presidio Trust who worked for the national park service before the Presidio (an old army base in San Francisco) was turned over to the Trust to manage. In the early days, they committed certain staff to finding green ways to maintain the grounds and then they developed ways to use green processes and materials to restore older buildings and then they downsized and got rid of some of the green jobs, but now green permeates the organization – so in effect, everyone at the Presidio Trust has a green job but there are fewer jobs that are identified as green.

I went to a panel discussion about green jobs at the Commonwealth Club the other night – and it had a mini green job fair as well. It was sold out. The job fair had mostly green staffing and career folks, but there were also solar companies, government agencies, an environmental firm, and a sustainable consulting firm. The staffing companies mostly had jobs in solar for engineers, scientists and installers. The others had some jobs, but like the general economy, not many. My sense was that some of them were actually looking for clients not employees and aligning themselves with green whenever they could.

So, what do you do if you want a green job? Research is first. Find a company you want to work for. Go to green job fairs, find the articles and the media (magazines, blogs, newspapers) that are trustworthy and have reliable information about the green economy and perhaps even your area. Build a list of companies you think are doing it right. Apply there.

Look at staffing companies that are focusing on green and find out if the jobs they have are right for you. Sing up for free newsletters with tips and job leads, like the one that Carol McClelland pus out at Green Career Central.

If you have a job, look at ways to make it green. I spoke recently with a real estate investor and he was hired in a normal way for a normal job but part of his agreement with his new employer was he would develop a portfolio of green investing opportunities. Greening may also save money and make you look good to your bosses. Check out the Wal-Mart story.

For me…. On Monday, I’m going to a one-day conference about the state of the green economy – The State of Green Business Forum. It will be held at the PG&E (our utility company) energy center in San Francisco. The panelists and experts represent a range of leading companies and industries – from IBM to Levi Strauss – and thought leaders from the Environmental Defense Fund, the Pacific Institute and Lawrence Berkeley Labs. I’m going to soak up information and hopefully make a connection or two. This particular conference is hosted by Joel Makower of greenbiz.com (part of Greener World Media). http://www.greenbiz.com/stateofgreenbusinessforum. Check out their newsletters as well.

Find events like these near where you live – and if you can’t, find them online. Find what is happening where you are or where you want to be. Learn the jargon of the part of green you want to be in. Stay focused and upbeat. There are green jobs out there and it’s up to you to define and find them.