Earth Day at UC's Green Marketing Class

I'm sorry I've been MIA for about a month now, but I've got a good excuse. It wasn't exactly Burning Man, but this weekend's epic-ness was worth the wait =  4:20 + Earth Day + my dad, brother Matty, and I co-teaching Green Marking, our yearly MBA class at UC, with my brothers John and Matty attending as students. It was like the perfect hippie storm.

(L-R) BD, John Michael, Matty D, Chris (moi)

This picture is in the eye of the storm and there's more going on here than meets the eye. It was taken by a Chinese graduate student that my dad admitted to the program. It was taken in front of an un-necessarily-illuminated bulletin board at the College of Business with no bulletins on a beautiful day where there is plenty of natural light. Matty D had just delivered a riveting talk on Permaculture and you might be able to detect that he pitted-out from fielding the most intense questions of any presentation all weekend. My belly has a weird bulge where my shirt had become un-tucked beneath my sweater from spending the previous 15 minutes cleaning our classroom's decked-out buffet table-- the implicit curriculum. (It was stocked all weekend with fresh produce and local eats from Melt, Dewey's Pizza, Coffee Emporium, Shadeau Bakery.) My dynamo-dad has much more energy than he had last year since he didn't have to lecture nearly as much, as there were many more brilliant students and presenters this year, contributing to the discussion.

Similar to Burning Man, there was lots of nakedness this year too--Naked "monster juice" that is. We didn't talk about it much during the course of the class, but food issues are Issue-AAA1 in terms of opportunity to address the biggest issues-- energy, pollution, soil depletion, monopolies, fairness, healthy bodies, healthy communities, and delicious FUN. But that's all I'm going to say about that today.

The explicit curriculum included the following:

PRESENTATION 1- Steve Burns from Amp Electric Vehicles discusses his projections for the electrification of the automobile, tells the amp story and gives test-rides in the retrofitted Mercedez-Benz SUV. (Fun fact of the day-- to maintain the heating in the car that you'd expect from a Mercedez HVAC sysetm, the electric motor has to boil water under the hood.)

PRESENTATION 2- Dr. Frederick Dwyer- discusses Resrouce Advantage Theory and the work of one of his Michigan State Spartan mentors-- Shelby Hunt.

PRESENTATION 3- Larry Falkin from The City of Cincinnati's Office of Environmental Quality discusses Cincinnati's progress implementing the Green Cincinnati Plan.

PRESENTATION 4- Chris Dwyer- discusses Ecological Economics and various metrics of "green".

From the HappyPlanetIndex.org

PRESENTATION 6- Steve Melink, CEO and founder of Melink Corporation, discusses his company's commitment to walking the walk-- converting their headquarters into a "net zero" facility. 

PRESENTATION 7- Chris Dwyer discusses Systems Theory and the typical traps that complicated systems fall into. 

PRESENTATION 8- Dr. Frederick Dwyer discusses Mindful Consumption and differentiates between "green" markets versus "green" outcomes. 

PRESENTATION 9- author and movie producer Pat Murphy from Yellow Springs' Community Solutions discusses concepts from his book Plan C and his documentary The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil.

PRESENTATION 10- Recent S.C.A.D sculptor/graduate and footballer extraordinaire, Matty Dwyer discusses the principles of Permaculture, global solutions to modern agriculture's constraints and the progress of his own urban food forest experiments in what used to be his soccer field in Oakley. 

Matty and Dad just planted an orchard of fruit trees, including apple, paw-paw, persimmon, and plum.

Marketing, at its best, is about moving economies to human needs. It's about finding, serving, and maintaining value and relationships. Oftentimes, the marketer pushes the right lever, but in the wrong direction. Such is the behavior of gnarly systems when we don't understand their complexity and the best ways in which to leverage a system. 

When the class finished, our heads were spinning. We collectively discussed how utterly frustrated and humbled we all were at the prospects of having to go back to work on Monday, and simply not have all the answers for some of the civilization's most formidable challenges. "How could my efforts possibly have an effect?" 

I certainly don't have the answer, but I'll end with what is my biggest take away from the weekend-- words of wisdom, channeled through Matty:

"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit. "

Papa Dwyer planting a paw-paw tree in his and Matty's future food forest.

 My dad is my hero.