Kari Havir, Eco Marketing Change Agent

The solar-powered website I rebranded and developed for Inner Earth Energy, an innovative geothermal company, launched on a 100% solar powered web server. Talk about a company walking their eco-friendly talk and your talking about Inner Earth Energy (IEE).

IEE’s mission statement is “Modeling Economic Growth Through Environmental Sustainability” and it shows. Everyone in the company is continually “breaking new ground” in this effort in everything from their product and service offerings, business practices, to the business relationships they develop and nurture. Their environmental mission doesn’t stop when the work day ends. Not surprisingly, IEE CEO Dave Sheild has installed a geothermal system to heat and cool his home. He paired the system with prairie restoration-oak savanna grasses which are planted over his rain garden/French drains. The eco-friendly, decorative grasses mean no lawn mowing in the rain garden and the French drains enhance the residential geothermal installation’s efficiency. IEE was so excited about launching their new website because of the way it both empowers them and because of its green hosting that they decided to launch ahead of having all content completed. This is quite similar to what we did at Marketing Eco when we launched our own solar-powered website. Because the content management system is so easy to use, filling in any thin spots is a breeze. IEE’s “energy” in both the geothermal and enthusiastic sense is marvelous to behold. Here’s a little more about IEE and their mission straight from the source: Modeling Economic Growth Through Environmental Sustainability We are committed to large-scale, nationwide deployment of sustainable energy solutions. Our primary focus is on making the the U.S. building sector more energy efficient with Geothermal Heat Pump (GHP) systems playing a central role. The U.S. building sector accounts for 40% of primary U.S. energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The Industrial and Transportation sectors are second and third in order of energy usage. GHP technology alone can realize 50%-60% savings on building energy usage making it one of the highest impact, deep savings solutions available. “There are immediate and significant savings in energy efficiency and conservation. Energy efficiency is not just low-hanging fruit; it is fruit lying on the ground. For example, we have the potential to make buildings 80% more efficient with investments that will pay for themselves in less than fifteen years. Buildings consume 40% of the energy we use, and a transition to energy efficient buildings will cut our carbon emissions by one third.” — Steven Chu, U.S. Secretary of Energy and Nobel Laureate in Physics, from 2009 Harvard Commencement Speech. One of our goals is to get private sector investors to drive the sustainability movement by providing structured financing made possible through project development and aggregation. Investors should be able to earn an attractive return while simultaneously supporting the rebuilding of America’s energy infrastructure. Linking sustainability with compelling economic incentives is the key to large-scale deployment of solutions that can ultimately end America’s dependence on fossil fuels and meet the required GHG emissions reductions. Check out www.InnerEarthEnergy.com and see for yourselves. Stay tuned! We will follow up this launch announcement in the coming weeks with IEE’s feedback on their new website. As they dig into their new paperless content management portal and get a feel for posting to their forum which will auto-tweet directly to Twitter, we expect their enthusiasm about social media will continue to grow. We can integrate their website’s auto-posts to LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace as well.

Clean Energy, Sustainability

The Compression "Main Site" features a walk through Compression Thinking and a Compression Thinking mind map.

I developed a sticky post-enabled, blog style website for Robert W. “Doc” Hall, Professor Emeritus, Operations Management, Indiana University, and author of “Compression – Meeting the Challenges of Sustainability Through Vigorous Learning Enterprises.” The website empowers Doc to self-publish articles about Compression, create topics for online discussion, and contains an embedded DebateGraph.org mind map that Doc designed and DebateGraph.org founder David Price helped to get started on www.DebateGraph.org. The new website’s sticky post capability organizes content and serves it up in a modular format that makes it easier for his visitors to digest the complex components of Compression Thinking.

The Compression "Discussion Forum" enables discussion about Compression Thinking and practical application.

About Doc Hall:

Frequently called “Doc” by industry friends, Hall is a founding member of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence and received its award for outstanding lifetime service. For 22 years he was editor-in-chief of AME’s publication, Target. He also received the SME Gold Medal for outstanding service to the manufacturing engineering profession in technical communications, technical writing, and lectures.

Hall has authored and co-authored six books on manufacturing excellence, with topics ranging from the improvement of manufacturing practice to organizational development and renewal. He also has an interest in innovation, and is a judge for the PACE Award (innovation by auto industry suppliers). A prior book, The Soul of the Enterprise (1992) touched on some of the topics in Compression, so he’s been ruminating about Compression thinking for almost 20 years – reluctantly concluding that there is no “easy out.” Compression thinking applies the best ideas seen in organizing for work to the manifold problems of the 21st century.

About Compression Thinking:

The 21st century must be a turning point. Physical economic expansion that accelerated with the industrial revolution cannot continue indefinitely. The earth has finite resources, but our legacy business and economic thinking promotes expansion, assuming that more resources are always available – somewhere. Transforming ourselves to limit consumption while simultaneously increasing human quality of life for everyone is the supreme human challenge of Compression.

What to do? The basics begin with eliminating waste, not doing that which doesn’t need to be done. Then reuse, repair, remanufacture, recycle and so on. Many individuals are doing what they can to decrease their personal waste of energy, water, and materials. But without working organizations creating systems that help them do it, that effect is minimal. And careful conservation is not enough. Every technology can have adverse consequences. Unless working organizations make a new kind of thinking practical, individual measures cannot offset the heedlessness stimulated by commercial incentives.

Compression calls for a change in fundamental economic thinking — a new mindset — Compression Thinking. This begins by contemplating issues so interrelated that single engineering fixes are unlikely to let mass consumption continue. Many different imaginative changes will be necessary, under always changing conditions. Most companies have barely started. Some do a little, but claim a lot, thus laying themselves open to charges of “greenwash.” Our technical and systems issues are unprecedented, but our biggest challenge, always, is us.

So start to look behind financial facades to see the physical reality of what we do. The transformation needed is so great that it amounts to redesign. Remediating excess consumption after it has happened is not good enough — expensive too. One can only go on from the present, devising operational methods that anticipate future problems and preclude them before they happen.

The goal of Compression is in short to greatly reduce global resource consumption while globally increasing human quality of life for everyone. It is a difficult challenge, yet it is possible.

To learn more about Compression Thinking, to download the free 55 page condensed version of the book “Compression” and extended footnotes, and to learn how to start thinking differently, visit Compression.org >

Sustainability