Background and Catching up to where I am today

As I said I am very new to this whole “blog”, thing and the idea of any real social networking. So I am just going to put down what seems appropriate to me and try to bring anyone who is interested up to date with my evolution to where I am today professionally and personally.

After leaving (being exiled from) the humane movement I had to decide what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. My love for animals and appreciation for the natural environment had not dimmed. What had been tarnished beyond repair was my view of the NGO’s who claimed they were the moral arbitrators of right and wrong and that they had the solution(s) to problems of animal and environmental abuse.

My personal experience had convinced me that the many of the leaders of these NGO’s were not even interested in solutions, only the perception that they had a solution which they needed to feed their vast fund raising apparatus.

I read a lot and had read a book by John Elkington called “Cannibals with Forks which posited the question “If a cannibal begins to eat with a fork is it progress?” The whole question involved the issue of technology, progress and ethics. In short, does technological advances and other scientific break-through’s necessary lead to a better world and of course the answer is ‘no”.

Elkington talked about the new for modern 21^st century corporations to go beyond the simple formula of success as the “bottom line” financially and argued that a truly successful corporation would have three measures of success, economic success, environmental sustainability and social equity, and thus have a “triple bottom line” measure for success.

I decided that since governments lacked the capability to make the world better and since the large national and international NGO’s in my view had proved themselves to be little more then corporate fund raising machines, that perhaps we could work with real corporations to convince them that doing the “right (ethical) thing” would yield them a better pay off.

I formed by own company, partnering with John Aquilino, and we began to develop a clientele of some very large corporations whose business utilized the earth’s natural resources or animals.

From 1995 through 2005 John and we worked with Darden Restaurants, Monsanto, International Finance Corporation, Strauss Veal, the National Fisheries Institute, Global Aquaculture Alliance, and a host of others.

I continued my globe trotting adventures traveling to countries such as Papua New Guinea, Madagascar, Panama, Vietnam, Venezuela, Chile, Iran, Kazakhstan, and many more.

We gravitated in most cases to the fisheries and aquaculture sectors in large part because they were areas that represented the worst of human disrespect and destruction of the earth’s environment.

I feel we did some very evolutionary work, including working with developing a plan to allow Caspian Sea sturgeon to be harvested sustainable, developing an artesianal lobster fishery in Madagascar, assessing and improving a multitude of shrimp aquaculture farms around the world, working to improve the conditions for veal calves in the USA, developing a commercial carp fishery in Croatia for the International Finance Corporation a division of the World bank, working with the world’s only farmed conch farm in the Turks and Caicos, developing a fisheries management plan which utilized artificial habitats for lobster in the Bahamas, amongst any other assignments.

Representing a private foundation with United Nations consultative status we also attended FAO meetings such as CITES and COFI tying to push a triple bottom line agenda.

The whole focus of our work during that ten year period was to try and convince company leaders and CEO’s that an ethical form of capitalism was not only in their and their shareholder’s interests but that it was the right thing to do.

The good news is that working with certain enlightened individuals within certain corporations allowed us to have some dramatic successes. The bad news is that I came to the conclusion that corporations have no souls and any success or progress was for the most part dependent on a key individual and once that that individual left through retirement or restructuring or whatever the “progress” disappeared.

Many of the corporations only wanted a PR spin.

For those few unique leaders in specific companies that really cared we taught them that 1) some times the “antis” were right what they were doing was wrong, and 2) that to “fix” a problem you had to understand the problem and accept ethical responsibility for the corporate actions in the future.

By early 2003 I had come to the conclusion that despite some truly wonderful individual and financial successes the idea of convincing corporate America to embrace a tripe bottom line approach was an unrealistic vision.

I decided I had to do something different. I had to build a company that could demonstrate that the triple bottom line of economic success, environmental sustainability and social equity could succeed and on a global scale.