Enough

If the planet is to survive and if we as humans are truly going to alleviate poverty, offer a real “quality of life” existence to all, and halt the rape and depletion of the earth’s natural resources beyond recovery, we need to develop real jobs that are profitable, eco-friendly and sustainable.  Period.  End of story!

NGO’s and the world press can only expose and admonish, to me they have both evolved into bloated, self indulgent, self serving, lobbying organizations no different than the companies they criticize for being greedy and lacking compassion and ethics as they march to make an unseemly profit. 

When you peel away all the rhetoric, ultimately governments can only punish and administer.  Creativity, innovation, and real solutions to the world’s problems must and will continue to come from the private or corporate sector.  This epiphany admittedly runs counter to current and widely accepted dogma.  But it’s true.

In order to pay the bills, to raise the quality of life for all, to stop the ceaseless harvest of the world’s dwindling natural resources, we have to learn to practice ethical capitalism.  Let me repeat that and underscore the word “ethical” associated with “capitalism.”

Indeed, it has taken me over a decade and a lifetime of risk and heartache to develop a highly efficient, eco-friendly, job creating, natural system that is efficient in producing high-end marine protein and that has applications to produce hundreds of millions of pounds (or kilos, whichever you prefer) of natural, antibiotic free, marine protein with no negative environmental foot print.

Ironically, now that we have removed all of the technological risk from our system and demonstrated for the third time the productivity and eco-friendly aspects of the system, we are now facing a not unanticipated barrier to growth and expansion.

Remember all those ads from banks and financial brokers and mutual fund and insurance companies that want to “lend and invest so the world can become a better place” or that “care about you and you and me and jobs” well, in the words of the late Jim Nabors through his great TV character Gomer Pyle, “surprise, surprise,” their slogans, their claims, their TV ads stating that they “desire to put their money behind a greener, leaner, cleaner, local business” is lip service, nothing more. 

So I have come to the inescapable conclusion that as important as it was to “build a better mouse trap” (and I apologize to all mice for the metaphor. I prefer “catch and release” as with bonefish played on my fly-rod knowing all the while that they are ultimately unharmed although a tad shaken), it is becoming just as critical that we broadcast our message to as wide an audience as possible through social media, being completely transparent, so we can overcome the cynicism of generations that have seen only the aforementioned lip service and few if any real solutions from any sector.

And for those of us who have lived in both camps, the NGO world and the world of private business, perhaps our only true opportunity to prove we can do what we say we can do, will be to find ways to employ that same phenomenon of social media to circumvent the risk adverse, staid, and unimaginative, (though very greedy, traditional sources of investment capital) and go straight to those of you who recognize that “talk is not action”, and that “if we want the world to be different than we have to begin to do things differently.”