A rising tide

One of our “Eight for 2008” green business trends featured in January’s annual TrendWatch issue highlighted the suddenly crowded pasture of green media efforts, and how a “thinning of the pack” would be the inevitable result of that. We were addressing the gold rush of inauthentic or naïve green consumer media, not necessarily mainstream business media, which until recently was limiting its engagement to occasional green-themed issues. Lo and behold, I wish we could go back and tweak that forecast a bit, since business media are suddenly picking up the slack, with the level of sophistication impressively rising in a variety of ways.

While browsing through Fast Company’s recent issue featuring Barack Obama on the cover, I discovered that the magazine was printed on 100 percent recycled (85 percent post-consumer) paper. While Fast Company doesn’t say where the paper actually comes from, this is no small coup for a national business-consumer title of its weight and stature. One could say the issue was filled with hope…

American City Business Journals, a former employer of mine, recently launched its greenbizjournal.com site, harnessing the power if its 40-plus local weeklies and deep pockets of parent media-conglomerate Advance Publications in a unified web portal that has the ability to drill down market-by-market for content and advertising dollars.

My first thought upon hearing the news was that the name sounds eerily similar to GreenBiz.com, which had its online web portal in place many years before ACBJ dared support the environment as a major part of any business dialogue. (I know this because, from 1999-2002, I’m pretty sure I was the first and only reporter in the entire ACBJ chain to fight for a “business and the environment” beat.) Today, ACBJ is really going for it, even hosting quarterly sustainability panel luncheons that, on the surface, seem to mirror our annual Sustainable Industries Economic Forums.

The conventional wisdom is to say congratulations and welcome to the new entrants scrambling to take advantage of the opportunities in green business. My biggest concern is the same I’ve had for a while: At what point do “green” and “eco” become too watered down for the mainstream to stomach?

More conventional wisdom tells us that a rising tide lifts all boats. But in truth our goal is to keep our sails raised and to continue treading new waters with our pioneering community of sustainable business leaders, like those spotlighted in this month’s “20 Leading Green Execs” feature, until the larger barges turn in tow—all hands on deck, all arms donning water wings.