Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Rob Melnick, Moderator: As many of you know, we bring people in, if you will, from the community, from the world, from the nation to talk about issues of sustainability and this like, at least the one that I have a hand in moderating, will be an interactive event. I’ll explain that in a minute. Anyway, I’m Rob Melnick. I’m the Executive Dean of the Global Institute of Sustainability (GIOS) in the School of Sustainability.

Melnick: So this is the first time that we’ve talked with people who really communicate sustainability, to the degree that this seems possible, with a very large public. You’ll learn about their listenership and the people they work with and who interact with them digitally.

We have a wonderful opportunity today to ask them questions and to hear their stories. These folks are from American Public Media, and particularly from the marketplace program, which I assume most or all of you have heard. I’m a regular listener and take the information to heart and I think they’re wonderful teachers and do really wonderful work.

We have four people from American Public Media today. I’m going to introduce them very, very briefly. Their vitaes and accomplishments are much longer than I have time for today. Some of their colleagues are here and there will be some events later on as well.

Let me explain the format to you very briefly. I’m going to ask each one of them to give a very brief opening remark. I’ll sort of tee up a question. Then when they’re done I’m going to ask each one of them a kind of a more specific question, given their areas of assignment. Then I’m going to leave it to you because I would like to spend the bulk of our time with you asking questions of these folks because we’ve spent some time with them earlier today and last night and they have just fascinating insights that I think we have not heard anything like before at Arizona State University in the Global Institute of Sustainability.

So, with that fanfare, I’m going to introduce my new friends and colleagues here, David Brancaccio is an Economy 4.0 correspondent for public radio’s popular daily program, Marketplace. You like that, huh, where he covers efforts to make the economy better and serve more people. His special on economical alternatives entitled “Fixing the Future” aired on PBS television last fall.

Next to him is Scott Tong who is a sustainability correspondent covering energy, markets, resources and the environment. For the last—well, ending in 2010, for four years, Scott served as Marketplace’s China Bureau Chief in Shanghai, China. We’ll be talking a little bit more about that, Scott.

Next to Scott, is Adriene Hill, who is a multimedia reporter from Marketplace’s Sustainability Desk. You’ll be hearing about the Sustainability Desk throughout the talks. Prior to joining Marketplace, Adriene worked as an editor and reporter at Chicago Public Radio.

Next to Adriene, is Eve Troeh, who joined the Sustainability Desk reporting team in 2010. Eve has covered the UN Climate Change Conference and follows breaking news on sustainability issues for Marketplace.

So that’s their brief background and I’m sure that you can look them up, Google them and everything else you may want to do, but what I’d like to do is just pose a very broad question and we’ll just sort of go in this order, if you don’t mind. I guess what’s on my mind, and I suspect on the mind of a lot of people in the audience here, is how do you communicate an idea as broad as sustainability?

When I talk to the students at the School of Sustainability, one of the things that they often say to me is, “If we have one more discussion about how to define sustainability my head’s going to explode,” right? Right, you can relate to this. It’s like, “Enough already,” all right, we’ve had it 16,000 times, and yet we still do not have a definition that’s common and let alone a definition that we communicate to the millions of people who are listeners.

So how do you go about this? How do you get your hands around this very complex concept? What’s inside the tent? What’s outside the tent? What’s evolving, etc. David?

David Brancaccio: And if experts, students, and academics can’t agree, how are people listening [laughter] going to possibly agree on this stuff? I suspect many people listen who are sympathetic with some of the values inherent in that kind of coverage, don’t have a good working definition. I’m a bit of an interloper on the panel.

I’m not with the Sustainability Desk. I’m with the Economy 4.0 Desk and guess what? They interlock quite nicely. My beat is about the economy of the future, how we measure it, what are the rules, regulations, and structures that we can put into place so that the economy better serves more people?

The economy is pretty good at serving some people, but it’s not even particularly good at serving most people. So I think we could all agree that wouldn’t it be great to have an economy that doesn’t explode every seven years, which is what it does? Does that sound sustainable to you, a system that explodes every seven years?

So, I’m very interested in applying these principles of sustainability. I think my colleagues are as well, moving them beyond simply, and I guess it’s not simple, but moving beyond just the green connotation and the future of the earth connotation and talk about the future of all of it. That’s a way that you can start bringing some rigor to the idea of what is sustainability?

There’s a kind of market activity, business, capitalism that’s hit and run capitalism. Go in, short-term, do something and leave. That sounds like the opposite of sustainable thinking, doesn’t it? Investment practices, attitudes toward mortgages, derivatives, trading in which you can make a very lightning fast profit but the rest of the world be damned. Does that sound sustainable?

So I’m not inventing this. You are starting to see, in fact, fully embrace—you see people, businesses and community activists applying the sustainable thinking to their work. I’ve been very interested, and I hope to do more coverage about this, about local communities that apply this longer-term thinking, thinking about the future, thinking about where do we want our community to be, not just at the end of the next accounting quarter, but in a year, five years, ten years, and how it might change behavior, how you might run a business.

Maybe you might not outsource some work to say, Asia, because it’s in the short-term cheaper. If that means all the jobs will go away and you end up living in a community that’s just awful. That, again, is sustainability. So that’s how I come at this, and it’s great because it’s a very beautiful, interlocking overlap between the type of work I’m doing and what my colleagues here are doing. Scott?

Scott Tong: Well, we have turned ourselves into pretzels trying to define sustainability [laughter]. In Los Angeles, about a year ago, all of us were at a table and we actually went around and said, “What do you think it means?” We went around and around and we came up with a paragraph, which I couldn’t recite if you asked me.

I think practically speaking, when we’re doing the stories and envisioning stories, it’s not a big barrier because in a radio story you can really tell just a good radio story. You make one point and just tell one thing. The advantage of being a business show is very often we’re doing the story that connects to these energy environment issues where there’s money at stake. So we’re covering—I’m back in the states.

I was in China the last four years. For them, the conversation almost never gets around to the polar bears, but it’s national competitiveness for companies there. I’m not sure China is going to lap the world, but as far as policy to channel human beings and capital, in the same place in the same ecosystem, and to see what happens. So this money has to stay there. It’s very practical in that respect. I think a lot of our reporting connects to that.

I’m based in Washington. I think another area where we do a lot of coverage is policy. As you know, energy is very connected to public policy. So, anyway, we do a lot of stories where policy, depending on your perspective, either promotes something or gets in the way.

I was in Florida. I did a story where we contrasted the Bahamas with Florida. In the Bahamas, which is much more free market, in a certain way, with all of the natural events that have happened there, and the rising seas, I went to look for the property insurance market on the coast. There isn’t one because no one can get insured so most people don’t live there any more. So the market is telling them, “You probably shouldn’t live here,” whereas in Florida, as I’m sure a lot of you know, it’s very subsidized. They do want to promote home ownership right on the water. The big national insurers have all left. They’re not there any more because it doesn’t make sense.

That’s an area where most people, except for politicians would say, “Well, this is a question of public policy,” and whether it’s getting in the way of sending signals, right? Because the signal from the market is, “What are you people smoking?”

I mean, I think money to be made and policy. We do a lot of stories about that, and you know we still manage to do a little naval gazing at our desk about what our mission in the world is, but not too much.

Adriene Hill: I would say, thinking back to that meeting Scott was talking about, where we all sat around this room and really worked hard at what this definition was, the one that stuck with me, although not the one we chose, was “don’t eat your seed corn.” Like at the end of the day, don’t eat your seed corn. Make sure there’s a future for your business, or for yourself, or for the species, or for the planet. Whatever it is, don’t eat your feed corn.

For me, that one sort of sticks with me but one thing I actually like about the sort of amorphous blobby definition of sustainability is that it allows lots of different openings. It allows people to come to these things through lots of different doors.

I was in Idaho for a story I was reporting on this little, tiny community that’s incredibly active environmentally. You’d think it was just a bunch of Liberals and this little community doing all these crazy greeny things, and it wasn’t. It was Republicans, it was Liberals and it was Independents that didn’t want anything to do with the government, but they all came to these spaces of caring about the environment, of caring about the natural world, of caring about their community and these different doors, through these different ways.

That’s something I think is so interesting about sustainability, and the fact that it is a little hard to define. It’s because we can tell stories that appeal to different people and get them there through different doors. So that’s something that I think is kind of an up-shot of not knowing exactly what we mean when we say the word.

Eve Troeh: I think one of the things that I report on is what companies think is sustainable and what cities and states and communities think is sustainable. In a way, my luxury as a reporter is to say, “Well, what do you think it is?” [Laughs] I don’t have to necessarily know what I think it is. I just need to report on what other people are doing that they think is sustainable, what other companies are doing that they think is sustainable.

One of the biggest challenges for sustainability reporting, especially if you’re sitting at a daily news meeting, is well what’s happening today? A lot of times the headline is some place has announced that they’re going to do something by 2050. That’s a hard headline to bring out to the public. It’s a story about something that’s going to happen in the next several decades.

One way to look at it is, “Well, what are people doing now because of what they think will happen in the future?” So it’s not necessarily our role to say what we think will happen in the future, or what we think should happen in the future, but it’s more to look at what certain companies or certain communities are doing because they’ve looked at information, they’ve got particular concerns and this is where they think things are going. That’s where the money goes, that’s where the policy goes, and then that’s where we go.

Melnick: Okay, thanks. So the next 15 minutes I’m going to ask some questions of the panel here, and then it’s your turn. So be thinking of some questions or this is going to be a very boring, but good lunch [laughter]. I’m going to start out of the order that we just went in. I want to ask Scott a question about energy in China.

There are stories, whether or not they’re actually evidence-based, I don’t know about. You know, a coal-fired power plant going up every fill-in-the-blank week, two weeks in China to create enough energy to meet the demands of this growing economy. This is the Global Institute of Sustainability so we think broadly about the globe and it’s challenges. Can we create a sustainable environment with a China that feels that it’s got to grow at eight or nine percent every year?

Similarly, the Brazils and the Indias that are coming behind them that are developing as well, when that requires in China’s case enormous amounts of energy to satisfy both their recreational needs and their industrial needs, etc. Given, at least in China, the fact that they’ve got this enormous amount of coal that they can use, it’s fairly cheap and they know the technology, there’s a disincentive in some respects for them to do some of the things I know they’re doing in renewable energy, etc.

Can we ever achieve some kind of global balance on energy and climate change with a China that’s that voracious, that has voracious an appetite?

Tong: So when I think about it, I have a cousin who, while I was growing up in New York, he was growing up in Shanghai. He works at a factory, a General Motors factory. So, actually, one reason I think GM kept the Buick label as they were tossing a lot of them out, was because Buick really sells well in China.

Melnick: God knows why [laughter].

Tong: It’s their corporate vehicle of choice, actually. There’s the alternative universe of China, I suppose [laughter], but his life is very energy-heavy. He’s got a small motorcycle that he rides around the city. He has two laptops and they’re both kind of sleeker and nicer than mine. His cell phone is nicer than mine. I mean, he has the same life that I have and then you multiply that.

He’s been in the city his whole life. We’ve had 200 million migrants come from the countryside to the cities to kind of live that life. Then there’s another 200 million who are coming along the way. So the energy future is—I mean the leaders in China, they have a choice, but the answer’s pretty clear. Did they want to make sure the energy is there to kind of keep the economy running, growing at eight percent a year, where the average person’s life has gotten better by eight percent every year? Or, are they going to do something to kind of curtail it for purposes of 2050? It’s a pretty easy choice.

I think as far as China, what a lot of people say is with how ever much coal it has, and it’s importing a ton of coal from Australia. That’s one reason Australia’s economy grew 18 years in a row was because of exporting this stuff to China. As you know, it is the game-changer of carbon capture. It’s if they can find a way to take the emissions from these coal-fired plants, capture it, stick it under the ground, which it’s not commercial anywhere in the world now. They’re testing it and putting a lot of money into it. China’s putting a lot of money into it. Without that, I think there are a lot of questions.

Melnick: Eve, we talked earlier. Can you hear me in back okay, Brenda, can you hear me? Okay, Eve, we talked earlier a little bit about corporations. You mentioned corporations and studying business. If this is an unfair question, you can let me know this in front of 150 of my closest friends here. Can you give us some examples of corporations that “get it” when it comes to sustainability, the ones that don’t and what’s the difference?

Troeh: Sure, I can give you examples of people within corporations who I think “get it”.

Melnick: Okay, close enough.

Troeh: Probably the most impressive person I’ve see who has the title of a sustainability officer, or a VP of sustainability, and these are titles which a lot of you, if you’re in this program here at ASU, are probably hoping to hold these titles one day. There are increasing numbers of companies that are hiring those sustainability suites of offices. Those people are rising up in the ranks.

I heard a guy, Tod Arbogast, not an easy—not a radio-friendly name, who is the Sustainability Officer for Avon. He used to be the Sustainability Officer for Dell. He had this amazing presentation on how companies should assess their risk.

Companies, if they want to do sustainability right, need to stay on top of UN policy. They need to stay up on top of domestic and foreign policy. If you sell products in Europe and you’re in the US, then you do care about your carbon emissions because you’re going to be selling in a market where that’s going to matter.

So he was talking about doing this sort of mapping of risk factors and communicating those risk factors for Avon. There are lots of issues for Avon. It’s a cosmetics company, so you might think there’d be things like using all-natural ingredients in their products, or making sure that their packaging is made of post-consumer plastic content or something like that. But the issue he came up with for Avon was deforestation.

Does anybody have any idea why deforestation would be a big issue for Avon? I had no idea. The catalogs. Avon is one of the biggest producers of paper on the planet. They send billions of catalogs around the world every year. They don’t just sell products in the US. They sell products all around the world.

So they decided to make deforestation a key issue for them. That was after extensive consideration of other issues and mapping these risk factors. Some factors they found, “Well, if we talk about the toxic chemicals in our face creams, and how we’ve reduced the toxic chemicals in our face creams, that’s just going to raise more issues than it solves for us,” but we can take on deforestation and we can talk about efforts that we’re doing. We can donate proceeds from catalog sales to deforestation. We can use recycled paper. We can do all these things on that part. So that was very impressive.

One major player in all of this is Walmart. People sort of begrudgingly give Walmart some huge credit for advancing sustainability. They’re really watching their supply chains. They’re not just taking it for granted if a company comes to them and says, “Hey, our packaging is compostable.” We talked about compostable packing. They’re saying, “Well, that’s great, but does that actually—we want more than that. When is it compostable? How much of it is actually going to get composted? We don’t want your compostable bowl if we’re selling it in markets that don’t have a program for managing that material in a way that it will end up making the world a better place, or reducing emissions,” or whatever measure you want to use.

So Walmart is really cranking down on its supply chains. Now, if you want to sell to Walmart, and you want to get your product on their shelves, you need to show them that you’re going to help them achieve their renewable energy and their sustainability goals. If you can do that, that gives you as a company, a smaller contractor, an edge with Walmart and then there you go.

Staples, I talked to the Sustainability Officer at Staples. I don’t know enough about their actual practices in sustainability, but one thing that was interesting to me was the way that they developed a sustainability department which was they got attacked. They were the target of some environmentalist campaigns against how they were the cause of millions of trees being cut down because of all the paper that they sell to offices.

As a response to that attack, as in sort of looking at this issue, because they were being—you know, people were demanding answers on this issue from them. They came up with some answers but it actually caused them to completely reevaluate the way that they did a lot of things. They created a sustainability department because of that. A lot of companies have that story. They create a sustainability department in response to drastic attacks. They don’t want to get caught with their pants down, basically.

So those are some of the corporate issues I would say. I don’t have anybody I can call out as really being awful on this, but I will say that a lot of companies that do sustainability reports, those sustainability reports are PR. They don’t have negative information in them. They’re just a way for companies to highlight internal issues. They haven’t, in the US, gotten to the point of being very meaningful documents. So when I get, in my inbox, a PR agency telling me, “Look at this company’s sustainability report. Would you want to do a story about this?” It’s like, “No, I don’t want to do a story about your sustainability reports [laughs].”

So I think that that’s the issue. It’s looking beyond the sustainability report, meeting these people, looking around the company and getting a sense of what they’re really doing. You’re not going to find the answer in their own internal report.

Melnick: Okay, thanks. Adriene, I don’t know. This just popped into my head, but I want to know whether or not, because I’ve heard that it’s possible, that the entire world could be fed with organic food supplies. I know you know something about this. Is this true or false, Adriene?

Hill: Well, thanks for asking [laughter]. We talked earlier today. I did a story for Marketplace about a month ago now, about organic foods, and whether or not organic food systems as they are currently in place could in fact feed the entire world as we are sort of approaching 9 billion, and then more people.

Sort of the answer that the experts that I had, and I was also sort of—the peg was this British report came out and said no. With the resources that we have right now, with the technology that we have right now, with the limited water and the limited land, this isn’t going to be the way for it. We can’t do it all organically.

So, yes, no we can’t, but it was quite controversial. We have gotten a ton of letters about it. We have gotten a ton of feedback. There’s an online petition you can sign [laughter]. I won’t give you the URL, but no it’s actually been a really interesting experience.

I think one thing that we’ve learned, and that we really pride ourselves on at Marketplace is not just sort of saying, not going ahead with whatever the common wisdom is, but actually looking at it and addressing it, really confronting it and hopefully starting a dialogue. I do feel like that we did do that in this case, a long, long dialogue, but one we really are thankful for.

I think it also points to one interest of mine which is really sort of the role food plays in being an entry point for people to think about the future, and being an entry point for people to think about climate change, people to think about issues of sustainability, people to really think about what It means for the world. I think food is something—you know, I can’t—my guess is not all of you care that much about solar panels. My guess is that not all of you care that much about even hybrid cars. But my guess is that you all care about food because you have to eat it.

So I think that food is this incredible entry point for us to really start a meaningful dialogue and really have conversations that matter about these bigger issues that are part of our mission.

Melnick: I’m going to ask David the last question before we go to you in the audience. So please have your questions ready.

David, earlier in the conversation this morning, you described what you and your colleagues do as your information designers. It strikes me that what you do in your portion of the world, what Marketplace does and what APM does is really similar to what we do as educators. You’re educating the public and your listeners in a certain way. You’re providing information and analysis and a form of education, and we just take 16 weeks to do it, right? You can do it perhaps more compactly.

What is it about the radio medium that both enables and/or inhibits your ability to teach?

Brancaccio: I was on the New York subway the other day and saw an ad. I think it’s a PSA (public service announcement) and it was riveting. I took a picture of it with my cell phone. It was a picture of 26 packets of sugar all arrayed out so that you could see what 26 packets of white sugar looked like. The tagline was something like, “Congratulations,” and it’s like a kid holding a—not even a Big Gulp, but a normal size soda. It says, “Congratulations, your kid just ate 26 packets of sugar.”

What an incredible, interesting, engaging, memorable instructive piece of information design. This is a group that feels that this is an important public policy issue. I dare say, it probably is, with rates of type 2 diabetes, and so forth, connected to our diets. Someone sat down and used their genius in getting their complex idea across in a vivid way.

That still was a bit of PR. It was probably the New York Department of Public Health, or somebody, I think paid for that. We’re not involved in PR, but we do—we think our job is to take important public policy ideas and not waste your time with unimportant public policy ideas, and figure out ways to communicate them in effective, clear ways so that you can run with them.

There was a question asked this morning about calls to action. You know, you do a story and how come we don’t tell people what to do with the information? We actually cannot do that. It’s not what public broadcasting does. It’s not actually in our mission to tell you what to do with it, or to order you to do something about it, but I think it’s part of our duty as reporters to design stories that are compelling, but that also give you a real clear sense of what some smart people are thinking are options.

Actually, I try never to do stories that end with “and we’re all going to die.” [Laughter] You need to find some human being who has a more positive vision of the future. “If we do this, this and this we could start to nibble away or actually solve these problems,” but an answer more specifically to your question, we have some wonderful assets as broadcasters that our print colleagues don’t have, and even it isn’t as strong in the wonderful multimedia world.

We, in our arrogance, decide what you listen to and in what order, like a seminar leader. When you have students around a table, you decide. In that way, we can hopefully introduce you to ideas that you did not wake up in the morning worrying about, but that perhaps we should all chew on. So there’s that.

The other thing we have in our toolkit, and it’s just a basic one and it’s all part of information design, is the ability to tell human stories. We get real people that hopefully you will like or hate that will be memorable. You remember information as narrative. You don’t remember, unfortunately, as PowerPoint presentations. This is something that people in large organizations tend to forget, but what are the limitations?

The limitations are we cannot demand—although it would be great, right? A foundation once talked to me about coercive information where—have you ever seen the movie “Clockwork Orange,” where the guy is like strapped down to the chair and his eyeball’s propped open? That’s what I’d like to have.

We’re going to take you through 4-1/2 hours of global warming stories, and you’re going to watch it, darn it!

We can’t do that. Why can’t we do that? Well, we can’t do that for obvious reasons, but also your attention span is a lot of competition for your time. It’s a blessing that you spend any time with us at all. So we try not to waste your time, but as Scott was alluding to, a typical public radio piece if it’s effective will introduce you to some characters, introduce you to a public policy idea, show you some options but you’re making a point. You’re not making four, and what issue out there only has one particular facet? They all have multi facets, but you can over time come at issues as we will with the issue of organics in the future.

I mean, what more crucial story is there than the future of our food supply. I mean, it’s something that we need to talk about. You can come with that over time. You can also do multimedia resources, because there will be a portion of the audience that is really hungry for that hint of an option they heard about, and they’ll want to delve into it.

Melnick: It just occurs to me, before we go to the questions in the audience, that maybe a little context is in order. I can ask the panel, but also some of their colleagues, Ben, Joaquin or Angela, can you give us a sense of the size of the audience and the distribution of the work that you do Marketplace, and in your case, David, a little bit different situation, perhaps. So the audience gets a sense of the number of people that you reach and a little bit about the demographics of your audience, just so they have a little bit of context for the discussion. Who can jump in here.

Adair: So Marketplace has three shows, three programs. There’s the PM broadcast, four programs. I’m sorry, four. The PM broadcast which is the evening show. It’s a half-hour. It reaches about 5 million a week. Then there’s the Marketplace Morning Report, which is an eight-minute cast in the mornings. It comes with the 51-59 on every hour. So that reaches another 5 million to 6 million—6-7 million. [Laughter]

Then there’s Marketplace Money, which is a weekend one-hour personal finance show that reaches 600 thousand—775 thousand. They [laughed over]. The new show is the Marketplace Tech Report which is a four-minute program that just launched, I think, maybe a month ago and is—how many markets is it on now? It’s growing [laughter].

Melnick: What about the demographics?

Adair: The demographics, we’re about to undertake a really big market analysis of our own audience. Most of the numbers that we use right now are standard for public radio’s demographic profile. So it’s older. The average age, I think, is late 40s early 50s, higher income, college grads and we refer to it as tastemakers and decision-makers as sort of what the underwriters, when they’re going out trying to sell underwriting, they talk about the public radio audience as being tastemakers and decision-makers. They’re the people who are running things, doing things, starting businesses, voting and things like that.

Melnick: Okay, thanks. So is this yours David? So 5 million people, so almost as many as are enrolled at ASU [laughs], or so it seems when you’re trying to find a parking place around.

Adair: The audiences are fairly separate as well. I think if you take the 5 million from PM, the 7 million from AM and the 775,000 for the weekend show, that rolls up to about, let me think, 9.5 million people total. So there’s some overlap, but it’s also very separate audiences.

So our sustainability stories, when we do a big story like when David went to the Middle East. He was going to do a big series of reports next week. We’re going to put them on PM and on AM, so we reach different audiences at different times of the day with different information that all kind of dovetails together.

Melnick: In the interest of full disclosure and in the unvarnished truth, how many people here listen to one or more of these programs on Marketplace. Good gig now [laughter and voicing over].

Adair: Fifty plus, I’m very rich.

Melnick: Yes, exactly. Okay, so the floor is open. The only ground rules here are two. One, is this is not your opportunity to spend five minutes giving your platform speech. This is for questions for these experts, okay? The second rule is, I get to cut you off if you break the first rule, rather unceremoniously, okay. So, yes. Can you stand up and just introduce yourself? By the way, we’ll have to repeat the questions, I believe, for the video, so if you get a question addressed to you, do you mind repeating it? If it’s to the whole group then I’ll repeat it.

Audience: I was going to—[inaudible0:34:45.5] issue of sustainability. I wanted to go all the way back to the first question about how you define sustainability. I don’t think we’re worrying that much about it any more [0:34:45.5inaudible], you know, how do you define truth, how do you define freedom and justice? Well, you don’t [laughter]. In fact, you can what it isn’t but you don’t have to say what it is. One thing that we have found that’s really important is having a good understanding of how you conceptualize sustainability. What are the components, right?

So is it about systemic thinking? What are the components that you’re really looking at because if you don’t have that, how do you know somebody is doing sustainability out there, aside from what they tell you? So, given that, the two stories that you were talking about food, organics, and the one about Avon. I wonder how far you take the story and what stories you pick because the stories you pick frame sustainability for people. If you’re talking about 9+ million people that are decision-makers and tastemakers, you’re framing sustainability for them. That’s critical if they’re the people that actually are taking it a certain direction.

Melnick: So the question is about framing sustainability and what the concepts are.

Audience: Yeah, how far do you take this?

Melnick: How far do you take the stories because you’re framing it.

Audience: How do you visualize it yourself because if you have a certain conceptualization of it, then you’ve already framed the story in a certain way. That conceptualization isn’t accurate or at least explicit so that the people understand. Then you’re only leading somebody in a direction instead of full educating them.

Melnick: So how does the reporter or the producer frame the story and deal with these issues to frame the stories? The floor is open.

Troeh: I think most sociologists who study journalism are very disappointed at the lack of drama in the decision-making process of how you frame a story. I mean, we at Marketplace, even have anthropologists and sociologists who want to watch our editorial meetings and find out how the news gets made. It’s not as probably dark and scary, or rational and organizationally sound, as you would probably hope that it would be. But, so when that comes to things like story choice and how we’re covering sustainability, that’s why (as Scott said) you make one point in a story.

So we try to diversify our interests across the desk so that we’re covering issues that we think we have a lot of the waterfront covered. So we’ve got a focus on energy. We’ve got someone—we sort of say, “Oh, well, I’ll take that, I’ll take that.”

We’re covering food. I would say that there isn’t anything that we say isn’t sustainability. If someone came to us with an idea we wouldn’t say, “Well, actually, you’re wrong that’s not a sustainability story.” We’d probably be more inclined to figure out how we could take sustainability as a slice of everything, a slice of politics, a slice of corporate earnings, a slice of energy use, a slice of housing, education, you know? When I think of sustainability I think of it as being that interdisciplinary subject that you all think of it as, at the school, as well.

For story choice, for features, story ideas can come from anywhere. Sometimes they do come from press releases, but we tend—we don’t do stories on just one company, but maybe something you get in an announcement in a study will spark your interest. Well, how much is that happening and to what extent?

Something like solar leases, you know, how many people are actually getting these solar leases? What kind of problems do these solar leases cause for a utility company and their planning. I mean, that—something like solar leases would have to be spread out over five or six stories. We’ve done one story on Marketplace, which I did about solar leases, which basically was a two-minute feature on the morning report which was just defining what it is. Then we take it from there.

Often, I think, if you’re in the sustainability community you would be surprised at what turns out to be the story. It’s probably something much more basic than it is for people in the industries that are bringing their story ideas to us. You know, they’re bringing us the latest development and we end up talking them through to something four steps back, and that’s where it is. You know, what you were doing, starting to do two years ago, is what we’re going to be talking about now in the public sphere. So I don’t know if that’s a helpful answer, but that’s one way to look at it.

Melnick: Anybody else want to respond?

Hill: No, I do think that Eve’s point is a good one, though, that sustainability really—I mean, in some ways it’s a lot like money, which is what we focus on in Marketplace. It’s everywhere. Sustainability is a component of nearly every story and many, I guess, stories that you hear. What we can do is take those stories, take those points of interest and look for the sustainability angle. I think sometimes we do that as well, instead of just—sustainability isn’t just greenhouse gases.

Sustainability isn’t just water. Sustainability is really in—there’s a component of sustainability in nearly every story that we tell. I think what we do is sort of look for that sort of creative angle, that sort of brings up this topic people are already talking about sometimes, but then shows people the sustainability side of it.

Brancaccio: You said that the time was done for debating what sustainability means, but I think it actually would inform your question. What definition did you come up with last time you sat around in the windowless room?

Adair: So let me introduce myself. I’m Ben Adair, the Editorial Director of Sustainability Initiatives at American Public Media. Sustainability for us is how we organize our economic activities or society’s present needs so that we—hold on, I’m mangling it now.

Melnick: You did great this morning.

Adair: The coffee’s wearing off. Sustainability means how we organize our current economic activity, so we don’t compromise future generations. So, with economic activities, we’re talking about a lot of different things, right? It’s buying and selling things. It’s resource extraction. It’s public policy. It’s energy. It’s consumer choices.

Brancaccio: Then I’m not in their beat, but for all Marketplace Stories, something that you may not have thought of that some people find confounding, my next question would then be, and who’s the human being that you’d want to listen to their story that evokes this? If it’s a future story, maybe they’re not born yet, so what do you do?

It’s a person who has passion, a person who has invested something of themselves into something connected to what meets the first criteria. That means that the issues are a dime a dozen. There’s a quadrillion issues we could all be covering. It’s not a problem finding them, finding the human being is often more of a challenge.

Moderate: Mick?

Audience: Mick Dalrymple, my question regards, it shows Marketplace, but it’s about the economy. GDP, being that GDP is an exponential function that anybody who has taken algebra knows that it eventually becomes vertical which is inherently unsustainable. Whoever, I think it’s the University of Chicago economist that came up with the definition of GDP. I think he, himself, said it’s a very poor way for people to judge the success of society.

I think it was on Marketplace. I’m not positive because this was the first time that I’d ever heard a national news story saying, “Hey, maybe we should be looking at something other than GDP, but I just—you know, being that it’s a very compact way, it’s a very nice sound byte way, it’s very media-friendly to use GDP, how? If you think it should happen, how do we actually change the way that the media presents, and that people think about, the success of our society with some other mechanism of measurement besides GDP?

Melnick: This is not easy to characterize. You guys are giving me tough questions to put in like four words for the videographer. Is it fair to say that the question is, other than GDP, how can we look at the economics of sustainability?

Audience: Yeah, in a media-friendly way.

Brancaccio: Funny you should ask [laughter]. You know the actor Liam Neeson? When it was “Schindler’s List” year, just before the Academy Awards, he was being interviewed by Barbara Walters. She said, “How does this affect your love life?”

He got annoyed, and he said, “Barbara, it’s not like I go into bars, goin’ up to women and saying have you seen ‘Schindler’s List,’ well I’m the guy!”

Well, I’m the guy! Half of my life right now for Marketplace is that, alternative measures, and trying to popularize them and explore them, because every—it’s not just a single proposed alternative measure that would go beyond GDP, and everybody knows in Bhutan they have thrown out the GDP, actually, which is a rare thing. Most people don’t want to throw out the GDP, and had the Gross Happiness Index, but there’s many different indices. They’re all a really interesting expression of someone who has a positive vision of the future and wants to measure it in an interesting way so that—with the view that you get what you measure, measure the right thing.

It’s crucial. It’s not just an academic discussion about this, now, because if the idea is we’ve just got to keep increasing the activity of the economy or none of us are going to have jobs, and everybody is going to be miserable, we’ve got a problem. We have an energy problem that we’re going to talk about at the thing tonight with Mr. Hofmeister. There’s a lot of challenges involved in the idea that trees have to grow to the sky or we’re all doomed.

So why not ask, because you didn’t wake up this morning going, “I got to increase GDP.” You know, “My life’s not going to be complete unless gross domestic product—.” Right, how many actual students in here? Raise your hand.

Okay, again, with the hands, how many people are concerned about getting a job? Okay, I bet, and I’m not going to ask, but probably that supersedes how many of you are worried about sustainability. You probably are worried about sustainability, but you’re probably more worried about getting a job.

Well, guess what? They’re interrelated, so maybe you could measure jobs as an indicator that’s an alternative to the GDP.

A lot of people like—but it’s an interesting dialogue to have, what is it that you want out of life? Sometimes it gets distorted too much into what makes you happy? That sounds frivolous, and it may be. There’s a lot of important work that we all have to do that doesn’t make us happy.

I just met a woman who is an urban planner in Ithaca, New York. She just slogged through this horrible campaign to rezone something to make her community a better place. It involved endless meetings, slogging through getting coalitions together. She was successful. She thinks Ithaca is going to be a better place. It didn’t make her happy, but it needed to get done.

Maryland has a Genuine Progress Indicator. There are interesting development indicators on like a Human Development Index that looks at education, infant mortality, gaps between the rich and poor.

The reason I’m so interested in it besides making the world a better place is that I was the anchorman for the show for all those years. I bought into the whole GDP thing. I feel I personally have something to atone for [laughter].

Melnick: Any other comments on GDP? That’s a hard act to follow. Yes, sir.

Audience: My name is Bill, and I totally agree that—

Melnick: Can you explain what your affiliation is?

Audience: I’m a small business person and I’ve used living healthy and green in my own personal business and my life. What changed me around was reading Al Gore’s first book, Herman Daly’s For the Common Good, if any of you have heard of it, and Paul Hawken with The Ecology of Commerce. I was just absorbed in it. I was so passionate after reading it, but anyways, I—the Civil Rights of the 60s, churches got on board to make the Civil Rights happen.

There was a program on now about a preacher up in Oregon, or Washington State, how he stood in front of his audience that came. He was scared to talk about sustainability and going green. He got a standing ovation.

Science and churches need to relate and we’re only getting a small percentage, let’s face reality. How do we reach out and get churches to jump on board? Due to population and urban sprawl, it’s an issue that’s very sensitive. How can we get the churches to get involved like the Civil Rights, because if we get them on board—some day I knew the colleges were going to talk about this issue and now it’s out there. Now it’s going into the high school level and slowly into the grade schools, but I still said the next thing would be churches. How do we reach out?

Melnick: So this is a little easier to characterize this question. No, but that’s fine, it’s a very good question. As the gentleman pointed out, the importance of churches in social change and awareness. The question is, how do you get churches on board with the thinking about sustainability. I’m sure that this is something that you lie awake at night worried about. What’s the answer from a public media perspective? How do you get the churches involved? Do you think of the churches as an audience?

Troeh: Well, I do think we do think of charity which is a huge part of the churches and the nonprofits that are so powerful in this space are almost corporations in unto themselves. Things like Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Wildlife Fund. I mean, these are huge, huge groups that wield a lot of power. There is a lot of passion that we’ve talked about.

I think a lot of it comes back to consumer issues that Adriene covers a lot in that people are sort of saying they want to know what to do. As we said, it’s not our job to tell people what to do, but people do want to be told what to do to make the world a better place.

In terms of that gap there, I mean, American Public Media does have a program called Unbeing which is great at talking about ethical issues and some of the issues in this space.

At Marketplace, I think our way of doing interfacing with the faith community would be more through something like what foundations, charities and faith-based organizations with a lot of power are doing on some of these issues. They do affect some of the poorest people in the world.

When we were in Mexico for Cancun for the Climate Conference, Scott spent some time with some farmers who are already losing the ability to make whatever meager living they make because of climate change. So when you get—when that rubber hits the road with relief work that so many churches do, and they get involved in climate change, I think that that might be the most direct way in through the relief and poverty work that so many churches are involved in around the world.

Hill: The other way is just through creating really interesting conversations and hopefully starting dialogues. I do think if we do really creative stories that get somebody talking over dinner, or somebody talking on Sunday after church, like if people start talking about what they hear on our show, what they hear about sustainability, then the movement—then it goes from there, and it spirals.

So in some ways, I don’t think we sit around and think of like how can we get churches talking about this, but we sit around and think how can we get people talking about this? I think that’s a really—it’s what we strive for in every story we do, is a story that you’re going to go home and you’re going to say, “You’ll never guess what I heard on the radio today.” That’s what we want. That’s a successful story.

Brancaccio: There is this concept of economic justice. That’s something that you can just imagine the person in the pulpit would resonate with them. The way I see it, we need to give them the tools, and her the tools, to be able to sort of—first of all, connect the dots on economic justice issues, but to form their conclusions. It’s not for us to form the conclusions on something as sort of objective as economic justice, but when I joked about the “Clockwork Orange” scenario where you’re strapped to the chair with your eyeballs opened, being forced to consume something?

Actually, those do exist. Book clubs [laughter] where there’s a social sanction if you don’t do your homework, right, if you haven’t read the book, but also church halls and other community groups. It doesn’t have to be religious, where they can say, “We’re all doin’ this on Tuesday, and we’re gonna play some Marketplace pieces.”

I remember the moment I just could have died and gone to heaven. It’s been a bunch of years, and it’s happened since in other contexts, but the example that I remember is Congressman George Miller’s office calls Marketplace from Washington. They say, “Listen, Meryl Streep contacted the congressman and wants your piece from last night because she has 1,000 people at Carnegie Hall tonight. She wants to hear your piece about Occidental Petroleum and a threat of mass suicide.”

You know, Meryl Streep, Carnegie Hall? So, through the magic of digital communications, we got that sucker right to New York. They played it to the captive audience.

So houses of worship can be very important and we should actually be running with our material and saying, “Here’s the people. Look, we’re meeting them. Here’s some of the issues. What are the other issues? What do you think this community’s response should be?”

Melnick: Okay, yes.

Audience: Kate Gallego, community member, and I Chair the Phoenix Environmental Quality Commission. I was wondering if you could talk about when you do a report that includes climate change, if you have the ability on your own to decide how you would characterize the scientific consensus, or if there is sort of guidelines from American Public Media or NPR, and sort what word you use for climate change or global warming. Then, also, the response you get and sort of how your listeners view the scientific consensus.

Melnick: So what are the parameters or limitations on how you define climate change, fair enough for basics? Good question. Scott?

Tong: I, as you know, there’s so much—it’s not about churches, but there’s so much religion over this topic [laughter]. So I guess a couple of times I’ve just gone to what the UN scientists use, the balance of the evidence [dot, dot, dot] and go from there. Beyond that, it is so—I live in Washington. It’s so loaded. People will take this and manufacture it into the fact-free zone of Washington, DC. So beyond that, you know, I just stay with that. I don’t know about the rest of you.

Hill: Yeah, I think it’s a word that can be charged. I mean, it’s something that in-house we have no debates over do we need to characterize both sides. We don’t have—I mean, we all believe in climate change. No one—we never have those conversations, but I think to say climate change has become a political—you know, climate change and global warming are both sort of political “buzzwords.” So sometimes I’ll say, “You know, the planet that is warming because of pollution,” [laughs] you know, and it’s—and I’m not saying climate change and I’m not saying global warming. So then people’s hackles are maybe less likely to go up, and we can go and get on with the story and get on with what we’re actually talking about.

Brancaccio: We haven’t committed to a date yet, on the air, for when the earth burns out [laughter], but therein lies the issue, right? In other words, beyond human beings have had an effect on the world’s climate, which I think that’s what most scientists will agree. You know, how quickly it’s happening and most importantly what our public policy response will be, that’s the one that absolutely we can’t tell you.

We can show you what some of the options are and explore them on the air, but that is a human decision, figuring out how we’re going to weigh today versus the future. If there’s a fault with all the media, ourselves too maybe, it’s this notion that sometimes we don’t explore the idea that—how do I put this? There’s a sense in Washington, in particular, and you must have noticed this, where there’s hardcore believers that the earth is going to burn out in 12 years. There’s the people who are the deniers. If the truth is right, it’s somewhere in the middle, right?

Isn’t that often how public policy works? Some of the worse scenarios could also come true. Those also remain possibilities. We just do not know. So people tend to, somehow psychologically and the media abets this, and sometimes we fall into that pattern of, “It is possible that some of the worse scenarios do come true.” So people need to, when deciding what their public policy response should be and what they should tell their congressman and woman and so forth, they have to weigh—we have to help them weigh the idea that, yes, it’s possible there are scenarios in which the worse effects are, in fact, further off than we ever thought, but the other possibilities are also the case.

Human beings deal with risk and understanding risk very imperfectly. We have a hard time conveying it as well, I think.

Tong: I think the advantage of the business show is that we can talk about how markets react to that risk. Certain sectors are very exposed to their perception of that risk, insurance markets, agricultural markets, etc. So, and I don’t think that we find ourselves very often in a situation where we’ll be taking that head-on. Rather, it’s in many cases there’s money to be made and lost in the marketplace based on how they see their risk. In that way, I don’t think we get stuck on that or how to characterize it too often.

Troeh: We do get comments, though. We get—there are the people who haunt the comment boards who do absolutely not believe in global warming and use our website as their public mouthpiece to espouse their beliefs on the subject. Jonathan Lovelace from Milan, Michigan, are you here? He comments on every single story that mentions climate change, on every single one. So we do get those activists on the other side of things who do not necessarily want any part of this and want a public forum to do that, so there’s that too.

Audience: My name is Yola, and my question is—

Melnick: Yola, you are a student or a community member?

Audience: I’m a college professor and a counselor. My question to you, David, is about cognitive business, an idea that is good but I don’t behave the behavior of my ideas [inaudible 0:57:29.3] on the inside. Sustainability is an idea that is wonderful, it’s a rational idea, and consumerism that is an emotional investment. We are a consumer society. Can you speak to how do we get sustainability to become an idea of passion, because I think there’s a split, and consumerism makes it harder to really buy, with passion, into it.

Melnick: Can you recharacterize this?

Brancaccio: Yeah, the question was about practicing what we preach. Many people would argue that the topics of sustainability are crucially important, so how come we’re not ginning up the passion that we should about this? What might we do to explore that issue?

Audience: And the role of consumers?

Brancaccio: I’ve been actually doing my homework for the presentation tonight where I do a dialogue with Jon Hofmeister, the former president of Shell. I was reminded of some notes that I took in Cambridge, England a couple of years ago that addressed this. It’s difficult stuff.

Economics has recognized this problem that it is much more easy to deal with the here and now because the here and now is concrete. The future is abstract and if you don’t believe that, try to get someone to quit smoking, who is young and started smoking. The idea that in 40 years horrible things are going to happen to your lungs, and you’re going to get operations and chemotherapy and die, they’re aware of it, but they’re like, “I don’t know, it’s in 40 years, stuff happens.”

It’s certainly relevant about climate change, but the idea of boosting your social standing among your peers by looking cool by lighting up a cigarette today is something extremely tangible. Humans are terrible at this. They discount the future amazingly.

I don’t know if I’ll get to it tonight, and I’ll see where Jon wants to also go with some of this stuff, but it’s even reduced to personal finance. Let’s talk about consumer issues. They’ve done experiments, economists, with “I’ll give you 50 bucks now, or I’ll give you $300 bucks in five years,” like for real, they’ll sign a contract. Everybody takes the 50 bucks now.

You have to raise the amount in five years up really high to get them to take the other bargain, completely irrationally high, like it doesn’t make any sense. There’s no return on investment that is that guaranteed that you could do in the regular marketplace that would increase it like that in five years.

People are awful at that. So what is the solution?

Well, smarter minds than me are thinking about this. Among the issues that you may hear more about, moving forward, especially with the debate not just about climate change and sustainability but also about the budget deficit and the national debt, in which there’s going to have to be, it is argued, the reining in of our spending, why not frame everything we do, every public policy decision, every dollar we spend, or every dollar we cut, through the prism of, “What does this do to our children and their children?”

Does it hurt them? Don’t do it.

Now, that of course easily applies to environmental sustainability. Is this going to wreck the earth so that they’re miserable?

Then that’s a little bit more tangible for people. It’s not their future, it’s the people they love. Is that enough to knock this thing home? I don’t know. We’re all, every one of us is guilty of this problem, all the time.

Tong: I think when it comes to energy we often talk about our behavior. You know, we drive so many miles to come to an event, whatever, and then we think about climate change in the long-term. I think that’s an area where we’re actually seeing a response to that, where we might assume that it’s just getting worse, but there are a lot of smart energy people who think energy demand in the US has actually peaked, and it peaked way before Lehman collapsed, that if you measure vehicle miles traveled, the average commute time, the vehicles we buy.

So, arguably, we have responded to the market signals. You know, we h