Edward  Humes

FORCE  OF  NATURE:
THE UNLIKELY STORY OF WAL-MART'S GREEN REVOLUTION:
HOW IT COULD TRANSFORM BUSINESS AND SAVE THE WORLD
HarperBusiness. 2011. 272 pages
ISBN-10: 006169049X

reviewed by Patrick Killough



(1) biblio.com not reviewable 03/13/2011


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(2) lunch.com  03/13/2011

name of review: "... it's getting harder and harder to hate Wal-Mart"

rating: * * * *

review:

The clumsily named book, FORCE OF NATURE -THE UNLIKELY STORY OF WAL*MART'S GREEN REVOLUTION: HOW IT COULD TRANSFORM BUSINESS AND SAVE THE WORLD, is a very long, happy morality tale of initial corporate rape of the planet, one CEO's conversion, management's change of heart and repentance for past failings, followed by purpose of amendment and ongoing redemption.

From beginning to end, bottom-line considerations are portrayed as the greatest single driving force within Wal-Mart. In 1962 Sam Walton launched Wal-Mart, a vision to bring lowest cost products to a hitherto neglected small-town, rural and penny-wise America. Unintentionally, "Mr Sam" also created a corporate monster which drove competition out of small-town America, broke labor unions, drove American jobs overseas, deforested large swaths of the earth and in the process generated expensive lawsuits and made itself increasingly unpopular, even hated -- especially by feminists, labor union leaders, environmentalists aka treehuggers aka greens.

Something had to change if Wal-Mart was to survive as a gigantic, hugely profitable global economic force. Fortunately for the world, according to FORCE OF NATURE author Edward Humes, Mr Sam had begotten an oldest son and large stockholder in Wal-Mart named Samuel Robson (Rob) Walton. Rob loved nature. And almost by chance white water rafters and other environmentalists with a vision, led by Jib Ellison, in 2004 used Rob as a point of entry into Wal-Mart and a series of three savvy Chief Executive Officers. The environmentalists showed the CEOs a mini-collection of quick wins, easy ways to increase savings and fatten Wal-Mart's bottom line. An particularly easy place to start was over-size product packaging; followed by reforming at low cost the Wal-Mart fleet of trucks idling their engines to keep drivers warm while they slept.

Ellison and his allies also showed CEOs ways to persuade generally willing suppliers to make changes in packaging, working conditions, safety controls and such like. By 2010 a third CEO was leading corporate colleagues and even competitors to work toward an INDEX. If all goes well with "The Index," there will be enough useful data in place by 2016 for you to go into any Wal-Mart or Sam's Club store or many of its competitors (e.g. Target) and find every product color-coded red-yellow-green for degrees of compliance with a series of agreed on product sustainability criteria. Scan the product's bar code with your smart phone and you find scads of backup data, photos of plants producing the product you are scanning, supplier's labor compliance, etc.

Current efforts to create The Index  are a colossus-sized, complex, never before undertaken effort to track every product sold anywhere from birth to death. The sea change still surging ahead in early 2011 has Wal-Mart's excited Green activists:
-- INHABITAT editorialized: "Wal-Mart's sustainability index may be a game changer and could easily have as much impact as a cap and trade program." (http://inhabitat.com/)

-- "Brian Merchant ... wrote, 'I hate to admit it, but it's true -- it's getting harder and harder to hate Wal-Mart. ... If it's successful, The Index could literally change the face of retail forever'" (ch. 9) (http://www.treehugger.com/).

What Jib Ellison and his colleagues did was convince skeptical Wal-Mart leaders that avoidable waste was cutting profits. Sustainability was smart economics. Doing good meant Wal-Mart would do well. It reminds of the old Rotary Club motto: "He profits most who serves best."

The book would profit greatly by an introductory Executive Summary. It wanders. It sometimes disguises an important emerging mega-trend by losing the reader in details. Yet it is well illustrated, documented, full of concrete examples and relates some 30 or 40 named people to the sea change at Wal-Mart. Taking one thing with another: a very good read. -OOO-

http://community.cafelibri.com/reviews/d/UserReview-Edward_Humes_
FORCE_OF_NATURE_THE_UNLIKELY
_STORY_OF_WAL_MART_S_GREEN_REVOLUTION
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(3) bn.com 03/14/2011

Title of this review:  "Americans live the least sustainable, most wasteful lives on the planet"

Reviewer's rating of FORCE OF NATURE * * * *

Review: Posted 3/14/2011:


There are simpler and more complicated ways to tell the story unrolled by Edward Humes's book of 2011, "FORCE OF NATURE - THE UNLIKELY STORY OF WAL-MART'S GREEN REVOLUTION: HOW IT COULD TRANSFORM BUSINESS AND SAVE THE WORLD. For reasons known only to himself, the author makes things unnecessarily complicated. A simpler form of his theses, facts and forecasts might run as follows.
"Americans live the least sustainable, most wasteful lives on the planet, consuming 25 percent of the world's energy and producing 25 percent of its waste with less than 5 percent of its population" (Ch. 4)

In 2010 the earth was giving mankind water, light, breathable air, minerals, etc. worth at least $72 trillion of "natural capital." Within that framework, the global human economy was transforming this natural capital to human uses at roughly $60 trillion/year. Nature's contribution to our well being was being used up at $2 to $5 trillion/year. By one calculation

"the world's natural capital will be depleted by the year 2046. The natural economy will collapse around the time today's infants reach the prime of life, and the human economy will collapse with it" (Ch. 10).

Since its creation in 1962 until its 2004 CEO Lee Scott began changing corporate direction, Wal-Mart had been a leading factor depleting the earth's natural capital. In 2004, however, thanks to an unlikely personal rapport forged between founder Sam Walton's oldest son Rob and a white water rafter, a handful of sustainability thinkers gained unparalleled access to Scott. In the past seven years these "greens" have persuaded consecutive Wal-Mart CEOs that they can make more money for company stockholders by recycling waste than by paying people to haul waste off.

And they have gone far beyond that. If all goes well, by 2016, any of us can walk into a Wal-Mart, Target or other product outlet and find every item for sale color-coded green, orange or red to indicate whether it has been produced in a sustainable, eco-friendly way. For more details and background information we can whip our our smart phone, scan the product's bar code and a mini-encyclopedia of information, factory photos, third-world peasants harvesting in the fields and a tracing of the product's birth, life and eco-friendly death will appear. That is, if and only if Wal-Mart's mammoth project to create "The Index" of product sustainability continues to be supported and added to by the giants of computers, clothing, dairy products, etc. already following Wal-Mart's lead since 2004.

Edward Humes's FORCE OF NATURE is about developments from 2004 to 2011 leading up to 2016's anticipated (or at least prayed for) full implementation of The Index. All the basic ideas how to provide customers with sustainability information were "out there" among scientists and environmentalists in 2004. Needed was a powerful corporate "champion" to begin to grasp that businessmen could make more money going green than continuing to tear up the planet's natural capital. Those corporate champions are Wal-Mart Chairman Rob Walton and three consecutive CEOs.

Humes tells their story with the breathless fervor of a Sci-Fi writer saving the world from alien invasion. His way of telling a fascinating story is not the clearest or the only one, but it is full of facts and human drama. -OOO-

Recommended Reading:

-- Paul Hawkin: NATURAL CAPITALISM

-- John Naisbitt: MEGATRENDS ASIA

http://my.barnesandnoble.com/communityportal/review.aspx?reviewid=1588325
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(4) amazon.com 03/14/2011

title of review: The earth will not support human life after 2046

rating: * * * *

review:

Suppose we manage to stay alive beyond December 21st, 2012 A.D. at exactly 11:11 am GMT: the ominous final date some have read into the Mayan calendar. Dare we then relax and go on blithely gobbling up Earth's resources at the pace greatly accelerated when Wal-Mart was founded in 1962? No, sorry. For after we shall have crashed through the dangerous white waters of the Mayan calendar, we may still not make it through the coming eco-sustainability crash of 2046.

Sez who? Sez Tom Miller, CEO of Blu Skye Sustainability Consultants, toward the end of Edward Humes's book, FORCE OF NATURE - THE UNLIKELY STORY OF WAL-MART'S GREEN REVOLUTION.

Everything else but that date 2046 in Humes's book is prelude to the 2046 doomsday. The book is about how Wal-Mart, beginning as one store in 1962, first accelerated mankind's race toward eco-suicide, but next, thanks to a 2004 meeting between a white water rafting guide and Wal-Mart's then CEO, the gigantic Arkansas corporation saw the light, repented, slowed its rush to destruction and is now actively and effectively re-directing course into green eco-sustainability. But will Wal-Mart be too late?

It may suffice for you to make up your mind whether or not to read FORCE OF NATURE, if I simply share with you some words about Tom Miller's sobering prediction.

Miller's epiphany came very recently: in February 2010. The place was Vancouver. And the occasion was Wal-Mart's "Green Business Summit." There 73-year old keynote speaker David Suzuki, Canada's best-known environmentalist, shook up the 350 corporate executives in attendance. Suzuki recounted all Wal-Mart's many initiatives during the past six years to lower its carbon footprint, to create an Index so that by 2016 500,000 products on sale in retail stores would be clearly labeled as to their sustainability. Suzuki then flatly predicted: "I believe they are all doomed to fail" (Ch. 10).

It was great news that Wal-Mart was on the right track. But what people everywhere did was to "pretend that nature has no dollar value." We assume that everything nature does for us it does for free, at no cost to us, "and that damaging and exhausting natural resources therefore costs nothing." Yet Nature "cleanses our water with root systems and aquifers no human engireer could outdesign. It purifies our atmosphere ... It absorbs and breaks down our waste. It protects us from cosmic radiation and harmful ultraviolet rays," etc., etc. "What if we had to do all that ourselves? What would it cost to build those services or buy them from someone else?"

The question had already been asked in a 1997 study. And nature's services had been calculated to be $33 trillion per year. No one could afford to pay that bill. But until we acknowledge and correctly calculate nature's true costs to us, we will continue driving toward our destruction, argued David Suzuki.

Long time financial adviser Tom Miller was in the Vancouver audience. He mused: what if we actually do what Suzuki suggests? How might we explain nature's contributions to a stock exchange? And what it would cost investors to exhaust the world's "ecosystem services?" What if we acknowledge nature's capital as we treat "interest rates, unemployment and other forces?" We would then discover which corporations are the best stewards of nature's services and value those companies accordingly, Miller reasoned. There is, he deduced, an "ultimate business case for green."

This was and remains, alas, not a popular notion. It was thundered against in the Wall Street JOURNAL, the Harvard BUSINESS REVIEW and the Washington POST. Their counter-thesis: Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is not the business of business! No business can afford what Suzuki demands.

But Miller's research soon discovered the 1999 book, NATURAL CAPITALISM by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins.  Those three conceptualized the smaller man-made economy as a smaller circle with the larger circle of overall contributions by nature (including people). This caused Miller to co-author an unpublished study re-calculating and updating the value of the world's natural capital as at least $72 trillion and encircling a global human economy of $60 trillion. The latter economy was chewing up the former at the rate of $2 to $5 trillion per year. At this rate, argued Miller, "the world's natural capital -- fresh air, fresh water, all the other things we depend upon -- will be depleted by the year 2046" (Ch. 10).

Fortunately, Wal-Mart was leading a rising business strategy based upon eco-sustainability being good for business. But will it be enough? Can 2046 be prevented or at least pushed into a distant future?

To find out, I suggest that you read Edward Humes's FORCE OF NATURE. I have sketched for you the book's climactic ending. The story of how since 2004 Wal-Mart and others have come to face up to the doom they were creating is fascinating and is detailed in considerable detail in sometimes not entirely clear biographic sketches, tales from dairies, textiles, computers and from memorable vignettes.

tags: wal-mart, Tom Miller, blu skye sustainability consultants, mayan calendar, the year 2046

http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/ABABCND8BHUXC/ref
=cm_cr_yc_cdp?ie=UTF8&sort_by=MostRecentReview
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(5) epinions.com  03/14/2011

Review Title:  Walmart's America: Must it Crash in 2046?

Product Rating: * * * *

Pros: Brings to life Wal-Mart's astonishing 2004 conversion to eco-enlightenment and its subsequent acts of contrition.

Cons: Proceeds chronologically, not clearly pointing toward its surprise  conclusion. Breathless. More about trees than forest.

The Bottom Line: Up-to-date data. Argues that Wal-Mart rightly become convinced, starting in 2004, that sustaining the world environment and its $72 trillion global economy can be profitable.

aohcapablanca's Full Review: 

Edward Humes's eco-broadsheet of early 2011 is entitled FORCE OF NATURE - THE UNLIKELY STORY OF WAL-MART'S GREEN REVOLUTION: HOW IT COULD TRANSFORM BUSINESS AND SAVE THE WORLD. Its author comes across as man on a desperate mission: breathless, excited, at times a bit incoherent. And well might he be excited. For his book climaxes in support of an unpublished 2010 paper titled "When Nature Gets Valued."  What that difficult calculation is made, it turns out that nature plus men together crank out economic goods including fresh air, clean water, protection from ultra-violet rays, etc. worth at least $72 trillion/year. Man's contribution - the global human economy --alas, destroys forever $60 trillion of the total $72 trillion at the rate of $2 - $5 trillion per year. The result? " (T)he world's natural capital -- fresh air, fresh water, all the other things we depend upon -- will be depleted by the year 2046" (Ch. 10).

There are many fascinating pages before the climactic Chapter 10. But bear that ending in mind. Here is a bit of the flavor of the rest of the book:

Eager for "quick wins" during the crucial first year (2004-2005) of Wal-Mart's experimenting with "greening, not green washing," Walmart's black "president of global procurement," Lawrence Jackson, hired as consultant former Sierra Club pesident Adam Werbach. Werbach designed a voluntary program for Wal-Mart employees called "Personal Sustainability Projects." Company employees ("associates" in WM jargon) would, if they signed on, quit smoking, walk or bike to work, recycle at home, give up fast food and junk food. These employees were typical WM customers, indeed they were typical Americans "women and men on tight budgets." They signed on in large numbers. This gave hope for selling sustainability to America as a whole.

And Wal-Mart's Americans needed to be sold.

"Americans live the least sustainable, most wasteful lives on the planet, consuming 25 perent of the world's energy and producing 25 percent of its waste with less than 5 percent of its population" (Ch. 4).

Sam Walton founded Wal-Mart in 1962.  Author Humes's thesis is that from then until a remarkably recent 2004, "Mr Sam" and his family tried hard to bring decent quality goods to people on tight budgets, especially in the previously underserved rural stretches of the USA. Unintended by-products of Wal-Mart's "rush to the bottom" in cost cutting were, however, often dreadful: discrimination against women employees, low wages for all, anti-unionism, driving mom and pop competiton out of business and shipping American jobs abroad. Not to mention buying and retailing products wrapped in needlessly large containers and textiles processed with dangerous chemicals.

In 2004 Mr Sam's eldest son Robson ("Rob"), then Wal-Mart chairman of the board and a great outdoorsman, met with a dynamic young rafting guide ecologist and had a personal "come to Jesus" eco-epiphany. He became convinced that it would be more profitable than not for Wal-Mart to stop paying truckers to haul away waste and to start recycling it, indeed to move towards selling products embedded in maximum sustainability and recyclability.

In its rush toward eco-doom, Wal-Mart, argues Humes, had before 2004 been trying, in effect, to go from San Antonio to Mexico City by driving toward Toronto at 100 miles per hour. Its first tiny steps toward eco-responsibility (employees volunteering to walk to work, etc.) was the equivalent of the corporation's taking its foot off the gas and driving toward Toronto at a mere 4 mph. What in-house eco-champion Rob Walton then did was to turn the corporate juggernaut around and head in the right direction for the first time.

It is a fascinating story. Not always clearly told or persuasive to millions of Americans. But well worth your time spent grasping its gist. You will, alas, not find between the covers of FORCE OF NATURE a six page Executive Summary to make all things quickly clear.

-OOO-

p.s. Thank you, DramaStef, for making FORCE OF NATURE reviewable on epinions.com. Also for your patience in teaching me how to ask in proper form that that be done.

Recommended:
Yes





Recommended:

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_The_Unlikely_Story_of_Wal_Mart_s_Green_Revolution
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