The Reason My Black Background Is Blue

For those of you who read my last post, The Reason My Background Is Black, I'm hoping you had a chance to watch the video about PSPs on Saatchi & Saatchi S's facebook page. If you did, you might've made yourself squirm a little by thinking, "Maybe she should've named that post "The Reason My Black Background Is Blue". Well, for this post, I absolutely had to. And to be sure you all understand why, I recommend watching The Birth of Blue. This is a video of a speech that Adam Werbach, Global CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi S, gave to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco as a fulfillment to his promise that he would return with some solutions for his speech given four years prior entitled, "The Death of Environmentalism".

This "eulogy" as Adam referred to it, addressed why he had decided to move out of the non-profit world and into the belly of corporate America, or should I say, Earth. When Adam was 23 years old, he graduated from Brown, and was handpicked to become the president of the Sierra Club by David Brower. This made him the youngest president of the largest and oldest non-profit in America. Adam became every activist's golden child, and the same people who had revered him would come to revile him when he made the decision to go and work for Walmart.

After watching, The Birth of Blue, the way I understand his justification for "selling out" is that Adam began to see that the world was not coming up with good enough solutions to face the huge crisis we face. He said, "When you want to steal some money, you go where the money is and rob a bank. When you want to create change, you go to where the people are. You go to the corporations". One out of every 100 people in America work for Walmart. He likens it to the story of David & Goliath - and in this scenario, he is David, crawling into the belly of the beast.

Change, needs to come from the inside out. I was discussing this with my friends Libby Patterson & Paul Kardash of the Eco-Alliance as Paul clobbered around in Libby's glittery pink stilettos. Paul jokingly exclaimed, "We should call Adam and tell him that he should've called it the Birth of Pink." I was thinking, hmmm... I guess part of the speech does focus on how women make the majority of household purchase decisions. We are absolute animals when it comes to finding a deal, and caring about what goes into our bodies, and the bodies of our loved ones. But Libby had a better take on the idea and delivered it in perfect Libby-empress-style, "That's good Paul," she said, "Because change needs to come from the inside out." I didn't realize that this is why Paul had suggested pink. Isn't it great when two intelligent people fall in love, and even better when you get to hang out with them?

I diverge...
The point of this post was to explain why my black background is actually blue. "Blue", in case you didn't watch the video(s) yet, is Adam's definition of what happens when you find a way to make green personal - which is really the only way we can affect change as individual regular people. What are your passions, what do you care about... how can you relate to the problem and engage in making the world a better place by shifting one tiny action that you repeat in your everyday life? I know, I know, you're all saying, well, "If I turn off the faucet while I brush my teeth, is that really going to save the world in any way!?" - and I hear you on that, but what I hear more loudly is the echo of a beautiful story I stumbled upon somewhere in my cyber-surfing recently. Maybe it was in The Birth of Blue - you tell me... it goes something like this ( I found this similar version of the story on Google taken from Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul):

A friend of ours was walking down a deserted Mexican beach at sunset. As he walked along, he began to see another man in the distance. As he grew closer, he noticed that the local native kept leaning down, picking something up, and throwing it out into the water. Time and again he kept hurling things out into the ocean. As our friend approached even closer, he noticed that the man was picking up starfish that had been washed up on the beach and, one at a time, he was throwing them back into the water. Our friend was puzzled. He approached the man and said "Good evening, Friend. I was wondering what you are doing."

"I'm throwing these starfish back into the ocean. You see, it's low tide right now and all of these starfish have been washed up onto the shore. If I don't throw them back into the sea, they'll die up here from lack of oxygen."

"I understand," our friend replied, "but there must be thousands of starfish on this beach. You can't possibly get to all of them. There are simply too many. And don't you realize it is probably happening on hundreds of other beaches all up and down the coast. Can't you see that you can't possibly make a difference?"

The local native smiled, bent down, and picked up yet another starfish, and as he threw it back into the sea, he replied, "Made a difference to that one!"

So this cheesey soup is being fed to millions of Walmart employees, and they are all picking their own PSPs (Personal Sustainability Promises). The reason my black background is blue is because it saves watt hours, which is also green, but what makes it blue is that it's not huge. It's small. It's probably insignificant. But knowing that and choosing to do it anyways is the shift that needs to happen in all of our hearts. That means we need to reach down deep and sense how we are all connected, how if we all turn our cheek, this blue planet will dry up and make a Mars out of itself.

If we each picked a starfish to throw back into the water, I'm sure we could save all of the starfish.

If we don't find ways to help, we'll be wishing we were starfish because we'll be drowning in seawater! That's not really the blue we want. Let's make blue what we want it to be. Deeper than green. Deeper than pink. Deep deep down into the source of what connects us all, the fact that we matter, the fact that unless we believe we count, we won't.