Minding Our Business–Faith Communities and Sustainable Enterprise
November 19th, we invited Andrew Ellis to lead the conversation at Climate Cafe Multifaith. Ellis is passionate about sustainable business, sustainable investment and climate change, and he has focused his energy to assist business owners and entrepreneurs learn and navigate sustainable business practices to benefit their employees, their communities, and the planet.
Religious folks and institutions can sometimes be nervous about talking “business.” But like it or not, the same mechanisms that accumulate money in the bank circulate money also in the church. There are good ways and bad ways to make a buck and spend it. Faith communities—and we need to admit this to ourselves and each other—need help. And some of that help is coming from business people like Ellis who are committed to developing tools, leading groups and programs, and supporting a growing effort that he hopes will amplify sustainable practices everywhere.
These are tools we need in faith communities, as well. Because as of right now, we are not minding our church business. Our Synagogues and meeting spaces need to tend to issues of water, waste, and energy in an age of climate change, just like everybody else. And as people of faith, business practice is business praxis—a faithful life calls us to do better.
Talking ‘business’ may make some church folk squeamish, but my goodness as a person of faith I learned so much. Andrew Ellis is a member of the Climate Reality Business Working Group and a trained Climate Leader working within the Los Angeles, California, Chapter and others of The Climate Reality Project. As he walked us through the tools and need-to-knows for sustainable business planning, he also told us the story of how the working group formed, grew into a team, and began to work with and inspire innovators in the LA area.
The above video is brimming with essential information, including a roadmap for how a business can attract ESG investors (investors/donors seeking to invest in sustainable enterprises), learn to understand and conduct sustainability audits, and perhaps, even, inspire folks to earn a B-Corp certification. Each business is unique, but there is a lot of shared territory. Ellis goes over that in the presentation, including the tools available, the first concerns of the innovator, and how to identify potential climate-caused risks—such as flooding or supply disruption—and mitigate those risks.
“What we try to do is help the businesses connect the dots,” says Ellis. While he and the team are working primarily with innovators who are at the head of the curve, climate-wise policies and regulations are coming into effect across the country. So the reality is, “they’re going to have to do this anyway.”
There are many strands to this, but from tech innovations to urban forest development, says Ellis, “We want to give the business participants the tools that they're going to need to assess their pollution burden and the community characteristics where they're operating…” Today’s companies will need a clean energy source, they will need to ensure their building/campus is energy efficient, non toxic, and non polluting, and they will need to ensure their workspaces can withstand Cat 5 hurricanes, extensive flooding, and be resilient to drought. All of this comes together when looking at how sustainable a business is and can be.
“…investors are going to want to see corporations that work hard on not hurting the planet and work hard on improving the social impact on their community. That's just what they're going to require.”
—Andrew Ellis
Photo by Peter Lam CH on Unsplash
Andrew Ellis believes innovation will help solve the climate crisis. There is still not a clear path ahead of us globally or in the US as to how we can get emitters to stop emitting while also drawing down the carbon pollution already in our air—and keep warming under 2°. Businesses and startups, then, will be tasked with not only contributing to a clean future, but cleaning up the huge mess.
Is it possible? Ellis and his team say, yes. Resilience, adaptation and innovation feature large in this vision, as young innovators start businesses that practice a new moral standard to solve current problems. The goal is a good kind of prosperity, with a footprint that leaves behind restored forest instead of spent nuclear fuel rods and hexavalent chromium.
Ellis does not speak wishfully. His background is as a environmental engineer with decades of business experience. He understands the scale of the degradation industrial era companies have left behind and what its going to take to clean it up. He explains, “I've been in the business world 50 years now and the work that I was centrally responsible for was cleaning up the messes of chemical companies that left big toxic waste dumps behind them. So I spent literally 20 years of my career in space suits with backhoes digging this stuff up and carrying it away to waste sites.”
As a businessman, he sees not only the necessity to develop sustainable practices, but also opportunities where the right business plan could lay a sustainable path to good jobs and outcomes others can follow. “If 1/3 of the planet is degraded, and I can assure you that it is because I spent half of my life cleaning it up, that's going to create millions of new jobs,” Ellis says.
As people of faith, we can pause here for lament that the future our industrial ancestors have left for us is the work of cleaning up their mess. We will never enjoy the forests our grandparents enjoyed, even if we spend a lifetime planting trees. All the same, there is power in choosing differently. And the deep desire of young entrepreneurs is to build a life and to leave this Earth much, much better than they found it. But as we shift the way that business is done globally, we must also ensure that there isn’t a perpetuation of the social and environmental injustices that are still with us.
Church and faith folks don’t get to side step this ‘green business’ work. Our youth will inherit our messes as well. Our faithful support of them means cleaning up our own sanctuaries of oil investments and toxic products and practices (for example, petrochemical carpeting and plastic cups). The youth group will need EV transportation for trips to camp, and we need to ensure that they have one, and a solar charging station, too—this is the right thing to do, and a business opportunity people of faith can support.
“I don't really like the term environmental justice because actually we're talking about environmental injustices that were perpetrated in a disproportionate manner on historically marginalized communities. … we want to make sure that corporations do not do any more harm than they need to do when they're thinking about the three pillars of sustainability which are people planet and profit.”
—Andrew Ellis
Photo by Андрей Курган on Unsplash
New businesses will need to attend to current and historic environmental injustices in addition to adaptive strategies for resilience in the face of worsening climate impacts. This will be true regardless of what type of business it is, faith-based nonprofit, church, synagogue, mosque or meeting, bicycle manufacturer, forester, school, or windturbine manufacturer. And especially the smaller businesses, those that work more closely in communities and must face local impacts head on, will bring change.
Additionally, not only will there be a growing list of new environmental policies and laws at the government and institutional, but consumers, investors, donors and citizens are thinking along those lines, too. Ellis explains, “All of us here are mindful every time we purchase, ‘is this a plastic package?’ ‘do we have to have it?’ ‘did they chop down a bunch of rainforest to put palm oil trees up and put this palm oil in my shampoo?’ We're all mindful of this, and I think the country is becoming more mindful of this, which means businesses are going to have to respond.”
Says Ellis, “we want to give the businesses an opportunity to think about the ways that they may be indirectly and directly impacting their community, their suppliers or employees. And are their products supporting the fossil fuel industry with packaging plastic and transportation related carbon emissions? …We want to give the business participants the tools that they're going to need to assess their pollution burden and the community characteristics where they're operating.”
So. Are people ready to do all this? The resounding answer experienced by Ellis and the team was YES. The response they got to the program they developed and presented at LACI (Los Angeles Clean-tech Incubator) was so enthusiastic they will be offering more programs and expanding their team. In working with The Climate Reality Project Chapter’s Business Working Group, Ellis and the team offer their time and expertise as volunteers, so cost is not a barrier for those looking to shape their businesses to be sustainable.
What are Ellis’s hopes? Ellis’s story has three layers, it is the story of a warming earth and the reality of the impacts that arise from that, it is the story of the business innovators who want to know how to build sustainable businesses and keep them that way, and it is the story of Ellis’s team itself, and of building that team and being a part of it. Ellis shared how uplifting it was to be among those original 17 Business Working Group team members and how they came together to do something of real value to businesses and the earth. Says Ellis, “it was the work of 17 people and I think my hope is that that's going to be 1,700 people that leads to 17,000 people and then 1.7 million, all pulling in the right direction.”
Andrew Ellis, with The Climate Reality Project Business Working Group is Los Angeles, helps businesses (and faith-based organizations) reduce their environmental impact while attending to social and environmental justice. The Working Group offers presentations including climate science, health impacts, environmental justice, corporate social impacts, sustainable business practices and impact investing. He is passionate about getting resources and tools into the hands of business owners and entrepreneurs to empower businesses to address their impacts on climate change, with a goal of building a better future. Mr. Andrew Ellis is a retired environmental scientist and industrial hygienist who began his career characterizing EPA listed SUPERFUND toxic chemical waste sites with the Environmental Protection Agency.
Rev. Richenda Fairhurst is here for the friendship and conversations about climate, community, and connection. She organizes the Climate Cafe Multifaith as a co-leader of Faiths4Future. Find her in real life in Southern Oregon, working as Steward of Climate with the nonprofit Circle Faith Future.