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Foresight Design's Jason Phillip recently spoke with Charles Shaw about the efforts at Conscious Choice to communicate and demonstrate sustainability in Chicago.
You took over as editor in chief of Conscious Choice in 2006. How has the magazine changed under your leadership?
I think that it’s changed in about as many ways as you can. We changed the editorial platform, so we created this four-pillar policy you see here [indicates editorial calendar on white board], with environmentalism, healthy and natural living--which includes organic and local food systems--progressive politics, and spirituality. The ideal is to have it all be balanced, but sometimes you have theme issues that get heavier on one more than the others.
What I think I have done that the magazine has not done before is really to stylize and to create some more provocative and innovative stories. I think I’m connected to different communities, and am part of different movements and publications that were a lot more cutting-edge than Conscious Choice had really been. I mean, they were really cutting-edge when they started. But this was when environmentalism was a cause, and “green” hadn’t become a value and a lifestyle. And that’s what it is now.
Today the publication is a lifestyle magazine for a specific demographic, a specific type of market called LOHAS [Lifestyles Of Health And Sustainability], which didn’t exist back when they started Conscious Choice. You’re looking at the maturation of a certain market, and that means that it’s got many new components. It’s slicker, it’s simpler, it’s more aware, and it doesn’t need to stress advocacy. It’s more a storytelling and a cultural engine.
What do you see as the mission of Conscious Choice and how has the mission evolved since the publication’s founding in 1988?
The mission in the beginning was to make you aware and to teach you, and to show you that there was a different way. We still do that, except now the topics we’re dealing with are big topics, and some of them have global reach.
The mission has changed in that we have such a reach and are part of a collaboration of voices that are helping shift the culture towards sustainability in the most general sense. I don’t really like the term sustainability because it’s deceptive in a few ways, but that’s neither here nor there. The real issue is to get people to think and live differently. In the past it was always “you have to do this” and “my God, don’t you know what will happen if you don’t” and it was very foreign and different. Now it’s been integrated so much that what we do is more chronicling new trends and thought, and telling the stories of people that are already doing it in a way that can be easily marketed. It can be easily disseminated because enough people connect to it now.
Where does Conscious Choice fit in the media landscape? Do you see yourself competing for market share or readership with local publications or national lifestyle magazines?
We have de facto competition locally because there are other free publications sitting in boxes on the corners where ours sit. So that’s just point-of-delivery competition. It’s whatever somebody responds to when they look at something visually, which doesn’t really have a lot to do with the substance of the publication.
Do we have any competition as far as the market we cater to and the stories we cover? No. Nobody’s doing what we’re doing, and I’m very confident in saying that. Will we have competition? Yes. People have already seen what we’re doing, and they’re already hot to trot to do us better.
Our competition exists right now on more the national level and online. We have a lot of that going on. Because we’re also largely part of the yoga and spirituality community, and there’s a huge subset of the population that’s into that stuff. They don’t happen to trend in Chicago as much as they do on the West Coast.
So we have various markets and support bases that we work with. In Chicago, we are a unique presence. This is why I think we are positioned better than other publications.
If I’m a person concerned about environmental issues, but I’m not committed to a lifestyle of yoga and spirituality in any serious way, what will I get out of reading Conscious Choice?
I think we’ve crossed the point in our culture where you can be just for one and not for some measure of the other. I mean, if you call yourself an environmentalist, but you aren’t aware of food issues, then you’re not truly an environmentalist. If you’re still eating processed food and you’re eating meat and corn syrup and genetically modified stuff, then you’re not an environmentalist; you’re contributing to the problem. You are actually giving the people that are producing these poisons revenue.
We don’t necessarily think that personal spirituality appeals to everybody. But when you take away all the names like Eastern mysticism and Hindu philosophy, it is all universalist thinking. So if you want to know where spirituality meets environmentalism, it is that only in a universalist paradigm are we going to save the planet. Nation states, religions, and all of these other things that codify, identify, segregate, and divide us and set us against each other are all part of the problem. Part of breaking through and saving the planet holistically is understanding that it’s everything you put in your body, it’s how you organize things, it’s how you go about addressing all these issues. The only way we’re going to transform the way we do things is by transforming our culture, which also means transforming our consciousness.
If you think that Americans are better than the Chinese, then how are the Americans and the Chinese going to get together and work on these crushing environmental issues that they have together. They have two totally different cultures on the face of things, but ultimately they have the exact same problem, and the cultural differences are what keeps them apart. When you look at the globe, do you see a political map? No. You see one giant planet.
So for the people who get all uptight about “well, I’m not into yoga” or “I’m not into spirituality,” I say good. Then just don’t read it. Flip the page and go on to something else. But realize that it’s all connected. Everything is connected. Only through total transformation are we are going to transform the planet.
Who do you see as your primary audience?
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Anyone who has an entry into these four portals [environmentalism, healthy and natural living, progressive politics, and spirituality] has an audience with us. We’re not a platform. We’re a reflection of the culture. We mirror back what people are doing. This isn’t a top-down thing. Again, it’s a chronicle of what’s going on; it is a reflection of the times. So I feel I’m just putting out what people are doing, telling their stories, so people can connect and they can realize, wow, this is amazing. Is this what we’re doing? In the end it has the effect of rallying the cause and getting people more involved in recruiting new people. So it has all functions. There isn’t one primary function. |
In the December issue you published a story about multinational corporations like GE, BP, and even Wal-Mart embracing green business practices. How much of these efforts at environmental rebranding is greenwashing and how much represents a fundamental shift to sustainability as a mainstream concern for corporate America?
To answer that question, you have to look at each separate company individually. In my article, we gave GE a thumbs-up, BP was a thumb-down, and Wal-Mart was a thumbs-down with an asterisk. The asterisk was that with a company that large, any move that they make is going to have some huge, tangible economic impact. It could, perhaps, have a systemic impact. They can butterfly-effect certain sectors of the economy just by snapping their fingers. That’s how powerful they are. Yet, as the Polish poet Stainslaw Lec asked, “Is it progress if a cannibal eats with a fork?” I say, if you are the very paragon of unsustainability, nothing you can do will ever make you sustainable.
So the short answer is that they know [what they’re doing], and they’re either getting in on it in earnest, or they’re greenwashing. Our responsibility now becomes not to get them to do it, but to create a tangible set of standards to guide it and to help those that aren’t doing it. And to keep those in check that are. So our role evolves just like their role.
What does that trend mean for local businesses--especially those that are already working on becoming sustainable?
Hopefully it doesn’t have any direct relationship because the local economy is what we need to rebuild, and the big multinationals need to get out of the way. They’re really the problem. So ultimately they can green themselves all they want, but they’re going to have to collapse at some point because it’s not going to be sustainable to keep everything running on oil. If we don’t have oil, we can’t have a global trade system. So, local businesses are retrenching, or are trying to do the local thing all over again. And they’re getting the same cues. They need to be sustainable within a local environment. So that means tapping in economically and systemically—power, water, all of this.
I think they’re parallel trends, but I don’t necessarily think that Wal-Mart having a green agenda should necessarily apply to Greenmaker relocating to Green Exchange. These are two totally different paradigms. They’re tied together by the message of retooling, but that has just now become the unstoppable trend. The trend is to retool from cradle-to-grave to cradle-to-cradle. That’s the paradigm we’re going toward. It’s just happening in different places. This is what’s so great about it. Ultimately, the effectiveness of this is tied to its ready decentralization and accessibility. Everybody needs to be able to retool their homes, their businesses, and their lifestyles to be sustainable. So it can never be done from the top down.
Can you talk a little bit about the Green Train events that Conscious Choice will begin sponsoring in 2007?
The Green Train events are parties. They are gatherings for different segments of the community to kind of blend together in a very fun setting—really good music and really great space. They are introduced to different segments of this culture that we chronicle. So we have people come in and learn about everything from solar panels to meat replacements. They get introduced to a figurehead in the community who is doing that stuff. They get to touch the products, and eat, drink, listen to great DJs, and have fun.
It’s a really accessible way to turn people on to stuff. People have a long, hard day at work, the last thing they want to do is spend another two hours getting a lecture or listening to a panel discussion. They want to have fun, they want to blow off some steam. They want different modes to access the information because lots of people don’t learn by listening. They have to see something, they have to touch it, they have to interact with it. So we’ve created this interactive space now where people can come into contact with these things.
What we hope to do is reach out to a huge segment of the population that otherwise wouldn’t plug into these other things. So the environmentalists are thrown together with the yogis. Grab the tofu eaters and put them together with the political organizers.
Can you talk about some of the stories you’re working on for future issues?
In February we have stories about organic school programs, transit-oriented development, fair trade, and endocrine-disrupting hormone regulators. March is really all about farms. We’ve got one on the local farm economy, on Family Farm Expo, and then Oxfam has something that they’re doing for a national piece. We’ve also got a piece on green hospitals. April is all about the Green Festival. Every single story in there profiles a local business, group, organization, or person who is connected with or appearing at the Green Fest…including CSBA.
