Save the planet, Tachi
During Eastern and my trip to Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and Czech Republic which will join the EU on May 1st, I had the great pleasure to meet in the Euro Identity Caravan bus with Takashi Tachi Kiuchi, who created Future 500. Tachi also wrote "What We Learned in the Rainforest: Business Lessons from Nature".
Tachi used to work for Mitsubishi. Mitsubishi used to cut lots of trees for their business and accelerate the pace at which the forests disappeared about 12 years ago. Mitsubishi boycott campaigns attacked Tashi and Mitsubish. Mitsubishi received 12 000 letters from school kids and 700 000 letters from citizens asking them to preserve their future and they stopped it, that was Tachi's wake up call to his future "save the planet" work.
On the PR that Fortune 500 companies had, Tachi had the idea to start "Future 500", to make the largest companies in the world aware that "enough is enough".
Here is what Tachi says:
"-we are the first generation to think that our next generation will not necessarily be better off, for first time in our history, it has always been better in the past from one generation to another, not this time
-we are the first generation ever to feel the limits of the Earth (climate changes for example) we cannot keep going like this
-the future depends on what we start doing today"
Some effects happening now:
Water shortages
Water level reserves under us are going down, huge shortage of corn, meat and all agricultural products are coming soon. We have to preserve water.
Pollution (soil, water, air)
Wastes increasing everywhere
An example of effects of forests disappearing is yellow sand storms coming from pollution in China because (China cut huge amounts of trees and the desert is spreading). In North East China some airports cannot operate anymore very often because of sand storms.
The desert keeps approaching so there are even people that even talk about having to move Beijing in the future.
"Citizen movements can stop that" says Tachi and to help citizens understand better the issues, one of Future 500 goals is to make information available. Future 500 is an "NPO" - "NGO" non profit, non governmental. Future 500 gets more and more funding from citizens and from governments, Japan has started investing heavily in it.
Future 500 is not really an "activist" organization, there are no boycotts, the goal of future 500 is to communicate in peace about the issues and express its objectives:
1. Try to save all kinds of life
2. Try to live a better society, better community for future generations
3. Making the country green & beautiful
To improve "corporate conscience", Future 500 started a green label with levels, the best one being platinum, for corporations supporting long term sustainability.
I meet more and more influential and extremely smart people who make me understand that our kids may live in a much worse place than we do. I have also been very influenced by Yann Arthus Bertrand's work on Earth when I met him in Davos.
I have three boys, and I am starting to wake up on these issues. Of course the difficult part for individuals like us and for small businesses is to get out of our daily business and think (and act) to preserve our planet. Difficult. It is also difficult as we do not know really where to start. If a large corporation creates bad effects, they know what they can change. On our level, it is harder to understand what we can do.
I will continue waking up to these issues. I am sure that blogging can do something for this too, as Tachi puts it "Citizen movements can stop that". Years ago they sent thousands of letters to Mitsubishi, now may be we can all start posting about it and at least starting to devote some time thinking about it, to make our children's life at least as good on Earth as the life we are happy to live.
Here is what Heiko says about the same meeting he had with Tachi.
