Joseph Malki is not your typical American environmentalist. The co-founder of Seven-Star, Inc., a green event planner, producer, and consultancy, is a former California National Guardsman and self-proclaimed ‘radical green Republican’. His environmental credentials began in his student days at UC Davis in the 1980’s where he was part of the Whole Earth Festival. Just back from a speaking tour in Asia and Australia, we recently chatted about the definition of a “green red-neck” and the exciting innovation of composting toilets.
Leslie Berliant: How did Seven-Star get its start?
Joseph Malki: The background of all the principles of the firm converges around the alternative market and environmental activism. We have all had a personal connection with the philosophy of deep ecology. Alan (Van de Kamp, a Seven-Star founding partner) was one of the original San Francisco street performers during the summer of love and founded one of the biggest celibate ashrams in Texas. They focused on sustainable community rather than the cliché’ hedonism, making it unique for an ashram at the time. Alan went on to produce sustainability festivals in the Southwest and become the Chief Marketing Officer for Whole Life Expo where he met my sister Georgia (Malki, another Seven-Star founding partner). I have a background in environmental activism and organization. I was also the PR Liaison for the California State Fair. One day, after we had finished managing the execution of the largest corporate party in US history as mere managers and contractors, we decided we had to go into business for ourselves and apply our talents to saving the world.
LB: How does a guy who served in California’s National Guard go into business with a guy who founded an ashram?
JM: I consider myself lucky. Even though Alan is a pacifist, he is a warrior for his beliefs. And I think many people misconstrue the intentions of those who serve in the military. A lot of patriots take environmentalism very seriously and see it linked to the economy and to society and its survival. In many ways, Earth First! was an eco right wing movement with a red neck component, as in a willingness to fight for the cause “by any means necessary”. It was like a “Minute Man” response to environmental emergencies that no one was willing to touch. The point is to put ones’ self in harms way for principle’s sake. The idea is that if you do fight, as a soldier or activist, you have shown your ability to sacrifice comfort and safety for the greater good. I think some environmentalists just have it in their blood. David Browder, Al Gore, and John Kerry all volunteered for military duty.
LB: Your background is pretty eclectic overall; developing projects for NASCAR and Fox television, serving in the National Guard, starting a sustainable real estate development fund - how did you end up in the world of greening?
JM: It really all started during my childhood when I lived in a suburb on the boundary of a farm and spent my time playing in nature and developing a deep connection to it. And as a dependent going to school in a Department of Defense elementary school on a US Air Force base, I received the first ecology curriculum in our nation’s educational history. I was hooked on the earth science when I “got” the water, carbon, and pollution cycle.
My first bout with activism came as an adolescent hard core punk rock afficionado. We were a highly political movement that intersected with Northern California’s organo-hippy movement. We took on campaigns for a free Afghanistan, free Ireland, legalized medical marijuana, wilderness issues, water issues, and a few of us, protecting gun rights. This community of organized resistance to ecological exploitation and aggressively defending civil freedoms, for me, was a conservative cause. I was simply surrounded by progressives who agreed with me.
Later, I became involved with the Whole Earth Festival when I was at UC Davis. The organization was completely student run and I was initially the director of volunteers and later became the recycling coordinator. UC Davis students have a history in recycling and sustainability. The Student experimental farm was one of the first to focus on heirloom seeds and sustainable agriculture. Students generated a sustainable architecture movement on campus, including the development of livable domes. The student movement had this tremendous commitment to the environment and sustainable living. We, along with professors and community members, spent a year fighting the Davis administration to preserve the farms and the domes. Our victory resulted in the establishment of Davis as a leader in sustainability and it raised my confidence in civil society. I figured, the system worked.
A few years later, I was turned on to the fact that the old redwood forests of the Pacific Northwest were being sacked as part of a junk bond bail-out by Japanese interests. Thousands of jobs were being lost as well as a historic forest that I considered central to our western defenses. I was part of the leadership of the “green redneck” side of Earth First! before and during Redwood Summer. In fact, I was supposed to be in the back seat of the car with Darryl (Cherney) and Judi (Bari) but I didn’t go because I didn’t really like them. It’s interesting that my disagreements with them probably saved my life (a pipe bomb exploded in their car in 1990 while on a concert and speaking tour to recruit college students for Redwood Summer, a campaign of nonviolent mass protests against corporate liquidation logging). Ironically, we were supposed to be on our way to run a non-violence training workshop. For me it was a wake-up call. It seemed that despite our commanding over 500,000 activists to the Pacific Northwest we accomplished little by civil disobedience or by appealing to the government. After Redwood Summer, I decided to attempt another strategy for ecological justice; business.
LB: How do you define a “green redneck”?
JM: A “green redneck” is someone who, despite their commitment to hunting and fishing and their advocacy of gun ownership as a right and principle against the possible tyranny by the government, will preserve the environment by any means necessary. It’s certainly not the typical Ghandian approach of nonviolence which offers safe boundaries for environmental activism. In my opinion, both types of activism are necessary, but most people are not willing to put their lives on the line or harm the property of foreign companies that are sacking environmental resources in order to protect the environment.
A green redneck will ask, “…if your survival and your families survival depend on the well managed preservation of the global and local ecology…what will you do to preserve it?” It’s a great question. The answer has to be more than recycling and buying carbon offsets. It has to be about scientific field work, volunteering with stream restoration, building swales for soil conservation, getting dirty…all of us.
The Green Republicans are trying their best. Thank god we have had some sage “Natural Capitalists” who made it to the top…like President Gore, Paul Hawkin and Hunter Lovins to spell it out in nice big letters for the Fortune 100. We don’t have to resort to the tactics of direct action anymore, as the corporate criminals are seeing the light and moving fast to avoid the risk. The market might just prevail and install sustainability as the essential missing link in capitalism. It’s what I am gambling on…or perhaps I’ve just gotten soft.
LB: How do you define yourself?
JM: Now that I’m a ‘green celebrity’, that offers new opportunities in my own personal evolution of trying to advocate for environmental rights. My intent is to bring more media attention to the sustainable market place and to the idea and implementation of responsible business practices. I often call myself a “green rustler” because it’s my job to herd the conventional market toward ecological and socially just principles. It’s a movement, and we are just a conduit for the organic farmers, green builders, sustainable practitioners and advocacy and watchdog groups. Apart from speaking and interviewing, I spend 14 hour days trying to convince corporation after corporation of the triple bottom line (an expanded spectrum of values and criteria for measuring organizational and societal success; economic, environmental and social, also known as ‘people, planet and profit’).
LB: What have been the most interesting trends in greening in the last year?
JM: Composting toilets at mass scale events. Seven-Star will be deploying these in late 2008. They offer a great educational opportunity to help people realize that our waste stream is connected to environmental impact. It takes human effluvia a year’s time to become harmless rich fertilizer with proper natural treatment. When it comes to making events and entertainment environmentally responsible, we know about organic catering, recycling, reusing materials, reducing energy use, and communicating the mandate, but composting toilets will be the leading edge. Our Australian counterparts in the event industry are really far ahead of us. Hamish Skermer from Natural Events in Queensland is revolutionizing the poop experience at events and festivals. He maintains that aside from making the “closed loop” point about waste, it’s a treat to take a dump in a comfortable eco-potty vs. the horrific porta-potty experience attendees have to endure in the growing number of festivals and sporting events around the globe. It’s time for America to catch-up and stop using precious clean water to move waste.
Seven-Star is also pioneering what we are calling ‘village direct offsets’. We have been very unhappy with the current carbon trading market. There are too many middle men absorbing the money and very little of it has an effectual impact in the intended biological remediation of greenhouse gas sequestration. Our thinking is that on the consumer level, offsets should be given directly to environmental scientists and institutions in the most depreciated environments, places like Sierra Leone and Sudan where indigenously controlled organizations can use that money toward sustainable projects in towns and villages. We believe that the most vulnerable people in the world need the support the most and can use the money to go toward sustainable plant propagation for medicines, cultivating indigenous crops for fair trade, and learning basic Permaculture techniques. Our hope is that the event and entertainment industry will catch on to this. We are recommending that companies forge their own offsets directly with villages and universities and create their own personal relationships so that they will have their own story to tell. It’s not just about offsetting but about forging real and deep connections between guilty offsetters and struggling communities. It could be a golden public relations opportunity as well, to have a corporate relationship with a town that could really see great transformation in health, education and prosperity. The risks might be high, but we ask, when will we take corporate social responsibility to a practical level beyond just policy statements? For us, it’s about keeping the market honest, humble and connected to real stories as opposed to green washing and opportunism.
LB: You’ve worked with some companies, like AMD and Apple Computers, that don’t have the best environmental records. Is it possible to work with companies like that and change the internal culture?
JM: We share with our clients a best practices policy, but we can’t force them to adopt it. We only work with companies with a stated attempt to be environmentally responsible and socially just. We try to support them in getting on the right path, doing things like joining Co-op America or Global Exchange. Right now in the US, there is a dearth of green consultants, but it’s not just about handing a policy to a bunch of executives. It’s about transforming corporate culture and vertical shifts in practices, habits and operations. Companies actually need a shepherd, like the work that Hunter Levins does or the work of Gil Friend and other engineers to develop benchmarks and ecological tools to not only retrofit, but also measure success. Going green actually becomes an asset when a company can make the transition to a closed loop industrial system that is 100% fair trade and minimizes waste. It’s not easy because globalization has created a situation where less than ethical sub contractors are participating in the global supply chain, but it is possible. It’s easy to boycott. The challenge is committing to helping a company grow and mature into an ethical business…even if it’s kicking and screaming all the way down the green carpet.
LB: Your company states it has its roots in Cultural Creativity, what does that mean?
JM: It means a movement in the global market place that is driven by principles not only held by consumers, but also manufacturers and service provider. These are really the LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) principles with roots in empathetic reasoning. The concept is to not just put oneself in the place of a worker in a developed nation or a farmer in a marginalized nation, but in the place of ecology itself and the other forms of life with which we are interdependent. These ideas are starting to shape engineering principles and corporate policies, but we have some adjustments to make.
The film ‘The 11th Hour’ introduced the idea of ecological overshoot very well, a phenomenon that LOHAS principles are trying to compensate for, but not succeeding very well in so far. The market right now is a replacement economy. For example, we take toxic hormone and pesticide ridden milk that costs $1.34 and replace it with a clean version of milk that costs $4.63. That kind of replacement doesn’t maintain sustainability or justice because poor people are deprived. We need to move towards a different economy, perhaps one we haven’t seen since the Neolithic Era! It has a lot to do with the re-engineering of cities. We have urbanized so much of the developed world’s population and now we need to think about bringing farms to people and people to farms in order to get back our local connection to food. On a biological level, we need to help people participate in their own survival.
In my opinion, the green economy really launched from the breast cancer scare and the strong case made for its connection to hormones and pesticides. The fear of cancer really led women, who make most of the food buying decisions, to make different choices. Now we need to move from a fear based economy to a hope based economy where we design intelligent societies as opposed to reacting to conventional products.
We can see another failure in the LOHAS consumer market in the lack of sales of Wal-Mart’s organic line. At the end of the day, it’s not the grocer that pays the price for organic goods, it’s the manufacturer, whether it sells or not. Retailers need to start to educate and market those products to increase sales and bring prices down but it’s a catch 22 because once conventional retailers start educating people, there will naturally be a comparison in which conventional products come out poorly, which puts the conventional market in a precarious place. Once a link is established in the consumer’s mind between nutrasweet, pesticides and cancer for example, conventional products will fall like the tobacco industry did. This is not necessarily what conventional retailers want to see happen. We need an amnesty program to help convert the conventional sector without debilitating torts which will only slow down the conversion to safe foods.
LB: What has been your favorite event to work on in the last year?
JM: This year, it was Live Earth Shanghai. For the first time, Chinese students from around the country came together to do waste diversion for a rock and roll concert! The enthusiasm of students was amazing and their dedication to micro separation between bits of noodles, plastic pop tops and little pieces of tinfoil to get every piece out of the trash was inspiring. SOLER, China’s number one environmental rock band was incredible, too. I gave them a gift of the first wheat based drumsticks by Wheat Wear and introduced the Chinese students to Dr. Boehner’s organic liquid soap which they loved. The band is traveling to schools to educate kids on climate change and there is a real dedication by the Chinese government to move forward with environmental education.
LB: In the short term, where do you think the green movement needs to go next?
JM: If the government pursues tax rebates for home solar energy, we’ll see a great deal of energy independence for home owners. Al Gore’s concept of a solar network will franchise people into small businesses through their home's own energy. And isn’t that what we want to create, more small business owners? The solution as a Republican, and I’m the only person in my company that is I should add, is that the way to transform this country is through business. The progressive movement's focus on policy has had a major impact, but the market place is the secondary place where environmental initiatives have won. We need more incentives for eco businesses and to focus on disenfranchised communities, African Americans and Latinos, that have been largely cut out of environmental dialogues.
LB: As one of the few Republicans I speak with, who do you like among the current candidates?
JM: (Laughs) I want Al Gore to run and win. I don’t care about his party, I care that he has a deep scientific commitment. The only thing that counts for America is our scientific edge, especially now that we have been de-industrialized. If our leadership isn’t in touch and well versed with science, we are lost. I don’t think any of the current Republicans are Republicans, they are neo-Trotskyites. It’s because of Gore’s statesman-like nature and that he has been talking to the global community that I back him 100%. All the candidates in both parties are sub-par. And while it’s doubtful he will run, I remain hopeful. If he won, it would be one of the few times in my life I would be truly happy. There are so many problems and obstacles to see every day, but that would really give me hope. We failed as a people, I failed as a citizen, to fight the theft of that last election…it’s a shame.
LB: What’s next for Seven-Star?
JM: We are engaging in a series of green tours and conferences that will be targeting every sector; consumers, government decision makers, businesses. We are also really stepping out as a global company. We are in the running to green the Olympics and are working with different organs inside the Chinese government to create green initiatives there. Brad Reichert, the owner of Bobo’s, an organic beer and wine gallery, asked me at our last green drinks event, “Joe, if we only had a year to respond to global climate change, what would you do?” As a company, we are asking ourselves that question. We are getting ready for the leading edge of Eco-edutainment, perhaps even engaging in mass eco-restoration trainings. It’s a very exciting time for us…it’s a make or break situation for the survival of many habitats and species, no time for vacations really.
