There’s a revolution underway. When the store where you buy cereal plans a major initiative to work with grain growers to reduce fertilizer impacts, you can feel the ground shift beneath your feet. When buyers routinely move their conversations with suppliers from price and shelf space to product recyclability, we’re definitely in a new millennium.

Last week found all of us from Pure Strategies bent over radishes, tomato plants, and kale as we weeded, picked and trimmed our way down harvest-ready rows.

Have you been dreading what you might find in the new G4 sustainability reporting guidelines? Smaller and mid-sized companies, take heart. There is (mostly) good news. There are also some tasks you should begin right now.

Water-related power outages in India; over 900 vessels stranded on the Xijiang River in Guangxi, China; industrial projects halted in at least seven U.S. states; closures of the Yangtze due to water shortages — despite carrying 60 percent of the goods transported by river in China…

​For most sustainability managers, there comes a time when your program starts to take shape. There is a future direction; there are goals – even some achievements. You’ve moved beyond baby steps with light bulbs and recycled office paper. You’re tackling the big stuff. You’re proud of the program you and your team have created. It may not be perfect but your aim is true and you are making progress.

“The sky is so blue; it looks fake.” That was what most shocked a Chinese graduate student I befriended during his studies in the United States. He had never seen a brilliant blue sky before. His friends back home thought he used a filter for his photographs because surely the sky could not be that color. He didn’t come from a rainy locale but from one of the many polluted cities in China.

It was twenty years ago that I first read Eric Hansen’s classic “Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo” and was immediately transported to a fantastical world bursting with magnificent riches. Hansen trekked almost 1,500 miles through forest so dense that the local people were pale-skinned from lack of sunlight. This world is now being relegated to the realm of fantasy — victim to the world’s growing demand for palm oil.

I was in Ireland back in 2002 just after that country passed a tax on plastic bags equal to 24 U.S. cents per bag. I wasn’t aware of the tax and had just bought a week’s worth of groceries when I was informed of it. It had obviously become socially unacceptable to use plastic bags at all – everyone I saw had cloth bags or boxes. I pressed my three-year old twins into service and we all carried armloads of groceries out the door.

Additional people on the planet will put increasing pressure on food, water and other resources. As we zoom toward the projected figure of nine billion people by 2045, a new study suggests there is another statistic to worry about – our weight.

Two positive trends in product sustainability and a recent report highlighting species loss prompt us to look at how companies consider the impacts of their own activities on biodiversity.