Step by Ittsy Bitsy Step

I’m writing from my hotel room in Ningxia, where I arrived with ECOLOGIA on Tuesday. We’re here to continue working with Canadian Aluminum (ALCAN) on the community project component of their local Environment, Health, and Safety program. It’s about eight o’clock in the evening, and from my desk, through my closed windows, I can hear the public speaker working through its evening routine from its perch in some poor tree across the street. It rotates through a series of dialogues, which I assume include news, public service announcements, messages from The Party, as well as orchestral space- odyssey interludes, and static chaos, all of which, to me, is incredibly irritating and creepy. Isn’t the land, air, body, and eye polluted enough in this industrial desert town?
Actually, in what I hope to look back on as a low point in my experience with culture shock or cross-cultural understanding, I can’t help but wonder if the speaker persists only to render anyone within earshot intellectually useless in the evening hours when independent or creative thought is most fruitful! Quick, turn on the television to drown the propaganda! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
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It’s now 8:45, the speaker is finished (until tomorrow morning), and I can feel the brain fog lifting. It’s amazing how peaceful quiet can be.
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Anyways, after our workshop last September, the ALCAN Sustainability Team went to work on three community projects. Right now we’re reflecting on the experience of the first three, and inviting local community members to participate in the next round. On a local level, these projects addressed issues of elderly health, rural school deficiencies, and traffic safety respectively. On a global level however, ALCAN’s endeavor to engage local stakeholders and facilitate community development represents what I hope is a sea change in international corporate culture.
Last week, for example, I was in Sydney for the fifth working group on ISO 26000, which by 2008 will be a new standard for social responsibility. ISO, the International Standards Association, traditionally deals in technical specifications for everything. Essentially, making international criterion to ensure that all the nuts and bolts of the world are compatible; so that a watt is a watt etc. anywhere you are in the world. Regardless of what happened at this working group, (which I’ll be sure to share asap) just the fact that ISO has initiated the process of creating a standard for social responsibility represents a monumental shift in priorities and vision of not only the organization, but the world. Just twenty years ago, corporate social responsibility was a brand new idea. Actually a colleague told me that just three years ago in Chengdu, mention of corporate social responsibility wouldn’t receive cognizant response from anyone. Now, in Chengdu, CSR front page, and sustainability reports are the new black. Internationally, here are so many documents addressing the issue that there is demand for a gold ISO standard to clarify what exactly businesses are supposed to do. Imagine packaging the Global Reporting Initiative, the UN Global Compact, the Declaration of Human Rights, resolutions from the International Labor Organization, the Earth Charter, and more into one easy-to-read and easy-to-do guidance standard for all organizations all over the world. The impact could* be world changing, pointing to proactive companies like ALCAN as role models, and making holistic and responsible business ethics a social norm.
Tomorrow I will help take one more step towards what I envision as a refined 21st century corporate-consumer-capitalist cultural Eden, working with ALCAN staff and local elementary school teachers to design a project about food safety.

*see future post about Sydney ISO working group. As optimistic as I’m being now, at points last week aggressive industry reps, blind experts, inhibiting politics, and squelched opportunity had me crying behind my poker face.