The problem, as the scientific community now tells us, is that at a macro-level, we now have severely jeopardized our children’s future through our unchecked fossil fuel burning and CO-2 production. We cannot view NH’s environment in isolation for when it comes to CO-2 output, it doesn’t matter whether coal is burned in Bow or China. The data is now incontrovertible:    NH, and the rest of our planet have warmed in these 25 years and the only question is whether we have the humility to realize we’ve had blinders on, and the will power to do something about it.

So, climate is now the dominant issue of our time facing our state, our nation and our world and we simply must change our ways. Interestingly, all is not gloomy and we’ve made some non-trivial progress on a number of environmental fronts. Our Gross State Product (GSP) grew 5-fold (from $11.4 B (’82) to $51.7B (’04)), but our energy costs have been reduced from 12.6% to 7.6% of GSP. We’ve actually improved our energy efficiency, just not enough. New greener technologies like super-insulated homes and wood pellet boilers, more ecological waste water treatment, the advancement of the Portland-Boston rail corridor, and increased land conservation activity are among the hopeful signs that NH can progress towards sustainability without adversely affecting our economy.

I see other signs of hope in these last 25 years.

Smog (ground level ozone) is down significantly over the past 25 years from its peak in ‘89 when we had 27 unhealthy ozone days, compared to just 4 in 2007. Smog and small particles have decreased thanks to regulations on power plants- due to the Clean Air Act and the Northeast States petitioning the EPA for stricter controls on power plants; and because of NH regulations requiring the use of cleaner burning fuels for vehicles and better fuel efficiency.

Mercury generation- from power plants and incineration is down due to regulations on incinerators and prohibition on backyard burning of trash- but because of the nature of Mercury, it is still building up in our environment. NH passed legislation to limit the mercury from power plants which won’t really fully benefit us for a few years still. But we still need national and international limits on mercury as it comes into NH from outside our region.

Agriculture is a great and interesting example. As Steve Taylor told us on your show a few weeks ago, after several decades of steady decline in the # of family farms in our state, we’ve actually seen an increase. From a high of 6,542 farms in 1959 we dropped to a low of 2,412 in 1974. And we’re now back up to 3,400. That’s the good news. At the same time, we’ve seen the complete demise of larger farms. Rockingham County lost 1/3 of its productive farmland from just 1997 to 2002. Most of our most productive soils and farmland are unprotected. Half of the farms today have annual revenues less than $2,500. These are mostly part-time farmers including career changers & retirees looking for something new and small groups of young people working at part time scale.

These smaller farms have been fueled by demand for local and organic foods and farmer’s markets.  So, the good news is that more people are getting involved in farming and healthier growing and eating, but the bad news is that we don’t seem to be able to support full time farmers, thus we import more food and have a bigger carbon footprint when it comes to our food system.

What are the most significant ways that business and the organic movement have changed over the past 25 years?

* To be parochial, Stonyfield has grown from a 7-cow organic farming school into a $300 MM, 450 employee company, one of the 5 largest private companies in the state and the third largest yogurt brand in the US, and a national role model for organic and sustainable business practices.  We are literally supporting tens of thousands of acres of organic farming around the world and thousands of family farmers producing milk, but also organic sugar, fruits, cocoa, vanilla, etc. We’ve done a complete climate map of our business and have ten employee teams working on every aspect of our footprint from our milk production and transportation miles to our commuter miles. And the good news is that we’ve found and are proving that reducing our climate footprint is excellent for business. By attacking our footprint, we save money, build supplier and consumer loyalty and also enthusiasm and pride among my wonderful colleagues who actually do the day-to-day work of operating the business. Today, I gave back-to-back keynotes with Al Gore in London at a sustainable business conference and last Saturday I was one of the few vendors ever allowed to address a private closed-door meeting with 700 Walmart Executives in Bentonville, Arkansas. We’ve grown over 27% each year for the last 18 years. My new book Stirring it Up: How to make Money and Save the World has been published by Hyperion and is being widely heralded and accepted in major booksellers across the US. We started Stonyfield as an organic farming school back then and this kind of success and influence was certainly our dream and the reason that I moved from being a Trustee of the school to join Samuel Kaymen full time, but if you’d told me in 1982 that we were going to be this big, or have this kind of access or influence, I’d have thought you were crazy.

On a larger community level, we’ve seen these changes:

• Organic Foods have grown as a national trend. Organics is now a $17.5 B business and almost 3% of the US food system.

• Here in NH, organic foods are on the shelves of every supermarket.  We now have 60 Farmers Markets, up from 1 in 1982. We now have 14 Community Supported Agriculture farms (CSA’s), up from 0 in 1982. 

• By the way, NH has paralleled our two neighbors in terms of decline of large dairy farms. In the mid-90’s, there were just under 2000 dairy farms in VT and in ME there were over 600. Both have nearly halved since then. On the other hand, there were no certified organic dairy farms in Maine or VT in 1982, and one Maine certified organic dairy farm in 1996. Today, there are 74, comprising roughly 21% of ME’s 340 commercial dairy farms. In VT in there were three certified organic dairy farms in 1996 and today, there are 209, comprising 19% of VT’s 1105 farms.  NH is behind these two neighbors with 7 certified organic dairy farms (5% of NH’s dairies), but we are growing now.

• NH can be proud that we have the nation’s first organic dairy farm on a land grant university. This is critical for educating the next generation of farmers and extension agents as we try to stem the decline of family farmers, encourage more young people to remain in agriculture and of course reduce the polluting aspects of agriculture.  It also positions us very well to be a leader in the 21st century economy for we will certainly see organic foods becoming a larger, double digit share of our state’s and nation’s food system.

• If you asked an audience in 1982 how many people know someone who is battling some kind of cancer, a handful would raise their hands. Today only a handful do not raise their hands.  While we are better at treating cancers, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) tells us that rates of most cancers are on the rise. More people are questioning our food supply and our past practices of devouring farmland, applying hormones and antibiotics and other chemicals.  And the cost premiums for organic food are coming down.

What Granite Stater(s) would you say inspired you? In what way?

Entrepreneurs like Dean Kamen, Pat Gallup, Chuck Henderson, Alex Ray and Jeff Swartz are people who care deeply about our state, community and environment and have worked hard to show that business not only cannot be divorced from community service, but must be firmly invested in giving back, and not just philanthropically. They’ve also proven that being socially involved and responsible takes nothing away from their bottom lines.

What would you consider your favorite spot in New Hampshire and why?

Choosing one spot is tough. The summit of Mt. Lafayette (I am an above-treeline addict and the view of all of that protected national forest to the east is completely breath-taking) and the picnic rocks on Bowman Island on Squam Lake (I grew up summering on an island on Winnipesaukee and am deeply saddened by the demise of that lake whereas Squam today is like Winnipesaukee was in my childhood) are close to the tops but if pushed, I would have to say that the top of the hill at the Bartlett Farm in East Concord wins my vote.

Why? All three places look much like they might have looked 50 years ago, and thus have given me hope that we can retain our state’s beauty and rural integrity. The reason that the Bartlett Farm wins is that I grew up with working farms all over this area (my dad owned an old farm that was surrounded by many working farms in Pembroke) and it is the last remaining working dairy farm in our state’s capital and yet when you walk in those fields, it harkens to a saner and more sensible time

What would you like to see accomplished in New Hampshire over the next 25 years?

I have a two-part general answer. First, I would like to be able to say that we in NH and the rest of the country stemmed the rate of CO-2 output, and slowed climate change. We’re not going to stop it, but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tells us that there is still time to begin to reverse it, and we certainly have the technology and know-how to do it. But the second part of this is that we need to move away from the tiresome and unproductive debate about the role of government and regulations in protecting in society and protecting what Aldo Leopold called the Commons. I’m not a fan of big government and don’t like regulation any more than the next person, but there can be no debate that we humans need to regulate and check our unconscious behaviors and to incentivize and reward those activities that actually slow and reverse climate change, protect biodiversity and open space, clean air and clean water. So I’d like to see less divisiveness on that front for I think we can all agree that whether we see NH as a place to hunt, fish, hike or farm, that we like it here and would like our children to enjoy some of the gifts our state has given us.  But we humans are slow to understand that we cannot just exploit and waste, and we cannot burn fossil fuels unchecked, and there is no place called “away” where we can just send our CO-2 and other pollutants. And if we want our kids to do anything but despise us, we need to act decisively and in concert now. The happy news is that we now know that reducing our climate footprint, using renewable energy and supporting organic farming are good for our economy, and hold enormous promise for 21st century jobs and economic development.

So, specifically in NH we must take what economists have called the “externalities” into our economic calculations and recognize that clean air and water, and a climate that is not warming have real economic value. This means many things but certainly among them would be:

• state and federal renewable energy tax credits;
• a change in state tax policy from taxing payroll and property to taxing consumption, waste  and carbon output;
• a national carbon cap and trade system;
• a light rail system up and down the main transportation corridors with plug-in wind and solar powered hybrid car charging stations and zip car type access ports at every station;
• a redirection of our current program of subsidizing enormous and rich land owners around the country to not grow crops, incentives to farmers that help them incorporate renewable energy, on-farm composting and methane digestion and reduced chemical dependency
• 500 NH organic farms
• 50% of the food on our store shelves will be organic.
• And finally, a return to more civil politics and less partisanship that only pits us against each other, when in fact I know that everyone wants a cleaner planet for our children.

In summary, over these next 25 years, we need to evolve so that we stop laboring under mythologies like (a) the solution to pollution is dilution, (b) we can continue to apply persistent synthetic pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers to our air, water and soil with no consequences, and (c) there is a place called “away” where we can send CO2, sludge and other unnecessary byproducts of our unconscious, selfish and reckless treatment of the environment