'What's your Company doing for the Environment?' And we didn't have answers. The real...
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Quote
Ray Anderson:
For 21 years I never gave a thought to what we were taking from the Earth or doing to the Earth in the making of our products. And then in the summer of 1994 we began to hear questions from our customers we had never heard before: 'What's your Company doing for the Environment?' And we didn't have answers. The real answer was not very much. And it really disturbed many of our people, not me so much as them, and a group in our research department decided to convene a taskforce and bring people from our businesses around the world to come together to assess our company's worldwide environment position to begin to frame answers for those customers. They asked me if I would come and speak to that group and give them a kick-off speech and launch this new task force with an environmental vision, and I didn't have an environmental position, and I did not want to make that speech. And sort of the propitious moment, this book landed on my desk. It was Paul Hawkins' book, The Ecology of Commerce and I began to read The Ecology of Commerce, really desperate for inspiration, and very quickly into that book I found the phrase, "The Death of Birth". It was E.O. Wilson's expression for species extinction, "The Death of Birth," and it was a point of a spear into my chest, and I read on, and the spear went deeper, and it became an epiphanal experience, a total change of mindset for myself and a change of paradigm. Can any product be made sustainably? Well, not any and every product. Can you make landmines sustainably? Well, I don't think so. There's a more fundamental question than that about landmines. Some products ought not to be made at all. Unless we can make carpets sustainably, you know, perhaps we don't have a place in a sustainable world, but neither does anybody else, making products unsustainably. One day early in this journey it dawned on me that the way I'd been running Interface is the way of the plunderer; plundering something that's not mine, something that belongs to every creature on earth. And I said to myself, "my goodness, the day must come when this is illegal, when plundering is not allowed. It must come". So, I said to myself, "my goodness, some day people like me will end up in jail".
Transcript
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what if it never ran
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And we said well you know
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we wouldn t be very happy about that
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And he said well I could kill it you know
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and we said yes of course you re the manager
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you could kill it it would never air
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And he hemming and he showing
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He s back and he s forth
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And we couldn t figure out what is this all about
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and finally he blurted out
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look would you tell anybody
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You know I said I m not going to lie for you
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And about a week later he calls us back to the office
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and says okay wed like you to make these changes
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In fact you will make these changes
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We said well look let us show you the research
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that we have that shows that this information
Clip duration: 36 seconds
Views: 126
Timestamp in movie: 01h 33m 52s
Uploaded: 01 April, 2022
Genres: documentary, history
Summary: Documentary that looks at the concept of the corporation throughout recent history up to its present-day dominance.
Comments
00:34 It can go back
00:18 The pursuit of profit is an old story
00:45 With deregulation privatization free trade
00:32 Privatization does not mean you take a public institution
00:30 The goal for the corporations is to maximize profit
00:33 About how they feel about things
00:16 In a world economy where information is filtered
00:35 One of the first stories that Jane came up with
00:24 Monsanto sent the second letter
00:36 I said you know this is news
00:37 What Fox neglected to report is this
00:36 Is a product that produces more of what we don t need
00:36 Is the collusion between corporations
00:35 Of their decisions
00:19 The corporations do
00:36 I ask myself often times why
00:36 And this time they freaked
00:37 Originally Wal Mart and Kathy Lee Gifford had said
00:28 So what wanted to do is to look at the very roots
00:35 They work for Lockheed Martin