Story:
Hi, The Human Index

We’re in a world resource crisis.  If civilization continues to define a resource in a market that does not balance a resource's cost with the toll on: basic human decency, human survival, and evolution; our species will carry the consequences.  We see them today: loss of biodiversity, areas without access to clean waters, people without access to healthy food.  We experience it in business as lack of inspired labor.  This is only the beginning if we do not change our approach.

A little personal history from the CEO of Environmental Health Concepts, Inc.

 At one point in my former professional career, I’d had the task of helping the Fortune 500 Environmental Health & Safety departments approve the waste treatment and disposal facilities they used ("approved TSDF's"). Here’s something that’s critical to understand about American philosophies on waste management vs. the United Nations and larger world-view approach.  To the letter of the law in the country (and trust me there are more agencies in the United States writing regulations on the environment than there are actual states to write them) we approach waste management with a “cradle-to-grave” attitude.  

Translation? We don’t care much about what waste is going to be produced in your process.  Unless, you're the one who's holding it when it goes into the hole it will be sitting in, degrading for the next 100 or 1000 or 10,000 years from now.  Long and very complicated story cut short: I’ve visited a lot of landfills and regulated waste facilities.  Exactly how many, I never kept count but it has to be over 100 in 10 years. Here’s what I’ll never forget.  The feeling of standing in the middle of millions upon millions of cubic feet of trash. It stretched as far as the eye could see in either direction. If you can try to close your eyes and share this experience.

First know this.  These were beautiful experiences other than the soul searing impact of the waste process.  The landfills are in "out there" locations.  You know, the kind where when you fly in at 2 a.m. and it takes you two hours to drive to because a certain unnamed home airport throws the entire air logistic system out of wack.  HINT & LITTLE KNOWN FACT: although Kenosha is technically a city in the state of Wisconsin, it is commonly referred to in almanacs as a suburb of Chicago.    

These are the most peaceful places in the world, even if life moves a little slower than one gets used to these days.  Maybe that's the magic of those places.  Having obsessively kept up with every new environmental report in the industry, I just walked through those places thinking this.  86% of landfills in the United States leak.  They are one of the largest contributors to ground water contamination and the remedial costs to that of a community far exceed the $18Million + clean-up costs we pay for as tax-payers.  Let that settle for a second.  Now understand that every landfill in the world will eventually leak.  I'm a pretty visually motivated person.  My trigger?  I know no other way to describe it other than to say I felt my soul scream on every silent tour.  What's more valuable than oil, gold, or really any other commodity you can think of? Water.  Recently an associate and his father mentioned that it would take less than 5 days for a man to kill for it.  I didn't bother to snoops that one.  Yeah...I might.  That's if I wasn't dead first.  

 It wasn’t just seeing those landfills and the waste process that was difficult.  The fact that when you put it all together. All of it.  The issues we experience every day at the office, at home, the never-ending news cycles of doom & gloom, the unstable markets, the insane attempt to upkeep the balance of work and family, the loss of habitat, and species.  Phew. It just seems to keep speeding up.  No one seems to know where to.