We Celebrate Earth Day 365 Days a Year

A couple months ago in this column, I called Valentine’s Day a “Hallmark holiday.” At the risk of sounding like the Grinch for all holidays, I wanted to rant for a minute about Earth Day. For the record, I love most holidays…really I do! I even like some elements of Valentine’s Day and Earth Day as well. My rant though is about how some corporations take actions 364 days a year that put tons of pollutants into the environment and make decisions to save a few pennies for them, but come with great environmental costs for society, but then tout their greenness because they throw an Earth Day party on April 22.

Over the last few days I have been reading about how companies from Kaiser Permanente to Delta Airlines to Radio Shack are doing one day or one week “green” initiatives in celebration of Earth Day. I am glad that green practices are becoming more a part of American business.  But I wonder about the motives of companies that have questionable environmental records during the year and decide to be Earth friendly for a day or a week. I envision corporate task forces and brainstorming sessions to discuss how they can appear more earth friendly. One particularly clever video took clips from Lockheed Martin, a leading weapons manufacturer, and showed the stark dichotomy between the “green” efforts of their employees and then promotional clips of Lockheed Martin’s products: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRfGzFMypIk

One of the great things about coming to work for Wild Idea Buffalo is that we celebrate Earth Day every day of the year. Our mission is restoring the Great Plains by putting buffalo back on the land. Grassland conservation and the preservation of healthy bio-diverse ecosystems are at the core of all of our efforts. By partnering with like-minded ranchers on the reservations, Nature Conservancy land, and private property, we have helped had a positive impact of 150,000 acres and counting. When you ask Dan and Jill O’Brien how we are doing as a company, they measure the results in acres of land positively impacted, not dollars of profit or cases sold.

This is not something we talk about for one week a year. Dan and Jill do not call me and say – “what is our Earth Day promotion?” or “I think we need to write a corporate sustainability statement.” Environmental responsibility is part of everything we do; it is a subject in almost every meeting we have as a company. And while we feel very good about our overall practices and great about the fact we are actually carbon negative (better than carbon neutral), we are constantly asking, “how can we do better?”

So while it is nice that some companies decide to give $1 on every purchase on Earth Day to an environmental cause, I wonder whether they can be doing more. Please know that every dollar spent on Wild Idea Buffalo meat goes back to supporting the Earth 365 days a year. It is a beautiful model – more buffalo sold means more land that we are raising 100% grass-fed buffalo on which means more land that is turned back to native prairie grasses, which means more carbon sequestered and fewer fossil fuels in transporting grain to the farm, or animals from farms to feedlots. There are NO compromises. At Wild Idea Buffalo, every day is Earth Day. Wishing you 365 Happy Earth Days.  Josh