We think of extreme climatic events as happening only in this past few decades, but there were events that fundamentally altered our country’s demography in the 1920’s and 1930’s and 1950’s, and were more devastating than what we are now experiencing.

The Mississippi River flooded in 1927 and had short and long term impacts.  In those floods, 700,000 people lost their homes and Herbert Hoover became a hero for his leadership in flood relief efforts, which propelled him into the Presidency in 1928. The flooding disaster triggered acceleration in the migration by African Americans from the Southern delta farm areas to Northern cities, which was part of a major migration by African Americans from South to North between 1915 and 1970.  It also resulted in a significant increase in federal control of waterways and flood control systems across the country.

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Recently, I stumbled on an online article about the Google effort to lobby the State of Nevada to allow self-driving automobiles to be used within the state.  That article is available at the following link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/science/11drive.html?_r=1

A more recent and broader article about self-driving cars was posted on Friday, March 31, 2012.

http://news.yahoo.com/coming-soon-self-driving-cars-120300164.html

If self-driving cars were to be broadly available, they would profoundly affect how society functions today.  There are many obvious consequences from having the ability to acquire and use a self-driving car:

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Our family was fortunate this past weekend in not experiencing any property damage or loss of power from Hurricane Irene.  700,000 other residents of Connecticut were not so lucky.  However, as I have thought about this disaster and others through which I lived during my lifetime, I have increasingly realized that much of the devastation of natural disasters is not “natural.”

Sometimes, the influence of bad human decision making on the scope of a disaster is obvious: Hurricane Katrina would not have been anything more than just another bad Gulf Coast hurricane, had the levees protecting big portions of New Orleans not failed to protect the city against water damage.  The levees were not built to protect against Category 4 or 5 hurricanes, so a disaster of the type that happened was inevitable and experts were not surprised when it happened.  Experts warned of this kind of problem, but were ignored year after year. Nevertheless, most of the time, we forget the degree to which we can anticipate disasters and minimize their impact.

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I find a lot of the commentary on what we will have to do to achieve energy independence and to adjust to a time of scarcity to be misguided.  Telling Americans they have to “sacrifice” and “conserve” sounds good, but is not sustainable over the long term.

On the contrary, finding ways in which to conserve energy or reduce spending that actually are perceived as beneficial to individuals is far more likely to succeed and be sustainable.  Why does the “sacrifice” or “conserve” message not work? (more…)

Two news items pertaining to health-related legislation caught my attention this summer.  In the July 22 issue of The Wall Street Journal, in an article entitled “Exiling the Happy Meal,” reporter Sarah McBride discussed proposed legislation in Los Angeles that would ban fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s and KFC from opening in a 32-square-mile section of the city.  Not surprisingly, one critic referred to the proposed legislation as an “example of a nanny state.”  Another critic, the president of the California Restaurant Association, blamed the obesity epidemic on “sedentary lifestyles and lack of nutrition education.”

The article also referred to New York City’s law requiring disclosure of calories on the main menus above the counter, and noted that San Francisco also will implement calories disclosure legislation.

A second article, dated July 30, also in The Wall Street Journal, entitled “San Francisco Votes For New Tobacco Rules” reporter Ann Zimmerman describes San Francisco’s proposed law to ban tobacco sales at pharmacies. An article in the Journal the day before, also written by Ann Zimmerman, entitled “Drugstore Tobacco Sales Under Fire”  summarizes arguments from opponents of the legislation that suggest that the legislation will have little impact on smoking rates and will force retailers to deny members of the public something they want. (more…)

I want to begin by thanking Doctor Gerberding and her team for convening and hosting this extremely important conference. I come to you as a leader of a company, Pitney Bowes that defined employee health and well-being as a core value even before I became CEO in 1996.

Our mail stream businesses have always required a high degree of subject matter expertise and relationship-building with postal services and customers that take many years to learn and master. Therefore, for several decades, we had been a generous company in delivering benefits that rewarded and encouraged employee loyalty and commitment.

In 1990, this commitment to employee health and well-being was being challenged by our inability to continue offering health plans that essentially provided medical benefits without meaningful employee contributions in terms of premiums, co-pays and deductibles. Our costs were increasing at an alarmingly high 14% per year, and we were not delivering a high degree of employee satisfaction. When I became head of human resources in 1990, I had the unenviable task of committing us to a long-term course of action that required higher employee premiums, co-pays and deductibles, but I also recognized that we had to maintain and/or increase employee satisfaction with our benefit offerings, or we were going to lose one of our key talent retention tools. (more…)

Last week, we posted on the Pitney Bowes web site at www.pb.com/mailimpact a white paper detailing preliminary findings on the environmental impact of mail. Several points stand out when we look at the study:

• Mail is a relatively minor source of carbon footprint compared with common personal and household activities, such as taking a two-minute shower, which has the same carbon footprint as receiving 40 pieces of letter mail.
• Electronic communications, on the whole, have a carbon footprint similar to paper-based communications
• As noted on pages 21 and 22, the ultimate question is not whether mail or paper-based communications have an environmental impact that could be reduced. No one questions the need to reduce the carbon footprint of mail or paper-based communications, and the paper talks about sustainability initiatives. (more…)

As anyone who has read my past blogs on environmental issues knows, I believe that eliminating unsolicited direct marketing mail may help reduce the “annoyance factor” some mail recipients experience, but there’s no assurance that it will improve the environment.”

I have been concerned that if some of those individuals who stop receiving unsolicited mail get into their automobiles and buy an item at a retail store that they would ordered through a direct mail solicitation, the environment is worse off. Until I attended the recent Center for Research on Regulated Industries Conference, I did not have data to support my point. Now I do. (more…)

In many blogs, I have commented on the issue the mailing industry faces with respect to the attacks on unsolicited marketing mail by environmentalists or privacy advocates. In particular, environmentalists argue that it would be better for the environment if everyone communicated electronically, instead of doing so in paper-based communications.

I am in the process of reviewing the increasingly robust research which suggests that electronic communication has substantial environmental hazards, in some cases, greater than physical mail-based communications. But the insight I want to share in this blog is that the boundary between physical and electronic communication is not clear, and is getting more muddied as time goes on. (more…)

As we move into May, this is junior prom season at high schools, and I have a son who is planning to attend the prom. I remember my junior prom, which took place in May, 1965. It was a wonderful evening with a wonderful date, but what I also remember is that Brother Joseph Clark, our principal at my high school, Bishop Kearney High School in Rochester, New York, decided that the prom would start at 10 pm and end at 4 am. He said that no one would be allowed to leave the prom before 4 am unless he or she was picked up by parents. His explicit reason for this decision was to keep us in the prom venue until after the bars and nightclubs around town closed.

Today, this same issue has surfaced in a different way. New York City has decided to order all bars closed at 2 am, instead of 4 am. In the Sunday, April 27, New York Post, in the Page 6 Magazine, there were actually two op-ed pieces published on this subject, one opposing the earlier closing hour, and the other favoring it. The proponent, a female freelance writer, made the great comment that nothing much good happened between 2 am and 4 am. In fact, those extra hours probably led to more behaviors that people later regretted, if they could remember them, than during any other 2-hour period during the day. (more…)