There is a huge risk associated with exclusively focusing on the damage we do to our environment – our footprint.  The world knows that glaciers are melting, that the average temperature is rising, and that it would take eight planets worth of resources if everyone consumed as much as the American middle class.  But Katrinas, Gulf Oil Spills and Fukishima Daichis generally do not change our personal behavior.  With our current mindset we probably will not do enough to turn things around, no matter how much we recycle or how many Priuses we buy.

Better ways to practice our values are needed. The environmental handprint represents one such paradigm shift.

Simply stated, the environmental handprint is the good you do for the world.  Here are a few examples:  Exploring nature with a child, so she can grow up to care about it. Improving the quality of wind generation.  Requiring a five cent pass-through charge on paper bags in grocery stores.  Promoting organic food labeling.  Writing a book such as Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, inspiration for the Wilderness Act.  Making compact fluorescent lighting user friendly.  Inventing and commercializing and buying LED lighting. Planting a tree.  `

Can you feel the positive energy exuding from these efforts, large and small?  Can you see the leverage in working with children?  Can you celebrate how some efforts keep on giving long after you and I are done?

Here are five reasons why focusing on one’s environmental handprint is a lower risk strategy than focusing on one’s footprint:

• Creativity, idealism, love, profit, and play are more powerful motivators than guilt, admonitions and fear.  Have you noticed how fundraisers are accompanied by entertainment?  The only bad news that motivates most of us happens in our back yard.
• A positive feedback loop tends to amplify while negative feedback tends to dampen.  Good energy from creating good things feeds upon itself.  Profit provides incentive and capital for further innovation.
• Handprinting plays on America’s strength.  With founding principles like Liberty and Self Reliance, we have become better capitalists than stewards.
• You can magnify your own impact by influencing others.  By designing a more efficient aircraft engine, an engineer (and associated managers, investors and technician)reduces the CO₂ releases of an entire industry. By writing this article I hope to motivate you.
• The impact of your handprint is theoretically unlimited.  You can surpass the inevitable damage you do – your footprint. In 1993 I helped organize a conference focusing on industrial energy efficiency.  It has continued biennially ever since.

Financial advisors often say, “Sure there is risk in investing in the stock market.  But there is also risk in not investing in the market.”  The market outperforms inflation in the long run, even when you take into account recessions and the great depression.

Let us invest our time, money and energy improving our environmental handprint.   Our collective returns, our legacy, will be commensurate with our effort.

Disclaimer: Your personal returns may vary.

BIO: As a project manager with Quality + Engineering and  principal of Creating Sustainability Jon Biemer focuses on Organizational Development. He and his wife live in Portland, Oregon without owning a car. Mr. Biemer is a Certified Enterprise Risk Manager and a registered Professional Mechanical Engineer.