Walk the talk for a fragile planet

By Ann Monroe

What's the most personal thing in your life? Not sex, I'd bet -- but money.

Most of us tend to think of the money that comes into our hands as intensely personal. Often we don't even share our financial decisions with our families. We may invest our money -- in which case it's earning (or losing) money for us -- or we may spend it, in which case it's buying something for us. Either way, it's ours alone. It affects only us.

But that's not how I see it.

I believe money is more like a stream -- or even better, an irrigation system.

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It comes to us from countless people whose lives it has changed, and when it leaves us it goes on to change the lives of people we will never see. With each of our decisions about how to spend or invest our money, we are acting like a sluice gate, pointing that flow in one direction or another. If it is money that makes the world go round, then it's our collective decisions about how we use that money that determine what direction the world is going.

Right now a lot of us want the world to move away from global warming and toward a sustainable future. And there are a lot of ways that you -- as a consumer and as an investor -- can help make that happen.

Responsibility for planet Earth

Need some examples? You can invest in stocks that fight global warming, or you can make your house "greener" (and, often, cut your utility costs) by minimizing your use of energy and reducing the pollution it causes. You can eat food that doesn't have to travel thousands of miles to get to you, or choose from some of the amazing fuels that may soon power your car (think algae).

There's a whole community of people in this country -- and around the world -- who are discovering ways to create a cleaner planet: building green houses, apartment buildings and skyscrapers, providing new markets for small (and green) farmers, and developing new green-investment vehicles. In ways ranging from small (buying recyclable carpet) to large (building off-the-grid houses), individuals are taking responsibility for making this a greener world.

Major companies like Wal-Mart Stores (WMT, news, msgs), General Electric (GE, news, msgs) and Bank of America (BAC, news, msgs) are also taking dramatic steps to cut down on the waste and pollution that help fuel global warming -- so you may want to bet on their efforts by investing in them. As of 2005, U.S. investors had put roughly $2.3 trillion into socially responsible investments -- a 258% increase from 1995.

If you're not already on this bandwagon, I encourage you to jump aboard. If you are, it may be time to move even more deeply into a sustainable world. And I hope you'll have fun doing it.

Does salad dressing have to taste good?

The fact is, it can be easy to forget about the fun part. The first place I ever tried to put into practice my conviction that my financial choices had global consequences was at the supermarket. I was using a guide called "Shopping for a Better World" (now out of print), which ranked companies on a variety of social issues and then told you what products each of them made. It was enlightening -- but exhausting. I'd walk down the supermarket aisle, thinking: Do I want to buy my salad dressing from a company that treats women well, or from one that doesn't test animals? Or do I just want to buy the best-tasting salad dressing I can find?

The mistake I made was thinking that I could do this right -- that there was a morally right or wrong way to make every single purchasing decision, and that virtue might well require foul-tasting salad dressing. So after that unfortunate experience, it was a few years before I tried again. But the second time, I didn't try to do it all. I just took baby steps.

I hope you'll try out some new ideas for your home or investment portfolio. I also hope you'll move at your own pace. If you do, I suspect you may find -- as I have -- that spending and investing your money this way is so satisfying you want to do more of it.

I also hope you'll find that, as your financial choices move more into sync with what you care most passionately about, you yourself will become more deeply connected with the people around you -- and with the planet that sustains us all.

Published June 28, 2007