This past weekend Tracy and I attended the Opportunity Green Conference. Yesterday, she posted her takeaways. Here are mine:

When thousands are becoming unemployed each day, it can be hard to be optimistic about the economy. But the name of this conference tells it all: the Opportunity of Green. After two days of lectures, workshops, networking lunches and yummy Organic cocktails, I think most of us felt very inspired by the potential of the green industry to bring hope to our lives and to our nation’s prosperity. It was a very “yes we can” weekend.

Amidst this happy-hippie aura there was a very real corporate and capitalistic undertone, which I believe is vital to the “stickiness factor” of our generation’s green movement. My favorite truism of the weekend was: “Green is the new green.” Think $$$ signs. Nike is not necessarily launching their new eco-friendly “Considered” line because they want to save the polar bears. They are doing so because, like Clorox learned with their “Green Works” cleaning line, green does work and it does sell. Corporations follow the dollar signs.

This might seem like a letdown for us idealists out there. Many of us love small companies with cute stories and cuddly values. It can be frustrating to realize that the small-time entrepreneurs do all the groundwork so that once an idea becomes popular the big giants swoop in and buy out all the market share until the little guy cant survive anymore. But this is the reality of the world we live in and I think we can succeed in making the world a better place if we work within the constructs of present reality. At the end of the day, when Walmart chooses to carry organic cotton they have the power to make far bigger change than any one small company, no matter their intentions.

And hopefully at the end of that same day the little guy gets bought out for a good sum so that he can reinvest in his next great idea that will drive our economy towards even better (not bigger) things. We met so many of these sorts of innovative companies at the conference. My favorite was TerraCycle, which I think displays “American” ingenuity at its best (keep an eye out for an upcoming ydt article).

So, what does all this gibber-gabbering mean for you and me? It means that we the consumers are the Kings and Queens in this game of chess. Our pocketbooks rule the world. Remember: little guy invents great eco-friendly product, we buy that product, and the end result is that a big corporation goes green. With this comes a different kind of CSR that I’d like to call “consumer social responsibility” to make well-informed decisions about the things we buy. Plus, living in L.A. is kind of like being the rich kid who has the duty to live up to her potential. We have so many opportunities here in L.A. to be informed, get involved, and have an impact that it would be a shame to let it go to waste.

We hope you take advantage of the resources that ydt has to offer you in this effort. If there is an issue or product you want to learn more about, let us know. We’ll do the research and report back to you. Remember, we are all in this together.