Wednesday
Vermont is cold. That message will be repeated several times
Wednesday night but it’s bleeding obvious from the minute I step
out of the Burlington airport and thank my lucky stars for my long
black coat.
Another reporter who will attend the sixteenth annual Society of
Environmental Journalists conference with me tries to find out
exactly how nippy it is. She reports: 36 degrees, plus (or, rather,
minus) wind chill. And the weather is just getting started
The cool climate almost convinced our keynote speaker not to
settle here. Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream,
had decided with Jerry Greenfield to start an ice cream parlor…
somewhere.
This was in the days before the Internet, he tells us. They had
two criteria for what city to set up shop in. It had to be (a) a
college town and (b) warm. Ben thumbed through a guide to American
colleges and Jerry brought an almanac to the kitchen table. Every
time they found a decent sized non-chilly college town, they looked
into it.
The problem was, every time they found a warm college town they
also found an established ice cream parlor. “So we threw out the
criteria of warm and ended up here in Burlington,” he tells us.
In fact, it may have been the weather that turned Ben &
Jerry’s into the massive success that it’s become. They did great
business in the Summer but nobody here wanted to buy ice cream in
the Winter, so they had to find a way to make money in the cold
months.
In order to survive, Ben and Jerry decided to sell pints to
supermarkets. The pint sales took off and the parlor was eventually
abandoned and torn down.
If we get a chance to tour more of Burlington, Ben recommends
that we take in two sights. The first is Al’s Frys, an old school
fast food joint. The second is the lot where the original Ben &
Jerry’s stood. There’s still a sign there behind some brush, he
says.
His talk is fascinating but frustrating. Fascinating because he
tells the story of how two friends who’d failed at everything else
finally managed to do something that we can all sink our teeth
into. Frustrating because when the subject isn’t ice cream, he
basically thinks in cliches.
The success of Ben & Jerry’s was in the fact that a couple
of hippies decided to try their hands at brass knuckled capitalism
and somehow managed to get in the best licks. When they didn’t have
enough for 30-second spots on late night television, they decided
to buy up all the 10-second slots. And when Pillsbury strong armed
a Ben & Jerry’s distributor with an ultimatum — they could
sell Haagen-Dazs or Ben & Jerry’s, but not both — the young
upstarts refused to let that be the end of it.
They looked into their legal options but found that the relevant
regulators had been “Reaganized,” and decided to deal with this
themselves. Ben & Jerry’s launched the “What’s the doughboy
afraid of?” campaign. They took out advertisements on buses and
rented banner planes that fly around sporting events. Jerry became
a one-man picket at Pillsbury headquarters. They slapped a 1-800
number on every pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.
“We started getting like a hundred calls a night, most of them
between the hours of midnight and 3 a.m.,” he tells us. The bad
press forced Pillsbury to stop trying to hobble a competitor.
Then he starts in with the cliches. Ben tells us that religion
used to be the most powerful force in society, then government, and
now business. Businesses control the media, elections, and everyday
life. It’s a power that can be used either for good or for ill, he
tells us, and he’s trying to use business to do good.
He throws out a few ideas about how to change business but then
he works into his government reform routine. Rather than using
business to do things that government is bad at we should lobby
government to change its spending priorities. Less money for the
Pentagon, more for world hunger, that sort of thing.
Great ice cream, though.
Thursday
Just call me butterfingers.
When you sign into the conference, you get a nametag with
stickers that allow you to go on the tours.
I lose my nametag just before a scheduled activity and search
for it so monomaniacally that I miss the bus.
According to the program, the tour has two scheduled stops, “The
Missisquoi National Wildlife Refuge on Lake Champlain, where
hunters and birders often inhabit the same space; and a shooting
range where journalists can try their hand at a round of skeet and
talk with folks who hunt, fish and trap.”
The tour will explore “one of the burning issues of our time:
How can consumptive users and non-consumptive users harmoniously
share our increasingly limited natural resources?”
I’d always wondered, and now I’ll never know.
Later in the evening come the sponsored receptions. Various
concerns rent out reception rooms and try to get environmental
journalists good and liquored up. The British government has the Ye
Olde Climate Change Pub.
For my non-money, the best reception is the one put on by the
law firm Bracewell & Giuliani, where the former New York mayor
hangs his shingle. The suite is spacious and it’s the one party
where nobody tries to sell us on some cause. Plus, it’s the only
place where a server slices up prime rib for the conferees.
“If you want red meat,” I tell a colleague, “you can always
count on Rudy Giuliani.”
