As the VP of
Planet Green for the Discovery Channel, and President & COO of
TreeHugger.com, Ken Rother commands quite the tech forces. We took the time to interview Ken about his career, his interest in the environment, and how he got there. From everything Ken stands for, its no surprise that this is our world premier interview. You can read more about Ken Rother on his TreeHugger
bio page.
Have you always been interested in the environment?
Yeah, not always so formally, but yes. When I was a kid I camped. I had a summer job leading canoe trips for a summer camp in Northern Quebec. I’ve always been interested in the environment, in that, I’ve always enjoyed and appreciated the outdoors. But only recently, in the last four or five years, has that translated into a desire to change the direction we’re headed in.
How did you first get involved in TreeHugger, Planet Green and Discovery?
I knew the founder of TreeHugger, Graham Hill, who is still actively involved. Graham and I met in 1998, when each of us sold our companies. We didn’t know each other, he owned a company in Seattle and I co-owned a company in Toronto, and we sold to the same New York firm. This was in the internet days, and each of us owned an internet consulting company. We ended up meeting in ’98 through this new parent company that had bought both of our firms plus a few others, and we worked together for a while in that capacity. We stayed in touch over the years. I had spent a couple years as a stay at home dad, and when I was looking to get back in to the workforce I knew that TreeHugger was taking off. I spoke to Graham and wanted to see what I could do, and sure enough he needed an extra set of hands to help run TreeHugger. About 9 months after that we sold TreeHugger to Discovery. Discovery was starting a network called Planet Green and they were looking to get a leg up in the digital space so they were looking for someone who was established in the green space. They were also looking for an organization that had a good grounding in creating digital content, not just digital content that supported their TV shows, but unique, free-standing digital content.
What do you do in the day-to-day operations of TreeHugger? What’s a typical day in the life?
My day is to be the business guy. I’m not a writer. My day is a combination of a lot of things. Anywhere from making sure that the organization is properly funded, so looking at advertising opportunities, to looking at a re-design, making sure [the redesign project], which is a very massive project, stays on track and all the right people are participating and we’re getting all of the right input. It often involves working with third-parties that want to contribute content, to see how we can work together. We’re talking to an organization that represents a number of chefs, for instance, and they would like to contribute some content. We would figure how we would do that and how would it appear on the site and be in everyone’s best interest as well as interesting to our readers. So it’s a little bit of everything, it’s a little bit of sales, it’s a little bit of content strategy. Mostly I describe my job as making it as easy as possible for the writers to do their job. Ultimately at the end of the day it’s the content, and the writers are the people that make the difference. I just try and make all of the obstacles go away so that the writers can write.
Are you part of the process in choosing the writers? Or do you just oversee one head Editor- and-Chief?
We have a main editor and chief on TreeHugger, Meghan O’Neill, and then on Planet Green we have another editor. I do participate in that process especially as it relates to guest posters. When we’re talking about our core writers, our editors and the editor in chief tend to be the folks who worry about that; though we will talk about what kind of people are writing for us - what skill set. In terms of the actual individuals, they worry about that. But when we start talking about guest posters, either from another corporation or a high profile environmentalist, then I’ll often get involved in that process and help facilitate getting that person on-board.
We get this question a lot on our website: what are some ways that the average person can live “greener”?
There are lots of things people can do. The easiest things are the classics, like changing your light bulbs. One of the easiest things you can do, if you live in a state where your electric company allows you to sign up for green power, is sign up for green power. That will encourage the creation of more green power generation facilities whether that means wind or solar. Most states now offer a green power alternative. It’ll only cost you a few more bucks a month, and it makes a huge difference.
Another thing people often don’t think of is the food chain and what strain the food chain puts on carbon generation. Anything from eating way less meat, and one of the programs we try to push here at Treehugger is this idea of weekday vegetarianism. We know a lot of people aren’t going to become vegetarians, but if you could be a vegetarian five days a week and on the weekends eat meat. The production of meat through the entire process from the amount of energy it takes to grow the crops that the animals eat, the whole process, a huge amount of Carbon gets generated, a huge amount of greenhouse gasses. So if you can reduce the amount of meat consumption, that’s an easy one. Mass transit, taking the bus, car-pooling, are opportunities to use less energy. It’s all over the map – you know you can find an opportunity to use less energy.
Is there anyone you really look up to in the green community – a public figure?
There are a lot of people doing great work – we look at Al Gore – he’s opened a lot of people’s eyes and made a huge difference. I look to Graham Hill who started TreeHugger. When he started TreeHugger in 2004 it was an important issue to him, it wasn’t in the newspaper every day and people didn’t talk about going green, he just knew this was a big issue and really pushed for it, and the world caught up to him.
So I think of people with that kind of vision, people like Dr. Saul Griffith, who is a scientist I had a chance to meet. He has really broken down on a very personal level ,for himself actually, every component of his life and what his personal energy use amounts to. What is the energy use embedded in his whole life? In this way, he can really understand where the opportunities are to make changes. There are people all over the map. There are people in the food space like Alice Waters who are pushing really hard to get people to eat local foods.
What do you think your biggest contribution to the green community has been?
Personally? I would say it’s my work here at TreeHugger, being given the opportunity to be a part of the leadership of this organization and really grow it. It’s substantially bigger in terms of the amount of people that look at it every day – our readers. That’s given me an opportunity to participate in a very big way. That in turn has made a huge impact on my family’s life at a very individual level. We’ve changed a lot of our behaviors because of what we learned being a part of this organization. I have been fortunate to be a part of treehugger and in doing so have contributed to our writers reaching a lot of people.
What are your thoughts on banning bottled water?
I don’t think we’re ever going to ban bottled water per se, there’s a limited place where maybe that would make sense but I think what’s happened is through very appealing advertising and marketing the social norms have changed. ‘X’ years ago if you would’ve said you’re going to be buying water in bottles people would’ve looked at you. Now, all of a sudden it’s become this social norm. I think what’s going to change behavior, whether were talking about buying bottled water or we’re talking about driving SUVs, or whatever it is we’re talking about, is when the social norms change. When it becomes socially unacceptable to drive a Hummer - you know actually Hummer went out of business. When it becomes socially unacceptable to be walking down the street with a plastic bottle of water instead of a clean canteen bottle behavior will change.
What changes behavior? A story we use as an example is the 70s anti-litter campaign. When you drove the highways before the anti-litter campaign they were full of litter. And then, because of this massive campaign by the government to change this behavior, all of sudden our highways were cleaner. Now that may be a bad example cause cars aren’t that green in the first place, but the idea was that through this big advertising campaign, an advertising campaign directed toward kids – the famous ad of the Native American with a tear in his eye as he saw the litter - it moved the social norm. All of sudden you didn’t see people just rolling down their windows and throwing litter out of their cars. We saw a change in behavior. We need to change the social norm. It’s ridiculous to be drinking bottled water, it’s a total waste of money, the idea of shipping it all over the country - it’s just a silly idea. You know, survey after survey shows that people tend to pick their local tap water over bottled water. We just need to change that social norm and we’ll get there. Social norms have changed around smoking, social norms have changed around littering, they’ve changed around big cars, and they’ll change around this when we get there, but there’s huge forces at play - a lot of money to be made, and it’s a complicated battle.
What are your thoughts on our dependence on oil, and do you think that electric cars we’ll be able to gain the dominance that they really should have these days?
That’s a complicated question. At the end of the day, were gonna run out of oil, whether that’s tomorrow, or sixty years from now, or even a hundred and twenty years from now – it’s not a particularly long time. My children’s children or my children’s grandchildren will live in a very different world. Even if oil wasn’t terrible for the environment, even if it wasn’t a polluter, you’d still have to think at a societal level - ok, we’re going to run out of oil soon –and on top of that, it’s obviously making a mess.
But cars are not the only answer. Cars take a huge amount of resources in and of themselves. Even if cars were not running on gas and instead running on electricity then we are going to need a whole new infrastructure to generate that electricity. Right now, when people are driving an electric car they are really driving a coal powered car because their electricity is coming from coal anyway. You know cars take a huge amount of resources out of the planet. There aren’t enough raw materials for every person on this planet to own a car, I mean that would just make no sense. As other cultures become wealthier and hopefully emerge from poverty, the answer will not be for everyone to own a car – we’re going to need to make a way better investment in mass transit. Like they have in Europe. In Europe you just hop on a train, you can use mass transit within a city and to multiple cities. We’re gonna need better mass transit. We can not expect, as we get more and more people on the planet who can afford to have cars
That's a pretty good point; it's definitely nice to know that we won't exist in that time, because it can't be anything but bad... Unless by that time, we've moved on to ruining other planets, I'm sure we can expect our own planet to look something like Coruscant (off Star Wars.)
Cynical as that may sound, I can't see a bright future for our planet. :(