We started this site for many reasons: To venture into something new, to have something to do, to have a creative outlet, to meet cool people, to counter some of the garbage thats on the internet, etc, etc. Most importantly, we wanted to provide an alternative to the doom and gloom side of environmentalism, and do this with a “hip-hop” point of view. I’m not sure we’ve accomplished this goal, but I do believe that we are on the right track. If affluent westerners are going to become active participants in saving the planet sooner rather than later, it is their higher needs that must be addressed, since their lower needs won’t become affected for some time. Let me explain.

I recently got a chance to listen to Chip Conley, an entrepreneur who started a hotel business at the age of 26 and who now runs Joie de Vivre Hotels, California’s largest boutique hotelier. Conley suggests that much of his success is due to looking at business through the eyes of psychologist Abraham Maslow. Anyone who took Psych 101 might remember Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, or at least the pyramid image to the right. At the bottom of the pyramid are primitive needs such as food and water, and toward the top we approach less tangible needs such as creativity and morality. While standard hotels address their customer’s base needs, such as water and shelter, Joie de Vivre tries to address needs at the peak of the pyramid: Matching hotels to customer’s specific personality, retaining staff so visitors see the same smiling faces time and time again, and addressing complaints immediately so upset customers don’t boil over into a mouth-to-mouth PR nightmare.

A friend of mine once applied the hierarchy of needs when discussing the situation in Iraq. Issues such as a well-run government or education tend to fall by the wayside when you have no food or water, let alone security. You can look at environmental challenges conversely. Though it is evident that global warming is occurring as I write these lines, the average reader’s life probably wont become affected by it for some time to come, therefore the base of the pyramid is not threatened. How can environmental issues become relevant to people’s lives if it is not currently affecting the first four tiers of the pyramid?

To become relevant, solutions to the environmental issues challenging our world must be ingrained into every facet of our life. In 2008, “green” is now almost as played out as “presidential politics”. So how do you break through the clutter of media to actually address people at their higher level needs? Well, one way is to get celebrities on your side. When Ludacris and Tommy Lee go on Youtube and claim to be green, you know that greenwashing has reached epic proportions… But then again, it would have been inconceivable that five years ago, pop-culture icons of this stature would be mentioning the environment. You have to dumb it down to reach the masses, but Planet Green knows exactly what they’re doing. They’ve managed to meet people in the middle of the pyramid. Celebrities are like friends that we really don’t know, but feel like we do.

But how do you get to people further up that pyramid? How do you get people from being passive spectators who watch An Inconvenient Truth, to becoming “self-actualized” and engaged at a higher level in the struggle for the environment. Organizations like the Crissy Field Center are well on their way. They have educational programs that inspire discussion, creativity, and problem solving - some very important higher-level needs. My goal for the second half of 2008 is to figure out how to incorporate some of these aspects into Chitta Chatta With The Green Rapper.