As the director of an environmental nonprofit, Terry Kellogg ’94 hopes to spark a revolution.
By Gretel H. Schueller
Terry Kellogg ’94 is standing on the balcony of the Joppa Flats Education Center, a green-certified building owned by the Massachusetts Audubon Society that overlooks a restored marsh. Below him, there is a flurry of bird activity; the mudflats and estuary provide a fertile feeding ground for terns, herons, egrets, gulls, and other shorebirds. As he and a visitor enjoy the view, he points to the estuary. “An estuary is a really interesting environment because it’s mixing freshwater and saltwater, and you get a lot of diversity. And interesting things are happening from an evolutionary standpoint. I’ve always thought that the same is true from the business and environmental standpoint: You get two seemingly disparate fields mixing, and you get interesting things happening.”
Interesting may be an understatement. “Big business” and “eco-friendly” are terms that don’t typically belong in the same paragraph, let alone sentence, but Kellogg is intent on narrowing that great divide. The headquarters for an international nonprofit organization called One Percent for the Planet reside on the second floor of the Audubon building. Directed by Kellogg, the outfit is a rapidly growing network of companies—more than 400 at last count—that have committed to giving at least one percent of their annual sales to environmental causes. With a diverse membership consisting of both the familiar (think Patagonia, Clif Bar, and surf musician Jack Johnson) and the not-so-familiar (Muumuu Heaven, a Hawaii-based apparel and home decor company), One Percent has channeled more than $10 million to environmental causes in less than five years.
And while One Percent’s “command center” is actually a windowless office for a fulltime staff of two and is barely larger than a shoebox—it is crammed with two desks, two chairs, a bookcase, and paper-filled boxes that cover most of the floor—the operation has member corporations spread across the United States and in 16 countries. And then there’s the view upstairs.
Cofounded in 2001 by Yvon Chouinard, president of the eco-friendly outdoor clothing company, Patagonia, One Percent—with its charge of leveraging resources to create a healthier planet—is, at its core, a revolutionary approach to a familiar problem. Kellogg agrees.
“I like the idea that we’re launching a revolution, and the challenge is finding the tipping points that can help this thing to cascade,” he says. “If we do this right, we’re going to leave a lasting legacy. That really motivates me.” Based on appearances, though, it’s hard to imagine Kellogg at the helm of any type of revolution. He’s modest and soft-spoken and has bright blue eyes, a big toothy smile, and hair tousled just enough to complete the picture of boyish charm. But he also has a great deal of energy and is exceedingly optimistic about, well, anything, which really seems to be working for him and the organization. Since he became executive director in March 2005, membership has exploded from 92 to more than 400, and an average of two new members is joining each week.
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With his wife and two young children, Kellogg lives just down the road from the office, allowing him to bike to work most days. He also lives the eco-life in more unconventional ways. His wardrobe today is typical: a plaid organic cotton shirt, hemp jeans, a vegetable-tanned belt, and brown loafers made without toxic solvents or adhesives. His worst environmental vice? Showering more than once a day to support his lunchtime workouts.
His first job after college was with the nonprofit environmental group, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, in Montana. Grant Meyer, one of Kellogg’s professors in Middlebury’s geology department, had been working on behalf of the coalition on the New World mine, which holds an estimated $600 million in gold and other metals. The owner, Crown Butte Mines, wanted to go after the trove. There was just one catch; the mine sits less than three miles from Yellowstone National Park, and the coalition didn’t want the ground touched. “Meyer covered the issue in our classroom, and he got me very fired up about working in a hands-on way about a particular issue,” Kellogg says. The coalition eventually engineered a buyout to prevent the company from developing the mine, but Kellogg left the job wanting more. “I spent two and a half years preventing one company from doing one thing, and it was satisfying. But I wondered, what if I spent that time helping companies think differently? Could I effect bigger change?”
And so he started a job search for positions at companies with progressive environmental track records. But he didn’t get a lot of feedback—“I felt like I needed to speak their language better and get a little more experience”—so he entered a joint MBA and MEM (master of environmental management) program at Yale. After earning both degrees, he was hired as the director of environmental affairs at Timberland and immediately made a mark at the apparel company.
Some of his proposals were simple solutions, such as changing the lighting at the company’s headquarters and distribution center, which reduced energy use by 50 percent and cut close to 1,200 tons of carbon emissions. But he also led the move to introduce organic cottons to the clothing line and replace chemical solvents with water-based adhesives in footwear.
Still, he wasn’t satisfied. “I felt like if you really wanted to create widespread change, you’d have to focus on something that had leverage,” he says. “It needed to have a lot of visibility, something you could get people excited about.”
To illustrate what he means, he points to his water-based adhesive initiative and the Timberland shoes he is wearing. “It turns out that most people have no idea that footwear requires harsh chemicals to assemble,” he says. “Even if they do, very few of them are going to change their purchasing behavior to support a company that’s using a water-based alternative. They’re looking for price and quality.”
As good as it felt to help a company stop using toxic solvents, it wasn’t creating a greater awareness among consumers. “I had a sense of needing to go further faster,” Kellogg says. “In order for that to happen, we needed to have a shift in both awareness of the issues and the solutions, and to make it really easy for people to do the right thing.”
For Kellogg, One Percent embodies everything he was looking for. As he puts it, “It just seemed to deliver because it is something that any company in any industry in any region can aspire to. If you’re really passionate about One Percent, you could construct your entire economy with members of One Percent—no matter what the product or service.” In contrast, he asks, “how many times do most people buy footwear over the course of a year?”