January 21 was a travel day for me – on my way to Toronto for three days of technical training with colleagues. I saw and heard snippets of the media coverage of the festivities in Washington along the way.
One point of interest to me, and perhaps a small handful of the national audience, was the fact that President Obama took his oath and made his speech from a temporary platform constructed of lumber from an SFI-certified company. The folks at SFI, Inc. had done some promotion of this, of course, but there really wasn’t much chance the it would be picked up by the mainstream media sources. It’s still a nice story.
I wrote a couple weeks ago about the possibility of getting SFI and FSC-US to co-promote around the inaugural. The combination of an SFI-certified platform and FSC-certified invitations seemed to me to be a wonderful opportunity to call attention to the Green Certification story. I tried to attract some attention to my idea on twitter (@mxdwood), and talked to a few colleagues about it. I got a positive response from SFI, but no reaction from FSC. That’s too bad, but not really a surprise. The FSC organization have persisted for years to define themselves as separate and distinct from other SFM certification organizations. A great deal of energy and emotion has been invested in their self-declared, “gold standard” status. It makes it difficult for them to participate in the community, which of course leads to lost opportunities like this.
Maybe next time…