Interview with Green Chamber Member: The Green Arcade

I spoke with Patrick Marks, owner of The Green Arcade, a specialty bookstore that focuses on sustainability and related subjects. Here’s what he had to say about the challenges of maintaining a brick and mortar store and the value of creating community to support small green businesses…

What’s green about your business and what made you decide to be green?

The overall mission of the store really has to do with what I call a broad definition of green, not just the personal but sustainability in general and all its methods: culture, history, where we came from and where we are going. The idea is that it’s a green bookstore. For building material, I used sustainable wood, paint and found lots of used and recycled products. I sell books on the environment, but also books on food, production, labor, justice. All of these subjects overlap and work together to show what sustainability looks like. Previously, I was a buyer for Cody’s Books. As the official bookstore of the Green Festival in San Francisco, I was responsible for putting together books for the festival. I came up with a distillation of the cream of the crop books on sustainability and everything connected to that issue. People at the festival would ask, “Wow, all these books are in your store? I didn’t know you had these books.” That’s when I decided I would use this selection of books as the model for The Green Arcade. I didn’t want to try to represent every type of book, but rather have a specialty store.

I understand you host events at the bookstore to create a sustainability community. Are there any upcoming events readers should know about?

Yes, we have lots of great guest authors come in to speak. For instance, Fritjof Capra, a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy will come in December to talk about how the organization is trying to bring sustainability into Berkeley’s public school curriculum. In the past, we’ve had people like Ned Sublette who wrote The Year Before the Flood: A Story of New Orleans as well as Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer. Carpenter started an urban farm in West Oakland and there is a huge upsurge in urban gardening right now. We have an extensive gardening book collection and it is one of our best-selling sections.

What’s your advice to other green businesses?

What’s working for me and what I think is most important is connecting with your immediate community, your neighborhood and who your community is at large. For me, that means places like the Center for Ecoliteracy. Find agencies and people involved with your specific mission. For my business, those people are educators, organizers and activists. Let people know you are there and try to create partnerships.

For businesses who are not green but want to head in that direction, do you have any tips for them?

It seems to me that for all aspects of greening your business, there is a lot of great advice out there in books. For green branding, I suggest reading The Gort Cloud: The Invisible Force Powering Today’s Most Visible Green Brands by Richard Seireeni. On the topic of a business trying to go green, I would read Auden Schendler’s Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution which tells the story of his efforts to green the ski industry in Aspen. There are many people who’ve written on this subject that can help aspiring green businesses.

It sounds like people should just come to your store and find the right books for advice. Did you face any obstacles in the process of going green?

The hardest part is definitely getting the financing right. Credit is pretty high. We were very lucky because we started when the economy was down and we are still here. We celebrated our one year anniversary in October.

That’s exciting. Your existence shows that there is a niche market for a store that caters to sustainability issues, especially as we see society becoming increasingly aware and interested in this topic. Tell us why you joined the Green Chamber?

I joined the Green Chamber because I wanted to see what other businesses were doing, and I thought it would be a clearinghouse for that. Being a member is a great way to catch up and learn about the language of business. Also, the protests against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce made me want to join because I think it’s crucial to get behind this kind of group activism. What happened was a groundswell and I believe it is up to us to participate, to create what will make this world be a new and better world. It’s about transforming the classic model of doing business. The comments that the U.S. Chamber made about how climate change legislation will hurt business represent such a dinosaur, old school way of thinking. We need to supplant the old order. This is what citizenship is about. We can’t just say we voted, we have new administration so now we are done with our job. We have to participate.

Is there anything else that you want Green Chamber members to know about The Green Arcade?

One of the interesting things is that a lot of members probably have what I have — a brick and mortar store. A lot of people shop online, but e-commerce is not representative of my store. There are many people who are still a part of “Main Street” with small storefronts. I encourage people go out into their community and visit storefronts to see what it really means to invest in your immediate community and support local businesses.