John Linton
We had an interesting board meeting yesterday which apart from the usual agenda items was mainly concerned with the two 'final' recommendations on committing Exetel to pro-active involvement in addressing the company's impact on the global and local (Australian) environment. With our very small 'board' which has the advantage/disadvantage of including the owners of Exetel discussions don't wander off track in the pursuit of some director's personal agenda so our meetings are usually comprehensive in covering the legal, financial and operating issues of the company but don't take inordinate amounts of time.
We dealt with the 'making Exetel carbon neutral' relatively quickly despite its complexity - largely due to the quite comprehensive but lucidly explained requirements, calculations and rationales. It seemed a relatively simple decision to me - it costs $4.00 to plant a tree and you need x trees to absorb the carbon emissions for which the company has been responsible in its four years of existence to date and y trees a month going forward. Just how 'x' and 'y' are reached needs more work and discussion but the implementation was agreed and we will execute the required agreements with the selected company over the next week or so for the tree planting and change our office use power to 'green power' by the end of January 2008.
Calculating the exact values of 'x' and 'y' needs to be discussed further and understood in terms of just what, reasonably and realistically could be regarded as Exetel's responsibilities. Its relatively simple to do the calculations on the carbon outputs of our own power and heat usage but the questions raised were:
1) Do we take in to consideration the carbon emissions involved in our personnel traveling to and from Exetel.
2) Do we take in to consideration the carbon emissions of the PCs, modems and routers used by our customers.
We will make decisions on those two, and any other subsequently raised issues before the end of January.
The second proposal for donating, to us, significant amounts of money on an ongoing basis to fauna and flora protection within Australia took a lot longer and was far less clear cut. While I think Exetel's owners and directors are 'above average' in terms of caring and compassion as individuals and also as employers we were being asked to make decisions that were beyond the scope of anything we had considered in the past and on behalf of a 'commercial' entity.
We discussed whether we should support charities that were aimed at relieving aspects of human deprivation or suffering rather than those that assisted inferior species. The prevailing view was that technology was a massive positive in assisting humanity and that the last thing you could say about homo sapiens would be that it's an endangered species.
We formally ratified the discussions we had held over the previous three months to create a 'pool' of money by allocating 50 cents per broadband customer each month and then using the money from this pool to support projects that we could see were directly aimed at protecting unique Australian fauna and flora from extinction by actions of humans intruding into their habitats.
Our final rationale was that the expansion of the human race in to so many areas around the globe and in Australia was only made possible by technology and that as we earned our living from providing technology to our (human) co-inhabitors of Australia we had an obligation to provide assistance to the other Australian (non human species) co-inhabitors who were adversely affected by human actions.
All a bit 'tree hugging ' and generally 'vomit inducing'? It could quite possibly be seen that way by some people. However we didn't see it that way at all and will do our best, in the very, very limited ways available to us, to make one or more species more able to withstand the negative effects of our actions while ever we can.
So - a bit of a different board meeting to the previous 45.