Andrew Brengle

I was such a good do-bee about sending in stuff for earlier reports. And now I miss the deadline for the most important one. And I mean really missed it; by about eight months. Thank God for the Internet and instant information transfer. Imagine how much longer we could have procrastinated if we had it back then? On second thought, maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.

We are still in Ipswich, Mass. but now in a house we built in 2003. The family continues to expand, although the newest members are from different species. In addition to my wife, children and yellow lab, there is a Staffordshire bull terrier sporting a partially repaired cleft palate, a cat with a pronounced overbite, four fish, and three oriental fire bellied toads. I love them all dearly, although I’ll admit to a preference for those highest up the food chain. Susan is one of the finer women on the planet in my estimation, and continues to amaze me with her capacity to accomplish anything she pretty much wants. Breadwinner, local organizer and schools advocate, athlete, terrific cook, mom, daughter, wife. She's living proof of the power of a state school education. As for me, we’re still waiting for the Ivy League degree and MA to bear real financial fruit. Well, I stand by the credo that it takes a little longer to reach your potential when you’re saving the world. More on that later.

Robbie is 15, Emily is 12, and Miles is 9. Life is what you would expect with kids at these ages, driving to all manner of sporting, music and theatrical events. Their constant need for some form of electronic media stimulation concerns me, but it’s a different world than when you and I grew up. All that button pushing, channel surfing, and frenetic multi-tasking is no doubt necessary training for the world they will negotiate. They still do plenty of outside stuff and old-fashioned creativity with pens, paint and paper—things I can understand. One happy mystery is my youngness’s penchant for bird watching. He’s psycho about them. No one knows where it came from, but what the heck? Bird books, bird logs, bird feeders, bird seed, bird houses, binoculars, bird magazines, bird drawings, bird screen savers, and so on. No one is allowed to mention or discuss any of this. He’s sensitive about the stigma, which his older brother reinforces by calling him the ‘bird nerd’.

Which gets me to saving the world part (OK, bad segue, but I’m trying to keep this reasonably short). For the past eight years, I have worked in socially responsible investing, at KLD, a firm in Boston where I dig up the good and the bad on publicly held corporations. I direct the environmental research and follow the energy and utilities sectors as well as private sector efforts in clean tech and alternative energy. I am proudest of developing a screened financial index of 100 companies chosen for their leadership on climate change. This was in 2005, long overdue, but strangely relatively early on as investment tools go. The Japanese and Europeans get it. U.S. financial folks are still suspicious, skeptical, waiting for this climate fad to pass.

SRI or ethical/sustainable investing or ESG or whatever you want to call it, is steadily gaining ground as cracks form in the mortar of the traditional financial world. Most of Wall Street still sniffs at us, but they can’t seem to shake us. SRI represents about 11% of the total U.S. assets under management, growing 325% since 1995. Europe has seen similar growth, and Asia is also now kicking into gear. High gas prices, subprime loan crises, Enron, WorldCom, cheap labor outsourcing, and toxic toys—all this stuff keeps coming and making us look not so crunchy and starry eyed after all. Are we laying a fine bed of nails for our kids? Whether it’s staggering debt or global warming, or recent squandering of international good will toward America, even our generation is starting to feel the prick. Perhaps we will simply innovate and techno fix our way out, but I think it’s going to take something more. Some deep-seated cultural attitudes will have to change. There are signs of hope, such as SRI. In 1983 the field, as a professional job opportunity, didn’t exist. Now college and grad school students want in. I get calls to speak at business schools (pretty ironic for someone who had his troubles with Ec 10), and the list of eager interns knocking at our door is long.

So that’s what I’m doing. I’ll stop the infomercial, and now you know to avoid me at reunion cocktail parties lest you be submitted to some kind of ethical rant. No, but I still like to talk about the Sox and the Pats, and now the Celts are back!