A good friend of mine recently bought a house in Florida.  To secure the best rate, he pledged his stock portfolio as collateral. But he encountered a problem when he went to get a loan from his bank, Wells Fargo. He owns marijuana stocks. Publicly traded companies that grow cannabis in the U.S. Apparently this […]

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When investing, your capital is at risk.  If there’s one industry that’s being forced to change rapidly, it’s fashion. Over recent years, shocking statistics and real life fatalities have forced us to come to terms with what is. If we don’t change the fashion industry now, it’ll change us.  Last year Boohoo faced allegations of [...]

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Among the constants in Adrianne Hawthorne’s life has been her desire to bring her artistic vision to life in a splash of vibrant colors.

While the graphic designer for Google dreamed of showcasing her art for others to enjoy, it wasn’t until she turned a Penske rental truck into a pop-up shop that her dream came true.

Now, the Chicago artist has a boutique of her own that she uses to showcase her work, as well as the work of other artists, to pay it forward and help them live out their artistic dreams.

“It worked out because having the Penske truck showed me that I could do it,” Hawthorne said. “The truck fueled my desire to curate a boutique.”

Do-It-Yourself Inspiration

Hawthorne had been living in California for a while when she began to long for the Windy City and the familiar places back home. So, she packed up her apartment and made the cross-country move to Chicago.

She was unemployed for a time, and she felt the need to be creative. So, she took on a 100-day project dedicated to creating something each day.

With each piece, she began to amass a body of work, which she decided to show in her apartment. “A bunch of people came and bought the art, and I realized I can be an artist who actually made money,” Hawthorne said.

After the success of the apartment art show, Hawthorne and her boyfriend were driving in Chicago when she spotted a yellow Penske truck in traffic. Then the idea came to her: Why not have a pop-up art showing in a Penske rental truck?

“When I told him my idea, he thought I was nuts, but I said, ‘Think about it. It’s a small space. Most people use rental trucks to move things. How cool and unexpected would it be?” Hawthorne said.

Penske Pop Up

It was different from the craft shows she was participating in to show her art. She called her Penske truck show “PenskePozz,” a play on words that had special meaning for her.

Her brand, Ponnopozz was created in 2018 and named after two imaginary friends she had as a child called Ponno and Pozzer.

“I named my business after them as a tribute to my younger and creative self who was not inhibited by anything,” she said. “When I got older, I started to worry about what people thought, and I didn’t blossom until recently. It’s all about going back to your younger creative truth.”

With the name for the pop-up fresh in hand, her next step was to make preparations for her art show.

“The trucks are yellow, which is one of my brand colors, and I love that the trucks have that clear roof so the light can come in,” Hawthorne said. “It was perfect. I loved it.”

View of the Penske rental truck turned pop-up art show venue.Photo courtesy of Mark Ukena.

After renting the truck from her local Home Depot, Hawthorne drove it home empty, but it did not stay that way for long.

“Basically, I put hooks along the center panel in that truck, and I hung paintings,” Hawthorne said. “I put a rug and a folding table in there. I had fabric samples because I do fabric design, and I had my prints for sale in little baskets.”

“Some people would actually walk up to the truck and browse the prints without getting in, but a lot of people wanted to get into the truck because you could look at all of the artwork that way,” she said.

That experience taught Hawthorne more than the value of her artwork. It stoked her dream to have her own art space.

“It was so much fun to decorate the truck and have my own baby boutique for one day,” Hawthorne said. “It was enough to finally push me over the edge and rent a studio. It showed me that I could do it and people would come out for it.”

From Pop Up to Ponnopozz

Fresh from the success of the PenskePozz pop up, Hawthorne moved ahead with finding a space for her art boutique. She didn’t have to go far.

On the day of the pop up, she noticed a small, 400-square foot basement studio for rent. It was the perfect place for her art.

Hawthorne describes her creative style as colorful maximalism, a mix of mostly bright and some muted colors. “Sometimes I paint abstract forms of plants but in maximalism. It is very detailed with lots of layers. I believe more is more,” she said with a laugh.

“I see pallets of color in my head all of the time, so I try to paint those. When you are an abstract artist, you don’t have to paint a person or something, you can paint the colors and shapes,” Hawthorne said. “Color is what inspires me always.”

She opened her Ponnopozz boutique in November 2019 – just a few months after the Penske pop-up show. “I always thought curating a boutique would be fun because you would be in total control of what you want someone to experience,” Hawthorne said.

Hawthorne’s boutique is awash with bright, cheerful colors. In addition to her own work, Hawthorne also carries work from a local business or artist.

“I love to focus on female-owned or black-owned businesses. I have candles in here, soap and mugs and tea and purses, and things I didn’t actually make,” Hawthorne said. “They are from people I met doing shows and other people I came across. I didn’t want it to be a store with just my work in it. I wanted to showcase other artists and other makers as well.”

Hawthorne pictured inside her current location.Photo courtesy of Amy Lynn Straub.

Recently, she moved into a larger location across the street from her first boutique and where she parked the Penske truck for her pop-up.

As Hawthorne reminisced about her journey, she credited Penske’s role in making her dream of owning her own art boutique come true.

“Having nice trucks with roofs that allow light to come through and allowing for uses in ways other than just moving boxes, it gave me my canvas,” Hawthorne said.

By Bernie Mixon

This nonprofit organization, the Soil Carbon Coalition, was inspired in part by Allan Yeomans's 2005 book, Priority One: Together we can beat global warming, which Abe Collins and I had been reading. Yeomans suggested that increased soil carbon could make a difference for climate. In 2007 Joel Brown of the NRCS gave a talk in Albuquerque in which he said that according to the published literature, good management by land stewards did not result in soil carbon increase, and that it was too difficult to measure anyhow. With that, I resolved to begin measuring soil carbon change on ranches and farms that were consciously aiming at greater soil health.

I had done plenty of reporting on land stewardship and plenty of rangeland monitoring. I studied research-grade, repeatable soil sampling and analysis methods and combined them with some rangeland transect methods I had learned from Charley Orchard of Land EKG. In 2011 I bought an old schoolbus, made it into living quarters, and for most of the next decade I traveled North America slowly, putting in hundreds of baseline transects and carbon measuring sites mainly on ranching operations that had some association with holistic planned grazing. I resampled over a hundred at intervals of 3-8 years. The question I was asking was: Where, when, and with whose management, was soil carbon changing over intervals of several years? I called this project the Soil Carbon Challenge.

A lot of data accumulated. What did it show, what did it mean?

In order for there to be meaning or learning, there needs to be a context, a purpose. My purpose in embarking on this project, the question behind the question, was 1) to see if measuring soil carbon change over time could provide relevant feedback or guidance to land stewards who were interested in soil health, and 2) to see what soil carbon change, if it were significant and widespread, might imply for climate policy that was narrowly focused on more technical rather than biological solutions. Everywhere I traveled, water was the main issue for people, whether it was floods or drought. I measured soil carbon because it was central to the flow of sunlight energy through soils, critically influential for soil function, and easier to measure change than measuring soil water. At no point did I advocate for the commodification of soil carbon into credit or offset schemes.

The soil carbon change data that I got on resampling baseline plots was noisy and variable, especially in the top layers (0-10 cm depth). There were some pockets of consistent change, such as a group of graziers in southeast Saskatchewan showing substantial increases, even down to the 40 cm depth that I often sampled to. But the majority of change data that I collected did not offer solid support to the hypothesis that holistic planned grazing or no-till, for example, in a few years would increase soil carbon in every circumstance or locale, or that soil carbon would faithfully reflect changes in forage production, soil cover, or diversity.

Many of the people on whose ranches I sampled did not know what to do with the data or results, or simply interpreted the data as a judgment: a high or increasing level of soil carbon indicated good management, and low or decreasing was bad. Measured soil carbon change, especially at one or two points, was not meaningful, useful, or in some cases timely feedback, and may not have contributed much to their learning and decision making as I had hoped it might. For the most part the ranches I sampled on were widely scattered, and there was little interaction between them or mutual support, little opportunity for discussion or the development of a shared intelligence or a community of practice. The "competition" framing or context that I suggested in 2010 did not help. The effort tended toward an information pipeline rather than a platform that enabled people to take responsibility for their own learning. For a while I posted the data on this website, but that did little to foster discussion or interpretation, or encourage people to add learning to judgment.

Nor did the noisiness and variability of the data I collected offer solid support for soil carbon increase as a strategy for reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide and easing climate change--a strategy that was growing increasingly popular, with many people and organizations advocating for it, and which has resulted in new programs, policies, and markets to try and reward ranchers and farmers for increases (usually modeled rather than measured) in soil carbon.

So the Soil Carbon Challenge was at least a partial failure, in that it took aim at the problems and technical issues at the tip of the iceberg, and fostered judgment more than learning and new questions. I did take some lessons from this decade of travel, conversations, workshops, transects and soil sampling, sample processing and analysis, data entry, and associated reading and research into the history of the discovery of the carbon cycle, water cycle, and climate issues. Some of these lessons resonated with what I had learned, and then forgotten, in the trainings I took in holistic management and consensus building in the 1990s.

Like many attempts at "solutioneering" the problems of soil health and climate, the Soil Carbon Challenge focused on the tip or immediately visible portion of the "iceberg," and was not designed around the center of gravity: human or people issues, paradigms and power, relationships and trust.

What I learned (or saw from a new perspective, or rediscovered):

1. Energy is a context for all life

and energy flow, from sunlight, is a pattern that connects all knowledge and activity. However, energy is an abstraction: we can only know it, sense it, or measure it by its results, the work it does, the changes it creates. Our planet is an open system largely run by sunlight energy. As I wrote here, "We are riding an enormous, incredibly complex, fractal eddying flow of sunlight energy used in many ways by interrelated communities of self-motivated living organisms whose metabolisms, behaviors, and relationships are increasingly influenced by our own." And, as Selman Waksman, Aldo Leopold, and others realized, soil is a major hub for sunlight energy flow.

2. Learning networks

are a context for the emergence of a community of practice, of a shared intelligence. These are social groupings where people share what they are learning, and are able to witness or share in the learning of others, and so gain an enriched perspective, with dialogue. It helps if these are participatory, ongoing, local, and include evidence as well as new questions. Some degree if trust is needed in order for judgments to ripen into learning, and listening is a key ingredient. Over the past year or so I have developed soilhealth.app as a way of supporting learning networks around soil health and sunlight energy flow, and am seeking partnerships on that project.

It's not that measuring soil carbon is a bad or useless thing, but a good context or purpose is needed. We learn from differences. Here are 4 suggestions for learning, about different kinds of differences, all of which may surprise and spark your curiosity:

1. To learn more about flows of sunlight energy, get an infrared heat gun ($15 and up) that measures or estimates radiant heat, and begin playing with it, pointing it at various stages of sky, soil, plants, and other surfaces and objects.
2. Use infiltration rings to gauge how well water infiltrates into various soil surfaces. Remember that soil moisture held in soil pores represents a huge capture of free sunlight energy.
3. Record change over time in some kind of indicator, quantity, or measurement you are interested in or curious about. Precipitation or infiltration for example. For ranchers, animal days of grazing on a particular pasture for example, or pounds of gain. Repeatable observations need some kind of recording system.
4. Share your observations and learning with others in a learning network. As two eyes helps you see depth, so do multiple perspectives enrich and deepen your learning.

Former "Gimme Shelter" co-host Matt Levin re-joins the podcast to talk about why he bought a house in Sacramento earlier this year.

I am traveling for the last time this year and when I am on the road I get to reflect a lot on what is actually going on within supply chains and what we can expect into the future.  Here are some things I have reflected on and believe for 2022:

Disruption is not Going Away:

Short of a major economic turndown, the container issues, ship issues, port issues, driver and transportation issues all will continue through 2022 and into 2023.  There is no evidence that until significant ship and container capacity comes on line (2023) there will be much improvement.  As we have learned this last few weeks, the “appearance” of improvement has been somewhat of a mirage.  Ships are slowing down and they are at anchor just further out at sea.  

COVID Is Moving from a Pandemic to an Endemic:

The definition of an endemic is something that is around us and never going away.  Covid will be around us, at a baseline level for the foreseeable future.  The next time you hear someone say to you, “When this is over… “ , remind them we are going into our 3d year. This is the “way it is” and masks, vaccines and therapeutics will be needed likely for the remainder of my life.  Supply chains cannot “wait until this is over “  to implement change and execute process improvements.  We have to learn to work within it. 

Shippers Will Continue To Take More Control of The Assets:

We all have seen the stories of big companies leasing ships but who would have thought a large furniture company would buy a large trucking company?  This is a perfect example where shippers will be adjusting their supply chains to deal with the massive margin inflation in purchasing of supply chain services.  It takes a while but supply chains will adjust.  Product will be on-shored, assets will be insourced, and networks will be redesigned to adjust and mitigate the inflation.  

This was started by Amazon when they bought Kiva Robots and they have progressively taken control of their own destiny.  Amazon will surpass UPS and FEDEX as the largest package shipper (on their own assets) sometime next year.  The massive margin inflation passed to shippers this year is not sustainable and it will end. 

We Will See 3 Interest Rate Hikes in 2022:

This is breaking news as it was today the Fed had their press conference after the December FOMC meeting.  You decide what this means for your business but suffice to say the “punch bowl” is going to be removed from this economy.  I personally believe this will mean a number of “zombie” companies will struggle to survive.  The easy money will be gone and companies which generate no profit will not continue to be valued at such high levels as they are today.  

A Few Charts:

Those who know me know I track the FRED Inventory to Sales ratios as an indicator telling us what stage the restocking and the “normalization” of supply chain is in.  The news is that we are still dramatically lower than we need to be and this means restocking will continue for the foreseeable future (See Disruption is Not Going Away above):

Policyholders are in control. They’re turning to online channels for self-service insurance information and support — instantly, seamlessly, and at any time.

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