“Imagination is the only weapon in the war with reality.” - Lewis Caroll, Alice in Wonderland “Enterprises which appear chimerical, often prove successful from that very circumstance,... the more the enemy is unprepared… there is [a happy] prospect of success.” - General George Washington, August 1775 “Well if I were You-Know-Who, I'd want you to feel cut off from everyone else. Because if it's just you alone you're not as much of a threat.” - Luna Lovegood, Harry Potter “I’ve always been crazy but it’s kept me from going insane.” - Billy Joe Shaver, Waylon Jennings, Always been Crazy

We developed a better lip balm tube. We’ll launch it in mid-2025. The only thing surprising about it is that no one else did it. It took a team of lowly beekeepers with our highfalutin honey money.

The plastic tube is awful. It’s plastic. The cardboard tube is subtly, cunningly worse. The cardboard tube is coated in per- and polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS) compounds. Plastic and PFAS accumulate in our blood, our brain, and our womb to no. good. end. Easy now, I say the rude reality for clarity. We must name what is wrong before we can, together, make it right.

This was never the deal. Had this been what the packaging industry offered, we would have rioted. The packaging industry said they offered inexpensive convenience. They hid the Devil in His details…

So, with our tube in hand and listening to business advice, I set out a bit ago to prevent others from using it. This is the smart money. Monopoly and exclusion is just how business works. Or so I’m told. 🤷‍♂️

My behind-the-scenes moves left me feeling shitty. If our tube is better, why do I prevent others from adopting a good thing? I say I care about wild things and future generations. I feel I care. Then why am I actively blocking progress? My underhanded actions tormented my sleep. After a string of restless nights I joked to a friend, “let’s make a Coalition for Better Outcomes. Billy Shakespeare never trademarked nada! Dude just got to creating.” My friend sighed and shook his head. My business advisor dropped me. And I slept blessedly. The Billy Shakespeare joke is bad. But my point is crazy, not insane.

When a new business is ready to make their thing plastic is the easy, cost-effective choice. When I made my first lip balms at scale, there was a ready way to do so. The plastic tube is standard. It is available at low cost. It’s functional, recognized, and the means of production are highly efficient. The customer knows the plastic tube. They know how to use it. It seemed then as it seems now–we already form effectual coalitions for plastic, plasticizers and other known and growing harms–a Coalition for Lesser Outcomes. We buy lots of plastic. We add to demand, which drives down costs, improves processes, product appeal and function.

Many different parties–plastic manufacturers, manufacturers of goods, manufacturers of corollary packaging implements, buyers at large chains–collaborate, coordinate and support each other to make plastic standard and unthinkingly accepted. Unthinking, there’s a dangerous thing. Congress slinks and subsidizes fossil fuel extraction (from which plastic is made). Citizens and consumers throw up our hands. The Coalition for Better Outcomes dissent is simple–if we’re all going to work together anyway, why don’t we go after good?

Someone asked me why I dissent from the convention in consumer packaging. It’s simple, the convention in consumer packaging has not served us. It has blighted the globe geologically and us bodily. In such a system, why consent? Wouldn’t a sharkish dissent be the good thing?

People have long told me I’ll fail. What of it? I have the courage to dissent from bland lies and blithe harm. And innovation is not beyond a dumb beekeeper! Who knew?!? Not me. I’m just willing to fail for the privilege to strive, for the hope of delivering a better thing to a good people.

And I share this world with angels. They have a buzzing way of buoying the heart and galvanizing the grit.

Hear ye, hear ye!

We make our safe, recyclable (as in actually recyclable, not wish-cycling) aluminum tube available to all. Just as plastic is now. We make the means of efficiently filling it with balm available to everyone too. Drew’s Honeybees does not and will not collect any fee at any stage, or in any form. We invite everyone to join us in broadening a healthier packaging solution. Nay! we encourage everyone! We’ll eagerly and gratefully donate our time to assist in any company's adoption. We’ll increase scale, together. We’ll drive down price and improve function, together. Just as we, together, made plastic highly functional, cost-effective, and standard. This time, as we lay our heads to rest, we’ll have the contentment of seeing a harm, not slinking, but strutting forth in bold remedy. A chest-thumpingly proud thing!

All aspects of the best tube will soon be available to striving upstarts and lumbering Goliaths–as the plastic and cardboard-PFAS tubes are now. Small upstarts will have access to something meaningfully and competitively better. Lowering barriers to competitive market entry will facilitate competition, innovation and better outcomes for the customer, citizen, and our ecology–the tapestry and arc of us. Yup, what is bad for the earth is bad for you.

The idea that an innovation can only be realized by excluding others is just that–an idea. There are other ideas. This is one.

There is a dogma that companies *shall not* work together. If you believe that, apply your dogma evenly. Apply your dogma to plastic, which was created by government, remains coddled by government, and is accelerated by the cooperation of countless businesses. There is so much cooperation behind plastics’ dominance you’d think it was an edict handed down carved in tablets.

Business has not innovated to meet this challenge. Drew’s Honeybees is under-resourced, educated, connected, known, expertisified and most else. I embrace my nickname as “the dumb beekeeper" as a matter of descriptive truth.

But inaction burns under my eyeballs. It riots in my chest.

Inaction is ecologically obtuse in this moment of life on earth.

Market fundamentalism has not delivered packaging innovation equal to evidence of packaging harm. Multinational corporations have billions; they got no pluck. There are many promising candidates to replace plastic. But, being culturally, financially, and organizationally obtuse to innovation, multinational corporations ply us with products that are harmful in their most enduring sense–their chemistry invades and harms our biology.

Some may say this is radical. But open access is standard for plastic. Plastic is the product of a war effort with the focusing effect of Nazis and the combined might of wartime U.S. government and industry. That’s right–U.S. corporate socialism and German National Socialism. Yea, Nazis. That’s once-in-a-world radical/infernal/Mephistopelian.

As Derek Thompson wrote in Why the Age of American Progress Ended, “we have become too enthralled with the [myth of the solitary genius inventor] and, more to the point, too inattentive to the things that must follow [invention].” Inventions are often clumsy and lack innumerable practical things such as distribution, scale, reliability, affordability and even understanding. “[I]mplementation, not mere invention, determines the pace of progress.” The Coalition seeks invention, but more to the point, we seek to facilitate progress after invention. This is how we realize the promise of invention to better our lives. Invention, absent implementation, does little. Implementation is the work of us all. For implementation, we need you. Not the person behind you. You, the person reading this right now.

People in power rely on a deference to the status quo. They rely on your difficulty imagining change, the vulnerability of plotting a path to a better outcome. They rely on making you feel like you have to accept your poor lot. Who the hell are you, anyway?

In 1857, Frederick Douglass, the American Lion, delivered his West Indian Emancipation speech. I quote it at length.

“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. [emphasis mine]”

We are not dealing with so celestial an article as human freedom nor infernal a bond as slavery. And this need not be a struggle. I offer you a better lip balm in a better tube and the better outcomes that flow from its use.

But we do challenge power. Power concedes nothing without a demand, our demand. We challenge plastic and plasticizers. We challenge the combined might of international plastic and plasticizer manufacturers. As oil makes plastic, we challenge Big Oil. As chemical companies make plasticizers, we challenge 3M, DuPont, and their legal-dodging offshoots. We challenge an ethic of blithe harm unto you and yours.

We may fail. It’ll be a good failure. We’re game. After all, we are the people who cheer David, cast woe at Goliath, and cheer ocular rocks.