Dear Mr. President,

Thank you for your continuing recognition of the crucial role that small businesses play in creating economic opportunity and growth and in producing most new employment and innovation. Your recent visits to the sites of small businesses make this point in a way that is especially compelling to the public at large.

One important and novel part of this story has not been told. That's the role of entrepreneurial small businesses in solving environmental problems.

Approximately 350,000 entrepreneurial small businesses in America have been classified as gazelles – innovative fast growing small firms. Many are profiting by solving environmental problems or dramatically increasing efficiency and resource productivity. These are the “green” gazelles, and they represent a strategy for environmental protection that's good for the economy.

This strategy is market-based, decentralized, non-bureaucratic and non-regulatory. It creates employment. And this strategy provides practical, technological solutions to environmental problems that are neither partisan nor ideological.

By expending your message about small businesses to include the “green” gazelle story, you can showcase their contribution to environmental policy. This will help build credibility with bankers and investors who can help provide these businesses with needed capital.

We are writing to suggest that you visit some of these small businesses. By doing so, you would enable the public and policy-makers to see that there's a viable alternative to the “command and control” approach to environmental protection.

Although these approaches have achieved a lot in the past, they do not create an environmentally sound and sustainable economy. Achieving these ends requires the creativity of entrepreneurs and the power and drive of economic enterprise. Your advocacy of “green” gazelles would help realize this vision.

A brief list of some Green Gazelle businesses is enclosed.

Sincerely yours,