Trying to stay focused on my journey... I have to believe that it is possible, even in this economy, to get a position that will fulfill my vision to contribute to the greater good and afford me the lifestyle I envision. Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite writers, said it best... "I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge, you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center." To me, this means to keep reaching and stretching without losing sight of the vision.

So many people are saying to just take a job because it's better to have something. Many times those are the same people that think work is a 4 letter word and tend to just subsist living day to day. Do I trust the critical eye of someone I respect with my vision? Will their feedback helps me see the bigger picture and understand just how very close to my goal I am, or will they offer criticism and give me the same advice? Have I lost objectivity about the struggle I've been going through, and what is the real truth -- am I almost there? Do I plan a celebration to keep me focused on the finish line and put the intention out there?



So many questions. I've created some of the answers and want to believe I can create all the answers. Yes, I fantasize about a minimalist bohemian lifestyle, if that's what it takes, but I still have my current lifestyle to support and have a hard time just walking away from that. Is it better to rip the Band-Aid off quickly and have immediate pain and potential shock, or do it slowly to minimize the pain and spread it out over time? The latter is what I think our government has done with the economic recovery, but just today it was announced that the foreclosure rates have spiked in some of the countries largest cities and in almost every state. Does this push people to strive for a better, more secure life, or does it put them in survival mode?


I think some people have become numb to it all and are in survival mode. I want to stay on the edge and keep seeing all sorts of beautiful things.

I saw a new film about the legendary environmentalist Aldo Leopold, his life and his legacy. The films name is Green Fire. It's bittersweet, gives you hope and makes you cry.

Here is a link to the site for the movie. http://www.greenfiremovie.com/

After the film, a few of us had a debate about the "Land Ethic" as it relates to environmental sustainability. Is the land ethic overarching everything we do, or is sustainability what we look to for our guidance? There were two camps, one was that environmental sustainability was the overarching concept while the land ethic was only a subset of environmental sustainability and the other was that the land ethic is the main idea for where environmental sustainability is created. I felt that the land ethic is the overarching guideline that we base our decisions on regarding environmental sustainability. The ethic gives us guidance to determine what is sustainable. We can't have environmental sustainability without a land ethic.

I pulled a couple of excerpts from Leopold's book

The Land Ethic

By Aldo Leopold,
from A Sand County Almanac, 1948

When god-like Odysseus returned from the wars in Troy, he hanged all on one rope a dozen slave-girls of his household, whom he suspected of misbehavior during his absence.
This hanging involved no question of propriety. The girls were property. The disposal of property was then, as now, a matter of expediency, not of right and wrong.
Concepts of right and wrong were not lacking from Odysseus' Greece: witness the fidelity of his wife through the long years before at last his black-prowed galleys clove the wine-dark seas for home. The ethical structure of that day covered wives but had not yet been extended to human chattels. During the three thousand years which have since elapsed, ethical criteria have been extended to many fields of conduct, with corresponding shrinkages in those judged by expediency only.

Land Ethic

The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.
This sounds simple: do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land of the free and the home of the brave? Yes, but just what and whom do we love? Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-skelter downriver. Certainly, not the waters, which we assume have no function except to turn turbines, float barges, and carry off sewage. Certainly not the plants, of which we exterminate whole communities without batting an eye. Certainly not the animals, of which we have already extirpated many of the largest and most beautiful species. A land ethic, of course, cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these 'resources,' but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state.

The Ethical Sequence

This extension of ethics, so far studied only by philosophers, is actually a process in ecological evolution. Its sequence may be described in ecological as well as in philosophic terms. An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom action in the struggle for existence. An ethic philosophically is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing. The thing has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to evolve modes of co-operation. The ecologist calls fees symbioses. Politics and economics are advanced symbioses in which the original free-for-all competition has been replaced, in part, by co-operative mechanisms with ethical content.
The complexity of co-operative mechanisms has increased with population density, and with the efficiency of tools. It was simpler, for example, to define the anti-social uses sticks and stones in the days of the mastodons than of bullet and billboards in the age of motors.
The first ethics dealt with the relation between individuals; the Mosaic Decalogue is an example. Later accretions dealt with the relation between the individual and society. The Golden Rule tries to integrate the individual to society, democracy to integrate social organization to the individual.
There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus' slave-girls, is still property. The land relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but no obligations.
The extension of ethics to this third element in human environment is, if I read the evidence correctly, an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity. It is the third step in a sequence. The first two have already been taken. Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief. I regard the present conservation movement as the embryo of such an affirmation.
An ethic may be regarded as a mode of guidance for meeting ecological situations so new or intricate, or involving such deferred reactions, that the path of social expediency is not discernible to the average individual. Animal instincts are modes of guidance for the individual in meeting such situations. Ethics are possibly a kind of community instinct in-the-making.

We have been working on our vision statement and the mission for Million Green Communities. Here is what we have so far...

By providing the necessary education, leadership training and resource development in relation to natural resource sustainability, sustainable food development and consumption, human impacts on the environment and dependability on imported goods, Million Green Communities vows to create one million green communities with a goal of saving each community one million dollars through the process of becoming more sustainable.

I've been asked to be on the board of a new non-profit called 1 Million Green Communities. I'm excited to get back to one of my missions, to educate communities on sustainability. The idea is to build sustainable communities from cities and towns and help those communities have a more positive impact on the environment while saving them 1 million dollars in the process. We have a meeting this Saturday to discuss our non-profit status. My revised creed is "Through providing information on how one can reduce their carbon footprint and negative environmental impact, “ How Green Is It?” aspires to influence businesses, communities and individuals to become more aware of how they affect the environment and assist them in having a more positive impact on the environment."

Now if I can only figure out a way to be sustainable while contributing to the greater good ;)

Wikis help make the world a smaller place. Wikis and blogs enable people who don't normally have a voice to be heard and those who have a voice not to be edited. Unfortunately, there are times that it is used for propagating propaganda, but since it's an open forum it also allows for rebuttal. These types of forums allow for people to ban together, collaborate, or be combative and allow for healthy debate. They help people not to feel alone and may have helped to instigate the revolutions, or revolts, happening in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and other Arab nations.

How Green Is It?

Through providing information on how one can reduce their carbon footprint and negative environmental impact, “ How Green Is It?” aspires to influence businesses and individuals to become more aware of how they affect the environment and assist consumers in purchasing green goods and services.

Through providing information on how one can reduce their carbon footprint and negative environmental impact, “ How Green Is It?” aspires to influence businesses and individuals to become more aware of how they affect the environment and assist consumers in purchasing green goods and services.

I can't believe that it has been almost 6 years since I posted anything! I've since moved back to San Francisco and have been searching for my next adventure.

I want that adventure to involve the greater good, but what does that exactly mean?

I've created communities to help bring people together that have common needs, communities for supporting specific needs of an interest group, communities for networking in a specialized field, and communities that support the green movement. I've also created communities to support products and services. All my career and most of my life I've been getting involved with communities or creating communities that bring people together. I think any community can be for the greater good even if it's just to give people a purpose, or social outlet. These communities are becoming more necessary as technology removes a lot of human interaction. People are craving to be part of something and want a feeling of belonging. I want to take advantage of my skills and past experience, or passion, of bringing people together.