Opportunity to tell your story

Tell me your story about sustainability and maybe you will be on cable TV.
email me at green1consulting@yahoo.com
Or
call me at 561-309-6048
to discuss your story and why you believe your story needs to be told.

Temple of Doom or Cap and Trade

Jim Hansen opines about the need for actions in reducing green house gases that result in actual reductions. It seems he feels cap and trade will end up being business as usual for companies in general.

Emily's Photos

The nature of slow money and how to create a 'new' economy

The Nature Of Slow Money'

Filed under: Economic Scene

Dante Hesse, organic dairy farmer, needs to raise $700,000. NPR

A bunch of you have been asking about economic growth and sustainability. Today on All Things Considered, we hear from an organic dairy farmer who has turned to his customers for help financing a bottling plant in his barn.

In his way, Dante Hesse is part of the new Slow Money movement. It's the brainchild of venture capitalist Woody Tasch, author of Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money from Chelsea Green.

You can read an excerpt from his book with the story. Here's a nugget from Tasch:

Organized from "markets down" rather than from "the ground up," industrial finance is inherently limited in its ability to nurture the long-term health of community and bioregion. These limits are nowhere more apparent than in the food sector, where financial strategies optimizing the efficient use of capital have resulted in cheap chemical-laden food, depleted and eutrophied aquifers, millions of acres of GMO corn, trillions of food miles, widespread degradation of soil fertility, a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, and obesity epidemics side by side with persistent hunger.

Laura Conaway

Social Capital

I thought this was an interesting article from the Earth Portal web site. I believe it adds to the discussion on what 'value' we place on outside and inside 'things'. If we are to truly change direction (some say that would be reducing green house gases by 80% by 2050) and save our planet we will need to educate ourselves and the people we love around us by any and all appropriate means. 

5 Things you can do today

1. Change your light bulbs to CFL's as your old bulbs burn out. Even better is to use a LED bulb if you can find one that fits.

2. Do a mini energy audit of your home. Find drafts by using feathers ( or something very light) around possible places like doors, windows or floors and ceilings. If there is more than a slight movement you more than likely have a draft that is costing you money. It is easier with water becuase you can usually hear it. Are you shading your windows exposed to the warm summer sun so it reflects the heat and are you insulating your windows in the winter so you don't let heat to escape? What appliances or products are running all the time? Is it necessary?

3. Do you excercise? Being 'green' also means being healthy and excercise is a very efficient way of increasing your chances of being healthy.

4. How do you eat? What are your portions? How 'green' is your food that you are buying? Can you buy some food at a farmers' market?

5. Many people are increasing their gas mileage by checking their tire pressure, changing the air filter and getting regular tune ups. Another great way to save money on gas is to make sure you drive 5 mph slower than you usually do. I find most people drive 5 mph faster than the speed limit because that is what the police have accepted as the default speed. If you just drive the speed limit you will get less tickets and save on gas.

Spirituality of Sustainability

This is a start:

The Spirituality of Sustainability or the sustainable Spirit

Sustainability has been defined many different ways, so for the purposes of this paper I will define it as the ability of any organization of nature (humans are part of nature) to be able to sustain itself in a way that promotes the existence and continuation of the environment including the organization in question for future generations (no time limit implied or specified, assumed infinite).

This is the dictionary definition:

1: capable of being sustained

2 a: of, relating to, or being a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged <sustainable techniques> <sustainable agriculture> b: of or relating to a lifestyle involving the use of sustainable methods <sustainable society>

Another set of definitions have been proposed as working or planning or implementation definitions for real like situations and they follow:

                  "Sustainable means using methods, systems and materials that won't deplete resources or harm natural cycles" (Rosenbaum, 1993).

                  Sustainability "identifies a concept and attitude in development that looks at a site's natural land, water, and energy resources as integral aspects of the development" (Vieira,1993)

"Sustainability integrates natural systems with human patterns and celebrates continuity, uniqueness and placemaking" (Early, 1993)

 

Using my definition I believe opens the discussion of sustainability to the realm of spirituality. We need to define spirituality which in some ways is even more difficult than sustainability. The dictionary definition:

1. The state, quality, manner, or fact of being spiritual.

2. The clergy.

3. Something, such as property or revenue, that belongs to the church or to a cleric. Often used in the plural.

Some other definitions:

                              a sense of purpose

                              a sense of ‘connectedness’ – to self, others, nature, ‘God’ or Other

                              a quest for wholeness

                              a search for hope or harmony

                              a belief in a higher being or beings

                              some level of transcendence, or

                              the sense that there is more to life than the material or practical, and

                        those activities that give meaning and value to people’s lives.

            Spirituality is stories.

            Spirituality can be defined as a search for the sacred, a process through which people seek to discourse, hold onto and, when necessary, transform whatever they hold sacred in their lives [the sacred includes the concept of God, divinity, transcendence, and ultimate reality].

 

As we can see in the definitions above, any discussion of the spirit assumes an unknowing of ‘things’ including any time limit or any other limits we define in our ‘real’ world at present. We now can say humbly that we do not know anything about the limits of sustainability, what it can or cannot do or what value to place on it in comparison to other standards of society or nature. Or can we? Humans have given value to spirituality since the beginning of our existence and it has no limits.

As society has developed we have focused and placed our attention on the ‘value’ of things or labor. This has become part of how we communicate to one another.

I have made several statements that are broad and diverse and many might not see any connection with the spirituality of sustainability. I have tried to lay a foundation of the context of my relationship to sustainability. I believe each persons individual understanding of sustainability can be different but is connected by the spirituality of sustainability. 

There is much more on this subject with many links of other people who have written about this that I will put on this blog in the near future.