The Blog » Sustainability

The hardest part about starting a business is dealing with different personalities. How do you make them mesh? How do you get everyone to work toward a combined/consolidated vision? How do you OWN your vision?!

Last summer, I sat in the Town Hall in Merrill, Maine listening to the Town Clerk cry over the town not having enough money for road salt this winter; the town had no way to get the money, since they couldn’t raise taxes with such a depressed economy. The Clerk made it clear to me why she was so upset – she was afraid that one of her friends’ children will skid off a slick road and hit a tree.

We’re starting a movement. The Emergent Posse is an online group/movement/community of highly-motivated community activists spread across the nation working to educate and empower communities and community leaders in order to implement real sustainability programs and projects. We’ve hit a paradigm shift: oil isn’t cheap, the planet has a fever, and the economy is in the toilet. I’ve heard smart people calling for BIG government intervention and Europe-styled Socialism. That’s not the answer here in America.

I was caught off guard this weekend when reading an article about how high savings rates in Japan have had a devastating effect on that nation’s economy. According to Hiroko Tabuchi of the New York Times,

“The economic malaise that plagued Japan from the 1990s until the early 2000s brought stunted wages and depressed stock prices, turning free-spending consumers into misers and making them dead weight on Japan’s economy.”

This article ultimately warns Americans of the dangers of saving their hard-earned money. I was taken aback when I fully realized the predicament our nation is in. How can we continue living in a society that rewards consumers for taking unnecessary risks? And yet, how can we revive our economy without consumer-driven growth?

As I sit here looking out onto the beautiful blue ocean on the beaches of the Dominican Republic, I think about the millions of Americans like me who traveled thousands of miles this holiday vacation. The rise in airfare hasn’t seemed to make a visibile dent in throngs of tourists taking advantage of the warm Carribean sun. While I diligently purchased a carbon offset for my flight, how much does that really reduce the impact that my trip made? Can we continue sustain this kind of global travel for our own pleasure?

Tad Fettig, director of the critically acclaimed series Design ‘e2′ on the PBS network, recently sat down with an interviewer from wired.com to discuss Sustainable Transportation and how to best implement transportation models that encourage the smallest emissions of greenhouse gases and the least amount of environmental degradation.

Walmart has started a Green Jobs Council. We’re officially saved. Seriously though, we are seeing some incredible growth on the green jobs front in America. Could you imagine, America, in it’s current slump, without the prospect of massive numbers of green-collar jobs to help give us at least a glimpse of a better economic future?

The Green Communities Act of Massachusetts is a sweeping piece of legislation slated to fully take effect in the coming months. Passed in 2007, this energy and environmentally focused act promises to make Massachusetts a leader in addressing climate change and energy independence. All of the regulations are currently being hashed out by the public and other stake holders with the goal being to have all the nuances of the act agreed upon so the regulations can be put into practice in the new year. While we could write a book on all the great, good and (few) not so good aspects of the act, for this series of posts we are going to focus on the changes to Net Metering as it pertains to distributed generation.

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about a potential federal stimulus package that will rival President Eisenhower’s massive investments in highway infrastructure during the 1950s. The Interstate Highway System (read an interesting viewpoint on the highway system here) from that era launched America into living model that is economically and environmentally unsustainable; we’re finally finding that out now. During the 50s and 60s, middle class Americans fled urban centers and flocked to rural farmland areas to live in single family homes accessible only by automobile.

Click for the video.