Like politics, sustainability is best practiced locally.
I have been a naturalist and environmentalist all my life. I grew up in the dairy country of New Jersey, playing in cow fields, corn rows, brooks and ponds. Our mom taught us to know nature. And to know it was to love it. We learned the names of the birds, the flowers, the trees and the constellations in the night sky. (And in the New Jersey countryside when the moon was not bright and the sky was clear, we saw a lot of stars.) We lived on an acre with two apple trees, a peach tree, numerous flower gardens, including the "rock garden," a Lilac, a Forsythia, roses, irises and usually a vegetable garden.
We played outside every day, making forts and hideouts in thickets and trees. We swam in our neighbor's pond at the bottom of the hill through the cow pasture. We spent hours and days building dams in the brook that fed the pond. We shoveled the snow off the poured concrete patio to play basketball all winter long. When cold weather was forecast, we squirted the patio with the hose, and when it froze, we skated! We made sleigh runs in the cows' field and flew kites with five 200' rolls of string. (Do the math.)
We learned at an early age to turn off the lights when not using them, to close the door in the winter time when the heater was on. We didn't have air conditioning, so we always performed the spring ritual of putting the screens over the windows on the outside of the house so we could have the windows open for natural cooling during the summer. In the spring we took down the screens.
My family repeated this particular ritual until I was only five or six years old. Then we got storm windows installed on our house. These new windows had aluminum frames and two glass panes, one of which was fixed in the top half of the frame. The other glass pane could be in either the "up" position or the "down" position. We kept this second pane down in the winter and, combined with the other older, inner window it kept us warmer and saved on energy. Our furnace burned coal when I was very young and soon thereafter, we converted it to use oil.
I remember our mom taking us to the recycling center when I was only six or seven years-old. We were the only people I knew who recycled, but doing so seemed the right to me even then.
We moved to Florida when I was in high school. Living in southwest Florida opened a whole new natural world, new plants and animals to learn and love: the exotic, invasive Melaleuca (a.k.a., paperbark) tree, diamondback and pygmy rattlers, roaches as big as your thumb and amazing palmetto and sable palm scrub to hike in and explore.
I learned to live with, explore and learn about nature. And I loved it and still do.
I graduated from the University of Florida with a Computer Science degree from the College of Engineering. I worked for Rockwell International at the Kennedy Space Center on the Space Shuttle program, then in California on an Air Force satellite. I got out of that business and worked in software development at a Hollywood studio, then moved to the big, well-known computer vendors, including Compaq and HP.
I have designed, sold and implemented simple and sophisticated computer systems to solve mundane and complex problems for small, medium and Fortune 50 companies, school systems, universities and state and local governments.
In 1995, we moved to Georgia. I live in Milton, Georgia, in North Fulton County, with my artsy, organizer, Jazzercise® -ing wife and 15-year-old son, who's a great kid, Boy Scout and cross country runner on the Milton HS team. A birder and gardener, hiker, biker, camper and canoeist, I compost in my back yard and put, at most, about a cubic foot of trash at the curb each week, for our family of three.
I have hiked to the top of Half Dome in Yosemite twice and done numerous other hikes in California, Colorado, New Mexico, Florida, Georgia, Utah, Yellowstone, etc. I pick up trash by the side of the road and in grocery store parking lots.
I am passionate about the birds and the bees, about minimizing our impact on the planet and making it a better place for our kids and their kids and teaching them that's natural behavior.
And now, I'm pressing my love for nature into my professional life and community involvement. I'm seeking work as a sustainability consultant.
And I'm blogging. This blog will be an account of my personal experience of living green to the extent I can in consumerist suburbia. But I think the type is right for sustainability. It's past time. I'll share tips, ideas and opinions, expect you to think about them, try them, comment on them and give me feedback. I plan to become active in our new town of Milton and see how green we can be.
Will you join me?
