Green Options

So you have an interest in sustainability, particularly when it comes to your home environment. You know enough that your friends seem to flock to you for advice. They say, “You should open your own store!” You think hmm, they might be on to something. But you’ve never opened up a store, and it’s a tough economy these days for doing so.

g Green Design Center may be just the ticket.

GreenTalk Radio host Sean Daily discusses green marketing for businesses with Maryanne Conlin, a lead writer for Ecopreneurist and Inspired Economist, and a green marketing consultant with expertise in targeting [...]

Here at Ecopreneurist, we believe in the power of sharing and building upon our resources and knowledge, so that everybody has a chance to accelerate the expansion of the launching of green businesses, and the effective, useful greening of what’s already here.

So it was a pleasure to learn about startingupgreen.com.

For those of you who didn’t know already, this week is “Green Week” at NBC Universal. On Monday (till the end of the week) the network started broadcasting 150 hours of environment-themed programming on its various TV channels and other properties.

Congrats to our friends at Ecopreneurist, recently named by Green Eco Services as one of the “Top 20 Green Business Blogs”

Photo Credit: By Photo Credit: aknacer via Flickr’s Media Commons

The Inspired Economist (IE) (http://inspiredeconomist.com/) provides a bridge between idealism and capitalism, profit and passion, iconoclast and industrialist, right and left, and all of the other dichotomies that serve as distractions from the serious issues that face the world. The IE aims to foster creativity, and to rally both emerging and established business leaders around the goal of creating a more just and sustainable society. A multi-media resource for the New Economy, the IE serves individuals and companies focused [...]

Entrepreneurs all over America identify with Joe the Plumber which is why he has clearly become the talk of the town. But what about the Ecopreneurists? To me you folks are the entrepreneurs of the New Economy who have the potential to not just to rebuild…but rebuild a sustainable economy. What are your thoughts on Joe The Plumber ? Does he represent you?

Effortlessly perched along the spectacular coastline of Big Sur, California, along the winding Highway 1, rests the Esalen Institute. While waves crash upon the rocky cliffs, up to 250 people per day participate in enriching workshops or research activities, often followed by a soak in the hot mineral baths tucked in a cliffside crevice. Since 1962, the nonprofit educational institute has provided transformational workshops for people eager to explore and realize human potential through experience, education and research.

My journeys along Highway 1, in search for leading ecopreneurial enterprises, brought me to this healing place and, as I discovered, a thriving residential community that draws energy and sustenance from their surrounding biological richness. It’s this residential community of researchers, staff, and educators, along with the enrichment programs and remarkable natural setting, that have drawn over 300,000 visitors from around the world seeking a greater connection to community and the land.

In their Solarium, a building attached to the main lodge where all the meals are taken in the community, I talked with Juliet Johnson, a former water engineer turned sustainability guide for the Esalen Institute as its Sustainability Coordinator.

The clock strikes prime time Friday night as I send you this introductory greeting. Back in my corporate cubicle days over a decade ago, “happy hour” did not find me at the computer screen. Most likely, on Friday night back then you’d find me physically and mentally as far from my work scene as I could muster: camping over state lines, social at a party, buzzing at the local coffeehouse. While I had a enviable job and paycheck, “work” remained something I did to pay the bills and indemnify my escapist fun.

I’m a business school failure — in a positive sort of way.

Rather than spend most of my life in a carpeted cubicle, earning-and-spending and, in my case, pimping for the culture of consumption at a large advertising agency in Chicago, my wife, Lisa Kivirist, and I exited corporate America. We resettled on a 5.5 acre small farm in southwestern Wisconsin, endeavoring to learn how to grow our own food, generate our own electricity and in various other ways reclaim the ability to meet our own needs without depending on Corporate America to provide all that we need, for a price. That goes for providing a job as well. The business school I attended as an undergrad primed me for a “successful career” earning income from a Corporation, paying taxes to the government and owing much to the banks that would one day own my home, car and credit worthiness.

By exiting the fast track overflowing with Lattes and legions of consumables (remember, you have the look the part of an Advertising Executive), I’ve settled into my own skin, weeding our bountiful gardens, harvesting more solar and wind energy than Lisa and I can use on our farm, and raising our son with the Earth in mind. Our business, Inn Serendipity Bed & Breakfast, when paired with our other enterprises like writing, speaking and “green marketing consulting”, provides a lifestyle and workstyle that’s sustaining to us and the ecological community in which we’re inexorably linked.

Greetings out there in the webosphere from chilly Grass Valley, California, and thanks for reading Ecopreneurist. My name is Paul Smith, and I wanted to take time to introduce myself, and tell you where I see this site going, and what I’d like it to do for you.

A little about me: I’ve been deeply immersed in the realm of sustainable business since being a part of the 3rd cohort at Presidio’s MBA in Sustainable Management program in San Francisco. It was one of the first to have such a deeply green program, and arguably, is one of the best. Those who teach there are not there to be professors for a living. They are there to create more colleagues to enable the conversion of business as usual to business as a force for good in the world. They are people like Hunter Lovins, who, along with being a powerful force in her own right, has collaborated with people such as Paul Hawken and Amory Lovins, creating what she is most known for, the book Natural Capitalism.